Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

He spoke of the Return. He said he’d return with the others. “The nation is not a prison. We shall not return as abject prisoners.” And he told her of the revolution he’d been waiting for since the day the Sha’ab garrison had been disbanded and all its members flung into prison. It was near, and he couldn’t abandon it.

*Verse from a poem by Abu Tammam (9th century).

HE SPOKE and spoke and spoke.

And Nahilah returned to him. She returned to him with every word he spoke, and he could see it. Her face was radiant, her eyes shone, and her hands took the little pieces of bread and transformed them into bite-sized morsels of kibbeh nayyeh that she fed to him.

He asked her about Hebrew and if it was difficult.

Of all the things the woman had said, the man picked up only on the question of language. He knew that Palestinian children in Israel learned Hebrew in school, and he knew that his own children were just like the others; but he wanted to talk about his children, so he asked about the language.

Nahilah smiled and said, “ Echad, shtayim, shalosh, arba, chamesh, shesh, sheva, shmone, tesha, eser .”

“What are you saying?” he asked.

“Guess.”

“It’s Hebrew.”

“Right,” she said. “Hebrew’s like Arabic. Arabic spoken like a foreign language, if you like, but you have to put in a lot of ch ’s and sh ’s. That’s how I learnt it. The first thing I learned was the numbers, and then I got so I could understand almost all the words. But the children are much better, God bless them. They speak Hebrew better than the Jews.”

She said the language was easy. “The easiest thing is learning their language.”

He said he was afraid the children would forget their own language.

“That’s their problem,” said Nahilah, meaning it was the Israelis’ problem, not the Palestinians’. “They don’t want us to forget our language and our religion because they don’t want us to become like them.”

Yunes didn’t understand what she meant and started talking about the relationship of the children to their history and their heritage, saying that this relationship could exist only through language. He talked a lot, blending together literature and religion and everything else.

She said he hadn’t understood her.

“Listen and try to understand. You don’t know anything. Try to listen to things the way I tell them and not the way you imagine them in your head. When I said it’s their problem, I meant it’s the Jews’ problem: We can’t abandon our language because they don’t want us to do that. They want us to remain Arabs and not to assimilate. Don’t worry; they’re a closed, sectarian society. Even if we wanted to, they’d never let us.”

When you told me, Father, about Nahilah’s theory of language, I thought of Isa who wanted to gather the keys to the houses in Andalusia. I wanted to say that we haven’t yet understood the fundamental difference. The Castilians didn’t persecute the Muslim Arabs and the Jews simply to throw them out, for no expulsion, no matter on how large a scale and how effective, can drive out everyone. The Castilians imposed their religion and their language on the Andalusians, and that’s why their victory was definitive; that’s why al-Andalus was assimilated into Spain and that was the end of the matter. Here, on the other hand, our keys aren’t the keys of the houses that were stolen; it’s the Arabic language. Israel doesn’t want to make Israelis out of us, it’s not imposing its religion or its language on us. The expulsion took place in ’48, but it wasn’t total. Our keys are with them, not with us.

I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to lose the thread of Nahilah’s story through digressions, as often would happen.

When I used to ask Yunes about Nahilah, he wouldn’t object or refuse to answer. He’d start to answer, then enter the labyrinth of peripheral stories, and Nahilah’s story would get lost.

On that occasion, I didn’t mention my theory about the keys because I was afraid for the other story, but the other story got lost all the same.

He spoke to me about Hebrew and then fell silent.

“And so?” I asked him.

“And so here we are.”

“What happened there, in the cave?”

“I returned to Lebanon, and we built bases in the south.”

“What about her?”

“Noor got married and Salem opened a garage and. .”

“Did you visit her after that?”

“Of course, often. Anyway. .”

Often and anyway was his only response.

“And the cave?”

He didn’t tell me about the cave even though he talked a lot that day. He discussed the children’s problems and the revolution, which had started to spread throughout Jordan and Lebanon. The two of them talked at length and laughed easily, he would drink and she would fill his glass.

“You’re like a bride,” he told her.

After he’d finished eating, he was overcome by sleepiness. She covered him with the blanket and gazed at him, her eyes brimming with desire.

“Now?” he asked, and cleared a space for her on the mattress.

“I didn’t say anything,” she said.

“I’ll sleep for a bit,” he said.

“You sleep and I’ll clean up the cave.”

“Wake me in half an hour.”

She let him sleep and left. But before he went to sleep, she repeated her invitation with her eyes and he repeated his smile asking if he could sleep for half an hour. She went into the corner of the cave and washed the dishes, and when she came back found him sleeping deeply, so she left him and went home.

When Yunes woke up he didn’t find her, and the shadows of evening were spreading over the hills. He found himself filling his water bottle, packing his bag and squeezing into it the two loaves of bread Nahilah had left, and setting off for Lebanon.

Did he go back to see her after the night of the Roman olive tree?

He said he did, but I have my doubts. Yunes’ life changed a great deal at that time. Once the revolution grew into an institution resembling a state, Yunes became part of that State. He went abroad as part of the official delegations, phoned his family from various capitals, then became a member of the Fatah Regional Command in Lebanon. His days filled up, especially after the massacres of April 1970 in Jordan and the transformation of Lebanon into the Palestinian Resistance’s only refuge following the migration of leadership from Amman to Beirut.

Yunes became part of that huge machine and ceased to be the wandering fedayeen fighter of old, shifting between the Ain al-Hilweh camp in the south and the Shatila and Burj al-Barajneh camps in Beirut. All the same, he was different from the others. He was not seduced by wealth like the majority of the Palestinian leaders; he remained a peasant, as he had been and wanted to remain.

Yunes tried to reconcile his new life with his convictions. It may be that he didn’t often succeed, but he preserved his image as Abu Salem, the Wolf of Galilee, who knew the country as no one else did and who had a story like no other.

Was it in that period that his legend began?

I don’t know because I didn’t know him then. Well, I knew him, but I was young and I couldn’t take things in and grasp their significance. I got to know him well from the beginning of the seventies, by which time he’d become a legend. I got to know him as the man who plants his children in Galilee and fights to liberate them.

All the same, I ask myself as I stand here beneath the rain of images covering the bedroom walls, did the legend begin when the story ended? Did he start telling people about Nahilah at the very moment he stopped visiting her?

I don’t know.