So, you’re right.

You were always right: The temporary is preferable to the permanent, or the temporary is the permanent. When the temporary comes to an end, so does everything else. I’m in your temporary world now: I visit your country, live your life and make imaginary journeys. I’m your temporary doctor who isn’t really a doctor. Do you believe I became a doctor? Do you believe three months’ study in China can make someone a doctor?

Would you like to hear about China?

I’ll give you a bath first, then order a dish of beans from Abu Jaber’s next door, then after dinner, I’ll tell you. I’m starving and the hospital food is foul. Believe me, you eat better than I do. You can’t taste anything now because you’re fed through your nose, but the taste of bananas with milk is delicious. Our food, on the other hand, is vile, and I’m forced to eat it. What else can I eat? Do you think I’m going to pay for a dish of beans every day? I had to fight a huge battle to get Dr. Amjad to take me back onto the hospital payroll as a mere nurse, at a miserable salary. He claims I’m not working and you don’t need a full-time nurse and all I do is take care of you.

That bastard of a doctor only agreed to pay me half a salary after Zainab intervened and told him his conduct was unjustified “because Dr. Khalil was a founder of this hospital, and he has a right to return to it.” She used the word doctor after hesitating and eyeing me like an idiot, as though she had really gone above and beyond the call of duty.

Do you know how much I make?

I make two hundred thousand Lebanese lira a month, or the equivalent of a mere one hundred and twenty U.S. dollars. A doctor for a hundred dollars, what a bargain! It’s not even enough to cover the cost of cigarettes, tea, and arak. And I only drink arak rarely because it’s gotten expensive.

What age are we living in?

“We were willing to take the shit, but the shit thought it was too good for us,” as they say. Between you and me, Amjad’s right. He found out I wasn’t a doctor, so he offered me a job as a nurse. I refused. And when I agreed, he made me half a nurse!

Do you believe I’m a doctor?

You encouraged me when I came back from China to work as a doctor, telling me revolutionary medicine was better than regular medicine.

But how sad it is when revolutions come to an end! The end of a revolution’s the ugliest thing there is. A revolution is like a person: It gets senile and rambles and wets itself.

What matters is that revolutionary medicine no longer exists. The revolution’s over, medicine’s gone back to being medicine, and I was only a temporary doctor.

And now I’m returning to my real self.

But what is my real self?

I have no idea. I know I became a doctor by accident, because I fractured my spine. I don’t remember how the accident happened — we were in the Burjawi district, whose main street forms a tongue descending from al-Ashrafiyyeh in East Beirut to Ras al-Nab’ in the west, a stretch we were able to occupy to announce that we were liberating Beirut.

It was Lebanon’s civil war.

When the war began, I remembered Amman and how we were thrown out without having lost; in September of ’70 we were defeated without a war and left for the forests of Jerash and Ajloun, and that was the end of it. Amman — today it seems like a dream; Black September was my dream. We called that September black to convey its significance, but Amman was white, and there I discovered the whiteness of death. Death is white, white as these sheets that you’re wrapped up in in your iron bed.

I was just a kid at the time. I fought in the district of al-Weibdeh near the Fatah office. To tell you the truth, I’d been enthusiastic about going to Amman so I could look for my mother, but that’s a long story I’ll tell you later.

The war in Beirut was different and went on for a long time. When it started, I thought it would be Amman all over again, and the fighting wouldn’t go on for more than a few weeks and then we’d withdraw somewhere. But I was wrong, Lebanon blew up in our faces. An entire country reduced to splinters, and we found ourselves running around among the shattered fragments of districts, cities, villages, sects.

I won’t provide an analysis of the Lebanese civil war right now, but it terrified me. It terrified me that the belly of a city could burst open and its guts spill out and its streets be transformed into borders for dismembered communities. Everything came apart during the years of the civil war; even I was split into innumerable personae. Our political discourse and alliances changed from one day to the next, from support for the Left to support for the Muslims, from the Muslims to the Christians, and from the Shatila massacre, carried out by Israelis and Phalangists in ’82, to the siege-massacre of ’85, carried out by the Amal movement with the support of Syria.

How can this war be believed?

I see it pass in front of me like a mysterious dream, like a cloud that envelops me from head to foot. I was able to swallow an amazing number of contradictory slogans: Words were cheap at the time, as was blood, which is why we didn’t notice the abyss we were sliding into. None of us noticed, not even you. I know you hated that war and said it wasn’t a war. With due respect, I disagree because I don’t think you can apply the concept of blame to history. History is neutral, I tell you — only to hear you answer, “No! Either we dish out blame where blame is due, or we become mere victims.” I don’t want to get caught up in that argument since, as you can see, nowadays I tend to agree with you, but you’ll have to explain one thing to me. Some day soon, when you wake from your long sleep, you must explain to me how clouds can so fill someone’s head that he goes to his own death without noticing.

In the war, the Khalil who’s sitting in front of you now was the hero of al-Burjawi. No, I’m lying. I wasn’t a hero. I was with the young fighters when we occupied that salient that climbs toward al-Ashrafiyyeh, and that’s where I fell: The world flipped upside-down, I couldn’t hear a sound, and I understood that death has no meaning, and we can die without realizing it.

Like all fedayeen, I expected to die and didn’t care. I thought that when I died, I’d die like a hero, meaning I’d look death in the eye before I closed mine. But when the world flipped upside down in al-Burjawi and I fell, I didn’t look at death. Death occupied me without my realizing. It was only in the hospital that I found out four of my comrades had been killed, and then I was stricken with the crazy fear that I’d die without knowing I was dead.

If you were alive, my dear friend, you’d laugh and tell me that no one knows he’s dying when he’s dying. But it’s not true, I’ve seen them dying and knowing. A doctor sees a lot, and I’ve seen them trembling, terrified of death, and then dying.

It’s not true that the dying don’t know; if they didn’t, death would lose its meaning and become like a dream. When death loses its meaning, life loses its meaning, and we enter a labyrinth from which there is no exit.

Tell me, when you were struck dumb and fell, did you know you were dying?

Of course not. I’m sure you didn’t. In medical terms, the moment you lost the power of speech, you became worried because Amna couldn’t understand what you were saying. You thought she’d gone deaf, so you raised your voice and tried to express yourself with gestures. Then, with the second stroke, you lost consciousness. Now look at you, lying here, not aware of a thing.

For me, too, when the world turned upside down, I didn’t regain consciousness for three days. The doctor at the American University Hospital in Beirut said I had to remain motionless for a week. My l6 vertebra was crushed to powder, and to escape semiparalysis, the only cure was to lie motionless.