What do you think?

If you could speak, you’d say that the whole of life seems like a dream. Maybe in your long sleep you’re floating over the surface of things, as eyes do over pictures.

We went to Rayyis’ restaurant and waited, but he didn’t come.

We sat at a table for four. The journalist ordered two glasses of arak and some hummus and tabouleh, and we waited. Then a group of young men came in. Their hair was cut like youths in the Lebanese Forces.

“Nasri!” yelled Baroudi, who jumped up from his seat to embrace him.

“What are you doing here?” asked Nasri.

“What am I doing? I’m getting drunk,” answered Baroudi.

“Come and get drunk with us,” said Nasri.

“I can’t. I have a guest. And we’re waiting for Boss Josèph.”

I found myself at their table. There were six young men and a young brunette in a very short skirt and a low-cut blouse. It seemed to me she must have been Nasri’s girlfriend because whenever she got the chance she’d put her hand in his.

They laughed and drank and ate and told jokes. I tried to match their mood, but I couldn’t, it was as though my mouth were blocked with a stone, or I was ashamed of my Palestinian accent.

Baroudi broke the ice and told them who I really was: “I forgot to tell you that Dr. Khalil works for the Palestine Red Crescent in Shatila.”

“Welcome, welcome,” said Nasri. “You’re Palestinian?”

“Yes, yes.”

“From Shatila?”

“Yes. Yes, I live in Shatila, but I’m originally from Galilee.”

“I know Galilee well,” he said, and he started to tell me, to the delight of his companions, about a training course for parachutists that he’d taken part in in Galilee.

“Have you visited Palestine?”

“No.”

“I know it well. You have a beautiful country. It’s a lot like Lebanon, but the Jews have fixed it up, and it’s in good shape. The way it’s organized is astonishing — gardens, water, swimming pools. You’d think you were in Europe.”

He said they’d done their training in a Palestinian village. The village was just as it had been, but weeds had sprouted up everywhere.

“What was the name of the village?” I asked.

“I don’t know. They didn’t tell us, and we didn’t ask.”

“It was a small village,” said another youth, called Maro. “In the center of it, there was a big rock.”

Nasri said he’d fired at a tree, to amuse himself, and the Israeli trainer had scolded him and told him that he was lucky he’d missed because in Israel they loved trees and forbade anyone to cut them down or do them any harm.

“They’re taking care of our trees,” I said.

“If only you could see it, the whole area is planted with pine trees. God, how lovely the pines are! You’d think you were in Lebanon.”

“Pine trees! But it’s an area for olives.”

“The Jews don’t like olive trees. It’s either pines or palms.”

“They killed the trees,” I said.

“No. They uprooted them and replanted.”

Nasri would throw in a few Hebrew words that I didn’t understand to prove that what he was saying was true. He said he’d been a fool because he’d believed in the war, and that this war was meaningless. He was leaving for America soon to continue his studies in computer engineering.

The strange thing was that I listened to this young man who’d jumped with his parachute over Galilee without feeling any hatred. I’d imagined that if I ever met one of those people, I wouldn’t be able to hold myself back, but there I was drinking arak and laughing at their jokes and watching the girl as she tried to hold Nasri’s hand and he pulled it out of hers, while Baroudi observed me and looked at his watch and grumbled because Josèph was late.

“That Josèph of yours is full of shit,” one of them said. He started telling tales of Josèph’s cowardice, telling how during the battle of the Holiday Inn,^* he threw himself from the fourth floor to escape and ran on a broken leg.

“A dopehead and an asshole,” said another.

“Look how he’s ended up — calling himself a boss, just when there aren’t any bosses left,” said Nasri.

I felt a desire to defend Boss Josèph. I thought it wasn’t fair to talk about him behind his back and that if he were there, he’d show them what being a boss meant. And as to his being a coward, I didn’t believe it, especially after what my writer friend had told me about how particularly brutal he’d been during the Shatila massacre. However, I preferred to remain silent. I was in a strange position. How can I describe it? I really can’t say there had been no crimes. We, too, killed and destroyed, but at that moment I sensed the banality of evil. Evil has no meaning, and we were just its tools. We’re nothing. We make war and kill and die, and we’re nothing — just fuel for a huge machine whose name is War. I said to myself, It’s impossible. Especially with this Nasri, I felt as though I were standing in front of a mirror, as though he resembled me! If I’d been able to talk, I’d have talked more than he did, but a big stone stopped up my mouth. Then the stone started crumbling to the rhythm of the girl’s hand that reached out for Nasri’s hand and then pulled back. He was drinking arak in a special way: He’d suck the glass, leave a little of the white liquid on its lip and then lick it off. He had fair skin and broad shoulders. I think he must have been a body builder because his chest rippled under his blue shirt. He kept coming back to the story of the parachute training and what he’d felt while flying over Israel.

He’d say Israel and look at me apologetically: “Sorry, sorry — Palestine — is that better?” He said he’d flown over Palestine and would look at me with eyes full of irony and complicity.

After my third glass I asked about the war: “What do you feel now?”

“Nothing at all,” said Nasri. “And you?”

“I feel sad,” I said.

Nasri said he didn’t feel regret or sorrow for his friends who’d died in the war. “That’s life,” he said, shrugging his shoulders indifferently.

“But you were defeated,” I said.

“And you were defeated,” he said.

“Not exactly,” I said.

“Tell me about your life in the camps, and then talk to me about victory and defeat.”

“I’ll tell you about my death,” I said. “You killed me.”

“We killed you, and you killed us. That’s what I was trying to explain to you,” said Nasri. “We were defeated, and you were defeated.”

“All of us were defeated,” said Maro, raising his glass. “Knock it back, boys — a toast to defeat.”

The young men raised their glasses and drained them to the last drop.

“We have to go. It was good to meet you, Doctor. Don’t be upset, we’ll talk some more,” said Nasri, who asked for the bill and paid it. Then they all left.

I wanted to — but didn’t — mention the intifada and say, “It’s true we were defeated, but the game’s not over.” But that stone stopped up my mouth.

Nasri paid and left, and I was embarrassed because my friend the writer didn’t even take out his wallet.

I felt nauseous among the stacks of empty dishes, but I wasn’t drunk. I’d only drunk three glasses of arak, but it was the emotion. I looked at my watch and said Josèph wasn’t coming.

“How about a coffee?” asked Baroudi.

I said, “Great,” and raised my hand to order, but Baroudi pulled it down.

“Not here,” he said. “Let’s go to a café.”

I sat next to him in his red Renault, and he took me through streets I didn’t know. That’s how I finally became acquainted with al-Ashrafiyyeh, East Beirut’s Christian quarter that they also call Little Mountain. He switched the car’s tape recorder to the Fairouz song, “Old Jerusalem.”

“We’re enemies,” I said to Baroudi.

“Don’t worry about it,” he answered me. “It’s all bullshit.”

Then we entered a beautiful street. It was how I imagined the streets of Haifa. My grandmother told me tales of the city by the sea, where the streets were shaded by trees and jasmine and there was the scent of frangipani. “We’re in the Circassian quarter,” Baroudi said. “This is where the rich people live. They were just translators for the foreign consuls in the days of the Ottomans, and look at their palaces now!”