Gate of the Sun (22 page)

Everybody sat in the Abu Odeh clan's guest hall eating lamb and rice and drinking coffee, and Adnan said nothing except for a few words that were lost among the ecstatic
youyous
of the women – and even the men, that day. The camp was flooded with a sea of colors – the women wore their multicolor peasant dresses and poured out onto the dusty streets of the camp as though they were back on the streets of their own villages.

When the party was over and everyone had departed, Adnan went back
home with his family and sat down among his children and grandchildren. He embraced them all and kept repeating, “Praise be to God!”

Everyone laughed when Yunes related the events of the trial.

“Stand up, Adnan, and tell us the story!” said Yunes.

Adnan didn't stand up, or tell them the story, or laugh, or clap; he didn't repeat for them what he'd told the judge: “Do you really think your state is going to last another thirty years?”

Yunes told the story and everyone laughed, while Adnan remained immersed in his deep silence.

“You see, Adnan, twenty years have passed. There's still plenty of time to go!”

At that moment Adnan began to manifest strange symptoms. He would raise his voice, then fall silent. He spoke an incomplete sentence and mixed in Hebrew words.

Yunes thought he was just tired. “Let the man rest,” he said. “He's exhausted.”

He said goodbye to Adnan and promised to visit him in the next few days.

A week later, news began to arrive of Adnan's madness, but Yunes refused to believe it. He went back to his friend's house to see for himself – he saw and wept and returned distraught.

But things didn't end there.

One morning, Adnan's son, Jamil, came to Yunes to inform him of the family's decision to move Adnan to the mental institution and asked him to get a report from a doctor at the Palestinian Red Crescent.

This is where Dr. Khalil – that would be me – comes in. He went to the Burj al-Barajneh camp, examined Adnan and said he was suffering from depression and in need of long-term neurological treatment, but there was no need to put him into a hospital. Adnan's condition worsened, however, to the point where he would leave the house naked. The writing was on the wall, and Jamil came to me for help. I explained my diagnosis and the man exploded, shouting that he couldn't take it any longer and that he'd made up his mind and it didn't matter whether I wrote the report or not.

Yunes decided to intervene.

He went to Burj al-Barajneh and knocked on Adnan's door. Jamil welcomed him, then started complaining and telling him stories. Yunes told him to be quiet.

Yunes went into the living room where Adnan was sitting in his pajamas listening to Umm Kalsoum's “I'm Waiting for You” on the radio and swaying to the music. Yunes greeted his old friend. But Adnan remained absorbed in Umm Kalsoum, as though unaware of him.

Yunes pulled out his gun, fired one shot at Adnan's head and shouted, “I declare you a martyr.”

Then he bent over his blood-covered friend and embraced him, weeping and saying, “It wasn't me that killed you, it was Israel.”

Adnan died a martyr. They printed his photo on big red posters, and he had a huge funeral the likes of which had never been seen before.

Don't you think this ending's much better than yours?

You should have killed him the way they do a wounded stallion instead of letting him be taken there.

Instead, you came to me asking for sleeping pills and left your friend to die a gruesome death in that place.

I saw him there, and I know he spent his final days screaming and then in a coma having shock treatments, but I never told you because you were busy and only wanted to hear what made you feel good.

As far as you were concerned, Adnan ended in the courtroom with his “This is the land of my father and my forefathers.” You'd clap your hands and laugh, saying, “Thirty years! God bless you, Adnan. There's still plenty of time to go, Adnan. The years have passed, and we're still in the camp.”

“It was time that pushed Adnan over the edge,” you told me. “Don't count the years. We need to forget. The years pass, that doesn't matter. Twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, a hundred years, what's the difference?”

You let Adnan die like a dog in the hospital, and his son didn't have the courage to announce his death. The Abu Odeh family didn't take part in his funeral. They buried him secretly, as though there'd been a scandal. Even you, his lifelong friend, didn't go to his funeral.

Now do you understand my confusion?

The temporary confuses me because it scares me.

“Everything's temporary,” you told me when we met after the disaster in '82. And during the long siege at Shatila in '85, you said it was temporary. “Listen, we have no choice. However dire the circumstances are, we have to keep on living or we'll simply disappear.”

I know your views, your eloquence, and your ability to make the impossible sound reasonable.

But what would happen if we were to remain in this temporary world forever?

Do you believe, for example, that your present condition is temporary?

Do you believe that I'll stay here in your temporary world trying in vain to wake you, telling you stories I don't know, traveling with you to a country that I've never seen?

What kind of a game is this? You're dying right in front of me, so I'll take you to an imaginary country!

“Don't say
imaginary!
” I can hear you protesting. “It's more real than reality.”

Very well, my friend. I'll take you to a real country. Then what? I can't stand any more illusions. I want something other than these stories stuffed with heroic deeds. I can't live forever within the walls of fiction.

Should I tell you about myself?

There's nothing to tell. I have nothing to say except that I'm a prisoner. I'm a prisoner of this hospital. Like all prisoners, I live on memories. Prison is a storytelling school: Here we can go wherever we want, twist our memory however we please. Right now, I'm playing with your memory and mine. I forget about the danger hanging over my life, I play with yours, and I try to wake you up. The fact is I no longer care whether or not you wake up; your return to life doesn't matter anymore. But I don't want you to die, because if you die, what will become of me? Would I go back to being a nurse or wait for death at home?

So, you're right.

