Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

“I need a fedayeen fighter, my dear. Not some doctor like you.”

Then I’d tell her I was a fedayeen fighter and would talk to her about our first camps in al-Khreibeh and Kafar Shouba.

“You? Incredible!”

In fact, I made a mistake. I shouldn’t have told her how the officer made me crawl in front of the platoon and how that incident made me lose my self-respect as a political commissar and as a soldier.

That was an unforgivable slip. I confessed I wasn’t brave enough to prevent the officer from humiliating me.

I wanted to be a blank page with her on which she could draw whatever she wanted. But she wasn’t looking for a blank page. Why, then, did she stay with me? Why was she here with me, and then there with Sameh? I swear I don’t know, I don’t understand how the devils that inhabit our bodies think.

Yes, Yunes. I waited for her until she died. I left the prison and didn’t step foot out of my house until after I got word of her murder. I thought she might come to my place to hide. How naïve I was. Rumors had spread through the camp that I’d stayed home to protest my arrest. No. I stayed in the house waiting for her. Ah, if only she’d come! Every part of my body hurt; separation causes pain in the joints, the chest, the knees.

I waited, not to understand what she’d done, but because I loved her. It no longer made any difference to me whether she’d been unfaithful or not. She was what mattered, not me. But she didn’t come. I’m sure she wasn’t aware I was waiting for her. She was enveloped in her crime, in blood. I can describe her to you, my son, even without having seen her. I can see the red halo around her head, the stains of blood. Ever since we’ve sunk into our own blood, it has dogged us and tied us to it with a long rope knotted around our necks.

After she died, I left my house and roamed the streets of the camp. I walked like a pathetic revenge taker even though pent up inside me was all the sorrow in the world. I didn’t weep for Shams and I’ll never weep for her, for all the tears would never be enough. Like an idiot, I walked with my head held high as though I’d taken my revenge.

The rumors started and I took refuge in the hospital out of fear. I was afraid because I knew her; she was a woman capable of killing all her men. She did kill us all — me and Sameh and I don’t know who else. Crime is like love: We kill another person just as we love a man or a woman — because they are a substitute for another man or woman.

I was a substitute for two men I didn’t know — Sameh, whom I’d never heard of, and Fawwaz, whom I never met. All the same, I was their stand-in. Sameh died, Fawwaz took Dalal, and here I am.

Where were we?

I told you Shams was ready for marriage at nine, and they married her off at fifteen. Fawwaz came along, and he was twenty-four. He married her and took her to Lebanon. But it wasn’t Fawwaz who came, it was Abu Ahmad Nassar. He asked for her for his son, Fawwaz, who’d finished his studies in engineering at Beirut Arab University and was working for the Resistance. Then he took her to Beirut. The girl got to al-Wahdat and became acquainted with her husband in a small house in the Tal al-Za’atar camp, situated in the eastern suburbs of Beirut. She lived a year and a half to the rhythm of bombardments, the explosions of canons, and the rain of bullets.

She said her husband scared her more than the war.

“He’d only have sex with me when we were being shelled. He was the devil incarnate. I never saw him except inside the house. He’d turn up from nowhere covered in dust, having left his position. He’d come to me coated in dust and sweat and take me without taking off his clothes. I never once saw him naked.

“He was an officer in the camp’s militia, but I don’t know anything about his duties. He never told me.

“His father took me to Beirut; we made an exhausting journey by car from Amman. When we got to the house in Tal al-Za’atar, his father stood at the door and didn’t go in. He kissed his son, told him, ‘I’ve brought you the bride,’ and left. During the six hours we spent together in the taxi from Amman to Beirut, he didn’t speak to me. He sat next to me and didn’t say a word. He’d look at me from time to time and say, ‘Amazing!’

“My father said I was going to get married, my mother agreed with a nod, and I got married, like a blind woman. Blindly I crossed the distance between Amman and Beirut, and blindly I entered the house of my husband who I didn’t know. I found myself standing in the house, holding my suitcase, as if at a railway station.

“‘Hello, Shams,’ said Fawwaz. ‘Come in and take a bath.’

“I went into the kitchen, heated water in a basin that I carried to the bathroom. I washed with the bay laurel soap my mother had put in my suitcase, suggesting I wash myself with it before going in to my husband. I bathed and then entered Fawwaz’s world to discover that he wasn’t an engineer, or anything at all. He’d come to Beirut to study engineering, then taken a job in a tile factory close to the Mar Elias camp and then forgot all about engineering. With the beginnings of the civil war, he’d joined the Resistance and had been inducted into the Tal al-Za’atar militia.

“I’m not beautiful,” she said, “but at Tal al-Za’atar I discovered that I’m a woman in the eyes of men avid for life. There was shelling and war and death; everything was coming apart.

“Fawwaz would go wild with jealousy. I can’t describe to you everything he did. At the beginning, he’d bang his head against the wall until the blood ran, he’d sleep with me, and then he’d go back to the wall to bang his head again and again. I didn’t understand. ‘You’re a whore and the daughter of a whore,’ he’d say.

“I was scared. I was living through an interminable war, and Fawwaz didn’t seem to want it to end. I’d ask him when he was going to go back to his work, and he’d look at me in amazement and say he wasn’t an engineer and didn’t want to go back to his job at the tile factory.

“‘What’s wrong with it?’ I’d ask him. ‘Those things aren’t important. My father was a pasta twister, but we still had our dignity. What matters are morals.’

“He’d frown. ‘Morals! Whore! I got stuck with a whore!’

“I don’t know — maybe he wanted me to be a whore, maybe he was afraid of me, but I didn’t do anything. I swear I didn’t look at another man. Well, it did happen, but that was much later, during our evacuation from the camp after it fell.

“Do you know what he did?

“He left his position and rushed over to the house. ‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘I’m going to withdraw with the other fighters. You surrender with the women. We’ll meet in Beirut,’ and he gave me the address of someone called Karim Abd al-Fattah, Abu Rami, in the district of al-Fakahani.

“‘I’ll go with you,’ I told him.

“‘No. This is safer,’ he said.

“He looked at me with fierce eyes. ‘You’re afraid of getting raped!’ and he left.

“What can I tell you? Of course I was afraid, and I didn’t understand why he wouldn’t take me with him. Did he want me to die? What had I done to him? I’d lived through the toughest times with him. You know what life’s like during a siege. All we could find to eat were lentils. I lived on my own like a stranger. I’d go to the public water pipe and wait in the line of death: The water was in their line of fire. We called it ‘the blood pipe.’ I lived alone with nothing to do but wait for him. He’d come, caked with dust and gravel, sleep with me, and leave. He wouldn’t eat the lentils I’d cooked because he’d eat with the boys.

“All I wanted was one thing — to go back to my family in Amman. But how could I leave? The camp was closed by the siege. I wanted him to pay attention to me, but I didn’t dare ask for anything: He was a fighter and we were at war. Even his visits and his sex were rapid-fire. And every time he slept with me, he’d bang his head against the wall, accuse me of being unfaithful, raving that I was a whore and that my body was a place of evil.