Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

Ahmad Ali al-Jashi told me how he’d gone around the whole village before reaching the mosque, and how he’d been afraid the weeds would devour him, and how he heard something panting and it scared him, and how he decided never to go back to al-Ghabsiyyeh again.

“Then I found the gap in the wall,” he said.

He said he walked a lot but kept looking back, for the pomegranate tree was his only landmark in the middle of that obliterated landscape. He returned to the tree, walked three steps backward and found himself in front of the opening. He jumped through it and was in their orchard. From there he returned to the mosque to find his uncle waiting for him.

Ahmad Ali al-Jashi said al-Ghabsiyyeh was the way it had always been.

He said it had been waiting for him.

He said most of the olive and carob trees had been cut down, but we’d plant new ones.

He said it wouldn’t take much work. We’d pick ourselves up and go. What could they do to us? We’d pitch our tents there the same as we’d pitched them here and wait until we’d rebuilt the houses that had been knocked down.

He said they hadn’t really been knocked down, it was just the earthen roofs that had collapsed, and we could rebuild them in days.

He said and he said and he said, his bald patch shining like oil, and I listened to him with half an ear. I thought, People like that never tire of repeating the same thing, they live in the past. Why don’t we pay attention to our present? Why must we remain prisoners of a past that overshadows us?

Then he asked me about the base in South Lebanon and said that, if I wanted, he could come down there so we could go to al-Ghabsiyyeh together. “It won’t be a military operation,” he said. “Fighting isn’t the point. I’ll take you there so you can see your village. Wouldn’t you like to see your village?”

When he said the words your village , we heard a wail from my grandmother’s room and realized the woman was dead. None of the men moved, but their tears flowed copiously, as though they’d been waiting for a signal, and the signal had come from my grandmother’s room. No one said a word, and no one went into the room. They were sure the end they’d been waiting for had come, and the crying began.

My aunt’s husband wiped the tears away with his hand and whispered into my ear his suspect question: “What are you going to do with the house?”

“What house?” I asked, thinking he was continuing the conversation about our houses in the village.

“This house,” he said.

“Nothing,” I said.

“You don’t want to sell it?” he asked.

“Why would I want to sell it?”

“Because you live on the base, and my son is coming next year to study at the university in Beirut. I’ll buy it.”

“No, I’m not going to sell my house.”

He said he was ready to give me whatever sum I named on the spot.

I told him that I didn’t need money, and I wasn’t going to sell my house.

The man stood up, joined the men’s circle, and resumed his weeping. Then my aunt came out of the room, silenced everyone with a flourish of her hand and announced that the woman wasn’t dead. The sobbing came to a sudden halt, the men returned to their conversation, and my uncle his story. Me, I decided to go back to the base. It seemed the woman was never going to die, and I had to get back.

My grandmother died in my absence, as my father had.

Why does the memory of my father come back when I want to root it out?

The fact is, I did root it out long ago and had forgotten about it, and the only reason it’s come back is you, because you want the story to go “back to the beginning.” I don’t know the beginning of the story. It’s not mine; I didn’t move from village to village, or go back to the field in Amqa carrying a bundle of vegetables on my back, or hide among the stalks, and I don’t know Aslan Durziyyeh and his son, Simon, or the story of the crime in Wadi Abu Jmil.

All the same, he comes back and haunts me.

It’s as though that woman who raised me on the smell of decaying flowers had slipped me into the skin of another man and handed me another name. It’s as though I’d become the Other that I’d never been.

My grandmother said the days passed. “I was like everyone else. I worked the land my husband had left me. Actually, I worked the land before and after he died — he, God bless him, was a fighter, meaning that he’d leave me and go off. If I hadn’t cultivated the land and looked after the olive trees, well, we’d have died of hunger. God rest his soul, he was full of talk, a peasant who didn’t know how to work the land and whose head was stuffed with gunpowder and weapons. We peasants don’t fight. I told them we don’t know how to fight, that the Arab armies were going to come lead the battles. But he didn’t want to listen to me. He would take off and occasionally return from further and further away, and then he died, and that was the end of him. It was my father’s fault. He was their commander, and he married me to Khalil without consulting me. One day, he came to say that they’d read the first surah of the Koran, the Fatihah , and that the wedding would be the next day. The wedding took place and I had a god-awful time. I lived with him for five years, bore three girls and a boy, and then my husband went off. The girls worked with me in the fields, and the boy we sent to the school in Acre.”

When Yasin finished his Koran lessons in the village, his mother sent him to Acre, where he joined the fourth grade class of its elementary school. In Acre, he stayed at the house of Yusef Effendi Tobil. This Yusef Tobil owned the oil press in the village and a small shop in Acre, and only came to the village in October and November, when he would press his olives and those of the peasants and then return to Acre.

“Your father, God rest his soul, would help with the oil pressing and then go back to Acre. He only studied in Acre for two years. He’d come to the village every Friday. He’d pass by the mosque and say his prayers before coming to the house, where he’d open his books and read. I barely saw him. I’d ask him about his life in Acre, and he’d read in a loud voice to make me stop talking. I tried to read his books, but I couldn’t. We knew how to read the Koran: We could open the Koran and read easily, but the books your father brought were impossible. My daughters and I tried to read them, but we couldn’t, even though they were written in Arabic. In those days, God help me, I used to think there was an Arabic language for men and another for women. Our language was the verses and chapters of the Koran, and God knows where theirs came from. Yusef Effendi, God bless him, persuaded me to send my son to school. He said, ‘Your son’s a beacon of intelligence, Shahineh, and he must go with me to Acre.’ I told him, ‘The boy’ll be scared there because he’s never seen the sea in his life.’ Yusef Effendi laughed and said the sea was the most beautiful thing in the world, and he’d teach him to swim. ‘The sea of life is harder than the sea of Acre,’ he said and took the boy. Yasin lived with them as though he were a member of the family, eating with them and sleeping in their house. He would go to school in the morning and help Mr. Yusef in his shop in the afternoon. I thought the boy would do as well in life as he did in school, but, poor boy, he only studied in Acre for two years. Then the catastrophes began: The war came to Galilee, and we started running from village to village until we reached Lebanon.”

My father, dear Yunes, didn’t understand what was going on. He was young and short and plump. He carried the vegetables on his back and stood watching his mother cry, and then resumed the exodus with her until they reached Tarshiha, and in Tarshiha he died. No, he didn’t die, but he saw death with his own eyes when the house collapsed on his head as the Israeli planes bombarded the town.