Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

“Wait a second,” she said. “I’ll go up to my room and get the book.”

I swallowed a large mouthful of wine and stood up to go. I didn’t want to discuss the Shatila and Sabra massacres again, and I wasn’t going to tell her about Boss Josèph, who I’d heard about from the crazed Lebanese journalist. I swear they’re all crazy: They’d invent the news so they could write it. Why did he want to set me up with Josèph? Was it because Josèph was from al-Damour? *Does one massacre justify another? I don’t want to make comparisons. I told him I rejected comparisons: Massacres are not supposed to happen, and if they happen, they must be condemned and their perpetrators arrested and taken to court. All the same, I’d gotten involved so I went with him to the restaurant in al-Jemmeizeh, at the bottom of the Ashrafiyyeh district in East Beirut. But, by then, I was half-drunk and wasn’t in the mood for a discussion.

I took a last gulp and was getting ready to leave when I saw her coming back, carrying the book.

“Listen,” she said.

She opened the book and started reading: “In the count of those lost were nine Jewish women who had married Palestinians during the British Mandate and followed their husbands to Lebanon during the exodus of 1948. The Israeli newspapers published the names of four of them.”

She closed the book, drank a mouthful from her glass, and asked me if I’d been in the camp during the massacre.

“Yes,” I said.

“Did you know those women?”

I laughed out loud. “You’ve come all this way and given me wine to ask me that? No, my dear friend, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Listen,” she said. “I’m serious. Did you know of the presence of Jewish women in the camp?”

“No.”

“I’m trying to discover their names. Can you help me?”

“Why?”

“Because this book saved me.”

“Which book?”

“Kapeliouk’s book. Do you see where I’m coming from?”

“Unfortunately, I don’t.”

“I told you I went to work on a kibbutz in the north when I was fifteen. I went because I felt guilty. And when I came here for the play, I felt guilty again. Then I came across this book, and it saved me. I stumbled on it here in Beirut — in Antoine’s Bookstore on Hamra Street, and I felt a sense of comfort. You know, this book will help me to say to Jews that when they kill Palestinians they’re killing themselves, too.”

“What has it got to do with me?”

“You’re Palestinian, and you have to help me.”

“Help you do what?”

“Get hold of the names of those women.”

“But it says in the book that they were published in the Israeli papers.”

“I want their stories,” she said.

“Why?”

“To prove my idea.”

“Do you know Hebrew?”

“ Ketsat .”

“What?”

“A little. Ketsat means a little in Hebrew. Do you know Hebrew?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m a doctor and not a linguist. Go to Israel, anyway, contact this writer, and he’ll give you the names.”

“No. I want the Palestinians to tell me about these women’s experiences.”

“Are you Jewish?”

“No. Why?”

“No reason,” I said. “I understand that you won’t act in this play so you won’t feel implicated. Didn’t the tall man say Jean Genet didn’t defend the Palestinians, he was just obsessed with death and sex, and that his project as a director was to put on a show that glorified death? You’ve refused to act in it, and you may be right: In your view, our death doesn’t deserve to have a play put on about it. But then you come and ask about nine Jewish women who, you say, or your Israeli writer says, were slaughtered here in the camp. There were more than fifteen hundred people killed, and you’re searching for nine!”

“You haven’t understood me. Please, tell me, do you believe, as a Palestinian, that what the Israeli writer says is true? Tell me about the massacre.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Did you see the massacre with your own eyes?”

I TOLD YOU that I was drinking white wine, the lights were dim, and the noose was around my neck. The wine was going to my head and taking me to places I’d forgotten. It made me think of Jamal the Libyan.

Did you know Jamal the Libyan?

Jamal whose chest was torn open by an Israeli bullet near the Beirut airport during the siege? I don’t know why I told her about Jamal. I think his story deserves to be made into a book; if only I’d told it to a great writer like Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, he could have made it into an epic. But Jabra’s dead now, and I never met him. All I had in front of me was this French woman half of whose face was hidden behind the bottle of white wine, and I wanted to explain things to her. It didn’t matter to me whether she was an actress or a spy. I wanted to make her understand the truth, and all I could think of was Jamal the Libyan. Or no, perhaps I wanted to seduce her. There was the wine, and there was her soft skin, and there was her little head balanced like a little ball upon her neck, and it was night, and for the first time in months I felt my loneliness had been breached.

The man who told the story of Jamal the Libyan wasn’t me. It was a man who resembled me.

I saw him do it and observed him closely and was impressed by his way of talking and how he could convert his fear and doubt into a dance of seduction and attraction; how he saw the woman’s defenses fall before him, and how taken aback he was at detecting a sort of betrayal as he approached the female body after a long dry spell. I saw him shaking off the humiliations his fear had inflicted on him. By the way, Father, why do fighters, when they feel fear, feel it more deeply than others? If you want to see fear, find a veteran, and put him in a frightening situation; then you’ll understand what real fear is.

So there was Khalil, which is to say myself, his fear tossed aside, sitting in front of this French woman about whom he knew nothing, telling her an extraordinary story, one that really deserves to be turned into a novel or a film. The truth is that Khalil Ayyoub had given some thought to the matter. Don’t think anyone could know such a story and not get the idea that he might become a writer — though to turn this true story into a novel we’d need at least one military victory so that people would take us seriously and believe that our tragedy deserves to be placed next to the other tragedies our ferocious century has known, while casting the gloom of its final days over us.

We don’t deserve our own story, which is why Jamal never told anyone. He fought in silence and died in silence. But what a story it is.

Why, come to think of it, did he tell me his story?

I remember he came to the hospital among the wounded. They brought him in with another man, both covered in blood. The first one looked dead, his blood clotted on his stiff body. I don’t know who examined him. Anyway, he was taken to the mortuary in preparation for burial. Then they discovered he was still alive, so they rushed him to the recovery room, and there we discovered he was a poet. The papers that came out in Beirut during the siege published long obituaries about him. When the poet awoke from his “death” and read these, he was delighted beyond imagining. His medical situation was desperate: He’d been hit in the spinal cord and his left lung was punctured, but he lived for two days, which were enough for him to read everything that was written about him.

He said he was happy, that he no longer was afraid of dying because he’d grasped the meaning of life through love woven by words. Ali — that was his name — was the only happy corpse I ever saw; it was as though all his pains had been obliterated. He lived for two beautiful days in his bed surrounded by stacks of obituaries, and by the time he actually died everything had already been written about him, so his second death notice consisted of a few lines and no one paid attention to the time of his funeral. We took him in a procession from the hospital to the camp cemetery — there were only a handful of us.