Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

Jamal the Libyan was wounded along with the poet, fracturing his right shoulder and sustaining several severe chest wounds. This didn’t stop him from visiting his friend, the living dead, in the recovery room and weeping over his two successive deaths.

Jamal told me his story in the hospital and I told the tale to Catherine, and here I am now, repeating it to you so I can unravel, for both of us, the meaning of things. I won’t lie to you and say that my encounter with this French actress was nothing and ended with the gush of the shower in her hotel room. Something stole into my insides and created a sort of breach, which I wouldn’t call passion but which I will say, for the time being, resembled passion.

Jamal the Libyan left the hospital to die, as though it were the fate of this pilot to die on firm ground, not in the sky. His real name, of course, wasn’t Jamal the Libyan; the tag “the Libyan” got attached to him because he’d studied at the aviation school in Tripoli in preparation for the formation of the first squadron of the Palestinian air force in exile. The squadron was never formed, and when the Israeli invasion of Lebanon started, the Palestinian pilots from Libya were called to join the defense of Beirut. Jamal died in Beirut, and it was there he told his story.

“Let’s start at the end,” you’ll say.

Okay, I’ll do it since I’ve always preferred to tell the ends of stories before their beginnings. But you’ll have to forgive me this time because first I’m going to give you an account of what happened with Catherine. I began with her from the beginning. I didn’t tell her, for instance, how Jamal told me his story.

I remember that, when he was speaking about the Israeli army, he said his maternal uncles were all in a dither because they couldn’t enter Beirut.

“My uncles are very scared of their soldiers dying. They’re sick! And they need psychiatric help!”

I didn’t say anything when he mentioned his uncles. At the time I didn’t notice because, like tens of thousands of others living in Beirut, I was under continuous Israeli bombardment from air, land, and sea and was suffering from what you might call shell shock.

He said it to give me a chance to stop him at the word uncles , and when I failed to notice and got into a political-military debate with him about our likely collapse in the war, he immediately changed the subject and said, “Look, Doctor, you don’t know them. I know them better than you because I’m a Jew like them.”

“A Jew!” I said, and burst out laughing, sure he was joking.

Jamal wasn’t joking, but he wasn’t a Jew in the true sense of the word. He said it to give me a jolt and provoke me to question him so he could tell his story.

I didn’t tell Catherine the story this way. I began from the beginning. I left things deliberately vague and in limbo to heighten the shock value, and it worked. I didn’t make anything up myself — the story’s astonishing, and I used it to frame a moment of passion with a beautiful woman in a Beirut hotel on Hamra Street.

We were drinking white wine, and Catherine was seated beside me because when she came back from her room with the book, she’d changed her place and, instead of sitting opposite me, sat down right next to me on the wide sofa. She moved close to me as she read the text so I could see the page she was reading from, but when she finished reading she stayed there.

I was surprised.

Really, the text took me by surprise, and I was on the point of expressing my doubts and saying, as any of us would, that they didn’t even want to grant us the benefit of being victims of the massacre but felt the need to skew even that by focusing on the nine Jewish women who’d been slaughtered. But when I remembered Jamal the Libyan, I decided to keep quiet. I swallowed what would’ve surely appeared ludicrous to that woman, however obvious it seems to you. It was in China that I learned to distinguish between the stupid and the obvious. It takes another culture to let us discover that half the things that seem obvious are simply our own stupidities.

I said to her, “Listen. I’m going to tell you a story about a Palestinian family, and afterward you can draw whatever conclusion you like. But listen carefully.”

She said that first she wanted a response concerning these women.

“This story is my response,” I said.

And Khalil began.

I can see him sitting in the hotel lobby, the words gushing from his lips and eyes. I see him now as though he were another man, I would have wanted a friend like him because I love people who know how to tell stories.

Khalil began.

Jamal was born in Gaza City, where his father was a notable of the place, a wealthy man who had never been interested in politics, in spite of the fact that Gaza had been badly shaken by the war in ’48 and had turned into a city of refugees. The city was overflowing with tens of thousands of those expelled from the areas the Israeli army had just taken over. It almost seemed as though there were no Gazans left in Gaza — Gaza dissolved in a sea of refugees and became the first place to be collectively Palestinian. It was there the Palestinians discovered they weren’t groups of people belonging to various regions and villages; the disaster had produced a single people. That’s why Gaza became the most important hub of political activity in Palestine’s contemporary history. The Communist Party was strong there, it was there that the Muslim Brothers arose, and the first Fatah cells took shape in its camps and quarters. The Popular Front would occupy the city by night, under the command of a legendary figure known as Guevara of Gaza, setting up roadblocks everywhere. It was there that the Hamas and Islamic Jihad movements were born. .

Ahmad Salim, Jamal’s father, lived in the heart of this political and ideological whirlwind that battered Gaza. He never participated in politics, but he permitted his sons, when they became young men, to attach themselves to the Arab Nationalists movement, which had caught on among students.

Jamal, his eldest son, finished his secondary education in Gaza and then studied civil engineering at Cairo University, where he was an activist in the Arab Nationalists movement, which changed its name to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine following the fall of Gaza and the West Bank to Israeli occupation in 1967.

Mirwan, the second son, studied agricultural engineering at the American University of Beirut.

Hisham, the third son, was unable to complete his studies. He was finishing up his secondary education in Gaza in 1967 when everything was turned on its head.

Samira, the only girl and the youngest in the family, was one of the first Palestinian women to be arrested on charges of forming cells of “saboteurs,” as they’re called in Israel.

The four children participated enthusiastically in the demonstrations that swept the streets of Gaza in support of Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser and his decision to shut the Strait of Tiran to Israeli shipping, which was the official reason for the Six-Day War.

The war broke out and Gaza was occupied. A period of curfews, of night, and of fear followed.

At the beginning of September 1967, as people in Gaza were searching for ways to initiate resistance, a bomb struck the house of Ahmad Salim.

Jamal said that as war became increasingly likely, his mother began to change. She didn’t share her children’s enthusiasm for Gamal Abdel Nasser but remained silent, her face flushed with a blackish redness, saying only, “May the Lord protect us, my children!” After the defeat and Gaza’s fall to occupation, her silence became heavy and alarming, and her face turned into a dark mask.

That evening, when the entire family was seated around the dinner table, and the mother’s silence had imposed a prickly muteness on everyone so that only the clattering of spoons and knives could be heard, the mother broke her silence in a dull wooden voice that seemed to come from far away. She said what she had to say with a strange rapidity, as though the words had been choking her, making her spill them all at once before resuming her silence.