Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

You promised to take me with you, and you never did. But I saw everything from the olive groves at al-Khreibeh on the Palestinian border. I saw endless olives and young men who never tired of dying for this land that has become our graveyard and our promise.

And now we’re here. Both of us have ended up in this place called Galilee Hospital, which isn’t a hospital, as I’ve told you a thousand times. The hospital is finished, and your illness continues.

“WE’LL CLOSE the hospital before the man dies,” said Dr. Amjad, laughing. I don’t know what brought him here, it’s been ages since he’d stopped by to see you. I was sitting with you after feeding you that yellow food through a tube in your nose, when Dr. Amjad came to talk about the probability of closing the hospital.

He spoke as if he had no idea of what was going on — practically speaking, the hospital is already closed. The first floor has become a warehouse, and on the second floor there are only five rooms left: one for you, a patient, one for me, a doctor, and three others inhabited by new patients I haven’t yet found the time to examine.

The patients here don’t resemble patients. Two old women and a man around fifty-five. As though the hospital, or what remains of it, has been transformed into an old people’s home. Zainab’s still here, and the job of looking after the storerooms has been added to her duties. The Syrian guard doesn’t guard, the cook doesn’t cook, and the operating room has been moved to Haifa Hospital in the Burj al-Barajneh camp. I heard recently that they may close Haifa Hospital, too. As Zainab explained it to me, the cost-reduction plan calls for keeping just one hospital in Lebanon, which will be Hamshari Hospital in the Ain al-Hilweh camp.

You know, things have been turned on their heads. The few surviving Palestinian leaders who migrated to Tunis went back to live in Gaza, where there’s an authority, a police force, prisons, everything. That’s why they absorb every penny, and there’s no need for all these hospitals in Lebanon!

Why didn’t you go with them to Tunis?

I didn’t because I couldn’t. I felt faint in the municipal stadium and went back to the hospital. But what about you? All the fedayeen went, and they ended up with their offices and their bodyguards and their revolution.

Why didn’t you go?

Is it true you refused to go and said it was our duty to die in Beirut?

That was a mistake. There’s no deciding when to die. We die when we die. Deciding when to die is suicide, madness.

Were you exhausted by it all?

Some people said you’d decided to go back over there after the defeat of ’82, but I didn’t want to believe it.

You told me it wasn’t possible for us to leave Lebanon like the Turkish army. Turn our backs on our people and go? Impossible! We had to stay with the people.

You stayed. Then what?

They slaughtered us the way everyone knew they would slaughter us. And nothing changed. Tell me, why did you choose to be a victim?

Rest assured, I’m not going to send you back now, as a corpse. I’ll keep you here with us. Staying was what you chose, and I’ll respect your choice. But talk to me about your children and your wife. I don’t want the story of Nahilah over again, because I don’t know anymore what parts of it are real and what parts are made up.

Do you remember the day you got furious with me because I refused to join the hospital staff — one of the new conditions they imposed on me after the end of the civil war in Lebanon? I refused because I’m a doctor, not a nurse. That day, you insulted me and also railed against your children: “You’re all shit! Not one of them has turned out like his father. You, you don’t want to work because you’re clinging onto your title, Salem is a mechanic, Ahmad’s a professor, and Salah’s an I-don’t-know-what. I didn’t beget any real men. Not one of them joined up with us. I was waiting for one of them, just one, who would come and be like me, with me. But they’re all like their mother, peasants rooted to the soil. You, too. What does being a doctor matter? The important thing is the work, not the position.”

You blew up because your children didn’t turn out like you, forgetting that you didn’t turn out like your father. Do you understand now how the blind sheikh suffered when you mocked the Sufi gatherings and the sessions of hadra ? *Your father swallowed his grief. He never once insulted you the way you did us, even though he wanted you to be a sheikh like him, like his father and grandfather. And here you now are, an officer in a slipshod army in a war that never happened. And when it did happen, you said no, this isn’t my war. You didn’t want to have anything to do with the civil war, not here, and not in Jordan. What were you thinking? That the war would be just as you like them, simple and clear? Were you surprised by the explosion of this Arab world that lost its soul a thousand years ago and today is flailing around in its own blood searching, and failing to find it?

What did you expect?

The blind sheikh mourned you and took pity on you.

And when you didn’t go to Tunis with the leadership, all of us here took pity on you because you’d become a fragment of the past, a relic, walking among the ghosts of memory.

You don’t know your children, or that country you used to contemplate in the blue night through the fissures in your cave. Now I’m going to be the voice of reality, which you’ve never heard before, as though fate has sent me to tell you your truth that you’ve taken care to hide away in your basket of stories.

“What is reality?” you’ll ask.

I won’t answer you by philosophizing and telling you that the reality of a man is his death because I don’t like heavy phrases like that. When I read them in a book they convince me that the writer has nothing to say.

Reality, Abu Salem, is what Catherine, the French actress, passed on to me.

Please don’t smile. Listen for a moment. I’m not. . I don’t. . I didn’t. .

Yes, I visited her. I went to the Hotel Napoléon on Hamra Street because she said she wanted to see me before she left. No, it never occurred to me that I might leave everything and go work with them in France. First of all, I don’t speak French, second of all, I don’t like the theater, and finally, I hate acting.

I thought I’d visit her to get out of this prison. Yes, I feel like a prisoner here. The doors are closed, the light’s dim, and there are bars over the windows as though we were surrounded by barbed wire or minefields, or the walls were leaning in on us and melding into one another to suffocate us.

I wanted to get out if only for an hour, and I stayed out all night. . I don’t know. Just be patient, please, I’ll get there.

No, it’s not what you think. It’s serious. Catherine told me something unbelievable, and I read the book and verified that what she said wasn’t a lure.

I went to the Hotel Napoléon and asked for her at the reception desk. They called her on the telephone and I spoke to her; she asked me to wait for her in the lobby.

She came, sat on the edge of an armchair and said she was sorry but she had an appointment with a Lebanese writer who was going to take her to see Prison of Sand at the Beirut Theater.

I told her that I’d just come over to say farewell.

She said she needed to talk to me. “Can you come back later?”

“When?” I asked her.

“Tonight,” she said. “The play’ll be over at ten. I won’t have dinner with him; I’ll come back and I’m inviting you to dinner.”

I said I couldn’t stay out that late because getting back to the camp, with all the security barriers surrounding it, was almost impossible at night.