Gate of the Sun (49 page)

Did my father understand the danger he'd put himself in? Why didn't he hide? Why didn't he flee the house? Why didn't he get his weapon and fire before he died?

He fell like a sack, as my mother said, or he flailed around in his blood like a rooster with its throat cut, as my grandmother said, or he was a hero, as all of you said.

But shouldn't he have worried about us?

I know you didn't worry about your children, but why didn't he?

Tell me, what was this life you led? You left your children with a woman on her own over there, and you were between here and there, wearing your heroism on your sleeve the way heroes do.

Tell me, is that what heroism's about? You abandon your children to fear and despair and march off to die?

I told you I hated my father and lived alone with my grandmother. Do you know what it means for a person to live in a vacuum? Do you know why my mother left me, and where she went?

You want the beginning!

That's the beginning. The beginning, Father, is death. In the beginning my father died, and my mother disappeared. My grandmother knows why she disappeared, and I'm certain she encouraged her to flee; she may have even given her a push. After the death of my little sister, Fatmah, my mother spent five years with us, weeping. Then she disappeared. I don't remember the day because I didn't notice her absence. Then it seemed as though it had always been that way. My grandmother said my mother had gone to visit relatives in Jordan, and the visit had turned into a long one. The woman disappeared as though she'd never been, and when I became aware of her absence, it was too late. I used to long for her at night. Just at night, I used to feel like something was gnawing at my chest. I'd get up from the mattress and go to hers, and not find her. I'd sleep next to her when she wasn't there. Then my grandmother decided to rearrange the house. She bought two beds, one for her and one for me, and my mother didn't have a place anymore, and I could no longer go to her mattress at night to sleep next to her or smell the scent of her hair. No, no, nothing happened the way it was supposed to happen, like my coming back to the house, for example, and not finding her, bawling, rousing the neighbors and everyone setting out to search for her; my grandmother bawling, surrounded by women giving me pitying looks, and one of them saying, “Poor boy, no father and no mother!” No, nothing like that. I told you, I don't remember the day she disappeared because I didn't notice, and then I sort of got used to it. My grandmother never told me what had happened, but I understood my mother wasn't going to come back.

“She's gone to her family,” the old woman said.

“Aren't we her family?” I'd asked her in amazement.

I don't remember if she answered, or had ever wanted to speak about the matter. My mother's phantom would hover over me at night, and the pain would gnaw at me. Then the light would come and she'd disappear.

Yes, I lived an ordinary life. I thought that everyone was like everyone else and all houses were like all other houses. I was sure that the memories of this faraway razed village were memory itself, and that my grandmother and my aunts were all the women there were.

But why were my aunts like that? Why did they refer to me as “Najwah's son”? Was it because I was dark-skinned like her or because they wanted to erase the image of my father from their lives?

My grandmother said that Lebanon was, in spite of everything, the beginning of a change for the better. She said her daughters married in Lebanon within two years: “We came to Lebanon, my daughters got married, each one went her own way, and I'm still waiting to find my own path.”

“And what's your path, Grandma?”

“My path is the one that will take us back.”

“Where will we go back to, Grandma?”

“We'll go back to al-Ghabsiyyeh.”

“When are we going to go?”

“How should I know? But my heart tells me I'm not going to die here. I'm going to go back and put my head next to that man's and close my eyes and rest.”

“We get no rest,” she said. “Since that day, we've been going from place to place like gypsies.” She said she picked up her children and ran. She said she saw the man fall from the minaret like a bird. She said she heard the screams of the dead, but she didn't look back and found herself in the midst of throngs of people on the outskirts of Amqa, and there, among the olive trees, she set up her tent made from two woolen blankets and lived for three months. Then she found herself among those going from Amqa to Yanouh, and from Yanouh to Tarshiha, and from Tarshiha to Deir al-Qasi, and from Deir al-Qasi to Beit Lif, and from Beit Lif to al-Mansourah, and from al-Mansourah to al-Rashidiyyeh, and from al-Rashidiyyeh to Burj al-Barajneh, and from Burj al-Barajneh to Shatila.

