Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

You say, “Enough,” and then blind history drags you by the hair back to war.

I said, “Enough,” and sunk into the massacre. I said, “Enough,” and the War of the Camps encircled me. I said, “Enough,” and found myself crucified on the wall of an abandoned house in a village of ghosts called Majdalyoun whose inhabitants had been driven out.

And now I say, “Enough,” and I find myself with a child in whom death dances exultantly, as though we were born, and die, in death.

I was standing against the wall, the weariness spreading through me, and with the image of Shahineh in Shams’ body as she left me in the rain. Why did she leave me to drown? Is it possible to leave a child calling for help? Even in a dream, it would be shameful. I was standing, the man was patting down my body as though he were detaching my bones, one by one. Then he ordered me to turn and face him. I saw four young men, the oldest not more than twenty. They were like children at play. That’s war — it should be like a game; when we stop playing we’re afraid, and when we’re afraid, we die.

I stood against the wall awaiting my death, but they didn’t kill me. Their boss showered me with questions, but I didn’t answer. What was I supposed to say? Was I supposed to tell the truth and make myself look laughable and stupid?

When the commander despaired of my face, with its sheen of sleep, he ordered them to take me away. One of them came forward, undid the buttons of my shirt and pulled it up to cover my face. They put me into a Land Rover and took me away. Within the jolts of the furrowed roads, sleep returned to cradle me. I wanted that woman. I wanted to give her the almond flowers I’d gathered for her.

But sleep wouldn’t come. I found myself in a dark cell like the one I’d been held in before. My guess is that they’d forgotten about me and left me to live out my three days in prison as though in the belly of death. Now I am Jonah, not you. I lived in darkness for three days without food or water. I was sure they’d forgotten me and that I’d die inside that dark vault, and no one would know what had become of me.

On the third day, however, they took me out of the cell to interrogate me, and the interrogator burst out laughing in my ear.

“So, Mr. Horns!” he said. “What were you doing there?”

I said I’d gone looking for her.

“And why were you looking for her?”

“To understand.”

When I said “to understand,” the man burst into a long, hysterical laugh and started coughing and choking on his words. Then, in the middle of his coughing and laughing, he gestured for them to throw me out.

So that was how I was twice arrested for her sake and twice released.

I went home, leaving Shams to her fate. Don’t say I didn’t try to save her. I went home and waited for her death, and she died.

What else do you want to know?

I swear I don’t know anything else. All I see in front of me now is a question mark. Why did she come from Jordan? And how did she become an officer in Fatah? And how did she put her military group together?

Questions I don’t know how to answer. All I know is that I know nothing.

Do you want to hear the story?

I’ll tell you as long as you don’t tell me it’s unbelievable. Believe first, then I’ll tell. I no longer feel the need to determine the truth of stories or the absence of it. None of our stories are believable, Uncle, but does that mean we should forget them?

I believed it because it resembled your story, but your story, and those of Reem or Nahilah in Sha’ab, and Adnan’s in prison or in the mental hospital, are all unbelievable stories, yet they’re still true. You know them, I know them, everybody knows them.

My question is. .

No, no. There is no question.

But let’s suppose there were a question. The question would be why don’t we believe ourselves? Why do I feel that the things that have happened, to me or to others, have turned into shadows? You, for instance — aren’t you the shadow of the man you were? And that man — was he a hero, a lie, or an illusion?

I know I disturb you when I throw this kind of question at you, and I know you’d rather be on your own now, because now you’re. . God, how beautiful you are! If you could open your eyes just once to look at yourself in the mirror. An old man opening his eyes and seeing himself as a child, seeing his body liberated from the sack holding his life. You’re the one who came up with that theory, remember?

You used to say that the years a man lived were a sack he carried on his back, but we couldn’t see it because no one can see his own life. Our life is like a dream: Life trundles us along and time trundles us along and we have no idea. Then suddenly, when we reach forty, we start feeling it, as though time had built up inside a large sack on our backs and were weighing us down.

Do you remember the day you returned to Nahilah, exhausted and wounded, from the Israeli ambush you fell into and by some miracle managed to escape?

You found yourself bleeding in the valley. You picked yourself up and went to her. As you made your way heavily toward the cave, you were certain you were on your way to death. And you didn’t feel sorrow. You told me that when you tapped on her window, all the images and memories halted in your eyes, and you saw yourself as a shadow walking toward its shadow.

You came around to find Nahilah before you, covering your head with her white headscarf, wiping your wounds with oil and rocking you as a mother rocks her child. Nahilah tried to remove the bullet lodged in your thigh but couldn’t, and you got better with the bullet in its place. I feel it under my fingers now when I bathe you. The bullet is getting bigger and you are getting smaller, there’s no need to remove it. We’ll let it accompany you to wherever you go off to.

That day you told Nahilah that the sack was getting heavy on your back, you asked her about her sack, she smiled and said nothing.

Nahilah would smile and say nothing, hiding her secret in that broad smile of hers that transformed her eyes into a grove of olives, into night.

That day you told her that age was the cross of man, you talked to her about Christ. She listened to you and loved what you said. She told you that you spoke like your mother, who hid an icon of the Virgin Mary under her pillow.

You told Nahilah that Christ was crucified on wood his own age, years he didn’t live, for life is like the cross — in the end we’ll find ourselves hung upon it.

Nahilah said you’d started to talk like a philosopher and smiled.

Your sack had started to weigh you down, making you bend. No, your back wasn’t hunched, because you were active to the end, but that accursed sack bent your neck a little, and you started to walk with your eyes to the ground.

Look now and see how beautiful and new you are! You’ve cast it off your back, and your childhood has commenced. You’re an ageless child again. The years that were behind you are now ahead of you.

No one will believe me.

I tell Dr. Amjad or Kamelya or Zainab, and they think I’m mad. It’s as though they can’t see. “Look!” I say, but they don’t see. Standing at the head of your bed, Amjad says the danger is now in the heart; at any moment it could fail.

I know more about medicine than he does. I know the chances of a heart attack. But nobody wants to see or believe; even you have become like them. I implore you to open your eyes just one time and look in the mirror, and you’ll see the surprise. You’ll see how a person can cast the sack of years off his back, return to his childhood, and start over from the beginning.

I told you nothing about our story was believable. Shams, too, is unbelievable. But you have to believe me. I know that in telling Shams’ story, I’ll kill her. This time Shams will be assassinated by words. All those people who gathered in the hills of al-Miyyeh wi-Miyyeh failed to kill her because she’s still alive within me, the betrayal radiating from her hot body and her fingers, as if I were still holding her hand and watching her long, slender fingers, kissing them one by one, igniting her from her fingers.