Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

“Thank you,” said the Palestinian, “I don’t want it. I’m giving it to you. Take it.”

“Thank you,” said the Israeli, who took the jug and returned it to its place.

The silence was broken — the two women burst out laughing. Umm Hassan started looking around the house. She stood in front of the bedroom but didn’t go in. Next she went to the kitchen. In the sink were piles of dirty dishes. Umm Hassan turned on the tap and watched the water flow out, and the Israeli woman ran in saying, “I’m so sorry, it’s a mess.” Umm Hassan turned off the tap and said, laughing, “I didn’t leave the dirty dishes. That was you.”

The two women went out into the garden.

The Israeli woman gave Umm Hassan her arm and told her about the place. She told her about the orange grove where Iraqi Jews worked, the new irrigation projects the government had started, their fear of the Katyusha rockets, and about how difficult life was. Umm Hassan listened and looked and said one word: “Paradise. Paradise. Palestine’s a paradise.” When the Israeli woman asked her what she was saying, she answered, “Nothing. I was just saying that we call it an orchard , not a grove . This is an orange orchard. How wonderful, how wonderful.”

“Yes, an orchard,” said the Israeli.

Then Umm Hassan began telling the Israeli woman about the place.

“Where’s the spring?” asked Umm Hassan.

“What spring?”

Umm Hassan told her the story of her spring and how she’d discovered water in the field next to the house. When her husband had built the house, close to the eucalyptus tree, there had been no water. It was Umm Hassan who had discovered it. And one day she saw water welling up from the ground. She told the men, “We must dig here,” and they dug, and water came gushing out. So they built a little stone wall around the spring, and it became known as Umm Hassan’s spring.

“Where’s the spring?” she asked.

The Israeli woman couldn’t answer. “There was a spring here,” she said, “but they dug an artesian well around it and laid some pipes. Could that be it?”

“No, it’s a natural spring,” said Umm Hassan, and told how they’d decided to plant apple trees after they discovered the water. But the war.

Umm Hassan guided the woman to where her spring had been.

She didn’t find it. Where it had been, she found a well walled with pipes and iron with a small tap on each side. Umm Hassan bent over to open the tap, and when the water gushed out, splashed her face and neck, sprinkled the water on her hair and clothes, and drank.

“Drink,” she said. “Water sweeter than honey.”

The Israeli woman bent over and washed her hands, and then turned off the tap without drinking.

“This is the most delicious water in the world.”

The Israeli woman turned on the tap again, drank a little and smiled.

Later Umm Hassan would say the Israelis don’t drink water, just fizzy drinks. “They only drink out of bottles, even though Palestine’s water is the best in the world.”

In vain we tried to explain to her that they drink mineral water not fizzy drinks and that the people of Beirut have started to drink water out of plastic bottles, too, but she stuck to her guns and said, “They don’t drink water. I saw them with my own eyes. You want me to question what I saw with my own eyes?”

After they’d had a drink, the two women walked around the house. Umm Hassan told the woman about the eucalyptus tree and the olive grove and pointed out the stone that looks like the head of an ox. She took her around behind the house and showed her the cave on the other side of the hill.

Umm Hassan talked and the other woman discovered, astonished that she’d never noticed the ox’s head, or had even gone into the cave. Then Umm Hassan told her how she’d learned her profession as a midwife from her grandmother on her father’s side, Maryam, and that she had an official license from the British government. She recounted how she’d gotten married at fifteen “to chase away the chickens from the front of the house,” as her mother-in-law had said when she’d asked for her hand.

Umm Hassan told her stories, strolling from place to place, and the Jewish woman followed along behind, listening and nodding her head but not uttering a word.

Umm Hassan would tell her guests that she had seen her life dissolving in front of her: “What’s life? Like a pinch of salt in water, it just melts away.” She slipped back as though no time had passed. She saw again the young woman who’d gone to live in her new home. At twenty, she told her husband that she wanted a house of their own — “I’m no good for chasing chickens anymore and I am no longer a little girl.” They got the land and built the house with their own hands, and she discovered the spring and the cave and the ox’s head, and became the midwife for the whole district of Acre.

The women went back inside the house and sat in silence.

Umm Hassan got up and went into the bedroom. She looked at the bed that occupied the center of the room. It was the first bed she’d slept on in her life. At home with her family, and then in her husband’s house, she’d slept on bedding on the floor, folding it up each morning and tucking it away at the far end of the room. But in this house the bed couldn’t be folded up.

“A room just for sleeping in,” her husband had said.

The other woman sleeps here every night, thought Umm Hassan, with her husband, in the same bed, in the same room, in the same house, in the same — No, not in the same village: The village didn’t exist anymore. Umm Hassan could no longer see the close-packed houses of the village — the houses were gone. Nothing was left of al-Kweikat.

When she finished her tour of the house, Umm Hassan wept. She sat in the living room and wept. Her brother came in to hurry her up so they could return to Abu Sinan and found her weeping. He wept, too, and the son with the camera wept.

“Do you know what she said to me?”

Umm Hassan would relate the same conversation every day, adding a word here, deleting one there, choking back her tears.

“She asked me, ‘Where are you from?’

“From al-Kweikat, I told her. This is my house and this is my jug and this is my sofa, and the olive trees and the cactus and the land and the spring — everything.”

“‘No, no. Where are you living now?’

“‘In Shatila.’

“‘Where’s Shatila.’

“‘It’s a camp.’

“‘Where’s the camp?’

“‘In Lebanon.’

“‘Where in Lebanon?’

“‘In Beirut, near Sports City.’”

When the Jewish woman heard the word Beirut, she gave a start and her manner changed completely.

“You’re from Beirut?” she cried, the words tumbling out of her mouth and her eyes filling with tears.

“Listen, Sister,” the Jewish woman said. “I’m from Beirut too, from Wadi Abu Jmil. You know Wadi Abu Jmil, the Jewish district in the center? They brought me from there when I was twelve. I left Beirut and came to this dreary, bleak land. Do you know the Ecole de l’Alliance Israélite? To the right of the school there’s a three-story building that used to be owned by a Polish Jew named Elie Bron. I’m from there.”

“You’re from Beirut?” Umm Hassan said in amazement.

“Yes, Beirut.”

“How did that happen?”

“What do you mean, how did that happen? I’ve no idea. You’re living in Beirut and you’ve come here to cry? I’m the one who should be crying. Get up, my friend, and go. Send me to Beirut and take this wretched land back.”

Umm Hassan said she talked with the Israeli woman for a long time.

The woman’s name was Ella Dweik. Hers was Nabilah, daughter of al-Khatib from the family of al-Habit — the fallen — wife of Mahmoud al-Qasemi. Al-Habit isn’t the family’s real name, but my grandfather used to spend all day sitting down so they used to call him that. Our real ancestor was Iskandar, and before Iskandar there was al-Khatib.