Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

“After we reached Tarshiha, he became a different man,” said my grandmother. “But on the road, during those silent nights, he was a monster. A tall, thin man with a hunchback. His moustache looked like it had been drawn with a pen. His hair was gray, his moustache black, and he ordered us about furiously. We could see the sinews of his small, veiny hands as he motioned to us to be silent.”

My grandmother said she gave the mother the one pita bread she had underneath her dress. She said she was afraid of the old man because he was determined to kill the child if he kept crying. The woman tried her best to make her son shut up — holding his hand, lifting him up, carrying him, putting him back down on the ground, letting him walk between her legs; but the child wouldn’t stop crying. The woman took the round loaf from my grandmother and divided it in two. She gave her son half and the other half she gave back to my grandmother. But the boy refused; he wanted a whole pita and started crying again. The old man came up to him and took hold of his clothes and started shaking him. My grandmother rushed over and gave her half to the mother, who gave it to her son. But the boy wanted a whole pita, not two halves. The woman put the two halves together, extracted a needle and thread from the front of her dress, threaded the needle, and started sewing up the pita bread.

My grandmother said she saw things as though they were wrapped in shadows. The meager crescent moon that would slip out from among the branches of the trees turned people into colliding shadows. I listened to the story and was scared of my grandmother’s husky voice, which swallowed up the scene and made it a story of djinn and afrits.

The woman sewed up the pita bread and gave it to the boy, and he stopped crying. He took it joyfully, until he discovered that it wasn’t a normal pita. The woman had sewn it hastily in the dark and hadn’t made the stitches tight. The boy took the bread and the stitches started to pull apart — the gap between the two halves widening. And he started to cry again. He held the pita up to give back to his mother and cried.

The old man came forward, took the pita bread, put it in his mouth, and started gobbling it down. He swallowed more than half of it along with the thread and went over to the woman.

“Kill it,” he hissed at her.

“Throw it down the well,” said a woman’s voice from the within the shadowed crowd.

“Give it to me. I’ll take care of it,” said the old man.

He went toward the child, whose screams grew louder and louder. The woman took a wool blanket, wrapped her son in it and picked him up. She put his head on her shoulder and kept pulling him down onto it as she walked, stifling the child’s cries with the blanket. The old man walked behind them; my grandmother said he walked behind the woman and kept pushing the child’s head down onto its mother’s shoulder.

In Tarshiha the mother put her son down on the ground. She pulled back the blanket and started weeping. The child was blue. But the old man changed when they reached the last Palestinian village and started looking for his daughter, eagerly asking people about a short, fat woman with five children.

My grandmother said the people of Tarshiha brought them food, but the man refused to eat. He became a different person. The veins disappeared from his face and hands, his body slumped, and he started weeping and asking to die.

“And the child?” I asked.

“What child?”

“The child with the pita bread.”

“I don’t know.”

She said she didn’t know, though she knew the boy had died.

Its mother killed it — do you hear, Father? — its mother killed it because she was afraid of the old man, who was afraid of the Jews. The mother didn’t carry her child on her breast, and she didn’t support his head on her shoulder the way my grandmother had told me. She wrapped him in the blanket and sat on him until he died.

That’s the way our relative, Umm Fawzi, told it. Umm Fawzi said they walked for five days without a sound so the Jews wouldn’t hear them, and when the boy cried his mother killed him because the old man threatened to kill them both.

“Umm Fawzi’s raving,” said my grandmother.

You’ll say I’m raving, too, because you don’t like hearing the story about the boy, or the story about the people of Saleheh, who were executed wrapped in their bed sheets. The Jews wrapped more than seventy men in the white sheets they’d been carrying as a sign of surrender and fired on them, and the sheets spurted blood.

You don’t want to hear about anything except heroism, and you think you’re the heroes’ hero . Listen then to the story of another hero, a mixture of you and your father, a hero who didn’t fight. A man from a village called Mi’ar. It’s close to your new village. His name was Rakan Abboud.

When Mi’ar fell, after the rest of his family had gone, the man refused to leave his village and stayed on with his wife. This is what Nadia told me. Do you know Nadia? Didn’t you meet her? She was in charge of the People’s Committee in the camp. Nadia said the Jews drove her grandfather out along with two other men from the village three months after they’d occupied it. The two men died on the road, near Jenin, but Nadia’s grandfather, who was in his eighties, went to Aleppo and stayed with someone he knew there. Then he joined Nadia’s father in the camp in Baalbek. “My grandfather had become unbearable,” said Nadia. “He hated Baalbek. He hated its snow and its cold. He used to scream that he didn’t want to die there, so my father decided to move to the camp in Burj al-Shamali near Tyre. We lived in a shack there, like everyone else. His condition got frighteningly worse. He’d go out at night and only come back at dawn. Then he informed my father he’d decided to go back to Mi’ar to look for his wife. That was in 1950, and we were waiting. All my father did was listen to the radio and set dates for the Return. Each month he’d say our time would come next month. My father tried to stop him and begged him to wait one more month, but the man had made up his mind. One day, he managed to hire a guide and a donkey and left.

“He made it to his house — imagine! — knocked on the door, and a woman opened it. The poor man thought she must be a spirit and ran off, tripping over himself. He left Mi’ar, never to return. He spent what remained of his life in the fields. My grandmother, who lived in Majd al-Kuroum, found out and began her long search for him. She looked for him for more than a year. When she found him, the poor man had completely lost his sight, so she took him to Majd al-Kuroum, where he died.”

Nadia went on at great length about how her grandfather died. She told how he lived his last days like a thief, a blind, feeble thief. Despite this, his wife had to hide him from the police so he wouldn’t be expelled like others who’d got back in. He’d gone to see his village and his wife, but he saw nothing. He lived in secret, and his presence was made public only when he died.

Blind and feeble, living in secret — but when he died, people wept openly. All those people who’d now become the people of Majd al-Kuroum wept. You know the villages aren’t the old villages anymore: They’ve become full of abandoned houses inhabited by refugees from other villages. The people were all mixed together. The people in Majd al-Kuroum didn’t know the blind old man. They knew that Fathiyyeh Abboud was hiding “Lebanon” in her house. They called him Lebanon because he’d come from there. When the secret got out, the whole village wept for the blind man. He didn’t die in his own house surrounded by children and grandchildren; he didn’t die, as most die, in the platitude of memories. He went back and died in the secrecy of that town living under the secrecy of military rule, curfew, and the footprints of those who slipped back in.