Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

I don’t sleep.

And you — could you sleep after you postponed your revenge?

*Koran, Surah III, 169.

*A soft, yogurt cheese.

YOU WANT A STORY!

I know you’d like to change the subject, you don’t agree with my way of telling the story of your son’s death and your revenge. You’ll ask me to tell it a different way. Maybe I should say, for example, that the moment you got close to the barbed wire, you understood that individual revenge was worthless and decided to go back to Lebanon to organize the fedayeen so we could start the war.

“It wasn’t a war. It was more like a dream. Don’t believe, Son, that the Jews won the war in ’48. In ’48, we didn’t fight. We didn’t know what we were doing. They won because we didn’t fight, and they didn’t fight either, they just won. It was like a dream.”

You’ll say you chose war instead of revenge, and I have to believe you. Everyone will believe you, and they’ll say you were right, and I’m trying to camouflage my fear within yours.

You weren’t afraid that night of March 1951.

And I’m not afraid now!

When Yunes told how his son Ibrahim died in 1951, he spoke a lot about Nahilah’s suffering. He never spoke of his own suffering, only of his thirst for revenge.

“Didn’t you feel pain?” I asked him.

“Didn’t you want to die? Didn’t you die?”

“I don’t understand, because I’m only afraid of one thing,” I once told Shams, transported by our love. “I’m afraid of children.”

When we made love, she’d scream that it was the sea. She was next to me and over me and under me, swimming. She said she was swimming in the sea, the waves cascading from inside her. She would rise and bend and stretch and circle, saying it was the waves. And I would fly over her or under her or through her, flying above her undulating blue sea.

“You are all the men in the world,” she said. “I sleep with you as if I’m with all the men I’ve known and not known.” I’d soar above her listening to her words, trying to put off the moment of union. I’d tell her to go a little more slowly because I wanted to smell the sky, but she would pull me into her sea and submerge me and push me to the limits of sorrow.

“You’re my man and all men.”

I didn’t understand the expanses of her passion and her desire to control her body. She would massage her body and grasp her breasts and swoon. I’d watch her swoon and it was as though she weren’t with me, or as though she were in a distant dream, a sort of island encircled by waves.

I didn’t dare ask her to marry me because I believed her. She said she was a free woman and would never marry again. I believed her and understood her and agreed with her, despite feeling that burning sensation that could only be extinguished by making her my own.

I agreed with her because I was powerless and didn’t dare force her to choose between marrying me and leaving me, for the idea of not seeing her was more painful than death.

Then I found out she’d killed Sameh because he’d refused to marry her. They said she’d stood over his body and pronounced, so everyone could hear, “I give myself to you in marriage,” before fleeing.

That’s what they said at the interrogation, when they detained me. I was silent. I was incapable of speech because I felt betrayal and fear. It was there, in the eyes of the committee members, I discovered she’d been sentenced to die. The head of the committee was in a hurry, as though he wanted to use me as new evidence to justify the decision to kill her.

The committee eyed me with contempt as the duped lover, though I wasn’t duped — but what could I say? I used to smell the other men on her body, but it never occurred to me that she loved another man the way I loved her. There — with him — she would have said nothing and been on the verge of tears as she listened to him saying that with her he was sleeping with all of womankind.

I understand her, I swear I do: The only solution to love is murder. I never came close to committing the crime, but I did long for her death, because death ends everything, as it did that day.

Shams is a hero because she put an end to her own problem. But me, I’m just a man who grew horns, as the head of the investigating committee said, thinking he was making a joke everyone could appreciate.

I refused to answer their questions. All I said was that I was convinced she was “not a normal woman.” I know I was hard on her, but what could I say? I had to say something, and those words spilled from my mouth. As for all the other things I’m supposed to have said, they’re not true. Liars! I never said anything about orgies. My God — how could we have held orgies in my house when it was surrounded by all those other wrecked houses? They put words into my mouth so as to come up with additional justifications for killing Shams. All I said was that she was my friend and that she was a woman of many moods. I heard their laughter and the joke about my horns.

The head of the committee ordered my release because I was pathetic. “A pathetic guy, no harm to anyone,” he said.

Pathetic means stupid, and I wasn’t stupid. I wanted to tell them that love isn’t foolishness, but I didn’t say anything. I left and went looking for Shams, and I was arrested again before being released and allowed to return to Beirut.

This isn’t what I wanted to say. I wanted to tell you that when I was caught up in that wave, I would dream of having a child and, at the same time, was terrified. I told Shams that the most horrible thing that could happen to a person was to lose a son or daughter. Even though I live amid this desolate people that has grown accustomed to losing its children, I can’t imagine myself in that situation.

Shams laughed and told me about her daughter, Dalal, in Jordan, and about how missing her was like having her guts ripped open.

And when I asked Yunes about the death of his son, he told me about Nahilah.

The woman almost went mad. All the people of Deir al-Asad said the woman lost her mind. She would roam the outskirts of the village as though chasing her own death — going into areas the military governor had placed out of bounds (almost everywhere was out of bounds). She’d roam and roam. Then she would return home exhausted and sleep. She’d never worry about her second son, Salem, whom his grandmother had smuggled out of the house.

It took Nahilah months and months to return to her senses after she gave birth to her daughter, Noor, “Light.” The girl’s name wasn’t originally Noor: Her grandmother named her Fatimah, but Yunes said her name was Noor because he’d seen Ibrahim in a dream reciting verses from the Surah of the Koran called “Noor.”

“Listen to what he was saying.” Nahilah looked and saw a halo of light around Yunes’ head as he recited:

God is the Light of the heavens and the earth;

the likeness of His Light is as a niche wherein is a lamp

(the lamp in a glass, the glass as it were a glittering star)

kindled from a Blessed Tree,

an olive that is neither of the East nor of the West

whose oil wellnigh would shine, even if no fire touched it;

Light upon Light;

(God guides to His Light whom He will). *

Yunes said he’d been able to bear his son’s death because he hadn’t believed it. “When you don’t see, you don’t believe. I used to tell Nahilah that Ibrahim would come back once he’d tired of playing with death. For me, I swear to you, Ibrahim is still alive, I’m waiting for him.”

I CAME INTO your room today laughing. Nurse Zainab had made me laugh by telling me how a woman had smacked Dr. Amjad. I’d thought that Amjad Hussein was a respectable man. I don’t know where they dug him up to play the doctor here. Some say Mme. Wedad, the director of the Red Crescent, got him the job because he’s a relative of hers. But he’s not one of us, because he didn’t fight with us and the Israelis didn’t detain him at Ansar. So where does he come from? Don’t ask me now why I didn’t go to the Biqa’ when our battalion withdrew from al-Nabatiyyeh during the Israeli incursion — that’s just the way it happened. I withdrew with the battalion and went to Ain al-Hilweh, and that’s where I was arrested. A month later they released me and I found myself going to Beirut. I’ve no idea, however, where you disappeared to. You told me that when you learned the Israelis had gone into Beirut, you fled to the village of Batshay and hid there with the priest.