Текст книги "Gate of the Sun"

Автор книги: Elias Khoury

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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

Dr. Amjad doesn’t know but he wants me to know. I didn’t say anything, gave no support to his hypotheses, and didn’t tell him about the girl from Karak who’s studying at the American University. I wish I could contact her; she’s really fantastically beautiful, or not beautiful but striking (now look at the precision of the word striking, meaning more than pretty and implying presence and authority).

God rest your soul, Kayed, but on the occasions when I met her I never saw her as being bossy. She had a certain indescribable delicacy. Her neck was long and smooth, and around it she’d wear a silver necklace with the Throne Surah, or so I thought until Kayed told me that it was a picture of the Virgin Mary. He said the girl from Karak loved the Virgin and would tell him not to be afraid because she had made a vow on his behalf to the Mother of Light. I didn’t ask who this “Mother of Light” was, guessing it must be one of the countless names of the Holy Virgin.

I’d like to see her again, but not to clear things up, since they’re beyond being cleared up at this point. No, I want to contemplate her beauty. Shameless, really. Instead of mourning my friend, Kayed, and bemoaning his horrible death, I desire his girlfriend. They left him on the pavement in Talet al-Khayyat for more than five hours before taking him to the hospital. A man lying in a pool of blood. The passersby looked on without wanting to see. For five hours under the Beirut sun, Kayed was in agony. Well, there you are. But I’m still not sure why I desire his girlfriend. My desire isn’t sexual; I desire to see her. Men are traitors from the beginning, from the moment they discover their names. To know your name is to be a traitor. Wasn’t that your blind father’s theory about names?

Where were we? It seems I’ve become like Dr. Amjad. All doctors must be that way: I’ve left you lying here to amuse myself with the story of Kayed.

That day I swear I could have committed murder. But it was as if I were hypnotized, virtually paralyzed and mute. I was asking for Amin when a hand covered my mouth; then Dr. Amjad got deep into the analysis of Kayed’s assassination and started mulling over the possible explanations and asserting the involvement of Israeli intelligence. But that wasn’t enough. If he’d stopped there, this eruption would never have come, involuntarily, from deep inside me. Zainab told me that I roared, and that Dr. Amjad fled, terrified. It was when he launched into his contemptible tales about women that I let loose. You know how we men are. Amjad was talking about Kayed and the Kurdish woman when he suddenly switched to his sexual experiences with Kurdish women. How vulgar! He said a Kurdish woman used to call him every day on the phone, sigh into the receiver, and tell him the color of her panties.

That was when I exploded.

I didn’t explode for your sake but for the sake of that woman he’d invented.

He said she would sigh into the telephone, but he didn’t say what he was doing – how he would sigh and masturbate and leap like an ape from one line to another.

Plus, how dare he talk about Kurdish women that way? Even if we suppose that one Kurdish woman did that, is it thinkable to write them all off? I hate this stupid machismo. I think it’s a cover up for men’s deep-seated impotence.

I exploded, howling and bellowing like a wounded bull. Dr. Amjad fled, and Zainab came running. Zainab’s stupid, and I could have done without further proof of it. She’s not really a nurse, all she can do is take blood pressure and give injections. Not grasping that I was shouting because of you, she ran to get me a glass of water and started to calm me down. The idiot! I threw the glass on the ground, grabbed her hand, and dragged her over to you. She found a woolen blanket, and I covered you with it.

“What are we going to do with him?” she asked, looking at me like an imbecile.

“Quickly, quickly! Let’s get him into a room.”

It was then that Zainab let out that Dr. Amjad had said you were to be left alone because there was no hope.

I told her to shut up and help me.

We tried to carry you, but it was impossible because the yellow foam mat on which they’d thrown you down wasn’t rigid. I ordered Zainab to bring a stretcher and she ran off.

From the moment I yelled at her, Zainab changed completely. She started running blindly every time she heard an order from me. I’d give an order and she’d set off running like a fool. I could hear her clattering around everywhere – on the stairs, in the room, in the corridors. I could hear, but I couldn’t see a thing. All she brought was a woolen blanket with a moldy smell. So I picked you up – I couldn’t wait any longer. I committed an unforgivable medical sin. I picked you up and put you over my shoulder folded in half. You were heavy and shaking. God, how heavy people are when they’re dying, or approaching death, as though, as Umm Hassan explained to me, the soul were a means of combating gravity and half your soul had left your body. I took you out of the emergency room and climbed up toward the first floor. Zainab was waiting on the landing to say there weren’t any empty rooms. I climbed up to the second and last floor and took you into Room 208, which you now occupy. I put you into bed and ordered Zainab to take the second bed out of the room.

