Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

Dunya lies on her bed sleeping with her eyes open, or so Salim As’ad informed me before he disappeared. He said he went into her room to check because he thought he’d heard a moan, and he saw her swathed in the woolen blanket up to her neck and eyes. . her eyes were open in the darkness, and a white light was coming out of them.

Thinking she was awake, Salim said he’d approached her. “I came closer,” he said, “but she didn’t move. I bent down and whispered her name, but she didn’t answer. I put my ear close to her nose, and her deep, slow breathing brushed my ear. She was asleep with both eyes open. Is that possible, Doctor?”

Salim said he’d been frightened and wanted to ask my opinion, which is, of course, that it’s impossible; no one can sleep with their eyes open. But I don’t know anymore, anything’s possible these days. Isn’t your own death a clinical reality, Father, except that you won’t die? Everything’s become strange. Tell me, is it true the voices of the dead fill the streets at night? I don’t believe such superstitious nonsense, but we weren’t able even to collect the names of the dead properly. The community committee met and decided to make a list of names. We gathered lots of names but still couldn’t arrive at a final record. Differences arose among the various political organizations and the project folded. We don’t have the names of our dead, we only have figures. We put figures next to figures, subtract them, add them, multiply them — that’s our life. Even the Lebanese journalist, Georges Baroudi, who came to the camp and asked for a list of the names of the victims and learned that we didn’t have a complete list, said that would complicate things. He suggested that a memorial be erected to the martyrs. You know how those intellectuals think: They imagine they can solve the problems of their consciences with statues, poems, or novels. I told him that memorials were impossible here because we didn’t know what would happen to us or the camp tomorrow. But he insisted. He came back a few days later with a Lebanese sculptor, in shorts, sporting a straw hat. They roamed around the camp together, then walked to the grave. The women rushed over, yelling and hurling abuse. In those days we were still capable of defending our dead. Only when you intervened did the brawl come to a halt. You dispersed the women, invited Baroudi and the sculptor for coffee, and explained that no one was allowed to walk over graves. They apologized profusely and told you the details of their project, and you asked them to contact me to coordinate it.

More than three weeks later, Baroudi came back and told me that a committee of Lebanese artists and intellectuals had been formed to prepare plans for the Martyrs’ Garden.

“We’re going to call it the Martyrs’ Garden — what do you think?” he asked.

I said the name was fine and asked him for details of the project. He said the committee hadn’t finalized the plans yet and promised to discuss them with me and the community committee before work started. Then he told me he was writing a book about the Shatila massacre. He said there were only two books about the massacre, both by Israelis. One was by a journalist, Amnon Kapeliouk, and the other, the report of Israel’s Kahane Commission. “Don’t you think it’s shameful that we don’t write our own history?” he asked. Baroudi told me he’d translated the Kahane Report into Arabic, but he felt that we should write a book that would gather eyewitness accounts together.

He invited me to lunch at Rayyis’ *restaurant in the Jemmeizeh quarter so I said to myself, Why not? We drank arak and ate a good, cheap Lebanese stew. My attention was drawn to the Lebanese man they call Shoukri. He was sitting at a table surrounded by customers, peeling enormous quantities of garlic. Baroudi told me Rayyis’ was the best popular restaurant in Beirut, that he went there regularly to meet a group of young men who’d fought in the ranks of the Lebanese forces, and that he’d heard the story from Boss Josèph, who’d taken part in the massacre himself. What he had in mind was to arrange an encounter between Boss Josèph and me. “A Dialogue between the Executioner and the Victim” would be the first chapter of the book.

He asked me what I thought.

I said I didn’t know because I didn’t know about that kind of book, but it might be a good idea.

We sat and waited, but Boss Josèph never appeared. Baroudi ordered some food and arak, and then he took me on a tour of al-Ashrafiyyeh and told me about the massacre as it had been described by Boss Josèph.

Are you in the mood to hear it? Or are you in some other place and would prefer me to tell you about Salim? I think you liked the story about Salim because he was a pleasant young man, bright, and a real son of a bitch.

Where was I?

Abu Akram came by and invited us to drink tea at the Popular Front office. The tall bald man hesitated, he was waiting for Daniel.

“Where’s Daniel?” asked Abu Akram.

“I don’t know. We lost him in the camp,” said the tall man.

“I’ll send someone to look for him. Please come with me.”

So we went with him.

In the office, I had to translate.

Abu Akram delivered a brief lecture in his awkward English on the sufferings of the Palestinian people. He was followed by a man I hadn’t met before; his stomach hung down over his leather belt, the smoke from his cigarette filtering through his thick moustache; he held forth. The tall man and Catherine found their attention wandering, and I translated a bit. I skipped the slogans because they bored me, and also because they sounded ridiculous in English. China taught me a valuable lesson. There I was required to translate whatever I said in Arabic into English, and I discovered that I could dispense with half the expressions we use. Even my way of speaking changed: I started to avoid the lengthy introductions we usually put in front of whatever we have to say and went straight to the point instead.

The fat man’s speech resisted translation. How was I to translate the words for suffering, torment, oppression, and persecution that the man used, one after the other? He’d string together adjectives without indicating what he was describing, so I summarized his long Arabic sentences in brief English ones.

He interrupted me to say, “I said more than that.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I told him. “English is a condensed language.”

“But you cut out half my speech. How do you expect them to understand our sufferings when you cut them out?”

He looked at the tall man and asked if he understood what he was trying to say.

“Translate, Son, translate. Ask him if he understood what I was trying to say.”

“I understood,” said the tall man in response to my translation, adding that the aim of their visit was to acquire knowledge. He didn’t say one word to indicate solidarity, as Abu Akram and the fat man expected he would. He said he’d come to learn so he’d be able to transfer an accurate picture to the stage.

Salim was sitting behind the room’s only table, while Abu Akram, the fat orator, and the rest of us sat on low sofas against the walls. Salim said nothing during the speeches; his glances moved between the French woman and me. But when we’d subsided into silence and were sipping our coffee, he asked me, without any preliminaries, why I didn’t dye my hair!

“Why should I dye it?”

“To make you young again,” he said.

“I am young. I don’t need to prove it.”

You know that my hair started to go white when I was twenty-one. My grandmother, God rest her soul, told me it was in the family, that my father’s hair was completely white before he was twenty-five.

My grandmother said my father had loved his white hair because it made him look old and young at the same time. She also told me she’d insisted on washing his hair before he was buried. She got a bowl of water and washed his hair, which had been stained with his blood, until it was white as snow. And she wept. My grandmother said she didn’t weep until the hair was shining white once more. It was then that she understood her son was dead, and she plunged into a bout of weeping; her tears only dried up when she died. I wasn’t in the house when she died. They sent me a message to tell me the end was coming, and I came up from the south. She gave me the cushion and the watch and the Koran, but she didn’t die. Her last days dragged on, so I went back to the base in the south. She died in my absence.