Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

The day her long final illness came, she summoned me to her side. I was in the village of Kafar Shouba in southern Lebanon, where the fedayeen had set up their first camp, when my uncle came and asked me to go to Beirut. In her house in the camp, the woman was dying on her pillow. When she saw me, her face lit up with a pale smile, and she gestured to the others to leave us alone. When everyone was gone, she asked me to sit down next to her on the bed. She whispered that she didn’t own anything she could leave me but this — and she pointed to her pillow — and this — and she pointed to her watch — and this — and she pointed to her Koran.

She squeezed my hand tightly, as if holding onto life itself. She told me she missed my father. Then she closed her eyes and her breathing became irregular. I tried to pull my hand away, but I couldn’t, so I yelled and the women came in and started weeping. She didn’t die, however. I stayed for three days waiting for it to happen, then went back to Kafar Shouba. Two weeks later, I returned to Beirut for her funeral.

I don’t know where I put the watch, the women in the camp decided to bury the Koran with her, but I still have the pillow. I thought of it because I was going to kill you with a pillow. Tomorrow I’ll bring it to you before I throw it away; I must get rid of that pillow of flowers that reeks of decay. The strange thing is that no one who comes to my house notices the smell. Even Shams didn’t smell it. I’m the only one who can smell that secret odor that nauseates me.

I wanted to kill you with the pillow because I hated your incredible insistence on clinging to life, but I hesitated and became afraid, and that was the end of it.

Tomorrow I’ll bring you my grandmother’s pillow and open it so I can see what’s inside. My grandmother used to change the flowers at the beginning of each season, and I think she expected me to continue the tradition. I want to open the pillow to see what happened to the flowers. Why does a person turn to dust when he dies, while an object decomposes and yet remains an object? Strange. Didn’t God create us all from dust?

Tomorrow I’ll open the pillow and let you know.

I wanted to suffocate you and then the desire faded. It was a passing feeling and never recurred, but I did feel it. How can I describe it? It was as though there were another person inside me who leapt out and made me capable of destroying everything. Whenever I became aware of that other person, I’d run out of your room and roam around the hospital. This would calm me down. Now I’m calm. Feeling that things around you and me are moving slowly, I’ve decided to kill some time by talking. Have you heard that terrifying expression “to kill time”? It’s time that kills us, but we pretend it’s the other way around!

So as to kill time and stop it from killing me, I’ve decided to examine you again.

At the beginning, that is, after you’d settled into your lethargy and the fever had left you, you smelled odd. I can’t explain what I mean, because smells are the hardest things to describe. I’ll just say it was the smell of an older man. It seems there are hormones that set different ages apart from one another. The smell of older men differs fundamentally from the smell of men in their prime, and especially from that of thirteen-year-old boys who start to give off a smell of maleness and sex. The smell of older men is different, quiet and pale. Like my grandmother’s pillow, it’s a disturbing scent. No, I wouldn’t say it disgusted me — God forbid. But I was disturbed, and I decided I ought to bathe you twice a day — but the smell was stronger than the soap. Then the smell started to go away, and a new one took its place. No, I don’t say this because I’ve become accustomed to your smell. It’s a medical matter and has clearly to do with hormones. And I believe that — I don’t know how — you’ve started a new life phase that I can’t yet define but that I can discern through your smell.

And because one thing leads to another, as the Arabs say, I want to tell you that you’re wrong, your theories about age and youth are a hundred percent erroneous. I remember I met you one rainy February morning when you were out jogging. I stopped you and told you that jogging after sixty was bad for the heart and lungs and that you should practice a lighter form of exercise, like walking, to lose weight and keep your arteries open. I told you older men should do older men’s sports.

That day you invited me to have coffee at your house and subjected me to a long lecture on aging. “Listen, Son. My father was an old man — I knew him only as an old man. Do you know why? Because he was blind. A person will grow old at forty, not sixty, if he loses the two things that can’t be replaced: his sight and his teeth. Being old means having your sight go and your teeth fall out. At forty, gray hair invades your head, your teeth start to rot, and your vision becomes dim, so you look like an old man. But inside you’re still young; your age consists of how other people see you, it comes from your children. Yes, it’s true: In addition to eyes and teeth, there are the children. We peasants marry early. I got married at fourteen, so just think how old my children and grandchildren were when I was forty. There’s no such thing as being old these days, for two reasons. The first is the invention of glasses, so weak eyesight is no longer an issue, and the second is dentistry, so people don’t have to have all their teeth out by the time they’re seventy or eighty. Here I am today, with all my own teeth and glasses that let me read, so how can you call me an old man? Old age is an illusion. People get old from the inside, not the outside. So long as there’s passion in your heart, it means you’re not an old man.”

On that occasion I meant to ask when you’d last seen her, but I felt shy. I stood up and started looking at the pictures on the wall. Seven sons, three daughters, and fifteen grandchildren, and in the middle the photo of Ibrahim, who’d died as a baby. Twenty-five people, the first fruits of the adventure you forged.

You told me about Ghassan Kanafani. *

You told me he came to you with a letter of introduction from Dr. George Habash asking you to tell him your story. He would write it down. It was you who trained George Habash and Wadi’ Haddad and Hani al-Hendi and everyone else in the first cadre. Why didn’t you tell me what that first experiment was like? And also why you joined Fatah? Was it because of Abu Ali Iyad, as you told me, or because you were against plane hijackings? Or because you liked change?

Ghassan Kanafani came, you told him your story, he took notes, and then he didn’t do anything. He didn’t write your story.

Why didn’t he write it? Did you really tell him your story? You never used to tell anyone your story because everyone knew it, so why bother?

Writers are strange. They don’t know that people don’t tell real stories because they’re already known. Kanafani was different though. You told me you liked him and tried to tell him everything. But he didn’t write anything. Do you know why?

It was the mid-fifties when he came to see you, and your story hadn’t yet become a story. Hundreds of people were slipping across from Lebanon to Galilee. Some of them came back and some of them were killed by the bullets of the border guards. That, maybe, is why Kanafani didn’t follow up on the story — because he was looking for mythic stories, and yours was just the story of a man in love. Where would be the symbolism in this love that had no place to root itself? How did you expect he would believe the story of your love for your wife? Is a man’s love for his wife really worth writing about?

However, you became a legend without realizing it, and I want to assure you that if Kanafani hadn’t been assassinated in Beirut by the Israelis in ’72, if the car bomb hadn’t ripped his body to shreds, he’d be sitting with you now in this room, trying to piece your story together.