Now you’re in a first-class room. It’s clean and attractive and organized. Forget about the colors – it’s impossible to preserve the original color of walls and doors in a place that’s been eaten away by moisture. There’s no solution to the humidity in Beirut, which is between eighty-five and ninety percent most of the time. However, it’s less a matter of humidity and more of the water pipes and sewage mains. The hospital was bombarded dozens of times, and each time they repaired it from the outside, that’s to say, patched the holes in the walls and sealed off the water that was spurting from the pipes at the joints. The place needs a complete overhaul, which is impossible at the moment. The pipes leak, the damp stains the walls, and the smell, a mixture of Nurse Zainab’s ammonia and standing water, seeps everywhere.

All’s well.

I say “all’s well” because I know you’re in a place that’s relatively safe from all those smells, because soap, insecticides, cologne, and powder fill your room with the aroma of paradise.

Of course, everything’s relative. It’s a relative aroma in a relative paradise in a relative hospital in a relative camp in a relative city. That’ll do.

Everything is relative. Even the Arabic calligraphy that I’ve hung on the wall above you is relative, since it isn’t a work of art in the precise meaning of the term, though it is beautiful. I brought it from my house because Shams refused to take it. A beautiful work with the name of the Almighty written in Kufic script. I like that script. I see its angular forms as redrawing the boundaries of the world, and I see it curving and rounding everything off. It’s true it’s not a curved script, but everything’s round in the end. Allahin Kufic lettering is above your head because Shams didn’t grasp the picture’s artistic value when I offered it to her. She looked at it with something approaching revulsion, said, “You want to make me into one of those women who cover their hair?” and laughed treacherously.

When Shams laughed, she laughed treacherously. I would smell the scent of another man on her breath and “avert my gaze” as they say. I would feel that I was with her and not with her. I would see them all hovering around the two of us and I would try to push them away so I could see her. Then I would forget them, and the betrayal, when I slid into her undulating body.

Shams laughed treacherously.

We were at my place, I told her I had a gift for her. I went to the bedroom to get the canvas rolled up in white paper. She tore off the paper, full of curiosity. Then the picture with the Kufic lettering shone out.

“Beautiful. A beautiful work,” I said. “Don’t you love Arabic calligraphy?”

She looked closely at it, read it carefully, then pulled back.

“You want to turn me into one of those women who cover their hair?”

Shams thought I was prodding her to believe in God and gave me a lecture on her personal view of the divine and of existence. I’ll spare you her theories about the united nature of existence and how God is present in everything and so on.

She didn’t take the picture because she imagined I wanted her to adopt the head scarf in preparation for marriage. She spoke of her conviction concerning the liberation of women.

I can assure you that such thoughts never had crossed my mind! I bought the thing because I love Arabic calligraphy, that’s all, and I wanted to give her a nice present.

This drawing, my dear Abu Salem, cost more than fifty dollars, and it’s the most beautiful thing in my house. Shams didn’t take it and I didn’t hang it up because it wasn’t for me. I said to myself, I’ll hang it in the living room when Shams comes and lives with me. But she died. I therefore decided I deserved the present and ought to hang it on the wall above my bed. Then things heated up: There was talk of a list of people to be killed and of Shams’ relatives seeking revenge. Apparently my name was at the top of the list. So I forgot about the drawing, and everything else.

But then, after having put you to bed and cleaned everything up, I went home to get a few things and remembered it. Something told me that it belonged here. Allahin Kufic letters wraps you in its aura and protects you.

I didn’t bring the map of Palestine or the posters of martyrs. Nothing. Those don’t mean a thing here. Do you remember how we used to tremble in front of those posters, how we were convinced that the martyrs were about to burst through the colored paper and jump out at us? Those posters were an integral part of our life, and we filled the walls of the camp and the city with them, dreaming that one day our own pictures would appear on similar ones. All of us dreamed of seeing our faces outlined in bright red and with the martyr’s halo. There was a contradiction here to which we paid no attention: We wanted to have our faces on the posters but also wanted to see them – we wanted to become martyrs without dying!

