Gate of the Sun (2 page)

“So what should I do?” I asked her.

“Do what he tells you,” she answered.

“But he doesn't speak,” I said.

“Oh yes, he does,” she said, “and it's up to you to hear his voice.”

And I don't hear it, I swear I don't, but I'm stuck to this chair, and I talk and talk.

Tell me, I beg of you, what should I do?

I sit by your side and listen to the sound of weeping coming through the window of your room. Can't you hear it?

Everyone else is weeping, so why don't you?

It's become our habit to look out for occasions to weep, for tears are dammed up behind our eyes. Umm Hassan has burst open our reservoir of tears. Why won't you get up and weep?

^*
A pastry.

H
EY, YOU!

How am I supposed to talk to you or with you or about you?

Should I tell you stories you already know, or be silent and let you go wherever it is you go? I come close to you, walking on tiptoe so as not to wake you, and then I laugh at myself because all I want is to wake you. I need one thing – one thing, dear God: that this man drowning in his own eyes should get up, open his eyes and say something.

But I'm lying.

Did you know you've turned me into a liar?

I say I want one thing, but I want thousands of things. I lie, God take pity on you, on me and on your poor mother. Yes, we forgot your mother. You told me all your stories, and you never told me how your mother died. You told about the death of your blind father and how you slipped into Galilee and attended his funeral. You stood on the hill above the village of Deir al-Asad, seeing but unseen, weeping but not weeping.

At the time I believed you. I believed that intuition had led you there to your house, hours before he died.

But now I don't.

At the time I was bewitched by your story. Now the spell is broken, and I no longer believe you.

But your mother?

Why didn't you say anything about her death?

Is your mother dead?

Do you remember the story of the icon of the Virgin Mary?

We were living through the civil war in Lebanon, and you were saying that war shouldn't be like that. You even advised me, when I came back from
Beijing as a doctor, not to take part in the war and asked me to go with you to Palestine.

“But Yunes, you don't go to fight. You go because of your wife.”

You gave me a long lecture about the meaning of war and then said something about the picture of the Virgin Mary in your house, and that was when I asked you if your mother was Christian and how the sheikh of the village of Ain al-Zaitoun could have married a Christian woman. You explained that she wasn't a Christian but loved the Virgin and used to put her picture under her pillow. She'd made you love the Virgin, too, because she was the mistress of all the world's women and because her picture was beautiful – a woman bending her head over her son, born swaddled in his shroud.

“And what did the sheikh think?” I asked you.

It was then that you explained to me that your father, the sheikh, was blind, and that he never saw the picture at all.

When did Nahilah tell you of your mother's death?

Why don't you tell me? Is it because your wife said your mother had asked to be buried with the picture and this caused a problem in the village?

Why do you sleep like that and not answer?

You sleep like sleep itself. You sleep in sleep, and are drowning. The doctor said you had a blood clot in the brain, were clinically dead, and there was no hope. I refused to believe him.

I see you before me and can do nothing.

I hold conversations with you and tell you stories. I'll tell you everything. What do you say – I'll make tea, and we'll sit on the low chairs in front of your house and tell tales! You used to laugh at me because I don't smoke. You used to smoke your cigarette right to the end, chewing on the butt hanging between your lips and sucking in the smoke.

Now here I am. I close the door of your room. I sit next to you. I light a cigarette, draw the smoke deep into my lungs, and I tell you tales. And you don't answer.

Why don't you talk to me?

The tea's gone cold, and I'm tired. You're immersed in your breathing and don't care.

Please don't believe them.

Do you remember the day when you came to me and said that everyone was sick of you, and I couldn't dispel the sadness from your round pale face? What was I supposed to say? Should I have said your day had passed, or hadn't yet come? You'd have been even more upset. I couldn't lie to you. So I'm sad too, and my sadness is a deep breach in my soul that I can't repair, but I swear I don't want you to die.

Why did you lie to me?

Why did you tell me after the mourners had left that Nahilah's death didn't matter, because a woman only dies if her man stops loving her, and Nahilah hadn't died because you still loved her?

“She's here,” you said, and you pointed at your eyes, wide open to show their dark gray. I was never able to identify the color of your eyes – when I asked you, you would say that Nahilah didn't know what color they were either, and that at Bab al-Shams she used to ask you about the colors of things.

You lied to me.

You convinced me that Nahilah hadn't died, and didn't finish the sentence. At the time I didn't take in what you'd said; I thought they were the beautiful words an old lover uses to heal his love. But death was in the other half of the sentence, because a man dies when his woman stops loving him, and you're dying because Nahilah stopped loving you when she died.

So here you are, drowsing.

Dear God, what drowsiness is this? And why do I feel a deathly drowsiness when I'm near you? I lie back in the chair and sleep. And when I get up in the middle of the night, I feel pain all over my body.

I come close to you, I see the air roiling around you, and I see that place I have not visited. I'd decided to go; everyone goes, so why not me? I'd go and have a look. I'd go and anchor the landmarks in my eyes. You used to tell me that you knew the sites because they were engraved on your eyes like indelible landmarks.

Where are the landmarks, my friend? How will I know the road, and who will guide me?

You told me about the caves dug out of the rocks. Is it true that you used to meet her there? Or were you lying to me? You said they were called Bab al-Shams – Gate of the Sun – and smiled and said you didn't mean the Shams I was in love with, or that terrible massacre at the Miyyeh wi-Miyyeh camp, where they killed her.

