Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

Bab al-Shams

Translated from the Arabic by Humphrey Davies

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Copyright 2006 Archipelago Books

English translation copyright 2006 Humphrey Davies

First Edition

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Khoury, Elias.

Gate of the Sun / by Elias Khoury
translated from the Arabic by Humphrey Davies. 1st ed.

p.cm.

ISBN: 0-9763950-2-9

I. Davies, Humphrey. II. Title.

PG7179.U45T7913 2005

891.8538 dc22 2005016693

First published with the title Bab al-Shams by Dr-al-Adb, Beirut, 1998.

The edition of the Koran quoted in this volume is The Koran Interpreted, translated
by Arthur J. Arberry, Oxford World Classics, Oxford University Press, 1998.

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This publication was made possible with the support of Lannan Foundation, the International Institute of Modern Letters, and with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.

He said, may Allah be pleased with him:

One day, Sheikh al-Junayd set out on a journey and while traveling was overtaken by thirst. He found a well that was too deep to draw water from, so he took off his sash, dangled it into the well until it reached the water, and set about raising and lowering it and squeezing it into his mouth. A villager appeared and asked him, Why do it so? Tell the water to rise, and drink with your hands! and the villager approached the edge of the well and said to the water, Rise, with Gods permission, and it rose, and the sheikh and the villager drank. Afterwards the sheikh turned to the villager and asked, Who are you? One of Gods creatures, he replied. And who is your sheikh? asked al-Junayd. My sheikh is al-Junayd, though I have yet to set eyes on him, replied the man. Then how did you attain these powers? asked the sheikh. Through my faith in my sheikh, replied the man.

Bab al-Shams

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UMM HASSAN is dead.

I saw everyone racing through the alleys of the camp and heard the sound of weeping. Everyone was spilling out of their houses, bent over to catch their tears, running.

Nabilah, Mahmoud al-Qasemis wife, our mother, was dead. We called her mother because everyone born in the Shatila camp fell from their mothers guts into her hands.

I too had fallen into her hands, and I too ran the day she died.

Umm Hassan came from al-Kweikat, her village in Galilee, to become the only midwife in Shatila a woman of uncertain age and without children. I only knew her when she was old, with stooped shoulders, a face full of creases, large eyes shining in a white square, and a white cloth covering her white hair.

Our neighbor, Sana, the wife of Karim al-Jashi the kunafa seller, said Umm Hassan dropped in on her the night before last and told her her death was coming.

I heard its voice, daughter. Death whispers, and its voice is soft.

Speaking in her half-Bedouin accent she told Sana about the messenger of death.

The messenger came in the morning and told me to get ready.

And she told Sana how she wanted to be prepared for burial.

She took me by the hand, said Sana, led me to her house, opened her wooden trunk, and showed me the white silk shroud. She told me she would bathe before she went to sleep: Ill die pure, and I want only you to wash me.

Umm Hassan is dead.

Everyone knew that this Monday morning, November 20th, 1995, was the time set for Nabilah, Fatimahs daughter, to meet death.

Everyone awoke and waited, but no one was brave enough to go to her house to discover she was dead. Umm Hassan had told everyone, and everyone believed her.

Only I was taken by surprise.

I stayed with you until eleven at night, and then, exhausted, I went to my room and slept. It was night, the camp was asleep, and no one told me.

But everyone else knew.

No one would question Umm Hassan because she always told the truth. Hadnt she been the only one to weep on the morning of June 5, 1967? Everyone was dancing in the streets, anticipating going home to Palestine, but she wept. She told everyone shed decided to wear mourning. Everyone laughed and said Umm Hassan had gone mad. Throughout the six long days of the war she never opened the windows of her house; on the seventh, out she came to wipe away everyones tears. She said she knew Palestine would not come back until all of us had died.

Over the course of her long life, Umm Hassan had buried her four children one after the other. They would come to her borne on planks, their clothes covered in blood. All she had left was a son called Naji, who lived in America. Though Naji wasnt her real son, he was: She had picked him up from beneath an olive tree on the Kabri-Tarshiha road and had fed him from her dry breasts, then returned him to his mother when they reached the village of Qana, in Lebanon.

Umm Hassan died today.

No one dared go into her house. About twenty women gathered to wait, then Sana came and knocked on the door, but no one opened it. She pushed it, it opened, she went in and ran to the bedroom. Umm Hassan was sleeping, her head covered with her white headscarf. Sana went over and took her by the shoulders, and the chill of death flowed into the hands of the kunafa-sellers wife, who screamed. The women entered, the weeping began, and everyone raced to the house.

I, too, would like to run with the others, go in with them, see Umm Hassan sleeping her eternal sleep and breathe in the smell of olives that clung to her small home.

But I didnt weep.

For three months Ive been incapable of reacting. Only this man floating above his bed makes me feel the throb of life. For three months hes been laid out on his bed in Galilee Hospital, where I work as a doctor, or where I pretend that Im a doctor. I sit next to him, and I try. Is he dead or alive? I dont know am I helping or tormenting him? Should I tell him stories or listen to him?

For three months Ive been in this room.