Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

But she didn’t come.

What had happened to Nuha? Had she understood that I didn’t want her anymore? Had love ended along with the siege?

Why the tears? I ask you. Your closed eyes are soaking in bluish white. I opened your eyes and put a few drops in. Do you know what the drops are called? Artificial Tears. They call drops for washing out the eyes “tears.” People go to the pharmacy and actually buy tears, while we can barely hold ours back.

“Tears are our remedy,” my mother used to say.

My mother used to cry beneath the beating rain that crackled on the zinc sheets we’d made into a roof for our crumbling house in the camp. She’d cry and say that tears were a remedy for the eyes. She’d cry and get scared. Then she fled to Jordan and left me with my grandmother and the flower pillow. I told you about my grandmother’s pillow, so why should I repeat the story now? I just wanted to say that I bought this eyedropper made in England so I could put tears in your eyes, which are dry as kindling. Brother, cry at least once. Cry for your fate and mine, I beg you — you don’t know the importance of tears. The best thing for the eyes are tears, tears are indispensable. They are the water that washes the eye, the protein that nourishes it, and the lubrication that allows the eyelids to slide over it.

You’ve made me cry, but you refuse to cry yourself.

I administer the drops, wait for your tears and feel the tears rise up in my own eyes. I’m not weeping for you; I’m weeping for Umm Hassan, not because she died but because she left me the videocassette.

SANA’, THE WIFE of the kunafa -seller, came. She came and stood by the open door of your room and knocked. I was sitting here reading Jabra Ibrahim Jabra’s novel In Search of Walid Mas’oud . I was fascinated by Walid Mas’oud, the Palestinian who disappeared leaving a mysterious tape in his car, to unravel the riddle of which Jabra had to write a long and beautiful novel. I love Jabra because he writes like an aristocrat — his sentences are elitist and beautiful. It’s true he was poor when he was a child, but he wrote like real writers, with expressive, literary sentences. You have to read them the way you read literature, not the way I’m talking to you now.

Sana’ knocked and didn’t enter. I put my book aside, stood up, and asked her in, but she stood by the door and gave me the cassette.

“This is what Umm Hassan left you,” she said. “Umm Hassan entrusted me with this tape to give to you.”

I took the videotape and offered her a cigarette, which she smoked greedily. I used to think that veiled women didn’t smoke, but Sana’ talked and stammered, gulping down the smoke between syllables.

I didn’t understand about the cassette, because Umm Hassan had visited Galilee three years before, and when she returned she brought me a branch of oranges and told me of her visit to al-Ghabsiyyeh, where she’d lit a candle under the lotus tree and prayed two prostrations in the mosque.

Sana’ said Umm Hassan had visited al-Kweikat again, six months before, and had seen her house and made up her mind to die. Every day she’d watch this cassette and tell stories while others joined her in her lamentation, her sorrow, and her memories.

“She stopped sleeping,” said Sana’. “She came to me and said she’d heard the call of death, because she couldn’t sleep. Sobs clung to her voice, and she told me to give you this tape. I don’t know what you’ll see on it. It’s falling apart it’s been used so often, but she left it for you.”

I thanked Sana’, nodding goodbye to her, but she didn’t move, as if she were stuck to the door. Then she spoke. She blew smoke in my face and her eyes filled with tears.

Sana’ told me about that journey. At first I couldn’t understand a thing. Then the words started transforming themselves into pictures. She spoke about Fawzi, Umm Hassan’s brother, and about the village of Abu Sinan, stammering and repeating herself as though she had no control over her lips. Then she got to the point.

“I won’t tell you to take good care of it,” said Sana’. “That cassette — I mean, you know. .”

“God rest her soul,” I said.

“God rest all our souls,” said the pious woman and started to go. After taking two hesitant steps, she came back and said, “Please, Doctor, take good care of the cassette.”

Is it true?

Can it be that a woman died because she met another woman?

Umm Hassan’s story shook me to the core, not just because she died, but because she thought of me and left me this tape.

What could have happened in al-Kweikat for the woman to die?

You know Umm Hassan better than I do and you know her courage. She left al-Kweikat when she was twenty-five carrying her son, Hassan, on her back and holding her daughters, Salema and Hanan, by the hand. They walked from al-Kweikat to Yarka. In the olive orchards of Yarka, when the wife of Qasem Ahmad Sa’id discovered that what she was carrying in her arms was a pillow rather than her baby son, she started wailing. Her husband was sitting on the ground like an imbecile while she implored him, “Go and get the boy!” But the man was incapable of getting to his feet. The mother moaned like a wounded animal, and the husband sat motionless, but Umm Hassan — do you know what she did? Umm Hassan went back on her own. She left her children with Samirah, the wife of Qasem Ahmad Sa’id, went back to the village, and took the child from the hands of the Jews. She didn’t tell anyone what she’d seen or what the Palmach *men were doing to al-Kweikat. She returned exhausted, gasping, as though all the air in the world couldn’t fill her lungs. She set the child down in front of its mother, took her own children, and went to the olive tree that her husband and brothers were beneath. Samirah ran to her to kiss her hand, but Umm Hassan looked at her with contempt and pushed her away.

Umm Hassan didn’t think she’d done anything extraordinary. She’d gone and got the child, and that was all there was to it. No one considered her a heroine. In those days, surprise had disappeared from people’s faces; sorrow alone wrapped itself around them, like an overcoat full of holes.

Al-Kweikat fell to the Jews without our knowing it. On the night of June 9, 1948, everyone came out of their houses in their nightclothes. The shelling was heavy, and the artillery thundered into the night of the unsleeping village. People took their children and fled through the fields to the neighboring villages of Yarka and Deir al-Qasi, and from Deir al-Qasi to Abu Sinan and Ya’thur, and on from there. Abu Hassan drove four head of sheep and three of goats along the road, but the flock died at Ya’thur, and Umm Hassan wept for the animals as a mother weeps for her children.

“God, I wept, Son! How I mourned those animals! How could they be gone as though they’d never been? Wiped off the face of the earth, dead. How were we supposed to live?”

But Umm Hassan lived long enough to bury her sons one after the other.

Sana’ said Umm Hassan never stopped weeping. She’d put on the cassette and would weep and tell everyone the story of the two visits she’d made over there. “Dear God, people. What we’ve lived through and seen. Would that we’d neither seen nor lived through such things!”

Sana’ said that she died of grief over her house.

“She knew?” I asked.

“I’ve no idea,” she answered. “Maybe it was because she saw it for herself. Hearing’s not like seeing.”

And you, Father — did you know these things? Why didn’t you tell Umm Hassan what had happened to al-Kweikat? Didn’t you spend your days and nights in those demolished villages? Why didn’t you tell the woman that the Jews had occupied her house?