Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

“He came to tell me he was withdrawing and asked me to surrender with the women.

“I knew what I could expect, so I decided to withdraw with the fighters and went toward the eastern edge of the camp. I put on jeans and a green shirt and went to look for Fawwaz. I couldn’t find him. It seems he was in one of the first groups to withdraw.

“That was when I met Ahmad Kayyali, who gave me a Kalashnikov and said, ‘Come with us.’

“We crossed the Monte Verde, which is full of pines. We walked by night and laid up by day. And there, in the midst of the scattered bullets and the nights of death, I made up my mind to leave Fawwaz. If I lived, I wouldn’t go back to him. Ahmad was my first lover. With him I discovered I had a body and that my body deserved the pleasures of life. When Fawwaz had sex with me, he’d say, ‘Pleasure me,’ but I had no idea how to ‘pleasure’ him. All I was aware of was his panting on top of me and that thing that penetrated me below, as though it were wounding me. With him I’d reach the edge of pleasure but never get there. Ahmad was different. I asked him to come to me, and I slept with him. We were lost in the forest, we’d left the camp with about twenty fighters, and we walked the entire night. When dawn came, we decided to split up to wait for dark. They started setting off in different directions, but I didn’t know what to do. Ahmad took me with him, and we hid on a rocky slope, not daring to breathe. He was around my age, and like all the men, he’d use colloquial mixed with Classical Arabic to make me feel he was serious. He asked me where I was going to go in Beirut. I said, to the house of Abu Rami, Karim Abd al-Fattah.

“‘Do you know him?’ he asked.

“‘No. They gave me his name,’ I said.

“‘And your family, where are they?’

“‘In Amman,’ I said.

“‘Mine’s in Nablus.’

“‘Why did you come to Beirut?’

“‘To join the fedayeen. And you?’

“I felt tears streaming down my cheeks. Ahmad moved closer to me and put his hand on my head. I said, ‘Take me,’ and he took me. With him I discovered what it means for a woman to make love with a man. Ahmad disappeared after that; he disappeared at Hammana, when we got to the assembly point. I don’t know where he went, I didn’t know anything about him. We reached Hammana, he disappeared, and I went down with the groups of fighters to Beirut and considered not going to Abu Rami’s house. But where could I go? I thought of going to one of the Fatah offices, but I wasn’t a member and didn’t carry a card. Stupid — who’d have asked for a card in those days? So I did go to Abu Rami’s house, and I didn’t find Fawwaz. Umm Rami said he was staying with the boys in the museum district, waiting for me.

“‘Go to him now,’ said Umm Rami.

“‘But I don’t know Beirut — I don’t know the museum, or anything else.’

“She asked her son, Rami, to accompany me. I got into the orange Renault 12 next to him, and we left. Suddenly, he stopped the car so he could open the back windows; I must have smelled awful. He parked the car in a side street, pointed out a square where people were congregating, and said, ‘Over there.’

“I got out, my rifle in hand, and walked among the crowds. I was exhausted and Ahmad’s smell went with me everywhere. I looked for Fawwaz for a long time before I found him among the weeping women. Lamenting and wailing, the women had just been dropped off in Lebanese Red Cross vehicles. Women, children, tears, pushing and shoving in front of the missing persons registration office; women telling of rapes, of executions against walls, of bodies being dragged through streets like in Roman times. Fawwaz was in the middle of them. I went up to him until I was almost right in front of him, but he didn’t notice me, perhaps because I was wearing trousers and carrying a rifle. I forgot to mention that he’d forbidden me to wear trousers.

“‘It’s me, Fawwaz.’

“When he saw me, he jumped like a madman. ‘I was wrong,’ he said. ‘I’m crazy. I should have brought you with me.’

“He took me by the arm and lifted the rifle from my hands as though he wanted to toss it aside.

“‘That’s my rifle. Leave it alone.’

“I snatched the rifle back, and we left. He stopped a car and told the driver, ‘To Hamra.’ There, near the Cinema Sarola stop, we went into a cheap hotel, where he rented a room on the second floor. As soon as we got inside the room, he attacked me and started tearing at my clothes.

“‘Take it easy. I want to wash.’

“He slept with me with Ahmad’s smell still clinging to me. I don’t know if he smelled the other man, but he hit me. Before that, he’d banged his head against the wall and cursed at me. But in the hotel on Hamra Street, he hit me after he’d had sex with me two times in a row. He said he’d fixed up a house in the camp in Burj al-Barajneh.”

Shams lived in Burj al-Barajneh until 1982, in other words, until the fedayeen left Beirut. She led with Fawwaz a wild sort of life that can barely be believed. True, I’m a doctor, or something like it, and true, doctors — through contact with their patients — come to understand the psychologies of their patients, since at least half of all illnesses are psychological in origin. But still I couldn’t understand. I asked Shams about Fawwaz’s childhood, but what she knew of it didn’t provide me with an explanation.

“Did you cheat on him, and he found out?”

She said she never betrayed him except with Ahmad, but Fawwaz made her forget the taste of the love she’d experienced in the Monte Verde.

She said Fawwaz was always afraid of her, always accusing her and repeating that he’d got stuck with a whore, and abusing her because she didn’t get pregnant.

“I don’t know why I didn’t get pregnant in Lebanon and why I did in Jordan, but after the night in the Monte Verde I wanted to get pregnant so I could have a boy like Ahmad. But it didn’t happen, and I forgot Ahmad; the only thing I remember was his lips on my breasts — God, how sweet that was! It was the first time a man had taken my nipple between his lips. Fawwaz would rub my breasts and then bite them. But when Ahmad took my nipple between his lips, the waves rose within me and I felt my depths moving toward him and taking him. Fawwaz was nothing like that. He was a beast. He’d crucify me half-naked and say he could only get aroused when he heard gunfire, and I would lay there beneath him as he would fire his gun, terrorized.

Shams thought that’s what life was like, and then the Israeli invasion had come and saved her. Fawwaz left with the fedayeen, and Shams went to her family’s house in Amman. She found a job in a sewing workshop owned by Mme. Hend Khadir and forgot she was married.

Two weeks later, he came and announced he’d decided to settle in Amman — the revolution was over, he didn’t want to go to the camp in Yemen, and he was going back to his original work.

“Meaning you want to be an engineer again?” said Shams sarcastically.

“Shut your mouth!” her mother shouted. “Women don’t have the right to make fun of their husbands.”

“In al-Wahdat, he no longer needed to fire his gun to become aroused. He stopped beating me and became kind. He’d go to work in his father’s shop and would come back in the evenings to eat and sleep. He’d tell me that he’d dreamt that he’d had a son. The poor man didn’t know I’d had a diaphragm inserted and wouldn’t get pregnant if all the semen in the world were stuffed into my guts. Then I got an infection, so the doctor took out the diaphragm, and Dalal arrived.”

IT’S NIGHT and I want to sleep. My eyelids are weighed down with stories. Now I understand why children fall sleep when we tell them stories: The stories infiltrate their eyes through the lashes and are turned into pictures too numerous for the eyes to process. Stories are for sleep, not for death. Now it’s time for us to stop telling stories for a while, because one story leads to another, and night blankets the words.