Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

The blind sheikh told his wife that words had lost their meaning, so he had decided to be silent. From day to day, he withdrew deeper into his silence, which was broken only by his morning mutterings while he’d recite Koranic verses.

The blind sheikh told his wife that he could see, even though his eyes were closed, and he couldn’t explain why he had come to fear the water.

Weeping, the woman told her son that the old man had gone senile. She said she was ashamed in front of the other people and begged her son to come back from the mountains with the fighters of the sacred jihad to look after his father.

The blind sheikh told his wife he couldn’t bear to live any longer now that they’d appointed a new sheikh to be imam of the village mosque. He said an imam couldn’t be deposed and that he’d never abandon his Sufi companions in the village of Sha’ab. And he said that Ain al-Zaitoun would be destroyed because it had rejected the blessings of its Lord.

He explained everything to his wife, but he couldn’t explain to her why he’d come to fear the water. He said that water was dirty and that when he touched it he felt something sticky, as though his hand were plunging into dead putrefying bodies, and that ablutions could be performed with dust, and that dust. .

He took to using dust to wash with.

The woman would look at him, her heart torn to pieces. The sheikh would go out into his garden carrying a container, squat as though he were preparing to pray, fill the container with dust and go into the bedroom. He would remove his clothes and bathe with the dust, which stuck to his body as he moved and sighed.

The sheikh said he was afraid of the color of water.

“Water doesn’t have a color,” said his wife.

“You don’t know, and nobody knows, but the water has its own color, like gluey blood that slides over the body and sticks to it.”

At the time, Ain al-Zaitoun was preoccupied with the story of its blind sheikh who bathed with dust. It had no idea that after a little while the dust bath would move to the neighboring village, Deir al-Asad, and that the sheikh would die in his new village.

Ain al-Zaitoun was built on the shoulder of a hill. It didn’t look much like a real village. Its rectangular square was long and sloping, and didn’t look much like a real square. Its houses were built of mud and rose up above one another in piles above neighboring terraces. To the left lay the Honey Spring, Nab’ al-Asal, which the village drank from and which the villagers said was sweeter than honey.

Ain al-Zaitoun was suspended between the land and the sky, and Sheikh Ibrahim, son of Salem, had been the imam of its mosque since he was nineteen years old.

Everyone looked like everyone else in Ain al-Zaitoun, and they all belonged to the Asadi clan, the Asadis being poor peasants who had come from the marshes of the Euphrates in southern Iraq during the seventeenth century. No one knows how or why they came. The blind sheikh said they weren’t Asadis and didn’t come from Iraq, but the Asadi name got attached to them because they worked as hired laborers on the lands of a feudal landlord of the Asadi clan who had come from there. It was said that the landlord’s descendants had sold the land to the Lebanese family of Sursuq toward the end of the nineteenth century. The question of land sales in Palestine has “no end and no beginning,” as they say. As to how the Asadi came to possess the lands of Ain al-Zaitoun, no one has any idea. Did he purchase these wide and extensive holdings, or was he a brave fighter in the army of Ahmad al-Jazzar — the governor of Acre who defeated Bonaparte — to whom the governor granted lands in Marj Ibn Amir, along with a group of villages including Ain al-Zaitoun, Deir al-Asad, and Sha’ab? Or did he flee Acre with a band of horsemen following the governor’s death, and were they the ones who occupied the land? The blind sheikh didn’t know, but he preferred the story with the band of horsemen, so he could say that the native inhabitants of Ain al-Zaitoun were originally cavalrymen with the Asadi sheikh in Acre and had come with him to the village to establish it, and that it came to be known by this name, which had nothing to do with them because they were originally from the districts surrounding Acre — “though we’re all sons of Adam, and Adam was created from dust.”

As for the Sursuq family, it’s even more complicated.

Did the Sursuqs buy the land, or was it given to them as a fiefdom because they were friends of the Turkish governor of Beirut?

The inhabitants of Ain al-Zaitoun never saw anyone from the Sursuq family. It was Kazem al-Beiruti, a man dressed in Western clothes and wearing a fez, who used to come after each harvest, count the sacks of wheat, and take half. The peasants parted with half their crop of wheat and maize without protest. The olives, however, were a different story; Kazem al-Beiruti didn’t dare demand the owner’s share of olives or oil. “The oil belongs to him who sows it,” the blind sheikh told Ahmad Ibn Mahmoud to his face when he came demanding his share.

When the disturbances in Palestine spread during 1936, the inhabitants of Ain al-Zaitoun refused to give Kazem al-Beiruti anything. Ahmad Ibn Mahmoud chased him away after humiliating him in public by knocking his fez off his head with his stick, trampling it underfoot and announcing the return of the land to its rightful owners. And Ahmad Ibn Mahmoud al-Asadi declared himself, as head of the clan, sole legal heir of the original al-Asadi, taking the fertile lands belonging to the village and giving the peasants of his family the liberty to cultivate the land without paying the owner’s share. However, he tried to take some of the olives and oil, and this was what caused problems between him and Sheikh Ibrahim.

Ahmad Ibn Mahmoud was one of the local leaders of the Revolution of ’36. It’s said that he met Izz al-Din al-Qassam, *and that he was injured in the revolution. He declared that anyone who sold land to the Jews was a traitor who must be killed.

Yunes doesn’t know why Ahmad was killed, because he’s convinced he didn’t sell land to the Jews, and that, in fact, he didn’t have any land to sell since he’d taken the land he controlled by force, and the deeds were in the Sursuq family’s possession.

When Ahmad was killed by the revolutionaries’ bullets, Yunes, who was then seventeen, didn’t understand why. Despite the rumors, he wasn’t the one who’d killed his cousin, and he was sure that Ahmad, who’d become the leader of the village, hadn’t sold land to the Jews. True, he was domineering, arrogant and rude; and true, he hated Yunes and would say that the youth had abandoned his father, mother, and wife to beggary while he worked as a bandit in the name of the revolution; and true, he beat his two wives terribly and treated everyone with contempt, but why had he been killed?

Yunes was convinced that Ahmad hadn’t been a traitor. Everyone hated him, even his children. The strange thing was that at his funeral his wives yelled as though they were being beaten. Surrounded by their children, the two women wept, moaned, pleaded with him to get up, swearing they would never leave the house again. Everyone was dumbfounded. No one mourned the loss of this shit (this is what his relatives called him privately), but everyone was amazed at his wives’ behavior and how unconvinced they seemed that the man had died. They appeared to be afraid he might rise up, see they weren’t weeping enough, and shower them with blows.

Ahmad died without anyone knowing who killed him, but the way he was killed seemed to indicate that he was a collaborator or had sold land. The killer came to his house at night, knocked on the door, shot him, and left. Then, when the killer got to Nab’ al-Asal, he fired two shots into the air. The two shots gave the impression that Ahmad had been executed rather than murdered for some personal or family reason. Suspicion hung over Yunes because of the quarrel between Ahmad and Sheikh Ibrahim, which had ended with the sheikh’s being expelled from his position at the mosque.