Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

“You know the rest,” Yunes said. “My mother right by the door and me inside. What are these awful customs? You have to fuck for their sake, strip off your clothes and get it over with in a hurry so they don’t get bored waiting outside.”

But I don’t know the rest, Father, and you’re lying when you say the rest was the way it usually is.

You didn’t tell me everything; I know, because Abu Ma’rouf filled me in.

Abu Ma’rouf was a pleasant man I met in 1969 in the Nahr al-Barid camp in northern Lebanon, after the commander of the base at Kafar Shouba had thrown me out for being an atheist. I had gone to Nahr al-Barid as political commissar for the camp militia, when clashes broke out between us and the Lebanese army. The November cold was intense and made our bones ache. They put me and Abu Ma’rouf on the forward road block, which was supposed to be a lookout position. We were opposite a hill occupied by the army, and it was our job to engage the enemy briefly if the camp were attacked before withdrawing, in other words, to delay their advance as much as possible so that the other groups could block the roads leading to the camp.

A naïve plan, you’ll say.

It wasn’t even a plan, I’ll answer, but I’m not interested at the moment in a critique of our military experiences, which I’ve never understood much about. I wanted to inform you that the rest was not “the way it usually is.”

Abu Ma’rouf was a grown man.

In those days, before we reached the age of twenty, we wondered at the way these men would come and fight with us. We thought they must be brave, if only because they were what we imagined men should be like. Abu Ma’rouf was in his forties. A thick black moustache covered his upper lip and curled into his mouth. He would take hold of the Degtyaref machine gun, wrap the ammunition belt around his neck and waist, and sit in silence. I gathered that he was from the village of Saffouri, that his wife and children lived in the Ain al-Hilweh camp, that he had fought in ’48, and that he didn’t believe Palestine would ever exist again.

I never asked him why, in that case, he was fighting. In those days I believed that the “people’s war” (that’s what we called it, inspired by the Chinese model) would liberate Palestine. These days, the issue’s become more complicated, even though I do believe that Palestine will return, in some form.

Abu Ma’rouf, that silent man from whose lips I would have to wrest words almost by force, told me a story similar to yours.

You’ll be surprised, since you never met Abu Ma’rouf al-Abid, and Ain al-Zaitoun isn’t near Saffouri. All the same, this man made me understand your generation’s stories about women, which can be summed up in the one about the cotton swab. Yes, the cotton swab. Don’t tell me I’m making this story up to upset you. I swear I’m not making up a word of it. But I finally understood.

It was four in the morning. We’d gone more than two days without sleep, dumped in the trench under the November drizzle, with the cold stealing into our bones.

He said he was going to warm himself up by talking about women, since nothing warmed a man’s bones like a woman’s body. He told the story of his first night with his wife from Saffouri. At the time, I didn’t ask him any questions, and that may be why he got going. He said that women would warm us up — what was I to say? Then I got scared. I thought maybe he was one of those and would eventually make his move. The man wanted me to keep quiet so he could talk, so I listened, but I didn’t believe him. Now I know that I should have believed him, because the story of Abu Ma’rouf and his first wife, who died in Saffouri, could well be your story, too.

Abu Ma’rouf said his first wife died during the Israeli bombing of Saffouri on July 15, 1948, and that it was Abu Mahmoud’s fault, the village’s commander in the sacred jihad: “After the fall of Shafa Amar and the displacement of more than three thousand of its inhabitants to our village, he should have realized that the battle was over, but he insisted on staying put. We gathered in the square in front of the mosque, and he said we could hang on for a week and then the Arab Liberation Army, which was based at Nazareth, would come. But we didn’t hang on. In fact, I can’t remember if we even fought. The planes came. Three of them circled above the village, dropped barrels filled with fire and gunpowder, and the houses started to collapse.”

He said he watched how the houses would blast open, the doors and windows would fly out, and then the flames would rise. He said his wife and three children died in their house: “I was at the roadblock at the entrance to the village, and when I heard the bombing, I ran toward the house. They said I got scared, but no, I wasn’t scared for myself, I was afraid for her and the children. I ran to the village carrying my English rifle, and when I got to the house, the flames were everywhere. I didn’t even have time to bury them. I was driven, with the rest of those who escaped, from Saffouri to al-Ramah, from al-Ramah to al-Bqei’a, from al-Bqei’a to Sahmatah to Deir al-Qasi, and finally, to Bint Jbeil in Lebanon.

“We spent three days in the fields around al-Ramah, where we had nothing and almost died of hunger. My mother asked me to go back to her house in the village to get a little flour and cracked wheat. I found the village empty and didn’t see any Jews. I met three old men and a woman with a crooked back. They said they’d given up, they didn’t know where to go. One of them was a relative of mine, Ahmad al-Abid. I was stunned that his son hadn’t taken him with him and asked if he wanted to come with me. He raised his head to say no, and then I realized he’d stayed behind because he was sick; he was spitting and coughing, and his eyes were running. I went to my mother’s house. The door was open and everything was in its place, untouched. I grabbed a bag of flour and left. On the way back, they fired at me, and I left the bag in the field. Later we found out that the three old men and the woman had been killed. We were in the fields near al-Ramah when we heard the news. It seems Ahmad’s son went back to look for his father and found the four bodies lying in the road.

“We never fought. Now we say we fought and that Palestine was lost because the Arab countries betrayed us. That’s not true. Palestine was lost because we didn’t fight. We were like idiots; we would take our rifles and wait for them in our villages, and when they came with their motorized units and their heavy machine guns and their airplanes, we were beaten without a fight.”

Later, he remarried in Lebanon and had seven children. He’d named the first three after his children who’d died there, but his first wife was still in his bones. “She was like fire,” he said. “She would ignite me whenever she came near me.”

She had been fourteen and he fifteen.

“Impossible! At that age!”

He started laughing, the tears pouring from his eyes from the cold. Then he told me about the cotton swab.

How to tell you the story, Father? Abu Ma’rouf said incredible things, but I believed them — perhaps because we were alone in that trench, perhaps because of the dawn, the changing colors of first light, perhaps because my bones were cold. I don’t know.

He said, “After the wedding party was over — and as you know, a wedding, my friend, is no joke — we went inside. You know, I swear I had no idea. Well, no, of course, I used to practice the secret habit and I’d played around with my buddies and everything, but getting married is different. As soon as I entered the bedroom, I saw her. She was young, seated on the edge of the bed all wrapped up in her clothes, and crying. I sat down beside her, my body feeling icy all over. She told me she liked sewing and embroidery and that she’d made all her wedding clothes. Then she started to yawn. She lay back on the bed, and I stretched out beside her. She didn’t take her clothes off, and I didn’t take mine off either. I went to sleep. Or no, before I dropped off I got on top of her, and as soon as I was on top of her it happened. I came and got it all over my trousers. Then I lay down next to her. I think we must have dropped off quickly because I woke up to a loud knocking on the door. I opened it and found my mother asking for the sheet. Then she rushed into the room, pulled out the sheet from under the girl and ran out. We heard the trills of joy. My mother told me later she’d wiped the sheet with chicken blood and that she’d wished the earth would have opened up and swallowed her.”