Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

Why did you always tell the story of your life as though it were only the story of your journey over there?

You’ll say I talk about Bab al-Shams because I’m in love: “You’re in love, and you want to use my story to fill in the gaps of your own, to paper over your disillusion with the woman who betrayed you.”

Please, don’t speak of betrayal — I don’t believe in it. If they hadn’t humiliated me the way they did, digging around in my hair for cuckold’s horns, staring me down, I wouldn’t have cared.

No, I’m not using your story to complete my own. I lost my own life right at the beginning, when my mother left me and escaped to Jordan. But you, you won everything.

The state you’re in now resembles your former state in the cave. The only difference is that your beloved won’t come and save you from death, so I have to find a woman for you. What do you say to Mme. Fayyad?

“Mme. Fayyad only exists in your imagination,” you’ll say.

But I saw her with my own eyes! She came to the hospital and kissed me. I know you don’t want me to go down this road but before I shut up I want to ask you why you didn’t tell me what went on in the cave during those weeks.

When I asked you, you replied that you’d sat and waited, that nothing happened.

Is waiting nothing? You must be mocking me; waiting is everything. We spend our whole lives waiting, and you say “nothing” as though you wanted to dismiss the entire meaning of our existence.

Get up now and tell me the rest of the story.

The story isn’t yours, it’s Adnan’s. Get up and tell me the story of your friend Adnan. You tell it much better than I do.

ADNAN HEARD the sentence of thirty years in prison and burst out laughing. So the judge added another ten for contempt of court.

Before the sentence, Adnan stood in the dock and put his hands on the bars like a caged animal. He struck the bars and shouted and cursed, so the judge ordered his hands tied behind his back, at which point he decided to remain silent. The judge asked questions, and Adnan said nothing. Then the blond Israeli woman lawyer, the only Israeli one who dared defend Adnan, explained the reason for Adnan’s silence, so they untied him. He said only one thing before being sentenced: “This is the land of my father and my forefathers. I am neither a saboteur nor an infiltrator. I have returned to my land.”

When the judge announced the sentence, Adnan burst out laughing and slapped his hands together as though he’d just heard a good joke. The judge asked him what he thought he was doing.

“Nothing. Nothing at all. But do you really think your state is going to last another thirty years?”

The judge listened to the translation of the defendant’s words, and, as they were leaving, Adnan began yelling, “Thirty years! Your state won’t last, and I’ll put you all on trial as war criminals.”

The judge came back to the stand and added ten years for contempt of court, while Adnan kept up his gesturing and fooling around, as if he were dancing in the Israeli clink.

That’s how you told me the story. You weren’t at the trial, naturally, and the events of the trial weren’t published in the Arab papers, but you knew all that from your private sources — whose source is known to none!

Tell me, now, why did you return in such a state from visiting Adnan, when he was freed after the celebrated prisoner exchange in ’83?

Were you afraid? Of what?

Were you afraid of his illness?

I told you he had a neurological disorder and that neurological disorders could be treated, but you continued to feign ignorance.

Adnan was mentally disturbed, which doesn’t mean he’d gone crazy. He returned as a semi-imbecile; that’s the correct term to describe his condition. He spoke calmly and with self-possession. He recognized everybody and knew the names of all the members of his family, even the grandchildren who’d been born during his long absence. He knew them and embraced them as grandfathers do their grandchildren.

He spoke slowly and calmly, that’s all.

After a few days, however, he began to lose his head. He would have unexpected outbursts and speak to people as though he were talking to the Israeli jailers, jabbering in Hebrew. Then, a bit later, he lost the use of language completely; he’d bellow and run into the streets naked.

You returned from your last visit to him in the Burj al-Barajneh camp defeated, in despair. You asked me for sleeping pills and decided to stop going to see him. His son, Jamil, wanted to send him to the mental hospital. You objected and even wept. Everyone saw you weep. You told them, “Impossible! Adnan is a hero, and heroes aren’t locked up in a lunatic asylum.” It’s said you pulled out your gun and tried to shoot him. People intervened to stop you, saying it was a sin. “The real sin is that he won’t die. The sin is that he should live like this, you bastards.”

Why didn’t you tell me you pulled out your gun? And why didn’t you kill him? Why did you let them take him away to the Dar al-Ajazah Institution? Did you believe that place was the same as a hospital? I swear it wouldn’t even be suitable for a beast. The patients there are crammed together like animals, they live a thousand deaths each day.

This time, allow me to give another version of the facts.

With your permission, I won’t let Adnan end this way. I’ll tell you what happened in a different way.

Yunes, Abu Salem al-Asadi, went to visit his friend Adnan Abu Odeh in the Burj al-Barajneh camp. This wasn’t his first visit since his release from the Israeli prison where Adnan had spent eighteen years. Yunes was at the head of the group that welcomed him home. He danced, fired his rifle into the air, and slaughtered sheep in his honor. He’d embraced Adnan and told everyone, “Hug him, smell the aroma of Palestine!”

Everybody sat in the Abu Odeh clan’s guest hall eating lamb and rice and drinking coffee, and Adnan said nothing except for a few words that were lost among the ecstatic youyous of the women — and even the men, that day. The camp was flooded with a sea of colors — the women wore their multicolor peasant dresses and poured out onto the dusty streets of the camp as though they were back on the streets of their own villages.

When the party was over and everyone had departed, Adnan went back home with his family and sat down among his children and grandchildren. He embraced them all and kept repeating, “Praise be to God!”

Everyone laughed when Yunes related the events of the trial.

“Stand up, Adnan, and tell us the story!” said Yunes.

Adnan didn’t stand up, or tell them the story, or laugh, or clap; he didn’t repeat for them what he’d told the judge: “Do you really think your state is going to last another thirty years?”

Yunes told the story and everyone laughed, while Adnan remained immersed in his deep silence.

“You see, Adnan, twenty years have passed. There’s still plenty of time to go!”

At that moment Adnan began to manifest strange symptoms. He would raise his voice, then fall silent. He spoke an incomplete sentence and mixed in Hebrew words.

Yunes thought he was just tired. “Let the man rest,” he said. “He’s exhausted.”

He said goodbye to Adnan and promised to visit him in the next few days.

A week later, news began to arrive of Adnan’s madness, but Yunes refused to believe it. He went back to his friend’s house to see for himself — he saw and wept and returned distraught.

But things didn’t end there.

One morning, Adnan’s son, Jamil, came to Yunes to inform him of the family’s decision to move Adnan to the mental institution and asked him to get a report from a doctor at the Palestinian Red Crescent.