Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

“The woman sewed the pita bread, and the boy was crying. She gave him the whole pita and asked him to be quiet, but he tore it in two and began crying again. So the mother killed her son!”

I see the exodus in your eyes and I hear my grandmother’s voice, which has dwindled into a low mutter full of ghosts.

“We reached Beit Jann, but we didn’t go into the Druze village because we were afraid.”

She tells me about fear and the Druze, and I swallow the pita bread stuffed with fried potatoes and feel the potatoes sticking to the roof of my mouth, as though I’m going to suffocate.

No, I’m not complaining about the potatoes — they were my favorite. I loved fried potatoes and still do. They were incomparably better than the boiled plants my grandmother cooked. She’d leave the camp for who-knows-where and come back loaded down with all kinds of greens, wash them, cook them, and we’d eat. The taste was — how can I describe it? — a green taste, and the stew would form a lump in my mouth. My grandmother would say that it was healthy food: “We’re peasants, and this is peasant food.” I’d beg her to fry me some potatoes; the smell of potatoes gives you an appetite, but those cooked weeds had neither odor nor taste; it felt like you were chewing something that had already been chewed.

You don’t like fried potatoes, I know. You prefer them grilled and seasoned with olive oil. Now I’ve come to like olive oil, but when my grandmother, who cooked everything in it, was around it tasted waxy to me and I didn’t like it, but I couldn’t say so in front of her. How can you say that sort of thing to a woman if she doesn’t see it? She used to live here as though she were over there. She refused to use electricity because they didn’t have it in her village — can you believe it? She didn’t want to get used to things that didn’t exist there because she was going to go back! If only she’d known what Galilee had become! But she died before she knew anything.

You won’t believe the story of the pita bread, just as you didn’t believe the story of Umm Hassan and Naji, whom she picked up and put in the basin. You believe, as I’d like to, that we don’t kill our own children and throw them under trees. You like things clear and simple. The murderer is a known quantity, and the victim, too, and it’s up to us to see that justice is done. Unfortunately, my brother, it wasn’t as simple as us and them. It was something else that’s hard to define.

I’m not here to define things. I have a mission. As usual I’ll fail and as usual I won’t believe I’ve failed; I’ll claim I succeeded or put the blame on others. Ah, habit! If only we could walk away from it! If only I could shed this past that hovers like a blue ghost in your room! Come to think of it, why do I see things as blue? Why do I see Shams looking at me with a blue face as though she were about to kill me?

If I could, I’d go to Shams’ family and tell them the truth and let them do what they want. I’m innocent of her murder, of her love, of everything, because I’m an imbecile. If I hadn’t been made a fool of. . everything might have been different.

Tell me, who in the story of Shams wasn’t made a fool of?

She killed him, the bitch! She told him, “I give myself to you in marriage,” and then she killed him.

She loved him, and he loved her, but, like me, he felt she would slip out of his hands. Is it possible for a man to marry a woman who leaves someone else’s bed to go to him?

Why did she kill him?

Was the fact that he’d lied to her enough to make her kill him?

We all lie, so it really seems unreasonable. Just imagine — if the penalty for lying were death, there’d be no one left alive on the surface of the earth.

Now I’ve started to doubt everything. I’m not sure it was a matter of honor. Shams is the first woman in the history of the Arab world to kill a man because he was unfaithful and tricked her.

But let’s slow down. .

Did she kill him?

They said she killed him in public. Everyone saw her, but does that mean anything? What if everyone’s lying? What if everyone just believed what they’d heard from everyone else, who had heard what they’d heard from others?

No, that’s impossible. If that were true, my whole life might have been an unbearable lie, which it is anyway. Shams lied to me, and everyone is lying to me now. Death threats are being passed on to me, and I’m afraid of a lie. When you’re afraid of a lie, it means your life is a lie, don’t you think?

I’m scared and I hide in the hospital, and the memories pour down on me and I have no idea what to do with them. What would you say to a novel-writing project? I know you’ll tell me I don’t know how to write novels. I agree, and I’d add that no one knows how to write because anything you say comes apart when you write it down and turns into symbols and signs, cold and bereft of life. Writing is confusion; tell me, who can write the confusions of life? It’s a state between life and death that no one dares enter. I won’t dare enter that state, I say this only because like all doctors and failures, I’ve become a writer. Do you know why Chekhov wrote? Because he was a failed doctor. I imagine that by becoming a writer he was able to find the solution to his crisis. But I’m not like him; I’m a successful doctor, and everyone will see how I was able to rescue you from the Valley of Death.

I’m certain she killed him, because I know her and I know how death shone in her eyes. I used to think it was love that changed her eyes from gray to green, then back to gray, but it was death. Gray-green is the color of death. Shams used to talk about death because she knew it. My grandmother didn’t.

Shahineh didn’t dare say the child had died. She said they went by Beit Jann and were afraid. The airplanes were roaring above their heads, and when night fell their journey to Lebanon began.

My grandmother said she found herself in the middle of a group of about thirty women, old men, and children from the village of al-Safsaf wandering the hills looking for the Lebanese border. “With my daughters and my son, we walked with them. I don’t know how we ended up in that terrified group. We were afraid, too, but not like them. When they spoke they whispered. When we got to Beit Jann, they refused to go into the place. Their leader said they’d rob us and ordered us to continue marching. I told him not to be afraid, but he told me to shut up, and we left. When we got to Lebanon, we’d lost our voices because the old man had made us whisper so much.”

It seems that on that journey my grandmother’s voice became husky. I forgot to tell you that my grandmother had this husky voice, like it was coming out of a well deep inside her, which made it seem broad and full of holes.

“The child began crying from hunger. A child of three or four sobbing and whining that he was hungry, while everybody looked askance at his mother and asked her to make him shut up. The woman didn’t know what to do. She picked him up and started shushing him, but he wouldn’t let up. And there was an old man. . I’ll never forget that old man.”

My grandmother always used to threaten me with the old man of al-Safsaf. When I refused to eat her greens, she’d tell me she’d ask the old man of al-Safsaf to come and strangle me at night, and I’d be scared and chew my prechewed roughage.

She said she realized why they were so terrified when they reached Tarshiha. There their fear disappeared and they ate and wept, and the old man told the story of the white sheets.

“We received them with white sheets. We went out waving the sheets as a sign of surrender, but they started firing over our heads. Then they ordered us to gather in the square. They chose sixty men of various ages, tied their hands behind their backs with rope and stood them in a row. Sixty men of various ages standing like a wall threaded together by the rope linking their hands. Then they opened fire. The sound of the machine guns deafened us, and the men dropped. The people gathered in the square fled into the fields. Death enveloped us.”