Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

That was when I exploded.

I didn’t explode for your sake but for the sake of that woman he’d invented.

He said she would sigh into the telephone, but he didn’t say what he was doing — how he would sigh and masturbate and leap like an ape from one line to another.

Plus, how dare he talk about Kurdish women that way? Even if we suppose that one Kurdish woman did that, is it thinkable to write them all off? I hate this stupid machismo. I think it’s a cover up for men’s deep-seated impotence.

I exploded, howling and bellowing like a wounded bull. Dr. Amjad fled, and Zainab came running. Zainab’s stupid, and I could have done without further proof of it. She’s not really a nurse, all she can do is take blood pressure and give injections. Not grasping that I was shouting because of you, she ran to get me a glass of water and started to calm me down. The idiot! I threw the glass on the ground, grabbed her hand, and dragged her over to you. She found a woolen blanket, and I covered you with it.

“What are we going to do with him?” she asked, looking at me like an imbecile.

“Quickly, quickly! Let’s get him into a room.”

It was then that Zainab let out that Dr. Amjad had said you were to be left alone because there was no hope.

I told her to shut up and help me.

We tried to carry you, but it was impossible because the yellow foam mat on which they’d thrown you down wasn’t rigid. I ordered Zainab to bring a stretcher and she ran off.

From the moment I yelled at her, Zainab changed completely. She started running blindly every time she heard an order from me. I’d give an order and she’d set off running like a fool. I could hear her clattering around everywhere — on the stairs, in the room, in the corridors. I could hear, but I couldn’t see a thing. All she brought was a woolen blanket with a moldy smell. So I picked you up — I couldn’t wait any longer. I committed an unforgivable medical sin. I picked you up and put you over my shoulder folded in half. You were heavy and shaking. God, how heavy people are when they’re dying, or approaching death, as though, as Umm Hassan explained to me, the soul were a means of combating gravity and half your soul had left your body. I took you out of the emergency room and climbed up toward the first floor. Zainab was waiting on the landing to say there weren’t any empty rooms. I climbed up to the second and last floor and took you into Room 208, which you now occupy. I put you into bed and ordered Zainab to take the second bed out of the room.

Now you’re in a first-class room. It’s clean and attractive and organized. Forget about the colors — it’s impossible to preserve the original color of walls and doors in a place that’s been eaten away by moisture. There’s no solution to the humidity in Beirut, which is between eighty-five and ninety percent most of the time. However, it’s less a matter of humidity and more of the water pipes and sewage mains. The hospital was bombarded dozens of times, and each time they repaired it from the outside, that’s to say, patched the holes in the walls and sealed off the water that was spurting from the pipes at the joints. The place needs a complete overhaul, which is impossible at the moment. The pipes leak, the damp stains the walls, and the smell, a mixture of Nurse Zainab’s ammonia and standing water, seeps everywhere.

All’s well.

I say “all’s well” because I know you’re in a place that’s relatively safe from all those smells, because soap, insecticides, cologne, and powder fill your room with the aroma of paradise.

Of course, everything’s relative. It’s a relative aroma in a relative paradise in a relative hospital in a relative camp in a relative city. That’ll do.

Everything is relative. Even the Arabic calligraphy that I’ve hung on the wall above you is relative, since it isn’t a work of art in the precise meaning of the term, though it is beautiful. I brought it from my house because Shams refused to take it. A beautiful work with the name of the Almighty written in Kufic script. I like that script. I see its angular forms as redrawing the boundaries of the world, and I see it curving and rounding everything off. It’s true it’s not a curved script, but everything’s round in the end. Allah in Kufic lettering is above your head because Shams didn’t grasp the picture’s artistic value when I offered it to her. She looked at it with something approaching revulsion, said, “You want to make me into one of those women who cover their hair?” and laughed treacherously.

When Shams laughed, she laughed treacherously. I would smell the scent of another man on her breath and “avert my gaze” as they say. I would feel that I was with her and not with her. I would see them all hovering around the two of us and I would try to push them away so I could see her. Then I would forget them, and the betrayal, when I slid into her undulating body.

Shams laughed treacherously.

We were at my place, I told her I had a gift for her. I went to the bedroom to get the canvas rolled up in white paper. She tore off the paper, full of curiosity. Then the picture with the Kufic lettering shone out.

“Beautiful. A beautiful work,” I said. “Don’t you love Arabic calligraphy?”

She looked closely at it, read it carefully, then pulled back.

“You want to turn me into one of those women who cover their hair?”

Shams thought I was prodding her to believe in God and gave me a lecture on her personal view of the divine and of existence. I’ll spare you her theories about the united nature of existence and how God is present in everything and so on.

She didn’t take the picture because she imagined I wanted her to adopt the head scarf in preparation for marriage. She spoke of her conviction concerning the liberation of women.

I can assure you that such thoughts never had crossed my mind! I bought the thing because I love Arabic calligraphy, that’s all, and I wanted to give her a nice present.

This drawing, my dear Abu Salem, cost more than fifty dollars, and it’s the most beautiful thing in my house. Shams didn’t take it and I didn’t hang it up because it wasn’t for me. I said to myself, I’ll hang it in the living room when Shams comes and lives with me. But she died. I therefore decided I deserved the present and ought to hang it on the wall above my bed. Then things heated up: There was talk of a list of people to be killed and of Shams’ relatives seeking revenge. Apparently my name was at the top of the list. So I forgot about the drawing, and everything else.

But then, after having put you to bed and cleaned everything up, I went home to get a few things and remembered it. Something told me that it belonged here. Allah in Kufic letters wraps you in its aura and protects you.

I didn’t bring the map of Palestine or the posters of martyrs. Nothing. Those don’t mean a thing here. Do you remember how we used to tremble in front of those posters, how we were convinced that the martyrs were about to burst through the colored paper and jump out at us? Those posters were an integral part of our life, and we filled the walls of the camp and the city with them, dreaming that one day our own pictures would appear on similar ones. All of us dreamed of seeing our faces outlined in bright red and with the martyr’s halo. There was a contradiction here to which we paid no attention: We wanted to have our faces on the posters but also wanted to see them — we wanted to become martyrs without dying!

Tell me, how were we able to separate the image of death from death? How did we attain this absolute faith in life?

All that I know is that after the massacre I grew to hate the posters of martyrs. I won’t tell you what happened, about the swarms of flies that almost devoured me — it’s not the right moment for those sorts of memories. They need the right moment. We can’t just toss off memories like that, we don’t have the right to remember any which way.