Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

I left him under the desk and stormed out of his office. A stormy exit: a hurricane.

And I came back to you.

I’m sure now that you’ll stay put even though I didn’t say what I meant to in Amjad’s office.

Tell me, how is it possible? How could Amjad dare speak of you that way? Is he completely out of it? Everyone knows your story. Doesn’t it mean anything to him or what? Has he lost his memory? Are we a people without a memory? Maybe he’s just out of it, but I bet he’s not. What’s come over him? What’s come over all of us? In the end, there’s nothing left but the end. You and me, in a world that’s hurling us into oblivion.

You’re fortunate, Yunes.

Can you imagine where you’d be without me?

If you were in my shoes, and only if you were in my shoes, you’d understand that the worst is yet to come. I know, you want me to tell you about the political situation at the moment. I hate politics because I can no longer understand what’s going on. I just want to live. I run from my death into yours and from my self to your corpse. What can a corpse do?

You can’t save me and I can’t heal you, so what are we doing here? I’m in the hospital and you’re in prison — no, I’m in prison and you’re in the hospital — and memories flow. Do you expect me to make myself a life out of memories?

I know, you don’t like memories. You don’t remember because you’re alive. You’ve spent your whole life playing cat and mouse with death, and you’re not convinced the end has come, you’re not ready to sit on the sidelines and remember. “We only remember the dead,” you said to me once, but no, I completely disagree with you about that. I remember through you so I can stay alive. I want to know. At least know.

Like all the other children who grew up in the camps, I heard all the stories, but I never understood. Do you imagine it’s enough to tell us we weren’t defeated in 1948 — because we never fought — to make us accept the dog’s life we’ve led since we were born? Do you imagine I believed my grandmother? Why did my mother run away? Why did my grandmother tell me my mother had gone to see her family and would come back? She didn’t come back. I went to Jordan to look for her and couldn’t find a trace of her, as though she’d evaporated into thin air. That’s how it works for us: Things disappear rather than appear, as in a dream.

Now, within this long dream in the hospital, I want you to tell me the story. I’ll tell it to you, and you can make comments. I’ll tell it, and you’ll speak to me. But before that I want to tell you a secret, but please don’t get angry. I watched the video Umm Hassan brought, and I saw al-Ghabsiyyeh. I saw the mosque and the lotus tree and the roads smothered in weeds, and I felt nothing. I felt no more than I felt when I went to the center of Beirut devastated by the civil war and saw the vegetation wrapped around the soaring buildings and the ruined walls. No, that’s not true. In the middle of Beirut, I almost wept — I did weep. But while watching Umm Hassan’s film, I felt a breath of hot air slap me. Why do you want me to weep for the ruins of history? Tell me, how did you abandon them there? How did you manage that? How did you live in two places at once, inside two histories and two loves? I won’t take your sincerity at face value nor your enigmatic talk about women. All I want is to understand why Nahilah didn’t come with you to Lebanon. How could you have abandoned her? How could you have lived out your story and let it grow and grow to the point of killing you?

My question, dear master, is: Why?

Why are we here? Why this prison? Why do I have no one left but you, and you no one but me? Why am I so alone?

I know you’re not able to answer, not because you’re sick or because you’re suspended between life and death, but because you don’t know the answer.

Tell me, for God’s sake, tell me, why didn’t you insist that your wife come with you to Lebanon? Why did Nahilah refuse to come?

She said that she wanted to stay behind with the blind sheikh but you didn’t believe her. Yet you abandoned her and left. You left her and you left your oldest son, who died. It’s because your father told you, “Go, my son, and leave her here. We’re drained after so many moves; we don’t have the energy to pick up and move again.”

The old blind man, who’d moved from village to village and from olive grove to olive grove until fortune brought him to Deir al-Asad to die, told you he didn’t have the energy to move, and you believed him?

Why did you believe him?

Why didn’t you tell them?

Why did you turn your back on them and go?

I know you were one man straying from village to village along with the other lost souls, that you were wanderers in despair. But what did you do after the fall of Tarshiha? Why didn’t you go to Lebanon with the fighters? You made your way into the hills of al-Kabri and fought with the Yemenis, and then returned to Sha’ab and found the village empty. You looked for them everywhere. A month later you found them in Deir al-Asad, living in half a house, and instead of looking after them you left again, abandoned them.

Tell me, what came over you?

Fill me in.

Whenever I ask you what happened, you start mixing events up, jumping from month to month and from village to village, as though time had melted away among the stones of the demolished villages. My grandmother used to tell me stories as though she were tearing them into shreds; instead of gathering them together, she’d rip them apart, and I understood nothing. I never was able to understand why our village fell or how.

I can understand my grandmother, I can forgive her her pillow that reeks of decay. But you, you who fought in ’36, who took part in all the wars, why don’t you know?

Do you want me to believe my grandmother, to lay my head on her pillow of dried flowers and say, “This is al-Ghabsiyyeh”? Do you want me to be like her and close my eyes? Her only son came back, and she didn’t see him at all. She was standing under the olive tree, undoing her hair and swaying in sorrow, when her son, my father, came back carrying a sack of vegetables, but she didn’t see him. The boy, who had just slipped through a shower of bullets, grasped his mother’s dress, and the two of them burst into tears together, she because she’d lost him and he from seeing her weep that way.

I won’t tell you about my father who died in a heap on the threshold of his house. They assassinated him and left him there. I didn’t see it myself. My mother and his mother were there, and when I see him now it’s with my mother’s and my grandmother’s eyes. I see him dying in a pool of his own blood like a slaughtered lamb, and I see white.

But no, it didn’t happen that way.

The sky fell to the earth, my grandmother told me, describing the terrible exodus into the fields. The sky fell to earth, the stars turned to stones, and everything went black.

Tell me about that blackness. I don’t want the usual song about the betrayal by the Arab armies in the ’48 war — I’ve had enough of armies. What did you do? Why are you here and they’re there? And why did fate finally bring us together now?

I won’t go back as far as Ain al-Zaitoun because our story begins where the story of Ain al-Zaitoun ends.

That was on the night of May 1 of ’48. You’ll never forget this date because you tattooed it with a piece of smoldering iron onto your left wrist. On that day Ain al-Zaitoun was wiped out of existence. The Israelis entered the village and demolished it house by house. It’s as though it had never been. Later, they planted a pine forest on the site of the village.

Where were you on May 1?

I know you were organizing the defense of Sha’ab. You had been summoned by Abu Is’af and you’d gone, not expecting an attack on the village. The sacred jihad battalions were reorganizing themselves after the volunteer Arab Liberation Army, led by the Lebanese Fawzi al-Qawuqji, decided to enter Galilee.