Gate of the Sun (4 page)

“But history isn't an illusion,” I answered. “And if it were, what would it be for?”

“What would what be for?”

“Why would we fight and die? Doesn't Palestine deserve our deaths? You're the one who taught me history, and now you tell me history is a ruse to evade death!”

That day, you laughed at me and told me that your father, the blind sheikh, used to talk that way, and “we ought to learn from our elders.” I
don't know if this discussion took place on a single occasion because we never had discussions; we'd just talk, and you wouldn't finish your sentences but would jump from one word to another without paying attention to cause and effect. But you laughed. When you laughed, it was like you were exploding from within yourself. Your laughter used to surprise me because I was convinced that heroes didn't laugh. I used to look at the photos of the martyrs hanging on the walls in the camp, and they weren't laughing. Their faces were frowning and closed, as though they held death prisoner within themselves.

But not you.

You were a hero, and you laughed at heroes. And the little creases that extend from the corners of your eyes created a space for smiles and laughter. You were a laughing hero – but all the same I wasn't convinced by your theories, or your father's, about death and history.

You answered me by saying that what was worth dying for was what we wanted to live for.

“Palestine isn't a cause. Well, all right, in some sense it is, but it isn't really, because the land doesn't move from its place. That land will remain, and the question isn't who will hold it, because it's an illusion to think that land can be held. No one can hold land when he's going to end up buried in it. It's the land that holds men and pulls them back toward it. I didn't fight, my dear friend, for the land or for history. I fought for the sake of a woman I loved.”

I can't recall your exact words now. They were simple, transparent, and fluid. You speak as though you aren't speaking, and I speak as though I am. But I remember what you said about smells. We were sitting in front of the hospital drinking tea, it was the time of false spring. That year, spring arrived in February. The sun broke through the winter and tricked the earth, and yellow, white, and blue flowers emerged shyly from the rubble. That day you taught me how to smell nature. Putting your glass of tea aside, you stood up and filled your lungs with air and the aroma, holding it in your chest until your face started to turn red. When you sat down again and took
a sip of tea and talked about the thyme and the jasmine and the columbine and the wildflowers, you said she was like the seasons. With each season she would come to your cave with a new smell. She would let down her long black hair, and the scents of flowers and herbs would fill the air. You said you were always enchanted by the new smells, as though she'd become a different woman.

“A woman, Son, is always new. Her smell reveals her. A woman is the aroma of the world, and when I was with her I learned to fill my lungs with the smell of the land.”

That was when I understood what you'd told me about her death: Nahilah hadn't died, because her smell was still in you. But Umm Hassan has died. Don't you want to come with me to her funeral? Everyone is gathering at her house, except for her son, Naji, who's in America, as you know. I have to go. I want to carry Umm Hassan's bier, and I will fear no one.

Please get up. We'll go to Umm Hassan's funeral, and then you can go back to your children and die with them. Go, die with them, as Umm Hassan suggested, and set me free.

Do you remember Umm Hassan?

Umm Hassan was my professor of medicine. I was in the hospital when a pregnant woman was brought in; I'd never seen a woman give birth before. In China they had taught me how to bandage wounds and do simple operations, what was called “field medicine.” But they didn't teach me real medicine.

The woman was writhing in front of me, and I could do nothing. Then I remembered Umm Hassan, and I sent for her, and she came. She managed the delivery and taught me everything. As she helped the woman, she explained everything to me like a doctor training a student. From then on I knew what to do, and I became sure enough of myself to deliver babies. But she deserves all the credit. Umm Hassan was the only certified midwife in al-Kweikat; she had British documents to prove it.

I can see her now.

She's putting the basin she was carrying on her head and bending over
to pick up babies in the olive grove. In reality, she only picked up Naji, who became her son. I told you the story, remember? They were traveling inside Palestine because, having been driven out of al-Kweikat, they got lost in the fields and stopped on the edges of Deir al-Asad, and then they were driven from there, so they went to Tarshiha, which the Israeli planes came and burned, so they found themselves on the road to southern Lebanon, where Qana was their first stop. And on that road, a woman named Sara al-Khatib gave birth to a child with Umm Hassan at her side. Everyone was running, carrying their bundles on their heads, and Sara threw herself down under a tree writhing in pain. Umm Hassan washed the baby with hot water, wrapped him in old clothes and gave him to his mother.

Everyone walked on that “last journey,” as the people of the villages of Galilee referred to their collective exodus to Lebanon. But it wasn't their last journey. In fact it was the start of wanderings in the wilderness whose end only God knows.

On that last journey, as Umm Hassan was walking with her basin on her head and her four children, her husband, her brothers, and their wives and children around her, she saw a bundle of old clothes discarded under an olive tree, and she realized they were the same clothes she'd used to wrap Sara's baby in. She bent down, picked up the child, put him in the basin, and named him Naji – Rescued. She offered him her dry breasts, then fed him sesame paste mixed with water. At the village of Qana, where they stopped for the first time, the boy's mother came, weeping and asking for her child back. Umm Hassan refused, but in the end, when she saw the milk bursting from the mother's breasts and spotting her dress, she gave him to her.

Umm Hassan said she'd named him Naji and his mother didn't have the right to change his name. Sara agreed, took the boy, offered him her breast, and went away.

“Naji's my only surviving child,” said Umm Hassan. “He writes to me from America, God bless him. He's become a professor at the best university, he sends me letters and money, and I send him olive oil.”

