Gate of the Sun (11 page)

I know you want me to leave after this night of weariness, insomnia, and darkness. I'll go; just tell me how Ibrahim died.

Nahilah told the story two ways, and you believed both.

The first time around, she lied to you because she was afraid you'd do something stupid. Then she told you the truth because she could tell from your eyes that you were going to do something stupid anyway, so she preferred you to do something meaningfully stupid.

Yunes went into the cave, the sun burning his sweat and fatigue-rimmed eyes, and he saw her. She was a motionless shadow in the back of the cave, her back turned to the entrance, and she was motionless. She heard his footsteps and smelled the smell of travel, but she didn't turn around. Yunes went toward her and saw that she was staggering, as though she had waited for him to come before falling to the ground.

He saw her shoulders, outlined by shadows, shaking as though she were weeping. He went up to her, gasping for breath as if all the distances he had traversed and that had been imprisoned in his lungs were about to explode. When he tried to grasp her by her shoulders, she started moaning and let out a single name.

Yunes tried to make her explain, but she wouldn't stop repeating “Ibrahim,” which had become a part of her moaning. He tried to ask about his father, but she didn't answer and burst into a long fit of weeping that grew louder before being choked off.

She said the boy died because she had been unable to take him to the hospital at Acre.

“His head fell forward while he was eating. He said his head was ringing with pain.”

She tied cloth around his head and rubbed oil on his neck, but the pain didn't stop. He held his temples as though hugging himself and writhed in pain. So she decided to take him to the hospital in Acre.

Nahilah went to the headquarters of the military governor to ask for a pass and was subjected to a long interrogation. When she returned to her
house without a permit, she found her son in the throes of death with the blind sheikh whispering the last rites.

“They didn't put the sack over my head, but they threw me into a darkened room,” she said, “and left me there for more than three hours. They then took me into the office of a short man who spoke with an Iraqi accent. I told him my son was sick, but he wouldn't stop asking about you. I wept and he threatened me. I said the boy was dying and he asked me to cooperate with them and questioned me about the border crossers. Then he said he couldn't give me a permit if I didn't bring him a medical certificate to prove my son was sick.”

“There's no doctor in the village,” I told him.

“Those are my orders,” he said. “If you don't cooperate with us, we won't cooperate with you.”

W
HEN
N
AHILAH
finished her story, she saw how calm your face was. Your panting had stopped, and you looked at her suspiciously, as though you were accusing her. She saw how calmly you took the news as you sat down, lit a cigarette, asked about Salem and told her you'd be away for a long time.

She understood you'd never come back.

You asked about the new Israeli settlement that was being built near Deir al-Asad. Then you stood up, said you'd have your revenge and walked out. She grabbed you by the hand, brought you back into the cave and told the story over again.

She said Ibrahim had been playing with the other children.

She said the new settlement had sprung up like a weed, and they'd fenced off the land they'd confiscated with barbed wire while everyone looked on, seeing their land shrinking and slipping out of their hands, unable to do anything.

She said, “They took the land and we watched like someone watching his own death in a mirror.”

She said, “You know how children are. They were playing close to the wire and talking to the Yemeni immigrants in Hebrew – our children speak Hebrew – and the immigrants were answering them in an odd Arabic; our
children know their language and they don't know ours. Ibrahim had been playing with them, and they brought him to me. God, he was trembling. They said a huge stone had fallen on him. I don't know how to describe it; his head was crushed, and blood was dripping from it. I left him in the house and ran to ask for a permit to take him to the hospital in Acre, and at the military governor's headquarters they made me wait for more than three hours in a darkened room, the Iraqi threatening to beat me during the interrogation. He said they knew you came, that their men were better lovers than you, and that they'd kill you and leave you in the square at Deir al-Asad to make an example of you. And he asked for information about you while I pleaded for the permit.

“And when I got back to the house, Ibrahim was dead, and your father was whispering the last rites.”

You sat down, lit a cigarette, and put a thousand and one questions to her. You wanted to know whether they'd killed him or he'd died accidentally; had they thrown the stone at him, or had he just gotten in the way of it.

Nahilah didn't know.

You got up and said that you'd kill their children as they'd killed your son. “Tomorrow you'll trill with joy, because we'll have our revenge.”

For three nights you circled the barbed wire. You had your rifle and ten hand grenades, and you decided to tie the grenades together, throw them into the Jewish settlement's workshop, and, when they exploded, fire at the settlers.

It was night.

The spotlight revolved, tracking the wire fence, and Yunes hid in the olive grove close by. He started moving closer, crawling on his stomach. He got the chain of grenades ready and tied them to a detonator, deciding to throw them into the big hall where Yemeni Jewish families slept practically on top of one another. He wanted to kill, just to kill. When you described the event to Dr. Mu‘een, you said that during your third pass you imagined the dead bodies piled on top of one another and felt your heart drink deep.

“I was thirsty; revenge is like thirst. I would drink, and my thirst would
increase, so that when the time came and I began to crawl, a refreshing coolness filled my heart. When everything was about to happen, the thirst disappeared, and I set out not with revenge in my mind but out of a sense of duty, because I'd promised Nahilah.”

Yunes never told the story of what actually happened.

He said later that it was impossible to carry out the operation successfully, that he had realized the huge losses the villages would incur as a result of the predictable Israeli response.

