“If you want a bride for your son, take this one,” she said, pointing to Nahilah, and there was no further discussion.

“This one” was Nahilah.

Yunes will never forget the wedding, and the wedding night.

How could he forget when he could smell the blood for days and days and would hate himself until the day he died?

How could he forget the girl’s face as she shook with fear?

How could he forget his mother closing the door behind them and waiting?

How could he forget that he fell asleep with the girl next to him in the bed, and didn’t take off his clothes?

How could he forget the high-pitched youyous of joy outside and the mother waving a white handkerchief with a spot of blood on it to announce the girl’s virginity and purity?

How could he forget that room, with its bittersweet smell?

The mother took the girl without argument. She wanted a wife for her son. Marriage would steady the boy and force him to come back home.

The sheikh took the girl without argument, because he’d grieved over his son and wanted a grandson. He had wanted his son to be a sheikh, a scholar and a Sufi, but all the boy could cite from the Koran was the first chapter. He sent him to the elementary school in Sha’ab, but instead of studying he made off with the others into the mountains. He’d picked up a rifle and started moving from village to village, taking part in attacks on British army patrols.

Yunes could see that his father and mother were sunk in poverty, but he had no concept of what that meant. He must have wanted to escape from the company of that old man who cursed fate and sat all day in front of his house, and who’d go every Friday morning to the mosque of Salah al-Din in the village square, where, without fail, an incident would arise that would result in his being thrown out. During that time, Kamel al-Asadi led the worshippers. This Kamel was neither a sheikh nor a scholar. He hadn’t learned the Koran by heart, he hadn’t studied in a religious school, and he didn’t take part in the devotions of the Sufis who’d built themselves a modest mosque in Sha’ab dedicated to the Yashrati master of whom Sheikh Ibrahim was one of the first disciples.

They said, “Let’s get him married,” so they got him married.

And Yunes accepted. He heard the name Nahilah and accepted. He gave his mother ten Palestinian lira — God knows where he got them — for the wedding, the dowry, and the rest.

And the wedding took place.

The boy sat down among the men. The ceremony almost got ugly: Sheikh Ibrahim threw Sheikh Kamel out and performed the rites himself, after which there were youyous of joy. Nahilah entered the house. The youyous mounted, and the young man was receiving congratulations when the door opened and the girl entered, holding her fingers out in front of her with a lit candle on each one. She was covered from head to toe by a robe behind whose colors her face was lost.

Yunes didn’t see her.

He saw a girl on the verge of collapse, swaying as though dancing, approaching the chair on which her husband was seated, and then kneeling. The candles shone in Yunes’ face, the flames dazzled his eyes, and he didn’t see.

Yunes doesn’t remember how long she knelt, for time seemed eternal that day; his eyes burned with something like tears, his shadow swayed on the walls, and the youyous pounded in his ears.

He would never say he was afraid. He would say instead that when his shadow leapt up in front of him that night he didn’t recognize it, as though it were the shadow of some other young man, lengthening and breaking off and barging around against the ceiling and among the guests and against the walls. And he would say too that when he bent over to extinguish the candles, his mother stopped him and made him sit still again and asked him to smile. Then his mother knelt next to the girl, took hold of her right arm and pulled her up, and the two of them walked among the guests as the showers of rice started to fall on them. Sheikh Sa’id Ma’lawi stood up, struck his tambourine and shouted, “God lives!” and the cry was taken up by five bearded men who had come from Sha’ab at the behest of the great Yashrati, sheikh of the Yashrati Shadhili order, to bless Sheikh Ibrahim’s son’s marriage and recite the prayers that would help him follow the path of righteousness like his father before him.

The woman and the girl disappeared into the bedroom. After what seemed like a long while, they returned carrying olives and grapes. The girl tossed the olives one by one to the guests while the woman bent down and laid a large cluster of white grapes before the girl’s feet and asked her to walk on them. The girl took off her slippers, raised her right foot with care and stepped on the grapes; then she raised the other foot and walked on them.

Yunes, telling me of his love for white grapes as we drank a “tear” of arak once at his house, said that the women sitting in the reception room rose from their places and started laying clusters of white grapes before the bride, and that she walked on them, the tears of the grapes soaking the ground.

He said he saw the tears. “Wine is the tears of grapes. That’s why we say ‘a tear of arak’ — not because we want to drink it in small quantities, and not because we put the arak in the small flask we call a batha, which is tear-shaped, but because when the grapes are pressed, the juice oozes out like tears, drop by drop.”

Years later, when Yunes and Nahilah were in the cave at Bab al-Shams and night fell, Nahilah lit a candle she had hidden behind a rock she called the pantry. Yunes leapt up and brought out ten bunches of grapes he’d cut from the vines scattered around Deir al-Asad, and he spread these on the ground and asked her to walk on them.

“Take off your shoes and walk. Today I’ll marry you according to the law of the Prophet.”

She said that that day the man was mad with love. She bent over, removed her head scarf, placed the grapes on it, wrapped them up and pushed the bundle to one side. She told Yunes that at the wedding, she’d only stepped on one bunch, that she hated walking on grapes, that she’d slipped and narrowly escaped death because the grape juice had clung to her heels, and that when it came time to marry her daughters, she’d never ask them to walk on grapes — what a shameful idea!

Nahilah walked on the grapes, which exploded beneath her small, bare feet, then went into the bedroom and did not come out again.

“You know the rest,” Yunes said. “My mother right by the door and me inside. What are these awful customs? You have to fuck for their sake, strip off your clothes and get it over with in a hurry so they don’t get bored waiting outside.”

But I don’t know the rest, Father, and you’re lying when you say the rest was the way it usually is.

You didn’t tell me everything; I know, because Abu Ma’rouf filled me in.

Abu Ma’rouf was a pleasant man I met in 1969 in the Nahr al-Barid camp in northern Lebanon, after the commander of the base at Kafar Shouba had thrown me out for being an atheist. I had gone to Nahr al-Barid as political commissar for the camp militia, when clashes broke out between us and the Lebanese army. The November cold was intense and made our bones ache. They put me and Abu Ma’rouf on the forward road block, which was supposed to be a lookout position. We were opposite a hill occupied by the army, and it was our job to engage the enemy briefly if the camp were attacked before withdrawing, in other words, to delay their advance as much as possible so that the other groups could block the roads leading to the camp.

A naïve plan, you’ll say.

It wasn’t even a plan, I’ll answer, but I’m not interested at the moment in a critique of our military experiences, which I’ve never understood much about. I wanted to inform you that the rest was not “the way it usually is.”