Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

“The Bedouin! What Bedouin?” I asked.

“Yes, the Bedouin. Abu al-Qasem had come to Amman and saw her at Ashrafiyyeh Hospital, where she worked, so he went to her family and asked for her hand, and they agreed right away without asking her because her stepmother wanted to get rid of her.”

Umm Hassan said that in Ramallah, Najwah found out that the Bedouin was married to another woman, and she lived in misery and humiliation. The Bedouin married her and then regretted it because his first wife, who was also his first cousin, turned the whole clan against him, so that Najwah became a sort of secret wife, which was why she was forced to work in the hospital.

I asked Umm Hassan how she knew all this.

She said that everybody knew.

“But I didn’t know.”

“The husband’s the last to know.”

But I’m not her husband, and I don’t understand. Why didn’t anyone tell me about my mother? When I’d ask my grandmother, she’d shut down, locking her face with the key of silence. I had to wait for that mysterious letter from Ramallah to know, and still I didn’t know. I tore up the letter, I lost Samya’s telephone number, and I lost the name of the Bedouin in Ramallah. Even Umm Hassan didn’t know the Bedouin’s name even though she knew everything. She told me about my uncle Aziz and about his days and nights in the ruins of al-Ghabsiyyeh. “He lived alone for more than twenty years, dividing his time between the tree, the mosque, and the graves. He’d stand in front of the lotus tree, talking to it and listening to it. He knew everything because the tree used to tell him. When people came from the surrounding villages to visit the tree, he’d disappear. He wouldn’t talk to them or go near them. They’d see him like a distant ghost wrapped in the shadows of his white mantle. They’d greet him and he’d respond with a nod. They’d bend over the roots of the tree and light their candles before tying their strips of cloth and ribbons to the branches and departing.”

I told her that he’d committed suicide, that he was mad: “Who could live alone for twenty years and not go mad?”

Her face lit up, seemingly in agreement, but then she said, “No, no, Son. He’s a saintly man; people make offerings to him and call his name when praying for their children.”

But I’m tired of saints and heroes and wolves. My father’s a hero and you’re a wolf, and I’m lost in the middle. I see my father’s death in yours and in your newfound childhood I see his. It’s very strange! I see you both, but I don’t see myself, it’s as though I’m no longer here and everything around me is unreal, as though I’ve become a shadow of the lives of two men I don’t know. It’s true, I don’t know you. You I know only through this childlike death of yours, and him only through a picture on a wall. Even Shams, Shams who I loved to the point of wanting to be her assassin, Shams whose vengeful ghost I fear, seems to be no more than the ghost of that woman who disappeared and became a white goat in a hospital in Ramallah.

I can’t believe Umm Hassan and her saintly Aziz Ayyoub, or my grandmother and the evil spell that was the cause of my father’s murder. Instead of telling me about the first fedayeen in whose ranks my father died, Shahineh told me about the cave and its curse.

Shahineh would contemplate the photo of the dead man; she’d wipe it with water to keep it fresh and would talk about the cave of al-Ghabsiyyeh.

She said she’d known that Yasin would die and that a woman was going to kill him.

“May God curse me,” she’d say, “I married him off and thought nothing of it. I was terrified by the business of the rabbi, so I married him to that girl from Tira. I paid no attention to her eyes. Her eyes had something of that fear I saw after the business with the cave.”

My grandmother said it was called Aisha’s Cave. Aisha’s Cave is to the north of the village, on the high ground that separates al-Ghabsiyyeh from al-Kabri.

My grandmother said that my paternal uncle, Mohammed Abdallah Ayyoub, was a religious scholar and a Sufi, and he had power over the djinn. “One day he sent his son Mahmoud and a boy called Sa’id with my son, Yasin, to the cave, telling them, ‘When you arrive, read this paper. A black dog will appear. Do not fear it, for it is possessed by the djinni that rules the cave, and watch out if you’re afraid!’”

My grandmother said Mohammed Abdallah Ayyoub wanted to test the three young men in preparation for their initiation into his Sufi circle.

“At the cave, it happened as he had said, for as soon as Mahmoud had finished reading the paper, the black dog appeared. Mahmoud was afraid and started to run. The dog struck him with its tail, knocked him down and then pounced on him. In the meantime, Sa’id and Yasin managed to get away. Then we don’t know what happened. Mahmoud had a fever for three days, and when his temperature went down, he left his father’s house carrying a stick. He knocked on the first door he came to, and when they opened it, he rushed at the people and beat them with the stick. He was like a madman. No, he had truly gone mad. He kept going from house to house beating and smashing until the men of the village managed to tie him up. He was sent to the insane asylum in Acre. I don’t know what the Jews did with him after the fall of Acre. During those days, people forgot themselves and their children, so how could they remember the insane? We were living in apocalyptic times. We rushed about in the fields to save our skins, but not one of us was saved, not one.

“I saw death in the eyes of my son. Yasin came back from the cave utterly transformed. I saw death hovering over him and knew he was going to die. And when he married Najwah, I saw death in her eyes, but somehow I took no notice, God curse us human beings. I saw death, but I wanted to release him from those rumors that clung to him after the incident of the Greek boy and the rabbi. So I decided to get him married and paid no attention, and he died.”

This is how things become linked in the mind of a senile old woman. The whole business of the cave is meaningless. Fantasies, Father. Fantasies, Son. We invent stories of our misery and then believe them. We’ll believe anything so as not to see. We cover our eyes and set off, and then we bump into each other.

Umm Hassan believed the story of the cave never took place and that my grandmother was crazy, persecuting my mother for no reason and forcing her to run away into God’s vast world.

But Umm Hassan knows that God’s world is narrow and that “eventually, all men meet.”

My mother fled from Beirut to Amman and then from Amman to Ramallah. She disappeared as completely as if she’d gone into your cave, dear friend. Which reminds me: Tell me about the cave. Umm Hassan said the Deir al-Asad cave was uninhabitable, so where’s the Bab al-Shams you spoke about? Where is that village that stretches through interlinked caves, “a village that’s bigger, I swear, than Ain al-Zaitoun,” as you used to say? “I proposed, ‘Come on, let’s look for caves in Galilee and bring back the refugees. A cave is better than a tent, or a house of corrugated iron, or banana leaf walls.’ But they didn’t agree. Members of the Organization said it was a pipe dream. An entire people can’t live in caves. They told me to go look for caves for the fedayeen and I saw the sarcasm in their expressions, so I didn’t look. I arranged my cave for myself and by myself and lived in it.”

Do you want me to take you back there, as Umm Hassan suggested?

“Go to his house, Son, and look. You may find their telephone number. Call them. Call his children, and they’ll work things out through the Red Cross.”

I don’t think Umm Hassan’s suggestion is practical. I’m not selfish, and it’s not that I’m afraid. To hell with this life. Whenever I think of you, I feel eyes boring into my back, eyes saying I’m scared. No, I’m not scared. Does Umm Hassan think I haven’t tried to contact your children? Do you remember that first day, Father, when Amna came to tell me of your fall? That same day I asked her to contact your children, and she did. She said she did.