Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

“I’ll walk with you to your house,” I responded.

She smiled and said she was strong now. I asked about her injuries, and she said she didn’t remember anything, or rather, she remembered running through the street, and when she woke up, she was in the hospital.

She told me how the men from the Lebanese Red Cross had discovered she wasn’t dead. They were at the entrance to the mass grave, sprinkling quicklime on the bodies, when a fat man discovered her, picked her up, and rushed with her to the hospital. He stood in front of me sobbing like a child.

“Doctor, doctor, not dead. Still alive, doctor.”

They threw you down in the emergency room, and that fat young Lebanese man — his white gown almost busting at the seams — begged me to go with him, saying we had to dig around at the grave site: “We may have buried people who’re still alive. Please, Doctor, come with me.” I went with him, and there was the smell and the flies. All I remember are the flies. I didn’t see the bodies. They were sprinkling quicklime over the piled-up, puffed-up corpses, and the flies were buzzing and making insane sounds. The man in white led me by the hand and I doubled over frightened of the flies. They were like a cloud or a woolen cover of black and yellow buzzing. I bent over and let him guide me, jumping over the corpses. I jumped, too. I let go of his hand and fell down and rolled over in that white stuff and got up again clinging to the ground and to the lime and ran toward the hospital. I ran turning and looking back afraid that he might have been following me. I ran with the quicklime dripping from me. I wiped my eyes with my hands so I could see. The flies were creeping into my hair and taking up residence in the depths of me. I wiped my hair and my face and I kept running. When Zainab saw me enter the hospital, she fled. In those days, Abu Salem, we used to fear the dead. We didn’t fear those who killed them, but we feared the people who’d been killed. We feared the quicklime. We were afraid they’d rise up and come toward us, covered with quicklime, shaded beneath their cloud of flies.

That’s how the camp lived, and the people died. We covered them with quicklime to kill the germs and wiped away their features before throwing them into the hole, which later became a soccer field.

I didn’t tell these stories to Catherine and her group, and I didn’t tell them about Dunya. I walked with them through the streets of the camp and took them to the mass grave, which is outside the camp borders now, and there they saw three children playing soccer. Catherine went up to the fence and laid her head on it. I thought she was going to cry, but she didn’t.

“Is that really the grave?” she asked me.

I nodded, but her dancing eyes and short black hair seemed not to believe me. The tall man, whose name I’ve forgotten, asked me about the numbers.

“Fifteen hundred,” I said.

I told them about the wall and said we’d built one around the grave, but that it had been destroyed during the War of the Camps and replaced with this fence.

The tall man said he wanted to talk to people.

“Of course, of course,” I said.

We went back to the main street and took the first turn on the right. We found children running through the alleys and women sitting in front of their houses washing vegetables and talking. We stopped in front of one of the houses.

“Come in, come in,” said the woman.

“Thank you,” I said. “I have a delegation of French actors with me, and they’d like to talk with you a little.”

“Welcome, Dr. Khalil. It’s been ages! How are you? I hope your mind’s at peace.”

Oh no, I thought, what I was afraid of is happening. Now she’ll ask me about Shams, and I’ll have to lie. But she didn’t, thank God; I ignored her words and explained that the French visitors wanted her to tell them about the massacre.

When the woman heard the word massacre , her face fell.

“No, Son. We’re not a cinema. No.”

The woman went into her house and closed the door in our faces.

I was embarrassed because I’d told the French group that the people here loved guests and spoke naturally, and that we only had to knock on the door and go in.

After the first door was closed in our faces, all the others were, too, and no one wanted to speak to us.

The fourth and last woman whose door we knocked on was very kind, but she, too, said she had nothing to tell us.

“My story? No, Dr. Khalil. I don’t want to talk about my children. Come and talk to me about something else. Not my children.” Then she came up close to me and whispered, “Don’t tell them what I’m going to tell you now, it’s a secret. Can you keep a secret? Every time I talk about them, or say something to them, they come to me at night. I hear their voices speaking like the wind. I can’t make out what they’re saying, but I know them from their voices. I know they don’t want me to talk about them. Maybe whenever I talk about them they remember the massacre. The dead remember, and their memories hurt like knives.”

“You’re right, Sister. Do whatever you like,” I told her and made a sign to the visitors to leave.

“No, please. Have some tea!”

We drank tea in a living room whose walls were covered from top to bottom with photographs banded with black ribbons. Catherine got up and bent over the sofa to examine one of the photos close up. It showed a girl of about ten standing with her short skirt riding up a little on her left thigh. She was wearing sandals and playing with her braid. Catherine bent even closer until her face was almost touching the picture, but the woman pulled her back and said, “Sit down.” Catherine almost fell over, but she sat down silently. When we left, however, the tall man asked me what the woman had said to Catherine. I told him she’d asked her to sit down and keep away from the picture.

“Why?” he asked me.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“We’re bothering them, I can understand,” he said.

“We shouldn’t have come,” said Catherine.

Then Daniel disappeared. We left the house, walked on a little, and he was no longer with us.

“Where’s Daniel?” I asked.

The tall man said Daniel was like that; he had to explore places by himself.

“Do you want to wait for him?” I asked.

“No need,” said the tall man. “He’ll figure out how to get back to the hospital on his own.”

“Is that all?” asked Catherine.

“There’s the mosque that was turned into a cemetery,” I said, and explained that during the long siege we’d turned the mosque into a cemetery because the original cemetery had been occupied and destroyed.

“I don’t want to go. Nous sommes des voyeurs ,” Catherine said to the tall man, who tried to translate what she had said, to the effect that it was the tragedy of intellectuals and artists that they had to go and look and react, and then they’d forget. When he read Jean Genet’s text on the massacre, he said, he felt as though he’d been struck by lightning; he said he hadn’t read the words, he’d seen them — the words emerged from the pages and moved around his room. That was why he’d decided to come here: “I had to see the people so the words would go back into the book and become just words again.”

I didn’t get into a discussion with him because I couldn’t understand what lay behind all that finickiness of his. I understood the meaning of voyeurs and said one didn’t have to be an intellectual to be a voyeur; we’re all voyeurs. Voyeurism is one of the human race’s greatest pleasures; uncovering what others want to hide justifies our own mistakes and makes life more bearable.

Catherine said the people were right. “Why should they talk to us? Why should they give us information? Who are we to them? It’s not right.”