Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

This is where Dr. Khalil — that would be me — comes in. He went to the Burj al-Barajneh camp, examined Adnan and said he was suffering from depression and in need of long-term neurological treatment, but there was no need to put him into a hospital. Adnan’s condition worsened, however, to the point where he would leave the house naked. The writing was on the wall, and Jamil came to me for help. I explained my diagnosis and the man exploded, shouting that he couldn’t take it any longer and that he’d made up his mind and it didn’t matter whether I wrote the report or not.

Yunes decided to intervene.

He went to Burj al-Barajneh and knocked on Adnan’s door. Jamil welcomed him, then started complaining and telling him stories. Yunes told him to be quiet.

Yunes went into the living room where Adnan was sitting in his pajamas listening to Umm Kalsoum’s “I’m Waiting for You” on the radio and swaying to the music. Yunes greeted his old friend. But Adnan remained absorbed in Umm Kalsoum, as though unaware of him.

Yunes pulled out his gun, fired one shot at Adnan’s head and shouted, “I declare you a martyr.”

Then he bent over his blood-covered friend and embraced him, weeping and saying, “It wasn’t me that killed you, it was Israel.”

Adnan died a martyr. They printed his photo on big red posters, and he had a huge funeral the likes of which had never been seen before.

Don’t you think this ending’s much better than yours?

You should have killed him the way they do a wounded stallion instead of letting him be taken there.

Instead, you came to me asking for sleeping pills and left your friend to die a gruesome death in that place.

I saw him there, and I know he spent his final days screaming and then in a coma having shock treatments, but I never told you because you were busy and only wanted to hear what made you feel good.

As far as you were concerned, Adnan ended in the courtroom with his “This is the land of my father and my forefathers.” You’d clap your hands and laugh, saying, “Thirty years! God bless you, Adnan. There’s still plenty of time to go, Adnan. The years have passed, and we’re still in the camp.”

“It was time that pushed Adnan over the edge,” you told me. “Don’t count the years. We need to forget. The years pass, that doesn’t matter. Twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, a hundred years, what’s the difference?”

You let Adnan die like a dog in the hospital, and his son didn’t have the courage to announce his death. The Abu Odeh family didn’t take part in his funeral. They buried him secretly, as though there’d been a scandal. Even you, his lifelong friend, didn’t go to his funeral.

Now do you understand my confusion?

The temporary confuses me because it scares me.

“Everything’s temporary,” you told me when we met after the disaster in ’82. And during the long siege at Shatila in ’85, you said it was temporary. “Listen, we have no choice. However dire the circumstances are, we have to keep on living or we’ll simply disappear.”

I know your views, your eloquence, and your ability to make the impossible sound reasonable.

But what would happen if we were to remain in this temporary world forever?

Do you believe, for example, that your present condition is temporary?

Do you believe that I’ll stay here in your temporary world trying in vain to wake you, telling you stories I don’t know, traveling with you to a country that I’ve never seen?

What kind of a game is this? You’re dying right in front of me, so I’ll take you to an imaginary country!

“Don’t say imaginary! ” I can hear you protesting. “It’s more real than reality.”

Very well, my friend. I’ll take you to a real country. Then what? I can’t stand any more illusions. I want something other than these stories stuffed with heroic deeds. I can’t live forever within the walls of fiction.

Should I tell you about myself?

There’s nothing to tell. I have nothing to say except that I’m a prisoner. I’m a prisoner of this hospital. Like all prisoners, I live on memories. Prison is a storytelling school: Here we can go wherever we want, twist our memory however we please. Right now, I’m playing with your memory and mine. I forget about the danger hanging over my life, I play with yours, and I try to wake you up. The fact is I no longer care whether or not you wake up; your return to life doesn’t matter anymore. But I don’t want you to die, because if you die, what will become of me? Would I go back to being a nurse or wait for death at home?

So, you’re right.

You were always right: The temporary is preferable to the permanent, or the temporary is the permanent. When the temporary comes to an end, so does everything else. I’m in your temporary world now: I visit your country, live your life and make imaginary journeys. I’m your temporary doctor who isn’t really a doctor. Do you believe I became a doctor? Do you believe three months’ study in China can make someone a doctor?

Would you like to hear about China?

I’ll give you a bath first, then order a dish of beans from Abu Jaber’s next door, then after dinner, I’ll tell you. I’m starving and the hospital food is foul. Believe me, you eat better than I do. You can’t taste anything now because you’re fed through your nose, but the taste of bananas with milk is delicious. Our food, on the other hand, is vile, and I’m forced to eat it. What else can I eat? Do you think I’m going to pay for a dish of beans every day? I had to fight a huge battle to get Dr. Amjad to take me back onto the hospital payroll as a mere nurse, at a miserable salary. He claims I’m not working and you don’t need a full-time nurse and all I do is take care of you.

That bastard of a doctor only agreed to pay me half a salary after Zainab intervened and told him his conduct was unjustified “because Dr. Khalil was a founder of this hospital, and he has a right to return to it.” She used the word doctor after hesitating and eyeing me like an idiot, as though she had really gone above and beyond the call of duty.

Do you know how much I make?

I make two hundred thousand Lebanese lira a month, or the equivalent of a mere one hundred and twenty U.S. dollars. A doctor for a hundred dollars, what a bargain! It’s not even enough to cover the cost of cigarettes, tea, and arak. And I only drink arak rarely because it’s gotten expensive.

What age are we living in?

“We were willing to take the shit, but the shit thought it was too good for us,” as they say. Between you and me, Amjad’s right. He found out I wasn’t a doctor, so he offered me a job as a nurse. I refused. And when I agreed, he made me half a nurse!

Do you believe I’m a doctor?

You encouraged me when I came back from China to work as a doctor, telling me revolutionary medicine was better than regular medicine.

But how sad it is when revolutions come to an end! The end of a revolution’s the ugliest thing there is. A revolution is like a person: It gets senile and rambles and wets itself.

What matters is that revolutionary medicine no longer exists. The revolution’s over, medicine’s gone back to being medicine, and I was only a temporary doctor.

And now I’m returning to my real self.

But what is my real self?

I have no idea. I know I became a doctor by accident, because I fractured my spine. I don’t remember how the accident happened — we were in the Burjawi district, whose main street forms a tongue descending from al-Ashrafiyyeh in East Beirut to Ras al-Nab’ in the west, a stretch we were able to occupy to announce that we were liberating Beirut.

It was Lebanon’s civil war.

When the war began, I remembered Amman and how we were thrown out without having lost; in September of ’70 we were defeated without a war and left for the forests of Jerash and Ajloun, and that was the end of it. Amman — today it seems like a dream; Black September was my dream. We called that September black to convey its significance, but Amman was white, and there I discovered the whiteness of death. Death is white, white as these sheets that you’re wrapped up in in your iron bed.