Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

On my second visit, when I went to ask him about the story of Reem at Sha’ab, which I’d heard from everyone, I saw his wife pound on the door of their house, cursing the sheikh. He refused to open the door.

Then I learned the truth.

She was sixty-three years old. Seated on the bench outside her sister’s house, she told the story, to those who wanted to hear, of how she’d gone in and found the sheikh panting with the wife of one of his disciples in his arms.

“I saw it,” the woman went on, “and her cuckolded mule of a husband didn’t want to believe me. He said I was crazy and drove his wife home.”

The Green Sheikh’s wife said that when she saw them she started screaming. Everyone, including the woman’s husband, rushed over, and the hullabaloo commenced. She continued: “Then the Green Sheikh raised his hand, everyone fell silent, and he declared, ‘You are repudiated.’ He managed to convince everyone that I was crazy, and ordered me out of the house. I tried to tell them the truth, but no one believed me. A man in his seventies, the old lecher: I saw him hugging the woman to his fat belly while he panted like a dog! They all said I was crazy. The husband took his wife away and spat on me. He should have spat on himself and on her.”

In the house of the Green Sheikh, I understood that Shams hadn’t betrayed me. She’d been under a man’s spell, or under I don’t know what. . I left the Sufi circle and never went back.

I understood Shams, but I was very angry with her for not having told me about her relationship with that other man. I’d have advised her not to kill him. But she was right; only death can put an end to love. By killing her love, she revealed who was the more courageous of the two of us. Me, I waited for my love to die. And with death came death. With death love evaporates and turns into nothing.

I don’t care about people. They pity me because they don’t understand anything. They pity me because I loved her, because she betrayed me, because I fear her ghost and because — I don’t know. For my part, I don’t care. Anyway, I’m in China. The hospital sent me back to China, where I was able to work on my English. I can’t be a doctor just in Arabic, and without warm water! There I was reborn. There, when everything seemed to end, when they decreed I couldn’t continue my military training, everything began. Khalil the officer was swept away, and in came Khalil the doctor. Instead of going to war, I went to the hospital. And today Khalil the doctor has been swept away again, and in has come Khalil the nurse.

Do you know what Dr. Amjad said?

He invited me into his office and started rambling incoherently. He sat behind the desk and spoke as though he were the director of a hospital. Of course, he is the director of a hospital, but come on! A hospital without the minimum necessities — no hygiene, no medication, nothing — it’s almost a prison. And this empty head stammers in front of me, saying I really should work full time. He stretches out his words, hesitates and leaves half of them suspended in midair before snatching them back and continuing. He trips over the letter R , saying, “You’re a nu’se , and you have to work as a nu’se . It’s impossible. Things can’t go on this way.” I tried to explain the conditions under which I was working and how you take up all my time.

“All your time!” he said mockingly. “The fact is, we’ve started to worry for your sanity, doctor, talking to yourself all the time. You think we don’t know what you do in that room? You think talking’s a cure? If talking were a cure, we’d have liberated Palestine long ago. No, it’s impossible.”

I told him I took half a salary and was content with that, and he told me that what I called a half-salary was a full salary now that the Red Crescent’s funding had been cut off.

“The money evaporated with Kuwait’s oil, Dr. Khalil. There is no money. There’s war and America, but the oil has gone, and the Arabs have gone bankrupt, and the revolution has gone bankrupt and your salary isn’t half a salary, so you’ll have to choose between working with us as director of nursing on a full-time basis and leaving the hospital.”

He said the hospital wasn’t a place of asylum, that he only wanted what was best for me, and he had respect for my past accomplishments. “But you have to do something. Don’t be afraid, you’re under our protection.”

I didn’t answer. He was trying to manipulate me, to make it clear that he knew the ins and outs of the Shams affair. All the same, I was on the verge of refusing his offer when he hung a threat over you.

“We’ll take care of Yunes,” he said. “Anyway, he no longer needs attention and the question of whether he should stay here is still on the table. I’m in the process of getting his papers ready for his transfer to Dar al-Ajazah. *People like him are put there, not in a hospital. His condition’s hopeless, and clinically he’s dead.”

Do you see what that son-of-a-bitch doctor wants? He wants to throw you into a home. Yunes — Abu Salem, Izz al-Din, Adam — is to end up in Dar al-Ajazah? May lightening strike him! Do you know what this means? Listen to me, please. I didn’t promise Amjad that I’d consider the proposal seriously out of concern for myself. After all, what can they do to me? It’s God that decides when we die. I said I’d consider the proposal because the idea of that place struck terror in my heart. Do you know what moving you there would mean? You would rot alive — yes, you’d rot and the worms and the ulcers would devour you. I didn’t tell you about Adnan because I didn’t want to upset you, but I’m the only one who visited him, because they sent for me, and while I was there Dr. Karim Jaber showed me something horrifying.

“I’m not a relative of the patient,” I told him.

“Precisely,” he answered. “We reviewed his medical file and found the report you wrote, and we’d like to discuss his condition with you.”

When I said I knew nothing about neurological diseases, he eyed me with distaste and corrected me: Mr. Adnan’s illness was not neurological but psychiatric. He was suffering from schizophrenia and received electric shock therapy.

I’ll spare you the excruciating details of the doctor’s diagnosis since I was certain he understood absolutely nothing. He invited me to see Adnan and we walked through the place, which could have been called anything but a hospital.

Heaps of lunatics, the smells of lunatics, the sounds of lunatics.

Moans from every corner.

Moans rising like smoke.

In front of the cluster of slums that previously was the Sabra camp, there stands a dingy yellow building enclosed on all sides called Dar al-Ajazah.

In this enclosure, which isn’t part of our world, I walked and walked until I got to a room that looked nothing like other rooms and saw an old man tied up in chains; they told me it was Adnan.

We walked through the first floor, where the larger wards are. “Here,” said Dr. Karim, “is where we put the nondangerous patients.”

We walked among them. They clung to our clothes as though they wanted something they couldn’t articulate. The musty smell of food and the sight of the patients in their soiled white garments gave the impression that the rooms hadn’t been aired for years.

I told Dr. Karim that I could barely breathe because of the poor ventilation, but he just patted me on the shoulder, saying that the hospital had been built to the proper standards and was equivalent to the best in Europe.

“And the odor?” I asked.

“Oh, that’s nothing,” he said. “It’s the natural odor of a group of people. Any indiscriminate mixture of humans or animals gives off a strong and penetrating odor, that’s all.”