Shams’ house looked like an oblong billboard.

Shams said she lived a great part of her life in the multicolored hovel, a house that turned into an oven in summer and a freezer in winter. A father who spoke to his wife only to discuss the need to change this or that wall that was starting to rust. “I lived all my life in dilapidation: The house was wearing out, my father was wearing out, and everything was drenched in water and sun. My father would go off to his work at the stone crushers and return exhausted and at the end of his tether. The only thing he could find to amuse himself was to make pasta and yell at my mother because she hadn’t kneaded the dough properly.”

Shams said that she remembered those days with a strange tenderness, and she felt alienation for the first time when their house in the camp changed. Concrete arrived and you couldn’t change the walls anymore. With the revolution everything arrived, and Ahmad Saleh, whose cousin found him a job in one of the offices of the Popular Front, left his work at the stone crushers and added two new rooms to his house. That was when Shams said she felt at sea. She was nine when everything in the house changed. The roof stopped leaking, the walls no longer were brightly colored with advertisements, and Shams felt some part of her had died.

Her childhood ended when the house was torn down. Her periods started. Her mother told her she was like all the other girls of al-Ammoura: “We’re like that, our girls grow up at nine.” Her mother explained everything to her and told her she had to get ready for marriage. Shams waited for a husband.

She waited for him at the unwra school.

She waited for him while training at the cadets’ camp.

She waited for him as she watched her brother die, hit by a bullet of the Bedouins in 1970.^*

She waited for him when she saw her father arrested after the closure of the Popular Front office, before finding himself a job in a pasta factory that belonged to the Alwan family in Amman.

She waited for him as she saw the concrete walls of the house corrode and become like the sheet metal that had enclosed her childhood.

Then came the husband and the nightmares.

How can you expect me to tell you about Fawwaz Mohammed Nassar when I only know him mutilated by Shams’ words? When she spoke of him she’d lacerate him: She’d take a small piece of a brown paper bag or a newspaper or a Kleenex or a book and start chewing on it and spitting it out, so I only saw the man drawn on mutilated paper. She would talk and mutilate, and the tears would pour out of her.

Have you ever seen a woman not weeping from her eyes but with everything inside her? Everything in Shams wept as she mutilated Fawwaz Mohammed Nassar and spat out the little shreds of paper she was chewing. And then suddenly she’d wipe away her tears as though it were nothing, as though the woman with tears in her eyes were another woman, and she’d start gobbling the dish of pasta for which she’d made a special sauce of cream and basil leaves. She’d eat and sniff the basil and say the smell intoxicated her. She’d eat as though her appetite had exploded inside her. She’d say she wanted nothing from Fawwaz; she’d just go to Amman, kidnap Dalal, and bring her back to Beirut.

“I won’t start my life without Dalal. Look.”

And she’d take a photo from the pocket of her khaki jacket.

“Look how beautiful she is. She’s the most beautiful girl in the world.”

I’d look. I didn’t see the most beautiful girl in the world, only a sweet child with curly hair and a little brown face devoured by large eyes with long lashes.

“Look at her eyelashes! How can I leave her with that beast?”

When Shams held Dalal’s picture in her hand, she was transformed into another woman. I’d see tenderness and sorrow and weakness gathered on her brow, and when I’d try to hold her, she’d push me away as though she were refusing to share Dalal with me. Then she’d turn to me and say she needed a man to help her kidnap Dalal. If I tried to tell her this man was sitting before her, she’d look at me with pity.

“I need a fedayeen fighter, my dear. Not some doctor like you.”

Then I’d tell her I was a fedayeen fighter and would talk to her about our first camps in al-Khreibeh and Kafar Shouba.

“You? Incredible!”

In fact, I made a mistake. I shouldn’t have told her how the officer made me crawl in front of the platoon and how that incident made me lose my self-respect as a political commissar and as a soldier.

That was an unforgivable slip. I confessed I wasn’t brave enough to prevent the officer from humiliating me.

I wanted to be a blank page with her on which she could draw whatever she wanted. But she wasn’t looking for a blank page. Why, then, did she stay with me? Why was she here with me, and then there with Sameh? I swear I don’t know, I don’t understand how the devils that inhabit our bodies think.

Yes, Yunes. I waited for her until she died. I left the prison and didn’t step foot out of my house until after I got word of her murder. I thought she might come to my place to hide. How naïve I was. Rumors had spread through the camp that I’d stayed home to protest my arrest. No. I stayed in the house waiting for her. Ah, if only she’d come! Every part of my body hurt; separation causes pain in the joints, the chest, the knees.

I waited, not to understand what she’d done, but because I loved her. It no longer made any difference to me whether she’d been unfaithful or not. She was what mattered, not me. But she didn’t come. I’m sure she wasn’t aware I was waiting for her. She was enveloped in her crime, in blood. I can describe her to you, my son, even without having seen her. I can see the red halo around her head, the stains of blood. Ever since we’ve sunk into our own blood, it has dogged us and tied us to it with a long rope knotted around our necks.

After she died, I left my house and roamed the streets of the camp. I walked like a pathetic revenge taker even though pent up inside me was all the sorrow in the world. I didn’t weep for Shams and I’ll never weep for her, for all the tears would never be enough. Like an idiot, I walked with my head held high as though I’d taken my revenge.

The rumors started and I took refuge in the hospital out of fear. I was afraid because I knew her; she was a woman capable of killing all her men. She did kill us all — me and Sameh and I don’t know who else. Crime is like love: We kill another person just as we love a man or a woman — because they are a substitute for another man or woman.

I was a substitute for two men I didn’t know — Sameh, whom I’d never heard of, and Fawwaz, whom I never met. All the same, I was their stand-in. Sameh died, Fawwaz took Dalal, and here I am.

Where were we?

I told you Shams was ready for marriage at nine, and they married her off at fifteen. Fawwaz came along, and he was twenty-four. He married her and took her to Lebanon. But it wasn’t Fawwaz who came, it was Abu Ahmad Nassar. He asked for her for his son, Fawwaz, who’d finished his studies in engineering at Beirut Arab University and was working for the Resistance. Then he took her to Beirut. The girl got to al-Wahdat and became acquainted with her husband in a small house in the Tal al-Za’atar camp, situated in the eastern suburbs of Beirut. She lived a year and a half to the rhythm of bombardments, the explosions of canons, and the rain of bullets.

She said her husband scared her more than the war.

“He’d only have sex with me when we were being shelled. He was the devil incarnate. I never saw him except inside the house. He’d turn up from nowhere covered in dust, having left his position. He’d come to me coated in dust and sweat and take me without taking off his clothes. I never once saw him naked.

“He was an officer in the camp’s militia, but I don’t know anything about his duties. He never told me.