Gate of the Sun by Elias Khoury

had sprung up like a weed, and they’d fenced off the land they’d confiscated with barbed wire while everyone looked on, seeing their land shrinking and slipping out of their hands, unable to do anything.
    She said, “They took the land and we watched like someone watching his own death in a mirror.”
    She said, “You know how children are. They were playing close to the wire and talking to the Yemeni immigrants in Hebrew – our children speak Hebrew – and the immigrants were answering them in an odd Arabic; ourchildren know their language and they don’t know ours. Ibrahim had been playing with them, and they brought him to me. God, he was trembling. They said a huge stone had fallen on him. I don’t know how to describe it; his head was crushed, and blood was dripping from it. I left him in the house and ran to ask for a permit to take him to the hospital in Acre, and at the military governor’s headquarters they made me wait for more than three hours in a darkened room, the Iraqi threatening to beat me during the interrogation. He said they knew you came, that their men were better lovers than you, and that they’d kill you and leave you in the square at Deir al-Asad to make an example of you. And he asked for information about you while I pleaded for the permit.
    â€œAnd when I got back to the house, Ibrahim was dead, and your father was whispering the last rites.”
    You sat down, lit a cigarette, and put a thousand and one questions to her. You wanted to know whether they’d killed him or he’d died accidentally; had they thrown the stone at him, or had he just gotten in the way of it.
    Nahilah didn’t know.
    You got up and said that you’d kill their children as they’d killed your son. “Tomorrow you’ll trill with joy, because we’ll have our revenge.”
    For three nights you circled the barbed wire. You had your rifle and ten hand grenades, and you decided to tie the grenades together, throw them into the Jewish settlement’s workshop, and, when they exploded, fire at the settlers.
    It was night.
    The spotlight revolved, tracking the wire fence, and Yunes hid in the olive grove close by. He started moving closer, crawling on his stomach. He got the chain of grenades ready and tied them to a detonator, deciding to throw them into the big hall where Yemeni Jewish families slept practically on top of one another. He wanted to kill, just to kill. When you described the event to Dr. Mu‘een, you said that during your third pass you imagined the dead bodies piled on top of one another and felt your heart drink deep.
    â€œI was thirsty; revenge is like thirst. I would drink, and my thirst wouldincrease, so that when the time came and I began to crawl, a refreshing coolness filled my heart. When everything was about to happen, the thirst disappeared, and I set out not with revenge in my mind but out of a sense of duty, because I’d promised Nahilah.”
    Yunes never told the story of what actually happened.
    He said later that it was impossible to carry out the operation successfully, that he had realized the huge losses the villages would incur as a result of the predictable Israeli response.
    He crawled toward the fence, and after the spotlight had passed over him a number of times, heard the sound of firing and dogs barking. He flattened himself to the ground. Then he decided to run, not paying the slightest heed to the spotlight. Bullets flying around him, he disappeared into the olive grove, and instead of hiding there until morning, he kept going until he reached the Lebanese border.
    He said later that he decided not to go through with the operation because it was an individual act of revenge and because the Israelis would take it out on the Arab villages. But he never spoke of the fear that paralyzed him or why he fled all the way to Lebanon.
    Now I have a right to be afraid.
    But not Yunes; Yunes wasn’t afraid,