Gate of the Sun (25 page)

You'll say these philosophical theories I'm repeating are an attempt to cover up my ignorance of medicine. Not true. I'm convinced of these things and that's why I'm treating you according to my own methods. Of course, you're not the issue; Dr. Amjad was right when he pronounced you a vegetable. But I'm convinced that the soul has its own laws and that the body is a vessel for the soul. I'm trying to rouse you with my stories because I'm certain that the soul can, if it wants, wake a sleeping body.

In China, in spite of everything, and in spite of the madness of history raging in my head, I learned the most valuable thing in my life. I learned that each of our bodies holds the entire history of the human race; your body is your history. I'm the living proof. Look at me. Can't you see the pain tearing at me? The Chinese doctor was right. The break in my spinal column, dormant for many years, has suddenly come back to life. The pain is everywhere, and painkillers are useless.

Our body is our history, dear friend. Take a look at your history in your wasting body and tell me, wouldn't it be better if you got up and shook off death?

I learned medicine in China and returned to Lebanon, a doctor, understanding nothing of medicine beyond its general principles, but speaking English!

After I transferred out of the training course, I was taken to a field hospital belonging to the Chinese People's Army, where a tall man – the Chinese are not all short, as we have a tendency to think – asked me if I spoke English. He asked me in English, so I answered, “Yes.” I used to think I knew English, which we studied in the
UNWRA
schools
^*
. So they put me with a group of trainees, most of them Africans. The training doctor taught the course in English. I didn't understand a thing. Well, actually, I understood a little bit, so I decided to pretend I was following everything. I learned to parrot everything that was said in front of me and ended up learning the language. I discovered I was no worse than the others. To speak English, you don't really have to know it; this is the source of its power. With amazing speed I retained the doctor's lectures and came back from China rattling on in English, tossing in a few medical terms to convince people that I was a real doctor. Everything was fine.

What I can't forget is that, when I spoke English in China, I felt I wasn't myself. Sometimes I'd be my Chinese professor or my African colleague, or I'd imitate the Pakistani. Oh, our group was composed of ten students, eight from Nigeria, me, and a Pakistani. The Pakistani knew more than we did; he said he'd been a student at the medical school in Karachi, had been thrown out because of his political activism and had come to China to study the science of revolution. He didn't want to study medicine, but they'd forced him to join this course before training him for guerrilla warfare.

I'd imitate him and feel myself becoming another person inside the English language. I'd react as they did – especially like the Pakistani, who would change totally when he got excited, stretching his mouth so that he looked like the heroes in American films when they scream,
Fuck!

I figured out something very important. I realized that when I spoke, I
was imitating others. Every word I spoke in English had to pass through the image of another person, as if the person speaking weren't me. And when I returned to Beirut and started speaking Arabic again, I found myself again, I found the Khalil I'd left behind.

In China I discovered that when I spoke the language of others I became like them. This isn't true, of course. But what if it were? What if, even in Arabic, I was imitating others? And that the only difference was that here I no longer knew who it was I was imitating? We learn our mother tongues from our mothers, imitating them, but we forget that. As we forget, we become ourselves; we speak and believe that we're the ones who are speaking.

Now I've begun to understand your feelings about your father's voice. You told me that sometimes you felt that the voice emerging from your throat was that of the blind sheikh: “It's amazing, but I began to look like him, and when I spoke I started to feel it was he who was using my tongue.”

No, no, I don't agree with that theory. It's true we imitate, but we shape our own language as we shape our own lives. I don't know my father. All I remember is a shadow, and I can't tell you now – or in twenty years – that it's that shadow's voice that emerges from my throat.

Of course we imitate, but we forget, and forgetting is a blessing. Without forgetting we would all die of fright and abuse. Memory is the process of organizing what to forget, and what we're doing now, you and me, is organizing our forgetting. We talk about things and forget other things. We remember in order to forget, this is the essence of the game. But don't you dare die now! You have to finish organizing your forgetting first, so that I can remember afterwards.

