Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

“But the chickens!

“I don’t know what got into the chickens.

“I went back to my house on my own and stayed in al-Kabri five days not daring to go out — you could still hear scattered shots. On the sixth day, I went out. I found blood everywhere and couldn’t see the chickens. I’m sure they’d shot them all and eaten them. I didn’t see a single chicken. I went to Umm Hussein’s house. Where was her husband? Her husband was with mine and had to be buried, too. The door of her house was off its hinges, and no one was inside. I looked around for her and stumbled upon old Abu Salim, a seventy-five-year-old man, who said he was looking for his son. He kept saying he’d lost his son and needed my help, and it was only then that I came to my senses again.

“Suddenly, I could see straight. I was someone else during those five days I’d spent hidden in my house after burying my husband. I remember nothing, or I remember that I fried some dough and ate it. I was completely lost, as though the soul of some other woman had entered my body. Five days that ran together like one single day, or one hour!

“When I found Abu Salim and walked through the deserted streets with him in search of his lost son, I came back to myself.

“I took the old man’s hand and brought him with me to Tarshiha. I told him he was the one who was lost, not his son. He went with me and didn’t say a thing. He bowed his head and went like a little child. At the entrance to Tarshiha, I saw my sister and rushed over to her. Then I couldn’t find the old man again. His son said he looked for him everywhere but in vain. I swear I don’t know. Maybe he went back to al-Kabri and died there.”

Umm Sa’ad Radi died before the families of the district of Acre assembled at Abu Husam’s house to congratulate him on the glorious death of his son.

If she’d been there she’d have told everyone her story, and told Abu Husam to stop boasting of his fictive heroic deeds.

I visited her a few days before her death. She wasn’t sick; it was more as if her life force were draining away. I prescribed some vitamins even though I knew they wouldn’t do any good. But I did my duty; a doctor has to do his duty to the end — he is the guardian of the spark of life. I’m the guardian of your life force, dear Abu Salem; I won’t abandon you. It’s my duty to defend the life in you against all odds.

With Umm Sa’ad Radi I did my duty. Radi was there, a man of about sixty, his children and grandchildren with him, hovering around his mother’s bed, afraid of death.

Umm Sa’ad Radi spoke in a low voice, almost inaudibly. “His grave,” she said, almost as if she could see him shaking the earth off his bones, raising his head a little, then sitting up with his pale, cracked face and looking at her as though in reproach. The woman kept repeating, “His grave. Go to his grave.”

She died in fear. She lived her whole life in fear, waiting at the entrance of the fedayeen camp for the fighters coming back or going to southern Lebanon and imploring one after another: “I beg you, go to the cemetery at al-Kabri.”

And the young men would shake their heads and run off as though to escape her words.

“The grave is the fourth on the right, near the oak tree. You’ll recognize it, my son. Just dig a little and you’ll find him. I wasn’t able to dig deep enough. Make sure his head’s aimed toward the Qibla , *and if it isn’t, I beg you, move him into the correct position. God will reward you.”

Everyone promised her but no one went. Who would be so stupid as to venture to the cemetery at al-Kabri? And who would go scratching around in a grave?

Even you, Father, made promises to her and lied, telling her you weren’t able to travel that far. Even you didn’t dare speak the truth — that al-Kabri no longer existed, the cemetery had been erased, the oak tree cut down, the olive groves uprooted, and palms and pines had been planted in their place.

Abu Salem never told her he hadn’t looked for the grave, and he never told her the story of the madwoman of al-Kabri and the bag of bones thrown down in the square at Deir al-Asad. He listened to her like all the others, and like all the others he nodded hurriedly and went on.

Umm Sa’ad Radi said she wanted nothing. “They took Palestine? Let them have it. I just want to visit the grave to make sure I buried him correctly. I don’t care about al-Kabri or anywhere else, they’re all going to disappear. They took them? They can have them. But they should give us the grave at least.”

Abu Salem agrees but says nothing.

And we say nothing.

All of us were afraid; we didn’t dare visit her and give her a proper answer. Why? A good question.

Why didn’t we lie to the woman and let her die with her mind at peace?

Why didn’t anyone dare release her from the ghost of the man sitting in his grave gazing at her from the sockets of his eyes, moving his head as though he wanted to say something?

Why didn’t we lie to her?

We’re not even capable of lying. Incapable of war, incapable of lying, incapable of truth.

Umm Sa’ad Radi wasn’t there, and she didn’t tell her story.

As for you, Abu Salem, you were sitting in the midst of them, calm and silent. Everybody knew you’d taken to criticizing everything, and no one took you seriously anymore. You were bitter, they said. Even I thought so. You’d become dismissive; we thought you felt beaten down because the route over there had been blocked. After the fedayeen were thrown out of Jordan in 1970, we only had the Lebanese front, and it was swarming with fighters. They told us we had to climb Mount Hermon to protect Palestine from vanishing, so we climbed it and set the ice on fire with our fighting and our blood. This made your route to Bab al-Shams difficult, if not impossible. However, I know you managed to make your way through and slipped into your village many times, but that’s another story. I’ll save it for tomorrow.

But today.

Now, on that day, you got up and explained things to us. The house of Abu Husam al-Jashi was sailing along on memories; the stories were flying from people’s mouths. Everyone told some story or other and believed what he wanted to remember.

And the curses rained down on Kallas and Alloush: How could the Arab Liberation Army have withdrawn? How could they have betrayed us? How?

Then your quiet voice came from the corner of the room, cutting through all the others. You were holding a thin stick resembling a long pen in your hand, and you drew imaginary lines and circles on the dark red carpet. You said that Galilee had collapsed.

“The whole of Galilee collapsed between operations Dekel and Hiram, and we had no idea.”

The Dekel plan began with the occupation of Kaswan on July 9, 1948. Then al-Mukur, al-Jdeideh, Abu Sinan, Kafar Yasif, and al-Kweikat were occupied. On July 13, they occupied Nazareth, and then Ma’loul, linking Kafar ha-Horesh with the rest of the settlements south of Nazareth. On July 15, an Israeli unit moved from Shafa Amr to occupy Saffouri, and a broad mopping-up operation followed that led to the occupation of al-Birwa.

“What did we do after the fall of al-Birwa? We were besieged in Sha’ab. Every village and city in Galilee fell during the war, except Sha’ab. We stayed there until the end of Operation Hiram on October 28, where, in the space of sixty hours, the whole of Galilee had fallen.”

“We never. .” said Yunes.

He stood up like a man I didn’t recognize, uttered half a sentence and sat down again without finishing it. He put his head in his hands and closed his eyes.

He resembled a man, somebody I didn’t know. When we call someone we know “a man,” it means we don’t recognize him anymore, or he’s taken us by surprise. That’s why a wife addresses her husband as “Man” — because she doesn’t know him.