Gate of the Sun (7 page)

Don't put your finger to your lips for silence. I can and will say whatever I like. You don't want me to talk about Mme. Nada Fayyad? Very well, I won't say a word – but she came yesterday and stood at the door to your room and wept. A woman of sixty, she came and stood at your door and refused to enter. This is the fourth time she's come in three months. Yesterday I ran after her and invited her in. I stopped her in the corridor, lit a cigarette, and offered it to her. She was weeping convulsively, mascara running into her eyes.

She said she didn't go into your room because she didn't want to see you like that. “Unbelievable!” she said. “How can it be? To hell with this world!”

I was surprised by her accent.

She told me she was from al-Ashrafiyyeh, in Beirut – her name was Nada Fayyad – she'd known you for a long time and used to work with you in the Fatah media office on al-Hamra Street.

Did you work in media? What did you have to do with media and journalists and intellectuals? You always used to say you were a peasant and didn't understand all that nonsense! Or is Mme. Nada lying?

She asked me if I was your son and said I looked a lot like you. Then she kissed me on the cheek and left. You must have seen her when she came in but didn't want to talk to her. Why don't you talk to her? Does she know about you and Nahilah? Or did you hide that story from her and give her a different account of your wife and children and journeys to your country?

Tell me the truth, confess you had a relationship with this woman. Maybe you even loved her. Tell me you loved her so I can believe the story of your other love. How do you expect me to believe you were faithful to one woman your whole life? Even Adam, peace be upon him, wasn't faithful to his only wife.

You had the habit of hiding your truth with a smile. When I asked you about other women, you had only one response: No. A big
no
would emerge from your lips. Now the secret is out: Amna and Nada and I don't know who else. One after another they will come, as though your illness has turned into a trap for scandals. I'll sit here with you and count your scandals.

Please don't get upset – I'm only describing the facts. Shams taught me to do this. She said she'd never lie to me. She said she'd lied to her husband and felt there was no reason to lie to me. She said she'd learned to lie after the long torment she'd lived through with him and had relished it because it had been her sole means of survival. Then she started to get sick of it. She said that when she lied successfully she felt she was disappearing. In the end she decided to run away so the lying and disappearing would stop. She said she wanted an innocent relationship with me. Then I discovered she was lying.

When I fell in love with her, she said she hated sex because her husband had raped her. I believed her and tried to build an innocent relationship with her. But, of course, I was lying to her: I used the phrase “an innocent relationship” so I could sleep with her. Then I discovered she was raping me.

I say she was raping me, but I'm lying. We lie because we can't find the words; words don't indicate specific things, which is why everyone understands them as they wish. I meant to say she enjoyed sex, as I did, which doesn't mean she raped me. On the contrary, it means we loved sex, reveling in it, laughing and frolicking. She would yell at the top of her voice – she said her husband had forbidden her to yell, and she loved me because of the yelling. She'd yell and I'd yell. I've no right to call that rape, so I withdraw what I said and apologize.

I'm certain Nahilah was different. You don't want me to talk about Nahilah? Very well, I'll shut up. With Shams, it was not a question of sex; I lost myself in that woman. And I wasted all those years of my life only to discover I'd been deceived. I don't concur with Shams' theory of love, that every love is a deception. She dominated me completely, and she knew it. Once, after disappearing for two months, she turned up as though she'd never been away, and instead of quarreling with her, I dissolved into her body. That was when I told her I was a lost cause, but she already knew it. She would disappear for days and weeks at a time, and then appear and tell me unbelievable stories that I believed. Now I've found out what a fool I was. Love makes a person naïve and drives him to believe the unbelievable.

The woman was amazing. After we'd made love and screamed and moaned, she'd light a cigarette, settle on the edge of the bed, and tell me about her adventures and her journeys. Amman, Algiers, Tunis. She'd tell me she saw me every day and heard my voice calling to her every morning. She'd ask me to repeat her name over and over again; she'd never get tired of hearing it. I'd sound her name once, twice, three times, a dozen times, then I'd stop, and I'd see her face crumple like a child's, so I'd start again, and we'd start making love again.

Then I discovered she was lying.

No – at that moment, when I was repeating her name, I knew, but I used to relish the lie. That's love – enjoying a lie, then waking up to the truth.

After the killing of Sameh Abu Diab, I looked everywhere for her. My first feeling was fear. I was afraid she'd kill me as she'd killed him. I told myself she was a madwoman who murdered her lovers. Instead of feeling jealousy or sorrow, I found fear. Instead of looking back over my relationship with this woman, I began shivering in my sleep.

Then she died.

No. Before she died, I went looking for her so I could warn her of her fate.

Do you believe me now? I know that the day her death became known you looked at me suspiciously and said, “Shame on you! That's not how a woman should be killed. A woman in love must never die.”

I told you she was a killer. She killed the man she loved and then claimed she'd done it to revenge her honor because he'd deceived her. He'd promised to divorce his wife and marry her, but didn't do it.

I told you, “Shams is lying. I know her better than any of you.”

“And why should she lie?” you asked me.

“Because she loved me.”

You told me then that I was naïve, that we never could understand the logic of the heart, and the point of her relationship with me might have been to rid herself of the ghost of her love for Sameh. You explained to me that a lover takes refuge in other relationships in order to escape the incandescence of his passion. You despised me because I was the “other man,” and you didn't believe I'd had nothing to do with the killing. It's true I appeared before the investigating committee in the Ain al-Hilweh camp, but I didn't participate in the massacre.

