Gate of the Sun (8 page)

And you, have you forgotten those days?

Have you forgotten how Abu Jihad al-Wazir,
^*
God rest his soul, would take a tattered scrap of paper and use it to disburse unimaginable sums to people in need of money? Indignant, I mentioned it to you, but you didn't agree with me. I told you so I could make the point that money had corrupted us and would destroy us, but you explained everything to me then and asked me not to say anything about Abu Jihad that I would regret later. “Two men, Son, represent all that's best among the martyrs – Abu Ali Iyad and Abu Jihad al-Wazir.” Could you have had a premonition of his assassination in Tunis? Did you know about it then, or did you just see it coming? You said Abu Jihad used a tattered scrap of paper to disburse money to show his contempt for it, because money is nothing.

I'll buy you a new radio tomorrow.

What?

You don't want one?

You don't like listening to the news any more?

I'll buy you a tape player and some tapes. You love Fairouz, and I'll buy you some Fairouz songs, in particular the one that goes, “I'll see you coming under the cloudless sky, lost among the almond leaves.” Tomorrow I'll bring you the cloudless sky and the almond leaves and Fairouz, and all the old songs of Mohammed Abd al-Wahhab. I'll bring “The wasted lover is spurned by his bed” – how I love Ahmad Shawqi, the prince of poets! Tomorrow I'll tell you the story of his relationship with the young singer Mohammed Abd al-Wahhab.

How I love love, Abu Salem! Tomorrow we'll sing and relive our loves. You'll love and I'll love – you and I, alone in the only hospital in a corner of the only camp in Beirut.

Recite this Surah with me:

Say the verse. The Koran will comfort your heart.

I'm going now. Goodnight.

^*
Liquidation by Jordanian forces of Palestinian troops based in Jordan.

^*
Abd al-Qadir Husseini, major figure in the Palestinian National Movement, died in combat in 1948.

^*
Considered the greatest of Classical Arabic poets. (915–965)

^*
Palestinian writer and spokesman for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Assassinated by the Israeli secret service in Beirut in 1972.

^*
Fatah leader, assassinated by the Israeli secret service April 15, 1988.

^*
Koran, Surah CXIV.

W
HY DON'T
you answer?

Why don't you want to tell me where the
good
is to be found?

Why would you believe me, anyway?

Last night I said goodnight, but I didn't go to sleep. Every night I say the same thing and don't go. I said goodnight because I was tired of everything. I sit with you and get upset. I sit and get fed up. I'm sick and tired of waiting. And I still can't sleep. I yawn, exhaustion fills my body as if all I need to do to drop off is put my head on the pillow, but I can't sleep.

Sleep is the most beautiful thing.

I lie down on the bed and close my eyes. The numbness that comes before sleep steals into my head . . . and then my body convulses, and I'm jolted awake. I light a cigarette, gaze at its glowing end in the dark, and my eyelids start to droop. I put out the cigarette, close my eyes, and let the phantoms take over. I think about Kafar Shouba; for ages now Kafar Shouba's been my sleeping companion. I lie down, and I go there and see the flares.

I was seventeen when I saw flares for the first time. At the time, I was a fedayeen fighter, one of the first cadre that came through Irneh in Syria to southern Lebanon to build the first fedayeen base.

I heard of Kafar Shouba on my way there, and the name stuck in my mind. In fact our base wasn't in Kafar Shouba but in an olive grove belonging to a neighboring village, al-Khreibeh. All the same, when in my drowsiness I travel back to those days, I go to Kafar Shouba.

I was the youngest. Actually, I'm not completely sure anymore, but in any case I was certainly too young for the job of political commissar that Abu Ali Iyad had handed me.

I was scared.

A political commissar has no right to be scared. I covered up my fear with a lot of talk, and the military commander of the base, a twenty-eight-year-old blond lieutenant named Abu al-Fida, used to call me the talk-a-lot-ical commissar.

I talked and talked because I wanted the fedayeen to acquire political consciousness: We wanted to liberate the individual, not just the land.

During those days – July of '69 – the Americans made it to the moon, and Armstrong walked on its white face.

That day, I remember, Abu al-Fida got very angry with me and punished me. Is that any way to deal with people – punishing a political commissar in front of his men for expressing an opinion?

In fact, as was the fashion in those days, I made no secret of my lack of faith. If man could go to the moon, that meant there was no God. May God the Exalted forgive me for such thoughts, but when I voiced them I only meant the concept. Atheism was just an idea, and I didn't express it because I believed in it but because it seemed logical, even though, along with the rest of the young men, I fasted during Ramadan and repeated Koranic verses to myself. How can you not repeat Koranic verses when confronted with death every day? What else can you say to death than, “Count not those who were slain in God's way as dead”?
^*

Abu al-Fida got angry with me and ordered me to hand over my weapon and crawl on the ground in front of the platoon. And I crawled. I won't lie to you and say I refused to carry out his order. I crawled, got filthy, and felt like an insect. I decided to hand in my resignation and join the fedayeen in the valley of al-Safi. Things heated up soon afterwards. The Israeli planes started shelling our positions, and we were too busy dealing with the slew of martyrs to remember Armstrong and his moon, my declarations and my atheism.

It was there that I discovered the incandescent flares. They lit up the sky, and I was able to see Palestine for the first time. The clustered bursts of
light spread across the shimmering olive trees. That's how I see them now, and I see you making your way alone, carrying your rifle through the hills and looking for a drop of water between the jagged rocks leading you toward Bab al-Shams, where Nahilah was waiting for you.

