Gate of the Sun (5 page)

I see a frown on your face and black spots in your closed eyes. Okay, we won't start the story with Umm Hassan or Naji or America. I'll tell you another one.

Back to the beginning.

Do you remember when you used to say, “Back to the beginning!” and would stamp your foot? Do you remember what you did after Abdel Nasser resigned in '67? People gathered in the alleyways of the camp and wept; it was night, and humid, and they were like ghosts weeping in the darkness. You stood in their midst, spat on the ground, and said, “Back to the beginning!”

And after 1970, when you'd returned safely to the camp from the slaughter in the forests of Jerash and Ajloun,
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you said to the woman who came to ask about her son, “Back to the beginning!” and left.

And after the Israelis went into Beirut, after each new thing that happened, you'd spit as though you were wiping out the past, and you'd say, “Back to the beginning!”

So, you want the beginning.

In the beginning, they didn't say “Once upon a time,” they said something else. In the beginning they said, “Once upon a time, there was – or
there wasn't.” Do you know why they said that? When I first read this expression in a book about ancient Arabic literature, it took me by surprise. Because, in the beginning, they didn't lie. They didn't know anything, but they didn't lie. They left things vague, preferring to use that
or
which makes things that were as though they weren't, and things that weren't as though they were. That way the story is put on the same footing as life, because a story is a life that didn't happen, and a life is a story that didn't get told.

Do you like this story?

It isn't real, you'll say, but I don't know any real stories, because my mother left me and went away before she could finish it. And the stories I know myself, you know, too.

Your eyes are alight with memories, and they're asking for the story's beginning.

The beginning of the story says that you were like a dead man, and there was no hope of reviving you. Dr. Amjad told me, “There's no hope” – but I wasn't convinced, and decided to try to treat you by talking to you.

Once upon a time, a long time ago, there was – or there wasn't – a young man called Yunes.

No. I have to start from the place you don't know, meaning from here, from the end, because the story can only start from its ending. I don't want it to be for you the way it was for me: I never knew the ends of stories because I would fall asleep before my mother got to them. You, however, are going to know the story starting with the ending.

The ending says that it was nine in the evening. I was sitting on the balcony of my house in the heat and humidity of August drinking a glass of arak. There's nothing like arak in the summer because it makes you burn hotter than the night. Each evening, I would nurse my sorrow and fear with arak. I was drinking on the balcony and eating a salted tomato and pistachios when I heard a violent banging on the door. Opening it, I found Amna, her face emerging from the shadows. All I could understand of what she said was that you were in the hospital. I thought you'd died, God forbid. Amna told me how you'd fainted and fallen to the ground like a piece
of wood. I listened, waiting for her to say you'd died. I wasn't sad. I felt a space emptying in my heart, but I wasn't upset. I asked where you were. I tried to get through the door to go to you, but Amna wouldn't let me by. She stood rooted to the spot and talked. I tried to get out, but she blocked the door with her hand.

She said it had started the previous night, when you'd lost the ability to speak. She'd gone to visit you, and found you wandering around the place, muttering. She'd asked you what was wrong and you'd answered, but your tongue couldn't form the words.

“That's when I realized,” Amna said. She ran to the hospital and told them, but nobody came. The nurse said she would send someone to look for Dr. Amjad, but Dr. Amjad didn't come.

“I stayed with him the whole night. Do you know what that means? He was wandering around his house and wouldn't settle down. He would raise his left hand and speak at the top of his lungs but you couldn't understand a word. I tried to calm him down. I sat him down and gave him a glass of aniseed tea. I led him to his bedroom, but when he saw the bed he went into a frenzy, and I ran in circles after him. He opened the front door and tried to leave. Look at my shoulder, my body's covered in bruises. No, he didn't hit me, but he was as strong as a bull, and I was running around after him in tears.”

“Okay, okay, Amna,” I said, and I tried to get past her so I could go to the hospital, but she blocked the way with her hand.

She said she'd been alone with you and that you'd scared her. She'd knelt down in front of you and beat her chest with her fist. She said you calmed down when you saw her kneeling. You looked at her as though you didn't understand, then fell to the ground.

At that point, I slipped between her hand and the door and went out.

Amna followed me, panting and talking, but I didn't listen. And at the hospital door, she said that doctors were bastards and that I was a doctor too and had no pity in my heart and that she'd waited for them to come, alone with you, until evening.

I went into the hospital and ran to the nurses' room so I could put on my white gown and go to you. Amna ran after me and said God would never forgive us. Then she disappeared.

You're upset with Amna because she doesn't come to visit you. Don't be angry with her. She doesn't know that you can hear and feel and are sad. She was convinced you'd died, so why should she come?

Who is Amna Abd al-Rahman really?

Is she a cousin of yours, as you told me? Were you in love with her? Why didn't you talk about her?

The fact is, my friend, you should tell me something about your women. You're a man surrounded by women, and there's something strange in your round pale face that inspires love; it's the face of a man who is loved. You always described yourself as a lover, but I think you hid your lovers. You only spoke about one woman, and even that one you only would talk about a little. Piecing the glimpses together, I turned it into a story. But you mentioned love only in passing. You jumped over the essential story as though it were a pool in which you might drown. Once I plucked up my courage and asked you where you made love with Nahilah. I didn't say her name, I just said “her,” and you smiled. You were in a good mood that day. Your eyes shone, you raised your right hand in a vague gesture and said, “There. Among the rocks,” and fell silent. It fell to me to collect your asides and mutterings and work them into a story to tell you.