You were always right: The temporary is preferable to the permanent, or
the temporary is the permanent. When the temporary comes to an end, so does everything else. I'm in your temporary world now: I visit your country, live your life and make imaginary journeys. I'm your temporary doctor who isn't really a doctor. Do you believe I became a doctor? Do you believe three months' study in China can make someone a doctor?

Would you like to hear about China?

I'll give you a bath first, then order a dish of beans from Abu Jaber's next door, then after dinner, I'll tell you. I'm starving and the hospital food is foul. Believe me, you eat better than I do. You can't taste anything now because you're fed through your nose, but the taste of bananas with milk is delicious. Our food, on the other hand, is vile, and I'm forced to eat it. What else can I eat? Do you think I'm going to pay for a dish of beans every day? I had to fight a huge battle to get Dr. Amjad to take me back onto the hospital payroll as a mere nurse, at a miserable salary. He claims I'm not working and you don't need a full-time nurse and all I do is take care of you.

That bastard of a doctor only agreed to pay me half a salary after Zainab intervened and told him his conduct was unjustified “because Dr. Khalil was a founder of this hospital, and he has a right to return to it.” She used the word
doctor
after hesitating and eyeing me like an idiot, as though she had really gone above and beyond the call of duty.

Do you know how much I make?

I make two hundred thousand Lebanese lira a month, or the equivalent of a mere one hundred and twenty U.S. dollars. A doctor for a hundred dollars, what a bargain! It's not even enough to cover the cost of cigarettes, tea, and arak. And I only drink arak rarely because it's gotten expensive.

What age are we living in?

“We were willing to take the shit, but the shit thought it was too good for us,” as they say. Between you and me, Amjad's right. He found out I wasn't a doctor, so he offered me a job as a nurse. I refused. And when I agreed, he made me half a nurse!

Do you believe I'm a doctor?

You encouraged me when I came back from China to work as a doctor, telling me revolutionary medicine was better than regular medicine.

But how sad it is when revolutions come to an end! The end of a revolution's the ugliest thing there is. A revolution is like a person: It gets senile and rambles and wets itself.

What matters is that revolutionary medicine no longer exists. The revolution's over, medicine's gone back to being medicine, and I was only a temporary doctor.

And now I'm returning to my real self.

But what is my real self?

I have no idea. I know I became a doctor by accident, because I fractured my spine. I don't remember how the accident happened – we were in the Burjawi district, whose main street forms a tongue descending from al-Ashrafiyyeh in East Beirut to Ras al-Nab' in the west, a stretch we were able to occupy to announce that we were liberating Beirut.

It was Lebanon's civil war.

When the war began, I remembered Amman and how we were thrown out without having lost; in September of '70 we were defeated without a war and left for the forests of Jerash and Ajloun, and that was the end of it. Amman – today it seems like a dream; Black September was my dream. We called that September black to convey its significance, but Amman was white, and there I discovered the whiteness of death. Death is white, white as these sheets that you're wrapped up in in your iron bed.

I was just a kid at the time. I fought in the district of al-Weibdeh near the Fatah office. To tell you the truth, I'd been enthusiastic about going to Amman so I could look for my mother, but that's a long story I'll tell you later.

The war in Beirut was different and went on for a long time. When it started, I thought it would be Amman all over again, and the fighting wouldn't go on for more than a few weeks and then we'd withdraw somewhere. But I was wrong, Lebanon blew up in our faces. An entire country reduced to splinters, and we found ourselves running around among the shattered fragments of districts, cities, villages, sects.

I won't provide an analysis of the Lebanese civil war right now, but it terrified me. It terrified me that the belly of a city could burst open and its guts spill out and its streets be transformed into borders for dismembered communities. Everything came apart during the years of the civil war; even I was split into innumerable personae. Our political discourse and alliances changed from one day to the next, from support for the Left to support for the Muslims, from the Muslims to the Christians, and from the Shatila massacre, carried out by Israelis and Phalangists in '82, to the siege-massacre of '85, carried out by the Amal movement with the support of Syria.

How can this war be believed?

I see it pass in front of me like a mysterious dream, like a cloud that envelops me from head to foot. I was able to swallow an amazing number of contradictory slogans: Words were cheap at the time, as was blood, which is why we didn't notice the abyss we were sliding into. None of us noticed, not even you. I know you hated that war and said it wasn't a war. With due respect, I disagree because I don't think you can apply the concept of blame to history. History is neutral, I tell you – only to hear you answer, “No! Either we dish out blame where blame is due, or we become mere victims.” I don't want to get caught up in that argument since, as you can see, nowadays I tend to agree with you, but you'll have to explain one thing to me. Some day soon, when you wake from your long sleep, you must explain to me how clouds can so fill someone's head that he goes to his own death without noticing.

In the war, the Khalil who's sitting in front of you now was the hero of al-Burjawi. No, I'm lying. I wasn't a hero. I was with the young fighters when we occupied that salient that climbs toward al-Ashrafiyyeh, and that's where I fell: The world flipped upside-down, I couldn't hear a sound, and I understood that death has no meaning, and we can die without realizing it.

Like all fedayeen, I expected to die and didn't care. I thought that when I died, I'd die like a hero, meaning I'd look death in the eye before I closed mine. But when the world flipped upside down in al-Burjawi and I fell, I didn't look at death. Death occupied me without my realizing. It was only in the hospital that I found out four of my comrades had been killed, and
then I was stricken with the crazy fear that I'd die without knowing I was dead.

If you were alive, my dear friend, you'd laugh and tell me that no one knows he's dying when he's dying. But it's not true, I've seen them dying and knowing. A doctor sees a lot, and I've seen them trembling, terrified of death, and then dying.