Gate of the Sun (75 page)

She said she never betrayed him except with Ahmad, but Fawwaz made her forget the taste of the love she'd experienced in the Monte Verde.

She said Fawwaz was always afraid of her, always accusing her and repeating that he'd got stuck with a whore, and abusing her because she didn't get pregnant.

“I don't know why I didn't get pregnant in Lebanon and why I did in Jordan, but after the night in the Monte Verde I wanted to get pregnant so I could have a boy like Ahmad. But it didn't happen, and I forgot Ahmad; the only thing I remember was his lips on my breasts – God, how sweet that was! It was the first time a man had taken my nipple between his lips. Fawwaz would rub my breasts and then bite them. But when Ahmad took my nipple between his lips, the waves rose within me and I felt my depths moving toward him and taking him. Fawwaz was nothing like that. He was a beast. He'd crucify me half-naked and say he could only get aroused when he heard gunfire, and I would lay there beneath him as he would fire his gun, terrorized.

Shams thought that's what life was like, and then the Israeli invasion had come and saved her. Fawwaz left with the fedayeen, and Shams went to her family's house in Amman. She found a job in a sewing workshop owned by Mme. Hend Khadir and forgot she was married.

Two weeks later, he came and announced he'd decided to settle in Amman – the revolution was over, he didn't want to go to the camp in Yemen, and he was going back to his original work.

“Meaning you want to be an engineer again?” said Shams sarcastically.

“Shut your mouth!” her mother shouted. “Women don't have the right to make fun of their husbands.”

“In al-Wahdat, he no longer needed to fire his gun to become aroused. He stopped beating me and became kind. He'd go to work in his father's shop and would come back in the evenings to eat and sleep. He'd tell me that he'd dreamt that he'd had a son. The poor man didn't know I'd had a diaphragm inserted and wouldn't get pregnant if all the semen in the world were stuffed into my guts. Then I got an infection, so the doctor took out the diaphragm, and Dalal arrived.”

I
T'S NIGHT
and I want to sleep. My eyelids are weighed down with stories. Now I understand why children fall sleep when we tell them stories: The stories infiltrate their eyes through the lashes and are turned into pictures too numerous for the eyes to process. Stories are for sleep, not for death. Now it's time for us to stop telling stories for a while, because one story leads to another, and night blankets the words.

But first tell me, what is the story of that spirit woman and that man who drowned in the circles of the red sun?

That happened at the beginning, but even so, it comes just at the end of the story.

Nahilah explained it to you, it was a simple misunderstanding. You thought she was a spirit, and she thought you were a prophet. You ran away, she knelt down, and Nahilah laughed and laughed.

You told me you named the tree Laila. You used to sleep by day inside the trunk of the Roman olive tree, and when you were with Nahilah you'd talk to her about Laila, and see the jealousy in her eyes.

It was the beginning of the fifties, and Yunes was making one of his trips to Bab al-Shams. That day, he hid inside the Roman olive tree on the outskirts of Tarshiha. When the sun began to set, he came out of his tree and saw something he'd never forget.

He said he'd never in his life forget that woman.

“She was wearing a long black dress, and had covered her hair with a black headscarf. She saw me and came toward me. I shrank back against the tree. I was wearing my long, olive-green coat and carrying my rifle like a stick. The woman was approaching me. She was far away, the sun was in my eyes so I couldn't see her silhouette clearly. I saw a black phantom emerging from among the red rays of the sun and coming toward me. Then, when she was two hundred meters away, she stopped in her tracks as though she were rooted to the ground, knelt down, rubbed her brow with dust, and raised her face toward me. She put her hands together and said something in an Arabic that I wasn't familiar with. Then she rose, stumbling over her
long dress. I took advantage of the moment to hide inside the trunk of the tree, slipping inside it with my heart beating like a drum. I stayed inside the trunk until night had covered everything. There was something strange in her eyes. I thought she was a spirit even though I don't believe in spirits; but I was afraid, very afraid.”

