Gate of the Sun (59 page)

“I saw death in the eyes of my son. Yasin came back from the cave utterly transformed. I saw death hovering over him and knew he was going to die. And when he married Najwah, I saw death in her eyes, but somehow I took no notice, God curse us human beings. I saw death, but I wanted to release him from those rumors that clung to him after the incident of the Greek boy and the rabbi. So I decided to get him married and paid no attention, and he died.”

This is how things become linked in the mind of a senile old woman. The whole business of the cave is meaningless. Fantasies, Father. Fantasies, Son. We invent stories of our misery and then believe them. We'll believe anything so as not to see. We cover our eyes and set off, and then we bump into each other.

Umm Hassan believed the story of the cave never took place and that my grandmother was crazy, persecuting my mother for no reason and forcing her to run away into God's vast world.

But Umm Hassan knows that God's world is narrow and that “eventually, all men meet.”

My mother fled from Beirut to Amman and then from Amman to Ramallah. She disappeared as completely as if she'd gone into your cave, dear friend. Which reminds me: Tell me about the cave. Umm Hassan said the Deir al-Asad cave was uninhabitable, so where's the Bab al-Shams you spoke about? Where is that village that stretches through interlinked caves, “a village that's bigger, I swear, than Ain al-Zaitoun,” as you used to say? “I proposed, ‘Come on, let's look for caves in Galilee and bring back the refugees.
A cave is better than a tent, or a house of corrugated iron, or banana leaf walls.' But they didn't agree. Members of the Organization said it was a pipe dream. An entire people can't live in caves. They told me to go look for caves for the fedayeen and I saw the sarcasm in their expressions, so I didn't look. I arranged my cave for myself and by myself and lived in it.”

Do you want me to take you back there, as Umm Hassan suggested?

“Go to his house, Son, and look. You may find their telephone number. Call them. Call his children, and they'll work things out through the Red Cross.”

I don't think Umm Hassan's suggestion is practical. I'm not selfish, and it's not that I'm afraid. To hell with this life. Whenever I think of you, I feel eyes boring into my back, eyes saying I'm scared. No, I'm not scared. Does Umm Hassan think I haven't tried to contact your children? Do you remember that first day, Father, when Amna came to tell me of your fall? That same day I asked her to contact your children, and she did. She said she did.

“What did they say?”

“Nothing.”

I didn't ask what
nothing
meant. Nothing means nothing.

She said nothing, and I didn't comment. At the time it never occurred to me that you might live. Being sure you'd die, I didn't think of sending you over there. What for? I don't believe they want you anymore. This is what things have come to.

In describing your other planet, Umm Hassan told me you could see God.

“Pay attention, my son,” she said. “Pay attention to his movements. We may learn something from them. People like him see God.”

“How's that, Umm Hassan?”

“I don't know, my son, but I'm sure of it.”

She told me about an old woman in Acre that she'd known before everything happened. Whenever the woman awakened from her stupor, she'd tell people of strange things, and then they'd happen. “It was like she saw
God, my son. I was there, training as a nurse, and this woman, who was halfway between life and death, would fall unconscious for a few days and say these strange things when she awoke. For instance, she'd say that so-and-so's husband was going to die. The man's wife would be nearby and would laugh it off, but when she went home, the prophecy would turn out to be true. They all started to fear her; her children and grandchildren sat around her deathbed trembling with fear, and they only relaxed when she died – as if a stone had been lifted from their chests. To tell you the truth, Khalil, I think they killed her. They were scared of her cottony words, her quavering voice, and her white hair. I think one of them smothered her with a pillow because she turned blue in death. But I didn't say anything. I returned to the village, dying with fear. And I'm telling you now, this man, Yunes Abu Salem, is in the same place. Take him back home and let's be done with it.”

C
AN YOU
hear me?

What's happening to you?

