Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

He laughs and cries neither in sorrow nor in joy

Like a lover who inscribes a line of love only to erase it.

You wrote the line and a white mist arose and clouded your face and eyes, allowing you to escape my gaze; you repeated the ode, the verse swirling around you like water. It was then that I understood the meaning of poetry, and the words of Imru’ al-Qais — my grandfather and yours, and the grandfather of all Arabs. For Imru’ al-Qais didn’t see his own image in the mirror of his beloved’s breast; he saw the world, he saw the mist that covered it. And, realizing that he was living inside that mist, he invented words to assuage his shame and confusion. Poetry, my son, is words we use to heal our shame, our sorrow, our longing. It’s a cover. The poet wraps us up in words so our souls don’t fall to pieces. Poetry is against death — it’s both sickness and cure, the bare soul and its clothes. I’m cold now, so I take refuge in poetry, hiding my head in it and asking it to cover me.

Letter in hand, you came and painted a portrait of Noor before reading it. You became like a poet as you read about the hundred Yuneses being born over there, you didn’t boast or trumpet your triumph. You wore your triumph and started weeping and laughing, because triumph is not unlike defeat; it is a moment when the soul is exposed from within. You were exposed and wounded, and in ministering to you with Little Akhtal’s poem, I poured the voice of Fairouz on your wounds. The mist of poetry covered you and took you to a distant place.

You’re now in the distant realm of poetry, the realm of a hundred Yuneses who don’t know you’re dying, and who don’t see the footprints you left behind on the roads of Galilee. Only the forest of oblivion remembers you now.

I PROMISED I’d tell you about Shams, and I didn’t. We got to where she became an officer with the fedayeen. How that came about I don’t know. I know she went to Jordan after the 1982 invasion of Beirut and her husband, Fawwaz, caught up with her there and worked with his father, who owned a small fabric store in Jebel al-Weibdeh.

Fawwaz quieted down in Amman, the violence that had erupted in Lebanon in the form of bullets fired around his wife’s body also disappeared.

“Fawwaz didn’t scare me anymore,” said Shams. “For six years in Beirut, I can only remember myself as naked, crucified, with bullets exploding around me, and then the man would come to me, erect, boring into my body with a savage shout that emerged from between his thighs. Six years. I knew I’d never get pregnant because what he was doing doesn’t make pregnancies. He’d ask me before starting my torture session if I was pregnant, and I’d say no and see his snarl and hear and watch his fury erupt.”

She said everything changed in Amman.

“It seems the demon left him, and he became a different man, stammering in front of his father, addressing his mother respectfully and coming to me calmly. We lived in one house with his father, mother, and unmarried sister. Fawwaz became someone other than Fawwaz, and I became pregnant, and Dalal came.

“Three months after Dalal was born, the father died regretting that I hadn’t given birth to a boy who’d inherit his name. I paid no attention to his harsh looks or to his refusal to speak to me after Dalal was born; he took to telling his wife and his son anything he wanted to say to me, even when I was sitting next to him. ‘Tell her,’ he’d say, without uttering my name. But I didn’t care. What mattered was that Dalal looked like me, not them. The girl was my daughter, not theirs. God, how beautiful she was! Soon, when I go get her and bring her back here, you’ll see the most beautiful girl in the world. I wanted to call her Amal, *because, with her, hope began. But Fawwaz insisted on Dalal, and I later found out that Dalal was the name of the cousin who’d refused to marry him. His own father had advised his brother not to give Dalal to Fawwaz if she didn’t love him; then they stumbled upon me for the no-good son who wasn’t an engineer or anything at all. Fawwaz insisted on the name Dalal and his father didn’t interfere, so I gave in. I cried because I felt that Amal had died. I named her Amal when she was still in my belly. I’d talk to her and listen to her. I knew from the beginning that she’d be a girl, from the first instant that I felt dizziness, nausea, and thirst. I spent the first three months of the pregnancy sleeping. I’d drink and sleep and talk to Amal. Then they stole the name. Fawwaz said Dalal, I said Amal. But names are not important. Dalal fits her and I’ve gotten used to it.”

Shams told of the great transformation that came about after the death of Fawwaz’s father, how the world — and her husband — utterly changed. She said she couldn’t believe her eyes.

“The father died of a heart attack, and his son inherited everything. Fawwaz changed. He reverted to being the Fawwaz I’d left behind in Beirut. Instead of trembling before his father, it was now his mother who trembled before him. Instead of stumbling when he walked, it was now his sister who stumbled, and instead of stammering when he talked, we were the ones who stammered. During his father’s time, when he came to sleep with me, he’d come whispering, covering my body with his, groping in the dark. Only in Amman, and only in the Amman of the whispering times, did I feel something sexual with him; I felt something move in the depths of me. Then his father died, and the page was turned.”

Shams said the situation grew worse and worse. “At first, he stopped paying attention, then he went back to his Beirut ways. He started beating me up, saying he couldn’t feel aroused if he didn’t hit me. The beatings started light but things progressed, and he began hitting me with all his might while I stifled my screams and my pain out of shame in front of his mother and sister. Then I couldn’t control myself anymore; as soon as he beat me, I would start screaming. The scenes multiplied, and I felt I could hear the two women’s footsteps outside our door; I imagined them bent over the keyhole, listening and shaking their heads. The sister’s handkerchief would fall to the ground and she’d pick it up, looking into her mother’s face.

“In the morning he’d leave and I’d be left on my own with the women, not daring to look at them. They behaved as though they were unaware of what went on in our bedroom.

“Once I said something to his mother, and she looked at me with startled eyes. I didn’t really say anything, I just said that Fawwaz pursued me at night and I couldn’t stand it anymore. She looked at me as though she didn’t understand what I was saying and mumbled something about life being like that and I should thank the Lord that he was providing me with a home.

“Umm Fawwaz said I should thank the Lord! Imagine! Thank God for the humiliation and the beatings!

“I don’t know whether his mother said something to him or whether things just took their natural course, but after that mistake of mine he became even more brutal and went back to acting out the Beirut scenes. In Amman he couldn’t fire his gun: There was a State rather than a civil war — but he transformed the bedroom into a battlefield. He’d spread-eagle me, point his finger like a gun, and fire from his mouth. He’d come up close and start boring into my body with the muzzle of his imaginary gun. I tried to find a solution. I went to see my mother, but all I got from her was, ‘Anything but divorce! Divorce costs a woman her reputation.’ So I decided to act alone; I decided to run away, but I didn’t dare make it happen. Every night, after he’d gone to sleep, I’d draw up my escape plans, and in the morning the plans would evaporate, and I’d find myself one of three women.