I put my hand in my pocket, but all I found was ten thousand lira. I gave them to him saying it was all I had.

“No, Son, no. I don’t beg.”

He put out his second cigarette, stood up, and left.

I know Fathiyyeh. That woman — I swear every time I think of Nahilah I see Fathiyyeh’s image. A tall, dark woman who covers her head with a white scarf and stands as straight as the letter alif — no bending, no shaking, and no stumbling, as though life had passed beside her, not through her.

I don’t understand how Fathiyyeh accepted his second marriage. At first, he hid it from her. He bought a house in Burj al-Barajneh, where Ikram lived, and divided his time. He’d spend the night in his first wife’s house in the Shatila camp, and he’d spend a portion of the day with his second wife in Burj al-Barajneh. Word got out and Fathiyyeh discovered what was going on. When Abu Kamal returned to the house one day exhausted from work — as he claimed — she raised the subject. A look of uncertainty crossed the man’s face, and he thought of denying everything because he was afraid of how she’d react, but instead he found himself telling the truth.

“Yes, I got married,” he said. “And that’s my legal right.”

He waited for the storm.

But instead of getting angry and breaking dishes, as she usually did whenever she had a disagreement with her husband over the smallest of things, and instead of killing him, as he believed she might do, this woman, straight as an alif, collapsed and broke in two. She bent over, letting her face fall between her hands, and started shuddering with tears. Fathiyyeh broke apart all at once and never stood upright again until he divorced her.

That same day she made peace with Ikram, and the two women lived in one house with their ten children. As the family hemorrhaged children through the deaths of several boys and the emigration of others, and the marriage of their girls, the women found themselves alone, breathing in the scents of letters sent from far away and chewing over their memories together.

After her divorce, Fathiyyeh came back to life. The slump of her shoulders was erased and they became straight again; the long neck bore its white scarf, and the woman walked the roads of the destroyed camp as though she were flying over the rubble, as though the destruction were a sideshow whose sole purpose was to focus the viewer on the beauty of her commanding height and the splendor of her huge eyes.

Fathiyyeh neither yelled nor roused the neighbors, as Abu Kamal claimed.

She stood at the door, blocking it with her broad shoulders, so Ikram couldn’t interfere. She knew Ikram’s heart would crumble for the man who’d made her believe that his every footstep shook the earth. She kept Ikram behind her and raised her right hand, straightening her scarf with her left one.

“Out!” she said. “Out!”

He tried to speak, but she put her hand over her mouth to keep her hatred and her shouts in, saying only those two words — “Out! Out!” The man left without daring to speak. He didn’t even ask for the address of his son, Subhi, who worked in Denmark. He saw the barrier rise in front of him, and he leaned forward, before turning his back on the door Fathiyyeh had blocked with her body.

And now he comes up with the story that she yelled and humiliated him in front of the camp.

Why do people lie like that?

I’m convinced he believed it himself. I’m convinced that when he told me the story of how he tried to get his divorced wives back, he heard the yells that never emerged from Fathiyyeh’s mouth.

Tell me — you know better than I do — do we all lie like that? Did you lie to me, too?

I told you your story with Nahilah as a beautiful story, and I didn’t question your version of that last meeting beneath the Roman olive tree. You’ll say it wasn’t the last and will tell stories of your visits that continued up until 1974, but that meeting was the last as far as I’m concerned and as far as the story’s concerned. For after Nahilah had said what she said, there was no more talk, and when there’s no more talk, there’s nothing.

When there’s nothing new and fresh to say, when the words go rotten in your mouth and come out lifeless, old, and dead, everything dies.

Isn’t that what you told me after the fall of Beirut in 1982? You said the old talk had died, and now we needed a new revolution. The old language was dead, and we were in danger of dying with it. If we weren’t fighting, it wasn’t because we didn’t have weapons but because we didn’t have words.

On that day the words died, Yunes, and we entered a deep sleep from which we didn’t awaken until the intifada of the people at the interior of the country. Then the papers published the photo of the child with his slingshot and you said to me, “It seems it’s begun again.” It did indeed begin, but where was it going?

You’ve never liked this kind of question, even when the self-rule agreement was signed at the White House and we saw Rabin shaking hands with Arafat and we thought everything was over.

You were sad, but not me. I was like someone watching someone else die. And now I can tell you that deep inside I was happy. Death isn’t just a mercy, it’s happiness, too. This language has to die, and the world manufactured from dead words has to become extinct. I was happy as I watched the end, all while wearing a false expression of sorrow on my face.

Do you remember?

I was at home, we were sitting in front of the television, and you were pulling every last bit of smoke from your cigarette down into your lungs and listening to the American talk. Then you turned to me and said, “No. This isn’t the end. There was one end and we got past it. After what happened in ’48, there won’t be an end.

“During that time, it was the end, my son, but we survived. What’s happening now is just a step, anything can change and be turned around.”

Your words broke up in front of me and scattered in all directions. Then you went out. You left me alone in front of the television tuned to the American talk. I waited for you until the program came to an end, then I turned it off and went to sleep, feeling that psychic confusion that compelled me to mask my joy with a simulated sorrow.

And now, tell me: How long are we supposed to wait?

Here am I, waiting for your end — forgive me, your beginning — in spite of everything, in spite of the smell of powder that emanates from your room, and in spite of your face, which flows over the pillow like the face of a baby still unformed. I’m here, waiting for the end. No, I’m not in a hurry, and I don’t have the slightest idea what I’ll do after they close the hospital.

They say they’re going to demolish the camp anyway, because the camp isn’t the camp any longer — its borders have shrunk, and its inside space, at this point, is up for grabs. I don’t know who lives here now — Syrians, Egyptians, Sri Lankans, Indians. . I don’t know how they get here or where they find houses. Soon the bulldozers will come. They say the plan is to demolish the camp and turn the land into part of the expressway linking the airport to central Beirut.

Anything’s possible here. Maybe we should start our exile over from scratch. I don’t know.

I told you I’m waiting for nothing except the end, and then I don’t know. Anyway, it’s not important. I asked you about speaking the truth so I could understand why Mr. Sinounou lied about things that didn’t happen and then believed his own lies.

NO. NOT SHAMS.

I haven’t told you anything about her, not because I don’t want to, but because I don’t know anything. A man only knows the woman he’s loved when the talking ends; then he discovers her all over again and rearranges her in his memory. If she dies before that happens, she remains suspended in the fog of memory.

Shams remained suspended because she disappeared in the middle of the talking and left me on my own to discover the infinite senses of things. Shams disappeared into the jungle of her words and left me alone. I don’t think all that was an illusion, that I was just a parenthesis in her life, but I don’t understand how anyone could be such a chameleon.