My grandmother said the journey had been long and that she'd believed the exodus from one village to the next would eventually bring her back to
al-Ghabsiyyeh, but she found herself in Lebanon. And in Lebanon, fate took her three daughters by storm and they married, and she was left on her own with her husband-son until she married him to Najwah.

I saw my grandmother's sisters only rarely. My grandmother used to visit them three times a week at the Ain al-Hilweh camp, but she didn't take me with her, and they didn't come to us. Though, in those last days, when I was summoned from the south as she succumbed to her final illness, I went to see her and they were seated around her. She gestured to them to leave the room. They went out, indignation written all over their faces, and I was left alone with her. That was the day she gave me her bequest. She tried to say something but couldn't, the words emerging in fragments from her lips like unconnected letters. The words broke up into letters and the letters rang in my ears as I bent over her trying to understand, but all I could understand was that these things were for me: the watch that didn't work, the pillow of flowers, and the Koran. I nodded to show I accepted them, she put her hand on my head to bless me, and I heard her say, “Yasin.” I pulled away. At the moment of truth, the woman revealed the secret of her relationship with me: she didn't know that I wasn't Yasin, that I didn't love Yasin and that I didn't want to be him. I'm a different man, and I don't resemble that photograph. I'm not a picture hung on the wall. At that moment I hated everything, and I decided to leave the base in the south and go abroad. I don't want to die the way my father died, and I don't want to become the captive of this mysterious village I've never seen or of al-Ghabsiyyeh's moon when it's full or of the man who hanged himself from the lotus tree.

I left her room after putting the watch in my pocket and let my aunt Munirah take the Koran from my hand. I sat in the living room listening to my aunt's husband.

“What's this?”

He questioned me about my grandmother Umm Yasin's bequest. Taking me by the hand and sitting me down next to him, he started telling his story. A man of about forty-five with a bald patch that shone as though he rubbed
it with olive oil, and a face full of pimples and pock marks, and a hand that trembled, holding a lit cigarette.

“Come and listen,” he said. “This is a story you must hear.”

Ahmad Ali al-Jashi began his story. I forgot about my grandmother dying in the next room, my hatred for Yasin, and my decision to go abroad, and I traveled with his words. Like a small child, that bald man told me with his eyes and his tears what his words could not. He spoke of his uncle Mohammed, who now lives in Kafar Yasif, and how he'd visited him the previous month and they'd gone together to al-Ghabsiyyeh.

I tell you, my dear friend, when I listened to Umm Hassan telling the same story before she died, I saw things flickering in front of me as though I knew the place. At the time I didn't understand my feeling of having already lived that moment, of already knowing the story.

Umm Hassan told me about the lotus tree, and about the candles and the cattle that fill the village mosque, and I shook my head as though I already knew what she was telling me and what she was about to tell me. The fact is, it was this man who turned into a child before me with his eyes and his tears; he's the one who took me there, fed me prickly pears and gave me water to drink from “the Bubbler.”

My grandmother's dying in her room, I'm fidgeting inside my hatred of the place, the people, the prayers and the incense, and this bald man takes me by the hand, sits me down at his side and forces me to listen to his story. Then my grandmother dies, and I forget the story. And after about twenty years, along comes Umm Hassan and tells me the same story, which makes me see the man's words as though I'd actually been there. I see the village square and its narrow streets, and I follow the words of Umm Hassan in my memory, interrupting her to say, “No. The Bubbler isn't near the mosque, Umm Hassan. The Bubbler's near the orchards.” She'd respond: “How foolish I am! I'm getting al-Ghabsiyyeh mixed up with al-Kweikat,” bringing her hand to my brow, caressing my face, and then leaving me.

The man said he went to visit his uncle in the village of Kafar Yasif and that it was very easy to do. The uncle got him a permit, he went to Jordan
by car, crossed the bridge, and found himself standing in front of his uncle and his nephews, who took him to Kafar Yasif.

