You’re acting all macho now because you’ve forgotten. Have you really forgotten Adnan?

Adnan Abu Odeh came back to the Burj al-Barajneh camp after twenty years in Israeli prisons. He came back a hero. You went to welcome him because he was a comrade, a friend, a lifelong acquaintance. You always used to speak of him as The Hero.

What happened to The Hero?

It was 1960. You were five fighters on one of your first operations inside Galilee. Adnan was taken prisoner, three others died, and you survived. What were the names of the three martyrs? Even you’ve forgotten — you were telling me about that fedayeen operation and you hesitated and said, “Khaled al-Shatti. No, Khaldoun. No, Jamal. .” Even you couldn’t remember anymore. You survived and they died. Death isn’t a good enough reason to forget, but you did.

You survived, you told me, because you “withdrew” forward after you’d fallen into the Israeli ambush, while your comrades “withdrew” backward, as soldiers normally do. They came under fire from two sides and died, while you continued your journey to Bab al-Shams. Adnan didn’t die even though he received appalling wounds in his stomach. The Israelis took him prisoner and treated him in the hospital before putting him on trial.

You’d tell the story tirelessly, as though it were your own. Then you suddenly stopped going to see him after he came back, and no longer talked about him.

Adnan stood up in court and said what he had to say.

He said he didn’t recognize the court’s authority: He was a fedayeen fighter, not a saboteur.

“This is my land and the land of my fathers and my grandfathers,” he said, refusing to answer any questions. They asked him about you, but he said nothing.

During the interrogation, he spoke of the three others because he’d seen them die in front of him, but he didn’t say one word about you. Although the Israeli interrogator informed him of your death, he didn’t believe it. The interrogator showed him the Lebanese newspaper; the Fatah leadership had issued a statement announcing the death of four martyrs. But Adnan didn’t believe it because he’d seen you move forward and disappear (which doesn’t change the fact that that statement in the papers was a terrible error, because it exposed you and led Nahilah to prison).

You realized Nahilah had been arrested when she stopped visiting you in your cave. You stayed in your hideout for more than a month, only going out at night to nourish yourself with wild herbs and to fill your flask with dirty water from the irrigation ditch.

You lived for five months at Bab al-Shams, which became a prison for you, and you almost went insane. You sat all day long without moving, not daring to sleep or go out. You became like a vegetable. Have you forgotten how a man can become a vegetable? How his thoughts can be wiped out, his words disappear, and his head become an empty pot full of ringing noises and incomprehensible sounds?

When Dr. Amjad informed me you’d entered a vegetative state and there was no hope, I couldn’t understand his pessimism: You’d already been through a vegetative state once and emerged on the other side.

Nahilah woke to their violent knocking, and, when they failed to find you, they took her for a weeklong interrogation. Leaving the prison, she found the village surrounded and realized they’d let her out as bait to lure you with. She acted out her celebrated play and buried you, praying for your absent corpse and receiving condolences while she wept and wailed and smeared ashes on her face. Nahilah’s excessive carrying on drove your mother crazy — the old woman couldn’t see why she was behaving that way. She understood the play had to be staged to save you, but Nahilah turned the play into something serious. She wept as women weep. She lamented and wailed and fainted. She let down her hair and tore her clothes in front of everybody.

“This isn’t how we mourn martyrs,” everyone told her. “Shame on you, Umm Salem! Shame on you! Yunes is a martyr.”

But Nahilah paid no attention to the sanctity of martyrs. She wept for you until she could weep no more, and her sorrow was mighty unto death. And death came. Your mother believed Nahilah caused your father’s death. After the death of his only son — meaning yours — he went into a coma that lasted three years, then he slept in his bed for a good month, and when he finally got up, started using dirt again to perform his ablutions. Then he died.

“Nahilah killed him,” your mother told everyone.

Your mother tried to explain to him that what Nahilah was doing was just an act, but he couldn’t understand. She would speak to him, but he wouldn’t reply; she would look at his face, but all she saw were his closed eyes; she would tell him you were alive, but he would shake his head and moan.

In the past his wife had been able to understand him from the slightest movement of his eyebrows. After your death, however, his eyebrows stopped moving, and she felt she was talking to herself as he sat there in front of her utterly apathetic.

Why did Nahilah act this way?

Was she worried about you? Did she hate you? What was it?

Did she reach into herself “where the tears are,” as the Sufi sheikh would say to his ring of disciples? “In our depths is nothing but water. We go back to the water to weep. We are born in water, we are drawn toward water, and we die when our water runs dry,” he would say. He’d always repeat the words of a certain Sufi imam: “The sea is the bed of the earth and tears are the bed of man.” Having finished their chanting and whirling, the dervishes would fall to the ground and weep — that’s what the Sha’ab Sufi chapter did. Sheikh Ibrahim, son of Suleiman al-Asadi, would go every Thursday evening from Deir al-Asad to Sha’ab to lead the séance; he’d return home, borne by his disciples, his eyes — red as burning embers — closed.

But Nahilah?

Why did she act that way, knowing that you were still alive?

I know why: Nahilah was weeping for herself, for others like her, out of resentment.

“She wept for love,” you would say if you could.

No, Abu Salem. Nahilah returned to the source of her tears to find herself again. She lived her life alone among the blind, the refugees, and the dead. Then you’d turn up at Bab al-Shams, place grapes beneath her feet and go away again, leaving her sad, abandoned, and pregnant.

What did you expect her to do?

Wait for you?

Languish?

You’d love to believe that she did nothing but wait for you. A woman who filled her days with bearing children and waiting for her husband who didn’t come. And when he did come, he’d breeze in secretly, once a month, or every three months, or whenever he could.

Nahilah got fed up with her life between an old blind man, his maniacal wife obsessed with cleanliness, and the children, always hungry, still crawling around on all fours.

And on top of that, you would have wanted her to rejoice to see you and stretch out on the floor upon your second sun hidden inside the cave?

Nahilah left the prison barefoot and when she got to her front door fell to the ground in tears. People thought the blind sheikh had died, so they raced over, only to find her weeping for you. Everyone in Deir al-Asad had learned of your death because Israeli radio had broadcast the military communiqué, but the villagers hadn’t dared to think of holding a big funeral. They mourned you in silence and told one another that Nahilah had been relieved of all the torment, the childbearing, the oppression, prison, and interrogation.

People rushed over and found Nahilah collapsed at her door lamenting and rolling her head from side to side in the dirt. When they gathered around her, she stood up and said, “The funeral is tomorrow. Tomorrow we’ll pray for his soul in the mosque,” and she went inside.

It was a wake beyond compare. Her weeping made everyone else weep. “As though he were Imam Hussein,” people said. “As though we were performing the rites of Ashura.” Food was served, coffee was prepared, turbaned sheikhs came from all over, and chanting circles formed. Nahilah went unveiled to where the men were gathered and recounted the news of your death. “They killed him and left him gasping with thirst. Three bullets to the chest. He fell to the ground, and they fell upon him. He asked for water, and the officer kicked him in the face.” Then she wept and the men’s tears fell, while the blind sheikh sat in the place of honor and red streaks, like tears, furrowed his creased, aged skin.