Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

These formalities had no impact on him because he was already in a dreadful state, everything shaking inside him. He thought he’d have a heart attack the moment he stepped off the airplane but was surprised to find himself behaving like an ordinary traveler, as though this weren’t his own country.

He left the airport and got a taxi, which took him to Jerusalem. He spent the night in a hotel in the Arab quarter and in the morning, instead of touring old Jerusalem as the tourists do, he took a taxi to Acre, where he alighted in the square close to the Jazzar mosque. He walked and walked and walked, lost and alone in his own city. He said he wanted to find his house without help. He was like me — born outside of Palestine with no memories of his country except what his mother had told him. No‘man walked, got lost in the alleys, stopped and scrutinized the houses, and walked some more. At last he found the house. He said he knew it as soon as he saw it. He knocked on the door and was greeted, as Umm Hassan had been, in Arabic, but they weren’t Jews, they were Palestinians.

He went into the house, greeted everyone and sat down.

The woman went to make coffee. He got up and started to look around, refusing the company of the man of the house. As he went through the rooms, No‘man recalled his mother’s words, and they became his guide. He came to the kitchen and there he saw his mother standing in front of the big saucepan of cracked wheat. No‘man said that in the Yarmouk camp near Damascus, where he’d been born, they ate nothing but cracked wheat. His mother would stand in their small kitchen in front of the saucepan, and No‘man would hold onto the hem of her dress and cry.

But in the spacious kitchen in Acre, it wasn’t his mother he saw, but a solitary child, standing in front of the Palestinian’s wife, who was making coffee. The woman tiptoed out when she saw No’man wiping away his tears.

They drank coffee, and the Palestinian explained to No‘man that he’d been waiting for him for a long time, that he’d rented the house from the official in charge of absentee property after they’d thrown him out of his own house, and that he was ready to leave whenever No‘man’s family wanted.

No‘man listened without uttering a word, as though he’d forgotten how to speak.

The Palestinian tried to explain their circumstances and the difficulties of their life and to reassure No‘man that he didn’t want the house but had been forced to rent it because his own house had been demolished.

No‘man stood up and excused himself.

“Stay for lunch — the house is yours,” said the man.

“No. Thank you,” said No‘man, and left.

No‘man didn’t look back, and he never returned. He wrote that he regretted not having gone back. Before, he’d needed to preserve the image of the house in his head, but now that image had evaporated, and nothing was left but the words of his mother that had engraved it in his memory.

No’man said he walked and walked, and then he heard the Palestinian man shouting, so he turned and saw the man running after him, waving something in his hand.

“The key. I forgot to give you the key to the house. Take it, it’s yours.”

“There’s no need,” said No‘man. “We still have the old key in Damascus.”

Dr. No‘man returned to Denmark, the key is still in Damascus, Umm Isa died muttering about the saucepan of zucchini, and her son, Isa, is in Meknes looking for the keys.

Umm Isa used to talk about her son as though he belonged to a different world, as though he were dead, which is what Umm Hassan thought when she heard Umm Isa talking about her son almost as if she were in mourning. Then she found out that Dr. Isa Safiyyeh wasn’t dead — he was living in Meknes, a faraway city in Morocco, where he taught Arabic literature at the university.

He’d been seduced by a woman from Meknes, said Umm Isa. “He met her in New York, where he was teaching, and fell in love. I saw her once when they visited me in Beirut. Damn her, how beautiful she was! Huge eyes and long, smooth black hair, and with something strange about her. She put a spell on him for sure. I know women, and I know that that one had shown him the fish that talks.”

Umm Hassan agreed, even though she didn’t believe in the existence of a magic fish in a woman’s private parts. Also, she didn’t give a damn about “Dr.” Isa, who did his doctoring in literature instead of becoming a real doctor and helping people. But then again, who knows, “maybe our Christian brothers from Jerusalem have a fish we don’t know about.”

“The woman from Meknes took Isa to her country, and they left me by myself in Beirut. Why don’t they come and live with me here? Isa writes to me, but the letters don’t arrive during wartime, and in the last one he said he was collecting keys. God help us, now we’re collecting the keys of the Andalusians! He said the descendants of the people of Andalusia who were chased out of their country and who migrated to Meknes still keep the keys to their houses in Andalusia, and he’s rounding up keys to put on an exhibition and wants to write a book about them. Here, read it, Umm Hassan.”

Umm Hassan’s sight was failing, and she could no longer read, the words looking to her like little jumbled-up insects. Umm Isa asked if she’d read it, and Umm Hassan nodded her head as though she had.

“What do you make of that? He said he wants to collect their keys and write a book! He says we have to collect the keys of our houses in Jerusalem. What do you make of it? Collect our keys, when the doors are already broken!”

Umm Hassan told me the story of Dr. Isa Safiyyeh’s keys when I asked her where I could find Dr. No‘man, since she knows everybody. I told her I didn’t want to collect keys, I wanted to ask him about emigrating to Denmark, but she didn’t believe me. She thought that I too had been struck by key fever and told me that our house in al-Ghabsiyyeh didn’t have a door and wasn’t even a house anymore because the weeds had devoured it.

I’m not interested in keys. That sort of sentimentality doesn’t concern me. I was only thinking about emigrating, and I said Denmark because lots of the young men from the camp have gone there. And I thought of Dr. No‘man because he was a doctor like me. I thought he might be able to get me a job in one of the hospitals over there. But I forgot about it and stayed here.

Umm Hassan said, “Stay in your own house here and forget about keys.”

Can we call these wretched shacks in the camp houses?

Everything here is collapsing, wouldn’t you agree, dear Abu Salem?

DO YOU know, master, where you are now?

You think you’re in the hospital, but you’re mistaken. This isn’t a hospital, it just resembles a hospital. Everything here isn’t itself but a simulacrum of itself. We say house but we don’t live in houses, we live in places that resemble houses. We say Beirut but we aren’t really in Beirut, we’re in a semblance of Beirut. I say doctor but I’m not a doctor, I’m just pretending to be one. Even the camp itself — we say we’re in the Shatila camp, but after the War of the Camps and the destruction of eighty percent of Shatila’s houses, it’s no longer a camp, it’s just a semblance of a camp — you get the idea, the boring semblances go on and on.

You don’t like what I’m saying?

Look around you. It shouldn’t take long to convince you that it’s true.

Let me walk you around the place.

This is a hospital. You are in the Galilee Hospital. But it’s — what can I say? It’s better I don’t say. Come on, let’s start with this room.

A tiny room, four meters by three, with an iron bed next to which is a bedside table on which are a box of Kleenex and a mucus extractor (a round glass instrument connected to a tube). To the left, opposite the bed, is a white metal cupboard. You think everything is white in this room, but in fact nothing is white. Things were white, but now they’ve taken on other colors — yellowish white, flaking walls, a cupboard discolored with rust, a ceiling covered in stains where the paint has blistered and burst because of damp, neglect, and shelling.