You know, you're really starting to look like Na'im, Noor's son. I know you'd rather look like Ibrahim, your first son and your twin, but unfortunately you don't look like him; you look like one of your grandsons. When I went to your house I saw a picture of Na'im. I was shocked, it was as if I were seeing you in front of me! I didn't go to your house because of Umm Hassan. I did search for the telephone number out of curiosity though, but didn't find it. No, I went for the pictures. And there I saw you the way you really are. What a setup, my dear friend! Two rooms and a kitchen and a bathroom. The first room for guests, with a traditional carpet spread on the floor, three sofas, a small table, a radio, a television and a video player, and one photo on the wall. I went up to the photo and saw a group of children circled around an old woman. It's her, I thought. I moved closer because I couldn't distinguish the features. Their features were almost obliterated, as though time had wiped them away – or not time, the photographer. The photographer had taken the picture from a distance in order to get that
throng of twenty-five children around the woman into the frame. The result was a crowd of indistinguishable children. I smiled at them. You don't know them; to you they're just numbers and names, these grandchildren of yours whose names you won't tell me. Wait, you did tell me about Nahilah No. 2, Noor's daughter; you told me you loved her particularly. Which one is she?

I
WENT INTO
the bedroom, and there I saw them all. It's like a studio. Seven photos frame to frame on the wall and, above the bed, a large photo of Nahilah. An amazing number of small photos of children of various ages hung on the other wall. A world of photographs. A strange world. I don't know how you managed to sleep amid all that life.

Tell me, did you sleep?

During the long nights of the Lebanese civil war, when there was no electricity, did you light a candle in your room and see them transformed into shadow puppets flickering on the walls?

Weren't you afraid?

They frightened me, those photographs. I entered your bedroom in the early evening. The clock said five and it wasn't dark yet, but there wasn't enough light. I tried the switch – no electricity. I seemed to be floating with the photos in the dark. I went up to them, one by one, and discovered your secret world, a world of photographs hung from the cords of memory. The photographs seemed to move. I heard low voices emanating from the walls and was afraid.

Where did all those photos come from?

When you went, did you go for Nahilah or for the pictures?

Tell me how you could live with their pictures. How could you restrain yourself from going to their houses and breathing in their smells, one after another?

I hear laughter in your eyes, you're telling me you did see them. You had gone into the house and kissed them one after another. It was the day that your father, the blind sheikh, died.

During that terrible winter of '68, the likes of which Galilee hadn't seen for a hundred years, Yunes arrived at his cave in the pouring rain, exhausted and soaked. The wolf arrived at his cave covered in mud and with every part of him knocking against the other. He lit a candle and searched for dry clothes in the caverns he'd made into his home, and all he could find were a shirt and a wool sweater. He undressed, put the dry clothes on over his wet body, and left the cave. He headed to the right, behind the hill that hid his cave from the village, and ran into the masses of mud that were sliding down with the rain, forming torrents of mud and water. He fell into the torrent, swallowing a lot of mud before getting back on his feet and continuing on his way. He reached his house, gave his three knocks on the window, and left. But she ran after him, grabbed him by the arm, and led him into the house he hadn't entered for twenty years. The blind sheikh was laid out on the ground, dying. He saw his mother beside the sleeping man, whose mattress had been placed on the floor. When his mother saw him, a sort of scream emerged from deep inside her. She stood and opened her arms, tried to go toward him, doubled over and sunk down again onto the floor. Yunes went up to her and kissed her on the head. She took him in her arms and squeezed him, and the water started to run off him. The mother wept while the water dripped from his clothes, and Nahilah stood there.

“Now you come?” said the mother.

Nahilah took him to the bedroom, undressed him, dried him with a large white towel, wrapped his naked body, and fetched hot oil and rubbed his back, his belly, and all his limbs with it.

“You're going to get sick,” she said. “What made you come?”

