Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

“What did they say?”

“Nothing.”

I didn’t ask what nothing meant. Nothing means nothing.

She said nothing, and I didn’t comment. At the time it never occurred to me that you might live. Being sure you’d die, I didn’t think of sending you over there. What for? I don’t believe they want you anymore. This is what things have come to.

In describing your other planet, Umm Hassan told me you could see God.

“Pay attention, my son,” she said. “Pay attention to his movements. We may learn something from them. People like him see God.”

“How’s that, Umm Hassan?”

“I don’t know, my son, but I’m sure of it.”

She told me about an old woman in Acre that she’d known before everything happened. Whenever the woman awakened from her stupor, she’d tell people of strange things, and then they’d happen. “It was like she saw God, my son. I was there, training as a nurse, and this woman, who was halfway between life and death, would fall unconscious for a few days and say these strange things when she awoke. For instance, she’d say that so-and-so’s husband was going to die. The man’s wife would be nearby and would laugh it off, but when she went home, the prophecy would turn out to be true. They all started to fear her; her children and grandchildren sat around her deathbed trembling with fear, and they only relaxed when she died — as if a stone had been lifted from their chests. To tell you the truth, Khalil, I think they killed her. They were scared of her cottony words, her quavering voice, and her white hair. I think one of them smothered her with a pillow because she turned blue in death. But I didn’t say anything. I returned to the village, dying with fear. And I’m telling you now, this man, Yunes Abu Salem, is in the same place. Take him back home and let’s be done with it.”

CAN YOU hear me?

What’s happening to you?

You know, you’re really starting to look like Na’im, Noor’s son. I know you’d rather look like Ibrahim, your first son and your twin, but unfortunately you don’t look like him; you look like one of your grandsons. When I went to your house I saw a picture of Na’im. I was shocked, it was as if I were seeing you in front of me! I didn’t go to your house because of Umm Hassan. I did search for the telephone number out of curiosity though, but didn’t find it. No, I went for the pictures. And there I saw you the way you really are. What a setup, my dear friend! Two rooms and a kitchen and a bathroom. The first room for guests, with a traditional carpet spread on the floor, three sofas, a small table, a radio, a television and a video player, and one photo on the wall. I went up to the photo and saw a group of children circled around an old woman. It’s her, I thought. I moved closer because I couldn’t distinguish the features. Their features were almost obliterated, as though time had wiped them away — or not time, the photographer. The photographer had taken the picture from a distance in order to get that throng of twenty-five children around the woman into the frame. The result was a crowd of indistinguishable children. I smiled at them. You don’t know them; to you they’re just numbers and names, these grandchildren of yours whose names you won’t tell me. Wait, you did tell me about Nahilah No. 2, Noor’s daughter; you told me you loved her particularly. Which one is she?

I WENT INTO the bedroom, and there I saw them all. It’s like a studio. Seven photos frame to frame on the wall and, above the bed, a large photo of Nahilah. An amazing number of small photos of children of various ages hung on the other wall. A world of photographs. A strange world. I don’t know how you managed to sleep amid all that life.

Tell me, did you sleep?

During the long nights of the Lebanese civil war, when there was no electricity, did you light a candle in your room and see them transformed into shadow puppets flickering on the walls?

Weren’t you afraid?

They frightened me, those photographs. I entered your bedroom in the early evening. The clock said five and it wasn’t dark yet, but there wasn’t enough light. I tried the switch — no electricity. I seemed to be floating with the photos in the dark. I went up to them, one by one, and discovered your secret world, a world of photographs hung from the cords of memory. The photographs seemed to move. I heard low voices emanating from the walls and was afraid.

Where did all those photos come from?

When you went, did you go for Nahilah or for the pictures?

Tell me how you could live with their pictures. How could you restrain yourself from going to their houses and breathing in their smells, one after another?

I hear laughter in your eyes, you’re telling me you did see them. You had gone into the house and kissed them one after another. It was the day that your father, the blind sheikh, died.

During that terrible winter of ’68, the likes of which Galilee hadn’t seen for a hundred years, Yunes arrived at his cave in the pouring rain, exhausted and soaked. The wolf arrived at his cave covered in mud and with every part of him knocking against the other. He lit a candle and searched for dry clothes in the caverns he’d made into his home, and all he could find were a shirt and a wool sweater. He undressed, put the dry clothes on over his wet body, and left the cave. He headed to the right, behind the hill that hid his cave from the village, and ran into the masses of mud that were sliding down with the rain, forming torrents of mud and water. He fell into the torrent, swallowing a lot of mud before getting back on his feet and continuing on his way. He reached his house, gave his three knocks on the window, and left. But she ran after him, grabbed him by the arm, and led him into the house he hadn’t entered for twenty years. The blind sheikh was laid out on the ground, dying. He saw his mother beside the sleeping man, whose mattress had been placed on the floor. When his mother saw him, a sort of scream emerged from deep inside her. She stood and opened her arms, tried to go toward him, doubled over and sunk down again onto the floor. Yunes went up to her and kissed her on the head. She took him in her arms and squeezed him, and the water started to run off him. The mother wept while the water dripped from his clothes, and Nahilah stood there.

“Now you come?” said the mother.

Nahilah took him to the bedroom, undressed him, dried him with a large white towel, wrapped his naked body, and fetched hot oil and rubbed his back, his belly, and all his limbs with it.

“You’re going to get sick,” she said. “What made you come?”

She rubbed him with the hot oil and left him to bring dry clothes, and when she returned she found the water exuding from his pores. He was naked, he was shivering. Droplets of water oozed from his limbs — water streamed onto the floor, a man enveloped in water as though it dwelt in his bones. She dried him again and told him how the blind sheikh had fallen into a coma three days before and how they’d given him nothing but a few drops of water dripped into his mouth, and that since the evening before he’d been shaking with fever.

Yunes left the room, drops of water clinging to his feet, and approached the prone man. He bent over Ibrahim, kissed him and left, saying nothing to his mother, who was reciting verses from the Koran, her eyes drifting in the emptiness.

Yunes returned to his cave, he was hungry but could find nothing to eat. He sat alone smoking. Then she came. She was wrapped in a long woolen blanket dripping with water that gave off a smell of mold. Nahilah cast the blanket aside and sat down. She said she’d brought him three boiled eggs, two sweet potatoes, two pieces of bread, and an onion. He took the food from her and devoured it. He’d tear off a corner of the bread, stuff it with onions, sweet potatoes, and eggs, and swallow the whole thing without chewing. By the time she’d made him his glass of tea, he’d polished off the lot. She told him the man had died and that she was tired and was going to go back to help his mother prepare for the funeral.