Tell me, how were we able to separate the image of death from death? How did we attain this absolute faith in life?

All that I know is that after the massacre I grew to hate the posters of martyrs. I won’t tell you what happened, about the swarms of flies that almost devoured me – it’s not the right moment for those sorts of memories. They need the right moment. We can’t just toss off memories like that, we don’t have the right to remember any which way.

I brought you the picture, saying to myself that the name of Allahin Kufic lettering would remain however circumstances and conditions changed. The photographs and posters were ephemeral, but the name of the Almighty will be eternally present before our eyes.

You don’t like the word eternally. You used to say, “What small minds the Jews have! What is this silly slogan of theirs – ‘Jerusalem, Eternal Capital of the Jewish State’! Anyone who talks of eternity exits history, for eternity is history’s opposite; something that’s eternal doesn’t exist. We even ate our gods. During our Age of Ignorance, we – we Arabs – would model gods out of dates and then eat them, because hunger is more important than eternity. And now they come and tell us that Jerusalem is an eternal capital? What kind of shit is that? It’s foolish – which means that they are becoming like us, defeatable.”

You said we’d never defeat them: On the contrary, we needed to help them defeat themselves. No one is defeated from the outside; every defeat is internal. Ever since they raised the banner of eternity, they’ve fallen into the whirlpool of defeat, and it’s up to us to keep them going in this direction.

You didn’t tell me how we were supposed to keep them going. So far, the only people we’ve helped to defeat have been ourselves – carpeting our land with our blood for the Israelis, so that they could walk over it like victors.

Things have changed, Father.

If you’d become sick, God forbid, ten years ago, I wouldn’t have brought you this drawing. I would have hung a map of Galilee above your head, to show how proud I was of you. You are the pride of us all. You made our country that we’d never seen come to life within us; you traced our dream with your footsteps.

Now it’s not the dream I put up but the reality.

Allahin Kufic lettering is the one absolute reality we can depend on.

No, I won’t let you speak.

You’re in a mysterious place now and approaching the moment when nothing but faith can help you. Please, don’t blaspheme. You’re a believer, your father was a Sufi sheikh.

You’d like to say – though I won’t let you – you’d like to say that someone who’s lived your life can depend on nothing and that even gods change; our forefathers used to worship other gods.

Be quiet, please – I don’t want to listen to your theory of temporariness. It’s time for the temporary to become permanent. It’s time for you to relax. I’ve had enough of your theories, but you don’t care. I believe you’re lying. You, too, are sick of the temporary and can’t take it anymore. The proof? May I remind you of Adnan Abu Odeh?

I know you don’t like to recall this affair because it scares you. Have you forgotten the day you came back from visiting him, trembling, and came to ask me for sleeping pills?

You came to me, doubled over, as though you were looking for death. Why don’t you want to face the truth? Why don’t you admit you feared for your life and not Adnan’s? And why, after I gave you those pills, did you go back to mocking everything?

Heroes aren’t supposed to behave that way.

A hero has to remain a hero. It’s a crying shame – you all abandoned Adnan, forgot him, and all you remember now is his legend. As for the man himself, he went to his fate without anyone batting an eye.

You’re acting all macho now because you’ve forgotten. Have you really forgotten Adnan?

Adnan Abu Odeh came back to the Burj al-Barajneh camp after twenty years in Israeli prisons. He came back a hero. You went to welcome him because he was a comrade, a friend, a lifelong acquaintance. You always used to speak of him as The Hero.

What happened to The Hero?

It was 1960. You were five fighters on one of your first operations inside Galilee. Adnan was taken prisoner, three others died, and you survived. What were the names of the three martyrs? Even you’ve forgotten – you were telling me about that fedayeen operation and you hesitated and said, “Khaled al-Shatti. No, Khaldoun. No, Jamal. .” Even you couldn’t remember anymore. You survived and they died. Death isn’t a good enough reason to forget, but you did.