You told me I didn't love Shams and should forget her: “If you loved her, you'd avenge her. It can't be love, Son. You love a woman who doesn't love you, and that's an impossibility.”

You don't understand. How can I avenge a woman who was killed because of another man?

“So she didn't love you,” you said.

“She did but in her own way,” I answered.

“Love has a thousand doors. But one-sided love isn't a door, it's a delusion.”

I didn't tell you then that your love for Nahilah may have been a delusion too, because you only met her on journeys that resembled dreams.

I
DRAW CLOSE
to tell you that the moon is full. In al-Ghabsiyyeh, we love the moon, and we fear it. When it's full we don't sleep.

Get up and look at the moon.

You didn't tell me about your mother, but I'll tell you about mine. The truth is, I don't know much about her – she disappeared. They said she'd gone to her people in Amman, and when I was in Jordan in 1970, I looked for her, but that's another tale I'll tell you later.

I already told you about my mother, and I'll tell you about her again. When you were telling me about Bab al-Shams, you used to say that stories are like wine: They mature in the telling. Does that mean that the telling of a story is like the jar it's kept in? You used to tell the stories of Nahilah over and over, your eyes shining with the same desire.

“She cast a spell on me, that woman,” you'd say.

But I know that the magician was you – how else did you persuade Nahilah to put up with you, reeking with the stink of travel?

My mother used to wake me while it was still night in the camp and
whisper to me, and I'd get up to see the moon in its fullness, and not go back to sleep.

The woman from al-Kweikat said we were mad: “Ghabsiyyeh people are crazy, they're afraid of the moon.” But we weren't afraid – though in fact, yes, we would stay awake all night. My mother wouldn't let me sleep. She'd tie a black scarf around her head and would ask me to look at the surface of the moon so I could find my dead father's face.

“Do you see him?” she'd ask.

I'd say that I saw him, though I swear I didn't. But now, can you believe it, now, after years and years, when I look at the face of the moon, I see my father's face, stained with blood. My mother said they killed him, left him in a heap at the door and left. She said he fell in a heap as though he weren't a man but a sack. And when she went over to him, she didn't see him. They took him and buried him in secret in the Martyrs' Cemetery. “Look at your father, and tell him what you want.”

I used to look and not see, but I wouldn't say. Now I see, but what am I supposed to say?

Get up and look at the face of the moon! Do you see your wife? Do you see my father? Certainly you will never see my mother, and even if you saw her, you would never know her. Even I have forgotten her, forgotten her voice and her tears. The only thing I remember is the taste of the dough she used to make in the clay oven in front of our house. She would put chili pepper, oil, cumin, and onions on a piece of dough and bake it. Then she'd make tea and eat, and I'd eat with her, and we'd look at the moon. That burning taste is still hot on my tongue and in my eyes now when I look at the moon; I drink my tea, I look at the moon, and I see.

My mother told me that in my father's village they didn't sleep. When the moon grew round and sat on its throne in the sky, the whole village would wake up, and the blind singer would sit in the square and play on his single-string fiddle, singing to the night as though he were weeping. And I am weeping with drowsiness, and the taste of hot pepper, and what seem to be dreams.

The moon is full, my swimmer in white sheets. Get up and take a look
and drink tea with me. Or didn't you people in Ain al-Zaitoun get up when the moon was full?

But you're not from Ain al-Zaitoun. Well, you are from Ain al-Zaitoun but your blind father moved to Deir al-Asad after the village was massacred in 1948.

You were born in Ain al-Zaitoun, and they called you Yunes. You told me that your blind father named you Yunes – Jonah – because, like Jonah, you'd beaten death.

You never told me about your mother; it was Amna who told me. She claimed to be your cousin on your father's side, and had come to help you set the house straight. She was also beautiful. Why did you get angry with me that day? I swear I didn't mean anything by it. I smiled – and you glowered, rushed out of the house and left me with her.

You came in and saw me sitting with Amna, who was giving me some water. She told me she knew everything about me because you had told her, and she asked me to watch out for you because she couldn't always come from Ain al-Hilweh to Shatila. I smiled at you and winked, and from that day on I never saw Amna at your house again. I swear I didn't mean anything. Well, I did mean something, but when all's said and done you're a man, so you shouldn't get angry. People are like that, they've been that way since Adam, God grant him peace, and people betray the ones they love; they betray them and they regret it; they betray them, because they love them, so what's the problem?

It's a terrible thing. Why did you tell Amna to stop visiting you? Was it because she loved you? I know – when I see a woman in love, I know. She overflows with love and becomes soft and undulating. Not men. Men are to be pitied because they don't know that softness that floods and leavens the muscles.

Amna loved you, but you refused to marry her. She told me about it, just as she told me other things she made me swear I'd never mention in front of you. I'm released from my oath now because you can't hear, and even if you could there'd be nothing you could do. All you would say is that Amna was a liar, and the debate would be closed.

Amna told me your whole story.

She told me about your father.

She said that Sheikh Ibrahim, son of Salem, son of Suleiman al-Asadi, was in his forties when he married, and that for twenty years his wife kept giving birth to children who would die a few days later because she was stricken with a nameless disease. Her nipples would get inflamed and collapse when the children started to nurse, and they'd die of hunger. Then you were born. You alone, Amna told me, were able to bite on a breast without a nipple. You would bite and suck, and your mother would scream in pain. So you were saved from death.