She said the boy died because she had been unable to take him to the hospital at Acre.

“His head fell forward while he was eating. He said his head was ringing with pain.”

She tied cloth around his head and rubbed oil on his neck, but the pain didn’t stop. He held his temples as though hugging himself and writhed in pain. So she decided to take him to the hospital in Acre.

Nahilah went to the headquarters of the military governor to ask for a pass and was subjected to a long interrogation. When she returned to her house without a permit, she found her son in the throes of death with the blind sheikh whispering the last rites.

“They didn’t put the sack over my head, but they threw me into a darkened room,” she said, “and left me there for more than three hours. They then took me into the office of a short man who spoke with an Iraqi accent. I told him my son was sick, but he wouldn’t stop asking about you. I wept and he threatened me. I said the boy was dying and he asked me to cooperate with them and questioned me about the border crossers. Then he said he couldn’t give me a permit if I didn’t bring him a medical certificate to prove my son was sick.”

“There’s no doctor in the village,” I told him.

“Those are my orders,” he said. “If you don’t cooperate with us, we won’t cooperate with you.”

WHEN NAHILAH finished her story, she saw how calm your face was. Your panting had stopped, and you looked at her suspiciously, as though you were accusing her. She saw how calmly you took the news as you sat down, lit a cigarette, asked about Salem and told her you’d be away for a long time.

She understood you’d never come back.

You asked about the new Israeli settlement that was being built near Deir al-Asad. Then you stood up, said you’d have your revenge and walked out. She grabbed you by the hand, brought you back into the cave and told the story over again.

She said Ibrahim had been playing with the other children.

She said the new settlement had sprung up like a weed, and they’d fenced off the land they’d confiscated with barbed wire while everyone looked on, seeing their land shrinking and slipping out of their hands, unable to do anything.

She said, “They took the land and we watched like someone watching his own death in a mirror.”

She said, “You know how children are. They were playing close to the wire and talking to the Yemeni immigrants in Hebrew — our children speak Hebrew — and the immigrants were answering them in an odd Arabic; our children know their language and they don’t know ours. Ibrahim had been playing with them, and they brought him to me. God, he was trembling. They said a huge stone had fallen on him. I don’t know how to describe it; his head was crushed, and blood was dripping from it. I left him in the house and ran to ask for a permit to take him to the hospital in Acre, and at the military governor’s headquarters they made me wait for more than three hours in a darkened room, the Iraqi threatening to beat me during the interrogation. He said they knew you came, that their men were better lovers than you, and that they’d kill you and leave you in the square at Deir al-Asad to make an example of you. And he asked for information about you while I pleaded for the permit.

“And when I got back to the house, Ibrahim was dead, and your father was whispering the last rites.”

You sat down, lit a cigarette, and put a thousand and one questions to her. You wanted to know whether they’d killed him or he’d died accidentally; had they thrown the stone at him, or had he just gotten in the way of it.

Nahilah didn’t know.

You got up and said that you’d kill their children as they’d killed your son. “Tomorrow you’ll trill with joy, because we’ll have our revenge.”

For three nights you circled the barbed wire. You had your rifle and ten hand grenades, and you decided to tie the grenades together, throw them into the Jewish settlement’s workshop, and, when they exploded, fire at the settlers.

It was night.

The spotlight revolved, tracking the wire fence, and Yunes hid in the olive grove close by. He started moving closer, crawling on his stomach. He got the chain of grenades ready and tied them to a detonator, deciding to throw them into the big hall where Yemeni Jewish families slept practically on top of one another. He wanted to kill, just to kill. When you described the event to Dr. Mu‘een, you said that during your third pass you imagined the dead bodies piled on top of one another and felt your heart drink deep.

“I was thirsty; revenge is like thirst. I would drink, and my thirst would increase, so that when the time came and I began to crawl, a refreshing coolness filled my heart. When everything was about to happen, the thirst disappeared, and I set out not with revenge in my mind but out of a sense of duty, because I’d promised Nahilah.”

Yunes never told the story of what actually happened.

He said later that it was impossible to carry out the operation successfully, that he had realized the huge losses the villages would incur as a result of the predictable Israeli response.

He crawled toward the fence, and after the spotlight had passed over him a number of times, heard the sound of firing and dogs barking. He flattened himself to the ground. Then he decided to run, not paying the slightest heed to the spotlight. Bullets flying around him, he disappeared into the olive grove, and instead of hiding there until morning, he kept going until he reached the Lebanese border.

He said later that he decided not to go through with the operation because it was an individual act of revenge and because the Israelis would take it out on the Arab villages. But he never spoke of the fear that paralyzed him or why he fled all the way to Lebanon.

Now I have a right to be afraid.

But not Yunes; Yunes wasn’t afraid, his heart never wavered. Yunes “withdrew” because he was a hero. I, on the other hand, am hiding in his room because I’m a coward. Have you noticed how things have changed? Those days were heroic days, these are not. Yunes got scared, so he became a hero; I’m scared, so I’ve become a coward.

When Yunes returned to Bab al-Shams, he didn’t tell Nahilah about the revenge that never happened. But me — the crippled nurse looks at me with contempt because she’s waiting for me to justify my stay at the hospital. Shams was killed, and I’m expected to pay the price for a crime I didn’t commit.

I don’t sleep.

And you — could you sleep after you postponed your revenge?

^* Koran, Surah III, 169.

^* A soft, yogurt cheese.

YOU WANT A STORY!

I know you’d like to change the subject, you don’t agree with my way of telling the story of your son’s death and your revenge. You’ll ask me to tell it a different way. Maybe I should say, for example, that the moment you got close to the barbed wire, you understood that individual revenge was worthless and decided to go back to Lebanon to organize the fedayeen so we could start the war.

“It wasn’t a war. It was more like a dream. Don’t believe, Son, that the Jews won the war in ’48. In ’48, we didn’t fight. We didn’t know what we were doing. They won because we didn’t fight, and they didn’t fight either, they just won. It was like a dream.”

You’ll say you chose war instead of revenge, and I have to believe you. Everyone will believe you, and they’ll say you were right, and I’m trying to camouflage my fear within yours.

You weren’t afraid that night of March 1951.

And I’m not afraid now!

When Yunes told how his son Ibrahim died in 1951, he spoke a lot about Nahilah’s suffering. He never spoke of his own suffering, only of his thirst for revenge.

“Didn’t you feel pain?” I asked him.

“Didn’t you want to die? Didn’t you die?”