Gate of the Sun (26 page)

“I'm not a relative of the patient,” I told him.

“Precisely,” he answered. “We reviewed his medical file and found the report you wrote, and we'd like to discuss his condition with you.”

When I said I knew nothing about neurological diseases, he eyed me with distaste and corrected me: Mr. Adnan's illness was not neurological but psychiatric. He was suffering from schizophrenia and received electric shock therapy.

I'll spare you the excruciating details of the doctor's diagnosis since I was certain he understood absolutely nothing. He invited me to see Adnan and we walked through the place, which could have been called anything but a hospital.

Heaps of lunatics, the smells of lunatics, the sounds of lunatics.

Moans from every corner.

Moans rising like smoke.

In front of the cluster of slums that previously was the Sabra camp, there stands a dingy yellow building enclosed on all sides called Dar al-Ajazah.

In this enclosure, which isn't part of our world, I walked and walked until I got to a room that looked nothing like other rooms and saw an old man tied up in chains; they told me it was Adnan.

We walked through the first floor, where the larger wards are. “Here,” said Dr. Karim, “is where we put the nondangerous patients.”

We walked among them. They clung to our clothes as though they wanted something they couldn't articulate. The musty smell of food and the sight of the patients in their soiled white garments gave the impression that the rooms hadn't been aired for years.

I told Dr. Karim that I could barely breathe because of the poor ventilation,
but he just patted me on the shoulder, saying that the hospital had been built to the proper standards and was equivalent to the best in Europe.

“And the odor?” I asked.

“Oh, that's nothing,” he said. “It's the natural odor of a group of people. Any indiscriminate mixture of humans or animals gives off a strong and penetrating odor, that's all.”

We continued through the halls, which opened onto the patients' rooms, and I noticed that they were all in pajamas. I wanted to ask why they weren't wearing clothes, but I held back.

We went up to the second floor, and there I saw!

On the first floor the conditions were more or less humane. The patients' rooms opened onto relatively large halls, and they could choose to stay with their companions in the hall or sit in their rooms, in each of which were four beds.

Upstairs was unbelievable.

We came first to a large ward full of cots with metal sides. “These are the incapacitated,” he said. Then we turned right and entered the hall of horrors. I saw thirty children tied to their beds, immobilized. “These are the mentally retarded,” he said with a smile.

“But this is torture,” I said.

“It's better this way, for them and for us,” he replied.

He led me down the long corridor and said we were coming to the “dangerous” ward.

There I saw Adnan.

It wasn't a ward, or a hall, or a room. It was a cluster of small, dark cells, and Adnan was tied with a metal chain to a bed fenced with metal bars. He was snoring.

The doctor went up to him and tried to wake him. “Adnan! Adnan!” he said.

The patient fidgeted and his snoring grew more staccato.

The doctor put his hand on the black metal siding surrounding Adnan's
bed and launched into a lengthy explanation of his case. He said they'd made a mistake. “It seems the doctor on duty didn't read Adnan's medical file carefully and had him tied down. You understand, the man had spent twenty years in solitary confinement under restraint, and when he saw the restraints here he went into convulsions, so the doctor was forced to give him shock therapy. Then he had him tied to his bed, and his condition began to deteriorate. He wouldn't stop screaming and trying to attack the nurses, and he's very lucky they didn't kill him. These errors can occur, of course, but as soon as I got back, I took things in hand. As you can see, there's not much hope and his condition's getting worse.”

“But he's still tied up!” I said.

“Of course, of course,” answered the doctor. “I was away, as I told you, and I had no choice but to tie him up so he wouldn't endanger himself and the nurses.”

“You ordered this?”

“Yes, Sir, absolutely. As you can see, the physician can be forced to take harsh measures. What could I do? As soon as I undid his restraints, he started beating one of the nurses and fractured his hand. So I ordered him to be taken back to shock therapy and tied down.”

“But he's half-dead now!”

“Precisely. That's why I called you in,” replied Dr. Karim. “I don't think he'll get up again after the last shock treatment. I'd like you to get in touch with his family and explain the situation to them so they can come visit him before he dies. Maybe if he sees one of his children he'll improve a little. Can you get in touch with them?”

That's where Dr. Amjad wants to send you – to the place where they chained Adnan up, tortured and killed him; to the place where Adnan hovered on the verge of death for six months between the shock-therapy room and his cell before taking his last breath.

“Impossible!” I said to Amjad.

I told him I'd give the matter some thought, gave him the impression
that I would accept, and then implored him to leave you here. I said it was a scandal. I begged. I insisted that it was out of the question.

I talked and talked and talked, I forget now what I said. I begged him not to transfer you to the home, and he promised to reconsider, so I felt better. I left his office in good spirits, but now I am sad.

I'm here before you confused, scared, despairing.

But in Amjad's office I was pleased that he would reconsider the situation, which meant that I'd remain here, and if I stay you stay, or vice versa.

When he does reconsider, he'll realize that he can't expel you from the hospital because that would be shameful. True, the hospital resembles a prison, and true, we're both prisoners here, but it's better than dying.

But no.

I shouldn't have given in to his conditions. I should have threatened him, don't you think?

In your room I saw the scene with new eyes, and I imagined what I should have said and said it, or basically did.

It was 9 a.m. and I'd finished giving you your morning bath and was standing in front of the window drinking tea and smoking an American cigarette when I found Zainab in the room.

She said Dr. Amjad was expecting me.

