Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

I won’t tell you about the interrogation. A man came and delivered a letter from the Ain al-Hilweh militia inviting me to visit them, and I went. They escorted me directly to the Ain al-Hilweh prison, where they threw me in a dark underground vault, full of damp and the smell of decay, and left me.

I rotted in the vault for ten days, which felt like ten years — time got mixed up in my head, and I lived underground as though I were floating on the entire night of my life.

They took me out for the interrogation. A man came holding the kind of pick we normally use for breaking up blocks of ice and started jabbing it into my chest asking me to confess.

He’d stab me with the pick and ask, “What did you do with Sameh, dog?” and I’d ask him who this Sameh was. He’d repeat his question as if he weren’t expecting an answer from me.

A stupid interrogator, you’ll say.

But no, he was neither an interrogator nor stupid. He was just a criminal. Crime has spread everywhere in our ranks. We’ve watered it with blood and stupidities. We’ve wallowed in error, and error has consumed us.

How is it possible?

They arrest you and throw you into the darkness without asking a single question? They throw you into an underground vault where you live with your waste and the next thing you see is an ice pick in your chest. Then they ask you about someone you don’t know and don’t wait for an answer?

Ten days in nowhere, and if it hadn’t been for Abu Ali, God knows how long I’d have remained there. Abu Ali Hassan was a comrade of mine from the days of the base in al-Khreibeh in 1968. He told me later he saved me because he was certain of my innocence. He believed “the whore” had fooled me.

They escorted me to the interrogation and there contemptuous looks and sarcastic smiles fell upon me, and I understood. Instead of being furious, however, and trying to defend my honor, I was afraid for Shams and possessed by a single idea: how to rescue her from their hands. I could read the decision to execute her in their eyes, and I didn’t want her to die. At the time I didn’t know what life taught me later, that death is the lover’s relief.

Nothing can save you from love but death.

If I’d known that, I’d have killed her myself.

At the interrogation, however, I was possessed by fear for her, and instead of going home and back to work when I was released, I decided to look for her to try to save her. I went to the outskirts of Maghdousheh, east of Tyre, where the fighters had established bases. I knew she commanded a military detachment there that carried her name and that she refused to accept orders from the military command in the south because they were directly under the command of Tunis. That’s what she’d told me and I didn’t believe her, but when I went to Maghdousheh I found out that this time she hadn’t lied. There really was an armed detachment known as “Shams’ group,” but it wasn’t at Maghdousheh. I was told they had withdrawn toward Majdalyoun.

I went to Majdalyoun but didn’t find her.

I was like a blind man, wandering the roads of the south, searching for her but not finding her. Everywhere I went I was assailed by the same strange looks, as though everyone knew the story.

I searched and found nothing. I crossed Majdalyoun, went to the house they told me was the headquarters of Shams’ unit and found it empty — a five-room house surrounded by a garden with fruit trees. I went in and found blankets on the floor, plastic bags, pans, and the odor of rotten food. It looked as though they’d evacuated the place in a hurry without time to organize their departure. I lay down on a blanket and felt like crying. I was besieged with tears, yet I found myself without tears, without emotion, without feeling. Nothing. I existed in the nothing and in tears, and I knew she was lost.

Shams was lost, and I didn’t know how I’d fill the gaps in my life without her.

I closed my eyes, squeezed them closed as hard as I could, and the darkness filled up with gray holes and despair overwhelmed me.

My son, Yunes, do you know what it means to feel incapable of living?

Once I told her I couldn’t imagine life without her, and she patted my shoulder and picked up Mahmoud Darwish’s collected poems and started reading –

Take me to the distant land.

Neverending is this winter — wailed Rita.

And she smashed the porcelain of day on the window’s iron,

Placed her small revolver on the draft of the poem

And threw her socks on the chair, breaking the cooing.

She went, barefoot, toward the unknown, and the hour of my departure had come.

Naked on my bed, she read. The pages gleaming in front of her, her voice bending, branching off, and blushing. I looked at her and failed to understand. I heard the rhythm of her voice mixed with the rhythm of the rhymes, and I saw her body shimmering.

She closed the book and asked, “What’s wrong? Don’t you like poetry?”

“I like it, I like it,” I said. “But you’re more beautiful than poetry.”

“Liar,” she said. “My ambition is to become like Rita as Mahmoud Darwish wrote her. Have you heard Marcel Khalifa’s song, “Between Rita and My Eyes There is a Rifle”? I’d like to be like Rita, with a poet coming along and putting a rifle between me and him.”

She shot up suddenly and said she was famished and was going to make some pasta.

I didn’t tell her I wasn’t always that way. I love poetry, I know entire poems by heart. But in the presence of a wild outpouring of beauty, words are no longer possible.

Though in those moments that I spent alone in the house in Majdalyoun, surrounded by traces of her, I could smell the aroma of pasta inside the gray spots dancing in front of my closed eyes, and I felt my death. Believe me, without her I’m nothing — alone with the nothing, alone with what’s left of her things, alone with her ghost.

And I sunk into sleep within the odors of decay that fumed from the blankets of that abandoned house.

I slept and floated over mysterious dreams, as though I were no longer myself. I saw her. Shahineh, wearing khaki trousers and a khaki shirt, like Shams. She was caught in the rain. Ropes of rain tied the ground to the sky, and she was standing under a flowering almond tree.

“How can the almond tree flower in the middle of winter?” I asked her.

The branches of the tree shook and the blossoms started to fall. I ran to gather them, and she pointed her rifle at me. “Go back,” she yelled. “The Jews are here.”

I was a child. No, I became a child. No, I saw myself as a child. Anyway, I started jumping to stretch my body to its normal height because I wasn’t a child and it wasn’t Shahineh, it was Shams.

“Why are you doing this to me, Shams?” I shouted.

Shahineh said she was going.

I went up to her and the earth started to open up beneath my feet — I was drowning. I was a child drowning in the rain. The huge drops struck me. It hurt.

“Mom!” I cried.

And I saw Shahineh — who looked like Shams — turn her back and disappear into the water.

The dreams are all mixed up in my head now, but when I woke there to the sound of their footsteps, I wasn’t afraid. I felt feet kicking me and rifles pointed at my head, so I curled up into a ball to avoid as many of the blows as I could.

They stood me up against the wall and told me to put my hands up. Then they turned my face to the wall and frisked me while I stood like a zombie. I didn’t resist because I no longer resisted.

Since the day at the stadium, when I’d decided I wasn’t going with the ones who got on the Greek ships, I’d told myself, “Enough.”

But where are we to find this enough?