I asked her what was wrong, and she shook her head and said, “A heart attack.”

Zainab wept, but I didn’t.

Amjad wiped his tears as he gave directions for the burial, and I stood there like a stone. As though it weren’t me.

Please don’t reproach me — you know what happened to me.

I walked in the funeral procession like a stranger, like any one of the dozens who were there. They put you in the hole, they covered you with earth, and no one came forward to say a word. They looked at me, and I lowered my gaze. I was incapable of looking, incapable of speaking, incapable of weeping. It was as though a veil had descended over my eyes, as though I saw without seeing.

I had to wait three days before I found within myself the courage to stand before your grave, in this rain, the night of the camp covering me and granting me speech.

Now I stand, not to apologize but to weep.

I swear the only reason I left was to go to your house and get the photos. I thought I’d go and get the pictures of you and Nahilah and your children and grandchildren, and we’d begin the story. I felt my memory had dried out and my soul had gone dead, and I thought that only the pictures could renew our story.

I’d go to the photos, put them in front of you in the hospital room, and we’d talk.

I thought instead of talking about love, we could talk about the children and grandchildren.

I thought we could tell their stories one by one. That way, with them, we’d make it through these two remaining weeks of our seventh month in death’s company and make it into the pains of childbirth.

Isn’t that the law of life?

Didn’t we agree we’d try to reach the depths of death so we could discover life?

No, I won’t leave you on this terrible night.

I thought I’d go for an hour and come back, and I didn’t come back.

Forgive me.

Please forgive me.

I left you with the story of Nahilah in her last moments, as she spoke with you and with Ibrahim, calling you Ibrahim and calling him Yunes, her children and grandchildren around her, weeping.

No. I didn’t mean to leave you with death, because it was your duty and Ibrahim’s to guard Nahilah and accompany her on her final journey.

I wanted a different story.

I wanted to tell you that I believed you when you said you didn’t stop going over there after the night of the Roman olive tree, when your wife sat you down and recounted her reality; when she told you that over there you’d become the Jews’ Jews, and over here you were the Arabs’ Arabs.

I believed you, I swear.

I don’t want you defeated and discredited.

I believe you.

After the night of the Roman olive tree, you absented yourself for nine months. Then you resumed your old habits, continuing your journeys over there despite all the difficulties. You didn’t stop going over until after 1982, or, in other words, until after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, when movement inside Beirut became impossible and the trip from Beirut to Sidon a reckless adventure.

That was when you stopped going across Jebel al-Sheikh and they started calling you. You’d talk to them and promise you’d all meet soon in Cyprus or Cairo. That meeting, however, kept getting postponed, as if neither of you wanted it — as if both of you’d agreed, without a word, to avoid the danger of a meeting outside the place you’d created for your meetings. One time it would be you that put it off, another time it was Nahilah, and then she fell ill.

I wanted to talk about this series of visits over there and your trip with Nahilah to Acre, when you went to the Abu Daoud restaurant in the Old City and ate fish and drank arak. It was there that you said to her, as the alcohol went to your head, “It’s like they weren’t here and had never taken our country. Acre’s still Acre, the Jazzar mosque is still where it’s always been, the sea and the sea bass and the red mullet and the black bream are still the same. I really feel like going home with you and staying there. What can they do about it? Let what happens happen.” When you returned at night, you slipped into Bab al-Shams and spent the night there and forgot your talk of all the different kinds of fish and your plans to stay at home. She left you in the morning and returned at nightfall to accompany you to the outskirts of Deir al-Asad, as she always did.

I was going to tell you about Noor and her son, Yunes, who excelled in his studies in Acre and went to the University of Haifa to study engineering; and about the second Yunes, Salem’s son, who is studying business management at Tel Aviv University and is getting ready to marry a Christian girl from Nazareth from the Khleifi family. You blessed the marriage; you told Salem his grandmother used to put an icon of the Virgin under her pillow and that you saw no harm in that, but that the thing that matters is for us to get married and have children.

I was going to tell you about the second Yunes, how you told him that God had blessed us by multiplying our descendants: “Here we are, thrown out of our country in ’48, and with only a hundred thousand of us left over there. The hundred thousand have become a million, and the eight hundred thousand who were thrown out have become five million. They bring in immigrants and we have children, and we’ll see who wins in the end.”

I was going to tell you the stories of the photos, photo by photo, story by story, moment by moment, so we might fool time and not let it kill us.

It’s my fault.

Dear God! How did it happen? How did I let it happen? How did I fail to notice? How could I have gotten drunk?

I left her in the morning and told her I had to go to the hospital because my father was sick. She said, “Go. I know all about it.”

Apart from that one sentence she didn’t say a thing. And we spent the whole night eating and drinking and making love.

What came over me?

Did her ghost come to liberate me, and to let you die in peace?

If only she were here, if only Umm Hassan were here — but she died before you and me. If Umm Hassan had been here, the funeral would’ve been different. She would’ve stood and lamented and made everyone weep.

They carried you, and we walked behind them, and they started dancing. The only ones to walk behind your bier were the men of the camp’s Sufi brotherhood. They remembered that your father had been a Sufi of their order, so they carried your bier — turning, singing, and dancing. Your bier flew on top of their raised hands and they turned and sang their hymns.

And I walked.

I didn’t sway or sing or weep.

I walked like a stranger, as though you weren’t my father or my son, as though I hadn’t been with you on your secret journey to your secret country.

They carried you and flew with you, singing hymns for the family of the Prophet, and I stood rigidly by.

I was like one who doesn’t see.

The taste of that woman was in my soul, the smell of her on my body, her voice enveloped me.

And now you’re dead and departing.

Would you like to know what happened to me? What’s the point?

Would you like to hear a new story that even its narrator and hero doesn’t believe?

We’d decided to stop telling such stories. We’d decided we wanted stories as real as reality.

That’s why I went to your house to get you the photos and spread them out in front of you in your hospital room or hang them on the walls and show them to you.

But I failed.

I didn’t get to your house, and I didn’t get the photos.

I know you want to know, but I feel ashamed. Instead of mourning you and opening my house to receive condolences, I spent the last three days looking for her.

I didn’t go to the hospital, and I didn’t receive condolences along with Nurse Zainab and Dr. Amjad. Instead I roamed the alleys of the camp like a lost soul and whenever I caught sight of a woman’s shadow, I’d run and catch up with her and would look at her for a moment before continuing, the disappointment etched on my face.