Gate of the Sun (33 page)

You'd tell them about the moon.

Your moon wasn't the full moon of my mother's; yours never became totally full. I think I read the fable of the moon in a Chinese book translated into Arabic, but it sounded more beautiful coming from your mouth than from any book: “The moon is full only one day a month. On all the other days it's either getting bigger or smaller. Life's the same. Stability is the exception, change the rule.” You'd ask the boys to follow the movement of the moon on training nights so they could get some practical political culture instead of book culture, which goes in through the eye and out at the ear.

Now tell me about Sha'ab.

Was it Abu Is'af who made the arrangements with the headman for you to have a house, the leader of the Sha'ab garrison thus guaranteeing that you'd stay with him?

You found yourself in the Sha'ab garrison after you'd failed – yes, failed – to form the mobile military unit you'd dreamed of. The war was speeding
up, and the Arab armies that entered Palestine in 1948 were being defeated by the larger, better-armed Israeli army in record time. God, who'd have believed it? Six hundred thousand Israelis put together an army larger than all seven Arab armies combined!

You started military patrols, you begged weapons, you took part in the battles of al-Birwa and al-Zib, but the rapid fall of the villages and hamlets of Galilee made it impossible for you to move and turned you into a garrison of not more than two hundred fighters centered on the little village called Sha'ab. Later, the garrison would end up in prison in Syria and its heroic deeds would disappear among the flood of displaced people who invaded the fields and groves.

All the stories of the exodus have collected now in your eyes – shut over the teardrops I put in them – and in place of heroism I see sorrow and hear the voice of my grandmother telling about the woman who sewed up the pita bread. I'm listening to the story of the woman in the fields of Beit Jann, and I see my grandmother miming the story, screwing up her eyes so she can put the imaginary thread into the eye of the imaginary needle, then taking the imaginary pita bread in her hand, cutting it in two and starting to sew it up.

“The woman sewed the pita bread, and the boy was crying. She gave him the whole pita and asked him to be quiet, but he tore it in two and began crying again. So the mother killed her son!”

I see the exodus in your eyes and I hear my grandmother's voice, which has dwindled into a low mutter full of ghosts.

“We reached Beit Jann, but we didn't go into the Druze village because we were afraid.”

She tells me about fear and the Druze, and I swallow the pita bread stuffed with fried potatoes and feel the potatoes sticking to the roof of my mouth, as though I'm going to suffocate.

No, I'm not complaining about the potatoes – they were my favorite. I loved fried potatoes and still do. They were incomparably better than the boiled plants my grandmother cooked. She'd leave the camp for who-knows-where
and come back loaded down with all kinds of greens, wash them, cook them, and we'd eat. The taste was – how can I describe it? – a green taste, and the stew would form a lump in my mouth. My grandmother would say that it was healthy food: “We're peasants, and this is peasant food.” I'd beg her to fry me some potatoes; the smell of potatoes gives you an appetite, but those cooked weeds had neither odor nor taste; it felt like you were chewing something that had already been chewed.

You don't like fried potatoes, I know. You prefer them grilled and seasoned with olive oil. Now I've come to like olive oil, but when my grandmother, who cooked everything in it, was around it tasted waxy to me and I didn't like it, but I couldn't say so in front of her. How can you say that sort of thing to a woman if she doesn't see it? She used to live here as though she were over there. She refused to use electricity because they didn't have it in her village – can you believe it? She didn't want to get used to things that didn't exist there because she was going to go back! If only she'd known what Galilee had become! But she died before she knew anything.

You won't believe the story of the pita bread, just as you didn't believe the story of Umm Hassan and Naji, whom she picked up and put in the basin. You believe, as I'd like to, that we don't kill our own children and throw them under trees. You like things clear and simple. The murderer is a known quantity, and the victim, too, and it's up to us to see that justice is done. Unfortunately, my brother, it wasn't as simple as us and them. It was something else that's hard to define.

I'm not here to define things. I have a mission. As usual I'll fail and as usual I won't believe I've failed; I'll claim I succeeded or put the blame on others. Ah, habit! If only we could walk away from it! If only I could shed this past that hovers like a blue ghost in your room! Come to think of it, why do I see things as blue? Why do I see Shams looking at me with a blue face as though she were about to kill me?

If I could, I'd go to Shams' family and tell them the truth and let them do what they want. I'm innocent of her murder, of her love, of everything, because I'm an imbecile. If I hadn't been made a fool of . . . everything might have been different.

Tell me, who in the story of Shams wasn't made a fool of?

She killed him, the bitch! She told him, “I give myself to you in marriage,” and then she killed him.

She loved him, and he loved her, but, like me, he felt she would slip out of his hands. Is it possible for a man to marry a woman who leaves someone else's bed to go to him?

Why did she kill him?

Was the fact that he'd lied to her enough to make her kill him?

We all lie, so it really seems unreasonable. Just imagine – if the penalty for lying were death, there'd be no one left alive on the surface of the earth.

Now I've started to doubt everything. I'm not sure it was a matter of honor. Shams is the first woman in the history of the Arab world to kill a man because he was unfaithful and tricked her.

But let's slow down . . .

Did she kill him?

They said she killed him in public. Everyone saw her, but does that mean anything? What if everyone's lying? What if everyone just believed what they'd heard from everyone else, who had heard what they'd heard from others?

No, that's impossible. If that were true, my whole life might have been an unbearable lie, which it is anyway. Shams lied to me, and everyone is lying to me now. Death threats are being passed on to me, and I'm afraid of a lie. When you're afraid of a lie, it means your life is a lie, don't you think?

I'm scared and I hide in the hospital, and the memories pour down on me and I have no idea what to do with them. What would you say to a novel-writing project? I know you'll tell me I don't know how to write novels. I agree, and I'd add that no one knows how to write because anything you say comes apart when you write it down and turns into symbols and signs, cold and bereft of life. Writing is confusion; tell me, who can write the confusions of life? It's a state between life and death that no one dares enter. I won't dare enter that state, I say this only because like all doctors and failures, I've become a writer. Do you know why Chekhov wrote? Because he was a failed doctor. I imagine that by becoming a writer he was able to find
the solution to his crisis. But I'm not like him; I'm a successful doctor, and everyone will see how I was able to rescue you from the Valley of Death.

I'm certain she killed him, because I know her and I know how death shone in her eyes. I used to think it was love that changed her eyes from gray to green, then back to gray, but it was death. Gray-green is the color of death. Shams used to talk about death because she knew it. My grandmother didn't.

Shahineh didn't dare say the child had died. She said they went by Beit Jann and were afraid. The airplanes were roaring above their heads, and when night fell their journey to Lebanon began.

My grandmother said she found herself in the middle of a group of about thirty women, old men, and children from the village of al-Safsaf wandering the hills looking for the Lebanese border. “With my daughters and my son, we walked with them. I don't know how we ended up in that terrified group. We were afraid, too, but not like them. When they spoke they whispered. When we got to Beit Jann, they refused to go into the place. Their leader said they'd rob us and ordered us to continue marching. I told him not to be afraid, but he told me to shut up, and we left. When we got to Lebanon, we'd lost our voices because the old man had made us whisper so much.”

It seems that on that journey my grandmother's voice became husky. I forgot to tell you that my grandmother had this husky voice, like it was coming out of a well deep inside her, which made it seem broad and full of holes.

“The child began crying from hunger. A child of three or four sobbing and whining that he was hungry, while everybody looked askance at his mother and asked her to make him shut up. The woman didn't know what to do. She picked him up and started shushing him, but he wouldn't let up. And there was an old man . . . I'll never forget that old man.”

My grandmother always used to threaten me with the old man of al-Safsaf. When I refused to eat her greens, she'd tell me she'd ask the old man of al-Safsaf to come and strangle me at night, and I'd be scared and chew my prechewed roughage.

She said she realized why they were so terrified when they reached Tarshiha. There their fear disappeared and they ate and wept, and the old man told the story of the white sheets.

“We received them with white sheets. We went out waving the sheets as a sign of surrender, but they started firing over our heads. Then they ordered us to gather in the square. They chose sixty men of various ages, tied their hands behind their backs with rope and stood them in a row. Sixty men of various ages standing like a wall threaded together by the rope linking their hands. Then they opened fire. The sound of the machine guns deafened us, and the men dropped. The people gathered in the square fled into the fields. Death enveloped us.”

“After we reached Tarshiha, he became a different man,” said my grandmother. “But on the road, during those silent nights, he was a monster. A tall, thin man with a hunchback. His moustache looked like it had been drawn with a pen. His hair was gray, his moustache black, and he ordered us about furiously. We could see the sinews of his small, veiny hands as he motioned to us to be silent.”

My grandmother said she gave the mother the one pita bread she had underneath her dress. She said she was afraid of the old man because he was determined to kill the child if he kept crying. The woman tried her best to make her son shut up – holding his hand, lifting him up, carrying him, putting him back down on the ground, letting him walk between her legs; but the child wouldn't stop crying. The woman took the round loaf from my grandmother and divided it in two. She gave her son half and the other half she gave back to my grandmother. But the boy refused; he wanted a whole pita and started crying again. The old man came up to him and took hold of his clothes and started shaking him. My grandmother rushed over and gave her half to the mother, who gave it to her son. But the boy wanted a whole pita, not two halves. The woman put the two halves together, extracted a needle and thread from the front of her dress, threaded the needle, and started sewing up the pita bread.

My grandmother said she saw things as though they were wrapped in
shadows. The meager crescent moon that would slip out from among the branches of the trees turned people into colliding shadows. I listened to the story and was scared of my grandmother's husky voice, which swallowed up the scene and made it a story of djinn and afrits.

The woman sewed up the pita bread and gave it to the boy, and he stopped crying. He took it joyfully, until he discovered that it wasn't a normal pita. The woman had sewn it hastily in the dark and hadn't made the stitches tight. The boy took the bread and the stitches started to pull apart – the gap between the two halves widening. And he started to cry again. He held the pita up to give back to his mother and cried.

The old man came forward, took the pita bread, put it in his mouth, and started gobbling it down. He swallowed more than half of it along with the thread and went over to the woman.

“Kill it,” he hissed at her.

“Throw it down the well,” said a woman's voice from the within the shadowed crowd.

“Give it to me. I'll take care of it,” said the old man.

He went toward the child, whose screams grew louder and louder. The woman took a wool blanket, wrapped her son in it and picked him up. She put his head on her shoulder and kept pulling him down onto it as she walked, stifling the child's cries with the blanket. The old man walked behind them; my grandmother said he walked behind the woman and kept pushing the child's head down onto its mother's shoulder.

In Tarshiha the mother put her son down on the ground. She pulled back the blanket and started weeping. The child was blue. But the old man changed when they reached the last Palestinian village and started looking for his daughter, eagerly asking people about a short, fat woman with five children.

My grandmother said the people of Tarshiha brought them food, but the man refused to eat. He became a different person. The veins disappeared from his face and hands, his body slumped, and he started weeping and asking to die.