Shams was lost, and I didn’t know how I’d fill the gaps in my life without her.

I closed my eyes, squeezed them closed as hard as I could, and the darkness filled up with gray holes and despair overwhelmed me.

My son, Yunes, do you know what it means to feel incapable of living?

Once I told her I couldn’t imagine life without her, and she patted my shoulder and picked up Mahmoud Darwish’s collected poems and started reading –

Take me to the distant land.

Neverending is this winter — wailed Rita.

And she smashed the porcelain of day on the window’s iron,

Placed her small revolver on the draft of the poem

And threw her socks on the chair, breaking the cooing.

She went, barefoot, toward the unknown, and the hour of my departure had come.

Naked on my bed, she read. The pages gleaming in front of her, her voice bending, branching off, and blushing. I looked at her and failed to understand. I heard the rhythm of her voice mixed with the rhythm of the rhymes, and I saw her body shimmering.

She closed the book and asked, “What’s wrong? Don’t you like poetry?”

“I like it, I like it,” I said. “But you’re more beautiful than poetry.”

“Liar,” she said. “My ambition is to become like Rita as Mahmoud Darwish wrote her. Have you heard Marcel Khalifa’s song, “Between Rita and My Eyes There is a Rifle”? I’d like to be like Rita, with a poet coming along and putting a rifle between me and him.”

She shot up suddenly and said she was famished and was going to make some pasta.

I didn’t tell her I wasn’t always that way. I love poetry, I know entire poems by heart. But in the presence of a wild outpouring of beauty, words are no longer possible.

Though in those moments that I spent alone in the house in Majdalyoun, surrounded by traces of her, I could smell the aroma of pasta inside the gray spots dancing in front of my closed eyes, and I felt my death. Believe me, without her I’m nothing — alone with the nothing, alone with what’s left of her things, alone with her ghost.

And I sunk into sleep within the odors of decay that fumed from the blankets of that abandoned house.

I slept and floated over mysterious dreams, as though I were no longer myself. I saw her. Shahineh, wearing khaki trousers and a khaki shirt, like Shams. She was caught in the rain. Ropes of rain tied the ground to the sky, and she was standing under a flowering almond tree.

“How can the almond tree flower in the middle of winter?” I asked her.

The branches of the tree shook and the blossoms started to fall. I ran to gather them, and she pointed her rifle at me. “Go back,” she yelled. “The Jews are here.”

I was a child. No, I became a child. No, I saw myself as a child. Anyway, I started jumping to stretch my body to its normal height because I wasn’t a child and it wasn’t Shahineh, it was Shams.

“Why are you doing this to me, Shams?” I shouted.

Shahineh said she was going.

I went up to her and the earth started to open up beneath my feet — I was drowning. I was a child drowning in the rain. The huge drops struck me. It hurt.

“Mom!” I cried.

And I saw Shahineh — who looked like Shams — turn her back and disappear into the water.

The dreams are all mixed up in my head now, but when I woke there to the sound of their footsteps, I wasn’t afraid. I felt feet kicking me and rifles pointed at my head, so I curled up into a ball to avoid as many of the blows as I could.

They stood me up against the wall and told me to put my hands up. Then they turned my face to the wall and frisked me while I stood like a zombie. I didn’t resist because I no longer resisted.

Since the day at the stadium, when I’d decided I wasn’t going with the ones who got on the Greek ships, I’d told myself, “Enough.”

But where are we to find this enough?

You say, “Enough,” and then blind history drags you by the hair back to war.

I said, “Enough,” and sunk into the massacre. I said, “Enough,” and the War of the Camps encircled me. I said, “Enough,” and found myself crucified on the wall of an abandoned house in a village of ghosts called Majdalyoun whose inhabitants had been driven out.

And now I say, “Enough,” and I find myself with a child in whom death dances exultantly, as though we were born, and die, in death.

I was standing against the wall, the weariness spreading through me, and with the image of Shahineh in Shams’ body as she left me in the rain. Why did she leave me to drown? Is it possible to leave a child calling for help? Even in a dream, it would be shameful. I was standing, the man was patting down my body as though he were detaching my bones, one by one. Then he ordered me to turn and face him. I saw four young men, the oldest not more than twenty. They were like children at play. That’s war — it should be like a game; when we stop playing we’re afraid, and when we’re afraid, we die.

I stood against the wall awaiting my death, but they didn’t kill me. Their boss showered me with questions, but I didn’t answer. What was I supposed to say? Was I supposed to tell the truth and make myself look laughable and stupid?

When the commander despaired of my face, with its sheen of sleep, he ordered them to take me away. One of them came forward, undid the buttons of my shirt and pulled it up to cover my face. They put me into a Land Rover and took me away. Within the jolts of the furrowed roads, sleep returned to cradle me. I wanted that woman. I wanted to give her the almond flowers I’d gathered for her.

But sleep wouldn’t come. I found myself in a dark cell like the one I’d been held in before. My guess is that they’d forgotten about me and left me to live out my three days in prison as though in the belly of death. Now I am Jonah, not you. I lived in darkness for three days without food or water. I was sure they’d forgotten me and that I’d die inside that dark vault, and no one would know what had become of me.

On the third day, however, they took me out of the cell to interrogate me, and the interrogator burst out laughing in my ear.

“So, Mr. Horns!” he said. “What were you doing there?”

I said I’d gone looking for her.

“And why were you looking for her?”

“To understand.”

When I said “to understand,” the man burst into a long, hysterical laugh and started coughing and choking on his words. Then, in the middle of his coughing and laughing, he gestured for them to throw me out.

So that was how I was twice arrested for her sake and twice released.

I went home, leaving Shams to her fate. Don’t say I didn’t try to save her. I went home and waited for her death, and she died.

What else do you want to know?

I swear I don’t know anything else. All I see in front of me now is a question mark. Why did she come from Jordan? And how did she become an officer in Fatah? And how did she put her military group together?

Questions I don’t know how to answer. All I know is that I know nothing.

Do you want to hear the story?

I’ll tell you as long as you don’t tell me it’s unbelievable. Believe first, then I’ll tell. I no longer feel the need to determine the truth of stories or the absence of it. None of our stories are believable, Uncle, but does that mean we should forget them?

I believed it because it resembled your story, but your story, and those of Reem or Nahilah in Sha’ab, and Adnan’s in prison or in the mental hospital, are all unbelievable stories, yet they’re still true. You know them, I know them, everybody knows them.

My question is. .

No, no. There is no question.

But let’s suppose there were a question. The question would be why don’t we believe ourselves? Why do I feel that the things that have happened, to me or to others, have turned into shadows? You, for instance — aren’t you the shadow of the man you were? And that man — was he a hero, a lie, or an illusion?