Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

I didn’t tell them what the fourth woman had said to me; I felt I had no right to reveal her secret. I also felt a certain pride, believe me, for when we suppress pain it shows we know its meaning. Nothing equals pain as much as the suppression of it.

On our way back to the hospital, we met Abu Akram, and he invited us to the Popular Front office, where I was introduced to Salim As’ad.

You agree that holding your tongue is a noble stand to take, don’t you? They were right not to talk. How could they, after all? We don’t tell these tales to each other, so why should we tell them to foreigners? What’s the point? And those voices — is it true that the voices of the dead flow through the alleys of the camp?

And Dunya? Why do I keep seeing Dunya, with her wide eyes, in front of the tall French man, speaking to him?

I don’t know Dunya. Behind the cemetery fence, I encountered her eyes, suspended in her face. I’d promised to try to work something out for her in Tunis, and then forgot the matter. Later I discovered that Dunya was the matter, all because of Dr. Muna Abd al-Karim, professor of psychiatry at the Lebanese University. Professor Muna works with the Association for the Disabled in the camp, and Dunya was a regular visitor. We thought Dunya had found a job for herself, but she hadn’t been working, she’d been talking. Foreign journalists would come and Professor Muna would take them to his office, where Dunya would tell her story with Professor Muna translating. Dunya had become a new kind of storyteller, one who tells stories only to foreigners, and she had become a story herself. I don’t have any objections — everyone’s free to do as they please — but a month after the Carlton Hotel Women’s Conference, they brought her here to the hospital and Dr. Amjad refused to receive her. He said that there was nothing he could do for her, that she was untreatable, but Salim As’ad and I admitted her by force. She’s living now in a room on the second floor, close to yours. Her situation is precarious because her pelvis has been shattered again. I think there must be some problem with her bones because they’re disintegrating. Today Dunya looks like a corpse and needs a private nurse. Her mother visits her every day but instead of helping us, she weeps. And Dunya says nothing. Her eyes, suspended in her thin, wan face, look without seeing, silent.

Dunya talked too much — it was Professor Muna’s fault. He had made her into a tool for fund raising . Let’s contemplate this expression that has entered our language from America. In order to collect money, we need pity, and Dunya could cry on command. Professor Muna Abd al-Karim would make her tell her story, and the fund raising went forward. I don’t know what’s come over us since the Israeli invasion of ’82: Every intellectual and activist has started talking about nothing but the international organizations that give out money. The activists have turned into thieves, Abu Salem, with all this fund raising going into their own pockets. Maybe they’re right! I swear I don’t know anymore.

But no.

This has nothing to do with Professor Muna. The psychologist was just doing her job, and maybe she believed that Dunya, being asked to tell her story so often, had turned into an actress. Acting isn’t confession and has no impact on the actor’s life. It seems, however, that Dunya wasn’t acting; she was really telling her story.

I saw her. I was watching the Women’s Conference on television when they announced a “Palestinian testimony,” and I saw Dunya come forward, on crutches. Her feet struck the ground hard, her pelvis swiveled, she walked slowly and calmly. She was neither hurried nor embarrassed, as though she’d learned her role well. She reached the podium, supported her weight on it, and let the crutches fall with a clatter. Dunya paid no attention either to the noise or to the man who hurried to pick the crutches up. She looked straight ahead and started speaking. And she amazed me. This woman was telling a completely different story. I’d no idea she’d been. . had no idea how she could have hidden all these things from us and could now be saying them in front of these foreigners. She spoke in English, sometimes slipping into Arabic, which Professor Muna would hasten to translate.

“I ran,” she said. “Then they raped me.” She said raped me in English and then stopped, to let the hall fill with silence.

“They came into the house and started firing. We were wearing our night clothes and sitting in the living room. Our house has two rooms, one for sleeping and the other for the television. When we heard the explosions, we all went into the television room. The electricity had been cut, but we found ourselves going there without thinking, to listen to the news.”

She said that her whole family was around the television when armed men entered carrying flashlights. “The light from the flashlights was terrifying. We were seated around the silent television with a single candle lit. Then the ropes of light burst in, and the firing. I fled. I went to the door, which the armed men had ripped off before entering. I walked away slowly without looking behind me, I didn’t run. I saw the flares, like little suns. I walked and I walked, then I felt something hot in my right thigh. I started running, or I felt I was running, but I wasn’t. I was moving very slowly in fact. I heard the machine-gun fire as though it were exploding in my ear.”

Dunya said she was running in place when he brought her down. “I thought I’d fallen, but it was that man. I didn’t see his face. The flares didn’t seem to give light, as though they were enveloping the darkened faces with light rather than lighting up their features. He fell on top of me. They all fell on top of me. I’d reached the corner of the main street. From our house to the main street was about ten meters. I was in front of Abu Sa’adu’s shop when I fell and the faces fell on top of me. They raped me and I felt nothing. I thought that the hotness that exploded from my right thigh was blood. Everything was hot, everything was black, everything was. . I can’t tell you long it went on. I was like someone in a coma. I saw without seeing, felt without feeling.”

Dunya’s face filled the small screen; she seemed to have black rings around her eyes. She spoke and spoke, in a flat, white voice without any trace of emotion, as though she were telling some other woman’s story. As though it had nothing to do with her.

Later I learned from Professor Muna that all Dunya did was relate what had happened to her and yet her listeners would be taken by surprise each time by some new thing she hadn’t mentioned on previous occasions. The journalists and representatives of international humanitarian organizations would come, and Dunya would sit in the office of the Association for the Disabled in the camp and speak, and Professor Muna would translate what Dunya didn’t know how to say in English.

Dunya became a story telling its own story.

When Professor Muna came to the hospital to visit her, she said she understood now. “Dunya collapsed because she stopped speaking after the Carlton conference. That was the first and last time she spoke about the gang rape. The story went around the camp, her mother got very angry, and everyone. . well, you know the people here better than me, Doctor.”

Professor Muna also said she’d been disappointed. “A German journalist said he wanted to do a piece about the camp and the trauma of the massacre. I told him about Dunya and he asked to meet her. She came, but she didn’t say a word. She told me the pain in her pelvis had come back and was so terrible she couldn’t talk through it. I begged her because I’d told the German journalist about her, and he was very interested. He wanted to hear a story from a victim, but the victim wouldn’t talk. I tried to persuade her, but she shook her head, tears flooding from her eyes, so I left her alone and apologized to the journalist, who was very sad because he wouldn’t be able to use Dunya’s story in his article. Then her mother came and told me that Dunya couldn’t get out of bed and asked me to get her into the American University Hospital. We don’t have a budget , Doctor, for such cases, so I advised her to put her in Galilee Hospital, and you know the rest.”