Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

All that the people saw in the square at Deir al-Asad was a dead woman. She was dead and spread-eagled, her arms outstretched like a cross, her black peasant dress torn over her corpse, her empty bag at her side, bones everywhere.

Ahmad al-Shatti, the sheikh of the mosque at Deir al-Asad, stood next to the corpse and ordered the women to leave. Then he wrapped it in a black cloth and asked the children to gather the bones; he placed them on top of the corpse. “The children of Deir al-Asad will never forget it,” Rabi’ told me at our military base in Kafar Shouba. Rabi’ was a strange young man who laughed all the time. Even when Abu Na’el al-Tirawi was killed by a bullet from his own machine gun, Rabi’ laughed instead of crying like the rest of us. Abu Na’el was the first dead person I’d ever seen. I’d only seen my dead father through my mother’s description. I saw Abu Na’el dying and the blood spurting from his stomach while we stood around him not knowing what to do. We carried him to the car, and on the way to the hospital he screamed that he didn’t want to die. He was dying and screaming that he didn’t want to. Then suddenly he went stiff, his body slumped, and his face disappeared behind the mask of death.

I don’t know how Rabi’ escaped from Israel, but I do remember his terror-stricken eyes as he said he hadn’t forgotten the bones. “Sheikh Ahmad al-Shatti was sure they were human bones but we children thought they were animal bones. That’s why we played with them until the sheikh made us put them on top of the corpse. There was a single human skull in the madwoman’s bag, and this the sheikh wouldn’t let us touch. He took it and put it in a bag of its own, and the rumor went around among the children that he’d taken the skull to his house to use in magic séances.”

Rabi’ left Kafar Shouba and joined one of the Hebrew-Arabic translation bureaus belonging to the resistance. He died during the Israeli bombardment of Beirut’s al-Fakahani district in 1981.

YUNES WAS sure that the madwoman collected people’s bones and put them in her bag. He believed that she’d been killed by mistake, that the Israelis had killed her during the sweeps ordered by Prime Minister David Ben Gurion in 1951.

In those days the villages of Galilee were haunted by border crossers at night, and there were clear orders to shoot anything that moved.

The madwoman used to move around at night, alone, like the ghost of the dead she carried in her bag. People were afraid of her. Nobody saw her and everybody saw her, wearing her long black dress and walking among the patches of darkness.

WHEN YOU told me the story of those long months spent among the abandoned houses, the night ghosts and the sound of the Israeli guns harvesting people, you told me everything except the word I was waiting to hear.

Are you scared of the word love ?

I am, I swear; that’s why I can’t sleep: Frightened people can’t sleep. I lie on my bed, and I ask the memories to come like swarms of ants, and I follow their spiralling motion. I think of Shams, and I get scared.

What if I couldn’t open my eyes again? What if I slept and didn’t get up? What if they came here and killed me? I’m scared.

No, not of them, nor of the rumors, which I don’t believe. I’m scared of sleep, of the distance it erases between my dreams and my reality. I can’t tell the difference anymore, I swear I can’t tell the difference. I talk about things that happened to me and then discover they were dreams.

And you, do you have dreams?

Scientists say the brain never stops producing thoughts and images. What do you imagine? Do you see your story the way I paint it for you?

Anyway, I’m scared. There are rumors all over the camp. They say Shams’ gang will take revenge on everyone who took part in her murder. I’m ready to explain that I had nothing to do with it, but where are they?

Is it true they killed Abu Ali Zayed in the Ain al-Hilweh camp? Why did they kill him? Because he whistled? Can a man be killed because he whistled? They say he was standing at the entrance to the Miyyeh wi-Miyyeh camp and that when he saw Shams’ car he put two fingers under his tongue and whistled. And the bullets rained down.

They’ll kill me, too.

I didn’t do anything. They took me to court, I gave my testimony, and that’s it.

I’m sure they’re just rumors. Dr. Amjad and the crippled nurse think I’m hiding in your room because I’m afraid of them, and two days ago I heard Nurse Zainab telling Dr. Amjad she wouldn’t try to stop them if they came. I gathered she was talking about me.

You know I don’t live here out of fear of Shams’ ghost or her gang. I’m here so you’re not on your own and I’m not either. What kind of person would leave a hero like you to rot in his bed? And I hate being on my own with no one to talk to. What kind of days are these, enveloped in silence? No one knows anyone else or talks to anyone else. Even death doesn’t unite us. Even death has changed; it has become just death.

I lie on my bed, open my eyes and stare into the darkness. I look at the ceiling, and it seems to get closer, as though it were about to fall and bury me beneath the rubble. But the darkness isn’t black, and now I’m discovering the colors of darkness and seeing them. I extinguish the candle and see the colors of the dark, for there’s no such thing as darkness: It’s a mixture of sleeping colors that we discover, little by little. Now I’m discovering them, little by little.

I won’t describe the darkness to you, because I hate describing things. Ever since I was in school I’ve hated describing things. The teacher would give us an essay to write: Describe a rainy day. And I wouldn’t know how, because I hate comparing things. Things can only be described in their own terms, and when we compare them, we forget them. A girl’s face is like a girl’s face and not like the moon. The whiteness and the roundness and everything else are different. When we say that a girl’s face is like the moon, we forget the girl. We make the description so that we can forget, and I don’t like to forget. Rain is like rain, isn’t that enough? Isn’t it enough that it should rain for us to smell the smell of winter?

I don’t know how to describe things even though I know a lot of pre-Islamic poems. Nothing is more beautiful than the poetry of Imru’ al-Qais — king, poet, lover, drunk, debauché, quasi-prophet, but I have a problem with his descriptions. “Her breast smooth as a looking glass”. . How, I mean, can a woman’s breast possibly be like a mirror? It won’t do. Isn’t he saying in effect that he’s not seeing her, he’s just seeing himself? And that he’s not making love to her but to himself? Which would lead us to a terrible conclusion about our ancient poets. Of course Imru’ al-Qais wasn’t a sodomite, nor was al-Mutanabbi; it’s the description that’s at fault.

All the same, I love ancient poetry, and I love al-Mutanabbi. I love the melody that makes the words turn inside their rhythms and rhymes. I love the rhythm and the way things resonate with one another and the reverberation of the words. When I recite that poetry, I feel an intoxication equaled only by the intoxication I feel when I listen to Umm Kalsoum. It’s what we call tarab . We’re a people of an exalted state, and tarab is beyond description, so how can I describe things to you when I don’t know how?

I don’t sleep, and I don’t describe, and I don’t feel tarab , and I don’t recite poetry. Because I’m afraid, and fear doesn’t sleep.

Tell me about fear.

I know you don’t use that word. You’ll say that you withdrew , because you use words to play tricks with the truth. That’s the game that you play with your memories — you play tricks and say what you want without naming it.