But where did the car pass?

This Dr. Amjad rubbed me the wrong way. Where did he get all this information? Is it true the so-called Kurdish woman stole the car? She suggested they meet in front of the television building and, when he arrived, asked him to get out of the car so she could tell him something. He was killed getting out of the car. A man fired five bullets at him from a silenced revolver, and the Kurdish woman disappeared, with the car.

Was the whole thing just a car theft?

But why did he get out?

Didn’t he know his life was in danger?

If we are to believe our Dr. Amjad’s version, Kayed was supposed to drive just past the television building, and the Kurdish woman should have gotten into the car beside him.

How could that be? He stops his car, gets out and dies? Where was his Iraqi bodyguard, Kazem, and what did Amin have to do with it?

Kazem told me with a wink that he didn’t make it to the rendezvous: “You know, meetings of that sort require privacy.”

Privacy! What privacy is there in the street at eleven in the morning? They’re all lying, and Kazem has disappeared. He came to say goodbye because he was traveling and to “see how Uncle Yunes was doing”!

I never heard anyone else use this Uncle. You’re Brother, Abu Salem, Yunes, or Izz al-Din — you’re only Uncle to people who don’t know you. The easiest trick in the book to get close to someone. Uncle and Hajj are titles we give to men over fifty when we don’t know what we’re supposed to call them. Out of laziness. Our language is a very lazy language. We don’t dig deep for the names of things; we name them on the run, and it’s up to the listener to figure things out, he is supposed to know what you mean so he can understand you; otherwise misunderstandings abound.

That’s the word I was looking for. What happened between Dr. Amjad and me was a misunderstanding.

Dr. Amjad was talking about the disappearance of Amin after Kayed’s killing and presented an exhaustive analysis to prove that Amin had a relationship with the Kurdish woman, as though I cared.

“She would come here to visit him and I think. . I think the last time she came in the Japanese car, so Amin killed him and not Kazem. He killed him for the woman and the car. It’s an expensive car as you know — Mazda, full automatic. I’m sure it was the car, but I don’t know anymore.”

Dr. Amjad doesn’t know but he wants me to know. I didn’t say anything, gave no support to his hypotheses, and didn’t tell him about the girl from Karak who’s studying at the American University. I wish I could contact her; she’s really fantastically beautiful, or not beautiful but striking (now look at the precision of the word striking, meaning more than pretty and implying presence and authority).

God rest your soul, Kayed, but on the occasions when I met her I never saw her as being bossy. She had a certain indescribable delicacy. Her neck was long and smooth, and around it she’d wear a silver necklace with the Throne Surah, or so I thought until Kayed told me that it was a picture of the Virgin Mary. He said the girl from Karak loved the Virgin and would tell him not to be afraid because she had made a vow on his behalf to the Mother of Light. I didn’t ask who this “Mother of Light” was, guessing it must be one of the countless names of the Holy Virgin.

I’d like to see her again, but not to clear things up, since they’re beyond being cleared up at this point. No, I want to contemplate her beauty. Shameless, really. Instead of mourning my friend, Kayed, and bemoaning his horrible death, I desire his girlfriend. They left him on the pavement in Talet al-Khayyat for more than five hours before taking him to the hospital. A man lying in a pool of blood. The passersby looked on without wanting to see. For five hours under the Beirut sun, Kayed was in agony. Well, there you are. But I’m still not sure why I desire his girlfriend. My desire isn’t sexual; I desire to see her. Men are traitors from the beginning, from the moment they discover their names. To know your name is to be a traitor. Wasn’t that your blind father’s theory about names?

Where were we? It seems I’ve become like Dr. Amjad. All doctors must be that way: I’ve left you lying here to amuse myself with the story of Kayed.

That day I swear I could have committed murder. But it was as if I were hypnotized, virtually paralyzed and mute. I was asking for Amin when a hand covered my mouth; then Dr. Amjad got deep into the analysis of Kayed’s assassination and started mulling over the possible explanations and asserting the involvement of Israeli intelligence. But that wasn’t enough. If he’d stopped there, this eruption would never have come, involuntarily, from deep inside me. Zainab told me that I roared, and that Dr. Amjad fled, terrified. It was when he launched into his contemptible tales about women that I let loose. You know how we men are. Amjad was talking about Kayed and the Kurdish woman when he suddenly switched to his sexual experiences with Kurdish women. How vulgar! He said a Kurdish woman used to call him every day on the phone, sigh into the receiver, and tell him the color of her panties.

That was when I exploded.

I didn’t explode for your sake but for the sake of that woman he’d invented.

He said she would sigh into the telephone, but he didn’t say what he was doing — how he would sigh and masturbate and leap like an ape from one line to another.

Plus, how dare he talk about Kurdish women that way? Even if we suppose that one Kurdish woman did that, is it thinkable to write them all off? I hate this stupid machismo. I think it’s a cover up for men’s deep-seated impotence.

I exploded, howling and bellowing like a wounded bull. Dr. Amjad fled, and Zainab came running. Zainab’s stupid, and I could have done without further proof of it. She’s not really a nurse, all she can do is take blood pressure and give injections. Not grasping that I was shouting because of you, she ran to get me a glass of water and started to calm me down. The idiot! I threw the glass on the ground, grabbed her hand, and dragged her over to you. She found a woolen blanket, and I covered you with it.

“What are we going to do with him?” she asked, looking at me like an imbecile.

“Quickly, quickly! Let’s get him into a room.”

It was then that Zainab let out that Dr. Amjad had said you were to be left alone because there was no hope.

I told her to shut up and help me.

We tried to carry you, but it was impossible because the yellow foam mat on which they’d thrown you down wasn’t rigid. I ordered Zainab to bring a stretcher and she ran off.

From the moment I yelled at her, Zainab changed completely. She started running blindly every time she heard an order from me. I’d give an order and she’d set off running like a fool. I could hear her clattering around everywhere — on the stairs, in the room, in the corridors. I could hear, but I couldn’t see a thing. All she brought was a woolen blanket with a moldy smell. So I picked you up — I couldn’t wait any longer. I committed an unforgivable medical sin. I picked you up and put you over my shoulder folded in half. You were heavy and shaking. God, how heavy people are when they’re dying, or approaching death, as though, as Umm Hassan explained to me, the soul were a means of combating gravity and half your soul had left your body. I took you out of the emergency room and climbed up toward the first floor. Zainab was waiting on the landing to say there weren’t any empty rooms. I climbed up to the second and last floor and took you into Room 208, which you now occupy. I put you into bed and ordered Zainab to take the second bed out of the room.

Now you’re in a first-class room. It’s clean and attractive and organized. Forget about the colors — it’s impossible to preserve the original color of walls and doors in a place that’s been eaten away by moisture. There’s no solution to the humidity in Beirut, which is between eighty-five and ninety percent most of the time. However, it’s less a matter of humidity and more of the water pipes and sewage mains. The hospital was bombarded dozens of times, and each time they repaired it from the outside, that’s to say, patched the holes in the walls and sealed off the water that was spurting from the pipes at the joints. The place needs a complete overhaul, which is impossible at the moment. The pipes leak, the damp stains the walls, and the smell, a mixture of Nurse Zainab’s ammonia and standing water, seeps everywhere.