by Elias Khoury
The truth was known to only one person, called Dalia, and it was she who told it to me before deciding to abandon me and her project for a movie about Assaf after she watched the videotape that no one else ever saw.
My anger was directed at the writer, the one who’d come before to the restaurant with Sarang Lee and to whom she’d introduced me. I think the man must have been disappointed when I failed to welcome him in his own right and made no reference to his novels. Sarang Lee claimed that my anger was due to my jealousy of the man because, like all men, I could only think about one thing. But that isn’t true. Over whom and of whom should I be jealous?
How could I feel jealous over a girl with whom I hadn’t had an affair and with whom I never for a moment wanted to have an affair? True, a few times we’d been on the verge of one but something had always told me, No!
The mistaken journey began in Tel Aviv.
I ran into Nahum Hirschman by accident on the street in Tel Aviv in January 2003. I was leaving the theater after watching Eugène Ionesco’s play The Bald Soprano for the fourth time. My head reverberating with the meanings fashioned by the Romanian playwright from the meaninglessness of words, I found Nahum Hirschman in front of me. This Nahum was a friend of mine from our days as students together at university. I’d called him the Soldier of the White Lilies because I’d seen in him a double of the Israeli soldier in Mahmoud Darwish’s poem who dreamed of peace and wanted to leave Israel. Nahum finally decided and left for the States. We’d graduated together from the Department of Hebrew Literature at the University of Haifa. I’d started working as a teacher in Haifa, while he went to America.
After meeting him, I decided to emigrate to the States.
He offered me a job at his New York restaurant, which was facing financial difficulties. I went in as a partner, using the money I’d got together to get married, and became a falafel seller, as well as a proper chef, thanks to the additions I made to the restaurant’s fast-food menu, among them the large manaqish to which we gave the name “oriental pizza.” We added manaqish with kishk too, which also sold very well, as well as the eggplant makdous, which became one of our most famous sandwiches and consisted of eggplant stuffed with walnuts and garlic pickled in olive oil. Nahum gave this the name of “olive-oil eggplant” in English and hatsil makhdus in Hebrew.
I say “mistaken” but it was the correct mistake as I had no alternative. “My paths had become straight,” as the Arabs say, meaning I could no longer find a foothold in my own country. The paths there had ended up leading me into the wilderness and I could hear the voice of my mother saying I’d end up losing my way, like her brother, my uncle Daoud, whom I resembled so much.
I had to find a new place so I could come to an end. Usually, people emigrate in order to begin a new life. My decision to do so was a search for the end. I told myself, as I said farewell to my house in Jaffa’s Ajami Quarter, that the end resembles the beginning and that when I set off in search of my end, it must become a metaphor for the beginning, and that both words deserve to be entered into the Arabs’ dictionaries of antitheses, in which a single word means both a thing and its opposite.
I considered my job at the falafel restaurant the best choice if I was to escape the circles of culture and the cultured and devote myself to writing my novel. It had nothing to do with criteria of failure and success: I was a successful journalist, writing my weekly article on Arabic music that ticked a certain oriental Israeli memory, a blend of nostalgia and exoticism. Gone were the days of Noah’s Café, where Egyptian Jewish musicians who had emigrated to Israel used to meet to play their painful memory in exile and recover Egypt, which they’d lost forever, and in their place had come the days of the Israeli Orient, which may be divided into two halves – one consisting of religion, which had become the refuge of the scattered souls of the Moroccans and Yemenis who had emigrated to Israel, the other of exoticism, which sees in the Orient a pillow for its desires.
I was successful, and I was an Israeli like other Israelis. I didn’t conceal my Palestinian identity but kept it out of sight, in the ghetto where I was born. I’m a son of the ghetto, and the ghetto had granted me immunity in Warsaw (which is another tale I shall tell at the right time).
I decided to leave the immunity of the Warsaw Ghetto behind me and to abandon al-Sitt Umm Kulsoum, her songs, and my analyses of Eastern art, which were the means by which I’d managed to occupy a weekly column at the newspaper.
