Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

You’ll say these philosophical theories I’m repeating are an attempt to cover up my ignorance of medicine. Not true. I’m convinced of these things and that’s why I’m treating you according to my own methods. Of course, you’re not the issue; Dr. Amjad was right when he pronounced you a vegetable. But I’m convinced that the soul has its own laws and that the body is a vessel for the soul. I’m trying to rouse you with my stories because I’m certain that the soul can, if it wants, wake a sleeping body.

In China, in spite of everything, and in spite of the madness of history raging in my head, I learned the most valuable thing in my life. I learned that each of our bodies holds the entire history of the human race; your body is your history. I’m the living proof. Look at me. Can’t you see the pain tearing at me? The Chinese doctor was right. The break in my spinal column, dormant for many years, has suddenly come back to life. The pain is everywhere, and painkillers are useless.

Our body is our history, dear friend. Take a look at your history in your wasting body and tell me, wouldn’t it be better if you got up and shook off death?

I learned medicine in China and returned to Lebanon, a doctor, understanding nothing of medicine beyond its general principles, but speaking English!

After I transferred out of the training course, I was taken to a field hospital belonging to the Chinese People’s Army, where a tall man — the Chinese are not all short, as we have a tendency to think — asked me if I spoke English. He asked me in English, so I answered, “Yes.” I used to think I knew English, which we studied in the UNWRA schools *. So they put me with a group of trainees, most of them Africans. The training doctor taught the course in English. I didn’t understand a thing. Well, actually, I understood a little bit, so I decided to pretend I was following everything. I learned to parrot everything that was said in front of me and ended up learning the language. I discovered I was no worse than the others. To speak English, you don’t really have to know it; this is the source of its power. With amazing speed I retained the doctor’s lectures and came back from China rattling on in English, tossing in a few medical terms to convince people that I was a real doctor. Everything was fine.

What I can’t forget is that, when I spoke English in China, I felt I wasn’t myself. Sometimes I’d be my Chinese professor or my African colleague, or I’d imitate the Pakistani. Oh, our group was composed of ten students, eight from Nigeria, me, and a Pakistani. The Pakistani knew more than we did; he said he’d been a student at the medical school in Karachi, had been thrown out because of his political activism and had come to China to study the science of revolution. He didn’t want to study medicine, but they’d forced him to join this course before training him for guerrilla warfare.

I’d imitate him and feel myself becoming another person inside the English language. I’d react as they did — especially like the Pakistani, who would change totally when he got excited, stretching his mouth so that he looked like the heroes in American films when they scream, Fuck!

I figured out something very important. I realized that when I spoke, I was imitating others. Every word I spoke in English had to pass through the image of another person, as if the person speaking weren’t me. And when I returned to Beirut and started speaking Arabic again, I found myself again, I found the Khalil I’d left behind.

In China I discovered that when I spoke the language of others I became like them. This isn’t true, of course. But what if it were? What if, even in Arabic, I was imitating others? And that the only difference was that here I no longer knew who it was I was imitating? We learn our mother tongues from our mothers, imitating them, but we forget that. As we forget, we become ourselves; we speak and believe that we’re the ones who are speaking.

Now I’ve begun to understand your feelings about your father’s voice. You told me that sometimes you felt that the voice emerging from your throat was that of the blind sheikh: “It’s amazing, but I began to look like him, and when I spoke I started to feel it was he who was using my tongue.”

No, no, I don’t agree with that theory. It’s true we imitate, but we shape our own language as we shape our own lives. I don’t know my father. All I remember is a shadow, and I can’t tell you now — or in twenty years — that it’s that shadow’s voice that emerges from my throat.

Of course we imitate, but we forget, and forgetting is a blessing. Without forgetting we would all die of fright and abuse. Memory is the process of organizing what to forget, and what we’re doing now, you and me, is organizing our forgetting. We talk about things and forget other things. We remember in order to forget, this is the essence of the game. But don’t you dare die now! You have to finish organizing your forgetting first, so that I can remember afterwards.

Even now, when I say the word fuck , I see the Pakistani with his distended mouth, white teeth, and fine oblong jaw like the beak of a bird; I feel his voice in my throat, and I can smell China.

I studied medicine for three months and then returned to Beirut carrying with me a new language as well as an education in drinking warm water and in the performance of simple field operations such as removing bullets, bandaging wounds, treating fractures, giving injections and so on.

I passed as a doctor. I worked in a field hospital in Tyre, would stretch my mouth while repeating the Pakistani’s words, and became a doctor. Time’s wheel has turned, as they say, and now here I am, a temporary doctor, in a temporary hospital, in a temporary country. Everything inside me is waiting for something else. These waiting periods breed and erase each other, push each other out of the way and interact.

I look at my life and see images. I see a man who looks like me, and I see men who don’t look like me, but I don’t see myself. It’s strange how we deal with life. We go to one place and find ourselves in another. We search for one thing and find something else. Alternatives pile up on top of us. In place of Nuha came Siham. In place of Siham came Shams, and in place of Shams I don’t know. But now I have to wise up and marry. I’m forty years old, and at forty you either get married or life becomes hell. When a man says he “has to” get married, it means he’s reached rock bottom. Marriage is supposed to happen without that “has to.”

No. With Shams, marriage never occurred to me because I was living like someone under a spell. Now when I remember that magic, I see another man. The Khalil sitting in front of you isn’t Shams’ Khalil. Shams’ Khalil was different. He didn’t eat, because love suppresses the appetite; he didn’t speak, because love has no language; and he didn’t mind waiting. When she was there, her presence filled him up, and when she wasn’t, the waiting filled him up.

Then the love went.

The only thing that destroys love is death. Death is the only cure for love. It ought to have been me. It ought to have been me who killed her. I’m the one who. . But I didn’t.

Now I’m looking for a substitute. I’m not looking for a woman like Shams but for any woman. How good it is to find a woman in your bed! But my bed remains empty, and I can’t ask anyone to help me find a woman. A woman is something you have to find for yourself.

Betrayed, a cuckold, and in search of a woman?

So what? All men are betrayed and all of them are cuckolds. I know. There, in the house of the Green Sheikh, I realized this. I suffered and wept for Shams.

I went through moments of great weakness. Shams was dead, and rumors of a death list were everywhere. I decided to go to them. Abd al-Latif with his one good eye took me to the house of Sheikh Hashim, who they called the Green Sheikh. I took off my shoes and joined their circle and twisted and swayed with the chanting, invoking with them God’s name in their dhkir ritual. I let my breathing be guided by the hand of the sheikh who conducted us to the final ecstasy where we touched the universal Presence. I twirled with them, experienced the intoxication, and my tears flowed involuntarily. The sheikh asked me to stay behind after the others had dispersed and said he was pleased with me, letting me know that the time to repent had come. He accepted me as a disciple in his order. He gave me a book by the great Yashrati sheikh and told me to come and see him whenever I wished.