Gate of the Sun (48 page)

But Shahineh didn't forget it.

She went to the Yarmouk camp and visited Abu Is'af, the commander of the Sha'ab garrison, who was living in the camp alone under a sort of house arrest.

In his tiny house, which consisted of one room without a bathroom, Abu Is'af told her he'd heard shots, but he wasn't sure if the man had died. He said the military camp they'd been in resembled a prison.

“They took our weapons and said the war was over. We said, ‘Okay, then we'll go back to our wives and children.' They said no, you will stay as our guests. You know what Arab hospitality is like: We were prisoners without a prison, we were like people abandoned in the desert. In fact, we were in the desert. Then your father disappeared and we heard shots, but we didn't know then that it was him. He did disappear, however. God rest your soul, Rabbah al-Awad, you were the reason for our release. After he disappeared, we went on a hunger strike. Yunes was the one who proclaimed the hunger strike and yelled in the officer's face, ‘A strike to the death!' Then they let us go. Everyone went back to his family except for me. They said that in view of my military experience, it had been decided to put me ‘at the disposal of the leadership.' Imagine the situation that I find myself
in at my age! I'm at the disposal of the leadership, I don't have a latrine to use, and I'm not allowed to visit my children in Ain al-Hilweh. Go, daughter, and take care of your son: Rabbah is a martyr and is buried God-knows-where. Forget his grave and look after the living. Go, God keep you, and if you pass by Ain al-Hilweh, ask for my son Is'af and tell him his father wants to see him before he dies.”

My grandmother said she was convinced.

“Listen well, Daughter,” said Abu Is'af. “Death is destiny. Someone who was destined to die in Palestine and wasn't able to, will die somewhere else.”

He said he'd wanted to die there himself because “Palestine is closer to paradise.”

My grandmother said she stayed in al-Ghabsiyyeh and didn't want to move out with the others three days before the battle because her father was fighting there, but he soon disappeared. “I waited for him at the house during the shelling, but he never came. So I got myself and the children ready and left. They were bombarding as we fled, the houses were collapsing. They died: Mohammed Abd al-Hamid and his wife Fathiyyeh, Ahmad al-Dawoud, Fayyad al-Dawoud; I saw them lying in the street, as though they had been hurled out of their houses.” She said, “The houses were still standing, but their roofs had flown off.”

I didn't want to believe my grandmother. The story of that birdman who fell from the minaret with his hands folded across his chest seemed like an image that had broken loose from memory and alighted in the woman's consciousness.

“That's history,” you'll tell me.

But I'm not concerned with history anymore. My story with you, Abu Salem, isn't an attempt to recapture history. I want to understand why we're here, prisoners in this hospital. I want to understand why I can't free myself from you and from my memory. In becoming the head nurse, I've returned to the position I deserve, as the hospital's effective director.

Is that because the hospital isn't a hospital any longer, that, in fact, it's been turned into something less than a clinic?

Or because I saw in you an image of my own death and rushed toward death to talk with it?

Or because, deep down, I'm afraid of Shams? I'll tell you her story later, then you'll understand why I'm afraid. I'm not afraid of death but of Shams, yes – of her, of her hoarse voice when it shudders with anger and passion, and of her body marked by sex, men, and death.

I don't believe my grandmother, and I don't believe history either, but that day I found myself wearing the name my grandmother had given me. She'd dressed me in the name of her dead son, ruffling my hair and weeping for her husband who'd died in the Revolution of '36 in the neighboring village of al-Nahar, and whom they brought back to her in a shroud, so that she was unable to see him.

My grandmother said she smelled the same odor when Yasin died.

“He was basted in his blood, and the odor of it escaped from the cracks of his disintegrating body until the whole house was filled with it, there in al-Ghabsiyyeh and here in the camp.”

“Like that smell, Grandmother?” I asked sarcastically, pointing to the pillow.

“It was our smell. The smell of the al-Awad family, the smell of blood mixed with the scents of flowers and herbs.”

She ran to her pillow.

“Smell it,” she said.

I clasped the pillow to my chest and took in a deep whiff of it; I chuckled and snorted at once.

