Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

Samih said he’d been in the Hebron prison.

“It was February; it was bitter cold, and snowing. They took me to the interrogator, who ordered me to take off my clothes. Around the interrogator were four men with rippling muscles. I took off my shirt. ‘Go on,’ he said. I took off my vest. ‘Your trousers,’ he said. I hesitated, but a punch in the face that made my nose bleed persuaded me. I took off my trousers and my shoes and stood naked except for my underpants. With a wave of the hand, the interrogator ordered them to take me away, and we went through the door of the prison and walked to a high mound. It was icy. I was certain they were going to kill me and dump me on the ice as food for the birds. At the top of the mound, the beating started. They attacked my entire body. They used their hands and their feet and their leather belts. They threw me down on the ground and kicked me and stamped on my face, my blood turning into icy red spots. At first I screamed with pain, and I heard the interrogator say, ‘Coward.’ I remembered the first interrogator and the contempt in his eyes as he flung the political pamphlet in my face, and I went dumb. They beat me, and I swallowed blood and groans. I rolled naked in the ice, and my skin was torn from me. The beating stopped after a stretch that seemed interminable, and they took me back to the prison. At the door to the interrogator’s room, where they ordered me to go in and get my clothes, I understood everything.”

Samih said he understood.

The naked, bleeding man stood at the door. He heard the order to enter so he could be given his clothes. The naked man turned to the interrogator, took hold of the sleeve of his thick coat, and said to him, “Please, Sir, don’t go.”

The interrogator turned in disgust. He tried to pull his arm away, but Samih tightened his grip and said, “Please, Sir. I want to tell you something.”

“Quickly, quickly,” said the interrogator.

Samih swallowed his blood and saliva and little bits that he later realized were pieces of his teeth and said, “Listen, Sir. Listen to me well. I didn’t cry out. You beat me and stamped on me, and I didn’t cry out even once. Next time, when you fall into my hands, please don’t cry out. I can’t stand pity.”

Samih didn’t know what happened after he said that because he woke up in solitary confinement. When he returned to the common wing, he told the other prisoners only part of his story. He told of the beating on the mound but didn’t tell them what happened afterwards in the interrogator’s room. He said his words had to remain a secret between him and the interrogator.

“What do you think?” he asked me.

“Do you know the interrogator’s name?” I asked him.

“No.”

“So?”

“Any one of them will do.”

“And if he cries out?”

“I’ll kill him.”

Samih died in Tunis, and his wife returned to Ramallah. I learned that he died in his small house in Menzah VI. It’s said he died of shock at the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in ’82, but I’m not convinced that was the reason. I mean, after all those who were killed fighting and in massacres, along comes someone who dies of sentiment! It’s too much. But in her letter, Samya said that heart disease ran in Samih’s family and his two brothers died of angina before reaching the age of fifty.

Samih said that nothing — not the ice, not the solitary confinement — frightened him as much as the day the prisoners beat him. “In the cell I lost all sense of time. But when the prisoners beat me, I lost my soul.”

He said he opened his eyes to find himself in darkness.

The cell was very small, and the darkness extended into every corner. He tried to stand, and his head hit the ceiling. He sat and began to suffocate.

“There wasn’t enough air,” he said, and he almost went mad worrying about it. He struck the walls of the cell with his fists and discovered that he couldn’t find where the door was. The walls seemed to be covered in seamless iron in which the door was lost.

He said he was suffocating, that he opened his mouth wide to capture the air.

He said he felt a terrible thirst inside. This was true thirst: True thirst is having no air.

He said it took a while to get used to the lack of air. Then, once he’d regulated his breathing, he relaxed a little and tamed the darkness.

“Do you know what darkness means?” he asked. “No one knows the meaning of the darkness of the grave. Darkness can’t be described. A gluey emptiness creeps over your body and seals your eyes and your pores.”

He said he no longer knew who or where he was. Time was lost and with it the man. “To regain my sense of time, I started to count. Eureka! I thought. I opened my ten fingers and started counting. On the count of sixty, I reached a minute. I’d count sixty minutes and reach an hour. But I began to get confused. Had I reached two hours, or was it more? I’d go back to the beginning and count over again. I’d count and the numbers would get confused, and then I couldn’t go on any longer and passed into silence.”

He said he waited for daybreak, when they brought him water and food.

He said that the day didn’t come. “I didn’t have a watch, I had nothing. I was alone in the darkness, with the darkness.”

He said he hit his head on the walls. He said he bled and screamed until he was hoarse. He said he only wanted one thing from them, that they tell him what day and what time it was.

As Samih told his story, the fear would steal into his words, and he’d shudder and say, “That’s the worst torment, being deprived of time. Eternity is true agony.”

I asked him what he felt when they took him out of the dark. He was silent for a long time before saying that he felt the beauty of old age. “The prisoner doesn’t see himself in the mirror; there are no mirrors there. His only mirror is the eyes of other prisoners.” When he saw his own image in the eyes of the other prisoners, who were struck with terror at how he’d aged, he felt comforted.

“And the beating?” I asked.

“That was my mistake,” he said.

Do you know what Samih did when he left solitary confinement? He joined the prisoners’ Sufi circle. He said he started joining in their prayers and their ritual dhikr . In fact, he became close to their sheikh, Hamid al-Khalili, until they found out he wasn’t a Muslim.

“When Sheikh Hamid found out I was a Christian, I was terrified,” said Samih. “On the mound I wasn’t afraid. I thought I’d die on the ice, so I surrendered to the ice; it inhabited my eyes and took me into the whiteness of death. With the sheikh it was a different matter. I think an informer told the sheikh I was a Christian; he said he’d seen my mother with the other visitors, and she was wearing a cross around her neck.”

“Is it true?” asked the sheikh.

Samih didn’t know what to answer. All he could do was confess. They pounced on him, but the sheikh raised his hand and they stopped in their tracks. The sheikh approached him.

“I said yes. I couldn’t find words to justify my position. How could I, how could I tell him that after the darkness of solitary confinement, I felt the need to be among them?

“He asked me if I was mocking them.

“I said, ‘No, no, I swear.’

“In the midst of the devotees, as their fury took shape around me, a murmur spread. I wished I were dead.

“The sheikh questioned me and I tried to explain, but my words were the cause of my downfall.

“I said I was Christian, but also not, that I believed in God and loved Christ, but still I was. .

“‘A communist, maybe?’ said the sheikh.

“I told him I was a member of Fatah.

“‘So you’re an atheist,’ said the sheikh.”