Gate of the Sun (64 page)

Your life is coming to an end with photos. And what about me? What shall I do with them after you die? I mean, God forbid, I don't want you to die, but if God decides to reclaim what's His – after a long life – what do you want me to do with the photos? Should I return them to your children? Should I bury them with you? Or should I leave them as they are for whoever comes to live in your house to throw out with the trash?

I don't know.

But I won't be sending you back over there. Even supposing I wanted to send you back, I wouldn't know how, and I don't know if the Israelis would allow it.

And besides, why all the fuss?

Why don't your children ask about you? Did Amna tell them you're dead, and did they already have a funeral for you over there, and was that the end of the matter? Or have they forgotten about you, has the image of the man who knelt and kissed them one by one been wiped from their memories? Or was everything cut off after Nahilah died?

You didn't tell me about the eighth Nahilah.

The eighth Nahilah is
the
woman, Father, and I'm prepared to make changes to the numbering because I know you love magic numbers. So, let's throw out Nahilah number six according to our previous classification and call the Nahilah of the Roman olive tree Nahilah number six, and that makes the Nahilah of the flower basket the seventh Nahilah, the last.

You didn't tell me about that Nahilah. You only said that Salem told you all she was interested in was flowers.

“Her senility's expressing itself through flowers,” said the son to the father he didn't know.

“What's all this about flowers?” the man asked his wife from his hotel in Prague, where he was visiting the city with an official Palestinian delegation.

“There's nothing to it. I like flowers and your son makes fun of me and says I'm senile.”

After having left his job in Haifa, your son opened his own garage in the village. Business was good, and soon his two brothers, Mirwan and Saleh, went to work with him. Ahmad graduated from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem with a master's degree in Arabic literature and is now preparing his doctoral thesis on the work of Ghassan Kanafani. Nezar is working with Noor's husband as a contractor. Noor is well, except her husband suffers from kidney stones, but the doctor says that his life is not in danger. Salma, the pretty one, is working as a teacher in al-Ramah and none of her flock of suitors has yet found grace in her lovely green eyes.

Why didn't you tell me about the Nahilah that you haven't seen again?

About the woman with the blazing head of white hair who had taken to carrying around a small basket into which she put flowers and little folded scraps of paper on which she wrote the names of those she loved. She'd mix up the flowers with the scraps of paper, warning her grandchildren that she'd put a black mark next to the name of anyone who annoyed her.

That was the game she played with her grandchildren. They'd visit her and she'd spill the contents of her basket onto the ground and ask them to
play the basket game with her, and they'd open the scraps of paper and read out their own names and the names of their mothers and fathers, as well as your name, all of your names.

Nahilah believed the basket was her family, and when they brought her back from the hospital to the house, and she was in the throes of the disease, she gave the basket to Nahilah, Noor's daughter, and asked her to leave only three Nahilahs in the basket, because Old Nahilah was going to die. She asked Noor to change the flowers once a week, and each time, she was to change the little scraps of paper with the names written on them.

“Keep the names safe, Daughter, and don't you dare stop writing them and putting them in the basket. This basket keeps the names safe from death.”

She took the scrap of paper with her name on it out of the basket and tore it up, and the next day she died.

Don't tell me now about Nahilah's death; I'm not here to listen to sad tales. I'm here to tell you I won't send you back over there. I'll bury you in the camp, in the mosque that's been turned into a cemetery where the young men are buried. Your story will come to an end there, Father. I won't tell little Nahilah that she has to tear up your names and take them out of the basket. I don't believe that little Nahilah has kept up the tradition, for we forget our promises to our dead; we keep them for a few days, and then we forget. I'm sure little Nahilah has forgotten the basket she inherited from her grandmother among her toys, that the basket of flowers ended up like my grandmother's pillow, and that mold will find the scraps of paper on which the woman wrote the names of the ones she loved.

Your Nahilah was careful to rewrite the names when she changed the flowers in the basket. She'd toss the old flowers under the Roman olive tree, burn the names, and replace them with fresh flowers and rewrite the names on new little scraps of paper.

Where are the women?

Where are the two women who used to come?

Where are the friends and comrades?

Where is everyone?

No one.

You are dying now, and there is this no one around you. You are dying in calm and in silence. I make you up as I please and I make myself up in you, I see what you have seen and what I haven't seen myself, I speak of a country I've never visited – a country I entered a few times at night with the fedayeen but never really could see. You told me it was like the Lebanese south, flat and overlooked by low hills, and that it was the epitome of a warm and tender land, which is why it had been ideal for Christ. You can't imagine Jesus Christ without Galilee. This land resembles him and is fitting only for strangers, which is why they call it Galilee of the Nations. The Jews fled to Galilee after the ruin of their kingdom, and we remained in it after the ruin of our history.

You talked to me about its caves and its cactus and its wild animals and its olives that stretch to the horizon. You said Galilee is an island between two seas. In the west there is the Mediterranean, and in the east there is the sea of blue olives. In these two seas, Christ learned how to fish and chose his disciples. A land of fish and olive trees and oil.

You promised to take me with you, and you never did. But I saw everything from the olive groves at al-Khreibeh on the Palestinian border. I saw endless olives and young men who never tired of dying for this land that has become our graveyard and our promise.

And now we're here. Both of us have ended up in this place called Galilee Hospital, which isn't a hospital, as I've told you a thousand times. The hospital is finished, and your illness continues.

