Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

I think that I fell in love with Nuha in the image of her grandmother.

Try to imagine with me the woman of al-Birwa.

A woman walking alone through the rubble of her village looking for the stones that were once her house. A woman alone, her head covered with a black scarf, hunched up in that emptiness that stretches all the way to God, among the hills and valleys of Galilee, within the circle of a red sun that crawls over the ground, passing slowly and carrying with it the shadows of all things.

All the woman saw was shadows. She was alone. They came and she spoke to them. It may be that she didn’t say the exact words her granddaughter related. Maybe they didn’t understand her language.

Nuha said they were Yemenis, and Yemenis understand the Palestinian dialect, or a lot of its words anyway. But probably they didn’t understand a thing. When she spoke they were terrified, because they thought she was a spirit who’d come out of the tree, and they started to throw stones at her. They were just adolescents, so they didn’t call the Border Guard from the kibbutz that had been built on top of al-Birwa.

Maybe. I don’t know.

Anything’s possible.

But why wouldn’t she agree to go to Kafar Yasif?

Was it because. .?

She probably regretted it afterwards, that must be why she didn’t tell her story to anyone, unlike Umm Hassan, who never stopped telling people the story of the woman of Wadi Abu Jmil.

The woman of al-Birwa said nothing.

And I’m telling you now to prove that you weren’t the only hero, or the only living martyr.

Don’t worry, you’ll die in peace. But I want you to know before you die that this protracted death of yours has turned our life upside down. Did you have to sink into this death for your memory, and mine, and everyone else’s, to explode? You’ve been stricken with a brainstorm, and I’m stricken with a storm of memories.

You’re dying, and I’m dying.

God, it’s not about Shams, or Dr. Amjad, or this Beirut that no longer looks like Beirut. It’s to do with me staying here and starting work in the hospital tomorrow. Don’t be scared. I won’t leave you. I’ll continue to work with you as usual and tell you stories and give you the latest.

Think about me a bit, and you’ll see I can’t take it anymore.

True, nobody cares anymore, and nobody believes anyone. Those who got used to me as a doctor will get used to me as a nurse. But me — how can I adjust to this new me that I’m being forced to accept?

We’ll find out tomorrow.

But before tomorrow comes, I want you to tell me who the woman of Sha’ab was.

I want the story from you. I’ve heard it dozens of times from different people, but I’m not convinced. In the Ain al-Hilweh camp I got to know Mohammed al-Khatib, who claimed that the woman of Sha’ab was his mother, Fatimah. Then I met a man from the Fa’our clan who said his mother, Salma, was the woman of Sha’ab. And then, of course, there’s that legend about the woman called Reem, to whom the story became attached.

Let’s go back to the beginning.

You went back to Ain al-Zaitoun only to find the village demolished. At that point you were with Abu Is’af on a mission to carry weapons to Galilee from Syria. I don’t want to hear now about the humiliations you suffered trying to find weapons and about how Colonel Safwat treated you like shit, saying you weren’t a regular army and that he wasn’t about to throw away the few weapons he had on peasants who were known for their cowardice and slyness.

That was how the “general of the defeat” — as he’d become known to the fighters who withdrew to Lebanon to the beat of the Arab leaders’ mendacious war drums — talked to you.

You returned, you and Abu Is’af, empty-handed. You left Abu Is’af in Sha’ab and continued on to Ain al-Zaitoun, discovering that the village had fallen without a shot being fired to defend it, and that your friend and twin Hanna Kamil Mousa had died crucified on an oak tree.

You all ended up in Sha’ab, and you only left after the whole of Galilee had fallen.

Now tell me about the woman. I know that the story of Palestine of your generation is a rough one, and that we can find a thousand ways to tell it, but Sha’ab, and that woman, and the men of Zabbouba: I want to hear about them from you.

You left Ain al-Zaitoun and went running to Sha’ab. You told me you ran there even though you went by car. What matters is that you got hold of a house in Sha’ab because the headman, Mohammed Ali al-Khatib, gave it to you, telling you he’d built it for his son, Ali, and that he considered you another son.

Sha’ab became your new village and it was there that you saw the miracle.

I don’t want to hear the history of the village, because I’m not interested in the brawl that broke out between the Fa’our and Khatib clans in ’35 and how it grew during the great revolt of ’36 when the Khatib clan avenged the murder of Shaker al-Khatib by killing Rashid al-Fa’our, headman of the eastern quarter, and how all of you — you were still very young — took action. You came with the revolutionaries and imposed a settlement, which was concluded on the threshing floor, where they slaughtered more than forty sheep and people came from all the neighboring villages to eat and offer their congratulations.

I don’t want to get into the labyrinth of families and subclans of which I understand nothing. I know you always cited the example of the Sha’ab settlement when you were conducting training courses for fighters. Instead of theorizing about the Sha’ab war, as we did, you’d tell stories and cite examples. And instead of asserting that the family and tribalism had to be transcended, you’d explain to the fighters how you succeeded during the Revolution of ’36 in fusing families together, and you’d cite the example of Sha’ab.

You’d tell them about the moon.

Your moon wasn’t the full moon of my mother’s; yours never became totally full. I think I read the fable of the moon in a Chinese book translated into Arabic, but it sounded more beautiful coming from your mouth than from any book: “The moon is full only one day a month. On all the other days it’s either getting bigger or smaller. Life’s the same. Stability is the exception, change the rule.” You’d ask the boys to follow the movement of the moon on training nights so they could get some practical political culture instead of book culture, which goes in through the eye and out at the ear.

Now tell me about Sha’ab.

Was it Abu Is’af who made the arrangements with the headman for you to have a house, the leader of the Sha’ab garrison thus guaranteeing that you’d stay with him?

You found yourself in the Sha’ab garrison after you’d failed — yes, failed — to form the mobile military unit you’d dreamed of. The war was speeding up, and the Arab armies that entered Palestine in 1948 were being defeated by the larger, better-armed Israeli army in record time. God, who’d have believed it? Six hundred thousand Israelis put together an army larger than all seven Arab armies combined!

You started military patrols, you begged weapons, you took part in the battles of al-Birwa and al-Zib, but the rapid fall of the villages and hamlets of Galilee made it impossible for you to move and turned you into a garrison of not more than two hundred fighters centered on the little village called Sha’ab. Later, the garrison would end up in prison in Syria and its heroic deeds would disappear among the flood of displaced people who invaded the fields and groves.

All the stories of the exodus have collected now in your eyes — shut over the teardrops I put in them — and in place of heroism I see sorrow and hear the voice of my grandmother telling about the woman who sewed up the pita bread. I’m listening to the story of the woman in the fields of Beit Jann, and I see my grandmother miming the story, screwing up her eyes so she can put the imaginary thread into the eye of the imaginary needle, then taking the imaginary pita bread in her hand, cutting it in two and starting to sew it up.