I didn’t say goodbye to anyone: there was no one to say goodbye to. For the past ten years, I’d made do with Dalia’s friends, deluding myself that I’d won. I did indeed beat the German artist whose pictures filled the Tel Aviv galleries with Dalia’s features. I paid no attention to her presence in the pictures till she told me that her relationship with the painter had ended the moment the wall of colors between them had broken down. She said she’d become tired of living in pictures and decided to take off the veil of colors, which had become a burden on her soul. I believed her. The painter wasn’t really German but in that small circle around Dalia we called him that because he was tall and blond, had bulging muscles, and looked like a German. I don’t know why they broke up: I fell in love with Dalia before discovering she was the painter Amnon’s girlfriend. I met her by accident at the Isaiah Bar in Tel Aviv, a small place frequented by left-wing intellectuals.
Suddenly, I saw her in front of me. She was standing as though she were her own shadow. I saw a woman’s shadow but couldn’t see a woman. She had a mysterious translucence and gave the impression that you could see things through her, and she was as beautiful as silence (if that is the proper expression to describe a woman covered with her own shadow and a silence that spoke without words).
She approached the bar and sat down next to me. She was cloaked in her own self, concealed behind the diaphanous veil of sadness that covered her face. I thought she asked me something, or said she knew me; that’s what I believed during the ten years of my relationship with her, but now my memory springs to life to tell another truth: the woman didn’t ask a question; when I spoke to her as though I were answering a question she’d asked, she didn’t even turn toward me.
Everything happened quickly. I talked and talked and watched my words ripping open her silence and stealing between her closed lips. Then she spoke. I don’t remember what she said, but I saw words drawing themselves over her gray eyes.
We drank a lot that evening, then walked aimlessly in the street, and I found myself embracing her and kissing her.
I don’t believe in love at first sight, but I fell in love with her and told her, as I held her to me in front of the building where she lived, that I loved her, and I heard her laugh and say it was the wine.
Two days later she behaved as though she didn’t know me, I have no idea why. She was sitting in the same bar, surrounded by a group of men. I went up to her shyly, then sat down without being invited. I felt uncomfortable, but love made me see things wrongly. I’d hardly got over my embarrassment before I found Amnon talking to me pleasantly, and we got into a discussion about the relationship of painting to music. The man was fond of Umm Kulsoum and said that when he was painting a woman he would listen to the singer, not understanding anything but intoxicated by the voice, which entered through his pores. He said the person who’d introduced him to Umm Kulsoum had taught him what it meant for music to be sensual and for the voice to rise from the depths of desire. He said Umm Kulsoum had introduced a flavor of the Orient into his pictures and it was through her that he’d discovered Iraq!
I couldn’t grasp the relationship between Umm Kulsoum and Iraq. For me, Umm Kulsoum is the Nile, shimmering with the depths that lie hidden beneath its calm surface. Umm Kulsoum is the Nile when it overflows with desires, simultaneously watering and devouring the land. I made no comment, however, and later I found out that the “Iraq” of which he spoke was simply the symbolic name of the woman with whom I was going to f
all in love.
How did Dalia come into my life? What did I want from a girl who said she was Iraqi and that through me she could catch the scent of coffee mixed with cardamom? I don’t take my coffee with cardamom and I get dizzy when I smell it. Later I discovered that she was searching, through me, for something mysterious, something that had been born in her depths the moment that the wall of colors between her and the German painter had been broken.
I didn’t believe her when she told me her affair with him had been broken off. I would feel his ghostly presence everywhere, and a mysterious jealousy, which for ten years I suppressed, intoxicated me.
The woman was fashioned out of the brown spaces that radiated inside the blue of the pictures painted by the German with the same detail as the nudes of Matisse, and she exited my life as stealthily as she had entered it.
She said, sketching her mysterious smile on her lips, that she’d decided to go, because life had lost its meaning.