Now you can't shut me up. I can say whatever I want and tell you that it's your story. My goal isn't to make one up. I'm only half a doctor awaiting death at the vengeful hands of Shams' family.

I promised I'd start with the ending, and the end will come when you've left this coffin of a bed. You'll get up, tall and broad shouldered, walking stick in hand, and you'll return to your country. You will go first to the cave of Bab al-Shams. You won't go to Nahilah's grave, as everyone expects. You'll go to Bab al-Shams, enter your village of caves, and disappear.

This is the only dignified ending to your story, which you'll never betray.

I know what you'll say and how you'll roll the word
betray
around in your
mouth, before announcing that you had no choice. Your life was a series of betrayals. You'll say that in order for us not to betray, we have to change – that is, to betray.

You'll tell me how the adolescent you were during the sacred jihad alongside Abd al-Qadir,
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God rest his soul, was related to the young man you became in the Arab Commando Brigades, and then in the Arab Nationalist Movement.

You'll say that the man you became in the Lebanon Regional Command of the Fatah Movement was a continuation of that same young man, but different from him in every way. You'll speak to me of the older man you became, the one dreaming of a new betrayal, because one has to begin somewhere.

Where were we?

Did you know that all this sitting in your room has made me incapable of concentrating? I jump from story to story, I lose the thread and forget where I began.

I was telling you about Amna. No, but Amna wasn't the point. I was telling you how they brought you to the hospital half-dead. We carried you into your room and put you on the bed. Your eyes were closed, and you were shivering with fever. They slipped an IV into your right hand, tying it first to the edge of the bed so the needle wouldn't rip the artery, you were shaking and twitching so much.

I stood there not knowing what to do. Alone in the room, I was listening to the nurses' voices in the corridor, taking in the smell. That was the first time I had really taken in the smell of Galilee Hospital. Why don't they clean the place? And why hadn't I noticed the smell before that day? I came to the hospital every day – it's true that I didn't really work, refusing the demotion from doctor to nurse – but I'd never smelled that horrible smell before. Tomorrow, I'll clean everything.

But the next day I didn't clean everything, and another day passed, and
after it another without my taking action. It seems I've gotten used to it. The smell is not a problem. Smells work their way into us, we absorb them, which is why they only exist at the beginning.

Let's return to the beginning.

I left your room in search of Dr. Amjad and found him sitting in his clinic, smoking, sipping his coffee, and reading the newspaper.

He invited me to sit down, but I remained standing.

“Please sit down. What's the matter with you?” he asked.

I asked him hesitantly about you.

“Blood clot on the brain.”

“Treatment?”

“‘No hope for a stroke,'” he recited.

“I can't believe it.”

“It's in God's hands,” he said. “Leave it, Dr. Khalil. It's over. I wouldn't give him more than seventy-two hours.”

“What about a blood thinner? Didn't you give him a blood thinner?”

“There's no point. We did a scan on him and found that the hemorrhage has spread to more than half the brain, which means it's over.”

“And the fever?”

I asked as though I didn't know, even though I did. It's amazing how one can become ignorant. Standing in front of Dr. Amjad, I forgot all my medical training and found myself behaving like an imbecile, as though I knew nothing.

I stood there asking and asking, and he answered me tersely, impatient with my questions, as though I were keeping him from something important.

Dr. Amjad explained that you would die within three days and asked me to contact your relatives about arrangements for the funeral, but instead of trying to get hold of Amna I returned to your room and began my work.

You have brought me back to the medicine that I hated and had forgotten. Don't be afraid of the fever. My opinion is that the clot occurred some
where near the area of the fever in the brain, and the pressure is interfering with your body temperature, which means that the fever will disappear once the blood is drawn off.

Don't be afraid.

I disagreed with Dr. Amjad when he said that the shivering was your death tremor. You were shivering with fever, and the fever would go. As you see, I was right. But do you remember what Nurse Zainab did? She started massaging your chest. When I asked what she was doing, she said that she was helping your soul escape from your body.

“Don't you see how his soul is shaking?” she asked.

“That's fever, you idiot,” I shouted, and chased her out of the room, locked the door and sat down, not knowing what to do.

During those first days I despaired. For three days I didn't leave your room. I changed your IV and put antibiotics in it; Dr. Amjad made fun of me, telling me that the fever had nothing to do with any inflammation.

But I wanted you to live – not because I'm a nonbeliever, as Nurse Zainab had thought – but because I don't want you to die in bed.

Do you remember what you told me when I visited to offer my condolences after Nahilah died? You received me calmly and offered me an unsweetened coffee. I asked you, as people offering condolences usually do, about the circumstances of her illness and her death, but you didn't give me any details. You said she'd died in the hospital in Nazareth. Then you started murmuring some verses by al-Mutanabbi.
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You recited the poetry as though you'd composed it yourself, and you said you'd never die here. You'd go and die over there.

“And if I die here, try to bury me over there.”

“As you wish, Abu Salem,” I said.

But then you looked at me strangely and said it was impossible, because you knew that your end would be a grave in the camp that would become a soccer field a few years later. You were talking about the mass grave of the
victims of the 1982 Shatila massacre, where children now play soccer and trash is scattered all over the place. Then you went back to al-Mutanabbi's verses: