Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

Shams still burns, Yunes, but it seems the time has come. I feel I have to shroud her in the little sack of years that she carried on her back. I feel the time for her death has come. So I’ll tell you the whole story, from the beginning, and I’ll bury Shams with words, as we buried Nahilah.

Now it’s my turn.

I can no longer hold onto my woman. I have to bury her as people bury their dead and their stories.

Shams’ story begins in 1960, when she was born in al-Wahdat camp in Amman. Her father was Ahmad Saleh Hussein, her mother Khadijeh Mahmoud Ali. Ahmad had married Khadijeh in their village of al-Ammour, in the district of Jerusalem, in 1947. One year later, their first son, Saleh, was born. He died in 1970 in the September battles in Jordan.

Ahmad and Khadijeh found themselves with their baby, Saleh, who wasn’t yet a year old, in the throngs of inhabitants of al-Ammour who were expelled from their village in 1948, following the establishment of the State of Israel. The family took up residence in the caves near Bethlehem, as did all the people from the village, and would slip back to the village in search of provisions. Then everything came to a halt because collective border crossings became more difficult, and because provisions had run out, and all the houses in the villages had been destroyed.

In 1950, after a new child — whom they called Ammouri in hopeful memory of the demolished village — had been born, the family moved to the Aydeh camp, in the town of Deir Jasir. There, Ahmad found a job in a pasta factory owned by Abu Sa’id al-Husseini. His wages were a shilling a day, and the shilling was enough because the man used to bring enough pasta back with him to feed the family.

From then on, the family ate only pasta. Even after the factory closed and they moved to the camp in Amman, Ahmad kept making pasta at home. People even called them “the Italians” because all Ahmad talked about in the camp were the virtues and benefits of pasta and the greatness of the Italian people who’d invented it. Ahmad didn’t know that pasta was invented by the Chinese, not the Italians, but how could he have?

She was known as “the Italian girl” in Jordan, but it wore off in Beirut, and Shams, who hated pasta as a child, rediscovered it when I fell in love with her. She said that love had brought her back to her Italian roots. All we ate was pasta, except on the rare occasions when I’d cook, in which case I’d make fried cauliflower with taratur sauce.

You see, there’s nothing unusual about Shams’ story so far, except for the pasta. We were all expelled from our villages, we all slipped back into them in search of food, we all stopped doing that after the houses and villages were destroyed, and all of us took whatever jobs we could find.

In 1960, the year Shams was born, Abu Sa’id al-Husseini’s factory closed. It’s said he went bankrupt when imported Italian pasta flooded the market and the national pasta industry collapsed because there was no tariff barrier.

Abu Sa’id al-Husseini closed his factory in Bethlehem, and Ahmad found himself out of work with a wife and five children (in the meantime a boy and two girls had been born before Shams). He decided to move from Bethlehem to Amman, to the Ras al-Ain district, where he worked on the stone crushers. Then after two years, he moved to al-Wahdat camp, taking up residence in the development area on the border and building a shack out of sheet metal, where he lived with his family. The house resembled a museum of advertisements of every kind and color. Ahmad Saleh got the metal sheets from the cans discarded in trash heaps along the roads and was not alone in doing so, most of the shacks in the development area were built from sheet metal. People would change the sheets according to the season, since some of them would wear out before others because of their exposure to the elements.

Shams’ house looked like an oblong billboard.

Shams said she lived a great part of her life in the multicolored hovel, a house that turned into an oven in summer and a freezer in winter. A father who spoke to his wife only to discuss the need to change this or that wall that was starting to rust. “I lived all my life in dilapidation: The house was wearing out, my father was wearing out, and everything was drenched in water and sun. My father would go off to his work at the stone crushers and return exhausted and at the end of his tether. The only thing he could find to amuse himself was to make pasta and yell at my mother because she hadn’t kneaded the dough properly.”

Shams said that she remembered those days with a strange tenderness, and she felt alienation for the first time when their house in the camp changed. Concrete arrived and you couldn’t change the walls anymore. With the revolution everything arrived, and Ahmad Saleh, whose cousin found him a job in one of the offices of the Popular Front, left his work at the stone crushers and added two new rooms to his house. That was when Shams said she felt at sea. She was nine when everything in the house changed. The roof stopped leaking, the walls no longer were brightly colored with advertisements, and Shams felt some part of her had died.

Her childhood ended when the house was torn down. Her periods started. Her mother told her she was like all the other girls of al-Ammoura: “We’re like that, our girls grow up at nine.” Her mother explained everything to her and told her she had to get ready for marriage. Shams waited for a husband.

She waited for him at the unwra school.

She waited for him while training at the cadets’ camp.

She waited for him as she watched her brother die, hit by a bullet of the Bedouins in 1970. *

She waited for him when she saw her father arrested after the closure of the Popular Front office, before finding himself a job in a pasta factory that belonged to the Alwan family in Amman.

She waited for him as she saw the concrete walls of the house corrode and become like the sheet metal that had enclosed her childhood.

Then came the husband and the nightmares.

How can you expect me to tell you about Fawwaz Mohammed Nassar when I only know him mutilated by Shams’ words? When she spoke of him she’d lacerate him: She’d take a small piece of a brown paper bag or a newspaper or a Kleenex or a book and start chewing on it and spitting it out, so I only saw the man drawn on mutilated paper. She would talk and mutilate, and the tears would pour out of her.

Have you ever seen a woman not weeping from her eyes but with everything inside her? Everything in Shams wept as she mutilated Fawwaz Mohammed Nassar and spat out the little shreds of paper she was chewing. And then suddenly she’d wipe away her tears as though it were nothing, as though the woman with tears in her eyes were another woman, and she’d start gobbling the dish of pasta for which she’d made a special sauce of cream and basil leaves. She’d eat and sniff the basil and say the smell intoxicated her. She’d eat as though her appetite had exploded inside her. She’d say she wanted nothing from Fawwaz; she’d just go to Amman, kidnap Dalal, and bring her back to Beirut.

“I won’t start my life without Dalal. Look.”

And she’d take a photo from the pocket of her khaki jacket.

“Look how beautiful she is. She’s the most beautiful girl in the world.”

I’d look. I didn’t see the most beautiful girl in the world, only a sweet child with curly hair and a little brown face devoured by large eyes with long lashes.

“Look at her eyelashes! How can I leave her with that beast?”

When Shams held Dalal’s picture in her hand, she was transformed into another woman. I’d see tenderness and sorrow and weakness gathered on her brow, and when I’d try to hold her, she’d push me away as though she were refusing to share Dalal with me. Then she’d turn to me and say she needed a man to help her kidnap Dalal. If I tried to tell her this man was sitting before her, she’d look at me with pity.