Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

I want to rest now.

I’m getting tired of talking and of death and of my mother and of you. I want to lay my head on the pillow and travel wherever I wish.

But please explain the secret of my father’s death.

My grandmother told me they were wearing civilian clothes, and my mother said they were soldiers. And what do you say?

Do you believe we can construct our country out of these ambiguous stories? And why do we have to construct it? People inherit their countries as they inherit their languages. Why do we, of all the peoples of the world, have to invent our country every day so everything isn’t lost and we find we’ve fallen into eternal sleep?

IT’S UMM HASSAN.

She came to the hospital to visit you three weeks before she died and said you had to be taken back there.

She came into the room and looked at you out of the corners of her small, sharp eyes. I was sitting in this eternal chair I sit in, and she gestured to me. “What?” I asked, and she put her finger to her lips and made me follow her out.

In the corridor she spoke in a low voice, almost a whisper. When I asked her why she was talking that way, she said, “So he won’t hear.”

“They can hear. I know them,” she said.

She talked about your planet, which no longer resembled ours. She said you were in torment and mustn’t be disturbed. “Talking’s no good anymore, my son,” she said. “He has to be taken back over there.”

Umm Hassan took me into the corridor and whispered that it was necessary to take you back to your country.

“How terrible!” she said. “He’s become like Aziz Ayyoub. You can’t let him die alone here.”

She said you were in this state because you refused to die alone. “Shame on you, my son, shame. The man spends his life over there and you want him to die here, in this bed? No, no, impossible. Get in touch with his children.”

I told her I didn’t know how to get in touch with his children in Deir al-Asad. She said I should contact Amna, that she would know what to do. I told her Amna had disappeared. She said she knew where she lived in Ain al-Hilweh and would go to her and come back with your children’s telephone number so we could contact them and organize your Return.

“He has to die there. It’s a sin. I know him. He’ll never die here.”

She put her hand on my shoulder and said you were like Aziz Ayyoub, who died hanging from the branches of the lotus tree.

I told her Aziz Ayyoub had committed suicide and there was no basis for comparison.

She said no. “Saints don’t commit suicide. They killed him to get rid of him.”

“But he wasn’t causing any problems, so why should they have killed him?” I asked.

“You don’t know anything,” she said. “They killed him by hanging him from the tree, and if it hadn’t been for God’s wisdom and the tree’s kindness, people would’ve thought he’d committed suicide. I didn’t see him, Son, but people told me: His eyes were open, the rope was around his neck, and he was lying on his back like a piece of wood, like this Yunes. No, Son. A man can’t die among men. A man needs a woman to die. Women are different, they’re stronger and can die on their own if they want to. But a man needs women so he can die. Aziz Ayyoub died that way because he was alone. His wife left him and took her children to Lebanon. I don’t understand why he lived that way. He said he was the guardian of the tree and of the mosque and of the graves, and he couldn’t abandon them. Who’s guarding the tree now? God is its guardian. I went there and I saw how the tree guards the whole of Galilee. The tree is the guardian, so why do we guard it? And this Yunes, Abu Salem, look at him. He’s shrinking and becoming a child again. Look at his face and eyes. His face is the size of a child’s palm, which means he wants his mother. Why are you keeping him here? Don’t you see how he’s shrinking? Take him to his mother, my son, and let him die in her house. Tomorrow I’ll go to Amna and get their telephone number and we’ll send him back. I know him better than you. He was a stubborn man; we called him ‘the billy goat.’ When he came back from over there, he stank like a billy goat, and we’d know Yunes had come back. How that poor woman could stand it I don’t know. A woman is a deep secret.”

Umm Hassan placed her hand over her mouth to hide her smile, then she drowned in laughter. When I say drowned , I mean it: She fell into her choked-off, silent roar of laughter, and her white headscarf slid onto her shoulders. Suddenly, she put her scarf back on, lowered her hand, and wiped away her smile.

I told her Nahilah would bathe you the moment you arrived at the cave of Bab al-Shams.

“Alas!” she sighed, turning her face away as though to close the subject.

I told her about the cave and about the village you built inside the caverns of Deir al-Asad. She said she knew those caves, which opened their mouths like ravening animals, and knew that no one ever went into them. “Those caves are haunted, my son.”

She told me about the goat that got lost in one of the caves of Deir al-Asad and reappeared in Ramallah.

“It’s the truth, Son. In Ramallah. And it was white. Its hair had turned white as though it had seen something terrible.” She said people had seen strange things in its eyes, so they shot it dead and no one dared eat its meat. “And now you come along after all this time and tell me that Yunes lived in those caves and used to bathe there. No, my son. I know better. He’d take her into the fields. Who told you about the caves? Yunes would go to his house, tap on the windowpane and wait for her. She’d come out and follow him, and he’d take her to the fields, and that was where those things happened. Not in the cave. Impossible.”

I told her that it was you who’d told me about it, and I tried to explain how Nahilah had fixed up the cave, how she’d brought mats and the mattress and the wooden chest and the primus stove and so on, but it seems it’s impossible to convince Umm Hassan of anything she thinks she already knows.

Then I understood.

This is your secret, Father. Your secret is your obscurity. Your secret is your multiple names and your mysterious lives. You are the Wolf of Galilee, and why should the wolf reveal his secrets? You yourself chose the name Wolf: You told me you wanted to be a wolf so the wolves wouldn’t eat you. You were a wolf enveloped in its secret. No one knew your secret or penetrated Bab al-Shams, which you made into a house, a village, a country.

I told Umm Hassan that the Ramallah goat resembled my mother. Najwah seemed to have disappeared down a tunnel from here to there. She disappeared from Beirut only to appear in a hospital in Ramallah wearing her white nurse’s outfit.

“No, my son, no,” said Umm Hassan.

“What could your mother do in the face of your grandmother’s madness? It was Shahineh who destroyed her, and all the people of the camp were witnesses. After the death of your little sister, the life of your mother became hell. Your grandmother, God rest her soul, was an excellent woman, but she was the reason. Was Najwah responsible for the death of your father? She didn’t know anyone here, she was from Tira, near Haifa, and had come on a visit to Lebanon. Your grandmother sunk her claws into her and managed to persuade her father to give his daughter to her son, who worked in that workshop that stank of scandal and filth. She wouldn’t let her touch anything in the house. She’d do the dishes, and the old woman would come along, sniff the dishes and the pots, and wash them again. She’d mop the floor, and your grandmother would mop it again behind her, cursing the filth. Your mother, my son, is no Ramallah goat; your mother is an unhappy creature, God help her. Her family must have truly tormented her to make her agree to marry the Bedouin and live with him in Ramallah.”