Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

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.

The funeral rites came to an end, earth was thrown over the sheikh, everybody dispersed, and Yunes returned to his cave, where he stayed for a week, never leaving it. Then Nahilah came and took you to the house. You walked behind her like a sleepwalker, and when you arrived you were a little nervous and said you shouldn’t go in, so she dragged you inside. In the courtyard, the children were playing, but you didn’t go to them. You went in and sat down in the living room; your mother came and sat down beside you, took your hand, and said nothing.

You were sitting next to your mother when you heard Nahilah’s voice calling the seven children into the house. She’d call to each of them by name, then say, “Shoo!” as though she were herding chickens rather than children. They came in and saw you. None of them came over to you, and you didn’t open your arms the way a father who sees his children is supposed to do. They came in and you stayed where you were. They came in and drew back and stood in a single row, pressing against the wall as though they were afraid of you. Silently, you got up, approached them, knelt, and kissed them one after the other. Then you stood up and left. Noor, who was fourteen, cried “Dad!” as you went away.

That was your only meeting with your children, and when you recalled it, you spoke of it as a dream — “as though it never happened.” When you told me about your father’s funeral and how you’d taken part, you said that the barbed wire and the electric border fences hadn’t stopped you from bidding him farewell.

AND YESTERDAY, I stood in your room, under the avalanche of pictures — I saw them all. I saw your children and your grandchildren with their backs to the wall, waiting for you to get up and approach them on your knees and kiss them. I heard Noor’s voice and saw your mother’s death-inhabited eyes. You told me your mother died two months after your father and that you didn’t go to her funeral.

That day, after you’d kissed them, you returned to Lebanon. You came back once more on a short visit before disappearing for more than a year because of your preoccupations and the tense situation on the border. In the meantime, everything had changed. Salem had started work with his brother Mirwan in Mr. Haim’s garage in Haifa, and Noor was about to announce her engagement to Isa al-Kashif, who worked as a construction worker before becoming a contractor in the Arab villages, and Nahilah was exhausted.

“I’m worn out with poverty and the daily grind,” she said.

You were together in the olive grove next to your cave, sitting beneath the summer moon that shed its light on the green leaves, giving them a blue shimmer. You waited for her there because she’d told you, “Beneath the tree.” You tapped on the window and were about to leave when Nahilah appeared behind the glass and said, “Beneath the Roman tree.” You thought she meant the enormous old tree with the hollow trunk, the one that yields a small fruit with a special taste.

You love olives.

All of us love olives, especially those little green ones Nahilah used to cover with coarse salt in a cloth bag and recommend you place — the moment you reached your house — in a glass jar filled with water so the salt would melt and rise, white and raw, to the top, and into which you were to throw a few bay leaves, leaving the jar for a month before eating them.

You kept those olives for celebrations. You’d celebrate with your olives in Shatila, taking a handful from the jar and steeping them in garlic, lemon, and oil, and drinking a glass of arak while listening to Saleh Abd al-Hayy singing, “My beloved, he tells me what to do,” taking your ritual to its pinnacle. You called those moments the ultimate prayer. You’d. . no, I won’t say the truth now so that I don’t spoil your memories, which you construct to please yourself. But when I listened to you talking about those Roman olive trees, planted before the time of Christ, saying they had an irradicable hidden bitterness, a bitterness that gave one an appetite for life, and then going on at length about those huge trees with the hollow trunks which they called Roman because they’re as old as the Romans, I’d imagine you with another woman. Please don’t get upset. You know I’m telling the truth, or what would the visits of those two women mean? The first I told you about. She came, and then disappeared. The second would come every Thursday at four in the afternoon. She still has a certain beauty, especially in her fine jaw and the two creases that crossed her cheeks. Her name is Claire; she introduced herself as Claire Midawwar. She came into your room and sat down. I was cleaning the mucus extractor. She didn’t pay the least bit of attention to me. She made me feel out of place, so I left the room, and when I came back an hour later, she was gone.