Gate of the Sun (23 page)

It's not true that the dying don't know; if they didn't, death would lose its meaning and become like a dream. When death loses its meaning, life loses its meaning, and we enter a labyrinth from which there is no exit.

Tell me, when you were struck dumb and fell, did you know you were dying?

Of course not. I'm sure you didn't. In medical terms, the moment you lost the power of speech, you became worried because Amna couldn't understand what you were saying. You thought she'd gone deaf, so you raised your voice and tried to express yourself with gestures. Then, with the second stroke, you lost consciousness. Now look at you, lying here, not aware of a thing.

For me, too, when the world turned upside down, I didn't regain consciousness for three days. The doctor at the American University Hospital in Beirut said I had to remain motionless for a week. My l6 vertebra was crushed to powder, and to escape semiparalysis, the only cure was to lie motionless.

If I told you the pain was unbearable, I'd be lying. The pain was appalling, as pain always is, but it could be withstood. It was like a hand of steel gripping my chest and neck. I was paralyzed, my chest was constricted, my breathing was shallow, and pain ran through every part of my body. But I knew I wasn't going to die and that if I did, I'd die with my comrades who'd been killed by the heat from the B7s. The B7 was our secret weapon – a small rocket-propelled grenade carried on the shoulder capable of piercing tank armor because it gave off two thousand degrees of heat.

We were in our hiding place in an old house in al-Burjawi when the grenade fell on us and we ignited. They told us later that our bodies were
completely charred, that I was black as charcoal. They thought I was dead and took me to the hospital morgue, but a nurse then noticed I was breathing so they moved me to the emergency room. They worked for hours to remove the black coating incrusted on my skin; you can still see a trace of it on my shoulder.

The doctor said my life wasn't in danger; the only real fear was that I'd be paralyzed, but I'd probably “escape clean” – and he made a gesture with his fingers like popping an almond from its skin. I wasn't afraid of paralysis. I was sure it wouldn't happen to me. But the idea that I'd die without knowing struck terror into me. Everyone knowing and not me. Everyone weeping and not the dead man. A true masquerade, the masquerade of death.

I got better, of course. After a week I got out of bed completely healed; I even forgot the pain. Pain is the only thing we forget. We're capable of revisiting many things, and may even be moved by certain sensations, but not pain. We either have pain or we don't – there's no halfway house. Pain is when it's there, and when it's not, it doesn't exist. The only feeling it leaves is of lightness, the ability to fly.

Why am I telling you about my back?

Is it because the pain came back since Shams' death?

Shams has nothing to do with it. God knows, when I was with her I didn't notice my back. I was like a god. With her I experienced love in the way you described it: You said God had made a mistake with men; he'd created them with all the necessary parts except one, which there is no doing without and whose importance we only discover when we truly need it.

But why am I telling you about the missing part now? I started out telling you about China.

Could it be because that was where I became aware of how ponderous my body was and discovered I was unfit for war? Do you know what it means to be unfit for war during a war?

I won't take up more of your time with this. I sense you're tired of my stories and would prefer to have me take you back to Bab al-Shams, to that day when you wept for love and told Nahilah you felt impotent.

“Women possess it, this missing organ,” you told me. “I discovered there that women possess it; it's their entire body, while I'm incomplete, incomplete and impotent.”

Nahilah looked at you in astonishment. She had a hard time believing in this sense of impotence that you were voicing, because you were insatiable. She thought you were talking about sexual impotence and burst out laughing. After such a journey of the body through the realms of ecstasy, you stop and tell her you're lacking something! She felt she'd been purified inside and out, luminous, embodied, that her eyes were two mirrors reflecting the world!

You tried to explain, but she didn't understand. You explained that you needed another part because the sexual organ was not an instrument of love. It was its doorway, but when the chasm opened you needed another part, for which you were searching in vain.

Nahilah thought you were saying all that as a preamble to making love again, and she had no objection; she was always ready, always ardent, always waiting. So she said, “Come here.” But you didn't want to. You'd just been trying to tell her about your amazing discovery. But of course, you went to her; and there, amid the waves of her body, you discovered that women surpass men because the woman's body itself is the part a man doesn't have, because she's a wave without end.

I won't tell you now the details of that night at Bab al-Shams. First China. Let's make a short journey to China, then we'll go back to the cave.

In China I discovered I was unfit for war and metamorphosed from an officer into a doctor. I studied medicine in spite of myself, because I had no other option.

In Classical Arabic mixed with colloquial Egyptian, the woman told me I was unfit for war and should go back to my country or join the doctors' course. I accepted even though the idea of studying medicine had never crossed my mind. Like the rest of my generation, I'd had no serious schooling. After elementary school we joined the cadet camps of the various military forces. We set off to change the world and found ourselves soldiers. We were like the soldiers in any ordinary army, the only difference being
that we talked about politics, especially me. I started my active military life as an officer, a political commissar with the commandos of al-Assifa because I loved literature. I used to memorize long passages of what I read. I liked Jurji Zeidan and Naguib Mahfouz, but my favorite was Ghassan Kanafani. I learned
Men in the Sun
by heart, like a poem. Then I broadened my horizons and memorized whole sections of Russian novels, especially Dostoevsky's
The Idiot
. How I felt for Prince Mishkin! How sweet he was, caught between his two lovers! How wonderful his naiveté, like that of the Christ! I'd read
The Idiot
and would never tire of it. How I wished I could be like him!

No. When I stood before the investigating committee, I didn't feel like an idiot; I felt humiliated. Being an idiot is not the same as being humiliated. It's a position one takes. But there I stood before them humiliated, and I lost my ability to defend myself.

