Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

A white stained with yellow and gray, a yellow stained with gray, a gray stained with white or. .

You don’t care, but I’m disgusted by the sight. You’ll say I worked here for years and never let on at all that it bothered me, so what has changed?

Nothing has changed except that I’ve become like a patient myself, and a patient can’t put up with such things. As you can see, when a doctor starts to feel like a patient, it’s the end for medicine. And medicine has come to an end, dear Mr. Yunes, Izz al-Din, Abu Salem, or I-don’t-know-what. In the past you were content with all the names people had for you, you’d shrug it off. And when I asked you your real name, you gestured broadly and said, “Forget all that, call me whatever you like.” And when I insisted, you told me your name was Adam: “We’re all children of Adam, so why should we be called by any other name?”

I found out the truth without your telling me. I found it out by chance. You were telling the story when I came to visit and your relatives from Ain al-Hilweh were there. When I saw them I tried to leave, but you told me to sit down, saying that Dr. Khalil was family, and went on with your story.

You said your father had first wanted to call you Asad. Lion. So you would have been Asad al-Asadi, Lion of the Lions, and everybody would have been terrified of you. He did name you Asad but changed his mind after a couple of days because he was scared of his cousin Asad al-Asadi, a village notable who’d indicated displeasure at his name being given to the poorest of the poor in the family. So he named you Yunes. Jonah. He chose Yunes to protect you from death in the belly of the whale, but your mother didn’t like the name, so she chose Izz al-Din and your father agreed. Or so the woman thought, and she started calling you Izz al-Din while your father was still calling you Yunes. Then he decided to put an end to the litany and said that the name Abd al-Wahid was better. He started calling you Abd al-Wahid, and you and everybody else got confused. In the end, the teacher at the primary school didn’t know what to do, so he went to the blind sheikh to clarify matters, on which occasion the sheikh pronounced his theory on names: “All names are pseudonyms — the only true name is Adam. God gave this name to man because the name and the thing named were one. He was called Adam because he was taken from the adeem — the skin — of the earth, and the earth is one just as man is one. Even after his fall from Paradise, Adam, peace be upon him, gave no thought to the matter of names. He called his first son Adam and his second Adam and so on until the fatal day, until the day of the first murder. When Cain killed his brother, Abel, Adam had to resort to pseudonyms to distinguish between the murderer and the murdered. So Gabriel inspired him with the names he gave to every Adam in his line so things wouldn’t get mixed up and the names get lost.”

“All our names are pseudonyms,” the sheikh told the schoolteacher. “They have no value, and you may therefore call my son whatever you like, but knowing that his name and your name and the names of everyone else are one. Call him Adam if you like, or Yunes or Izz al-Din or Abd al-Wahid or Wolf. . Why don’t we call him Wolf? Now there’s a name that never came to mind before!”

You told your relatives you only discovered the wisdom of your father’s words during the revolution. You were the only sacred warrior, and later the only fedayeen fighter, who wasn’t obliged to take an assumed name. You used all your names, and they were all real and all assumed at the same time.

I brushed against the essence of your secret, master, and understood that truth isn’t real, it’s just a matter of convention; names are conventions, truth’s a convention, and so is everything else.

When your relatives left your house, I asked you for the truth and you said you’d been telling the truth. Listening to you, I’d thought you’d been making the story up as you went along, perhaps to make yourself even more mysterious, but you assured me you’d told them the truth and that to this day you still didn’t know your real name. Then you told me the men were your relatives from Ain al-Zaitoun and lived in the Ain al-Hilweh camp and had come to invite you to be the head of an Asadi clan association they’d decided to form, and that the business of the names was the only thing you could think of to make them drop the idea. “Names and families and sects have no meaning. Go back to Adam,” you told them as they left. So they left with gloomy faces. They’d wanted you to be head of the association because you were the family’s only hero, but as you were pouring the tea and stirring in the sugar you said, “There are no heroes. We all come from Adam, and Adam was made of mud.”

Come with me then, Adam, to your hospital room. There’s only one small window, which is covered with a metal grille like in a prison cell. The yellow — or sometime-yellow — door opens onto the corridor, from which comes the sharp smell of ammonia. Why the smell? Zainab says it’s to kill germs, but I’m convinced there are germs nesting in every cranny here. That’s why I bought us some cleaning supplies and clean your room every day. I wipe it down with soap and water, making sure that the smell of the soap gets into every corner. But no matter what I do, the smell of ammonia seeps back in and threatens to choke us. I thought of washing the corridor at night but gave up on the idea since it would be impossible to clean the hospital on my own, and everyone else seems to be used to the smell.

We’re leaving your room now for the corridor, where you can see rooms just like yours on both sides. But you are the only patient with a private room. Why this special treatment? That’s something I won’t go into. You think you’re here because they respect your history, and that’s what I tell myself too so I can put up with the situation. The truth, however, is very different.

When they brought you here, Dr. Amjad threw up his hands and said, “There is no power and no strength but with God.” Everyone dealt with you as though you were dead so they didn’t allocate you a room. Zainab understood you were to be left in the emergency room until you died — they left you lying there and went away. When I saw you in that state, with the flies hovering around you as though you were a corpse, I rushed to the doctors’ room, put on a white gown and ordered Zainab to follow me. She didn’t. Zainab, who throughout the war used to tremble at my orders, looked at me with contempt when I told her to prepare a room for you.

“No, Khalil. Dr. Amjad said to leave him.”

“I’m the doctor and I’m telling you. .”

The bitch! She left my sentence hanging in the air and turned her back and went off. So I stayed with you on my own.

You were primed for death — lying on the ground on a yellow foam pad and shivering. And the flies. I started shooing the flies away and yelling. I left you and went in search of Zainab, ordered her to follow me, and went back to you. Even Amin, the young man in charge of the emergency room, had disappeared. I became obsessed with finding Amin. Where was Amin? I started yelling for him, and then a hand came from behind and covered my mouth.

“Shush, shush. Snap out of it, Khalil.”

Dr. Amjad covered my mouth with his hand and dragged me to his examining room on the first floor, where he explained to me that Amin had disappeared and started telling me a strange story about the killing of Kayed, the Fatah official in Beirut, and the Kurdish woman, and the car, going into an exhaustive analysis of the political assassinations that had taken place recently in Beirut.

You remember Kayed.

He was quiet and gentle and brave — you don’t know that he’s dead. No, you should know — Kayed died two weeks before your stroke. He was the last to be killed. Is it true he married a Kurdish woman before he died? And if he did marry her, why did he make a date to meet her at Talet al-Khayyat near the television building? Who makes an appointment with his own wife to meet on the road? And where did his new Japanese car vanish to?