“W
E'LL CLOSE
the hospital before the man dies,” said Dr. Amjad, laughing. I don't know what brought him here, it's been ages since he'd stopped by to see you. I was sitting with you after feeding you that yellow food through a tube in your nose, when Dr. Amjad came to talk about the probability of closing the hospital.

He spoke as if he had no idea of what was going on – practically speaking,
the hospital is already closed. The first floor has become a warehouse, and on the second floor there are only five rooms left: one for you, a patient, one for me, a doctor, and three others inhabited by new patients I haven't yet found the time to examine.

The patients here don't resemble patients. Two old women and a man around fifty-five. As though the hospital, or what remains of it, has been transformed into an old people's home. Zainab's still here, and the job of looking after the storerooms has been added to her duties. The Syrian guard doesn't guard, the cook doesn't cook, and the operating room has been moved to Haifa Hospital in the Burj al-Barajneh camp. I heard recently that they may close Haifa Hospital, too. As Zainab explained it to me, the cost-reduction plan calls for keeping just one hospital in Lebanon, which will be Hamshari Hospital in the Ain al-Hilweh camp.

You know, things have been turned on their heads. The few surviving Palestinian leaders who migrated to Tunis went back to live in Gaza, where there's an authority, a police force, prisons, everything. That's why they absorb every penny, and there's no need for all these hospitals in Lebanon!

Why didn't you go with them to Tunis?

I didn't because I couldn't. I felt faint in the municipal stadium and went back to the hospital. But what about you? All the fedayeen went, and they ended up with their offices and their bodyguards and their revolution.

Why didn't you go?

Is it true you refused to go and said it was our duty to die in Beirut?

That was a mistake. There's no deciding when to die. We die when we die. Deciding when to die is suicide, madness.

Were you exhausted by it all?

Some people said you'd decided to go back over there after the defeat of '82, but I didn't want to believe it.

You told me it wasn't possible for us to leave Lebanon like the Turkish army. Turn our backs on our people and go? Impossible! We had to stay with the people.

You stayed. Then what?

They slaughtered us the way everyone knew they would slaughter us. And nothing changed. Tell me, why did you choose to be a victim?

Rest assured, I'm not going to send you back now, as a corpse. I'll keep you here with us. Staying was what you chose, and I'll respect your choice. But talk to me about your children and your wife. I don't want the story of Nahilah over again, because I don't know anymore what parts of it are real and what parts are made up.

Do you remember the day you got furious with me because I refused to join the hospital staff – one of the new conditions they imposed on me after the end of the civil war in Lebanon? I refused because I'm a doctor, not a nurse. That day, you insulted me and also railed against your children: “You're all shit! Not one of them has turned out like his father. You, you don't want to work because you're clinging onto your title, Salem is a mechanic, Ahmad's a professor, and Salah's an I-don't-know-what. I didn't beget any real men. Not one of them joined up with us. I was waiting for one of them, just one, who would come and be like me, with me. But they're all like their mother, peasants rooted to the soil. You, too. What does being a doctor matter? The important thing is the work, not the position.”

You blew up because your children didn't turn out like you, forgetting that you didn't turn out like your father. Do you understand now how the blind sheikh suffered when you mocked the Sufi gatherings and the sessions of
hadra
?
^*
Your father swallowed his grief. He never once insulted you the way you did us, even though he wanted you to be a sheikh like him, like his father and grandfather. And here you now are, an officer in a slipshod army in a war that never happened. And when it did happen, you said no, this isn't my war. You didn't want to have anything to do with the civil war, not here, and not in Jordan. What were you thinking? That the war would be just as you like them, simple and clear? Were you surprised by the explosion of this Arab world that lost its soul a thousand years ago and today is flailing around in its own blood searching, and failing to find it?

What did you expect?

The blind sheikh mourned you and took pity on you.

And when you didn't go to Tunis with the leadership, all of us here took pity on you because you'd become a fragment of the past, a relic, walking among the ghosts of memory.

You don't know your children, or that country you used to contemplate in the blue night through the fissures in your cave. Now I'm going to be the voice of reality, which you've never heard before, as though fate has sent me to tell you your truth that you've taken care to hide away in your basket of stories.

“What is reality?” you'll ask.

I won't answer you by philosophizing and telling you that the reality of a man is his death because I don't like heavy phrases like that. When I read them in a book they convince me that the writer has nothing to say.

Reality, Abu Salem, is what Catherine, the French actress, passed on to me.

Please don't smile. Listen for a moment. I'm not . . . I don't . . . I didn't . . .

Yes, I visited her. I went to the Hotel Napoléon on Hamra Street because she said she wanted to see me before she left. No, it never occurred to me that I might leave everything and go work with them in France. First of all, I don't speak French, second of all, I don't like the theater, and finally, I hate acting.

I thought I'd visit her to get out of this prison. Yes, I feel like a prisoner here. The doors are closed, the light's dim, and there are bars over the windows as though we were surrounded by barbed wire or minefields, or the walls were leaning in on us and melding into one another to suffocate us.

I wanted to get out if only for an hour, and I stayed out all night . . . I don't know. Just be patient, please, I'll get there.

No, it's not what you think. It's serious. Catherine told me something unbelievable, and I read the book and verified that what she said wasn't a lure.

I went to the Hotel Napoléon and asked for her at the reception desk.
They called her on the telephone and I spoke to her; she asked me to wait for her in the lobby.