I see you making your way beneath the flares, feeling no fear.

How selective our memories are! Now I remember the light falling from flares, but then, after they had ignited the camp, after the flies had devoured me on the main street of Shatila, and after I had returned to this hospital with its pervasive stench of death, all I retained was the memory of fear.

That's the difference.

You remind me of the light, even though you're half-dead, while the corpses of the Shatila massacre make me think of death, however much they give the impression of living beings leaning against each other, petrified on the spot.

This is how I begin my journey toward sleep, watching the paths of the bright flares and the face of Abu al-Fida shining under the Doshka machine gun aimed at the sky. I run through the olive grove, take cover behind a rock, and fire. Then I find myself in al-Hama, taking part in general staff meetings and discussing military plans. Then I fall asleep. The memories come like swarms of ants invading my mind, and with their spiraling motion I sleep.

I lie on my bed and try to summon up the image of the ants, but it won't come. I think of Shams, I see her mutilated body, and sleep won't come. I think about love. Why didn't I go to Denmark with Siham? I see her walking in the streets of Copenhagen and turning around as though she's heard my footsteps. That was how our story, which isn't even really a story, began. She came to the hospital complaining of stomach pains. When she lay down and uncovered her belly, I trembled all over. A shimmering little sun appeared, coated with olive oil. I prescribed a painkiller and explained that the pains were just symptoms of nervous tension. From that day on, whenever I saw her on what was left of the roads of this devastated camp, she'd turn around and smile, because she'd heard my footsteps and knew I was hurrying to catch up with her. Our relationship developed through walking,
turning, and smiling. Then she went abroad. Should I go to her? Or stay? Indeed, why should I stay? But what work would I find in Denmark?

Siham doesn't care because she doesn't understand that I'm almost forty and that it's difficult for someone of that age to begin again, starting from zero.

“But you're at zero now,” she told me one day.

She's right. I have to acknowledge this zero in order to begin my life. But what do I mean by “begin my life”? When I say “begin,” does it mean that everything I did before doesn't count?

I think of Siham and try to sleep. I go with her to Denmark and become a prince like Hamlet. Hamlet lived in a rotten state, and I live in a rotten state. Hamlet's father died, and my father died. True, my uncle didn't kill my father and marry my mother, but what happened to my mother was perhaps more horrible. Hamlet went mad because he was incapable of taking revenge, and I'm on the verge of going mad because someone wants to take revenge on me. Hamlet was a prince watching the world rot around him, and I, too, am watching mine rot. Hamlet went mad, so will I.

When you told me about Ibrahim, your eldest son, with his curly hair, black eyes and long eyelashes, Hamlet came to mind. You say Ibrahim, and I see Hamlet.

The image of Hamlet started to form when you told me of your son's death. At the time it amazed me that people could recall such painful things. Why wouldn't they forget? And a terrible thought crossed my mind – that people are only the phantoms of their memories. Ibrahim's story came up when you were telling me about the beneficial qualities of olive oil and how your mother never used any other remedy.

“Drugs never entered our house,” you told me. “My mother treated herself and us with olive oil. If she felt a pain in her belly, she'd dip a piece of cotton wool in the oil jar and swallow it, and if my father came back from the fields with his feet covered in cuts, she'd dab oil on them, and if her son was crying in pain, she'd run to the demijohn of oil, for the perfect cure.”

When Nahilah told you that three-year-old Ibrahim only liked to eat bread dipped in oil, you told her the boy was like his grandmother. He
would dip his bread in oil and eat it with onions, only onions, never any thyme or
labneh
.
^*
Only onions – but he liked honey, too.

You didn't know your son.

His mother brought him to the cave several times, and you saw him swaddled in his diapers by candlelight, but you didn't really see him. All that stuck in your memory was a white face and half-closed eyes. You loved him, of course – could any man not love his firstborn son? You would hold him in your arms and kiss him and then, when his mother came close, forget about him. When he got a little older, Nahilah no longer brought him to the cave.

She would describe him to her husband and imitate his walk, his movements, and his words, but she adamantly refused to bring him to the cave. She said he could understand now and talk, and that the child shouldn't be exposed to danger. The village was full of informers. You'd agree with her, ask her to imitate the way he talked, and then forget the boy in your feverish efforts to hold onto time as it drained out of the cave. You'd bury your head in her hair and tell her you wanted to sleep with your head resting there, but you wouldn't sleep.

One day, when Nahilah was telling him about her son, Yunes left the cave. He left his wife with her talk and went off. Nahilah knew he'd go to the house, but she didn't go after him. Later she'll tell him she'd been rooted to the spot with fear.

Yunes reached the house, pushed open the old wooden door, went into his wife's room, turned on the electric light, and saw for himself. The boy was sleeping on his left side, his head resting on his hand, which was curled under the pillow, and his curly black hair covered his face.

Years after that visit, he would tell his wife that when he stood in front of the bed, he forgot where he was and was overwhelmed by beauty. He would tell her that beauty was curly hair flowing over a sleeping face on its pillow.

Yunes doesn't recall how long he'd stood there before hearing his
mother's footsteps. The old woman had been awakened by the light; she climbed out of bed and went toward the bedroom, asking Nahilah if something had happened.

“When I heard her, I turned off the light,” he told his wife, “and tiptoed out of the house.”

Nahilah would tell him that his mother never stopped interrogating her. “Your mother hates me,” she said.