Literature was my refuge. In the days of Kafar Shouba, when we were exposed to the aerial bombardment, sheltered only by the branches of the olive trees, those books were my refuge. To stay alive, I would imitate their heroes and would speak their language.

I became a political commissar because I loved literature, I became a soldier because I was like everyone else, and I became a doctor because I had no choice.

It happened because of my back: After a week I was completely recovered and rejoined my battalion, which had been transferred to fight at Sanin mountain. There among the snows of Lebanon I grew to hate the war and love that white mountain. I lived in the mire of blood-spattered snow.

Blood stained the snow on both sides of the front, which stretched to the horizon. I understood why my mother had fled the camp. There we don't see, we remember. We remember things we never experienced because we take on the memories of others. We pile ourselves on top of one another and smell the olive groves and the orange orchards.

At Sanin I realized that those far horizons were an extension of man and that if God hadn't made these curves, we'd die and our bodies would turn into coffins.

I was in Sanin when Colonel Yahya from the Mobilization and Organization Department came and informed me that I'd been chosen to join a training course for battalion commanders in China.

And I went.

From Sanin to China in one straight shot. “Seek knowledge, though it be from China,” the Prophet said. I descended from the highest mountain in Lebanon to the lowest point in the world and there my final destiny was decided. “No soul knows in what land it shall die.”
^*

It never occurred to me that I'd switch from military to medical school. Such are destiny and fate. My destiny was not to be a soldier, and my fate took me where it willed. I understood that that fall on the Burjawi steps had determined my future, and once I accepted my future as a doctor in the armed forces, things began to change. Now I'm no longer a doctor and it's up to me to decide whether I remain a nurse. I prefer something else but I don't know what it would be. You'll say it was my fault, that I should have left with the others in '82, you'll blame me for having left the stadium and gone home.

When I recall my moments at the stadium, where the fedayeen gathered amidst rice and
youyous
, I don't know what happened to me. I had no justification for staying in Beirut. I had no family, only Nuha, who I didn't want.

“You should have gone with them,” Zainab said when she learned they'd decided I wasn't a doctor and had to work as a trainee nurse.

Do you see the significance of the insult, Father? A trainee nurse! After all those years of being treated as a doctor, I've become a miserable servant in the hospital whose founding physician I once was. But let's suppose I had gone with the fedayeen, where would I find myself today?

I'd probably be in Gaza, and my status would be ambiguous. Do you think they'd have accepted me as a doctor there? Our leaders, as I understand it, are setting up a legal authority, and this authority needs educated people, crooks, merchants, contractors, business men, and security services.
Our role has come to an end; they won't be needing fedayeen anymore. If I'd gone with them, I'd have to choose between working as a nurse or joining one of the intelligence groups. My destiny would be in limbo.

We've ended up in limbo, dear friend. Our lives have become a burden to us.

The decision to return to Shatila from the stadium wasn't a mistake. It's true it wasn't a conscious decision, but, like all critical decisions, we take them, or they take us, and that's the end of the matter.

In China I had no choice, I had to accept my role as a doctor because after two weeks of intensive nonstop military training, the doctor discovered I was unfit for war. She didn't take me into the X-ray room or subject me to medical tests; she simply looked at me and understood everything.

I went to see her bare chested as my comrades had done. She looked at me attentively, walked around me, asked me to bend over, put her finger on the place where it hurt and pressed. I screamed in pain.

“When did your spinal chord get broken?” she asked.

“What? . . . Two months ago.”

She asked me to bend over again, brought her face close to the place where it hurt, and I don't know what she did, but I could feel her hot breath scorching my bones. Then she went back behind the desk and asked me to get dressed and wait.

After everyone had left, she came and sat down beside me. She was wearing khaki pants, a khaki shirt, and a khaki cap. All I could see of her was a small face and Mongol eyes. I couldn't work out her age; I had guessed about thirty, but then someone mentioned she was in her fifties. I have no idea.

She sat down beside me and explained that my broken spine had knitted in such a way that to continue training, or any military work, was out of the question. The pain might erupt again at any moment. This meant that I had to get ready to go home.

I tried to explain that she was cutting off my future and that I had to continue military training at any cost.

She patted my hand to reassure me – the only time my hand touched a
Chinese woman's. She advised me to go back to Palestine to work with the peasants, saying that her most beautiful memories were of the time when she'd worked in the countryside.

“But I can't go back.”

“Of course you can.”

“If I go back, I won't work with the peasants because we're not living in our own country and because there aren't any peasants . . .”

My response stunned her. I explained that we were a people of refugees, and she was even more stunned. I said we were orchestrating our revolution from the outside, surrounding our land because we were unable to enter it.

“You are surrounding the cities,” she said, looking relieved, “as we did on the Long March.”

“No,” I said. “We're surrounding the countryside because we're outside our country.”

Numerous questions flitted across her face, but she didn't say anything more; she didn't understand how you could surround the countryside or how there could be no peasants. She asked me to pack my bags, so I left the clinic and went back to the barracks as though nothing had happened.

The next morning, I went out to join the lineup as usual, but the trainer, who was accompanied by a social worker who spoke Classical Arabic, ordered me to leave. I went back to my room to wait to go home, but instead of sending me to Beirut, they took me to another camp, where I spent the training period in a field hospital belonging to the Chinese People's Army. It seems that what I'd said had had some effect on the doctor. Medical training wasn't very different from military training. We drank the same water, ate the same food, ran in morning lineups and practiced using medical instruments as though they were weapons. The only difference was the language.