Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

“They’re taking care of our trees,” I said.

“If only you could see it, the whole area is planted with pine trees. God, how lovely the pines are! You’d think you were in Lebanon.”

“Pine trees! But it’s an area for olives.”

“The Jews don’t like olive trees. It’s either pines or palms.”

“They killed the trees,” I said.

“No. They uprooted them and replanted.”

Nasri would throw in a few Hebrew words that I didn’t understand to prove that what he was saying was true. He said he’d been a fool because he’d believed in the war, and that this war was meaningless. He was leaving for America soon to continue his studies in computer engineering.

The strange thing was that I listened to this young man who’d jumped with his parachute over Galilee without feeling any hatred. I’d imagined that if I ever met one of those people, I wouldn’t be able to hold myself back, but there I was drinking arak and laughing at their jokes and watching the girl as she tried to hold Nasri’s hand and he pulled it out of hers, while Baroudi observed me and looked at his watch and grumbled because Josèph was late.

“That Josèph of yours is full of shit,” one of them said. He started telling tales of Josèph’s cowardice, telling how during the battle of the Holiday Inn, *he threw himself from the fourth floor to escape and ran on a broken leg.

“A dopehead and an asshole,” said another.

“Look how he’s ended up — calling himself a boss, just when there aren’t any bosses left,” said Nasri.

I felt a desire to defend Boss Josèph. I thought it wasn’t fair to talk about him behind his back and that if he were there, he’d show them what being a boss meant. And as to his being a coward, I didn’t believe it, especially after what my writer friend had told me about how particularly brutal he’d been during the Shatila massacre. However, I preferred to remain silent. I was in a strange position. How can I describe it? I really can’t say there had been no crimes. We, too, killed and destroyed, but at that moment I sensed the banality of evil. Evil has no meaning, and we were just its tools. We’re nothing. We make war and kill and die, and we’re nothing — just fuel for a huge machine whose name is War. I said to myself, It’s impossible. Especially with this Nasri, I felt as though I were standing in front of a mirror, as though he resembled me! If I’d been able to talk, I’d have talked more than he did, but a big stone stopped up my mouth. Then the stone started crumbling to the rhythm of the girl’s hand that reached out for Nasri’s hand and then pulled back. He was drinking arak in a special way: He’d suck the glass, leave a little of the white liquid on its lip and then lick it off. He had fair skin and broad shoulders. I think he must have been a body builder because his chest rippled under his blue shirt. He kept coming back to the story of the parachute training and what he’d felt while flying over Israel.

He’d say Israel and look at me apologetically: “Sorry, sorry — Palestine — is that better?” He said he’d flown over Palestine and would look at me with eyes full of irony and complicity.

After my third glass I asked about the war: “What do you feel now?”

“Nothing at all,” said Nasri. “And you?”

“I feel sad,” I said.

Nasri said he didn’t feel regret or sorrow for his friends who’d died in the war. “That’s life,” he said, shrugging his shoulders indifferently.

“But you were defeated,” I said.

“And you were defeated,” he said.

“Not exactly,” I said.

“Tell me about your life in the camps, and then talk to me about victory and defeat.”

“I’ll tell you about my death,” I said. “You killed me.”

“We killed you, and you killed us. That’s what I was trying to explain to you,” said Nasri. “We were defeated, and you were defeated.”

“All of us were defeated,” said Maro, raising his glass. “Knock it back, boys — a toast to defeat.”

The young men raised their glasses and drained them to the last drop.

“We have to go. It was good to meet you, Doctor. Don’t be upset, we’ll talk some more,” said Nasri, who asked for the bill and paid it. Then they all left.

I wanted to — but didn’t — mention the intifada and say, “It’s true we were defeated, but the game’s not over.” But that stone stopped up my mouth.

Nasri paid and left, and I was embarrassed because my friend the writer didn’t even take out his wallet.

I felt nauseous among the stacks of empty dishes, but I wasn’t drunk. I’d only drunk three glasses of arak, but it was the emotion. I looked at my watch and said Josèph wasn’t coming.

“How about a coffee?” asked Baroudi.

I said, “Great,” and raised my hand to order, but Baroudi pulled it down.

“Not here,” he said. “Let’s go to a café.”

I sat next to him in his red Renault, and he took me through streets I didn’t know. That’s how I finally became acquainted with al-Ashrafiyyeh, East Beirut’s Christian quarter that they also call Little Mountain. He switched the car’s tape recorder to the Fairouz song, “Old Jerusalem.”

“We’re enemies,” I said to Baroudi.

“Don’t worry about it,” he answered me. “It’s all bullshit.”

Then we entered a beautiful street. It was how I imagined the streets of Haifa. My grandmother told me tales of the city by the sea, where the streets were shaded by trees and jasmine and there was the scent of frangipani. “We’re in the Circassian quarter,” Baroudi said. “This is where the rich people live. They were just translators for the foreign consuls in the days of the Ottomans, and look at their palaces now!”

He said he dreamt of having a house here.

He said that during the illness of his aged father, who was now dead, he’d come to walk with him every day in this street. His father loved to walk here. “I want to die and take these colors with me to the grave,” he would say. Then Baroudi told me a strange story about a woman his father had been in love with before he married his mother. He spoke of an old hunchbacked woman who lived close to the cemetery: “She was ten years older than my father, worked as a seamstress and spent her money on him. She had no family; her only brother had died when he was young. My father didn’t marry her. His family forced him to marry his cousin, my mother. The strange thing was that this woman encouraged him to get married. He went on loving her even when she grew old and her back was bent, but he would send me to see her because his heart could no longer bear to see her in her miserable old age. A woman with a hunched back, who wore black clothes, and walked as though she were crawling — as though she’d turned into a tortoise. I was afraid of her; I’d place the basket of food at the entrance to her house, knock on the door, and flee. She’d yell at me to come in, but I was scared of the tortoise shell that had sprouted on her back.”

He stopped the car, turned to me, and said, “And you?”

“And me what?”

“What about your father?”

“My father died a long time ago, and I don’t remember him.”

Before we got to the café, he pointed out the cemetery of Mar Mitri. I saw what looked like marble palaces adorned with statuettes of angels and doves taking flight.

“These are their tombs,” he said.

“Whose tombs?”

“The tombs of the owners of the palaces we saw along the avenue.”

“Those are tombs!”

“Indeed, my friend. They live in palaces, and they’re buried in palaces. It’s the way of the world.”

We sat in Joachim’s Café close to Sasin Square in al-Ashrafiyyeh, whose name has been changed to Phalange Martyrs’ Square. In the middle of the square is a memorial to the victims of the explosion of the House of Phalanges on the day of the Feast of the Cross, September 14, 1982, when President-elect Bashir Jmayil met his end. The base of the monument bears a large photograph of Jmayil crossed with gray lines. His assassination, a few days before he was to assume the post of President of the Lebanese Republic, was the declared pretext for the Shatila massacre. It was said that his men committed the massacre, in coordination with the Israeli army because they were so blinded by sorrow for their leader.