Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

Nabilah al-Habit talked of al-Kweikat.

Ella Dweik spoke of Beirut.

Ella said then that she’d married an agricultural engineer who worked there, that they’d been given the house, that she hadn’t had any children. Her husband was Iraqi, from the outskirts of Baghdad; she’d always wanted to see Baghdad. She had a brother who worked in Tel Aviv, but she never saw him.

Umm Hassan told her about Beirut. About the sea and the Manara Corniche, the shops on Hamra Street, the wealth and the beauty and the cars. She said the war hadn’t been able to destroy Beirut. It had destroyed a lot, but Beirut was still as it had always been.

Umm Hassan said that there, in al-Kweikat, she saw once again the Beirut that she didn’t know very well. “All I know is Umm Isa’s house on America Street, near the Clémenceau cinema.”

“In al-Kweikat I saw Beirut, but I don’t live in Beirut, I live in the camp. The camp? It’s a grouping of villages piled up one on top of another.”

The Jewish woman stood up.

When someone stands up, it means it’s time for the guest to leave. Umm Hassan didn’t grasp the meaning of the signal, however; when her brother said they had to go, she looked at him in amazement and didn’t respond.

“And now, what can I do for you?” said Ella.

“Nothing, nothing,” said Umm Hassan as she began ponderously to get up.

The Jewish woman took the earthenware jug and gave it to Umm Hassan without a word. Umm Hassan took it without looking and went back with her brother to his house in Abu Sinan.

“The jug is still in its place,” said Sana’.

Umm Hassan said nobody should move it and that she was sorry she’d brought it with her, it should have stayed in its own house.

“Then what?” I asked Sana’.

“‘Then what?’” she said. “She died in the camp, and the Jewish woman is still living in her house.”

Can you imagine, Father, that Umm Hassan would die weeping for the earthenware jug she brought with her from her house? That she’d die because a woman said to her, “Damn al-Kweikat! Take it!” Why didn’t she take it? Why didn’t she tell this woman she was welcome to the whole camp, the whole of Wadi Abu Jmil, the whole world?

Umm Hassan said she wept over what had happened to her. “The Jewish woman bought my silence with the jug and her stories about her mute childhood, and I came back to the misery and poverty of the camp. She has the house and I’m here. What’s the point?”

So the story was turned into a videotape that’s now mine. Rami didn’t film the conversation between the two women. He made the camera roam over the house and around the land and the olive orchard. But it’s a beautiful tape, made up of lots of snapshots joined together. I’d have preferred a panorama, but never mind, we can imagine the scene as we watch. We’ve become a video nation. Should I be watching the tape every night, weeping and eventually dying from it? Or should I be filming you and turning you into a video that can make the rounds of the houses? What should I film though? Should I ask someone to play you as a young man? I might be able to play that role myself, what do you think? Mme. Claire already asked me if I were your son. I’d be able to say that I am and that I might play the role of you as a young man. But I’m not an actor, acting is a difficult profession! I wish I did know how to act, I’d have reenacted Shams’ crime, and the interrogators wouldn’t have laughed at me and humiliated me with their pity.

“Pity is the ugliest thing,” you used to say. “We must not pity ourselves. Once a man pities himself, he’s doomed.”

But I’m very sorry to have to tell you now that I pity you. I swear you stir more pity than Umm Hassan’s earthenware jug or that mute Jewish woman.

The Jewish woman told Umm Hassan she hadn’t forgotten her Arabic and said she’d been struck dumb when she came to Israel.

“I was on my own, the only child from Lebanon; they all spoke Hebrew. I went for five months without saying a word in class. I didn’t dare talk to anyone, I didn’t answer the teachers’ questions, and I refused to read out loud. Five months. Then I opened my mouth. It was as though I’d tried, in my silence, to become part of these people I didn’t know. French was my first language because at the Ecole Alliance in Beirut we were taught Arabic, like all other school children in Lebanon, but our language in school and at home was French. I knew a little Hebrew because we also studied it at school, though we never liked it. I also learned Hebrew at the Maabarot, but in the classroom, in the midst of all the children, I was struck dumb before I could speak like them.”

She told Umm Hassan how she’d lived in the Maabarot, where they’d sprayed the Sephardic Jews with insecticide, as though they were animals, before admitting them to the stone barracks. She cried when they’d forced her to take off her clothes; a blond woman approached her with the long, cylindrical sprayer and showered every part of her body mercilessly. Her father, a man in his fifties, began howling when they ordered him to remove his red fez and the men started kicking it around like a soccer ball. He chased after it while the soldiers horsed around and laughed. When he could see that his fez was destroyed, he started howling, repeating, “There is no god but God,” so they assumed he was a Muslim and subjected him to a prolonged interrogation before asking him to remove his clothes and spraying him — letting him get used to standing naked, without a fez, forever.

Ella Dweik told Umm Hassan al-Habit her story. And Umm Hassan told everyone that she’d wept.

“May the Lord punish me for how I cried. ‘Take this bleak, dreary land,’ she told me, ‘and send me back to Wadi Abu Jmil, send me back to the Elie Bron building!’”

“And what did you say, Umm Hassan?”

“What could I say? Nothing. I began to weep.”

Did you know, Father, that the medical profession is against pity? You can’t be a doctor and feel pity for your patients. That’s why I’m a failure as a doctor. In fact, I’m not a doctor. I came to the profession by accident. It never occurred to me to be a doctor until the Chinese doctor — a woman — decided for me. It was by her decree. She ordered my military training stopped and enrolled me in medical school. I don’t like medicine. I found myself in China and had to acquiesce. But the way people regarded my new profession won me over. They call you a hakim — a wise man — and think you’re a magician. I think that magic aura was what made Shams love me. Don’t say Shams didn’t love me — she loved me in her own fashion, but she loved me. I’m convinced her death contains a riddle that needs to be solved. The riddle will only be solved after the emotional shock has passed along with my self-imposed imprisonment in this accursed hospital. There’s dirt everywhere. The walls of the room are no longer white, the paint is peeling and yellowed, and something is smeared on them. I scrubbed them with soap, but it made no difference.

What do you say to Denmark?

You know Dr. No‘man al-Natour? I don’t know him, but he wrote an article that made me weep. I didn’t weep for old Acre, which has nearly collapsed, but I wept over the key.

Shall I tell you what happened to No‘man?

He went to Acre — he can visit Israel because he has a Danish passport. He boarded a plane at the Copenhagen airport and got off at Lod. He disembarked like any ordinary passenger, presented his passport to the security man and waited. The man took the passport, examined it closely and asked Dr. No‘man to wait. He waited for about a quarter of an hour, and then a young woman in military uniform arrived. She returned the passport to him and apologized, smiling. He took his passport and went out to the baggage claim, got his suitcase, which he later discovered had been opened and carefully searched, and left the airport.