Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

“I burst out laughing and said I’d come to propose a family meeting.

“‘Your mother sent you?’

“‘No. My mother doesn’t know.’

“‘So who sent you?’

“‘No one.’

“‘What’s your job?’

“‘I’m an engineer.’

“‘What kind of an engineer?’

“‘A civil engineer.’

“‘Where did you study?’

“‘In Cairo.’

“‘They know how to teach engineering there?’

“‘So so. It’s not bad,’ I said. ‘The people who built the Pyramids can build a house.’

“‘Your name’s Jamal?’ asked the girl.

“‘Yes, Jamal. And yours?’

“‘Leah Rimsky,’ she said.

“‘A beautiful name,’ I said.

“‘Do you know Tel Aviv?’ she asked.

“‘How could I?’

“‘Would you like to see it? I could show you around.’

“‘Go to your room and let me deal with him,’ said the colonel.

“But Leah didn’t go to her room, and the interview with my uncle, the retired colonel, was short and brusque. He said he didn’t want to see his sister, had no interest in any family meeting, that it was up to us Palestinians to assimilate within the Arab countries (‘You’re Arabs like the rest of the Arabs’) and that he didn’t understand our insistence on living in the refugee camps, which had come to resemble Jewish ghettos: ‘Go and become Syrians and Lebanese and Jordanians and Egyptians, so that this blood-drenched conflict can come to an end.’ I thanked him for his advice and said, ‘Thank you, and you too. Why don’t you, my dear European German colonel, become assimilated in Europe? Go and assimilate yourself instead of giving me lessons in assimilation, and then the problem will be over. We’ll assimilate with the Arabs, you can assimilate with the Europeans, this land will be deserted, and we can turn it into a resort for tourists and religious fanatics from every nation. What do you say?’

“‘You understand nothing about Jewish history,’ he said.

“‘And do you understand anything about our history?’

“At this, Leah intervened and said she was ready to show me around Tel Aviv. We went out. The colonel said nothing and didn’t try to stop his daughter from going.

“With Leah I saw Tel Aviv, I discovered that strange society, which I can tell you is difficult to reduce to a few words. No, I didn’t go back and visit the colonel. I phoned Leah several times and went out with her, becoming reacquainted with my mother through her. Extraordinary! How is it possible? They’d never met but were so alike in everything — the same laugh, the same gestures, and they liked more or less the same foods. I suggested to Leah that she come with me to Gaza so I could introduce her to her twin, but she said she’d have to think about it.”

“And your mother? Have you told your mother?”

“I told my mother I’d visited them, and at first she asked about them eagerly; then the mask reappeared and covered her face.

“‘Please, stop visiting them. He’s a criminal and will kill you,’ said my mother.

“I told her about our discussion about assimilation and her face lit up for a moment, but then she furrowed her brow and said that history was a wild animal.

“After several more outings, Leah stopped answering the phone. Their number had been changed, and I had no other way of getting in touch with her. She’d warned me that her father wouldn’t allow her to meet me. Her father changed the number, and she didn’t call. Just between us, my uncle, the colonel, was right: After the bus operations, our meetings were no longer possible. Do you remember the bus operations, when the Popular Front planted explosives at bus stops in Tel Aviv?”

“Was that you?”

“I can’t claim that honor for myself, but I did take part through surveillance. My outings with Leah were a type of surveillance, and I reported on what I’d seen to the Popular Front cell. The cell was uncovered after a sweep of arrests in Gaza, and they took me to Damoun Prison, where I was sentenced to twenty years on charges of participating in terrorist activities and belonging to a saboteur organization.”

Jamal said that prison had brought him relief: “The battering torrent stopped roaring in my head. I was twenty-three years old then and I’m twenty-nine now, but all the same, when I remember those days before I was arrested and the feelings that raged inside me when I went out with Leah and took her to Jerusalem. .! I took her to Zalatimo’s, and when I saw her eating and singing and smelling the scent of orange-blossom water I told her about my mother and how my father had managed to seduce her with the help of Zalatimo’s pastries. When I remember that now, I feel a loss. Prison let me have a rest. Things are clear there — them and us. We’re behind bars, and they guard us. That way there’s no confusion. In prison I read all sorts of books, and I learned Hebrew. I thought to myself, When I leave prison, I’ll go and visit my uncle and speak to him in his new language.

“My mother came to visit me regularly. My father came with her sometimes, but she’d come every week, bringing cigarettes and food. She told me that my brother, Mirwan, had been arrested, too, that Samirah had been held for several days and then released, and that they were thinking about sending Hisham and Samirah to Cairo because they were afraid for them. I asked her why she didn’t get in touch with my uncle so he could help to get me out, and she asked me never to mention the subject again. I stayed in prison for five years before I was deported to Jordan.”

“And your mother? Where’s your mother?” I asked him.

“I haven’t gotten there yet. My mother stopped visiting me a year after I went to prison, and my father started coming on his own. He said my mother was sick, that she had arthritis. He brought me letters from her. Her letters were short and said only that I was to take care of myself after I came out of prison. You don’t know my mother. I swear no one could’ve guessed that she was Israeli or Jewish. She was more Palestinian than all the rest of us put together. My father still spoke with his Jerusalem accent, but she became Gazan — a true ghazzawiyya . She loved hot peppers, ate salad without olive oil, and all the rest. Then my father disappeared, too. Hisham and Samirah were in Cairo, Mirwan was in prison like me, and my father stopped visiting me.

“Later, a short letter from him reached me via the Red Cross. It said he’d taken my mother to Europe for treatment.

“When I got out of prison, I learned the truth. What a woman she was! And I don’t say that because she was my mother. All of us love our mothers and see them as saints, but if you only knew.”

“If you only knew,” Khalil said to Catherine.

“You could never guess what happened. Sarah didn’t go to Europe for treatment. Guess what she did.”

“She went to Tel Aviv and returned to her family,” said Catherine.

“That possibility has passed through Jamal’s mind, but it’s not what happened.”

“Her brother killed her?”

“Now you’re imagining an American film. We can’t behave as if we’re in American films, even if we like watching them.”

“What then?” asked Catherine.

Khalil said Sarah contracted colon cancer, but they discovered the disease too late, after the cancer had spread through her entire body.

“You know how women in our country suppress everything. They don’t complain, they refuse to say anything, and barricade themselves in with silence and secrets.”

Sarah treated herself at the beginning, and when the pain got bad she went to the doctor. She was admitted to hospital, had three operations, and was sent home after the cancer spread to her bones. She returned home to enter a long period of appalling pain.