Gate of the Sun by Elias Khoury

dentist, a friend of ours, who put in a temporary bridge and advised me to rest for a month before he put in a permanent one.
    â€œNezar didn’t ask me why I was wearing a torn shirt; his only concern was to stop me from going out. I told him I wouldn’t be long but that I had to go, and I set off. That day I was wearing the torn blue shirt I’d been wearing in the dream of the pit of al-Birwa. I found the shirt in the bottom of my pack – I’m the only man in the world who lives out of a bag: I put all that I possess in my bag, and it goes wherever I go.
    â€œI won’t describe how I got there, because you’d never believe me. It’s true the distance between southern Lebanon and the village of Tarshiha in Galilee is short and you can do it, walking, in four or five hours, but in those days it took about twenty hours because we had to avoid the Israeli patrols.I don’t remember how, but I flew. Now, as I’m telling you the story, I see myself as though I weren’t walking – no, I swear I was moving over the ground as though I were skating, and I arrived at noon.
    â€œI went to my cave at Bab al-Shams thinking I’d wait until evening and then go to the house, and I found her there, waiting for me.”
    â€œYou’re too late,” she said.
    Yunes didn’t hear and didn’t see. Nahilah stood with her back to the entrance of the cave. The cave was dark, and the sunlight splintered against his eyes so he couldn’t see a thing. A wavering shadow appeared and what looked like bowed shoulders.
    She said she’d spent the whole night waiting for him.
    She said she wanted to die.
    She said she had died.
    And her words blended into her moans.
    â€œShe wasn’t weeping,” said Yunes. “I didn’t hear sobbing or screaming. I heard moaning like that of a wounded animal. I went to her. She shook me off and fell to the ground. Then I understood, and I started to rip up my shirt.
    â€œShe whispered, ‘Ibrahim.’ Silence and the madness of sorrow struck me, and I heard a low moaning coming from every pore of her body.
    â€œI tried to question her but she wouldn’t reply. I sat down on the ground and reached out to her shaking body, but she moved away. She opened her mouth to say something, and a grating, gasping sound emerged, as though she were in her death throes.
    â€œPoor Nahilah, she stayed that way for more than a year. For a year her eyes were swollen with unspilled tears. Her milk dried up, and Salem, our second son, almost died.
    â€œTo tell the truth, I couldn’t understand her behavior. Is it possible for a mother to lose her instincts, to refuse to let her second son live, as though she wanted him to join the first?
    â€œHer milk dried up, but she went on feeding Salem as though nothing were wrong, and my mother didn’t notice. The child wept night and day. She would give him her breast, and he would fall silent for a while. Thenhe would start crying again. My mother finally discovered the truth when he wouldn’t stop crying even as he was nursing.
    â€œDo you know what my mother did?
    â€œShe stole the child. She snatched him away and took him to Umm Sab‘, Nabil al-Khatib’s wife, and asked her to suckle him and keep him with her. My mother was afraid the old story would happen all over again, and my children would die just as hers had.
    â€œPoor Nahilah. Mothers, my friend, are really something.”
    I didn’t ask you then what you did, and how you bore the death of your son that you so resembled. “You look like him,” Nahilah used to say, when she found you sad in the cave because she hadn’t cooked you mihammara and kibbeh nayyeh . She said it wasn’t just your features and clothes but also in the way you moved. This would make you laugh, and you’d accept the dish of leftover food she’d brought from home after hearing the tap of your hand on the kitchen