Gate of the Sun by Elias Khoury Read Free Book Online Page A

house notices the smell.Even Shams didn’t smell it. I’m the only one who can smell that secret odor that nauseates me.
    I wanted to kill you with the pillow because I hated your incredible insistence on clinging to life, but I hesitated and became afraid, and that was the end of it.
    Tomorrow I’ll bring you my grandmother’s pillow and open it so I can see what’s inside. My grandmother used to change the flowers at the beginning of each season, and I think she expected me to continue the tradition. I want to open the pillow to see what happened to the flowers. Why does a person turn to dust when he dies, while an object decomposes and yet remains an object? Strange. Didn’t God create us all from dust?
    Tomorrow I’ll open the pillow and let you know.
    I wanted to suffocate you and then the desire faded. It was a passing feeling and never recurred, but I did feel it. How can I describe it? It was as though there were another person inside me who leapt out and made me capable of destroying everything. Whenever I became aware of that other person, I’d run out of your room and roam around the hospital. This would calm me down. Now I’m calm. Feeling that things around you and me are moving slowly, I’ve decided to kill some time by talking. Have you heard that terrifying expression “to kill time”? It’s time that kills us, but we pretend it’s the other way around!
    So as to kill time and stop it from killing me, I’ve decided to examine you again.
    At the beginning, that is, after you’d settled into your lethargy and the fever had left you, you smelled odd. I can’t explain what I mean, because smells are the hardest things to describe. I’ll just say it was the smell of an older man. It seems there are hormones that set different ages apart from one another. The smell of older men differs fundamentally from the smell of men in their prime, and especially from that of thirteen-year-old boys who start to give off a smell of maleness and sex. The smell of older men is different, quiet and pale. Like my grandmother’s pillow, it’s a disturbing scent. No, I wouldn’t say it disgusted me – God forbid. But I was disturbed,and I decided I ought to bathe you twice a day – but the smell was stronger than the soap. Then the smell started to go away, and a new one took its place. No, I don’t say this because I’ve become accustomed to your smell. It’s a medical matter and has clearly to do with hormones. And I believe that – I don’t know how – you’ve started a new life phase that I can’t yet define but that I can discern through your smell.
    And because one thing leads to another, as the Arabs say, I want to tell you that you’re wrong, your theories about age and youth are a hundred percent erroneous. I remember I met you one rainy February morning when you were out jogging. I stopped you and told you that jogging after sixty was bad for the heart and lungs and that you should practice a lighter form of exercise, like walking, to lose weight and keep your arteries open. I told you older men should do older men’s sports.
    That day you invited me to have coffee at your house and subjected me to a long lecture on aging. “Listen, Son. My father was an old man – I knew him only as an old man. Do you know why? Because he was blind. A person will grow old at forty, not sixty, if he loses the two things that can’t be replaced: his sight and his teeth. Being old means having your sight go and your teeth fall out. At forty, gray hair invades your head, your teeth start to rot, and your vision becomes dim, so you look like an old man. But inside you’re still young; your age consists of how other people see you, it comes from your children. Yes, it’s true: In addition to eyes and teeth, there are the children. We peasants marry early. I got married at fourteen, so just think