Gate of the Sun (21 page)

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.

A
DNAN 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.

He spoke slowly and calmly, that's all.

After a few days, however, he began to lose his head. He would have
unexpected outbursts and speak to people as though he were talking to the Israeli jailers, jabbering in Hebrew. Then, a bit later, he lost the use of language completely; he'd bellow and run into the streets naked.

You returned from your last visit to him in the Burj al-Barajneh camp defeated, in despair. You asked me for sleeping pills and decided to stop going to see him. His son, Jamil, wanted to send him to the mental hospital. You objected and even wept. Everyone saw you weep. You told them, “Impossible! Adnan is a hero, and heroes aren't locked up in a lunatic asylum.” It's said you pulled out your gun and tried to shoot him. People intervened to stop you, saying it was a sin. “The real sin is that he won't die. The sin is that he should live like this, you bastards.”

Why didn't you tell me you pulled out your gun? And why didn't you kill him? Why did you let them take him away to the Dar al-Ajazah Institution? Did you believe that place was the same as a hospital? I swear it wouldn't even be suitable for a beast. The patients there are crammed together like animals, they live a thousand deaths each day.

This time, allow me to give another version of the facts.

With your permission, I won't let Adnan end this way. I'll tell you what happened in a different way.

Yunes, Abu Salem al-Asadi, went to visit his friend Adnan Abu Odeh in the Burj al-Barajneh camp. This wasn't his first visit since his release from the Israeli prison where Adnan had spent eighteen years. Yunes was at the head of the group that welcomed him home. He danced, fired his rifle into the air, and slaughtered sheep in his honor. He'd embraced Adnan and told everyone, “Hug him, smell the aroma of Palestine!”