When Yunes told Nahilah how he'd stood close to his tree, wrapped in the red rays of the sun, and how the spirit woman had appeared to him at a distance and how she was going to carry his mind off like in the stories, Nahilah laughed for a long time.

“A spirit woman! The Yemenis are everywhere. That must have been a Yemeni Jewess.”

Nahilah told Yunes about the sobs they'd heard coming from the
moshav
the Yemenis had built over al-Birwa and about the mysterious rumors of children dying and disappearing. She said the Yemeni Jewesses would go out into the fields and lament like Arab women and that she'd started to fear for her children. “If the children of the Jews are disappearing, what will happen to ours?”

“That spirit woman was no spirit,” said Nahilah. “She was a poor woman like us who must have lost one of her children. So when she saw you, she probably thought you were a vision of the prophet Elias.”

Nahilah laughed at you and called you Elias, saying that with your beard you'd started to look like a Jewish prophet.

You can't forget the scene – a black ray emerging from the red rays of the sun, a woman kneeling on the ground and crying out in a voice to rend the heavens. You thought of her as “Rachel the spirit,” and on your way to see Nahilah, you'd enter the Roman tree and invoke the Yemeni woman. You told Nahilah that you were a Yemeni, too. “We come from Yemen. Our tribe migrated from there when the Ma'rib dam collapsed; the dam collapsed and drowned Yemen, and we fled. I'm Yemeni and my sweetheart's Yemeni, I have to look for her.”

Nahilah would be a little jealous, but then she'd take you into the space at the back of the cave that she christened “the bathroom,” where she'd
make you take off you clothes and would bathe you. You'd stand naked and she'd be wearing her long black dress, which would get soaked and cling to her body, kindling your desire, and you'd grab her with the soap still all over you, and she'd slip out of your grasp and say, “Go to your Yemeni woman. I don't care.”

I told you about the Yemeni woman to wish you sweet dreams.

I, too, need to sleep so that tomorrow I can try to convince Zainab not to leave the hospital. I don't know anything about Zainab. I've been living with her here for more than six months, and I know nothing. She's been here since the beginning. During these months everything has changed, as you know: Dr. Amjad comes only rarely, I've become head nurse and acting director of the hospital, the nurses have disappeared one after another, the hospital's been converted into a warehouse for medicine, but Zainab's still here, immovable. She limps a little, her shoulders droop, she has a short neck and small eyes. She moves like a ghost and takes care of everything. The cook left so Zainab has become the cook. Nabil went abroad so Zainab took over responsibility for the operating room. The Syrian guard disappeared so Zainab's become the doorkeeper. Zainab is the hospital. I don't care anymore. I spend most of my time with you, convinced that it's no use struggling for the hospital's survival. I had many discussions with Dr. Amjad, and I've tried with Mme. Wedad al-Najjar, the Palestine Red Crescent official in Lebanon, but it's no use.

No one wants this hospital anymore, as though we'd all agreed to announce the death of Shatila.

The camp is besieged from the outside and demolished on the inside, and they won't let us rebuild it. The whole of Lebanon was rebuilt after the war, except here; this testimony to butchery must be removed from our memories, wiped out just as our villages were wiped out and our souls lacerated.

I've lost hope. I said, “If they don't want it, too bad,” and I built an imaginary wall around your room and won't let anyone come near you. At first Amjad tried to make me believe that the decision to move you couldn't be
revoked, then I forced him to back down. I thought I'd scored a victory, but I discovered he simply didn't care. No one cares. They said, “He'll eventually get tired of it, and if he doesn't get tired of it, the old man will die anyway,” and no one expected my treatment method would be so successful. Amjad used to think your death would be a matter of days, and Zainab said you wouldn't see the end of your first month, but here we are, past the sixth and into the seventh. We have to hang on to the end of the seventh month. If we get through the seventh, we'll definitely get to the ninth, and the ninth is where salvation lies. But they don't know. They've shut us in here and left us to rot. If only they knew. I'm certain that no one has the slightest notion of what's going on in this room, here with the world, the women, the words.