Even now, when I say the word
fuck
, I see the Pakistani with his distended mouth, white teeth, and fine oblong jaw like the beak of a bird; I feel his voice in my throat, and I can smell China.

I studied medicine for three months and then returned to Beirut carrying with me a new language as well as an education in drinking warm water and in the performance of simple field operations such as removing bullets, bandaging wounds, treating fractures, giving injections and so on.

I passed as a doctor. I worked in a field hospital in Tyre, would stretch my mouth while repeating the Pakistani's words, and became a doctor. Time's wheel has turned, as they say, and now here I am, a temporary doctor, in a temporary hospital, in a temporary country. Everything inside me is waiting for something else. These waiting periods breed and erase each other, push each other out of the way and interact.

I look at my life and see images. I see a man who looks like me, and I see men who don't look like me, but I don't see myself. It's strange how we deal with life. We go to one place and find ourselves in another. We search for one thing and find something else. Alternatives pile up on top of us. In place of Nuha came Siham. In place of Siham came Shams, and in place of Shams I don't know. But now I have to wise up and marry. I'm forty years old, and at forty you either get married or life becomes hell. When a man says he “has to” get married, it means he's reached rock bottom. Marriage is supposed to happen without that “has to.”

No. With Shams, marriage never occurred to me because I was living like someone under a spell. Now when I remember that magic, I see another man. The Khalil sitting in front of you isn't Shams' Khalil. Shams' Khalil was different. He didn't eat, because love suppresses the appetite; he didn't speak, because love has no language; and he didn't mind waiting. When she was there, her presence filled him up, and when she wasn't, the waiting filled him up.

Then the love went.

The only thing that destroys love is death. Death is the only cure for love. It ought to have been me. It ought to have been me who killed her. I'm the one who . . . But I didn't.

Now I'm looking for a substitute. I'm not looking for a woman like Shams but for any woman. How good it is to find a woman in your bed! But my bed remains empty, and I can't ask anyone to help me find a woman. A woman is something you have to find for yourself.

Betrayed, a cuckold, and in search of a woman?

So what? All men are betrayed and all of them are cuckolds. I know.
There, in the house of the Green Sheikh, I realized this. I suffered and wept for Shams.

I went through moments of great weakness. Shams was dead, and rumors of a death list were everywhere. I decided to go to them. Abd al-Latif with his one good eye took me to the house of Sheikh Hashim, who they called the Green Sheikh. I took off my shoes and joined their circle and twisted and swayed with the chanting, invoking with them God's name in their
dhkir
ritual. I let my breathing be guided by the hand of the sheikh who conducted us to the final ecstasy where we touched the universal Presence. I twirled with them, experienced the intoxication, and my tears flowed involuntarily. The sheikh asked me to stay behind after the others had dispersed and said he was pleased with me, letting me know that the time to repent had come. He accepted me as a disciple in his order. He gave me a book by the great Yashrati sheikh and told me to come and see him whenever I wished.

On my second visit, when I went to ask him about the story of Reem at Sha'ab, which I'd heard from everyone, I saw his wife pound on the door of their house, cursing the sheikh. He refused to open the door.

Then I learned the truth.

She was sixty-three years old. Seated on the bench outside her sister's house, she told the story, to those who wanted to hear, of how she'd gone in and found the sheikh panting with the wife of one of his disciples in his arms.

“I saw it,” the woman went on, “and her cuckolded mule of a husband didn't want to believe me. He said I was crazy and drove his wife home.”

The Green Sheikh's wife said that when she saw them she started screaming. Everyone, including the woman's husband, rushed over, and the hullabaloo commenced. She continued: “Then the Green Sheikh raised his hand, everyone fell silent, and he declared, ‘You are repudiated.' He managed to convince everyone that I was crazy, and ordered me out of the house. I tried to tell them the truth, but no one believed me. A man in his seventies, the old lecher: I saw him hugging the woman to his fat belly while
he panted like a dog! They all said I was crazy. The husband took his wife away and spat on me. He should have spat on himself and on her.”

