Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

As you see, dear master, things have become mixed up in my mind just like in yours. I had nothing to do with it: It was Yasin, my father, who stood behind the donkey. But, you see, I’ve been infected by Umm Hassan and have started talking about these people as though I knew them all personally. But Ayyoub did become a saint. What do saints do to become saints? Nothing, I suppose, because people invent them. People invent wonders and believe in them because they need them. True as that is, it changes nothing. Ayyoub’s a saint, whether we willed it or not.

Aziz was guardian of the mosque and the lotus tree and the cemetery. He’d inherited his profession from his father, who’d inherited it from his father, who’d inherited it from his father, who. . until you run out of fathers. Every day he filled his water jar, washed the graves, cleaned the mosque, walked around the lotus tree, and slept.

“A man who sleeps in a cemetery.” That was how Umm Hassan described him.

And the man who slept in a cemetery started curing the sick, helping women get pregnant, bringing back those who had gone away, and finding husbands for girls.

Ayyoub gave his name to the tree, which became known as the Tree of Ayyoub.

Now I understand why you get things mixed up, Father. I asked you about the lotus tree, and you answered that there was no such thing as a lotus tree in al-Ghabsiyyeh, and that the people of Deir al-Asad used to talk of a tree called an Ayyoubi but you didn’t know what kind of tree that was.

The tree, Father, is the lotus, and its guardian is Ayyoub — a man who hanged himself from its branches, so the tree proclaimed him a saint.

“Listen, Khalil,” said Umm Hassan. “It could be that he hung himself, or it could be that the man tied the rope around his neck and climbed onto a branch of the tree to put an end to his misery and loneliness, but the tree took pity on him and broke so as not to allow him to commit the defilement of suicide. The tree, which is ruled by a saint, proclaimed him a saint, so now it has two saints, the first one, whose name we don’t know, and Ayyoub, of our village, whose name was Aziz. The sheikh of al-Jdeideh has a different opinion. He believes the Israelis strangled him, then tied a rope around his neck to make people think he’d committed suicide. ‘Why should he commit suicide?’ the sheikh asked me. ‘The man chose to live alone in the service of God — they killed him. They killed him because they wanted to uproot the tree, but we’ll never let them do that. I’ll appoint a new guard, for the tree and the tomb.’”

The sheikh of al-Jdeideh didn’t appoint a guard as he’d promised Umm Hassan, and the tomb remained alone, but no one lifted a hand against the sacred tree.

Would you like me to make a vow to Ayyoub for your recovery?

I’m certain you know Aziz Ayyoub. You may not have liked him because he wasn’t a fighter. You told me you despised anybody who didn’t carry a gun: “The country was slipping away before our eyes, and they sat there doing nothing.” Aziz Ayyoub didn’t carry a gun, and he didn’t fight, but look what he became and what we’ve become. He’s now a saint to whom people make vows, and we’re on our own.

Leave Aziz Ayyoub in his tomb and come with me to look for Shahineh. We left her in front of her tent in Deir al-Qasi. She went into the tent and lay down next to her children after her long journey to al-Ghabsiyyeh. And before she fell asleep, she smelled her own sweat, left the tent and asked Munirah to help her bathe. Later she divided her wealth into two halves, and managed to live off it for more than a year.

From Deir al-Qasi to Beit Lif, from Beit Lif to al-Mansourah, from al-Mansourah to Qana. Shahineh told how the people were like locusts: “The Israeli planes sailed overhead while we scurried through the emptiness looking for a refuge, until we reached al-Mansourah. There we crossed the border, the noise stopped, and the terror was extinguished. We found ourselves in Qana, and there we rented a house from the Atiyyeh family. Yasin went to school, and the girls and I sat in the house, and I spent all my money. Qana was beautiful and quiet, like our village in Palestine.”

My grandmother didn’t tell me much about Qana because she believed her exile only really began when they gathered everyone together in the camps around Tyre.

“In Qana, we weren’t in exile, or refugees. We were waiting.”

Do you know what waiting, and the hope of return, meant to these people, Abu Salem? Of course you don’t. However, the story of the buffalo of al-Khalsah astonished me. When my grandmother told me the story, I thought she was telling me something like the stories grownups tell children that they don’t expect them to believe. The story concerns a man called Abu Aref, a Bedouin of the village of al-Khalsah, belonging to the tribe of Heyb. He came to Qana along with everyone else and stayed there with his wife and five daughters. And he brought his buffalo. Seven buffalo cows, God protect them. “We all drank their milk, for the man used to give it away to everybody. He refused to sell it, saying the buffalo were an offering to al-Khalsah — ‘When we go back, we can buy and sell.’ He was generous and stubborn, like all Bedouin. When spring came, the season when buffalo become fertile, people saw the man leading his herd toward the south. His wife said he was crazy because he believed the buffalo could only conceive in al-Khalsah, and he’d agreed with a cousin of his to hand the buffalo over to him at the Lebanese-Palestinian border on the condition that he return them two weeks later. The man set off for the border, and his wife stood in the square at Qana to bid him farewell, mourning him and mourning the buffalo, but the man would have nothing to do with her. Then the buffalo disappeared from view, and everyone forgot about the matter.”

My grandmother said Abu Aref returned alone, cowering, his spirit broken. He wouldn’t speak. “He was bathed in tears, and we didn’t dare ask him anything. He returned alone, without the buffalo.”

“We’ve lost everything,” said Umm Aref.

Abu Aref drove his buffalo to al-Khalsah because he was convinced the buffalo could only conceive on the land where they were raised, and, at the border post, the firing started. The buffalo sank to the ground, their blood splashing the sky, and Abu Aref stood there in the midst of the massacre.

He told his wife he was standing at the border making signs to his cousin when the firing started.

He said he ran from buffalo to buffalo. He said it was all blood. He said he raised his hands and screamed, but they were killed anyway.

He said his dog of a cousin never turned up. He said he’d taken off his white kufiyyeh and raised it as a sign of surrender, then started running with it from buffalo to buffalo, trying to staunch their wounds, the kufiyyeh becoming drenched in blood. He said he raised the stained kufiyyeh and shouted and begged, but they didn’t stop. “The ground was covered in blood, the buffalo were dying, and I was weeping. Why didn’t they kill me too? I wiped my face with the blood-soaked kufiyyeh and sat down among the buffalo.”

The man returned to his wife cowering, frightened. He returned without his buffalo, carrying the blood-stained kufiyyeh and the marks of despair.

That was Qana.

My father went to the school, and my grandmother got out her Palestinian lira and spent them one by one, then sold her gold bracelets and her necklace; she didn’t, however, sell the signet ring, which remained on her finger until her death. I think my aunt Munirah took it. I don’t know. She sold everything and then started working with her daughters crushing stone in the village. Waiting was no longer viable. The borders were closed; people had entered a labyrinth. The Lebanese police came and said they had an order to gather the Palestinians into the camp at al-Rashidiyyeh. This was when the agony began. They drove Abu Aref, tied up with ropes, whipping him while he bellowed that he couldn’t bear to be taken away from his buffalo.