The man said he visited the whole of Palestine – Haifa, Jaffa, Acre, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, everywhere. But he wanted to tell me about al-Ghabsiyyeh. He said the moment he arrived in the square at al-Ghabsiyyeh, he fell to the ground spontaneously. “I started kissing the ground, and my tears were falling. I stayed like that for about five minutes, then I told my uncle, ‘I want to see our house.' ‘You won't recognize your house,' he said to me. We stood in the square, and I walked toward the west. There was grass all around me and they'd planted pines to hide the features of the place. My uncle said, ‘Don't go. There are vipers and scorpions.' I walked through the plants, and the houses looked as though they'd been planted in the middle of the green grass. I stopped in front of our house but didn't go in. The stone walls were still intact, but the roof was gone and there was grass growing inside the house and out of the walls themselves, as though the grass were eating the walls. I rested my head on the wall, and I felt a hand on my shoulder. I jumped. My uncle said, ‘Let's go.' I told him, ‘This is our house.' ‘I know,' he said. ‘But we have come back to live here.' ‘It's forbidden,' he said. ‘Even visits are forbidden. Come on, let's go, Son.' And we left. There were nettles on my clothes. I don't know why nettles grow so well inside houses. I told my uncle, ‘We have an orchard. I want to see it.' I turned northward, and he walked at my side. I told him, ‘Please, don't show me the way, Uncle,' and he said, ‘Very well.' I arrived at a rusty iron gate, looked around, and sensed it was there. There's a way of recognizing our orchard. It has a
muzawi
winter fig tree whose fruit is shaped like pears. I saw the fig tree and told him, ‘This is our orchard.' My uncle picked a fig – fig season was past – saying to me, ‘A bit of what's yours.' I ate the fig, and afterward we picked a few prickly pears and ate them. Then he said, ‘Come on, let's go back.' I said, ‘No.' There's a gap in the wall between our orchard and the Hammad family's orchard. I used to slip through and steal pomegranates from them. I searched and found the opening, and I slipped through and found myself, as if by magic, in front of the pomegranate tree. I started picking. The tree
was full of fruit. I told him, ‘Come and pick with me.' As I was picking, I could hear my uncle's voice calling for me and asking, ‘Where did you go through?' And I answered, ‘Through the gap in the wall.' ‘I don't see a gap,' he said. I took off my coat, filled it with pomegranates, and told him, ‘Here I come.' And guess what happened – I couldn't find the gap either, as though the wall had closed up before my eyes. He was shouting from one side and I was shouting from the other, carrying the coat full of pomegranates and telling him to be patient. He was searching for me and I was searching for him. I don't know how much time passed, but I stopped hearing his footsteps, and his voice disappeared. I was afraid. I thought, I'm on my own, and if the Jews come now, what would I say? I threw the pomegranates aside, keeping one with me, which I put in the pocket of my coat, and I shouted to him, ‘Let's meet at the mosque!'”

Ahmad Ali al-Jashi told me how he'd gone around the whole village before reaching the mosque, and how he'd been afraid the weeds would devour him, and how he heard something panting and it scared him, and how he decided never to go back to al-Ghabsiyyeh again.

“Then I found the gap in the wall,” he said.

He said he walked a lot but kept looking back, for the pomegranate tree was his only landmark in the middle of that obliterated landscape. He returned to the tree, walked three steps backward and found himself in front of the opening. He jumped through it and was in their orchard. From there he returned to the mosque to find his uncle waiting for him.

Ahmad Ali al-Jashi said al-Ghabsiyyeh was the way it had always been.

He said it had been waiting for him.

He said most of the olive and carob trees had been cut down, but we'd plant new ones.

He said it wouldn't take much work. We'd pick ourselves up and go. What could they do to us? We'd pitch our tents there the same as we'd pitched them here and wait until we'd rebuilt the houses that had been knocked down.