I answered with a shrug of my shoulders.
That was our last meeting. Instead of waiting for her, my love for her, which had enveloped me, fell away. I became like a tree that the autumn has stripped of its leaves. I found out that she had said what I hadn’t dared even to think: that she had left me because I had left her already.
I’m not going to recount my story with Dalia now, not because I want to put it off, but because it’s shorthand for all the stories of which my life is made up, and she will crop up everywhere. Even her absence fills places with its ambiguous presence.
When I remember the Lydda Ghetto, where I was born, I feel as though she’d lived the story with me – and then scoff at my memory and scoff at the love that so often made me remind Dalia of events she hadn’t lived through. Perhaps that’s love – living what we haven’t lived as though we had – and when love ends, the memories are transformed into scents we can no longer recall.
Now I live the memory of the fragrance that once was, appearing to me like a dream approaching from afar, as though the life that I have lived has been no more than a rehearsal for the death that awaits me.
Intersections
MY PRESENT PROBLEM is my inability to concentrate and the incoherence of my thoughts. Usually, writers are at a loss as to how to begin a novel, because the beginning determines the end. I’m not a writer, and I’m not in the process of writing a novel. I let my memory say what it likes and its images surface unordered, which is why I don’t care about the ending, which I shall not, in any case, write. Anyone who, like me, wants to tell his tale should be aware that he will never write the ending, because he doesn’t know it.
My problem is simpler. Now that I’ve abandoned the idea of writing the novel about Waddah al-Yaman, the issue has resolved itself, and all I have to do is to get into the substance and ignore the breath of poetry with which Waddah’s story filled the first pages of this text, setting me on a wandering course, lost among meditations and memories, and making me abandon the search for a beginning that would fit the ending.
The substance is straightforward and simple.
It was February 10, 2005. I left the restaurant at 7 PM. I went home, had a shower, and then went to the cinema. I met Sarang Lee at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 12th Street and we walked together. In the lobby, I bought myself a cup of coffee and my friend a bag of popcorn and a Coke. We went in and found the theater was crowded.
Until this point, Dalia had been completely absent from the screen of my memory. New York is a great eraser. It had wiped my memory clean and made me enjoy life’s little details. “This is the life!” I said to my soul. “Life is living the present as it is.” I envied those Americans who have come to terms with life’s details. They’ve forgotten the larger goals. They’ve forgotten the massacres that were committed on their land. Even the battle cry against Iraq and the hysterical hatred of the French that accompanied that war now seem fabricated, just entertainment.
I’d convinced myself that here it was up to me finally to live and enjoy life. All my affairs with women were ephemeral and I refused to allow them to break through the walls of my soul, which, after Dalia, I’d rebuilt, adding an iron shield that sprouted from my chest. Even Sarang Lee I’d kept outside this shield, and, although I did almost slip into a love that from the beginning I’d considered forbidden, I managed not to. I put the past of the past in the place of the past and camouflaged myself with the stories of my grandsires, the Arab poets, regarding this semblance as just a game, until, on that freezing New York night, things turned upside down.
New York is a rhythmic city. I discovered there that daily life composes itself from an assemblage of voices, which interconnect along numerous trajectories. Don’t believe the poets! This isn’t just a city of steel and skyscrapers. It is also a city of exquisite miniature components that exist within it as something simultaneously both strange and familiar. A city without memory! One of my Lebanese customers told me it resembled Beirut, though I didn’t believe him, unless we suppose both cities exist within a memory that has been lost.
I put myself together anew. I became a lone wolf and forgot all the emotions at one go – a man without affiliation or language, a man over fifty beginning his life in its final moments, intoxicated with death.
I made the small kitchen at the restaurant my world, and my friend Chaim was so pleased with my dedication that he suggested we open a real restaurant where I would be the chef, but I refused. He said I had no ambition and he was right. Screw ambition! My little world and my little successes are enough for me – with the books I read, the bars I go to, and my ephemeral women.