You survived, you told me, because you “withdrew” forward after you’d fallen into the Israeli ambush, while your comrades “withdrew” backward, as soldiers normally do. They came under fire from two sides and died, while you continued your journey to Bab al-Shams. Adnan didn’t die even though he received appalling wounds in his stomach. The Israelis took him prisoner and treated him in the hospital before putting him on trial.

You’d tell the story tirelessly, as though it were your own. Then you suddenly stopped going to see him after he came back, and no longer talked about him.

Adnan stood up in court and said what he had to say.

He said he didn’t recognize the court’s authority: He was a fedayeen fighter, not a saboteur.

“This is my land and the land of my fathers and my grandfathers,” he said, refusing to answer any questions. They asked him about you, but he said nothing.

During the interrogation, he spoke of the three others because he’d seen them die in front of him, but he didn’t say one word about you. Although the Israeli interrogator informed him of your death, he didn’t believe it. The interrogator showed him the Lebanese newspaper; the Fatah leadership had issued a statement announcing the death of four martyrs. But Adnan didn’t believe it because he’d seen you move forward and disappear (which doesn’t change the fact that that statement in the papers was a terrible error, because it exposed you and led Nahilah to prison).

You realized Nahilah had been arrested when she stopped visiting you in your cave. You stayed in your hideout for more than a month, only going out at night to nourish yourself with wild herbs and to fill your flask with dirty water from the irrigation ditch.

You lived for five months at Bab al-Shams, which became a prison for you, and you almost went insane. You sat all day long without moving, not daring to sleep or go out. You became like a vegetable. Have you forgotten how a man can become a vegetable? How his thoughts can be wiped out, his words disappear, and his head become an empty pot full of ringing noises and incomprehensible sounds?

When Dr. Amjad informed me you’d entered a vegetative state and there was no hope, I couldn’t understand his pessimism: You’d already been through a vegetative state once and emerged on the other side.

Nahilah woke to their violent knocking, and, when they failed to find you, they took her for a weeklong interrogation. Leaving the prison, she found the village surrounded and realized they’d let her out as bait to lure you with. She acted out her celebrated play and buried you, praying for your absent corpse and receiving condolences while she wept and wailed and smeared ashes on her face. Nahilah’s excessive carrying on drove your mother crazy – the old woman couldn’t see why she was behaving that way. She understood the play had to be staged to save you, but Nahilah turned the play into something serious. She wept as women weep. She lamented and wailed and fainted. She let down her hair and tore her clothes in front of everybody.

“This isn’t how we mourn martyrs,” everyone told her. “Shame on you, Umm Salem! Shame on you! Yunes is a martyr.”

But Nahilah paid no attention to the sanctity of martyrs. She wept for you until she could weep no more, and her sorrow was mighty unto death. And death came. Your mother believed Nahilah caused your father’s death. After the death of his only son – meaning yours – he went into a coma that lasted three years, then he slept in his bed for a good month, and when he finally got up, started using dirt again to perform his ablutions. Then he died.

“Nahilah killed him,” your mother told everyone.

Your mother tried to explain to him that what Nahilah was doing was just an act, but he couldn’t understand. She would speak to him, but he wouldn’t reply; she would look at his face, but all she saw were his closed eyes; she would tell him you were alive, but he would shake his head and moan.

In the past his wife had been able to understand him from the slightest movement of his eyebrows. After your death, however, his eyebrows stopped moving, and she felt she was talking to herself as he sat there in front of her utterly apathetic.

Why did Nahilah act this way?

Was she worried about you? Did she hate you? What was it?

Did she reach into herself “where the tears are,” as the Sufi sheikh would say to his ring of disciples? “In our depths is nothing but water. We go back to the water to weep. We are born in water, we are drawn toward water, and we die when our water runs dry,” he would say. He’d always repeat the words of a certain Sufi imam: “The sea is the bed of the earth and tears are the bed of man.” Having finished their chanting and whirling, the dervishes would fall to the ground and weep – that’s what the Sha’ab Sufi chapter did. Sheikh Ibrahim, son of Suleiman al-Asadi, would go every Thursday evening from Deir al-Asad to Sha’ab to lead the séance; he’d return home, borne by his disciples, his eyes – red as burning embers – closed.

But Nahilah?

Why did she act that way, knowing that you were still alive?

I know why: Nahilah was weeping for herself, for others like her, out of resentment.

“She wept for love,” you would say if you could.