He crawled toward the fence, and after the spotlight had passed over him a number of times, heard the sound of firing and dogs barking. He flattened himself to the ground. Then he decided to run, not paying the slightest heed to the spotlight. Bullets flying around him, he disappeared into the olive grove, and instead of hiding there until morning, he kept going until he reached the Lebanese border.

He said later that he decided not to go through with the operation because it was an individual act of revenge and because the Israelis would take it out on the Arab villages. But he never spoke of the fear that paralyzed him or why he fled all the way to Lebanon.

Now I have a right to be afraid.

But not Yunes; Yunes wasn't afraid, his heart never wavered. Yunes “withdrew” because he was a hero. I, on the other hand, am hiding in his room because I'm a coward. Have you noticed how things have changed? Those days were heroic days, these are not. Yunes got scared, so he became a hero; I'm scared, so I've become a coward.

When Yunes returned to Bab al-Shams, he didn't tell Nahilah about the revenge that never happened. But me – the crippled nurse looks at me with contempt because she's waiting for me to justify my stay at the hospital. Shams was killed, and I'm expected to pay the price for a crime I didn't commit.

I don't sleep.

And you – could you sleep after you postponed your revenge?

^*
Koran, Surah III, 169.

^*
A soft, yogurt cheese.

Y
OU WANT A STORY!

I know you'd like to change the subject, you don't agree with my way of telling the story of your son's death and your revenge. You'll ask me to tell it a different way. Maybe I should say, for example, that the moment you got close to the barbed wire, you understood that individual revenge was worthless and decided to go back to Lebanon to organize the fedayeen so we could start the war.

“It wasn't a war. It was more like a dream. Don't believe, Son, that the Jews won the war in '48. In '48, we didn't fight. We didn't know what we were doing. They won because we didn't fight, and they didn't fight either, they just won. It was like a dream.”

You'll say you chose war instead of revenge, and I have to believe you. Everyone will believe you, and they'll say you were right, and I'm trying to camouflage my fear within yours.

You weren't afraid that night of March 1951.

And I'm not afraid now!

When Yunes told how his son Ibrahim died in 1951, he spoke a lot about Nahilah's suffering. He never spoke of his own suffering, only of his thirst for revenge.

“Didn't you feel pain?” I asked him.

“Didn't you want to die? Didn't you die?”

“I don't understand, because I'm only afraid of one thing,” I once told Shams, transported by our love. “I'm afraid of children.”

When we made love, she'd scream that it was the sea. She was next to me and over me and under me, swimming. She said she was swimming in the sea, the waves cascading from inside her. She would rise and bend and stretch and circle, saying it was the waves. And I would fly over her or under her or through her, flying above her undulating blue sea.

“You are all the men in the world,” she said. “I sleep with you as if I'm with all the men I've known and not known.” I'd soar above her listening to her words, trying to put off the moment of union. I'd tell her to go a
little more slowly because I wanted to smell the sky, but she would pull me into her sea and submerge me and push me to the limits of sorrow.

“You're my man and all men.”

I didn't understand the expanses of her passion and her desire to control her body. She would massage her body and grasp her breasts and swoon. I'd watch her swoon and it was as though she weren't with me, or as though she were in a distant dream, a sort of island encircled by waves.

I didn't dare ask her to marry me because I believed her. She said she was a free woman and would never marry again. I believed her and understood her and agreed with her, despite feeling that burning sensation that could only be extinguished by making her my own.

I agreed with her because I was powerless and didn't dare force her to choose between marrying me and leaving me, for the idea of not seeing her was more painful than death.

Then I found out she'd killed Sameh because he'd refused to marry her. They said she'd stood over his body and pronounced, so everyone could hear, “I give myself to you in marriage,” before fleeing.

That's what they said at the interrogation, when they detained me. I was silent. I was incapable of speech because I felt betrayal and fear. It was there, in the eyes of the committee members, I discovered she'd been sentenced to die. The head of the committee was in a hurry, as though he wanted to use me as new evidence to justify the decision to kill her.

The committee eyed me with contempt as the duped lover, though I wasn't duped – but what could I say? I used to smell the other men on her body, but it never occurred to me that she loved another man the way I loved her. There – with him – she would have said nothing and been on the verge of tears as she listened to him saying that with her he was sleeping with all of womankind.

I understand her, I swear I do: The only solution to love is murder. I never came close to committing the crime, but I did long for her death, because death ends everything, as it did that day.

Shams is a hero because she put an end to her own problem. But me, I'm
just a man who grew horns, as the head of the investigating committee said, thinking he was making a joke everyone could appreciate.

I refused to answer their questions. All I said was that I was convinced she was “not a normal woman.” I know I was hard on her, but what could I say? I had to say something, and those words spilled from my mouth. As for all the other things I'm supposed to have said, they're not true. Liars! I never said anything about orgies. My God – how could we have held orgies in my house when it was surrounded by all those other wrecked houses? They put words into my mouth so as to come up with additional justifications for killing Shams. All I said was that she was my friend and that she was a woman of many moods. I heard their laughter and the joke about my horns.

The head of the committee ordered my release because I was pathetic. “A pathetic guy, no harm to anyone,” he said.

Pathetic
means stupid, and I wasn't stupid. I wanted to tell them that love isn't foolishness, but I didn't say anything. I left and went looking for Shams, and I was arrested again before being released and allowed to return to Beirut.