Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

Yunes came to the Ain al-Hilweh camp from the prison, stood up, and screamed among the tents, “We’re not refugees!”

The rest you know, Father.

Shall I tell you the rest? Why should I tell you when you already know everything?

On the other hand, you don’t know what happened to Abd al-Mu’ti.

Abd al-Mu’ti died yesterday, here in the hospital. He breathed his last after suffering an angina attack. We tried to treat him, but he died.

What can you do for a man of seventy who’s decided to die? Let him go — it’s better for him and for us. We tried to save him, but in vain. “It was the will of God Almighty.”

When they brought him in, he was having a hard time breathing, opening his mouth as though there weren’t enough air, or as though his spirit were seeking a way out of his body.

A new booby trap for me, I thought, because Sha’ab men refuse to die. Then I remembered you are not from Sha’ab, which meant that he wasn’t like you and so wouldn’t repeat this drama. On top of that, I realized he wasn’t a relative of yours, as I’d first thought based on your resemblance. Actually, you don’t look alike at all; but you old men all become infants again — you all resemble each another at first glance, but the resemblance is only in our heads.

Abd al-Mu’ti died and took his story with him.

He was like a broken record when it came to his towering courage during the long siege of the Shatila camp. And you were the reason, because you — I don’t know why you took such pleasure in that story of the nuclear bomb that you made up with the Lebanese woman journalist to break the siege of the camp.

I wasn’t in the camp for the entire siege because I’d been given the mission of going out for antibiotics, which we needed desperately, and when I came back I found that the routes into the camp had been closed off once and for all. That was the day I met Shams, in our office in the Mar Elias camp, and she took over the mission. She said she could get things in through her private network, and she took the antibiotics and disappeared. Then I learned that she’d entered the camp and had stayed there for about two months, leaving again after a dispute with its military commander, Ali Abu Toq. It was after she left the camp that our love began. She’d come to Mar Elias, sit with us in her uniform, draw maps and talk about her impossible plans for breaking the siege of Shatila. That was when my passion was ignited. I didn’t make a declaration or a move. I just waited. When she would come, that burning passion that erupts from deep inside the rib cage would hit me and cut off my breathing. It seems she noticed, because she behaved like she’d noticed. At the time I thought she was trying to convey her lack of interest, but I found out later that this sort of sideways way of showing interest was her way. She’d glance at me obliquely, as though desire had made its abode in the corners of her eyes.

My love for Shams started with the antibiotics, in Mar Elias. I didn’t run away during the siege, as was said; I was on a mission. And anyway, when I came back, no one looked on me as a traitor. The camp had been wiped out, and none of the siege fighters were left. Even Shams refused to stay in Shatila and joined the fighters of Ain al-Hilweh, using a village east of Sidon as her base.

I didn’t return to the camp because I was afraid to take part in the fighting in Maghdousheh but because I’d lost any desire for war. War is an urge, as you used to say. You said that war burned inside you and you couldn’t wait for the Arabs to complete their military arrangements so you joined Fatah, and fought the way you wanted to.

In those days I didn’t like fighting anymore. What was I supposed to do east of Sidon? Plus why continue with the war of Lebanon when it wasn’t a war anymore? I will never say, as you do, that it wasn’t ever a war, that it was a trap we set with our own hands and fell into. I disagree. We got into the civil war in Lebanon because all roads were closed to us and because it was our duty to bring the world down on the heads of its masters. That’s what I believed in ’75. But after the fall of Shatila in ’87 and our conversion into bands fighting around Sidon, I was no longer convinced.

Abd al-Mu’ti was different.

His war urge never died.

During the siege, when the camp was surrounded by men from the Amal movement, when everyone was on the verge of collapse, Abd al-Mu’ti picked up his Czech rifle and hunkered down in one of the forward positions. The young fighters felt sorry for him being so old, but he was as alert as an ape. The years had left no trace on his well-defined body, white moustache, and bald head. His rifle fire used to reassure us because it signified that we were still capable of resistance.

Abd al-Mu’ti said he fought so they wouldn’t give him another “sun-bath.”

Before we get into “sunbathing,” do you remember what Abd al-Mu’ti did during the siege?

You were all cut off and half-starved and your morale was pitiful. So Abd al-Mu’ti decided to use his secret weapon. He telephoned the Agence France Presse office in Beirut and talked to a woman, asking her to repeat her name several times before he gave her the news. He said he wanted to be sure of her identity. She said her name was Jamila Ibrahim and that she was Lebanese, from Zahleh.

You listened to him stupefied. He made up a story about a meeting to be held by the fighters in the camp to discuss the situation. He said that the fighters had decided to ask a religious authority for a fatwa permitting the consumption of human flesh. “We’re dying of starvation. We’ve eaten the cats and the dogs, and there’s nothing left to eat, and the militias surrounding us have no mercy, so what are we to do? We’ve decided to eat the flesh of our fallen comrades, and we’re asking for a fatwa to allow it.”

He said they couldn’t call from the camp and asked the journalist to contact a religious authority, promising to call her back in an hour.

An hour later, the news that shook the world was out. Abd al-Mu’ti called Jamila, and she told him of the good news that Sheikh Kamel al-Sammour had ruled that it was permissible to eat human flesh in situations of urgent necessity. Agence France Presse sent the news out over its international network of television and radio stations, and the world press went into an uproar.

The people of Shatila didn’t eat human flesh, and the Syrian army that was surrounding the area ordered the Amal militias to make a partial lifting of the siege.

I entered the camp after Abd al-Mu’ti’s bombshell. I went in with medicine and rations, and there I met Jamila Ibrahim.

The journalist came to the camp looking for Abd al-Mu’ti. She came carrying a cooking pot full of delicious food — God, how good her food was! A pot of cracked wheat, cooked cracked wheat with mutton and onions and chickpeas piled on top, plus a big container of milk.

Jamila said she’d cooked it for Abd al-Mu’ti, and everyone ate. When she saw the number of people hovering around the pot, she said she was ashamed; if she’d known Abd al-Mu’ti was going to invite the whole camp she’d have made more. Abd al-Mu’ti told her, his mouth full of cracked wheat, that he was going to repeat the miracle of the fishes. “Didn’t your prophet make five fishes feed a thousand people?”

We ate and laughed, and Jamila’s round face was flooded with happiness. I never saw a woman so happy. She didn’t touch the food herself, and Abd al-Mu’ti sat next to her and tried to make her eat from his hand, as though they were two old friends, and she called him “my partner” because he’d written the news dispatch with her that led to the raising of the siege, and he called her “my partner” because she’d cooked for him.