No, Abu Salem. Nahilah returned to the source of her tears to find herself again. She lived her life alone among the blind, the refugees, and the dead. Then you’d turn up at Bab al-Shams, place grapes beneath her feet and go away again, leaving her sad, abandoned, and pregnant.

What did you expect her to do?

Wait for you?

Languish?

You’d love to believe that she did nothing but wait for you. A woman who filled her days with bearing children and waiting for her husband who didn’t come. And when he did come, he’d breeze in secretly, once a month, or every three months, or whenever he could.

Nahilah got fed up with her life between an old blind man, his maniacal wife obsessed with cleanliness, and the children, always hungry, still crawling around on all fours.

And on top of that, you would have wanted her to rejoice to see you and stretch out on the floor upon your second sun hidden inside the cave?

Nahilah left the prison barefoot and when she got to her front door fell to the ground in tears. People thought the blind sheikh had died, so they raced over, only to find her weeping for you. Everyone in Deir al-Asad had learned of your death because Israeli radio had broadcast the military communiqué, but the villagers hadn’t dared to think of holding a big funeral. They mourned you in silence and told one another that Nahilah had been relieved of all the torment, the childbearing, the oppression, prison, and interrogation.

People rushed over and found Nahilah collapsed at her door lamenting and rolling her head from side to side in the dirt. When they gathered around her, she stood up and said, “The funeral is tomorrow. Tomorrow we’ll pray for his soul in the mosque,” and she went inside.

It was a wake beyond compare. Her weeping made everyone else weep. “As though he were Imam Hussein,” people said. “As though we were performing the rites of Ashura.” Food was served, coffee was prepared, turbaned sheikhs came from all over, and chanting circles formed. Nahilah went unveiled to where the men were gathered and recounted the news of your death. “They killed him and left him gasping with thirst. Three bullets to the chest. He fell to the ground, and they fell upon him. He asked for water, and the officer kicked him in the face.” Then she wept and the men’s tears fell, while the blind sheikh sat in the place of honor and red streaks, like tears, furrowed his creased, aged skin.

The village turned into a place of lamentation, and your mother said, “Enough!”

But Nahilah wouldn’t be silent. Three days of tears and lamentation. Even the Israeli officer who came to monitor the wake stood there dumfounded. Did he believe Nahilah’s tears, call himself a liar and doubt what he knew to be the facts? Can weeping deceive the eyes?

You think she did all that to protect you from them. As though the Jews didn’t know you’d escaped and were probably hiding somewhere in Galilee.

No, that’s not the case. It was about weeping.

The woman wept because she needed to weep. Nahilah needed a false death in order to cry because a real death doesn’t make us cry, it demolishes us. Have you forgotten how the death of her son Ibrahim annihilated her? Have you forgotten how she was incapable of weeping and sank into moaning?

You, Abu Salem, were merely the pretext for all those tears brought up from the depths of waters imprisoned there for a thousand years.

No, she didn’t weep for you.

During the false funeral and even later, you were holed up in your distant cave. You and the night – a long night, thick and gluey, a night without color or eyes.

When Nahilah finally came to the cave of Bab al-Shams, she was afraid of you; you were lying on the ground like a corpse. She arrived with food, water, and clean clothes, found you lying on your belly. Your foul smell, like that of a dead animal, filled the cave. She tried to wake you. She listened to your rasping breath. She tried again to wake you, trying to pull you up by your shoulders, but kept falling back down. She held your head in her hands and spoke to you; your head kept falling back down, and she kept pulling it back up. When you opened your eyes, you didn’t see her. She said she’d brought you food, and you moaned. Then you turned over and tried to sit up. You pulled yourself onto your hands and knees. Finally managing to sit up, you looked around, frightened.

“It’s me. Nahilah.”

You started peering around, terrified, while she tried to convince you that you had to wash and change your clothes.

Nahilah told you later that you were in that state for at least two hours before coming to your senses. After she succeeded in stripping off your clothes, she bathed you in cold water. That was the only chaste bath that took place in Bab al-Shams.

She covered you with soap, her long black dress was soaked, clinging to the curves of her body. And, instead of leaping out of the water like a fish, you let her bathe you, covered in soapsuds, weeping.

