Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

I didn’t ask you because this time you seemed like someone who was just telling the story. You told me how you’d spent two months in the wild out of fear for your wife. You tried to calm her down and told her that Salem had to stay with Umm Sab‘ so he could survive. She would speak disjointedly and say your mother was a liar, that her milk hadn’t dried up, that she was going to die. You spent two months wandering in the woods, going to see her three times a week, and taking her to Bab al-Shams.

After staying with her for two months, you went back to Lebanon because the temporary bridge the dentist had given you was starting to crumble. You wanted to forget: More than a year went by before you returned to Galilee. You told me you were delayed by your various preoccupations and that you were getting things ready for the first groups of fedayeen, but I didn’t believe you. I believe you fled because you had no solution. A wife on the edge of madness, inconsolable, what could you do? You fled as men always do. Manliness, or what we call manliness, consists of flight, because inside all the bluster and bullying and big words, there’s a refusal to face up to life.

You went back to her after more than a year. You were embarrassed and timid, but you went back, knocked on the window and sprinted off to your cave.

She came.

She was like a new woman. Her hair was long and tied back; she smelled of a mixture of coffee beans and thyme, and her face was just like the face of Ibrahim, whose sleeping face you’d known only from photographs, with his curls spread across his pillow.

You said the woman had come to resemble her dead son and that when you smelled the coffee beans and the thyme rising from her hair, you fell into that feeling that never left you. You said that when you returned to Lebanon after that visit, you were like a lost man, talking without thinking, moving like a sleepwalker, unaware of your own existence except when you were on your way to Bab al-Shams.

“That’s real love, Abu Salem.”

You refused to acknowledge this blazing truth and said that something inside you, something that had come out into the open after being secret, made you incapable of putting up with other people, and that you were like a wolf that prefers to live in the open.

During that time, Yunes lived in the forest for sixteen continuous months. He didn’t tell Nahilah he was nearby. He would visit her twice a week, amazing her with his ability to traverse such distances and dangers. He didn’t tell her he had no distances to traverse, only time — the time that became his cross during the days and nights of waiting.

You told Dr. Mu‘een al-Tarshahani, who was in charge of the training camp you’d set up at Meisaloun near Damascus, that you were going on a long surveillance trip. “I’ll be away for a few months, maybe a year. Don’t look for me, and don’t issue any statements. I won’t die, I’ll come back.”

At the time, Dr. Mu‘een thought you’d been hit by “Return fever,” that disease that spread among the Palestinians at the beginning of the fifties and led hundreds of them to their deaths as they tried to cross the Lebanese border on the way back to their villages. He tried to dissuade you, saying that the Return would come after the liberation.

“But I’m not going back,” you told him. “I’m going to scout out the land, and I’ll come back so that we can return together.”

Dr. Mu‘een explained that those who succeeded in reaching their objective couldn’t live decent lives because they were treated as “resident absentees” and were permitted neither to work nor to move around.

“No communiqué. No death notice. I’m coming back.”

And you left.

There you were, pretending that you wanted to explore Galilee inch by inch, but you were lying. You didn’t explore Galilee. On the contrary, you just kept hovering around Deir al-Asad and making a circuit of Sha’ab, al-Kabri and al-Ghabsiyyeh. You lived among the ruins of villages and would go into the abandoned houses and rummage for food. You’d pounce on what people had left behind and savor the vintage olive oil. You said oil’s like wine, the longer it matures in its jars the smoother it gets. And then you gave me your views on bread. You made me taste the bread you ate when you were on your own during those long months, kneading the dough and cutting it and frying the little pieces in olive oil. You said you’d gotten used to that kind of bread, and you made it now in the camp whenever you felt nostalgic.

“But it’s bad for you and raises your cholesterol,” I said tasting its burning flavor.

“We don’t get high cholesterol. Peasants are cholesterol-proof.”

A YEAR OF living without shelter around Deir al-Asad.

A year of solitude and waiting.

You spoke to no one. No one lent you a sympathetic ear. People had other things to worry about, they danced with death every day.

Who remembers that woman?

You told me you prayed that God would bless you with forgetfulness and that you didn’t want to remember her, but she kept slipping into your thoughts, like a phantom.

She was alone — a woman alone wandering among the destroyed graves of al-Kabri. But they weren’t graves: The Israeli army didn’t leave one stone on top of another in al-Kabri after its occupation.

The woman was picking things up and putting them in a bag on her back. Yunes approached her. At first she looked like an animal walking on all fours. Her long hair covered her face, and she was muttering. Yunes moved toward her carefully, ready to fire his rifle. Then she turned and looked him in the eye.

“My hands were shaking and I nearly dropped the rifle,” he told his wife. “She seemed to have thought I was an Israeli soldier, and when I got close to her she slung her bag over her shoulder and started running. I stayed where I was and looked around but saw nothing on the ground. I found dried bones, which I thought belonged to dead animals. I thought to catch up with her to ask her what she was doing, but she bolted as fast as an animal. When Nahilah told me who she was, I went back to the place, gathered the remaining bones and buried them in a deep hole.”

The woman’s story terrified the whole of Galilee.

In those days, Galilee quaked with fear — houses demolished, people lost, villages abandoned and everything in shambles.

In those days, the woman’s voice was like a wind whistling at the windows. People became afraid and called her the Madwoman of al-Kabri; she crept along the ground, leapt from field to field, her bag of bones on her back.

It was said that she gathered the bones of the dead and dug graves for them on the hilltops. When she died, the bones from her bag were scattered in the square at Deir al-Asad, and people came running and gathered them up and made a common grave for them. The Madwoman of al-Kabri was buried next to the bones she’d been carrying.

Who was that woman?

No one knows, but people learned her story from her bag.

Yunes said he met the madwoman of the bones and spoke to her, and that she wasn’t as mad as people said. “She gave me wild chicory to eat. She was looking for wild chicory, not bones. What happened was that she stayed behind in al-Kabri after the Jews demolished it to avenge the victims of Kherbet-Jeddin. The woman didn’t run away with the others because they’d left her behind.”

“In those days we forgot our own children,” said Umm Hassan when I asked her about the Madwoman of al-Kabri.

“In those days, Son, we left everything. We left the dead unburied and fled.”

IN THOSE DAYS the people lived with fear, military rule, and the death of border crossers. People no longer knew who they were or who their families were or where their villages were. And there was her voice. She would go around at night and wail, like a whistling wind colliding with the tottering houses.