Gate of the Sun by Elias Khoury Page B

didn’t explore Galilee. On the contrary, you just kept hovering around Deir al-Asad and making a circuit of Sha’ab, al-Kabri and al-Ghabsiyyeh. You lived among the ruins of villages and would go into the abandoned houses and rummage for food. You’d pounce on what people had left behind and savor the vintage olive oil. You said oil’s like wine, the longer it matures in its jars the smoother it gets. And then you gave me your views on bread. You made me taste the bread you ate when you were on your own during those long months, kneading the dough and cutting it and frying the little pieces in olive oil. You said you’d gotten used to that kind of bread, and you made it now in the camp whenever you felt nostalgic.
    â€œBut it’s bad for you and raises your cholesterol,” I said tasting its burning flavor.
    â€œWe don’t get high cholesterol. Peasants are cholesterol-proof.”
    A YEAR OF living without shelter around Deir al-Asad.
    A year of solitude and waiting.
    You spoke to no one. No one lent you a sympathetic ear. People had other things to worry about, they danced with death every day.
    Who remembers that woman?
    You told me you prayed that God would bless you with forgetfulness and that you didn’t want to remember her, but she kept slipping into your thoughts, like a phantom.
    She was alone – a woman alone wandering among the destroyed gravesof al-Kabri. But they weren’t graves: The Israeli army didn’t leave one stone on top of another in al-Kabri after its occupation.
    The woman was picking things up and putting them in a bag on her back. Yunes approached her. At first she looked like an animal walking on all fours. Her long hair covered her face, and she was muttering. Yunes moved toward her carefully, ready to fire his rifle. Then she turned and looked him in the eye.
    â€œMy hands were shaking and I nearly dropped the rifle,” he told his wife. “She seemed to have thought I was an Israeli soldier, and when I got close to her she slung her bag over her shoulder and started running. I stayed where I was and looked around but saw nothing on the ground. I found dried bones, which I thought belonged to dead animals. I thought to catch up with her to ask her what she was doing, but she bolted as fast as an animal. When Nahilah told me who she was, I went back to the place, gathered the remaining bones and buried them in a deep hole.”
    The woman’s story terrified the whole of Galilee.
    In those days, Galilee quaked with fear – houses demolished, people lost, villages abandoned and everything in shambles.
    In those days, the woman’s voice was like a wind whistling at the windows. People became afraid and called her the Madwoman of al-Kabri; she crept along the ground, leapt from field to field, her bag of bones on her back.
    It was said that she gathered the bones of the dead and dug graves for them on the hilltops. When she died, the bones from her bag were scattered in the square at Deir al-Asad, and people came running and gathered them up and made a common grave for them. The Madwoman of al-Kabri was buried next to the bones she’d been carrying.
    Who was that woman?
    No one knows, but people learned her story from her bag.
    Yunes said he met the madwoman of the bones and spoke to her, and that she wasn’t as mad as people said. “She gave me wild chicory to eat. She was looking for wild chicory, not bones. What happened was that she stayedbehind in al-Kabri after the Jews demolished it to avenge the victims of Kherbet-Jeddin. The woman didn’t run away with the others because they’d left her behind.”
    â€œIn those days we forgot our own children,” said Umm Hassan when I asked her about the Madwoman of al-Kabri.
    â€œIn those days, Son, we left everything. We left the dead unburied and fled.”
    I N THOSE DAYS the people lived with fear, military rule, and the death of border crossers. People