Nahilah didn’t say that you wept, but she felt you were on the verge of tears. She said it wasn’t you. It was as though you were another man, as though the fear had almost paralyzed you and made you surrender.

Later, when you came back to yourself, you’d deny all that, claiming that you hadn’t slept for four weeks and that when you heard the sound of Nahilah’s footsteps, you felt safe and gave in to sleep.

I don’t know what to believe.

Sleep or fear?

Should I believe Nahilah, who saw her husband disintegrating, or the husband who claims he was sleeping peacefully to the sound of his wife’s footsteps?

I’ve thought about the story of the cave a lot since you went into a coma, and about your fate and that of Adnan. I’ve thought about those long weeks in the cave and your sleeping while your wife tried to wake you. I wish I could ask Nahilah about it. Nahilah knows the secret, but you, you’re locked up tight, like all men. You’ve turned your life into a closed book, like a circle.

How am I to bear the death of Shams and my fear, if not through telling stories?

But you, what are you afraid of?

Why did you always tell the story of your life as though it were only the story of your journey over there?

You’ll say I talk about Bab al-Shams because I’m in love: “You’re in love, and you want to use my story to fill in the gaps of your own, to paper over your disillusion with the woman who betrayed you.”

Please, don’t speak of betrayal – I don’t believe in it. If they hadn’t humiliated me the way they did, digging around in my hair for cuckold’s horns, staring me down, I wouldn’t have cared.

No, I’m not using your story to complete my own. I lost my own life right at the beginning, when my mother left me and escaped to Jordan. But you, you won everything.

The state you’re in now resembles your former state in the cave. The only difference is that your beloved won’t come and save you from death, so I have to find a woman for you. What do you say to Mme. Fayyad?

“Mme. Fayyad only exists in your imagination,” you’ll say.

But I saw her with my own eyes! She came to the hospital and kissed me. I know you don’t want me to go down this road but before I shut up I want to ask you why you didn’t tell me what went on in the cave during those weeks.

When I asked you, you replied that you’d sat and waited, that nothing happened.

Is waiting nothing? You must be mocking me; waiting is everything. We spend our whole lives waiting, and you say “nothing” as though you wanted to dismiss the entire meaning of our existence.

Get up now and tell me the rest of the story.

The story isn’t yours, it’s Adnan’s. Get up and tell me the story of your friend Adnan. You tell it much better than I do.

ADNAN HEARD the sentence of thirty years in prison and burst out laughing. So the judge added another ten for contempt of court.

Before the sentence, Adnan stood in the dock and put his hands on the bars like a caged animal. He struck the bars and shouted and cursed, so the judge ordered his hands tied behind his back, at which point he decided to remain silent. The judge asked questions, and Adnan said nothing. Then the blond Israeli woman lawyer, the only Israeli one who dared defend Adnan, explained the reason for Adnan’s silence, so they untied him. He said only one thing before being sentenced: “This is the land of my father and my forefathers. I am neither a saboteur nor an infiltrator. I have returned to my land.”

When the judge announced the sentence, Adnan burst out laughing and slapped his hands together as though he’d just heard a good joke. The judge asked him what he thought he was doing.

“Nothing. Nothing at all. But do you really think your state is going to last another thirty years?”

The judge listened to the translation of the defendant’s words, and, as they were leaving, Adnan began yelling, “Thirty years! Your state won’t last, and I’ll put you all on trial as war criminals.”

The judge came back to the stand and added ten years for contempt of court, while Adnan kept up his gesturing and fooling around, as if he were dancing in the Israeli clink.

That’s how you told me the story. You weren’t at the trial, naturally, and the events of the trial weren’t published in the Arab papers, but you knew all that from your private sources – whose source is known to none!

Tell me, now, why did you return in such a state from visiting Adnan, when he was freed after the celebrated prisoner exchange in ’83?

Were you afraid? Of what?

Were you afraid of his illness?

I told you he had a neurological disorder and that neurological disorders could be treated, but you continued to feign ignorance.

Adnan was mentally disturbed, which doesn’t mean he’d gone crazy. He returned as a semi-imbecile; that’s the correct term to describe his condition. He spoke calmly and with self-possession. He recognized everybody and knew the names of all the members of his family, even the grandchildren who’d been born during his long absence. He knew them and embraced them as grandfathers do their grandchildren.