Gate of the Sun Read Online Free

suspiciously at everyone, saying that they were going to kill us like they killed my father. I was afraid of her eyes; they had something deep in them that I couldn’t look at. Fear, Father, sleeps in the eyes, and in the eyes of the woman who was my mother I saw a cold fear that I couldn’t shed until I looked into the eyes of Shams.
    I know you’ll laugh and say I didn’t love Shams and ask me to call you Abu Salem, because Salem – He who was saved – was saved from death, and we’re not allowed to die.
    You used to call Nahilah Umm Salem – Mother of Salem – telling her, in the cave or beneath the olive tree, that she should use the name of her second son, who had become her first.
    To tell you the truth, I don’t know the truth anymore. You never actually told me your story – it came out like this, in snatches. I wanted you to tell me the whole thing, but I didn’t dare ask you to. No, didn’t dare isn’t accurate. It would be better to say that I didn’t feel capable of asking you, or couldn’t find an opportunity, or didn’t realize the importance of the story.
    The moon is full, Father.
    I call you my father, but you’re not my father. You said your hope was that Salem would become a doctor, but the circumstances – military rule, the curfew, poverty – didn’t allow him to complete his studies and he became a mechanic. Now he’s got a garage in Deir al-Asad and he speaks Hebrew and English.
    You said to me, “Doctor, you’re like a son to me. I picked you out when you were nine and I loved you, and I asked them at the boys’ camp if I could take care of you, and you became my son. You’ve lost your parents, and I’ve lost my children. Come and be a son to me.”
    You took to referring to me as “my son, Dr. Khalil,” though I’m not a doctor, as you know. Three months of training in China doesn’t make you a doctor. You appointed me doctor to the camp and asked me to change my name the way the fedayeen do. But I didn’t change my name, and the fedayeen left on Greek ships, and the only ones left here were you and me. The war ended, and I was no longer a doctor. In fact Dr. Amjad, the director of the hospital, asked me to work as a nurse. How could anybody accept that, going from doctor to nurse? I said no, but you came to my house, rebuked me, and asked me to report to the hospital immediately.
    When you spoke, you’d open your eyes as wide as eyes can go. The words would come out of your eyes, and your voice would rise and I’d say nothing. I’d steal glances at your eyes, opened to the furthest limits of the earth.
    In the office at the boys’ camp, you’d stand spinning and spinning the globe and then would order it to stop. When the little ball stopped turning, you’d extend a finger and say, “That’s Acre. Here’s Tyre. The plain runs to here, and these are the villages of the Acre District. Here’s Ain al-Zaitoun, and Deir al-Asad, and al-Birwa, and there’s al-Ghabsiyyeh, and al-Kabri, and here’s Tarshiha, and there’s Bab al-Shams. We, kids, are from Ain al-Zaitoun. Ain al-Zaitoun is a little place, and the mountain surrounds it and protects it. Ain al-Zaitoun is the most beautiful village, but they destroyed it in ’48. They bulldozed it after blowing up the houses, so we left it for Deir al-Asad. But me, I founded a village in a place no one knows, a village in the rocks where the sun enters and sleeps.”
    D R . A MJAD said he wasn’t sure. The doctor said, and I say too, that you hear sounds but don’t know what they are. Do the sounds enter your consciousness, or do they simply remain sounds?
    The doctor said you don’t see, and I didn’t ask him what that means. Does it mean that you’re in blackness, and is the blackness a color? Or do you exist in an absence of color? What does “absence