Gate of the Sun by Elias Khoury Page B

you in marriage,” before fleeing.
    That’s what they said at the interrogation, when they detained me. I was silent. I was incapable of speech because I felt betrayal and fear. It was there, in the eyes of the committee members, I discovered she’d been sentenced to die. The head of the committee was in a hurry, as though he wanted to use me as new evidence to justify the decision to kill her.
    The committee eyed me with contempt as the duped lover, though I wasn’t duped – but what could I say? I used to smell the other men on her body, but it never occurred to me that she loved another man the way I loved her. There – with him – she would have said nothing and been on the verge of tears as she listened to him saying that with her he was sleeping with all of womankind.
    I understand her, I swear I do: The only solution to love is murder. I never came close to committing the crime, but I did long for her death, because death ends everything, as it did that day.
    Shams is a hero because she put an end to her own problem. But me, I’mjust a man who grew horns, as the head of the investigating committee said, thinking he was making a joke everyone could appreciate.
    I refused to answer their questions. All I said was that I was convinced she was “not a normal woman.” I know I was hard on her, but what could I say? I had to say something, and those words spilled from my mouth. As for all the other things I’m supposed to have said, they’re not true. Liars! I never said anything about orgies. My God – how could we have held orgies in my house when it was surrounded by all those other wrecked houses? They put words into my mouth so as to come up with additional justifications for killing Shams. All I said was that she was my friend and that she was a woman of many moods. I heard their laughter and the joke about my horns.
    The head of the committee ordered my release because I was pathetic. “A pathetic guy, no harm to anyone,” he said.
    Pathetic means stupid, and I wasn’t stupid. I wanted to tell them that love isn’t foolishness, but I didn’t say anything. I left and went looking for Shams, and I was arrested again before being released and allowed to return to Beirut.
    This isn’t what I wanted to say. I wanted to tell you that when I was caught up in that wave, I would dream of having a child and, at the same time, was terrified. I told Shams that the most horrible thing that could happen to a person was to lose a son or daughter. Even though I live amid this desolate people that has grown accustomed to losing its children, I can’t imagine myself in that situation.
    Shams laughed and told me about her daughter, Dalal, in Jordan, and about how missing her was like having her guts ripped open.
    And when I asked Yunes about the death of his son, he told me about Nahilah.
    The woman almost went mad. All the people of Deir al-Asad said the woman lost her mind. She would roam the outskirts of the village as though chasing her own death – going into areas the military governor had placed out of bounds (almost everywhere was out of bounds). She’d roam androam. Then she would return home exhausted and sleep. She’d never worry about her second son, Salem, whom his grandmother had smuggled out of the house.
    It took Nahilah months and months to return to her senses after she gave birth to her daughter, Noor, “Light.” The girl’s name wasn’t originally Noor: Her grandmother named her Fatimah, but Yunes said her name was Noor because he’d seen Ibrahim in a dream reciting verses from the Surah of the Koran called “Noor.”
    â€œListen to what he was saying.” Nahilah looked and saw a halo of light around Yunes’ head as he recited:
    God is the Light of the heavens and the earth;
the likeness of His Light is as a niche wherein is a lamp
(the lamp in a glass, the glass as it were a glittering