Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

I was just a kid at the time. I fought in the district of al-Weibdeh near the Fatah office. To tell you the truth, I’d been enthusiastic about going to Amman so I could look for my mother, but that’s a long story I’ll tell you later.

The war in Beirut was different and went on for a long time. When it started, I thought it would be Amman all over again, and the fighting wouldn’t go on for more than a few weeks and then we’d withdraw somewhere. But I was wrong, Lebanon blew up in our faces. An entire country reduced to splinters, and we found ourselves running around among the shattered fragments of districts, cities, villages, sects.

I won’t provide an analysis of the Lebanese civil war right now, but it terrified me. It terrified me that the belly of a city could burst open and its guts spill out and its streets be transformed into borders for dismembered communities. Everything came apart during the years of the civil war; even I was split into innumerable personae. Our political discourse and alliances changed from one day to the next, from support for the Left to support for the Muslims, from the Muslims to the Christians, and from the Shatila massacre, carried out by Israelis and Phalangists in ’82, to the siege-massacre of ’85, carried out by the Amal movement with the support of Syria.

How can this war be believed?

I see it pass in front of me like a mysterious dream, like a cloud that envelops me from head to foot. I was able to swallow an amazing number of contradictory slogans: Words were cheap at the time, as was blood, which is why we didn’t notice the abyss we were sliding into. None of us noticed, not even you. I know you hated that war and said it wasn’t a war. With due respect, I disagree because I don’t think you can apply the concept of blame to history. History is neutral, I tell you — only to hear you answer, “No! Either we dish out blame where blame is due, or we become mere victims.” I don’t want to get caught up in that argument since, as you can see, nowadays I tend to agree with you, but you’ll have to explain one thing to me. Some day soon, when you wake from your long sleep, you must explain to me how clouds can so fill someone’s head that he goes to his own death without noticing.

In the war, the Khalil who’s sitting in front of you now was the hero of al-Burjawi. No, I’m lying. I wasn’t a hero. I was with the young fighters when we occupied that salient that climbs toward al-Ashrafiyyeh, and that’s where I fell: The world flipped upside-down, I couldn’t hear a sound, and I understood that death has no meaning, and we can die without realizing it.

Like all fedayeen, I expected to die and didn’t care. I thought that when I died, I’d die like a hero, meaning I’d look death in the eye before I closed mine. But when the world flipped upside down in al-Burjawi and I fell, I didn’t look at death. Death occupied me without my realizing. It was only in the hospital that I found out four of my comrades had been killed, and then I was stricken with the crazy fear that I’d die without knowing I was dead.

If you were alive, my dear friend, you’d laugh and tell me that no one knows he’s dying when he’s dying. But it’s not true, I’ve seen them dying and knowing. A doctor sees a lot, and I’ve seen them trembling, terrified of death, and then dying.

It’s not true that the dying don’t know; if they didn’t, death would lose its meaning and become like a dream. When death loses its meaning, life loses its meaning, and we enter a labyrinth from which there is no exit.

Tell me, when you were struck dumb and fell, did you know you were dying?

Of course not. I’m sure you didn’t. In medical terms, the moment you lost the power of speech, you became worried because Amna couldn’t understand what you were saying. You thought she’d gone deaf, so you raised your voice and tried to express yourself with gestures. Then, with the second stroke, you lost consciousness. Now look at you, lying here, not aware of a thing.

For me, too, when the world turned upside down, I didn’t regain consciousness for three days. The doctor at the American University Hospital in Beirut said I had to remain motionless for a week. My l6 vertebra was crushed to powder, and to escape semiparalysis, the only cure was to lie motionless.

If I told you the pain was unbearable, I’d be lying. The pain was appalling, as pain always is, but it could be withstood. It was like a hand of steel gripping my chest and neck. I was paralyzed, my chest was constricted, my breathing was shallow, and pain ran through every part of my body. But I knew I wasn’t going to die and that if I did, I’d die with my comrades who’d been killed by the heat from the B7s. The B7 was our secret weapon — a small rocket-propelled grenade carried on the shoulder capable of piercing tank armor because it gave off two thousand degrees of heat.

We were in our hiding place in an old house in al-Burjawi when the grenade fell on us and we ignited. They told us later that our bodies were completely charred, that I was black as charcoal. They thought I was dead and took me to the hospital morgue, but a nurse then noticed I was breathing so they moved me to the emergency room. They worked for hours to remove the black coating incrusted on my skin; you can still see a trace of it on my shoulder.

The doctor said my life wasn’t in danger; the only real fear was that I’d be paralyzed, but I’d probably “escape clean” — and he made a gesture with his fingers like popping an almond from its skin. I wasn’t afraid of paralysis. I was sure it wouldn’t happen to me. But the idea that I’d die without knowing struck terror into me. Everyone knowing and not me. Everyone weeping and not the dead man. A true masquerade, the masquerade of death.

I got better, of course. After a week I got out of bed completely healed; I even forgot the pain. Pain is the only thing we forget. We’re capable of revisiting many things, and may even be moved by certain sensations, but not pain. We either have pain or we don’t — there’s no halfway house. Pain is when it’s there, and when it’s not, it doesn’t exist. The only feeling it leaves is of lightness, the ability to fly.

Why am I telling you about my back?

Is it because the pain came back since Shams’ death?

Shams has nothing to do with it. God knows, when I was with her I didn’t notice my back. I was like a god. With her I experienced love in the way you described it: You said God had made a mistake with men; he’d created them with all the necessary parts except one, which there is no doing without and whose importance we only discover when we truly need it.

But why am I telling you about the missing part now? I started out telling you about China.

Could it be because that was where I became aware of how ponderous my body was and discovered I was unfit for war? Do you know what it means to be unfit for war during a war?

I won’t take up more of your time with this. I sense you’re tired of my stories and would prefer to have me take you back to Bab al-Shams, to that day when you wept for love and told Nahilah you felt impotent.

“Women possess it, this missing organ,” you told me. “I discovered there that women possess it; it’s their entire body, while I’m incomplete, incomplete and impotent.”

Nahilah looked at you in astonishment. She had a hard time believing in this sense of impotence that you were voicing, because you were insatiable. She thought you were talking about sexual impotence and burst out laughing. After such a journey of the body through the realms of ecstasy, you stop and tell her you’re lacking something! She felt she’d been purified inside and out, luminous, embodied, that her eyes were two mirrors reflecting the world!