Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

“And you came.

“I was starting to get used to my new life when you returned to us bearing a promise. Why did you promise you’d all come back? Why did you make me believe you, even though you knew otherwise — don’t deny it. You knew it was history and that history’s a dog. You’d bring me books and go away. And I’d read. I read all the novels and the poetry, and I learned the stories by heart. Do you know what I used to do? I used to copy the books by hand. I wrote out Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun longhand innumerable times.

“And what else?

“Your father was fierce as a hawk. He said, ‘We’ll die before we let our women work for the Jews.’ And he didn’t let me. My belly would swell up and I’d swell up and my children filled the house. I swelled up so I wouldn’t die. I’d get pregnant and I’d feel the life beating in my belly. The plenitude.”

Nahilah talked and talked.

She talked of the death of Ibrahim and of her madness.

She talked of Salem, who was stolen by his grandmother so he wouldn’t die of hunger because of his mother’s dry breasts.

She talked of Noor and of the other children who are now adults.

She talked and talked, and Yunes put his head in his hands, sitting against the Roman olive tree on the ground that stretched to the horizon of the green summer moon.

She talked of a country that didn’t look like itself, and of people who refused to look in mirrors so they wouldn’t see their own faces, and of abandoned villages. . She said she no longer believed this world founded on destruction would last: “We lived in expectation of something that would come, as though we weren’t in a real place.

“That’s why I loved you,” she said.

“Do you remember the day you came to me and married me all over again? You spread your clothes on the ground, in that cold cave, and asked me to walk over the grapes. There I felt something real. There things were real. But not here. I fell in love with you in that place you called Bab al-Shams. I’d come to you as though I’d been sleeping on thorns, for in the house in Deir al-Asad, which had become our house, and among the furniture and the pots and pans left by its owners, I felt afraid, and strange, and insecure, drinking out of their cups and cooking in their saucepans. What do the Jews who live in our houses feel? I just couldn’t do it, even knowing that I’ll give everything back the moment they ask for it. I’ve lived all this time in the house of al-Asadi, who fled to Lebanon, but I was no longer myself.

“In truth, who am I? And who are you?

“Only Ibrahim made me feel I was alive, but he died. They killed him, or it was his destiny to die — I don’t know. I don’t cry for Ibrahim, I cry for myself.

“You know.

“At one point, I decided to work, work at anything, work as a maid — but where? I went to Haifa. I’d never been to Haifa in my life. I got on a bus and went, and I walked the streets aimlessly. In Haifa, I got lost. No, not because of the language. I speak their language, I learned it with my children. I speak it as well as they do, or even better. I got lost because I felt like a stranger. On the way from here to there, I saw all the houses that have sprouted up; I felt like I was in a foreign country. And in Haifa, I saw the city. God, Haifa’s beautiful: a mountain that runs down into the sea, and a sea that embraces the mountain as though it were rising to meet it. But what good does beauty do? Is it true that Beirut looks like Haifa? You haven’t told me about Beirut, but Haifa is beautiful. I wish we could live there with the children. I went looking for work without saying anything to the sheikh or his wife. In any case, by that time the sheikh already wasn’t taking in what was said to him. He performed his ablutions with dust and lived in his own distant world. He’d talk to strange beings that only he could see. I went on my own to find a solution to our money problems, which became serious once the sheikh became confined to the house. But I couldn’t find work. And you didn’t care and didn’t know and didn’t come. And when you finally came, you’d give me the little bit of money you had on you. I didn’t tell you it wasn’t enough; I didn’t want to upset you. But the village isn’t a village anymore. It’s become part of a large city that sprawls from the heights of Galilee to Acre. A city of ghosts. The village has died and the city has died, and we are trying to. . And you knew nothing. I told the military interrogator, ‘I’m free to do as I please, and it’s no business of yours.’ I told him, ‘You’re stronger and richer, but you’re an impossibility that can’t last forever.’ I don’t know where I got those words, how I was able to say what I said about the Jews. I told him, ‘You were tormented, but your torment doesn’t give you the right to torment us.’ I told him, ‘We are suffering in our guts.’ He asked me about my swollen belly and my pregnancy and the children, so I told him, ‘Pain generates pain, Sir. You don’t know the meaning of pain that attacks the guts.’ He made fun of me for what I said. He said, ‘Go to Lebanon, where your husband is.’ And I said, ‘My husband isn’t in Lebanon; I don’t know where he is, and I’m not going anywhere. You, Sir, go to Poland where you came from, or stay here, but leave me alone. You come here and then ask me to leave? Why?’ I didn’t know how to argue with them. When the interrogator was with me, I pretended you were in front of me and thought, If Yunes were here, he’d know how to make them shut up. When you talk, you convince me of everything. Do you remember the first days in the cave — we’d make love, then you’d light your cigarette and start to talk. You’d talk about politics, and I didn’t understand politics; I was waiting for you to take me in your arms and cover me with your body, for you to pull out the thorns that had attached themselves to my soul. But all you’d talk about was politics and how you all were ready to liberate the land, and you’d tell me about Gamal Abdel Nasser, who was like Saladin. I believed you. I told the military interrogator about Saladin. He laughed, baring his large white teeth, and said, ‘You Arabs are living in a daydream.’ I didn’t understand what he meant by that, but I told him, ‘We’re not Arabs.’ Tell me, why here in Israel don’t they call the other Arabs Arabs? They call the Egyptians Egyptians, the Syrians Syrians, the Lebanese Lebanese, not Arabs. Are we the only Arabs? ‘We’re Palestinians, Sir,’ I told him, and he said, ‘Just a daydream.’ I agree we’re Arabs; if we aren’t, what are we? But I said we’re not Arabs to annoy him, because I didn’t understand what daydream meant.

“Then later I understood.

“My whole life is a daydream.

“You imagine I was waiting for you because I was dazzled by your manliness? No, Yunes. I was waiting for you to talk, to escape the daydream that was swallowing my life. But you didn’t listen. You’d tell of your adventures, and of the magic nights that bewitched you, but you knew nothing.

“I didn’t tell you what the young men here in the village did. I was afraid you’d get upset. On the first of each month, they’d knock on my door and throw down a small cloth bundle. I’d open it and find money, and that was what we lived on. Do you think your blind father supported us — a family of ten mouths? Did you think we were waiting for your visits and the few pennies you brought to get by? No, Abu Salem. We were waiting for the little cloth bundle; I neither knew nor wished to know who threw it nor how they collected the money.

“Don’t tell me they were your comrades because we both know they had nothing to do with you.

“I waited for you to give me the feeling that my life was real. Can you believe it? I lived my life without being convinced it was really life? Maybe everybody feels that way, maybe all our lives are like mine, I don’t know. But I’m exhausted.”