Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

“But I can’t go back.”

“Of course you can.”

“If I go back, I won’t work with the peasants because we’re not living in our own country and because there aren’t any peasants. .”

My response stunned her. I explained that we were a people of refugees, and she was even more stunned. I said we were orchestrating our revolution from the outside, surrounding our land because we were unable to enter it.

“You are surrounding the cities,” she said, looking relieved, “as we did on the Long March.”

“No,” I said. “We’re surrounding the countryside because we’re outside our country.”

Numerous questions flitted across her face, but she didn’t say anything more; she didn’t understand how you could surround the countryside or how there could be no peasants. She asked me to pack my bags, so I left the clinic and went back to the barracks as though nothing had happened.

The next morning, I went out to join the lineup as usual, but the trainer, who was accompanied by a social worker who spoke Classical Arabic, ordered me to leave. I went back to my room to wait to go home, but instead of sending me to Beirut, they took me to another camp, where I spent the training period in a field hospital belonging to the Chinese People’s Army. It seems that what I’d said had had some effect on the doctor. Medical training wasn’t very different from military training. We drank the same water, ate the same food, ran in morning lineups and practiced using medical instruments as though they were weapons. The only difference was the language.

In the military camp, we used Arabic, while in the field hospital, it was English. It’s true that I don’t know the language very well, but I could understand everything. The truth is I learned English in China! Imagine the paradox; imagine that I learned the importance of drinking water warm in English! In China they always drink their water tepid, almost hot. That’s why no one gets fat there. You open your eyes in the morning, and you’re desperate for a drink of cold water. But you get warm water, so you drink and you drink and you’re still thirsty. For the first few days, I was thirsty all the time. The more I drank, the thirstier I would get. Then I became accustomed to their water, discovered the secret and grew to like it. Warm water enters you as if through your pores: You drink as though you aren’t drinking, as if the water were already inside you. To this day I yearn for warm water, but I don’t drink it anymore the way I used to during the first days after I returned to Beirut. Perhaps the climate is the reason. The climate is what makes our men fat.

After the first days in China, we were overwhelmed by the feeling that we were outsiders. This happened when we visited the tunnels of Beijing — there were tunnels everywhere, tunnels full of rice and wheat depots, tunnels amazingly camouflaged. Once we went into a small shop to buy clothes. The salesman stood up and pushed aside piles of khaki garments, and we found ourselves descending into a tunnel more than thirty meters deep, equipped for people to live in for months.

An underground universe. A universe of war, a universe of history. In China we learned how a human being could live in history. How can I describe history to you?

Some middle school children came one day to take part in our military training. We competed with them at target practice with Simonov rifles. It’s a useless rifle, or that’s what we think here, but over there they respect the Simonov enormously, because it’s the rifle that played such an important role in bringing American planes down in Vietnam.

The point is that Chinese kids, not more than fifteen years old, beat professional officers at target practice! That was our first lesson — respect your weapon. Of course, you’ll say, we forgot everything the moment we returned to Beirut, but that’s not true. I didn’t forget everything, but I wasn’t able to keep things up on my own. How can you convince people from here to drink water warm? How can you teach them to respect an ordinary rifle when Kalashnikovs are dirt cheap, along with Belgian and American rifles and all the others?

This isn’t what I wanted to tell you.

I wanted to try to describe for you the sight of the people doing their morning exercises. I know this is difficult to believe, but I saw it with my own eyes. At seven in the morning, in the streets, music blasts out of loudspeakers scattered everywhere, and millions of men, women, and children of all ages pour into the streets for their calisthenics. The entire Chinese people doing morning stretches!

Can you imagine how these scenes affected us?

First the warm water, then the Simonov children, then the morning exercises, then the soybean that swells up in water that we ate, and then the long, thin bag of rice that every Chinese soldier would wrap around his neck and waist.

It took us into history.

Now, that’s history.

Today I might have another reaction, but at the time we were intoxicated by the wine of revolution. Imagine with me a billion Chinese men, women, and children doing their street exercises each morning. Imagine the tunnels and the grain and the ideas of Chairman Mao Tse Tung.

I was convinced and bewitched.

No, I can’t say I was convinced one hundred percent, but I started repeating phrases to myself as though they were prayers: “Chairman Mao Tse Tung, a thousand years more.” Of course, Mao died, and stayed good and dead, and the Cultural Revolution ended, the crimes were revealed, and these things no longer stir up the same sort of emotions in us.

But during those days, Father, we felt we were making history. We behaved and talked as though we were heroes in novels without authors, novels we all knew and which we narrated every day. We ended up not speaking when we spoke but reciting lines we’d learned by heart. We would ask and we knew the answer and our memories would speak through us. It was as though we were mimicking ourselves; yes, mimicking ourselves.

Now, that’s history.

It drags you to two contradictory places: where you’re everything and where you’re nothing. You are both a monster and an angel, you kill with the feeling that you’re the one dying, you seek gratification and fear it, you become your own god.

History is our becoming gods and monsters at the same time.

I say it because I lived it. No, it’s not about China, it’s about us. I don’t want to desecrate anyone’s memory, but you know Ali Rabeh? The martyr, Ali Rabeh, who we mourned so bitterly?

Ali Rabeh was the hero of Maroun al-Ras in ’78. He didn’t run from the Israelis who swept over our positions in their first incursion into Lebanon. Ali Rabeh, along with a small group of others, stuck it out and fought and became a hero. We thought he’d died because in those days we used to assume that anyone who didn’t withdraw was a dead man. Our term for running away was withdrawing . Ali Rabeh came back alive, told his story, and became a hero.

I saw an unrecognizable monster emerge from inside Ali Rabeh. We were fighting in the Burjawi district — this was before my fall and before China and before I became a doctor. Abu George was there. This Abu George wasn’t important enough to be mentioned in the history books. He was just an ordinary citizen living on the ground floor of a three-story building located at the crossroads that divides al-Burjawi in half — a protected half and a half exposed to gunfire from the Phalangists who occupied the tall buildings of al-Ashrafiyyeh opposite. He was our friend. From his accent, I could tell that he was from Syria, from the village of Maaloula where the houses seem to grow out of the rock and the people still speak Aramaic and pray in the language of Christ.