I threw my cigarette out the window, put the teacup on the table and followed her. The doctor was reading the newspaper. He moved it a little to one side, said, “Please sit down,” and went on with his reading. I accepted his kind invitation, sat down, and waited. But he didn't interrupt his reading, muttering in disapproval as he read. Finally he threw the paper onto the desk, greeted me, and fell silent again.

“Nice to see you,” I said.

“Can I do anything for you?” he said.

“Thanks. Zainab told me you wanted to see me.”

“Ah yes,” he said. “How's the old fellow doing?”

“Better,” I said.

I told him about the drops, of your reaction when I pricked your hand with a needle, of the clear signs of improvement.

He took off his dark glasses – I forgot to tell you, he wears dark glasses when he reads. Strange. I'm sure this doctor doesn't have a clue about either medicine or politics, but what can we do? “God's the Boss,” as they say. He took off his dark glasses, blew pipe smoke in my face, and announced my new duties as a full-time head nurse.

I objected.

I explained the importance of my work with you and was getting up to go when he informed me of the decision to transfer you to the home.

I tried to say something but couldn't. My tongue was as heavy in my mouth as a log. Then the words burst out. I said that transferring you meant throwing you onto the garbage dump and leaving you to die, and that I knew the place was neither a
home
nor a hospital but a purgatory for the living and the tortured.

Amjad, however, insisted on having his way.

“Do you have any idea what you're doing?” I asked.

“Of course, I'm doing my duty. The hospital isn't set up for a case like Yunes'. People like him die in their own homes.”

“There's nobody there,” I said.

“I know. That's why we'll be transferring him to Dar al-Ajazah,” he said.

“Impossible!” I yelled. “You don't know what you're saying.”

“On the contrary, I know better than you do.”

“You know nothing.”

“I'm doing my duty. There's no room for pity in our profession.”

“Pity! You're an imbecile. You don't know what Yunes represents.”

“Yunes! What does Yunes represent?”

“He's a symbol.”

“And how can we treat symbols?” he asked. “There's no place for symbols in a hospital. The place for symbols is in books.”

“But he's a hero! A hero doesn't end up in a cemetery for the living dead.”

“But he's finished.”

When I heard the word
finished
, everything tipped over the edge. I don't remember exactly what spilled out of me – that you were the first, that you were Adam, that nobody was going to touch you, that I'd kill anyone who got near you.

The doctor tried to calm me down, but I got more and more excited.

He said he was the one who made the decisions here.

I said, “No. No one decides.”

I snatched the newspaper out of his hands and started ripping it into little shreds and putting them in my mouth. I chewed them up and spat them out and shouted. I kept on ripping and spitting away, and the doctor shrank back behind his desk until only his head remained visible. Then it disappeared and his body grew smaller and smaller in the chair until it vanished entirely as though the desk had swallowed it.

I left him under the desk and stormed out of his office. A stormy exit: a hurricane.

And I came back to you.

I'm sure now that you'll stay put even though I didn't say what I meant to in Amjad's office.

Tell me, how is it possible? How could Amjad dare speak of you that way? Is he completely out of it? Everyone knows your story. Doesn't it mean anything to him or what? Has he lost his memory? Are we a people without a memory? Maybe he's just out of it, but I bet he's not. What's come over him? What's come over all of us? In the end, there's nothing left but the end. You and me, in a world that's hurling us into oblivion.

You're fortunate, Yunes.

Can you imagine where you'd be without me?

If you were in my shoes, and only if you were in my shoes, you'd understand that the worst is yet to come. I know, you want me to tell you about the political situation at the moment. I hate politics because I can no longer understand what's going on. I just want to live. I run from my death into yours and from my self to your corpse. What can a corpse do?

You can't save me and I can't heal you, so what are we doing here? I'm in
the hospital and you're in prison – no, I'm in prison and you're in the hospital – and memories flow. Do you expect me to make myself a life out of memories?

I know, you don't like memories. You don't remember because you're alive. You've spent your whole life playing cat and mouse with death, and you're not convinced the end has come, you're not ready to sit on the sidelines and remember. “We only remember the dead,” you said to me once, but no, I completely disagree with you about that. I remember through you so I can stay alive. I want to know. At least know.

Like all the other children who grew up in the camps, I heard all the stories, but I never understood. Do you imagine it's enough to tell us we weren't defeated in 1948 – because we never fought – to make us accept the dog's life we've led since we were born? Do you imagine I believed my grandmother? Why did my mother run away? Why did my grandmother tell me my mother had gone to see her family and would come back? She didn't come back. I went to Jordan to look for her and couldn't find a trace of her, as though she'd evaporated into thin air. That's how it works for us: Things disappear rather than appear, as in a dream.

Now, within this long dream in the hospital, I want you to tell me the story. I'll tell it to you, and you can make comments. I'll tell it, and you'll speak to me. But before that I want to tell you a secret, but please don't get angry. I watched the video Umm Hassan brought, and I saw al-Ghabsiyyeh. I saw the mosque and the lotus tree and the roads smothered in weeds, and I felt nothing. I felt no more than I felt when I went to the center of Beirut devastated by the civil war and saw the vegetation wrapped around the soaring buildings and the ruined walls. No, that's not true. In the middle of Beirut, I almost wept – I did weep. But while watching Umm Hassan's film, I felt a breath of hot air slap me. Why do you want me to weep for the ruins of history? Tell me, how did you abandon them there? How did you manage that? How did you live in two places at once, inside two histories and two loves? I won't take your sincerity at face value nor your enigmatic talk about women. All I want is to understand why Nahilah didn't come with
you to Lebanon. How could you have abandoned her? How could you have lived out your story and let it grow and grow to the point of killing you?