Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

“They buy luxury cars instead of spending money on equipping the hospitals,” said Dr. Amjad. “The Kurdish woman stole the car. She was a spy and inveigled him into meeting her and they assassinated him. And it seems Amin had something to do with the affair.”

Amjad was speaking, and I was trembling.

Amjad was telling his stories, and you’re prostrate down below.

Amjad was analyzing Kayed’s killing, and when I tried to get in a word his hand would come and cover my mouth.

When we’re puzzled we always say, “ Cherchez la femme! ” and the problem is soon resolved. I’m convinced this Kurdish woman doesn’t exist but is a figment of the young Iraqi who calls himself Kazem.

Do you know Kazem? He was Kayed’s personal bodyguard. He came by twice to see you, claiming he wanted to see how you were doing. But he didn’t know you. He came to clear his conscience; I’m sure he was involved in the assassination. But why would he come to visit me? I have nothing to do with all that. It’s true, Kayed was my friend, but I wasn’t his only friend, why choose me to tell the story of the Kurdish girl to? Did he want to get me involved? Or maybe he’s part of the plot against my life. Does he know Shams’ family? Did he come to check the place out? I don’t want my imagination to gallop out of control because it has nothing to do with me, and Kazem has immigrated to Sweden. He said he was waiting to get refugee status but I didn’t sympathize, and I made sure he understood that. Then he stopped coming to see me and we were finally free of him.

I know, but I haven’t told anyone. The girl that Kayed loved wasn’t Kurdish, she was a Jordanian from Karak, a student at the American University in Beirut studying engineering. Kayed did love her. I met her with him a number of times. She was tall and fair and had mesmerizing eyes. They weren’t large like the eyes we usually describe as beautiful, but they were mesmerizing. And her name was Afifa.

She smiled as she introduced herself to me: “An old name that isn’t used much now.” She said her father, who’d been living in Beirut for twenty years, had named her Afifa after her mother, who was living alone in Ma’daba, and that she’d discovered that her uncle on her mother’s side was a priest named Nasri who lived in Deir al-Seidnaya near Damascus and painted beautiful icons. Her eyes watered — no, they didn’t water, but they had something of that watery blue in them. Kayed loved her and said she bossed him around: “People from Karak are always bossy.”

There was no Kurdish woman. Kayed was in love with a girl from Karak and all his friends knew about it, but that wasn’t why he was killed. It’s true that after falling for Afifa he abandoned many of the security precautions that Fatah officials in Beirut had to take in the wake of the decision to liquidate the Palestinian political presence in the city, but his death had nothing to do with love. It was connected with something else, and I don’t think the Israelis had anything to do with it.

But where did the car pass?

This Dr. Amjad rubbed me the wrong way. Where did he get all this information? Is it true the so-called Kurdish woman stole the car? She suggested they meet in front of the television building and, when he arrived, asked him to get out of the car so she could tell him something. He was killed getting out of the car. A man fired five bullets at him from a silenced revolver, and the Kurdish woman disappeared, with the car.

Was the whole thing just a car theft?

But why did he get out?

Didn’t he know his life was in danger?

If we are to believe our Dr. Amjad’s version, Kayed was supposed to drive just past the television building, and the Kurdish woman should have gotten into the car beside him.

How could that be? He stops his car, gets out and dies? Where was his Iraqi bodyguard, Kazem, and what did Amin have to do with it?

Kazem told me with a wink that he didn’t make it to the rendezvous: “You know, meetings of that sort require privacy.”

Privacy! What privacy is there in the street at eleven in the morning? They’re all lying, and Kazem has disappeared. He came to say goodbye because he was traveling and to “see how Uncle Yunes was doing”!

I never heard anyone else use this Uncle . You’re Brother , Abu Salem, Yunes, or Izz al-Din — you’re only Uncle to people who don’t know you. The easiest trick in the book to get close to someone. Uncle and Hajj are titles we give to men over fifty when we don’t know what we’re supposed to call them. Out of laziness. Our language is a very lazy language. We don’t dig deep for the names of things; we name them on the run, and it’s up to the listener to figure things out, he is supposed to know what you mean so he can understand you; otherwise misunderstandings abound.

That’s the word I was looking for. What happened between Dr. Amjad and me was a misunderstanding.

Dr. Amjad was talking about the disappearance of Amin after Kayed’s killing and presented an exhaustive analysis to prove that Amin had a relationship with the Kurdish woman, as though I cared.

“She would come here to visit him and I think. . I think the last time she came in the Japanese car, so Amin killed him and not Kazem. He killed him for the woman and the car. It’s an expensive car as you know — Mazda, full automatic . I’m sure it was the car, but I don’t know anymore.”

Dr. Amjad doesn’t know but he wants me to know. I didn’t say anything, gave no support to his hypotheses, and didn’t tell him about the girl from Karak who’s studying at the American University. I wish I could contact her; she’s really fantastically beautiful, or not beautiful but striking (now look at the precision of the word striking , meaning more than pretty and implying presence and authority).

God rest your soul, Kayed, but on the occasions when I met her I never saw her as being bossy. She had a certain indescribable delicacy. Her neck was long and smooth, and around it she’d wear a silver necklace with the Throne Surah, or so I thought until Kayed told me that it was a picture of the Virgin Mary. He said the girl from Karak loved the Virgin and would tell him not to be afraid because she had made a vow on his behalf to the Mother of Light. I didn’t ask who this “Mother of Light” was, guessing it must be one of the countless names of the Holy Virgin.

I’d like to see her again, but not to clear things up, since they’re beyond being cleared up at this point. No, I want to contemplate her beauty. Shameless, really. Instead of mourning my friend, Kayed, and bemoaning his horrible death, I desire his girlfriend. They left him on the pavement in Talet al-Khayyat for more than five hours before taking him to the hospital. A man lying in a pool of blood. The passersby looked on without wanting to see. For five hours under the Beirut sun, Kayed was in agony. Well, there you are. But I’m still not sure why I desire his girlfriend. My desire isn’t sexual; I desire to see her. Men are traitors from the beginning, from the moment they discover their names. To know your name is to be a traitor. Wasn’t that your blind father’s theory about names?

Where were we? It seems I’ve become like Dr. Amjad. All doctors must be that way: I’ve left you lying here to amuse myself with the story of Kayed.

That day I swear I could have committed murder. But it was as if I were hypnotized, virtually paralyzed and mute. I was asking for Amin when a hand covered my mouth; then Dr. Amjad got deep into the analysis of Kayed’s assassination and started mulling over the possible explanations and asserting the involvement of Israeli intelligence. But that wasn’t enough. If he’d stopped there, this eruption would never have come, involuntarily, from deep inside me. Zainab told me that I roared, and that Dr. Amjad fled, terrified. It was when he launched into his contemptible tales about women that I let loose. You know how we men are. Amjad was talking about Kayed and the Kurdish woman when he suddenly switched to his sexual experiences with Kurdish women. How vulgar! He said a Kurdish woman used to call him every day on the phone, sigh into the receiver, and tell him the color of her panties.