“Yesterday,” he’d say, “I had a dream,” and he’d repeat the same dream, until it became a joke.

“Yesterday I had a dream that I was, I don’t know how, standing on the pavement with my manhood (he used this odd term for his member) sticking out, and it was — and I apologize for mentioning it — long, very long, longer than the street from side to side, and an Israeli tank came along and drove over it.”

“Did the tank cut it off, Abu Mohammed?”

“Did it hurt a lot?”

Abu Mohammed would say he was afraid he was going to die, because “when a man sees his manhood cut off in a dream, it means he’s going to die.”

“Where did you get that from, Abu Mohammed?”

“I read it in Ibn Sirin’s Dreams,” he answered.

“And who’s this Ibn Sirin? An interpreter of dreams about reproductive organs?”

“God forbid! Ibn Sirin was a great Sufi and a great scholar, and his dream interpretations are never wrong.”

Anyway Ibn Sirin was right, because Abu Mohammed died. This Dr. Amjad, though, wasn’t with us at Ansar, and no Israeli tank cut off his manhood. But he’s here; a respectable man, obsessive about cleanliness. I’ve never seen such a clean man. He lives in the middle of this shit and streams of cologne flow from him. He washes his hands with soap, then dabbles them with cologne and turns his nose up at everything. I don’t know what to make of him. You haven’t seen him, so I’ll have to describe him to you (even though I don’t like descriptions): bald, short, thin, with an oval face, high cheekbones, small eyes. He wears glasses with gold frames that don’t flatter his dark complexion, and his pipe never leaves his mouth. He has very narrow shoulders, and he speaks fast, looking off into the distance to make what he says seem important.

He wasn’t with us in the war or the detention camp, and I don’t understand why he’s working in the hospital here. He says he’s half-Palestinian because his mother’s Syrian, from the region of Aleppo, and he doesn’t speak Palestinian Arabic but a funny dialect that’s a mixture of Classical and Lebanese.

Zainab told me today about a pious Muslim woman wearing a headscarf who struck him because he tried to make a pass at her.

“I heard the woman’s scream, then the sound of slapping. The woman came out, threatening to return with her husband, and the doctor started pleading with her in an embarrassed voice. Later the woman emerged with her husband, who was carrying a bag of medicine, and the doctor thanked the husband, practically falling over himself he was bowing so low.”

Today I’m happy. Dr. Amjad was humiliated, and I want to savor the thought of him bowing in front of the husband, groveling like a dog. I want to have a quiet cigarette and think about life. What more do you want from me today? I’ve bathed and fed you. We sucked out the mucus and everything else. Today I’m happy.

I DON’T KNOW any stories. Where am I supposed to get stories when I’m a prisoner in this hospital? Okay, I’ll tell you the story of the cotton swab. You’re the one who told it to me, I’m certain of that. You know, when I heard the story, I was very aroused, even though I pretended to be disgusted and went into a long tirade defending women’s rights, saying that such degradation of our women was the root of our failures, our paralysis, and our defeats. But when I fell asleep, I was possessed by the demon of sex. That’s all I will say.

In those days, as the story goes, in a small village in Galilee called Ain al-Zaitoun, Sheikh Ibrahim Ibn Suleiman al-Asadi decided his only son should marry. The boy had reached adulthood, his beard sprouting at fourteen. The blind sheikh urged his wife to find a bride for her son quickly, for the sheikh had one foot in the grave, and he wanted to see his grandchildren before dying.

The wife was of the same mind. She, too, wanted her son to marry so that he’d settle down, find himself work, and put an end to his long absences and his life in the mountains with the sacred warriors.

The story is that the young man, who was called Yunes, had no objection to the idea, and when his mother told him she was going to ask for the hand of Nahilah, the daughter of Mohammed al-Shawwah, he agreed, even though he’d never met the girl. He said yes because he liked her name and in his mind drew himself a picture of a fair skinned girl with long black hair, wide eyes, broad cheeks, full hips, and round breasts. He fantasized about a woman sleeping next to him and letting him into her treasures.

But Yunes got a surprise. His wife wasn’t a woman, she was a twelve-year-old girl. The girl wasn’t fair skinned; her complexion was the color of wheat, her hair wasn’t long but like tufts of black wool stuck to her head, and her hips weren’t. .

More than ten years later, when he was about to make love with her at Bab al-Shams, he discovered that he was mistaken. The girl was a woman, and fair-skinned, and her eyes were large, her hair long and black, and she was overflowing with secrets and treasures.

He said, on that occasion, that she’d changed.

And she laughed at him because he hadn’t seen what was in front of him. “Now, after I’ve had children and have become fat and flabby, you come to me and say I’m beautiful? Now, after all the hard times, you see that. . You men! Men are blind, even when they can see.”

But Yunes insisted, and embraced the roundness of her hips and saw the bright sky in her broad, high brow and ate Turkish delight from her long, slim, smooth fingers.

He told her he could smell Turkish delight on her neck. He would open his pack after making love to her and would pull out a tin of Turkish delight while she made tea. Then he’d sit hunched up inside the curve of her body as she lay on the rug, and she’d feed him, the fine white sugar falling onto his chest. He told her he loved eating Turkish delight from her fingers because they were as white as the sweet, which was the best thing the Turks had left behind when they left our country, and because her smell was musky, like the white cubes that melted in his mouth.

IN THOSE DAYS, as the story goes, the world was at war, and when there’s war, things take on a different shape. The air was different, the smells were different, and the people were different. War became a ghost that seeped into people’s clothes and walked among them.

Ain al-Zaitoun, in those days, was a small village sleeping on the pillow of war. Everything in it rippled. The people hurled themselves into the electrified air and tasted war. Nobody called anything by its real name, war itself didn’t resemble its own name. Everyone thought it would be like the war tales of their ancestors, where mighty armies were defeated, locusts ate up the fields, and famine and pestilence spread through the land. They didn’t know that this time the war without a name was them.

The blind sheikh told his wife that words had lost their meaning, so he had decided to be silent. From day to day, he withdrew deeper into his silence, which was broken only by his morning mutterings while he’d recite Koranic verses.

The blind sheikh told his wife that he could see, even though his eyes were closed, and he couldn’t explain why he had come to fear the water.

Weeping, the woman told her son that the old man had gone senile. She said she was ashamed in front of the other people and begged her son to come back from the mountains with the fighters of the sacred jihad to look after his father.

The blind sheikh told his wife he couldn’t bear to live any longer now that they’d appointed a new sheikh to be imam of the village mosque. He said an imam couldn’t be deposed and that he’d never abandon his Sufi companions in the village of Sha’ab. And he said that Ain al-Zaitoun would be destroyed because it had rejected the blessings of its Lord.

He explained everything to his wife, but he couldn’t explain to her why he’d come to fear the water. He said that water was dirty and that when he touched it he felt something sticky, as though his hand were plunging into dead putrefying bodies, and that ablutions could be performed with dust, and that dust. .