Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

“‘Let’s go,’ said my brother. ‘We’ll eat lunch first and rest a little.’

“‘Then we’ll leave right at sundown,’ said Ali.

“He slaughtered a rooster for us, and we ate it with rice, drank coffee and chatted. As soon as the sun began to set, my brother, Hamad, set off with the smuggler, Ali, and I went back to Beirut.

“My brother reached his house and stayed there. Thirty years after all this, he got me a permit to visit Tarshiha, and there I found Hamad, living among his children and his children’s children. I told him, ‘This isn’t Tarshiha: Our land doesn’t belong to us anymore, and our house isn’t ours any longer’ — Hamad was living in the house of Mahmoud Qabalawi, whose family live in Burj al-Barjneh today. He told me our house had been demolished along with all the houses in the lower square and that Salmeh had had no choice but to live there. ‘I moved in here, but you can tell Jaber, Mahmoud Qabalawi’s son, that I haven’t changed a thing in their house. When they come back, they can take it, and God bless them.’

“‘But it’s not Tarshiha, Hamad,’ I said to him. ‘The Jews are everywhere.’

“Hamad reached his house and stayed a week with his wife before he was seized and deported to the Lebanese border. Before he reached the border checkpoint, he took off his Swiss watch and offered it to the Israeli soldier. The soldier hesitated, then took the bribe, and left Hamad on his own.

“My brother returned and was arrested again. He was convicted as a saboteur, getting eighteen years. He spent nine of those in prison, then they let him out after a series of remissions for good behavior. They didn’t know what to do with him because he refused to go to Lebanon — he said he’d rather stay in prison. So they sent him back to his house in Tarshiha.”

Tell me, Yunes, why didn’t you go back for good?

Why didn’t you ever try?

Were you afraid of dying? If you say you were afraid they’d liquidate you, I’ll understand, but then don’t talk to me about the struggle or the revolution or any of that.

And now, tell me, what will you do when we’ve got everything fixed and you’re born again? Will you lead a new life, or will you return to your old migratory life?

I hear your voice emerging from low-pitched moans. Why the moaning? Your body temperature’s normal, everything’s tip-top, your heartbeats are more regular than those of a young man; knock on wood. But tell me, if we could run life backwards, who would you prefer to have been — Yunes or Hamad? Or would you prefer a third option, going to Canada, for instance? What do you think — emigrate and leave the whole thing behind?

I know you can’t answer. That’s why I can ask you so freely, I’m not obliged to defer to you in anything. I know what you’d like to say, but you don’t, and that’s much better.

Tell me, what should I tell Zainab?

Should I advise her to stay here or encourage her to travel to her son in Germany? Should I promise her that things will get better for the hospital or promise her that her village, Saffouri, will be reborn from its ashes?

I’ll tell her to do what she wants.

I see Zainab now for the first time, it’s as though for all those long months I’d looked right through her. And now, after she’s told me how she was wounded at Tal al-Za’atar, her name is no longer “the crippled nurse,” as I would call her to myself; her name is Zainab, Zainab the nurse. Good grief, how long do we need to wear our names for them to become ours! Zainab became Zainab because she told her story. True, she’s leaving soon, and true, she informed me when her work here came to an end, and true, if I’d known earlier things would have been different. But that’s the way it is. A human being only reveals his name at the moment of departure or, in other words, when the name becomes his shroud. We wrap him in his name and bury him. Now I understand the wisdom of the photos that fill our lives: The victims of the massacres have no names and no shrouds. Their bodies are covered with lime and insecticides before being thrown into a common grave. People disappear because they have no names, they are reduced to numbers. That’s the terrifying thing, my son, numbers are the terror. That’s why people carry pictures of their dead and their missing, and use them as a substitute for names.

Zainab is not convinced.

She says everything I’ve done for you was for nothing. If she only knew! But she doesn’t want to listen to the story from the beginning, plus I no longer have the energy to tell it. If Zainab had come and listened to your story, she’d have understood I wasn’t wasting your time and mine but was buying time and history, for you and for me.

Yes, my son and master, yes.

I’m here because I was under the influence of Shams. I thought I’d flee her ghost and her revenge. I wasn’t afraid of real revenge — that one of her family would come and shoot me. No, I was afraid of her.

Your death came and rescued me. You made me a doctor again, you brought me to live with you here in the hospital, and you allowed me to recover my desire for life. Yes, I was incapable of living. The air that entered my lungs felt like knives. I’d feel ants burying themselves in my face and would get dizzy. In clinical jargon, it’s called the onset of nervous collapse.

When Shams died, everything inside me died. I became a corpse, and things lost their meaning and taste. Life became unbearably heavy. It was as though I were carrying my own corpse on my back. Who can carry the sack of life when it’s filled with forty years of desolation? Who would have the courage?

Amna came, and she told me about you. By the way, where is she now? She vanished, like all your women. This means we’ve entered the dangerous period, for when the women vanish, it means the end is near. Women only run away when life is extinguished.

Amna left, followed by all your other women. No one remains but me in this collapsing place. There are cracks everywhere — cracks in the walls and cracks in the ceiling; it seems everything is on the verge of collapse.

But I’m not afraid. Everything’s collapsing, but I’m here and I’m not afraid.

Strange, isn’t it?

Maybe neither one of us has been afraid during these long months we’ve spent together. We’ve made a shelter out of words, a country out of words, and women out of words.

I’m not afraid for you, and I won’t comment on what Zainab said — don’t be angry with her, please: She doesn’t understand. She said in the beginning that you’d become young like a baby again, then she added that your shrunken form didn’t look human and that I’d created a little monster.

It’s as though she can’t see.

Never mind; I’m convinced that you’re the most beautiful baby, and that’s enough, right? And I feel your freedom, too. You can die if you want to. I say, “You can,” which doesn’t mean I’m suggesting you do so, but you’re free, choose to live or to die as you like. Do whatever you feel like doing, for now your truth is inside me.

Tell me a little about your daughter, Noor. What a lovely name! I don’t know her, but I feel as though I do, and I long to see her. When you described her to me the first time, I thought you were telling me about Shams. You described her dark beauty and her infinite charm, and you told me about her son, Yunes.

You said you’d received a letter from her announcing the birth of Yunes and that she said all of your children were naming their boys Yunes. That way you’d live among them and would return to them not as one but as a hundred.

You were carrying around the letter and laughing. You read me that passage laughing, then tears started to flow from your eyes. You wept and laughed as though your emotions were crossed and you no longer knew how to express yourself. I promised I’d give you the Fairouz song that’s taken from a poem by the Lebanese poet, Bishara al-Khouri, known as Little Akhtal, and I recited the line that opens the song, and you took out a pen and wrote it on the back of the letter: