If I told you the pain was unbearable, I’d be lying. The pain was appalling, as pain always is, but it could be withstood. It was like a hand of steel gripping my chest and neck. I was paralyzed, my chest was constricted, my breathing was shallow, and pain ran through every part of my body. But I knew I wasn’t going to die and that if I did, I’d die with my comrades who’d been killed by the heat from the B7s. The B7 was our secret weapon — a small rocket-propelled grenade carried on the shoulder capable of piercing tank armor because it gave off two thousand degrees of heat.

We were in our hiding place in an old house in al-Burjawi when the grenade fell on us and we ignited. They told us later that our bodies were completely charred, that I was black as charcoal. They thought I was dead and took me to the hospital morgue, but a nurse then noticed I was breathing so they moved me to the emergency room. They worked for hours to remove the black coating incrusted on my skin; you can still see a trace of it on my shoulder.

The doctor said my life wasn’t in danger; the only real fear was that I’d be paralyzed, but I’d probably “escape clean” — and he made a gesture with his fingers like popping an almond from its skin. I wasn’t afraid of paralysis. I was sure it wouldn’t happen to me. But the idea that I’d die without knowing struck terror into me. Everyone knowing and not me. Everyone weeping and not the dead man. A true masquerade, the masquerade of death.

I got better, of course. After a week I got out of bed completely healed; I even forgot the pain. Pain is the only thing we forget. We’re capable of revisiting many things, and may even be moved by certain sensations, but not pain. We either have pain or we don’t — there’s no halfway house. Pain is when it’s there, and when it’s not, it doesn’t exist. The only feeling it leaves is of lightness, the ability to fly.

Why am I telling you about my back?

Is it because the pain came back since Shams’ death?

Shams has nothing to do with it. God knows, when I was with her I didn’t notice my back. I was like a god. With her I experienced love in the way you described it: You said God had made a mistake with men; he’d created them with all the necessary parts except one, which there is no doing without and whose importance we only discover when we truly need it.

But why am I telling you about the missing part now? I started out telling you about China.

Could it be because that was where I became aware of how ponderous my body was and discovered I was unfit for war? Do you know what it means to be unfit for war during a war?

I won’t take up more of your time with this. I sense you’re tired of my stories and would prefer to have me take you back to Bab al-Shams, to that day when you wept for love and told Nahilah you felt impotent.

“Women possess it, this missing organ,” you told me. “I discovered there that women possess it; it’s their entire body, while I’m incomplete, incomplete and impotent.”

Nahilah looked at you in astonishment. She had a hard time believing in this sense of impotence that you were voicing, because you were insatiable. She thought you were talking about sexual impotence and burst out laughing. After such a journey of the body through the realms of ecstasy, you stop and tell her you’re lacking something! She felt she’d been purified inside and out, luminous, embodied, that her eyes were two mirrors reflecting the world!

You tried to explain, but she didn’t understand. You explained that you needed another part because the sexual organ was not an instrument of love. It was its doorway, but when the chasm opened you needed another part, for which you were searching in vain.

Nahilah thought you were saying all that as a preamble to making love again, and she had no objection; she was always ready, always ardent, always waiting. So she said, “Come here.” But you didn’t want to. You’d just been trying to tell her about your amazing discovery. But of course, you went to her; and there, amid the waves of her body, you discovered that women surpass men because the woman’s body itself is the part a man doesn’t have, because she’s a wave without end.

I won’t tell you now the details of that night at Bab al-Shams. First China. Let’s make a short journey to China, then we’ll go back to the cave.

In China I discovered I was unfit for war and metamorphosed from an officer into a doctor. I studied medicine in spite of myself, because I had no other option.

In Classical Arabic mixed with colloquial Egyptian, the woman told me I was unfit for war and should go back to my country or join the doctors’ course. I accepted even though the idea of studying medicine had never crossed my mind. Like the rest of my generation, I’d had no serious schooling. After elementary school we joined the cadet camps of the various military forces. We set off to change the world and found ourselves soldiers. We were like the soldiers in any ordinary army, the only difference being that we talked about politics, especially me. I started my active military life as an officer, a political commissar with the commandos of al-Assifa because I loved literature. I used to memorize long passages of what I read. I liked Jurji Zeidan and Naguib Mahfouz, but my favorite was Ghassan Kanafani. I learned Men in the Sun by heart, like a poem. Then I broadened my horizons and memorized whole sections of Russian novels, especially Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. How I felt for Prince Mishkin! How sweet he was, caught between his two lovers! How wonderful his naiveté, like that of the Christ! I’d read The Idiot and would never tire of it. How I wished I could be like him!

No. When I stood before the investigating committee, I didn’t feel like an idiot; I felt humiliated. Being an idiot is not the same as being humiliated. It’s a position one takes. But there I stood before them humiliated, and I lost my ability to defend myself.

Literature was my refuge. In the days of Kafar Shouba, when we were exposed to the aerial bombardment, sheltered only by the branches of the olive trees, those books were my refuge. To stay alive, I would imitate their heroes and would speak their language.

I became a political commissar because I loved literature, I became a soldier because I was like everyone else, and I became a doctor because I had no choice.

It happened because of my back: After a week I was completely recovered and rejoined my battalion, which had been transferred to fight at Sanin mountain. There among the snows of Lebanon I grew to hate the war and love that white mountain. I lived in the mire of blood-spattered snow.

Blood stained the snow on both sides of the front, which stretched to the horizon. I understood why my mother had fled the camp. There we don’t see, we remember. We remember things we never experienced because we take on the memories of others. We pile ourselves on top of one another and smell the olive groves and the orange orchards.

At Sanin I realized that those far horizons were an extension of man and that if God hadn’t made these curves, we’d die and our bodies would turn into coffins.

I was in Sanin when Colonel Yahya from the Mobilization and Organization Department came and informed me that I’d been chosen to join a training course for battalion commanders in China.

And I went.

From Sanin to China in one straight shot. “Seek knowledge, though it be from China,” the Prophet said. I descended from the highest mountain in Lebanon to the lowest point in the world and there my final destiny was decided. “No soul knows in what land it shall die.”^*

It never occurred to me that I’d switch from military to medical school. Such are destiny and fate. My destiny was not to be a soldier, and my fate took me where it willed. I understood that that fall on the Burjawi steps had determined my future, and once I accepted my future as a doctor in the armed forces, things began to change. Now I’m no longer a doctor and it’s up to me to decide whether I remain a nurse. I prefer something else but I don’t know what it would be. You’ll say it was my fault, that I should have left with the others in ’82, you’ll blame me for having left the stadium and gone home.