Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

One night, when Sarah couldn’t sleep because the pain was so bad even though she’d had a morphine injection, she went to her husband’s bed, woke him and told him she wanted to talk to him.

The man sat up in bed and listened to the strangest request.

Sarah asked her husband to take her to Berlin and bury her in the Jewish cemetery there.

Her husband told her he was prepared to go any place in the world with her for treatment and that he’d call the doctor in the morning to get the addresses of hospitals in Berlin.

“I don’t want treatment,” she said. “There is no treatment. I want to be buried there.”

Khalil told Catherine that Jamal, as he told the story, was more astonished than he was, as though he were listening, not recounting. He said his father told him later, when they met in Amman a few months before his death, that he’d leave this world in peace because he’d succeeded in making Sarah happy.

“She was like a little girl there,” the father said. “Every day we’d go out. I don’t know where she found the strength. She took me to the places of her childhood, of which not many remained — but she was happy. It was as though the pain had gone, or a miracle had occurred. After a week she was no longer able to get out of bed. I tried to take her to the hospital, but she refused. Three days later she died, and I buried her there.”

Khalil saw the sorrow engraved on Catherine’s face. The French actress who wouldn’t act in Jean Genet’s play was slumped in her chair almost as if she were unconscious.

“Why aren’t you drinking?” Khalil asked her.

She looked at her glass and said nothing. Khalil took Catherine’s glass and finished it off in one gulp.

Catherine said she was exhausted.

Khalil looked at his watch. “It’s three in the morning,” he said.

Catherine said she wanted to sleep.

“Now you want to sleep! The night’s just beginning. I would like some more wine.”

“No. You’ve had a lot to drink, Jamal,” she said.

“Not at all, and my name’s Khalil, my mother’s name is Najwah, and Jamal died during the Israeli invasion of Beirut.”

Catherine got up. Khalil got up.

“How are you going to get back to the camp?” she asked.

“I don’t know, but I’ll manage.”

“You can spend what’s left of the night here, in my room.”

“In your room. . No. .”

“I’m tired and want to sleep. Come up with me.”

They went up to her room. Catherine undressed quickly and climbed into bed almost nude. After a little hesitation, Khalil lay down next to her, fully clothed.

“Take your clothes off,” she said. “Don’t tell me you’re going to sleep in your clothes.”

He undressed, Catherine turned off the light, and there, in the darkness of the room, which would continue to cling to Khalil’s skin, they made love.

Khalil doesn’t remember things clearly, but he felt as though he were drowning and caught hold of the woman, who fell on top of him, and they drowned together.

The next morning, as he was opening his eyes, he saw Catherine emerging from the bathroom dressed and wearing a lot of lipstick. He dressed quickly, and they went down to the restaurant, where they ate breakfast like strangers.

She told him she was leaving that afternoon; she was going to the crafts shop near the hotel to buy some presents. He told her he was already late for work at the hospital and would have to get going. Neither one brought up any of the topics of the previous day — they didn’t even mention the play again. They finished breakfast and got up from the table. She planted a cold kiss on his cheek, and he left.

AND THAT was all that happened with the French actress.

I told her the story of Jamal, and we slept together. She thought she was sleeping with Jamal the Libyan, who could have been Palestinian or Jewish or German, and I glimpsed in her something of Sarah, who became Palestinian.

Now let’s suppose that Catherine had immigrated to Israel, married Jamal, and — after a long life — death had come for her. Where would she have asked to be buried? With her Jewish grandmother, her Catholic mother, or her Muslim children?

Our story has no end.

When Jamal told me his story, I couldn’t believe it. He told me because he knew he was going to die; now he’s resting in his grave in Beirut while his father’s in Gaza and his mother in Germany.

Will the dead be reunited?

Why did Sarah return to the country of her executioners?

“It’s the classic relationship between executioner and victim,” you’ll say.

I’m not so sure. I don’t have any strong convictions that would provide me with an answer about a world like the one that drew Sarah toward her German grave.

Jamal told me his father was able to see the joy that reconnecting with the German language gave Sarah. She adored speaking German and would gurgle in it the way a child does.

Are we slaves of our own language?

Is language our land, our mother, and our universe?

Catherine went back to her country. She didn’t take the part she was supposed to in the play about the massacre. She left the play to us so we could go on playing the role of the victim. The role has no end, starting from the fall of the man-bird from the heights of the minaret of al-Ghabsiyyeh and the men of Sha’ab who climbed the ropes of rain to their deaths.

The French actress left us to play our role and went back to her country with the story of Sarah and Jamal the Libyan. And, instead of uncovering the names, she lost them. I asked nothing of her; I found myself in bed with her and she spoke to me in French, which I don’t understand, and called me Jamal. And when she got up the next day, she put her mask back on and went back to her country.

She was right, but I didn’t understand right away.

In the morning, beneath her mask of lipstick, she became another woman. She put on her French mask and planted a glacial kiss on my cheek. She was right: If I’d had a French mask, I wouldn’t have taken it off and let myself enter this labyrinth called Palestine. I have no choice because I was born in this labyrinth, nor do you. Jamal the Libyan, his cousin, Sarah, the same goes for an incalculable number of others from here, from over there, or even from outside. We have no alternatives and no masks, and even war no longer provides enough of a mask to conceal the whirlpool in which we’re drowning. Them and us. As you see, they’ve become like us and we’ve become like them. We no longer possess any other memory.

All the war stories have evaporated, all that’s left are the massacres. Are we imitating our enemies, or are they imitating their executioners and pushing us to put on that same mask that camouflaged Dunya’s features? You remember Dunya? Dunya’s dead now. “It doesn’t matter,” you’ll say. I’ll agree — we’re all going to die. But Dunya died because she was no longer able to play the role of the victim. That phase is over. The international humanitarian agencies have lost interest in us. Now what they’re interested in is the West Bank and Gaza, and Dunya has lost her following. That’s why she died.

And you.

I know why you’re dying, Father.

You’re dying because the story has come to an end with Nahilah’s death.

Tell me, why don’t you open your eyes and speak as Sarah spoke? Why don’t you declare your wish to die over there?

Are you afraid of dying?

Or is it that you don’t want your story to end, that you want to leave it open-ended so you can force us to keep on playing the role of the victim for as long as God sees fit?

What do you say?

No, my story’s different, and I’ll tell it to you from beginning to end. Shams’ death is no reason for me to die. No, I won’t go out onto the street and ask them to kill me. No, what happened last week was an absolute fiasco. I heard shooting in the street near the hospital, which started shaking with the rattle of the Kalashnikovs. I came running to hide in your room. I was shaking with fear. Now I laugh at myself when I remember how scared I was — I was ready to hide under your bed.