Now I call Shams' killing a massacre rather than an execution, as I used to. It was terrible. They tricked her, asking her to go to the Miyyeh wi-Miyyeh camp to be reconciled and to pay blood money, and they were waiting
for her. A man with a machine gun came from each family; they hid themselves behind the mounds lining the highway, and when she arrived – you know what happened. There's no need to describe the shreds of woman stuck to the metal of the burned-out car.

Why am I talking about Shams when we're supposed to be talking about Mme. Nada Fayyad? Was Nada your way of escaping the incandescence of Nahilah?

You don't want me to talk about Nada? Okay, suggest another subject then.

I know you don't like talking about these things, and I never meant to end up here. I just wanted to tell you a story you didn't know. I must concentrate because one thing leads to another.

I was describing your physical condition to you. After they pulled out the IV needle, they put the feeding tube into your nose. Yesterday I decided to add a drug called L-Dopa that's used for epileptics and has proven effective for the comatose. This is something I should have done earlier. Why didn't I think of it sooner? Never mind. We'll have to wait a few days before we'll notice its effects.

I know you're in pain, and I can sense your rigidity in this white atmosphere. Here you are – wrapped in white, surrounded by dust and noise and incomprehensible murmurs.

I know that your back is hurting you. I promise you that will change; I'm rubbing your back with creams that will improve your circulation. I won't allow poor circulation to give you sores. There's no way around the pressure sores; we just need to deal with them quickly. Whatever we do, however much we massage you, we'll never be able to prevent the sores that come from lying motionless in bed.

We've inserted a permanent catheter. It has to be there or you'd be poisoned by your own urine, because instead of wetting yourself, as Nurse Zainab had expected, you are retaining everything. The catheter will most likely lead to an inflammation of the urethra. That's why we take your temperature every day. I know you hate it, but I have to do it. Please let me use the suppositories three times a week – even the milk is converted into shit.
God, how horrible we discover our bodies to be – a feeding tube at the top, a tube for waste below, and us in between.

Please don't despise yourself, I beg you. If only you knew how happy I was when I discovered it wasn't over, that your cells were still renewing themselves even in the midst of this death.

I'm cutting your hair, clipping your nails and shaving your beard, but the most important thing is your new odor, an odor of milk and powder almost like a baby's.

I'll describe how I spend my day with you, so you can relax and stop muttering.

I enter your room at 7 a.m., empty your catheter and clean your nails. Then I mop your room. After that I give you a bath with soap and water, for which I use an expensive soap that I bought myself, because here at the hospital they refuse to buy “Baby Johnson” claiming that it costs a lot and is supposed to be for babies. Then I change your white gown and call Zainab to help me lift you and sit you in the chair; she holds you up while I change the sheets. I don't want to give you more to worry about, but the sheets were a problem. What kind of hospital is this? They said they weren't responsible for sheets, so I had to buy three sets. I've asked Zainab to wash them, and I give her a small amount for the service. That way I don't have to worry anymore about changing the sheets every day. Next, I put you back in bed, get the mucus extractor (because you can't cough now), extract the mucus from your windpipe, clean the extractor, and rest a little.

At eight-thirty, I get your breakfast ready and feed it to you gently through your nose. At twelve-thirty, I prepare your lunch and, before feeding you, tip you a little on your side and wipe your face with a damp towel.

At five, I make your afternoon snack, which is a bit different because I mix honey into the milk, farm honey from the village of al-Sharqiyyeh in the south.

At nine, I rub your body with alcohol, then sprinkle talcum powder on it. When I find the beginnings of a bed sore, I stop rubbing and bathe you again. The evening bath isn't mandatory every day.

At nine-thirty, you eat dinner.

After dinner, I stay with you a while and tell you stories. Sometimes I'll fall asleep in my chair and wake up with a start at midnight. Or I'll leave you quietly and go to my room in the hospital, where I sleep.

My room is a problem.

They all think I sleep there because I'm scared and on the run. To tell you the truth, I am scared. Amin al-Sa'id came to see me three months ago. You know him: he was a comrade of mine in Fatah's Sons of Galilee brigade and now lives in the Rashidiyyeh camp near Tyre. He told me they'd decided to take special security measures because Shams' family had sent a bunch of their young men from Jordan to Lebanon to avenge their daughter, and he asked me to be careful. I told him I didn't care because I had a clear conscience. But, as you see, I'm stuck in this hospital and unable to leave.

The surprising thing, master, is how much you've changed. I won't tell you how much thinner you've gotten, since I'm sure you're aware of that. And your little paunch – which you hated so much you'd run five kilometers every day hoping to get rid of it – is gone. I think you've lost more than half your weight.

Zainab thinks that your new smell is the result of the soap, powder, and creams I use to massage you, but that's not true. You smell like a baby now because you eat what babies eat. Your smell is milky – a white smell on a white body.

I suspect you've started to shrink a little; maybe tomorrow I'll bring a tape measure. Don't be frightened, it's just your bones contracting because of the lack of movement or the cells not renewing themselves due to your age. Your bones are getting shorter and you're getting shorter, but so what? Don't get upset: Soon, when you get up, I'll organize a special diet full of vitamins for you and everything will be as it was, and better.

Do you hear me?

Why don't you say anything?

Didn't you like the story?

I know what you want now. You want me to leave you alone to sleep, and
you want the radio. The bastards stole the radio. Last night I left it on all night. I thought it would keep you company while you were on your own, but they stole it.

I know who they are. They haven't forgotten their status and wealth during the revolution. Don't they know I'm the poorest guy here? True, I'm a nurse and a doctor, but I'm also a beggar. The golden days are over, but they haven't yet digested that we're back to square one – poor.