“I told her about our discussion about assimilation and her face lit up for a moment, but then she furrowed her brow and said that history was a wild animal.

“After several more outings, Leah stopped answering the phone. Their number had been changed, and I had no other way of getting in touch with her. She’d warned me that her father wouldn’t allow her to meet me. Her father changed the number, and she didn’t call. Just between us, my uncle, the colonel, was right: After the bus operations, our meetings were no longer possible. Do you remember the bus operations, when the Popular Front planted explosives at bus stops in Tel Aviv?”

“Was that you?”

“I can’t claim that honor for myself, but I did take part through surveillance. My outings with Leah were a type of surveillance, and I reported on what I’d seen to the Popular Front cell. The cell was uncovered after a sweep of arrests in Gaza, and they took me to Damoun Prison, where I was sentenced to twenty years on charges of participating in terrorist activities and belonging to a saboteur organization.”

Jamal said that prison had brought him relief: “The battering torrent stopped roaring in my head. I was twenty-three years old then and I’m twenty-nine now, but all the same, when I remember those days before I was arrested and the feelings that raged inside me when I went out with Leah and took her to Jerusalem. .! I took her to Zalatimo’s, and when I saw her eating and singing and smelling the scent of orange-blossom water I told her about my mother and how my father had managed to seduce her with the help of Zalatimo’s pastries. When I remember that now, I feel a loss. Prison let me have a rest. Things are clear there — them and us. We’re behind bars, and they guard us. That way there’s no confusion. In prison I read all sorts of books, and I learned Hebrew. I thought to myself, When I leave prison, I’ll go and visit my uncle and speak to him in his new language.

“My mother came to visit me regularly. My father came with her sometimes, but she’d come every week, bringing cigarettes and food. She told me that my brother, Mirwan, had been arrested, too, that Samirah had been held for several days and then released, and that they were thinking about sending Hisham and Samirah to Cairo because they were afraid for them. I asked her why she didn’t get in touch with my uncle so he could help to get me out, and she asked me never to mention the subject again. I stayed in prison for five years before I was deported to Jordan.”

“And your mother? Where’s your mother?” I asked him.

“I haven’t gotten there yet. My mother stopped visiting me a year after I went to prison, and my father started coming on his own. He said my mother was sick, that she had arthritis. He brought me letters from her. Her letters were short and said only that I was to take care of myself after I came out of prison. You don’t know my mother. I swear no one could’ve guessed that she was Israeli or Jewish. She was more Palestinian than all the rest of us put together. My father still spoke with his Jerusalem accent, but she became Gazan — a true ghazzawiyya. She loved hot peppers, ate salad without olive oil, and all the rest. Then my father disappeared, too. Hisham and Samirah were in Cairo, Mirwan was in prison like me, and my father stopped visiting me.

“Later, a short letter from him reached me via the Red Cross. It said he’d taken my mother to Europe for treatment.

“When I got out of prison, I learned the truth. What a woman she was! And I don’t say that because she was my mother. All of us love our mothers and see them as saints, but if you only knew.”

“If you only knew,” Khalil said to Catherine.

“You could never guess what happened. Sarah didn’t go to Europe for treatment. Guess what she did.”

“She went to Tel Aviv and returned to her family,” said Catherine.

“That possibility has passed through Jamal’s mind, but it’s not what happened.”

“Her brother killed her?”

“Now you’re imagining an American film. We can’t behave as if we’re in American films, even if we like watching them.”

“What then?” asked Catherine.

Khalil said Sarah contracted colon cancer, but they discovered the disease too late, after the cancer had spread through her entire body.

“You know how women in our country suppress everything. They don’t complain, they refuse to say anything, and barricade themselves in with silence and secrets.”

Sarah treated herself at the beginning, and when the pain got bad she went to the doctor. She was admitted to hospital, had three operations, and was sent home after the cancer spread to her bones. She returned home to enter a long period of appalling pain.

One night, when Sarah couldn’t sleep because the pain was so bad even though she’d had a morphine injection, she went to her husband’s bed, woke him and told him she wanted to talk to him.

The man sat up in bed and listened to the strangest request.

Sarah asked her husband to take her to Berlin and bury her in the Jewish cemetery there.

Her husband told her he was prepared to go any place in the world with her for treatment and that he’d call the doctor in the morning to get the addresses of hospitals in Berlin.

“I don’t want treatment,” she said. “There is no treatment. I want to be buried there.”

Khalil told Catherine that Jamal, as he told the story, was more astonished than he was, as though he were listening, not recounting. He said his father told him later, when they met in Amman a few months before his death, that he’d leave this world in peace because he’d succeeded in making Sarah happy.

“She was like a little girl there,” the father said. “Every day we’d go out. I don’t know where she found the strength. She took me to the places of her childhood, of which not many remained — but she was happy. It was as though the pain had gone, or a miracle had occurred. After a week she was no longer able to get out of bed. I tried to take her to the hospital, but she refused. Three days later she died, and I buried her there.”

Khalil saw the sorrow engraved on Catherine’s face. The French actress who wouldn’t act in Jean Genet’s play was slumped in her chair almost as if she were unconscious.

“Why aren’t you drinking?” Khalil asked her.

She looked at her glass and said nothing. Khalil took Catherine’s glass and finished it off in one gulp.

Catherine said she was exhausted.

Khalil looked at his watch. “It’s three in the morning,” he said.

Catherine said she wanted to sleep.

“Now you want to sleep! The night’s just beginning. I would like some more wine.”

“No. You’ve had a lot to drink, Jamal,” she said.

“Not at all, and my name’s Khalil, my mother’s name is Najwah, and Jamal died during the Israeli invasion of Beirut.”

Catherine got up. Khalil got up.

“How are you going to get back to the camp?” she asked.

“I don’t know, but I’ll manage.”

“You can spend what’s left of the night here, in my room.”

“In your room. . No. .”

“I’m tired and want to sleep. Come up with me.”

They went up to her room. Catherine undressed quickly and climbed into bed almost nude. After a little hesitation, Khalil lay down next to her, fully clothed.

“Take your clothes off,” she said. “Don’t tell me you’re going to sleep in your clothes.”

He undressed, Catherine turned off the light, and there, in the darkness of the room, which would continue to cling to Khalil’s skin, they made love.

Khalil doesn’t remember things clearly, but he felt as though he were drowning and caught hold of the woman, who fell on top of him, and they drowned together.

The next morning, as he was opening his eyes, he saw Catherine emerging from the bathroom dressed and wearing a lot of lipstick. He dressed quickly, and they went down to the restaurant, where they ate breakfast like strangers.