Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

In the morning, Zainab entered your room with a gloating smile.

“What are you doing here?” she asked me.

I said I’d been afraid for you because your breathing was irregular, so I spent the night here.

“Didn’t you hear the shooting?”

“No. What happened?”

That was my mistake. When you lie, you discover that you can’t correct anything: You’re naked. I was naked before Zainab’s smile.

“Everyone heard, and Dr. Amjad came from his house to make sure everything was alright and we looked for you. We didn’t find you in your room, and Dr. Amjad said you’d run away and told me to get everything ready to move Yunes to the home this morning.”

“We won’t be moving him,” I said.

“As you wish. Go and discuss it with Dr. Amjad. But why didn’t you come out of Yunes’ room last night?”

“I didn’t hear anything. I must have been fast asleep.”

“Whatever, Doctor. I can’t understand how you couldn’t have heard. Maybe you were in a coma. Fear can cause comas,” she said as she left.

I ran after her. “Zainab, come here.”

“What do you want?”

I asked her about the day before, fear creeping into my voice.

“It was nothing,” she said. “A robbery. A bunch of thieves tried to rob the hospital, and when Kamelya noticed them they fired in the air and ran away.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all. What did you think it was, an assassination attempt? Get a grip! No one’s after you. The woman’s dead and gone, and if they’d wanted to kill you they’d have killed you. Go back home and get some sleep. What kind of person sleeps next to a corpse when he can sleep at home?”

She called you a corpse! Stupid woman.

It’s as though she can’t see. No one sees you but me. I said to Amjad — this was the last time we talked about you — I said to him that I refused to move you to the home and asked him to come to your room to see for himself.

“It’s your responsibility,” he said. “You want him here, let him stay here. I suggested moving him for your sake.” Then he said he refused to examine you himself: “I’m not a forensic physician who examines corpses.”

I attempted in vain to explain it to him. He said that what I see as positive signs are really signs of death. Good God, can’t he see how like a little child you’ve become? You’ve grown younger, and the signs of aging have been erased from your brow and your neck, and your smell is that of a baby. Even your reflexes are like those of a newborn. The problem is your closed eyes, which I still put “tears” into. Your eyes are clear, the whites slightly blue, and your heart’s as strong and regular as a young man’s.

I told Amjad I could see your improvement in your eyes. I said I could hear your voice, as though you were waiting for something before coming out with the words.

“It’s all in your imagination,” he said.

“No, Doctor, I’m not imagining it. I speak to him and he understands. I put on Fairouz cassettes for him and see him swimming in his dreams, I play him Umm Kalsoum and see the desire gushing out around him, I play him Abd al-Wahhab and Abd al-Halim and see the mist of life curling above his head.”

He said he was sure you’d entered the final phase and he expected your heart to collapse — it could happen at any instant and carry you off — and that all my concern for you wouldn’t make the slightest difference. You hadn’t died already because your constitution was strong and your heart excellent — he’d never seen such a pure heart. He used the word pure to mean “regular” but the only true purity is the purity of love, and I’m jealous of you and of your love. I’m jealous of that meeting you had beneath the Roman olive tree when Nahilah took you to Bab al-Shams and poured her rain upon you. When I imagine that scene, I see her envelop you like a cloud and then pour her rain upon you. That is the water of heaven, and of life.

How can I convince them you’re not going to die? How can I convince myself?

Your childhood drives me crazy and crushes me; I never fathered a child and never knew the beauty that Yunes saw when his son Ibrahim’s hair covered the pillow.

Now I’ve started to understand how a man becomes a father.

Would you agree?

You don’t have to agree, Father, because you’re my son now. Let me call you “son,” please. Think of it as a game. Don’t parents play that way with their children, the father calling his son “daddy” and the son calling his father “son”? I’m the same. I carry the same name as your father: He was Ibrahim and I’m Khalil — the Companion. Ibrahim was the Companion of God, which is why we’ve named Ibrahim’s city Khalil, the City of the Companion. That’s why, too, the fiercest battles between the Palestinians and the Jews will take place in that city, and for it.

We won’t get into the complications of the relationships between fathers and sons. You know I don’t care for religious stories, and the name of the sacrifice that wasn’t sacrificed — be it Isaac, as the Jews say, or Ishmael, as we say — doesn’t concern me. Neither of them was sacrificed, because Ibrahim, peace be upon him, was able to produce a ram. The knife passed over both of their necks without a scratch, so what’s the difference?

I don’t want to discuss that now. I want you, Son, to see life with your new eyes. Start at the beginning, not at the end. Or start wherever you like. I’ve told you these stories so you can create a new story for yourself.

I can’t imagine the world that’s waiting for you. Make it yourself. Make it the way you want to. Make it new and beautiful. Tell the mountain to move, and it will. Didn’t Jesus, peace be upon him, say to the mountains, “Move!” Was he not the son who took on the outlines of his father’s image when he died on the cross?

Be the son, and let your bed be your cross.

What do you say?

Don’t you like the image of the son?

Isn’t it more beautiful than all the ones we’ve drawn during the six months we’ve spent together here? Come, let’s go back to the beginning.

You wanted the beginning, so let’s go there.

Listen, I don’t know any lullabies. Zainab does. Zainab lost her firstborn son in the Israeli air raid on al-Fakahani in ’82, and she still sings to him. I see her, when she’s all on her own, cradling her arms as though she were carrying a baby and I hear her singing:

Sleep now, sleep,

I’ll trap for you a dove.

Go, dove, fear not,

I’m only teasing my son.

Come now and sleep.

Tomorrow I’ll go to Hamra Street and buy you Fairouz, and that’ll be your sixth birthday present. Now I have to go and make you lunch, and I’ll put some orange-blossom water in it. There’s nothing like orange-blossom water. It has the most delicious flavor and the loveliest scent. I’ll put some orange-blossom water in your lunch, and your birthday meal will be delicious.

*Ritual invoking the Presence. The da’ira al-hadra represents the circle of saints reunited in the Presence, in ecstasy.

*Christian city in the south of Lebanon attacked in ’ 76 by the Saika, a pro-Syrian Palestinian militia, leaving approximately 400 civilians dead.

THE EXPERIMENT worked. Didn’t I tell you?

After I’d bathed you, daubed you with cologne, rubbed you with ointment and dressed you in your sky-blue pajamas, I sat you up at the table and let go of you, and you didn’t fall or slump over. You’ve regained your balance — and it’s impossible to balance if your brain is damaged. I left you alone, standing behind you without touching you. Then an idea came to me.

I stood in front of you, took hold of you just below the armpits, and the miracle occurred. It’s the first time I’ve dared to try such an experiment. There are three involuntary reflexes that newborn babies have.