Gate of the Sun Read Online Free Page B

red. When you sat down again and tooka sip of tea and talked about the thyme and the jasmine and the columbine and the wildflowers, you said she was like the seasons. With each season she would come to your cave with a new smell. She would let down her long black hair, and the scents of flowers and herbs would fill the air. You said you were always enchanted by the new smells, as though she’d become a different woman.
    â€œA woman, Son, is always new. Her smell reveals her. A woman is the aroma of the world, and when I was with her I learned to fill my lungs with the smell of the land.”
    That was when I understood what you’d told me about her death: Nahilah hadn’t died, because her smell was still in you. But Umm Hassan has died. Don’t you want to come with me to her funeral? Everyone is gathering at her house, except for her son, Naji, who’s in America, as you know. I have to go. I want to carry Umm Hassan’s bier, and I will fear no one.
    Please get up. We’ll go to Umm Hassan’s funeral, and then you can go back to your children and die with them. Go, die with them, as Umm Hassan suggested, and set me free.
    Do you remember Umm Hassan?
    Umm Hassan was my professor of medicine. I was in the hospital when a pregnant woman was brought in; I’d never seen a woman give birth before. In China they had taught me how to bandage wounds and do simple operations, what was called “field medicine.” But they didn’t teach me real medicine.
    The woman was writhing in front of me, and I could do nothing. Then I remembered Umm Hassan, and I sent for her, and she came. She managed the delivery and taught me everything. As she helped the woman, she explained everything to me like a doctor training a student. From then on I knew what to do, and I became sure enough of myself to deliver babies. But she deserves all the credit. Umm Hassan was the only certified midwife in al-Kweikat; she had British documents to prove it.
    I can see her now.
    She’s putting the basin she was carrying on her head and bending overto pick up babies in the olive grove. In reality, she only picked up Naji, who became her son. I told you the story, remember? They were traveling inside Palestine because, having been driven out of al-Kweikat, they got lost in the fields and stopped on the edges of Deir al-Asad, and then they were driven from there, so they went to Tarshiha, which the Israeli planes came and burned, so they found themselves on the road to southern Lebanon, where Qana was their first stop. And on that road, a woman named Sara al-Khatib gave birth to a child with Umm Hassan at her side. Everyone was running, carrying their bundles on their heads, and Sara threw herself down under a tree writhing in pain. Umm Hassan washed the baby with hot water, wrapped him in old clothes and gave him to his mother.
    Everyone walked on that “last journey,” as the people of the villages of Galilee referred to their collective exodus to Lebanon. But it wasn’t their last journey. In fact it was the start of wanderings in the wilderness whose end only God knows.
    On that last journey, as Umm Hassan was walking with her basin on her head and her four children, her husband, her brothers, and their wives and children around her, she saw a bundle of old clothes discarded under an olive tree, and she realized they were the same clothes she’d used to wrap Sara’s baby in. She bent down, picked up the child, put him in the basin, and named him Naji – Rescued. She offered him her dry breasts, then fed him sesame paste mixed with water. At the village of Qana, where they stopped for the first time, the boy’s mother came, weeping and asking for her child back. Umm Hassan refused, but in the end, when she saw the milk bursting from the mother’s breasts and spotting her dress, she gave him to her.
    Umm Hassan said she’d named him Naji and his mother didn’t have the right to