I decided I’d write as though I were a reader, which is where the true pleasure lies. You open the covers of the book, you fear its mysterious worlds, and then you slowly draw closer to it, like someone standing on the shore, hesitating in front of the water. Then, when you wade out into it, you find you’ve become a part of its waves, plunging, rising, and falling, and you feel you’re the real author of the book because it has become your sole property. That’s how I lived my first two years in this city. I’d go to movies, enjoy the ballet and music, drink French wine and vodka, and read as though I were writing.
Sarang Lee wasn’t part of my world. She was just a breath of fresh air and only entered my life after the crisis I went through, when I decided to rewrite the novel I hadn’t yet written and she became the companion of my dying moments.
I don’t wish to generalize and say that every writing is a form of death, but that’s how I feel now as I write. Perhaps all writers have these thoughts, I don’t know. In my heart of hearts, I believe that writers approach death certain that they will never die and that death is just an artistic game that allows them to access the most extreme emotions. Personally, I disagree. At the instant when I woke from my coma, I felt death had come so close to me that I’d never again be able to free myself from its clutches and that my decision to abandon the story of Waddah al-Yaman to write the story of my relationship to the movie I’d just seen, with the consequent necessity of writing my own life story, was the very moment of death, from which no man can escape.
No soul knows in what land it shall die, as it says in the Precious Book.
What drove me crazy was the mendacity of the truth. That the director should stand up before the beginning of the showing to talk about Palestine, the author of Gate of the Sun next to him, didn’t provoke me. I regarded it as just a normal situation that called for no special concern. But when the movie began to tell the story of Assaf’s suicide following the death of his friend Danny in Gaza at the beginning of the Second Intifada, I felt the fire ignite in my brain; never before that ill-omened day had I felt as though the folds of my brain were on fire and that the blood was about to explode in my veins. I knew the whole story – not just the story of Assaf, whose video, recorded before his suicide, Dalia had shown me, but also the story of Yibna, the town from which the Palestinian martyr Fa
hmi Abu Ammouna came – from beginning to end.
My grandmother Najiba, who came to visit me once in Haifa, is originally from Yibna. She lived in Lydda and then bolted with the rest of those fleeing, only to find herself back in Yibna. She told me everything. I don’t know how she rebuilt her relationships with her family in Nuseirat Camp in Gaza, after they were expelled from Yibna, but she knew everything, which was what drove me to visit them countless years later, encountering there my grandmother’s brother, Abd al-Ghaffar, whose story deserves to be told.
Was Sarang Lee right? Should I have kept silent, gone to the director to congratulate him, and then greeted the writer with a show of admiration for his work?
How could I possibly admire what I know to be false? I know Khalil Ayoub, narrator and hero of Gate of the Sun, and I know his mother. I met Khalil more than once on the shores of the Dead Sea and the man seemed to me more like a poet than a military commander, despite his having been in charge of one of the branches of the Palestinian Preventive Security force before becoming governor of Nablus. As for his mother, Najwa Ibrahim, she was the beautiful nurse I met at the Ramallah hospital when I broke my hand in a car crash. She eventually asked me to help her sell the house in Lydda that she’d inherited from her Bedouin husband.
I didn’t tell Sarang Lee the truth, I told her half of it and left the other half for the dark. The truth is that, three days before I went to see the movie, I’d had a terrifying personal experience: I’d run into Blind Ma’moun by chance in New York. This encounter, which I don’t know how to write about or whether I shall ever be able to turn into words, reduced me to a limp rag of confusion and grief and tore my soul apart.
Blind Ma’moun, who lived in a room in the garden of our house in the ghetto for seven years and who was so much like a father to me that when he left us I felt like an orphan, suddenly turned up, more than fifty years later, in the form of an elderly man with the halo of a scholar, come from Cairo to New York to lecture on Palestinian literature and expatiate on the image of Rita in the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish.