Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

This was where Samih made the mistake that almost cost him his life. He said he saw religion as a social phenomenon, an ethic. He said he loved Arabic literature and knew the Koran and pre-Islamic poetry by heart, and wanted to join in their experience.

“But that’s not what you told us at the beginning,” said the sheikh.

The sheikh held his hand up and said, “What do you think, brothers?” The brothers, however, rather than responding, attacked. The sheikh managed to extricate himself, but Samih fell beneath their blows and howls.

“On the ice,” said Samih, “when I saw death, I didn’t open my mouth. But there, I screamed and wept and was afraid. The circles revolved around me and by the time I opened my eyes, I was in solitary confinement. Then they took me to a new communal cell, where I found Sheikh Hamid, and we became friends.

“I explained to him and he explained to me. He wanted to convert me to Islam, and I wanted to convince him of the mixture of secularism, humanism, and Marxism that I believed in. We parted ways without him converting me or me convincing him, but he came to understand that I hadn’t been mocking them and that I loved religious ritual.”

Samih was an intellectual. He’d had two books published, plus a number of articles. He had his own particular theory on Israel, basically that it would collapse from within and that the moment of liberation was near. He’d mention dates. He was convinced that Israel would collapse at the end of the eighties as a result of its internal contradictions. It was difficult to discuss anything with him because he knew everything. He read Hebrew and English and kept an amazing amount of numbers in his head, which he would toss down in front of you so you could do nothing but agree. Naturally, his predictions didn’t come true. The only part that came true was that his remains were transported to Ramallah, where he was buried in his family’s grave. Samya was the one who arranged it.

I’ve told you about Samih so I can tell you about Samya. Samya was an ordinary woman, or at least that’s what she led us to believe in Beirut. She did nothing other than wait for her husband. In the space of two years, she bore two children and cooked a lot. When I visited them at home, I’d see her sitting on the edge of the sofa as though ready to get up at any moment. She sat with us but gave the impression of being elsewhere. I was told she changed a lot after Samih died. She arranged for herself and the children to return to Ramallah because she had American citizenship. She’d worked as a librarian and became the official in charge of the Ramallah organization during the intifada . It was as though Samih’s death had liberated her from waiting and had driven her to forge a new life.

My existence was jarred by Samya’s mysterious letter.

I was in Shatila, during the first siege, when a young man called Nadim al-Jamal joined us. He was a friend of the camp commandant, Ali Abu Toq.

Nadim al-Jamal said he had a letter for me from a woman called Samya Barakeh whom he’d met by chance in Amman, where she was returning from a conference in Stockholm. When she found out he was going to see me in Beirut, she asked him to delay until the next morning and brought him a letter for me.

I believed that Samya had never listened to me because although she’d sit with us at their place, she always gave the impression of not really being present. Her husband would ask questions and I’d respond, but she would never intervene. Samih would always talk about his dream of writing a book without a beginning or an end. “An epic,” he called it, an epic of the Palestinian people, which he’d start by recounting the details of the great expulsion of ’48. He said we didn’t know our own history, and we needed to gather the stories of every village so they’d remain alive in our memory. Samih would talk to me about his theories and dreams, and I had nothing to tell him. Well, I did tell him about our village, and my grandmother’s stories, and my father’s death and my mother’s disappearance. With him, or because of his questions, I became acquainted with the stories of my family, put events together and drew a picture of al-Ghabsiyyeh, which I hadn’t known. I put so much into getting the story ready that I came to know the village house by house. And during all that time, Samya sat there in silence.

I opened Samya’s letter and read it.

To start with, she wrote about her longing for Beirut. Then she informed me of Samih’s death and about the difficulties of life in Ramallah. I don’t have the letter any longer to read to you because we tore up all our papers when we were afraid the camp would fall. I wish I hadn’t torn it up, because it was my only evidence that my mother wasn’t a ghost or a story made up by my grandmother. My mother is a real woman, not a phantom belonging to the mysterious world of childhood. I followed orders and tore up the letter; Abu Toq called us together during the siege and ordered us to tear up everything. “I don’t want documents falling into their hands,” he said. I tore the letter up, but before doing so I wrote down the telephone number Samya had put at the end. I must have tried that number a dozen times, and every time I got a recorded message saying it was out of service. Did I copy it wrong? Or were the numbers on that little piece of paper I kept in the back pocket of my trousers erased or illegible?

Sanya wrote that she’d met my mother, Najwah, and that she had wept and wept when Samya told her she knew me and had kissed her and held her close, so she might breathe in the smell of me. Samya wrote that she’d met my mother in the hospital in Ramallah, that she wore a headscarf, and she was working as a nurse.

Samya was waiting for her son outside the operating room where he was having his appendix taken out when a dark-skinned nurse wearing a white headscarf came over to reassure her.

“Your mother’s beautiful, Dr. Khalil,” she wrote. I wish I had the letter, but it’s gone and I can’t get in touch with Samya because the number was either erased or written down wrong.

My mother’s there, a nurse like me! Samya wrote that she knew her because she was a nurse. “Nurses look alike, and she resembles you a lot.” I’m at a loss. What if I found my mother? I don’t want her now, and I don’t love her. But why? Why should her ghost come and inhabit this room with me? My grandmother didn’t describe her to me, and all I can remember is her brown arm. I used to put my lips on her arm and kiss it. All that’s left of that woman for me is the image of a face nuzzling her arm, two eyes fixed on it, a mouth caressing the vast, soft brownness.

Samya’s letter brought me this new picture of a woman, a woman who covered her hair and worked as a nurse in Ramallah. My mother emerged from the letter looking like any other woman, and when your mother comes to resemble any other woman, she’s not your mother anymore. What strange kind of a relationship is this that depends on an illusion? But everything’s like that. Isn’t Shams an illusion? My problem with Shams is that the illusion won’t die. When they killed her, they didn’t kill her image. I haven’t told you what I found out afterwards. When Shams was ambushed, she opened the door of her car and was about to get out. The upper half of her body hung outside the open door while the lower half remained inside the car. The number of bullets that poured into her was terrible. More than sixty machine guns firing at once. Her body was torn apart and scattered. Little bits flew through the air and pelted trees and houses. After they’d finished, the pieces were collected in two plastic bags and buried.

As far as I’m concerned Shams didn’t die, for when the body is torn apart there is no death. I wish she’d died, but she didn’t. And I’m incapable of loving another woman. No, I’m not saying that I won’t ever be unfaithful, because everyone is unfaithful, but I can’t. . The problem is not my betrayals but my permanent feeling of being unfaithful. I wish she’d died. No, it’s not possible to compare your situation with mine. You died when your wife died, but my wife wasn’t my wife, she was another man’s wife, and when she died her smell invaded and took hold of me. When her image comes to me, I’m overwhelmed by that feeling that my rib cage is burning. I get up from my bed and stand in the dark and drink it in. I drink in the dark and rub it into my chest, and the memories possess me.