Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

And how will Abu Kamal live now?

The children have emigrated. They send a little money to the two women, but he’s alone, and no one sends him anything. Should I have told him he was paying the price for his behavior? Why should he have to pay? Was the camp destroyed just because he married a third time? His third wife, Intisar, died during the long siege that destroyed our world: Our world wasn’t destroyed during the great massacre, when we were buried under corpses; our world was destroyed by what they call the War of the Camps, between 1985 and 1988, when we were besieged from every side. That was when everything was wrecked.

Later we read all that stuff they threw together in a hurry about how the intifada in Gaza and the West Bank was born to the beat of the War of the Camps. It may be true — I don’t mean to judge history — but tell me, why does history only ever come in the shape of a ravening beast? Why do we only ever see it reflected in mirrors of blood?

Don’t talk to me now about the mirrors of Jebel al-Sheikh. Wait a little, listen a little.

In front of me sits Abu Kamal, who I wish would die.

A man who has tried his hand at virtually everything, forging his path through life. He worked in concrete — he left concrete with a hip problem, then at the Jaber Biscuit Factory, before deciding to sell ice cream. Then he opened a café, then a shop, which he named the Abu Kamal Minimarket and where he sold smuggled tobacco and a bit of everything. This man who tried to master life by every means possible, now, however, only inspires pity in me. I’m incapable of imagining a solution for his predicament. How could I possibly find work for him when I am myself, as you know, virtually unemployed? And then this man comes and tells me his two wives have shunned him and are keeping the money his children send from him?

“If I could just get in touch with Subhi,” said Abu Kamal. “Subhi’s always been kind to his father, but I don’t know his address. I went to Fathiyyeh and told her. . I told her I didn’t want anything. You don’t know, Son, what it is to be treated like shit by a woman, a woman who was once. .”

“Shame on you, Abu Kamal. Don’t talk that way about the mother of your children.”

“But you don’t know anything.”

He said that Fathiyyeh was humiliated twice. The first time was when he married Ikram, and the second, when Intisar forced him to repudiate his two other wives as a condition of marrying him.

“It was my fault, Son — it was my fault, but I just couldn’t resist the Devil. He seduced me and made me accept the woman’s conditions, but she died and took everything with her. Now I have nothing. The shop was burnt down, the house is half-destroyed. Can an old man like me live alone? I said I’d go back, I’d go back to my life the way it was before and to the two women who couldn’t do enough to serve me. Do you know what Fathiyyeh did when I went to visit her? She stood at her door and began yelling and rousing the neighbors. As though I were a beggar. I didn’t go to ask for anything, I went because God had opened my eyes. I said, ‘I’ll get my wife back, and I’ll be decently taken care of. I’ll get my children back. God took Intisar and the shop to punish me.’ I went to make amends, and all I got was humiliation and abuse. Now I don’t have the price of a loaf of bread.”

I put my hand in my pocket, but all I found was ten thousand lira. I gave them to him saying it was all I had.

“No, Son, no. I don’t beg.”

He put out his second cigarette, stood up, and left.

I know Fathiyyeh. That woman — I swear every time I think of Nahilah I see Fathiyyeh’s image. A tall, dark woman who covers her head with a white scarf and stands as straight as the letter alif — no bending, no shaking, and no stumbling, as though life had passed beside her, not through her.

I don’t understand how Fathiyyeh accepted his second marriage. At first, he hid it from her. He bought a house in Burj al-Barajneh, where Ikram lived, and divided his time. He’d spend the night in his first wife’s house in the Shatila camp, and he’d spend a portion of the day with his second wife in Burj al-Barajneh. Word got out and Fathiyyeh discovered what was going on. When Abu Kamal returned to the house one day exhausted from work — as he claimed — she raised the subject. A look of uncertainty crossed the man’s face, and he thought of denying everything because he was afraid of how she’d react, but instead he found himself telling the truth.

“Yes, I got married,” he said. “And that’s my legal right.”

He waited for the storm.

But instead of getting angry and breaking dishes, as she usually did whenever she had a disagreement with her husband over the smallest of things, and instead of killing him, as he believed she might do, this woman, straight as an alif , collapsed and broke in two. She bent over, letting her face fall between her hands, and started shuddering with tears. Fathiyyeh broke apart all at once and never stood upright again until he divorced her.

That same day she made peace with Ikram, and the two women lived in one house with their ten children. As the family hemorrhaged children through the deaths of several boys and the emigration of others, and the marriage of their girls, the women found themselves alone, breathing in the scents of letters sent from far away and chewing over their memories together.

After her divorce, Fathiyyeh came back to life. The slump of her shoulders was erased and they became straight again; the long neck bore its white scarf, and the woman walked the roads of the destroyed camp as though she were flying over the rubble, as though the destruction were a sideshow whose sole purpose was to focus the viewer on the beauty of her commanding height and the splendor of her huge eyes.

Fathiyyeh neither yelled nor roused the neighbors, as Abu Kamal claimed.

She stood at the door, blocking it with her broad shoulders, so Ikram couldn’t interfere. She knew Ikram’s heart would crumble for the man who’d made her believe that his every footstep shook the earth. She kept Ikram behind her and raised her right hand, straightening her scarf with her left one.

“Out!” she said. “Out!”

He tried to speak, but she put her hand over her mouth to keep her hatred and her shouts in, saying only those two words — “Out! Out!” The man left without daring to speak. He didn’t even ask for the address of his son, Subhi, who worked in Denmark. He saw the barrier rise in front of him, and he leaned forward, before turning his back on the door Fathiyyeh had blocked with her body.

And now he comes up with the story that she yelled and humiliated him in front of the camp.

Why do people lie like that?

I’m convinced he believed it himself. I’m convinced that when he told me the story of how he tried to get his divorced wives back, he heard the yells that never emerged from Fathiyyeh’s mouth.

Tell me — you know better than I do — do we all lie like that? Did you lie to me, too?

I told you your story with Nahilah as a beautiful story, and I didn’t question your version of that last meeting beneath the Roman olive tree. You’ll say it wasn’t the last and will tell stories of your visits that continued up until 1974, but that meeting was the last as far as I’m concerned and as far as the story’s concerned. For after Nahilah had said what she said, there was no more talk, and when there’s no more talk, there’s nothing.

When there’s nothing new and fresh to say, when the words go rotten in your mouth and come out lifeless, old, and dead, everything dies.

Isn’t that what you told me after the fall of Beirut in 1982? You said the old talk had died, and now we needed a new revolution. The old language was dead, and we were in danger of dying with it. If we weren’t fighting, it wasn’t because we didn’t have weapons but because we didn’t have words.