Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

The seventh Nahilah said she was afraid.

“I’m getting scared now. Noor will get married, and Salem and Mirwan will go to work every day in Mr. Haim’s garage, but what will become of us?

“I’m afraid for your children. I don’t know how they’ll live. I don’t understand them. They live these things as though they were ordinary things and this reality as though it were the only reality. Do you know what Salem said? That he was going to open a garage in Deir al-Asad. I told him Deir al-Asad wasn’t our village, and he laughed. He said he dreamed of going to America. And Noor, how lovely she is! She’s going to get married, and the younger children are in school and I’m afraid for them. You’ve never really been interested in them. You only ask about their health. You don’t care about their studies or their future. Do you think they’ll wait for you, their lives suspended in a vacuum like mine was waiting for your Saladin to put things back the way they were? Things will never go back to the way they were. Don’t misunderstand me: I’m not saying. . I have Israeli citizenship, of course, and I vote for the Arab Communist party for the Knesset, and I attend the meetings and demonstrations, in an attempt to preserve what’s left of our land.

“I told the interrogator that they were like an isolated fortress from the days of the crusades, they were destined to fade away.

“I told him we’d paid the full price and had been destroyed. ‘You’ve taken us to the bottom, and beneath the bottom there’s nothing. You’ll go down with us — we’ll show you around down there, and you’ll taste the fire that burns us.’

“Don’t misunderstand me, Yunes, but I want to assure my children’s future. I want them to build houses, and find work, and marry, and live. I want the illusions to end, I want. .”

He didn’t let her finish the sentence.

Yunes understood that she didn’t want him anymore, understood that she was tired of him and his journeys through the unknown. He understood, and at that moment, he discovered that he’d talked about his journeys over there more than he’d actually gone on them, and that his life, too, was like a daydream.

He said she was his life.

He said, “You and the children, you are my life. I don’t have any life without you.”

He said that he didn’t know, that it was the revolution.

In the days of ’69, Yunes entered a new phase of his political life. He joined Fatah and became an official in its Western Sector as well as a member of the Southern Lebanon Sector Command Office.

He told Nahilah that hope had reappeared, that he couldn’t abandon everything and come back to live with them.

“No, no. I’m not asking you to come back!”

He said he’d thought about it, but what could he do here? How could he earn a living? He said he didn’t know a trade and only knew how to live the way he had, but he understood their situation and was there for them, completely.

“I’m here for you,” he said.

Nahilah smiled but didn’t say anything.

Silence fell.

Time passed slowly and came between them like something solid and unmoving. Yunes tried to break the silence, but the woman’s silence stretched in all directions. He’d listened to her and deep down he knew it was true, life had slid past him, without even approaching.

“I swear I didn’t. .”

He didn’t complete his sentence and felt the urge to sleep. If only sleep would come and take him from here to there. Sleep was everywhere. The village was sleeping, the trees were sleeping, and Yunes sat in silence in Nahilah’s arms.

Nahilah broke the silence. She said Salem was going to be workshop foreman in Mr. Haim’s garage and Mirwan was going to work with his brother and learn from him. She said the third boy, Ahmad, was very good in school and wrote poetry, and that Salma helped in the house and was excellent in English, and that the little ones, Saleh and Nezar, were still little.

“Listen, Yunes,” said Nahilah. “I want to open a garage for Salem here. Do you have three thousand American dollars to help us?”

“Three thousand!” he said in a hoarse voice. “Me put together three thousand?”

“Never mind. We’ll manage. I just wanted to ask you. Don’t worry about it. We’ll manage as we’ve managed before. I shouldn’t have asked, I know you’re not a profiteer, but won’t you come to Noor’s wedding? Of course you won’t come, but the groom’s insisting on the horse. His family says he’s going to arrive on a purebred Arabian horse and kidnap Noor from in front of the house. It’s their custom, and Noor loves him. I’m sure she loves him. They were together in school, and now he works in Acre and plans to move there.”

Nahilah told Yunes that the details of life are ordinary and meaningless but had to be taken care of. “Why don’t you say anything? Why are you so silent? I swear to you, I don’t want anything. I just wanted to get things off my chest and talk. Who do I have to talk to? Before your mother died, God rest her soul, I used to talk to her, but do you think that was easy? When I told her I was going to look for work, she went berserk, and when she saw me in the house studying Hebrew with the children, she trembled with irritation. Your mother lived her life in a world that wasn’t connected to the real world. I had to remind her all the time who we were and what misery we were living in.

“How can I tell you about her?

“Poor woman, she didn’t know how to calm your father, or how to make his last days easier. She told me he was at the end and that we had to help him to get to the end. Your father was stubborn. He used dust for his ablutions, had no idea where he was anymore, and talked with his sister. Why his sister, I don’t know. He’d say something to her, and I’d think he was addressing me, so I’d answer him, and he’d avert his face and say, ‘You keep quiet!’ Your mother told me about his sister who died giving birth to her first son. It was as if his mind had been wiped clean of everything, and all that was left was his sister. He’d even mistake his wife for her. She’d order him to do something, and he’d obey. Your mother would say to me, ‘See how it is at the end, daughter. The wife turns into the sister and the son into the father, and everything’s all wrong.’

“And you — when will you become my brother? Let’s become brother and sister. That way I can tell you everything, and you can tell me everything. A man can’t say everything to his wife, and a wife can’t say everything to her husband, but a brother and sister can.

“Come on, speak to me.

“I know you’re upset now. I know I shouldn’t have told you all these things, but what you don’t know is that I’m not upset with you. I swear I’m not. When they announced you’d died and become a martyr, I came back from the prison to the house and put on a funeral that had no equal. I wept every last tear from my body and smeared my face with ashes; I was an exemplary widow. The Israeli interrogator who summoned me a month later said I could be a movie actress. What the interrogator didn’t know was that I wasn’t acting. In my heart I was convinced I’d become a widow, that you were no longer my husband.

“The military investigator didn’t know I wasn’t acting. We’ve been acting for more than twenty years, to the point of taking on our roles and resembling them more and more each day. You’re acting over there and I’m acting here. God, it’s funny.

“I’m laughing. Why aren’t you?

“You’re playing your role, and I’m playing mine, and life is draining away.

“Tell me about yourself. Tell me how you live, how you manage, how?

“Me, I’ve managed to get by through acting. I played the role of a widow and it was well-received, and I played the role of a hero’s wife and that went over even better.