You’re the only one who knows his story, so why don’t you tell it to me?

Before you — that is, before this endless illness and coma of yours — I wasn’t interested in him, I didn’t love him. I’d look at his picture without seeing it, and if my grandmother hadn’t been so obstinate, the picture would be dead.

Shahineh, Yasin’s mother, had a theory about photos. She thought they died if we didn’t water them. She’d wipe the dust from the glass over my father’s photo with a damp rag and place a container full of flowers and sweet-smelling herbs beneath it, saying that the picture lived off the water and the nice scent. She’d pick basil and damask roses and put them in vases underneath the picture. Bending over it with a damp rag, she’d talk with her son. My grandmother would talk to the man hanging on the wall and hear his voice, and I’d laugh at her and fear her.

“You’ll understand when you grow up,” she’d say.

I grew up and didn’t understand.

Maybe the picture died because I didn’t water it. Maybe it died the day my grandmother died. Maybe it ought to have been buried with her. I was young and didn’t care; even her death happened without my feeling it. I didn’t shed a single tear for her. I arrived after they’d buried her, so I returned to my base in southern Lebanon, and it was there that the pain struck me. Can you imagine, I waited a month to feel the sorrow? On the day itself, I didn’t feel any sorrow — it was as though I’d been hypnotized. I remember sitting. I remember that I took the pillow and the watch. I remember that I put the watch on my wrist and discovered it was broken. I tried to wind it but the spring wouldn’t move. So I took the watch off and threw it in a drawer and forgot about it.

Can it be that my grandmother wore a broken watch all those years — as though she’d killed the time on her wrist? Did she occasionally look at her watch?

I don’t know because I didn’t see her during her last days. I came and stayed for a stretch of her suffering, then came again after she was dead; I threw her watch into a drawer before returning to my base.

It was there, at the base, that fierce sorrow hit me, and I didn’t dare tell anyone why I was sad. How could I? You’re living in the midst of young men who fall in battle every day and you mourn for an old woman who waters her son’s picture, tells delirious tales, and sleeps on a pillow of flowers?

The sorrow struck me fiercely. Her voice came and went among dreams filled with horror and empty picture frames. At the time, I didn’t admit to myself that my sorrow was for her.

Today, faced with your perpetual sleep, I understand my sorrow.

There at the base we built in the olive grove at al-Khreibeh, death came and spoke to me. My sorrow was indescribable, as though I’d lost the meaning of life, as though my life had been dependent on this woman who’d departed, on her tall tales and memories.

On that day I was possessed by an intimation of death, and I became convinced I was going to die because she had died. However, it was my duty to come back to life — that’s what I told myself then, and that’s what I told myself after the massacre of the camp in ’82. I didn’t go to Tunis with the others because I was afraid of the death I saw on the faces of those who were saying goodbye. I stayed here and lived death. Then along came your illness to bring me back to the beginning. When I’m with you, master, I feel as though everything is still at its beginning, my life hasn’t started yet, your story is still before me to try to unravel, and my father has come back to me, as though he’d stepped down from the picture on the wall and is speaking to me.

Do you know what I did yesterday?

I let you sleep and went home. I lit a candle, took a wet rag, and wiped the picture, telling it I’d come back tomorrow with flowers and basil. I didn’t go back, however. It was an absurd thing to do, don’t you think? There, beneath the picture, I understood why my grandmother said I was like him, because in fact I really do look like him. I don’t know why I used to hate myself when my grandmother told me I was like him. Perhaps because I was afraid of dying like he had.

Where is my mother now?

Even her photos have disappeared from the house. My grandmother said she’d run away and taken her pictures with her. Maybe my mother was afraid of what my grandmother might do to them. Maybe she was afraid the old woman would find a way of talking to the pictures and somehow compel her — Najwah, wife of Yasin — to come home. Or no, maybe my grandmother tore the pictures up so all that would be left to me would be his picture, which spoke to her. My grandmother would say she heard him order this or that to be done, and I believed her. She’d attribute all her orders to him. Which is why I detested the picture and detested her and detested my father.

I told you I looked like him, and I hated myself because of that. No longer. But in those days, when the white was starting to invade my hair, I felt a terrible hatred for that man, and for myself, but I didn’t dye my hair. I don’t possess Salim’s degree of irony. Maybe if my life had started like his, with the Shatila massacre, I’d have become an actor like him. But let’s slow down — I also started my life with a massacre; what else would you call my father’s murder? True, I was young and can hardly remember anything, but I can still imagine the scene. What my grandmother told me about his death turned into images that haunt me.

I sit and talk to you and hear that man’s voice coming from my heart. What does one call that? The first sign of old age? Maybe. I stand at the crossroads of my forties, and at this crossroads the image of that man who left me so he could die still imposes itself on me, and always will.

Shouldn’t he have given some thought to his son’s fate, which was to be decided by two women — one who’d run away and another who’d collapse under the weight of her memories? Shouldn’t you all have given this some thought?

Before going on about my father, and before getting to the beginning, I want to tell you that the temperature you’ve had isn’t a cause for concern. Don’t be afraid and don’t fidget about on the feather pillow I put under your head. The miracle finally has occurred: I’ve managed to buy you a waterbed. I bought it with my own money, with Salim As’ad acting as the intermediary. It was the last job he did at the hospital before he took off for who-knows-where. He went and bought the waterbed, brought it to the hospital and gave me back twenty thousand lira.

“From you, Doctor, I’d never take a commission,” he said.

He took a hundred dollars from me and gave me back only twenty thousand lira, and everything was settled.^*

This bed will help. Your bed sores will heal because waterbeds don’t stick to people’s bodies like ordinary beds do. In the beginning, I substituted a cotton mattress for the hospital mattress, which is made out of foam. Cotton is more comfortable, but it’s soft. As soon as you start sleeping on cotton, the mattress fills with lumps. I thought of cotton because I was afraid of the heat of the wool we normally stuff our mattresses with.

And look at the result.

I left you for three weeks only to come back and find you covered in sores. Then I thought of the waterbed, and Salim As’ad solved the problem. He said he could rustle one up, and he did. Nothing to worry about from now on. The cause of your fever this time is the ulcers, not the catheter. All the same, I’ve decided to give you a rest from the catheter for a while — I can’t do more than that. I left you for four hours without one so you’d feel your freedom again. But more than that means blood poisoning so I put it back, in spite of your objections. I expect your temperature to decrease gradually with the ointments and the antibiotics I’ve mixed into your food. Don’t be afraid, we’ll start over, like before. I’ll bathe you twice a day, apply the ointments, put powder on your ulcers and perfume you. Rest easy, Father, and don’t be afraid. I say father and think of how you used to call me nephew. When you came to visit us at home or dropped in on the cadets’ camp, you used to hug me and say, “This one’s a champ, a champ like his father.” Now you’ve figured out that I’m not a champion like my father. I’m just a semi-unemployed nurse in a hospital suspended in a void. Also, I don’t resemble him in any way except for my prematurely white hair, my stooped shoulders, and my height. My mother used to say: “Poor boy, he’ll grow up short. He’ll be no taller than a water pipe.” And my grandmother would rebuke her and shout, “No. He’s like Yasin. Yasin was that way, then suddenly he shot up and became as tall as a spear.” She’d talk of the Nakba: “The Nakba shortened our lives and stunted our growth, too, all except Yasin. Suddenly the short boy became like a spear. We got to Lebanon after all that torment, and there I suddenly noticed, God knows how I’d failed to see it — I opened my eyes and there he was, tall and beautiful. Amazing how he grew up like that. This boy’s like his father, you know nothing about our family!”