Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

“Nahilah killed him,” your mother told everyone.

Your mother tried to explain to him that what Nahilah was doing was just an act, but he couldn’t understand. She would speak to him, but he wouldn’t reply; she would look at his face, but all she saw were his closed eyes; she would tell him you were alive, but he would shake his head and moan.

In the past his wife had been able to understand him from the slightest movement of his eyebrows. After your death, however, his eyebrows stopped moving, and she felt she was talking to herself as he sat there in front of her utterly apathetic.

Why did Nahilah act this way?

Was she worried about you? Did she hate you? What was it?

Did she reach into herself “where the tears are,” as the Sufi sheikh would say to his ring of disciples? “In our depths is nothing but water. We go back to the water to weep. We are born in water, we are drawn toward water, and we die when our water runs dry,” he would say. He’d always repeat the words of a certain Sufi imam: “The sea is the bed of the earth and tears are the bed of man.” Having finished their chanting and whirling, the dervishes would fall to the ground and weep — that’s what the Sha’ab Sufi chapter did. Sheikh Ibrahim, son of Suleiman al-Asadi, would go every Thursday evening from Deir al-Asad to Sha’ab to lead the séance; he’d return home, borne by his disciples, his eyes — red as burning embers — closed.

But Nahilah?

Why did she act that way, knowing that you were still alive?

I know why: Nahilah was weeping for herself, for others like her, out of resentment.

“She wept for love,” you would say if you could.

No, Abu Salem. Nahilah returned to the source of her tears to find herself again. She lived her life alone among the blind, the refugees, and the dead. Then you’d turn up at Bab al-Shams, place grapes beneath her feet and go away again, leaving her sad, abandoned, and pregnant.

What did you expect her to do?

Wait for you?

Languish?

You’d love to believe that she did nothing but wait for you. A woman who filled her days with bearing children and waiting for her husband who didn’t come. And when he did come, he’d breeze in secretly, once a month, or every three months, or whenever he could.

Nahilah got fed up with her life between an old blind man, his maniacal wife obsessed with cleanliness, and the children, always hungry, still crawling around on all fours.

And on top of that, you would have wanted her to rejoice to see you and stretch out on the floor upon your second sun hidden inside the cave?

Nahilah left the prison barefoot and when she got to her front door fell to the ground in tears. People thought the blind sheikh had died, so they raced over, only to find her weeping for you. Everyone in Deir al-Asad had learned of your death because Israeli radio had broadcast the military communiqué, but the villagers hadn’t dared to think of holding a big funeral. They mourned you in silence and told one another that Nahilah had been relieved of all the torment, the childbearing, the oppression, prison, and interrogation.

People rushed over and found Nahilah collapsed at her door lamenting and rolling her head from side to side in the dirt. When they gathered around her, she stood up and said, “The funeral is tomorrow. Tomorrow we’ll pray for his soul in the mosque,” and she went inside.

It was a wake beyond compare. Her weeping made everyone else weep. “As though he were Imam Hussein,” people said. “As though we were performing the rites of Ashura.” Food was served, coffee was prepared, turbaned sheikhs came from all over, and chanting circles formed. Nahilah went unveiled to where the men were gathered and recounted the news of your death. “They killed him and left him gasping with thirst. Three bullets to the chest. He fell to the ground, and they fell upon him. He asked for water, and the officer kicked him in the face.” Then she wept and the men’s tears fell, while the blind sheikh sat in the place of honor and red streaks, like tears, furrowed his creased, aged skin.

The village turned into a place of lamentation, and your mother said, “Enough!”

But Nahilah wouldn’t be silent. Three days of tears and lamentation. Even the Israeli officer who came to monitor the wake stood there dumfounded. Did he believe Nahilah’s tears, call himself a liar and doubt what he knew to be the facts? Can weeping deceive the eyes?

You think she did all that to protect you from them. As though the Jews didn’t know you’d escaped and were probably hiding somewhere in Galilee.

No, that’s not the case. It was about weeping.

The woman wept because she needed to weep. Nahilah needed a false death in order to cry because a real death doesn’t make us cry, it demolishes us. Have you forgotten how the death of her son Ibrahim annihilated her? Have you forgotten how she was incapable of weeping and sank into moaning?

You, Abu Salem, were merely the pretext for all those tears brought up from the depths of waters imprisoned there for a thousand years.

No, she didn’t weep for you.

During the false funeral and even later, you were holed up in your distant cave. You and the night — a long night, thick and gluey, a night without color or eyes.

When Nahilah finally came to the cave of Bab al-Shams, she was afraid of you; you were lying on the ground like a corpse. She arrived with food, water, and clean clothes, found you lying on your belly. Your foul smell, like that of a dead animal, filled the cave. She tried to wake you. She listened to your rasping breath. She tried again to wake you, trying to pull you up by your shoulders, but kept falling back down. She held your head in her hands and spoke to you; your head kept falling back down, and she kept pulling it back up. When you opened your eyes, you didn’t see her. She said she’d brought you food, and you moaned. Then you turned over and tried to sit up. You pulled yourself onto your hands and knees. Finally managing to sit up, you looked around, frightened.

“It’s me. Nahilah.”

You started peering around, terrified, while she tried to convince you that you had to wash and change your clothes.

Nahilah told you later that you were in that state for at least two hours before coming to your senses. After she succeeded in stripping off your clothes, she bathed you in cold water. That was the only chaste bath that took place in Bab al-Shams.

She covered you with soap, her long black dress was soaked, clinging to the curves of her body. And, instead of leaping out of the water like a fish, you let her bathe you, covered in soapsuds, weeping.

Nahilah didn’t say that you wept, but she felt you were on the verge of tears. She said it wasn’t you. It was as though you were another man, as though the fear had almost paralyzed you and made you surrender.

Later, when you came back to yourself, you’d deny all that, claiming that you hadn’t slept for four weeks and that when you heard the sound of Nahilah’s footsteps, you felt safe and gave in to sleep.

I don’t know what to believe.

Sleep or fear?

Should I believe Nahilah, who saw her husband disintegrating, or the husband who claims he was sleeping peacefully to the sound of his wife’s footsteps?

I’ve thought about the story of the cave a lot since you went into a coma, and about your fate and that of Adnan. I’ve thought about those long weeks in the cave and your sleeping while your wife tried to wake you. I wish I could ask Nahilah about it. Nahilah knows the secret, but you, you’re locked up tight, like all men. You’ve turned your life into a closed book, like a circle.

How am I to bear the death of Shams and my fear, if not through telling stories?

But you, what are you afraid of?