I see her walking and picking up babies and putting them in the basin on
her head. It's as though she had picked me up, as though I were Naji, as though the taste of the sesame mixed with water still lingered in my mouth, as though – I don't know. I swear I don't know. Umm Hassan died this morning, and we have to bury her before the noon prayer, and you are sleeping as if oblivious to what Umm Hassan's death means for me, and for you, and for everyone in the camp.

Umm Hassan told me everything about Palestine. I asked her before she set off to visit her brother in al-Kweikat, or what's left of it, to pass by al-Ghabsiyyeh and tie a strip of cloth to a branch of the lotus tree near the mosque for me. I told her that my father had made an oath to do this and that he'd died before he could carry it out, but he'd passed it on to my mother, and my mother had passed it on to me before going to her people in Amman. I haven't been, and I didn't dare to ask you to do it. I was afraid you'd make fun of me and of my father's superstitions. I asked Umm Hassan to say a short prayer in the mosque and hang the piece of black cloth on the tree and light a candle for me.

When she returned, she gave me a branch heavy with oranges and told me she'd gone to the mosque to pray.

“Is a mosque defiled if they put animals in it?”

Umm Hassan didn't ask herself that question. She went into the mosque at al-Ghabsiyyeh, which had been taken over by cows, drove them out, performed her ablutions, and prayed. Then she went out to the lotus tree, hung a black ribbon on it, and lit two candles.

She said the tree was covered with pieces of cloth.

“I don't understand, Son. Your village is deserted. The roads have disappeared, and the houses aren't demolished but are collapsing and almost in ruins. I don't know why houses go like that when their people abandon them. An abandoned house is like an abandoned woman; it hunches over itself as though it were falling down. There's no sign of life in your village, except for the strips of cloth tied around the branches of the lotus tree and the melted candles spread around all the way to the mosque.”

Umm Hassan said she'd been afraid of the tree when they told her about
my uncle, Sheikh Aziz Yunes, and how he was found dead beneath it. But when she got close to it, she felt awe, and she knelt and wept and lit the candles.

She said she heard the rustling of the branches, full of the souls of the dead. “The souls of the dead live in trees,” she said. “We have to return and shake the trees so that the souls fall and find peace in their graves.”

I was about to cut an orange from the branch so that I could taste Palestine, but Umm Hassan yelled, “No! It's not for eating, it's Palestine.” I was ashamed of myself and hung the branch on the wall of the living room in my house, and when you came to visit me and saw the moldy branch, you yelled, “What's that smell?” And I told you the story and watched you explode in anger.

“You should have eaten the oranges,” you told me.

“But Umm Hassan stopped me and said they were from the homeland.”

“Umm Hassan's senile,” you answered. “You should have eaten the oranges, because the homeland is something we have to consume, not let consume us. We have to devour the oranges of Palestine and we have to devour Palestine and Galilee.”

It came to me then that you were right, but the oranges were going bad. You went to the wall and pulled off the branch, and I took it from your hand and stood there confused, not knowing what to do with the decayed offering.

“What are you going to do with it?” you asked.

“Bury it.”

“Why bury it?”

“I'm not going to throw it away, because it's from the homeland.”

You took the branch out of my hand and threw it in the trash.

“Outrageous!” you said. “What are these old women's superstitions? Before hanging a scrap of the homeland up on the wall, it'd be better to knock the wall down and leave. We have to eat every last orange in the world and not be afraid, because the homeland isn't oranges. The home-land is us.”

U
MM
H
ASSAN
is waiting. Won't you come with me? I'm in a hurry now, so I won't tell you what she did in al-Kweikat.

Get up, my friend. God, you're impossible. The woman's dead, and everyone's at her house. I can hear them weeping through the hospital walls, and you hear nothing.

You're not coming? Okay, I'll go on my own. But tell me, why do you look like that – like a little baby swathed in white? For the last three months I've been watching you shrink. My God, if you could see yourself before you die. It's a shame you don't know what's going on, a shame you can't see how a man doesn't die but goes back to where he came from. I used to think the poets were lying when they said that a man returns to his mother's womb. But now I swear they weren't: A man becomes an infant again before he dies. Only infants die; all death is the death of infants – infants searching for their mothers' wombs, curling up like fetuses. And here you are, turning back into an infant, curling up on yourself, blind. If only you could see yourself.

I can't hear you properly. Why are you mumbling? Why are you moving your left hand? You want me to tell you about Nahilah? You already know the story, and no, I won't tell it again. Do you think of yourself as the hero in a love story? Why have you forgotten your other heroic roles? Or maybe they weren't so heroic. You told me, “Everyone thinks that the fighters are heroes, but that's not true. People fight the way they breathe or eat or go to the john. War is nothing special. All you need to be a fighter is to fight. Being a hero is something else; heroism doesn't exist, and even courage isn't anything special. A brave man can turn into a coward, and a coward can turn into a brave man. The important thing is — ” You left it there.

I didn't ask what the important thing was. I knew what your reply would be, and I didn't want to hear it again. And now you want me to tell you some stories? No, I won't tell stories, not today. Today I'm busy. Have pity on me; get up and release me, please release me. I'm tired.

I'm tired of everything. I'm tired of your sickness and of how sad you look, I'm tired of the baby's round face suspended above your neck, I'm tired of praying for you.

Did you know that I pray?

My grandmother used to say that praying means laying down words like a carpet on the ground. I lay down my words so that you can walk on them.

Why don't you get up?

O
NCE UPON
a time there was a baby.

No, you don't like the story about Naji. You told me Naji was a dog because after everything Umm Hassan had done for him, he went off to America and left her poor and abandoned.