Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

That was 1953, the year when Rabbi Ya’qoub Elfiyyeh was stabbed to death in his home in Wadi Abu Jmil. It seems the police suspected that the gang responsible for the crime consisted of workers at the sheet-metal factory owned by Durziyyeh and Lawi, so they raided the place and took all the young men in for interrogation.

“Your father went straight from the prison to his wedding,” said my grandmother.

The story spread through the camp. At the beginning, the newspapers hinted that the presence of three Palestinians among those arrested pointed to it being a revenge killing. You know how they make a big thing out of any crime committed by a Palestinian in Lebanon, so you can imagine when the victim was a rabbi.

The investigation turned up some amazing facts. The rabbi’s wife gave everything away, confessing that her husband had been involved in abnormal relationships with seven young men and had fallen madly in love with the Greek, Dimitri Alefteriades, and had kept him overnight in his bed despite his wife’s objections.

So the investigation turned to Alefteriades, who confessed before the investigating magistrate, Lt. Colonel Tanyous al-Tawil, that he, along with seven of his comrades, had stabbed the rabbi to death. Dimitri said he’d wanted to get rid of the rabbi, who’d forced him to have sex with the young man, Salim Hneineh, in front of him and hadn’t paid him the money he’d promised. He said that he’d hated the rabbi but had had sex with him and had gone along with his wishes out of greed.

Dimitri wept in the courtroom and swore he was innocent and that he’d killed the rabbi unintentionally. The judge, however, accepted the view of the public prosecutor, who asserted that the crime was premeditated and that seven young men had taken part, led by Dimitri.

Naturally, my father was released a long while before the trial. But the details of the sodomy spread through the camp, and my grandmother felt she had to get her son married. She went to visit her daughter in Ain al-Hilweh the day before my father was let out of prison. There she met Najwah and her father, and the father broached the subject. She didn’t mention to him that the groom was in prison for a sex crime, and he didn’t ask what the groom did for a living. He just confirmed that he owned land in al-Ghabsiyyeh, for in those days people didn’t believe the land was lost.

So my father left prison and went straight to his wedding.

It goes without saying that he lost his job, since Aslan Durziyyeh closed his factory after the scandal and devoted himself to prayer, and my father went on visiting him at his house and eating lamb-sausage sandwiches with him. Aslan Durziyyeh even visited my father in the camp when my sister was born. After the events of ’58, however, he emigrated to Israel.

It was the rabbi’s wife who became the story!

She came to the courtroom and spat in Dimitri’s face as he stood handcuffed in the dock, cursed her husband who had soiled the reputation of the Children of Israel, and said that Beirut would burn like Sodom. She said she didn’t know what would become of her: “I’m alone and have no children, and I can’t stay in my house, which is filled with the stench of sin.” She said she wasn’t asking for anything, but she was ruined: “I’m completely ruined, Your Honor. I don’t have the strength to stay here in Beirut or the courage to migrate to the Land of Israel. What am I supposed to tell them there? That I’m the widow of the rabbi who was murdered in the bed of adultery and sodomy?”

The judge ordered that she be removed from the courtroom because in those days it was forbidden to pronounce the name of the State of Israel, and there was this woman saying that Beirut was going to turn into the new Sodom and that she didn’t dare migrate to the land of her ancestors because she would be turned into a pillar of salt. “I am the pillar of salt, Your Honor, who announces the burning of your city,” said the woman before the policemen dragged her out of the courtroom.

The upshot was that my father married the girl from al-Tirah.

Najwah Hani Fayyad was fourteen years old when she married Yasin. Her father put her in my grandmother’s hands. He took the dowry and left, and the girl entered our house as the wife of Yasin, who’d found himself work in a sheet-metal factory called The Light Metals Company, in the Bir al-Abed district, owned by the Palestinian Badi’ Boulis.

I know nothing about my mother’s family. My grandmother said her mother had died and her father agreed to the marriage quickly because he’d found a job in Kuwait and didn’t want to take his daughter there with his second wife and her children.

“The wedding was like any other wedding — a party, a procession, youyous , and the usual fuss. But the girl remained a stranger among us, and your father changed after he got married. It was all the fault of the girl from al-Tirah. He would come home in the evening after work, close the door of his room, and read for hours. She’d sit with me in the house doing nothing — I swear she did nothing. I’d do all the cooking, wash the clothes, wash the dishes, everything. Even you, Son: I looked after you, and your father took no interest. He began staying away from home a lot and not coming back until the morning. It seems he left his job. I think Adnan Abu Odeh put ideas into his head. Then Najwah had her daughter, and Yasin died, and his daughter followed him.”

TELL ME about those days. My grandmother didn’t know much. Tell me about the beginning and how you formed the first groups of fedayeen, why my father died, why you disappeared, and why Adnan left the camp.

Tell me why Najwah disappeared.

In Jordan no one knew her address. It was as though she’d melted into thin air. My grandmother said she’d gone to her family in Amman, but she didn’t have family. Her father was in Kuwait. So where was she? The subject didn’t interest me much because when she disappeared, I was a child, and when I grew older, I held a grudge against her and didn’t pay much attention to her story. Then I met Samih and his wife, Samya. You didn’t meet Samih Barakeh; you hate intellectuals, especially the ones who come and visit the fighters, theorize and philosophize, and then go back to their comfortable homes.

I first met Samih in ’73 when clashes erupted between the army and the camps. He came to the camp with a group of workers from the Palestine Research Center. They toured the camp and then all went home. Except for him. Samih stayed for more than ten days, we were posted in the same positions and we became friends. I liked him a lot. There was great suffering in his face, which was broad and brown and etched with pain. He told me he was waiting for Samya to come from America so they could get married in Beirut. He said he’d fallen in love with her in Ramallah and then had gone to prison, and in the meantime, she had to leave with her family for Detroit, which has the world’s largest concentration of inhabitants of Ramallah. I asked why he didn’t go to her, complete his education in America, and marry her there. He told me he had his hands full here because he wanted to liberate Palestine. He spoke of his lengthy imprisonment in Hebron and of his dream of living with Samya in the stone house he’d inherited from his father in Ramallah. Samya did come and marry him, and now she lives in the stone house in Ramallah while Samih sleeps in his grave.

Samih said he was arrested for the first time in October of ’67.

He was distributing pamphlets against the Israeli occupation in the city. “In prison,” he said, “the Israeli officer taught me the most important lesson of my life. He interrogated me with a copy of the pamphlet in his hand and flung questions at me. At first I said I’d been reading the pamphlet and had nothing to do with distributing it, when in fact I was the one who’d written it, which called on schools to strike in protest against the occupation. He looked me in the eye and said I was a coward. He said that if he were in my place, and if his country were occupied, he wouldn’t go around distributing pamphlets — that would be shameful — he’d be distributing bombs instead. I confessed I was the one who’d written the pamphlet, and then he grew even more contemptuous and said I deserved to be beaten. I finished my one-year sentence in Ramallah, and when I came out, we started the real resistance. We began organizing a network for Fatah, but they arrested us before we could undertake any operations. They seized one of the members of the network who’d gone to Jordan and had come back in clandestinely, with explosives. And it was in the second prison that I learned my lesson.”