“Nice to see you,” I said.

“Can I do anything for you?” he said.

“Thanks. Zainab told me you wanted to see me.”

“Ah yes,” he said. “How’s the old fellow doing?”

“Better,” I said.

I told him about the drops, of your reaction when I pricked your hand with a needle, of the clear signs of improvement.

He took off his dark glasses — I forgot to tell you, he wears dark glasses when he reads. Strange. I’m sure this doctor doesn’t have a clue about either medicine or politics, but what can we do? “God’s the Boss,” as they say. He took off his dark glasses, blew pipe smoke in my face, and announced my new duties as a full-time head nurse.

I objected.

I explained the importance of my work with you and was getting up to go when he informed me of the decision to transfer you to the home.

I tried to say something but couldn’t. My tongue was as heavy in my mouth as a log. Then the words burst out. I said that transferring you meant throwing you onto the garbage dump and leaving you to die, and that I knew the place was neither a home nor a hospital but a purgatory for the living and the tortured.

Amjad, however, insisted on having his way.

“Do you have any idea what you’re doing?” I asked.

“Of course, I’m doing my duty. The hospital isn’t set up for a case like Yunes’. People like him die in their own homes.”

“There’s nobody there,” I said.

“I know. That’s why we’ll be transferring him to Dar al-Ajazah,” he said.

“Impossible!” I yelled. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“On the contrary, I know better than you do.”

“You know nothing.”

“I’m doing my duty. There’s no room for pity in our profession.”

“Pity! You’re an imbecile. You don’t know what Yunes represents.”

“Yunes! What does Yunes represent?”

“He’s a symbol.”

“And how can we treat symbols?” he asked. “There’s no place for symbols in a hospital. The place for symbols is in books.”

“But he’s a hero! A hero doesn’t end up in a cemetery for the living dead.”

“But he’s finished.”

When I heard the word finished, everything tipped over the edge. I don’t remember exactly what spilled out of me — that you were the first, that you were Adam, that nobody was going to touch you, that I’d kill anyone who got near you.

The doctor tried to calm me down, but I got more and more excited.

He said he was the one who made the decisions here.

I said, “No. No one decides.”

I snatched the newspaper out of his hands and started ripping it into little shreds and putting them in my mouth. I chewed them up and spat them out and shouted. I kept on ripping and spitting away, and the doctor shrank back behind his desk until only his head remained visible. Then it disappeared and his body grew smaller and smaller in the chair until it vanished entirely as though the desk had swallowed it.

I left him under the desk and stormed out of his office. A stormy exit: a hurricane.

And I came back to you.

I’m sure now that you’ll stay put even though I didn’t say what I meant to in Amjad’s office.

Tell me, how is it possible? How could Amjad dare speak of you that way? Is he completely out of it? Everyone knows your story. Doesn’t it mean anything to him or what? Has he lost his memory? Are we a people without a memory? Maybe he’s just out of it, but I bet he’s not. What’s come over him? What’s come over all of us? In the end, there’s nothing left but the end. You and me, in a world that’s hurling us into oblivion.

You’re fortunate, Yunes.

Can you imagine where you’d be without me?

If you were in my shoes, and only if you were in my shoes, you’d understand that the worst is yet to come. I know, you want me to tell you about the political situation at the moment. I hate politics because I can no longer understand what’s going on. I just want to live. I run from my death into yours and from my self to your corpse. What can a corpse do?

You can’t save me and I can’t heal you, so what are we doing here? I’m in the hospital and you’re in prison — no, I’m in prison and you’re in the hospital — and memories flow. Do you expect me to make myself a life out of memories?

I know, you don’t like memories. You don’t remember because you’re alive. You’ve spent your whole life playing cat and mouse with death, and you’re not convinced the end has come, you’re not ready to sit on the sidelines and remember. “We only remember the dead,” you said to me once, but no, I completely disagree with you about that. I remember through you so I can stay alive. I want to know. At least know.

Like all the other children who grew up in the camps, I heard all the stories, but I never understood. Do you imagine it’s enough to tell us we weren’t defeated in 1948 — because we never fought — to make us accept the dog’s life we’ve led since we were born? Do you imagine I believed my grandmother? Why did my mother run away? Why did my grandmother tell me my mother had gone to see her family and would come back? She didn’t come back. I went to Jordan to look for her and couldn’t find a trace of her, as though she’d evaporated into thin air. That’s how it works for us: Things disappear rather than appear, as in a dream.

Now, within this long dream in the hospital, I want you to tell me the story. I’ll tell it to you, and you can make comments. I’ll tell it, and you’ll speak to me. But before that I want to tell you a secret, but please don’t get angry. I watched the video Umm Hassan brought, and I saw al-Ghabsiyyeh. I saw the mosque and the lotus tree and the roads smothered in weeds, and I felt nothing. I felt no more than I felt when I went to the center of Beirut devastated by the civil war and saw the vegetation wrapped around the soaring buildings and the ruined walls. No, that’s not true. In the middle of Beirut, I almost wept — I did weep. But while watching Umm Hassan’s film, I felt a breath of hot air slap me. Why do you want me to weep for the ruins of history? Tell me, how did you abandon them there? How did you manage that? How did you live in two places at once, inside two histories and two loves? I won’t take your sincerity at face value nor your enigmatic talk about women. All I want is to understand why Nahilah didn’t come with you to Lebanon. How could you have abandoned her? How could you have lived out your story and let it grow and grow to the point of killing you?

My question, dear master, is: Why?

Why are we here? Why this prison? Why do I have no one left but you, and you no one but me? Why am I so alone?

I know you’re not able to answer, not because you’re sick or because you’re suspended between life and death, but because you don’t know the answer.

Tell me, for God’s sake, tell me, why didn’t you insist that your wife come with you to Lebanon? Why did Nahilah refuse to come?

She said that she wanted to stay behind with the blind sheikh but you didn’t believe her. Yet you abandoned her and left. You left her and you left your oldest son, who died. It’s because your father told you, “Go, my son, and leave her here. We’re drained after so many moves; we don’t have the energy to pick up and move again.”

The old blind man, who’d moved from village to village and from olive grove to olive grove until fortune brought him to Deir al-Asad to die, told you he didn’t have the energy to move, and you believed him?

Why did you believe him?

Why didn’t you tell them?

Why did you turn your back on them and go?

I know you were one man straying from village to village along with the other lost souls, that you were wanderers in despair. But what did you do after the fall of Tarshiha? Why didn’t you go to Lebanon with the fighters? You made your way into the hills of al-Kabri and fought with the Yemenis, and then returned to Sha’ab and found the village empty. You looked for them everywhere. A month later you found them in Deir al-Asad, living in half a house, and instead of looking after them you left again, abandoned them.