In the house of the Green Sheikh, I understood that Shams hadn't betrayed me. She'd been under a man's spell, or under I don't know what . . . I left the Sufi circle and never went back.

I understood Shams, but I was very angry with her for not having told me about her relationship with that other man. I'd have advised her not to kill him. But she was right; only death can put an end to love. By killing her love, she revealed who was the more courageous of the two of us. Me, I waited for my love to die. And with death came death. With death love evaporates and turns into nothing.

I don't care about people. They pity me because they don't understand anything. They pity me because I loved her, because she betrayed me, because I fear her ghost and because – I don't know. For my part, I don't care. Anyway, I'm in China. The hospital sent me back to China, where I was able to work on my English. I can't be a doctor just in Arabic, and without warm water! There I was reborn. There, when everything seemed to end, when they decreed I couldn't continue my military training, everything began. Khalil the officer was swept away, and in came Khalil the doctor. Instead of going to war, I went to the hospital. And today Khalil the doctor has been swept away again, and in has come Khalil the nurse.

Do you know what Dr. Amjad said?

He invited me into his office and started rambling incoherently. He sat behind the desk and spoke as though he were the director of a hospital. Of course, he is the director of a hospital, but come on! A hospital without the minimum necessities – no hygiene, no medication, nothing – it's almost a prison. And this empty head stammers in front of me, saying I really should work full time. He stretches out his words, hesitates and leaves half of them suspended in midair before snatching them back and continuing. He trips over the letter
R
, saying, “You're a
nu'se
, and you have to work as a
nu'se
. It's impossible. Things can't go on this way.” I tried to explain the conditions under which I was working and how you take up all my time.

“All your time!” he said mockingly. “The fact is, we've started to worry for your sanity, doctor, talking to yourself all the time. You think we don't know what you do in that room? You think talking's a cure? If talking were a cure, we'd have liberated Palestine long ago. No, it's impossible.”

I told him I took half a salary and was content with that, and he told me that what I called a half-salary was a full salary now that the Red Crescent's funding had been cut off.

“The money evaporated with Kuwait's oil, Dr. Khalil. There is no money. There's war and America, but the oil has gone, and the Arabs have gone bankrupt, and the revolution has gone bankrupt and your salary isn't half a salary, so you'll have to choose between working with us as director of nursing on a full-time basis and leaving the hospital.”

He said the hospital wasn't a place of asylum, that he only wanted what was best for me, and he had respect for my past accomplishments. “But you have to do something. Don't be afraid, you're under our protection.”

I didn't answer. He was trying to manipulate me, to make it clear that he knew the ins and outs of the Shams affair. All the same, I was on the verge of refusing his offer when he hung a threat over you.

“We'll take care of Yunes,” he said. “Anyway, he no longer needs attention and the question of whether he should stay here is still on the table. I'm in the process of getting his papers ready for his transfer to Dar al-Ajazah.
^*
People like him are put there, not in a hospital. His condition's hopeless, and clinically he's dead.”

Do you see what that son-of-a-bitch doctor wants? He wants to throw you into a home. Yunes – Abu Salem, Izz al-Din, Adam – is to end up in Dar al-Ajazah? May lightening strike him! Do you know what this means? Listen to me, please. I didn't promise Amjad that I'd consider the proposal seriously out of concern for myself. After all, what can they do to me? It's God that decides when we die. I said I'd consider the proposal because the idea of that place struck terror in my heart. Do you know what moving you
there would mean? You would rot alive – yes, you'd rot and the worms and the ulcers would devour you. I didn't tell you about Adnan because I didn't want to upset you, but I'm the only one who visited him, because they sent for me, and while I was there Dr. Karim Jaber showed me something horrifying.