Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

And Nahilah, what did she call you?

You never told me your wife’s names for you, but I don’t think she addressed you as “Man” despite the fact that she was completely in the dark about her husband.

This man, his head crowned with white, stood up and tried to respond to this woman. All the woman said was what we’d been saying every day, what we’ll always say because it’s easiest.

“So, they sold out,” said the woman.

But instead of letting the words slide past, as words usually do on such occasions, you stood up and said, “We never. .” and fell silent. And everyone else fell silent.

Yunes used Classical Arabic on that occasion, as though he felt himself to be an orator or wanted to say the final and unanswerable word. So he said, “We never. .” in Classical Arabic and sat down.

I would like to know, what stopped you? You waited for the teardrop to be caught in Nuha’s eye before speaking. You stood up twice and started to tell the story of what happened to you in Sha’ab, your last war. You said that all the villages fell except for Sha’ab: “We evacuated Sha’ab because defending it was impossible after the rest of Galilee had fallen. Sha’ab isn’t a country, it’s just a village.”

You said you understood the meaning of the word country after the fall of Sha’ab. A country isn’t oranges or olives, or the mosque of al-Jazzar in Acre. A country is falling into the abyss, feeling that you are part of the whole, and dying because it has died. In those villages running down to the sea from northern Galilee to the west, no one thought of what it would mean for everything to fall. The villages fell, and we ran from one to another as though we were on the sea jumping from one boat to another, the boats sinking, and us with them. No one was able to conceive of what the fall would mean, and the people fell because everything fell.

You talked and talked; you were at boiling point, almost exploding, and we couldn’t grasp what you were trying to get at, and why you said that Palestine no longer existed.

“Palestine was the cities — Haifa, Jaffa, Jerusalem, and Acre. In them we could feel something called Palestine. The villages were like all villages. It was the cities that fell quickly, and we discovered that we didn’t know where we were. The truth is that those who occupied Palestine made us discover the country as we were losing it. No, it wasn’t only the fault of the Arab armies and the ALA; we were all at fault because we didn’t know. And by the time we knew, everything was over. We found out at the end.

“Listen. All of them sold out, and we want to buy it back. We tried to buy it back, but we were defeated, defeated utterly.

“Listen. They were less traitors than miserable wretches because they were ignorant; they didn’t know what was really happening. Would you believe me if I said that none of us — not I, not Abu Is’af — knew their plans or understood the logic of their war? We didn’t know the difference between the Palmach and the Stern Gang. *

“Why call it a war when you aren’t really fighting?

“We thought we were fighting to defend our homes. But not them; they didn’t have any villages to defend. They were an army that advanced and retreated freely, as armies do.

“We didn’t put up a defense. At Sha’ab we discovered we were incapable of defending our homes. My house in Ain al-Zaitoun disappeared into thin air; all the houses in the village were blown up the moment they entered. I fought at Sha’ab, even though it wasn’t my village.

“We fought and fought. Don’t believe all that lying history. We have to go back there to fight, but I’m here. That’s enough for now.”

Do you remember how Abu Husam got up, all macho, and said that it made him angry to hear that kind of talk. “The Arab Liberation Army never fought. The Arab armies just entered Palestine to protect the borders that had been drawn and left us on our own.”

You tried to explain that we fought but we didn’t know. When you fight and don’t know, it’s as though you aren’t fighting. But no one wanted to listen. Only Nuha. Do you remember Nuha? She was there. She came and sat close to you and stared at the imaginary map you’d drawn on the dark red carpet. Then she took the stick from your hand, redrew the map of Galilee and asked you about al-Birwa.

That was the day I fell in love with Nuha and a one-sided love story began that only turned to real love six years later, when she came to the hospital to ask for my help in looking after her dying grandmother.

After Nuha finished drawing her map, she turned to you and asked, “Why?”

I think I saw a tear suspended in the corner of her eye, and that tear was the start of a love story, a love that began with a teardrop that didn’t fall and ended in the municipal stadium under a downpour of tears that soaked eyes and faces.

But Nuha, when she fell in love with me years later, denied the story of the tear. She said she hadn’t cried, but she’d felt pity for all of you because you were living on memories, and the past was your only pillar of support.

Looking at the map, she asked you — her voice halting and punctuated by white spaces, as though emotion were staining her words with silence:

“Why did you believe Mahdi?”

The room exploded in silence.

Is it true, Father, that al-Birwa fell because you believed Mahdi, Jasem, and the ALA division stationed at Tal al-Layyat?

Answer me. I don’t want anecdotes but a clear-cut answer.

I know you don’t know the answers. I can see you with the eyes of those days. You were an impulsive young man — that’s how everyone who knew you describes you. Despite that, or because of it, you succeeded — you and the division from Sha’ab — in breaking through to al-Birwa and taking it back.

But, to be accurate, before the breakthrough and the recovery, al-Birwa had fallen without a fight.

Sun-dust enveloped the fields, the wheat glittering in that golden light that precedes the harvest. And the village was afraid. After the fall of Acre, the villages of al-Mukur, al-Jdeideh, Julis, Kafar Yasif, and Abu Sinan surrendered, leaving al-Birwa floating in the wind.

And they attacked.

No one was ready. Our ambushes were laughable. Now we’ve figured out how to do things, and we have an impressive numbers of fedayeen. But then we were forty men and Father Jebran. The priest of al-Birwa didn’t negotiate with the Jews for a surrender, that’s a lie. He negotiated for our return — this issue has sparked great debate.

Nuha’s grandmother, who came to be known as Umm al-Hajar, *would tell the story and say, “If only!”

“If only we’d believed Father Jebran! We were nothing, my daughter — just forty men and up above, at Tal al-Layyat, more than a hundred soldiers of the ALA under their leader, Mahdi, who used to come down like a monkey asking for chickens. We named him Lieutenant Chicken Mahdi and would hand them over. What are a few chickens? Let them eat and good health to them! The important thing was for the village to survive — better a village without chickens than chickens without a village. But the chickens did no good, my dear, because when the Jews attacked, Chicken Mahdi didn’t fight.”

They were forty. They’d sent their wives and children into the surrounding fields and sat in their ambushes waiting. The Jews chose to attack from the west at sunset, so the sun would be in the peasants’ eyes. Three armored vehicles advanced under a heavy cannon bombardment but were brought to a halt. Then the Jews retreated and dug themselves in, renewing the attack at dawn.

“We ran,” said Nuha’s father. “Yes, we ran. We had no means of defense and the army up above us didn’t fire a single shot. I said to Mahdi, ‘Aren’t you even going to defend your chickens?’ He replied, ‘No orders.’ The village fell and we left everything behind. The ALA didn’t even try to save the chickens.”