Gate of the Sun Read Online Free Page A

of color” mean? Do you see that frightening blend of white and black that we call gray? If you don’t see colors, that means you’re not in blackness but in a place we don’t know. Aren’t you afraid of what you don’t know?
    You said you didn’t fear death and that you knew fear only once, when you were living with the dead in the olive grove. You said that men die from fear, that fear is what is down below.
    Are you “down below”? What do you see?
    â€œIt’s a matter of arithmetic,” you told me. “We are afraid because we live in illusion, since life is a long dream. People fear death, but they really should be frightened of what goes on before being born. Before they were born, they were in eternal darkness. But it’s an illusion. The illusion makes us think that the living inherit the lives of all others. That’s why history was invented. I’m not an intellectual, but I know that history is a trick to make people believe that we’ve been alive since the beginning and that we’re the heirs of the dead. An illusion. People aren’t heirs, and they don’t have a history or anything of the sort. Life is a passage between two deaths. I’m not afraid of the second death because I wasn’t afraid of the first.”
    â€œBut history isn’t an illusion,” I answered. “And if it were, what would it be for?”
    â€œWhat would what be for?”
    â€œWhy would we fight and die? Doesn’t Palestine deserve our deaths? You’re the one who taught me history, and now you tell me history is a ruse to evade death!”
    That day, you laughed at me and told me that your father, the blind sheikh, used to talk that way, and “we ought to learn from our elders.” Idon’t know if this discussion took place on a single occasion because we never had discussions; we’d just talk, and you wouldn’t finish your sentences but would jump from one word to another without paying attention to cause and effect. But you laughed. When you laughed, it was like you were exploding from within yourself. Your laughter used to surprise me because I was convinced that heroes didn’t laugh. I used to look at the photos of the martyrs hanging on the walls in the camp, and they weren’t laughing. Their faces were frowning and closed, as though they held death prisoner within themselves.
    But not you.
    You were a hero, and you laughed at heroes. And the little creases that extend from the corners of your eyes created a space for smiles and laughter. You were a laughing hero – but all the same I wasn’t convinced by your theories, or your father’s, about death and history.
    You answered me by saying that what was worth dying for was what we wanted to live for.
    â€œPalestine isn’t a cause. Well, all right, in some sense it is, but it isn’t really, because the land doesn’t move from its place. That land will remain, and the question isn’t who will hold it, because it’s an illusion to think that land can be held. No one can hold land when he’s going to end up buried in it. It’s the land that holds men and pulls them back toward it. I didn’t fight, my dear friend, for the land or for history. I fought for the sake of a woman I loved.”
    I can’t recall your exact words now. They were simple, transparent, and fluid. You speak as though you aren’t speaking, and I speak as though I am. But I remember what you said about smells. We were sitting in front of the hospital drinking tea, it was the time of false spring. That year, spring arrived in February. The sun broke through the winter and tricked the earth, and yellow, white, and blue flowers emerged shyly from the rubble. That day you taught me how to smell nature. Putting your glass of tea aside, you stood up and filled your lungs with air and the aroma, holding it in your chest until your face started to turn