“It's the smell of henna, Grandma. It's the smell of your head. Did my grandfather dye his hair with henna?!”

She snatched the pillow away from me angrily. “You don't understand anything,” she said. “When you grow up, you'll understand what I'm saying – the same dream and the same smell. They brought my husband and his smell came off him and filled me up. They took him into the house for a few minutes and stopped me from going to the grave. They carried him around the house and asked me to let out some ecstatic
youyous
, but I
didn't, not because I don't believe in God, as they claimed, but because I couldn't. The smell had overwhelmed me, and I could feel it creeping into my bones and inhabiting them. You have to trill for martyrs, and I've trilled for many. In fact, our lives are punctuated by
youyous
. We're all martyrs, Son. But when they brought him to the house, I couldn't; his smell reigned everywhere.”

She recounted my father's death.

When she recounted his death, she'd rise and enact the crime. The truth of the matter is that the story changed after my mother disappeared. When my mother was here, she was the one who'd tell the story. My mother would speak, and my grandmother would sigh. My mother would say the man fell like a sack, motionless, as though he'd died before they shot him.

My mother said she opened the door, with Yasin behind her, and saw three men. Yasin said, “Is everything okay? Please come in.” One of them pulled out his revolver and fired three bullets. She said she was standing in front of him, saw the gun and heard the shots. She said that everything happened very fast – they shot him and left.

“I turned and saw him on the ground, motionless. I bent over him. His mother came and pushed me away. Then everyone came.”

My mother said my sister died two weeks after my father. “He took my daughter and went away,” she said, “so what am I doing still here?”

I don't remember my younger sister, Fatmah. My grandmother said she was pink and blond and white, like the middle of the day, and that the Jew, Aslan Durziyyeh, when he visited us, couldn't believe she was my father's daughter, she was so beautiful and white. The old woman yawns and raises her hands to her head as though she's going to throw the days behind her. “God bless him, Aslan Durziyyeh. I don't know what's become of him.”

My grandmother doesn't remember my sister well. I ask her and she says she doesn't know. “I told Najwah, ‘You take care of Fatmah, and Khalil's mine,'” so the work was divided between the two women from Fatmah's birth. But Fatmah died; she was struck by an intestinal infection.

“We got up in the morning, and she was like a piece of cold wood. Your mother picked her up and ran with her to the doctor. He told her she'd dehydrated.”

I lived alone. My mother stayed up at night, waiting for the moon of al-Ghabsiyyeh that she never saw, and my grandmother wept and called me Yasin. Between the two women I listened to stories I thought were mine and got confused. I would tell stories about my father as though I were telling them about myself. I'd imagine him through my mother's eyes and see him fall like a sack. Then I'd see him in my grandmother's words, see the blood staining his white hair as he convulsed between life and death on the threshold of our house.

But why did they kill him?

The papers wrote that he'd been killed because he'd resisted the police patrol that came to arrest him. My mother said he was behind her when he went to the door and didn't possess any weapons. And my grandmother says the weapons were there, but they didn't find any. “They came the next day and turned the house upside down. I'm the daughter of Rabbah al-Awad and you think they're going to find the rifle? The rifle's there, Son, and when you grow up you'll take it. But they were liars. He didn't resist. If he'd resisted, he'd have killed them all. He went out to greet them because he didn't know they'd come to kill him. The sons of bitches.”

My grandmother doesn't know why they killed him.

You, Father, on the other hand, know everything.

My grandmother said you showed up at the funeral when no one was expecting you, appearing among the mourners and raising your hand in the victory sign. You'd covered your face with your
kufiyyeh.
^*
In those days, the
kufiyyeh
hadn't yet become our emblem; we didn't have an emblem. You came with the
kufiyyeh
covering your face and head and you shouted “God is most great!” and everyone shouted the same thing. Then you disappeared.

Tell me about those days. Tell me how you held onto the courage of the beginning after all that had happened.

You'll tell me that in those days you weren't aware of the beginning. You continued your journeys over there as though things hadn't been interrupted, as though what had been etched on our bodies hadn't been etched on yours. You moved among the forests and hills of Galilee, continuing your life and returning to the camp. You appeared only to disappear.

I know that things weren't as simple as they appeared.

I know you were a wolf and like all wolves didn't like to settle down in one place. In the early years, you felt a strange wildness and a killing loneliness.

But my father.

Why did he die that way?

Why didn't he go with you?

Why did he leave me?

Dr. Amjad is wrong. Do you know what he told Zainab? He said: “Khalil is going through a psychological crisis driven by the need to find his father; leave him with that corpse until he's had enough.”

He spoke of you as a corpse, of me as an idiot, and of our story as nonsense. The son of a bitch! I wish I could rip away that shell he hides behind! Camouflaged behind those thick glasses of his, he's so sure he's discovered meaning in his life by chasing after money. I know he's a thief. He steals here, and he works at another hospital, where he dons the skin of the all-knowing, all-understanding doctor – but he doesn't know a thing. No one who hasn't crossed a desert like the desert of Shams can know anything about life.

Excuse me, Father, if I say that love is not as you describe it. Love is feeling yourself to be lost and unanchored. Love is dying because you can't hold on to the woman you love. Shams would slip through my hands, and she made a fool of me, saying that she wanted me, then taking off for some other man. That's love – an emptiness suddenly filled, or a fullness that empties and melts into thin air. With her I learned to see myself and love my body.
Before, I knew nothing. I thought that love was Nuha, her mother's cooking, and her father's throat clearing, desire that wakes and then dies away. But Shams taught me to be a man, how to die in her arms and cease to exist. Please don't laugh. I don't remember if I became aroused with her the way men do, the way I would when I took hold of my member and discharged it with my hand. With her I didn't have a member. Naturally, I'd become aroused but – how can I put it? – it was more like melting and coming out of the water. We'd bathe in the water of desire and dissolve – but the desire never died. Her water . . . her water would burst forth like a spring emerging from the depths of the earth, and I'd drown.

That's what Amjad doesn't know, since, if he had known love, his life would've been ravaged as mine has been.

How can you expect me to fix my life now that she is dead?

Should I tell you a secret? My secret, Father, is that now, when her ghost comes to haunt me, I feel the same desire that used to take me into her limitless world, and I tremble with lust, and I'm afraid.

But why?

I used to think that Sameh's death would be swept under the carpet the way we've swept so many hundreds of deaths under the carpet. Why did they sentence her to death?

Was it because . . . ?

Or because she . . . ?

But I knew she was going to die, because I could see death lurking in her eyes. You were the one who told me about the death that blazes from people's eyes. Do you remember that girl, what was her name? Dalal? Yes, Dalal al-Maghribi. Do you remember the suicide operation she carried out in Tel Aviv, convulsing the camp as though it had been struck by an earthquake? We were unable to believe that Dalal, that melancholy, meek girl who worked in the sewing workshop, had been capable of commanding a boat that would set her down in Haifa, of kidnapping an Israeli bus full of passengers and dying that way.

That day you told me you'd seen death in her eyes and explained that
you could tell the fighter who was going to die from his eyes, since death covers the eyes like an invisible film and the fighter is bewitched by his own death before he dies, and so goes obediently. I remembered the Lebanese youth, Mohammed Shbaro, who we called Talal. You don't know him because you weren't with us during the Lebanese war. That was our war, Abu Salem. I say that in all sorrow because whenever I talk about memories of the Lebanese war, I feel as though my face is falling to the ground and shattering. I could see death in the eyes of that young man, who we called the Engineer because he was a student at the Jesuit University in Beirut. He'd put on his thick glasses, wrap the patterned
kufiyyeh
around his neck, and go out looking for death. He died in Sanin because he'd decided to die. He didn't have to die, but you might say he was trailing behind his eyes. The image of the Engineer resurfaced when you were telling me about the connection between my father's death and his eyes. I know you'll say that my father carried his death in his eyes, I know that it wasn't your fault, or Adnan's, God rest his soul. In those days you were all in a hurry to carry out armed operations, and the central authority that emerged from the Lebanese civil war of '58 had decided to teach you a lesson. My father was the lesson. They came and killed him to deter you, but in vain. My father died and my mother paid the price.