I studied medicine for three months and then returned to Beirut carrying with me a new language as well as an education in drinking warm water and in the performance of simple field operations such as removing bullets, bandaging wounds, treating fractures, giving injections and so on.

I passed as a doctor. I worked in a field hospital in Tyre, would stretch my mouth while repeating the Pakistani’s words, and became a doctor. Time’s wheel has turned, as they say, and now here I am, a temporary doctor, in a temporary hospital, in a temporary country. Everything inside me is waiting for something else. These waiting periods breed and erase each other, push each other out of the way and interact.

I look at my life and see images. I see a man who looks like me, and I see men who don’t look like me, but I don’t see myself. It’s strange how we deal with life. We go to one place and find ourselves in another. We search for one thing and find something else. Alternatives pile up on top of us. In place of Nuha came Siham. In place of Siham came Shams, and in place of Shams I don’t know. But now I have to wise up and marry. I’m forty years old, and at forty you either get married or life becomes hell. When a man says he “has to” get married, it means he’s reached rock bottom. Marriage is supposed to happen without that “has to.”

No. With Shams, marriage never occurred to me because I was living like someone under a spell. Now when I remember that magic, I see another man. The Khalil sitting in front of you isn’t Shams’ Khalil. Shams’ Khalil was different. He didn’t eat, because love suppresses the appetite; he didn’t speak, because love has no language; and he didn’t mind waiting. When she was there, her presence filled him up, and when she wasn’t, the waiting filled him up.

Then the love went.

The only thing that destroys love is death. Death is the only cure for love. It ought to have been me. It ought to have been me who killed her. I’m the one who. . But I didn’t.

Now I’m looking for a substitute. I’m not looking for a woman like Shams but for any woman. How good it is to find a woman in your bed! But my bed remains empty, and I can’t ask anyone to help me find a woman. A woman is something you have to find for yourself.

Betrayed, a cuckold, and in search of a woman?

So what? All men are betrayed and all of them are cuckolds. I know. There, in the house of the Green Sheikh, I realized this. I suffered and wept for Shams.

I went through moments of great weakness. Shams was dead, and rumors of a death list were everywhere. I decided to go to them. Abd al-Latif with his one good eye took me to the house of Sheikh Hashim, who they called the Green Sheikh. I took off my shoes and joined their circle and twisted and swayed with the chanting, invoking with them God’s name in their dhkir ritual. I let my breathing be guided by the hand of the sheikh who conducted us to the final ecstasy where we touched the universal Presence. I twirled with them, experienced the intoxication, and my tears flowed involuntarily. The sheikh asked me to stay behind after the others had dispersed and said he was pleased with me, letting me know that the time to repent had come. He accepted me as a disciple in his order. He gave me a book by the great Yashrati sheikh and told me to come and see him whenever I wished.

On my second visit, when I went to ask him about the story of Reem at Sha’ab, which I’d heard from everyone, I saw his wife pound on the door of their house, cursing the sheikh. He refused to open the door.

Then I learned the truth.

She was sixty-three years old. Seated on the bench outside her sister’s house, she told the story, to those who wanted to hear, of how she’d gone in and found the sheikh panting with the wife of one of his disciples in his arms.

“I saw it,” the woman went on, “and her cuckolded mule of a husband didn’t want to believe me. He said I was crazy and drove his wife home.”

The Green Sheikh’s wife said that when she saw them she started screaming. Everyone, including the woman’s husband, rushed over, and the hullabaloo commenced. She continued: “Then the Green Sheikh raised his hand, everyone fell silent, and he declared, ‘You are repudiated.’ He managed to convince everyone that I was crazy, and ordered me out of the house. I tried to tell them the truth, but no one believed me. A man in his seventies, the old lecher: I saw him hugging the woman to his fat belly while he panted like a dog! They all said I was crazy. The husband took his wife away and spat on me. He should have spat on himself and on her.”

In the house of the Green Sheikh, I understood that Shams hadn’t betrayed me. She’d been under a man’s spell, or under I don’t know what. . I left the Sufi circle and never went back.

I understood Shams, but I was very angry with her for not having told me about her relationship with that other man. I’d have advised her not to kill him. But she was right; only death can put an end to love. By killing her love, she revealed who was the more courageous of the two of us. Me, I waited for my love to die. And with death came death. With death love evaporates and turns into nothing.

I don’t care about people. They pity me because they don’t understand anything. They pity me because I loved her, because she betrayed me, because I fear her ghost and because — I don’t know. For my part, I don’t care. Anyway, I’m in China. The hospital sent me back to China, where I was able to work on my English. I can’t be a doctor just in Arabic, and without warm water! There I was reborn. There, when everything seemed to end, when they decreed I couldn’t continue my military training, everything began. Khalil the officer was swept away, and in came Khalil the doctor. Instead of going to war, I went to the hospital. And today Khalil the doctor has been swept away again, and in has come Khalil the nurse.

Do you know what Dr. Amjad said?

He invited me into his office and started rambling incoherently. He sat behind the desk and spoke as though he were the director of a hospital. Of course, he is the director of a hospital, but come on! A hospital without the minimum necessities — no hygiene, no medication, nothing — it’s almost a prison. And this empty head stammers in front of me, saying I really should work full time. He stretches out his words, hesitates and leaves half of them suspended in midair before snatching them back and continuing. He trips over the letter R, saying, “You’re a nu’se, and you have to work as a nu’se. It’s impossible. Things can’t go on this way.” I tried to explain the conditions under which I was working and how you take up all my time.

“All your time!” he said mockingly. “The fact is, we’ve started to worry for your sanity, doctor, talking to yourself all the time. You think we don’t know what you do in that room? You think talking’s a cure? If talking were a cure, we’d have liberated Palestine long ago. No, it’s impossible.”

I told him I took half a salary and was content with that, and he told me that what I called a half-salary was a full salary now that the Red Crescent’s funding had been cut off.

“The money evaporated with Kuwait’s oil, Dr. Khalil. There is no money. There’s war and America, but the oil has gone, and the Arabs have gone bankrupt, and the revolution has gone bankrupt and your salary isn’t half a salary, so you’ll have to choose between working with us as director of nursing on a full-time basis and leaving the hospital.”

He said the hospital wasn’t a place of asylum, that he only wanted what was best for me, and he had respect for my past accomplishments. “But you have to do something. Don’t be afraid, you’re under our protection.”

I didn’t answer. He was trying to manipulate me, to make it clear that he knew the ins and outs of the Shams affair. All the same, I was on the verge of refusing his offer when he hung a threat over you.