I told you Zainab's become everything, meaning nothing. When someone becomes everything it means they've lost their particularity. Zainab's like that: I wasn't aware of her presence beyond the fact that she was present. I didn't ask her for anything. Then two days ago she came to me and said she'd decided to stop working. It never crossed my mind that Zainab could stop working: She exists because she works.

She came to your room and said she wanted to speak to me.

“What, Zainab?”

“No, not in front of him,” she said.

“Speak up, Zainab. There are no strangers here.”

“Please, Dr. Khalil. I'm afraid to talk in front of him. Please come with me to the office.”

I followed her to Dr. Amjad's office, which would have become my office if people took things seriously around here. Zainab went out and returned after a few minutes with a pot of coffee. She poured us both a cup and said that the children wanted her to stop working.

“You're married and have children, Zainab?”

“Of course, Doctor.”

“I'm sorry. I never knew.”

“‘Cripples don't marry,'” she quoted and smiled.

“I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I didn't mean it like that.”

“But I'm not a cripple, at least I wasn't a cripple when I got married. This is from Tal al-Za'atar.”

“You're from Tal al-Za'atar?”

“I was there. I left with the women, my husband disappeared in the Monte Verde. We walked toward the armed men with our hands in the air, and they fired on us. I was with my children. They were between my legs, and I was trying to cover them with my long skirt. Then a man came, and the firing stopped. We kept going until we reached the armed men, and the Red Cross convoy that had been sent to take us to West Beirut were there. That man came. I don't know why he picked me out of the crowd. ‘Over there!' he screamed, but I pretended I hadn't heard and kept going. Then the hot red fluid covered my thigh and bathed the head of my daughter, Samiyyeh, who was still between my legs. I kept going until I made it to the truck. I don't know why he only fired one shot, just one, or why he didn't kill me. These are things I don't understand now, but at the time everything was logical and possible. Our death seemed so logical that we weren't capable of protesting against it. They took me to Makased Hospital, and you can imagine what that did to my children. We reached the museum crossing when they decided to transfer me to the hospital. They put me in an ambulance, and the children started crying. I'd lost half my blood or more but somehow I managed to jump out of the ambulance to stand with my children. Then the nurse understood and let them come with me. At Makased Hospital, they put me in a room with more than ten beds and the children stayed with me. The eldest, Samiyyeh, was twelve and couldn't understand anything, and the youngest of them was three. Five boys and three girls, God protect them. I stayed in the hospital instead of going with the others to al-Damour. It's out of the question! I thought, when I heard they'd decided to house the Tal al-Za'atar people in al-Damour, which had been cleared of its Christian inhabitants. I thought, that's what the Jews did to us, and we're going to do the same to the people of al-Damour? It's not possible; it's a crime. And I stayed in the hospital. There was a doctor there from the Lutfi family in Tyre – do you know him? Dr. Hasib Lutfi? God
bless him, he told me I could work in the hospital and found me a small apartment nearby. We lived there, me and the children, until 1982. After the invasion and the massacres, we came to Shatila, and I started working in this hospital. I'm not a nurse, but I learned on the job at Makased Hospital. I came here, and as you know very well, there was no one, so I did everything. But I'm tired, Dr. Khalil. And what are we doing here anyway? You're guarding a corpse and I'm guarding a storeroom of medicine. Also, Shadi, God bless him, is going to send me a visa and a ticket for Germany.”

“You're going to Germany? What will you do there?”

“Nothing,” she answered. “There nothing, here nothing. But I'm tired. And Shadi's wife – I didn't tell you, Shadi married an Iraqi girl who lives in Germany, a Kurd and political refugee. She arranged asylum and residence for him – a refugee like us, so, like they say, ‘Refugees marry refugees,' and she's expecting, so I'll go for the child.”