That was when I became convinced that self-criticism was useless, since everything will be found to have its motives, its pretexts, its special circumstances, and so on.

Sitting in the café, Georges Baroudi took advantage of the rhythm of the rain with its long ropes to confess. He said he’d recorded more than three hours of confessions by Boss Josèph and wanted to publish them in a book that he’d call The Banality of Man. He said he’d brought a tape recorder with him to record our conversation, and that he’d make that the introduction to his book. But Josèph didn’t come, so he asked me to tell him my version of what happened, so he could put the two versions into the book. “A page for you and a page for him — what do you think? The killer and the killed in conversation.”

“But I wasn’t killed,” I said.

“You represent the dead,” he said.

“The dead don’t talk and they don’t have representatives,” I said.

“Aren’t you a Palestinian like them? Look at Israel; it represents the victims of the Holocaust.”

“That’s the difference,” I said. “I don’t believe victims have representatives, that they. . that they. .”

“You understand nothing,” he said.

I told him his project didn’t make sense, that you couldn’t sit the victim down next to the perpetrator. “Your book will be as banal as its title.” Then I burst out laughing.

At that instant, the man before me was transformed. Even his white face became tinged with green. He said, as though it were Josèph speaking, “They took us to the airport — I was leading a detachment of twenty boys. We were wasted. Bashir died and Abu Mash’al gave me a load of cocaine and asked me to distribute it to the boys. We were sniffing cocaine like a snack, as if we were eating pistachios. Then we went down to the camp and began. We didn’t take any prisoners and there was no face-to-face combat. We went into the houses, sprayed them with bullets, stabbed and killed. It was like a party, like we were at scouts’ camp dancing around the campfire. The fireworks came from above, from the flares the Israelis were sending up, and we were down below having a party.”

“A party,” he said!

Boss Josèph had come across three children. He’d asked one of his comrades to help him grab them. He’d asked his comrade to push them together on a table. “I took out my revolver. I wanted to find out how far a shot from a Magnum could go. One of the children slipped off onto the floor. The light was burning our eyes, and I asked my comrade to turn his face away. He didn’t understand what I wanted, so he let go of the two children and left the house. I went up to them. I wanted to tie them up and then move back from them but I couldn’t find a rope, so I jammed them together, put the muzzle of the revolver close to the head of the first one, and fired. My bullet went through both heads, so they died right off. I didn’t see the blood, I couldn’t see it, in that strange Israeli light. When I left the house, I came across the third child, the one who’d fallen. I stepped back and fired at this small moving thing, and it came to a sudden stop where it was.”

At this point Monsieur Georges got into a complicated analysis of Boss Josèph’s state of mind, saying he wasn’t aware of what he was doing and so couldn’t be considered responsible for his crime, and he got into a complex theory about death. Then he asked me if I’d killed anyone.

“Listen, Monsieur Georges, I’m a fighter, your friend is a butcher. Can’t you tell the difference between a criminal and a soldier?”

“You’re right, you’re right, but I want to know.”

“What do you want to know?”

“I’m asking you if you’ve ever killed anyone and what you felt afterward.”

In the middle of this maelstrom, he asks me if I’ve killed anyone! Where does this man live?

“Of course,” I said. I said it simply, even though I’d never asked myself that question before. I hadn’t killed anyone, in the sense of getting close to an unarmed man and firing at him and seeing him die. But I said with a simplicity that astonished Monsieur Georges that I’d killed.

He asked me about my feelings.

“What feelings? There are no feelings.”

Imagine, Abu Salem. Imagine if Monsieur Georges came to you and asked you the same question. How would you answer him? For sure you’d throw him out of your house and tell him to go to hell. What kind of questions are these? Doesn’t this genius know that death means nothing, all his talk of blood instinct means nothing, it’s just literary talk? In war, we kill like we breathe. Killing means not thinking about killing, just shooting.

Is it possible that someone would come along in the middle of the whirlwind of this war and ask me about my feelings when I kill?

First of all, I haven’t killed.

Second of all, even if I’d killed, there would have been no feelings.

And finally, I’m a fighter. Either I die or I live. What am I supposed to do?

Monsieur Georges wanted to focus on the first experience. He said he was starting to understand my response, because anything could become a habit, and habitual behavior loses its impact.

“Tell me about the first time,” he said.

“There wasn’t a first time,” I said.

“No, no, try to remember.”

“The first time I saw a man die, he was screaming that he wanted to die.”

That was my first time.

Do you remember your first time, master?

I think that this kind of question leads nowhere.

When Monsieur Georges asked me about my first time, I could only remember myself as a cadet. I could see myself running with the other boys with shaved heads and crying out: “We’ll die, we’ll die, but we will never submit!”

The trainer running in front of us shouting, “We’ll die,” and us behind him, our mouths full of the fruit of death. That was my first experience — putting death in my mouth like a piece of gum, chewing on it, running with it to the end of the world and then spitting it out. But Monsieur Georges wanted to know my feelings when I killed a man — so I asked him about his feelings. He said he’d never fought in his life. I don’t understand how a man can be an intellectual and a writer and let war go on right next to him and not try to find out what it’s like.

He said his first time was when he truly saw, and then he told me the story of the barrels in the camp Jisr al-Basha.

He told me he went with them to provide press coverage and saw how they forced their prisoners to get into the barrels. He said the fall of the Tal al-Za’atar and Jisr al-Basha camps had been barbaric.

I told him I didn’t want to hear about it — about the barrels that seeped blood, or the prisoners rolling around inside the barrels, or the rapes, the killings, or the eating of human flesh.

I have enough to deal with as it is.

I told him I hated myself now. I hated myself for the way I’d stood spellbound in front of that yellow poster designed by an Italian artist — I’ve forgotten his name — as a salute to the martyrs of Tal al-Za’atar. I hate those three thousand vertical lines the artist put on his poster. I hate our way of celebrating death. The number of our dead was our distinguishing feature — the more deaths, the more important we became.

I said I no longer liked our way of playing with death.

He said death was a symbolic number and numbers had been the sole stable element since the dawn of history. “Numbers are magic,” he said. “Nothing fascinates men more than numbers; that’s why death expressed in numbers turns into a magic formula.”

We left the café. He gave me a lift to the entrance of the camp and went away. I don’t know what he wrote in his newspaper about the meeting with Boss Josèph that never took place; I lost interest the moment I got back to the camp. Even the idea of reconciliation stopped making any sense: The reconciliation has happened without happening, as should be clear from my telling you about the incident without getting upset.