Gate of the Sun by Elias Khoury Page A

window.
    I didn’t ask you because this time you seemed like someone who was just telling the story. You told me how you’d spent two months in the wild out of fear for your wife. You tried to calm her down and told her that Salem had to stay with Umm Sab‘ so he could survive. She would speak disjointedly and say your mother was a liar, that her milk hadn’t dried up, that she was going to die. You spent two months wandering in the woods, going to see her three times a week, and taking her to Bab al-Shams.
    After staying with her for two months, you went back to Lebanon because the temporary bridge the dentist had given you was starting to crumble. You wanted to forget: More than a year went by before you returned to Galilee. You told me you were delayed by your various preoccupations and that you were getting things ready for the first groups of fedayeen, but I didn’t believe you. I believe you fled because you had no solution. A wife on the edge of madness, inconsolable, what could you do? You fled as men always do. Manliness, or what we call manliness, consists of flight, because inside all the bluster and bullying and big words, there’s a refusal to face up to life.
    You went back to her after more than a year. You were embarrassed and timid, but you went back, knocked on the window and sprinted off to your cave.
    She came.
    She was like a new woman. Her hair was long and tied back; she smelled of a mixture of coffee beans and thyme, and her face was just like the face of Ibrahim, whose sleeping face you’d known only from photographs, with his curls spread across his pillow.
    You said the woman had come to resemble her dead son and that when you smelled the coffee beans and the thyme rising from her hair, you fell into that feeling that never left you. You said that when you returned to Lebanon after that visit, you were like a lost man, talking without thinking, moving like a sleepwalker, unaware of your own existence except when you were on your way to Bab al-Shams.
    â€œThat’s real love, Abu Salem.”
    You refused to acknowledge this blazing truth and said that something inside you, something that had come out into the open after being secret, made you incapable of putting up with other people, and that you were like a wolf that prefers to live in the open.
    During that time, Yunes lived in the forest for sixteen continuous months. He didn’t tell Nahilah he was nearby. He would visit her twice a week, amazing her with his ability to traverse such distances and dangers. He didn’t tell her he had no distances to traverse, only time – the time that became his cross during the days and nights of waiting.
    You told Dr. Mu‘een al-Tarshahani, who was in charge of the training camp you’d set up at Meisaloun near Damascus, that you were going on a long surveillance trip. “I’ll be away for a few months, maybe a year. Don’t look for me, and don’t issue any statements. I won’t die, I’ll come back.”
    At the time, Dr. Mu‘een thought you’d been hit by “Return fever,” that disease that spread among the Palestinians at the beginning of the fifties and led hundreds of them to their deaths as they tried to cross the Lebanese border on the way back to their villages. He tried to dissuade you, saying that the Return would come after the liberation.
    â€œBut I’m not going back,” you told him. “I’m going to scout out the land, and I’ll come back so that we can return together.”
    Dr. Mu‘een explained that those who succeeded in reaching their objective couldn’t live decent lives because they were treated as “resident absentees” and were permitted neither to work nor to move around.
    â€œNo communiqué. No death notice. I’m coming back.”
    And you left.
    There you were, pretending that you wanted to explore Galilee inch by inch, but you were lying. You