Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

He had lived for his long journeys to Galilee, when he had to get through the barbed wire, past the dangers and the Border Guard and the machine guns that mowed down border crossers.

He’d built up political and military cells composed of the tattered remnants of men who wanted to get back to their land. He’d joined various organizations. He’d started as an Arab nationalist with the Heroes of the Return and the Youths of Revenge and moved on to Fatah after meeting Abu Ali Iyad, and there, he became an official in the Western Sector.

“I was living in a no man’s land,” he told Nahilah, “as though I weren’t living, and you were here on your own, and I did nothing for you. Come with me to Lebanon.”

She said no. “The children have grown up, and it’s over. What do you want me to do in Lebanon? Live in the camp? Become a refugee? No. You come back here. I know you can’t because they’ll kill you or put you in prison here. You can’t come and I can’t either. You’re my husband, and I’m your wife. What kind of life is this, Abu Salem?”

The green moon cast its light over Yunes, and the story stole into his eyes and drowned them in a sort of drowsiness. It wasn’t tears; things rooted themselves in his eyes and spread out before him, and he became like a blind man who sees. He had been seeing without understanding. This was Yunes’ state in the presence of the seventh Nahilah — hearing and seeing and dissolving in the light of the moon that emanated, pure and green, from the woman’s eyes.

She spoke of the world she’d divided into two halves, her life she put into little compartments, her children. She didn’t talk about the little compartment of fear, she didn’t talk about how the children — their children — wore her down with their questions and their fearful eyes. She didn’t say she’d waited for him to say, “Come with me,” and that she’d thought he hadn’t said it because of his parents, so she’d waited, and when they’d died, leaving was no longer possible. She said only that things weren’t as impossible anymore, that Salem and Mirwan had started working in Mr. Haim’s garage in Haifa, and that they were happy. Then a certain hesitancy began to punctuate her speech, stretches of silence began inserting themselves between words.

“You don’t know,” Nahilah said. “You don’t know anything. You think life is those distances you cross to come to me, carrying the smell of the forest. And you say you’re a lone wolf. But my dearest, it’s not a matter of the smell of the wolf or the smell of wild thyme or of the Roman olive tree, it’s a matter of people who’ve become strangers to each other. Do you know who we are at least? Do you know what happened to us when we found ourselves being led by a blind man? Your mother saved him from death, she yanked him out of their midst, and the Israeli soldier looked right through her. She said she asked God to blind them so they wouldn’t see her. Then they killed them all. You know what happened at Sha’ab. We found ourselves with bullets flying over our heads — no, before we fled, they led the men in front of the pond, the Israeli officer was shouting: ‘To Lebanon!’ Your mother took your father by the hand and tried to lead him to where the officer was pointing, but your father walked in the opposite direction. So we followed him. A blind man leading two women and a child toward the unknown. ‘Go with the others,’ your mother told me, but I didn’t go. I was afraid to leave them, afraid to meet you in Lebanon, afraid of you and of those crowds racing against one another and stomping over one another, and I said, ‘No, I’ll stay with you.’ So we walked. Night came, but the sheikh didn’t notice. It was the first time the sheikh failed to distinguish between night and day. Your mother said that was the day the sheikh went blind. You know your father better than me. The sheikh knew the times for prayer by the way the sunlight fell upon his closed eyes, but that night he lost the ability to distinguish. Two women walking behind a blind man, in the blackness of the night, in a devastated land. We walked for endless hours. Then the sheikh stopped and said, ‘We’ve reached Deir al-Asad. Take me to the mosque.’ The sheikh had decided that Deir al-Asad was his new village, and in the morning your mother went to the headman, who was related to your father; his name was Awwad. But the headman pretended he didn’t know them. In those days, no one knew anyone anymore; we’d all become strangers. The village sheikh intervened. He came to the mosque and told your mother there were plenty of abandoned houses, and that they should go to any house. We went to the first house we found, and it was beautiful, close to the caves that came to be known as Bab al-Shams, and surrounded by an olive grove. It was the house of Ahmad Karim al-Asadi, who had fled to Lebanon with his family at the time of the unforgettable incident in the village square when everybody lay down in the road to stop the Israeli bulldozers. Ahmad Karim al-Asadi didn’t join them in the square. Like many others, he fled. So we moved into the house; it became ours. And the village became our village.

“Yes Sir, we were strangers. Your father became a beggar. We went to live in this house not knowing what else to do and discovered, with the villagers, that the land had gone. The village wasn’t a village anymore — the peasants’ land wasn’t theirs anymore, so they were nothing, like you in Lebanon and Syria and I-don’t-know-where. No land, no rifles, and no horses — the men were no longer men. When a woman tried to pick her olives from her grove, they would detain her and make her throw them away — the land now belonged to the State. Nobody was left with work except for thieves. Yes, we stole from our own land and lived like thieves. I don’t know how many stayed behind. I stayed because I followed the blind man, and others fled because they ran like blind men.”

“There were more than a hundred thousand of you,” said Yunes.

“We became strangers to one another. The villages were all mixed up together. The Bedouins moved into Sha’ab, we were in Deir al-Asad, and al-Ba’neh filled up with people from who-knows-where. We were no longer at home, and the villages weren’t villages any more. We no longer felt we were in our own country. You knew only the bullets that flew over your heads, of the blood that flowed, and of the young men reaped by death. We could no longer move from place to place. Going from one village to another required a military permit. We weren’t even allowed to visit al-Ba’neh, which was only a stone’s throw away. It was as though they’d built imaginary walls between the villages. And the people turned into thieves, or something like thieves, going into their fields at night and stealing their own crops. Strangers stealing from strangers. I would look around me and see nothing but emptiness, as though we had dug graves for ourselves in the air and had been buried in them. I hated everyone. I hated them all: the ones driven to take jobs working for their enemies, building settlements for the new immigrants with their own hands. We hated each other, idiotically, for no reason. Yes, we are an idiotic and naïve people. We buried our land with our own hands. Instead of digging the soil to make the plants grow and provide food for our livestock, we dug the foundations for houses to be built on the ruins of our own. We labored without daring to look each another in the eye, as though we were embarrassed to.

“What could we do? Nothing. We worked so we wouldn’t die.

“Then you came.

“You made your way through the blockade of hate that surrounded us, and knocked on my window. Did you think you were Qays looking for Layla among the ruins? You poor thing, I swear I hated you as much as I did myself. I was afraid you’d take me with you to Lebanon. I didn’t want to have anything to do with you because I didn’t know you, and you scared me. All I had in the world was the blind man, who used to go every day to the mosque and try and convince everyone that he was the sheikh of the Shadhliyya order. They would take pity on him and throw him a few piasters, which weren’t even enough to buy bread with. There was no trace of my mother. It was as though the earth had split and swallowed up my sisters. Do you know anything about my family? Are they in Lebanon? I never asked you about them and you never mentioned them, as though we had a tacit agreement to forget about them. At the beginning I used to see my mother in my dreams. I’d see her sinking into green water and when I woke up, choking, it felt is if my neck had been in a vise. Gradually their images started to disappear. I know they’re somewhere but I’ve forgotten them. I hated my mother. How could she have married me to a man who wasn’t even a man, and when I was only a child? How could they have abandoned me to roam from place to place and stopped taking care of me? All I had left was the blind beggar, who succeeded — by some miracle — in turning himself into a real sheikh and acquiring disciples.