She rubbed him with the hot oil and left him to bring dry clothes, and when she returned she found the water exuding from his pores. He was naked, he was shivering. Droplets of water oozed from his limbs – water streamed onto the floor, a man enveloped in water as though it dwelt in his bones. She dried him again and told him how the blind sheikh had fallen into a coma three days before and how they'd given him nothing but a few drops of water dripped into his mouth, and that since the evening before he'd been shaking with fever.

Yunes left the room, drops of water clinging to his feet, and approached the prone man. He bent over Ibrahim, kissed him and left, saying nothing to his mother, who was reciting verses from the Koran, her eyes drifting in the emptiness.

Yunes returned to his cave, he was hungry but could find nothing to eat. He sat alone smoking. Then she came. She was wrapped in a long woolen blanket dripping with water that gave off a smell of mold. Nahilah cast the blanket aside and sat down. She said she'd brought him three boiled eggs, two sweet potatoes, two pieces of bread, and an onion. He took the food from her and devoured it. He'd tear off a corner of the bread, stuff it with onions, sweet potatoes, and eggs, and swallow the whole thing without chewing. By the time she'd made him his glass of tea, he'd polished off the lot. She told him the man had died and that she was tired and was going to go back to help his mother prepare for the funeral.

She stood up, wrapped herself in the woolen blanket, and bade him farewell. He grabbed her by the waist, threw her to the ground, and made love to her. At the time, Nahilah didn't understand why he'd behaved that way. She'd come with the intention of bringing him food, informing him of his father's death, and returning. He'd listened to her weep for his father without shedding a tear himself while he was busy eating. And when she got up to go, he threw her down on the soggy, musty blanket, and took her. He was like an animal mounting its mate. He was like he'd been in the beginning, an ignorant kid who didn't know how to love. On that stormy night he mounted her. Nahilah tried to refuse, but he was on top of her. She tried to move so he could penetrate her, but he came. In an instant, the hot fluid spurted and spread across her dress. She tried to get up, but he clung to her neck and broke out into loud sobs. She stayed motionless and cradled his head, and his sobs grew even greater. “Let me go, my love,” she said. “I have to go to your mother. The poor woman's alone with the dead man and the children.”

Instead of moving aside and letting her go, he hung on to her. His body covered her entirely, his chest on her chest, his belly on her belly, his feet on her feet. She had to shove him several times before she succeeded in
freeing herself. She got up, straightened her clothes and departed, swathed in the damp blanket. Nahilah couldn't understand how he'd lain with her without her removing any of her clothes. He hadn't penetrated her, she thought on her way back through the black night spotted with drops of rain the size of cherries.

At eleven the next morning, the sun was wrapping itself around the hills of Deir al-Asad and spreading itself over Galilee. The procession moved off from the house of Sheikh Ibrahim al-Asadi toward the mosque. After the prayer, they carried the bier to the village cemetery. The men walking behind the bier, which was raised up to the height of outstretched arms, bent their heads, covered with their white
kufiyyehs
, as they tried to avoid the mud and the puddles, and kept up a loud buzz of prayers.

Opposite the hill on which the village cemetery lay, Yunes stood alone, holding his rifle and hiding behind a tall palm tree that he would call from that moment on, “Sheikh Ibrahim's palm.” There the men turned into ripples of water around the bier as they circled it to the sound of Sufi chanting, their voices reaching Yunes: “
Madad! Madad!
Succor! Messenger of God, Beloved of God, People of the House, You whom we adore.” He seized his rifle, raised it in the air, and placed his finger on the trigger to bid the sheikh farewell with a salute. Instead, he lowered it and pointed its muzzle at the ground, bent over where he stood, and started to sing with the others as he had done when he was a child, when his father had taken him from Ain al-Zaitoun to Sha'ab. There, in the little mosque, the young Yunes would let himself be transported by the rhythm of the men as they spun around their blind sheikh, singing, shouting and dancing. And now, Yunes wanted to revolve with them and merge with their voices, but he stood still where he was and listened to the voice of the child he'd been.