“They took our weapons and said the war was over. We said, ‘Okay, then we’ll go back to our wives and children.’ They said no, you will stay as our guests. You know what Arab hospitality is like: We were prisoners without a prison, we were like people abandoned in the desert. In fact, we were in the desert. Then your father disappeared and we heard shots, but we didn’t know then that it was him. He did disappear, however. God rest your soul, Rabbah al-Awad, you were the reason for our release. After he disappeared, we went on a hunger strike. Yunes was the one who proclaimed the hunger strike and yelled in the officer’s face, ‘A strike to the death!’ Then they let us go. Everyone went back to his family except for me. They said that in view of my military experience, it had been decided to put me ‘at the disposal of the leadership.’ Imagine the situation that I find myself in at my age! I’m at the disposal of the leadership, I don’t have a latrine to use, and I’m not allowed to visit my children in Ain al-Hilweh. Go, daughter, and take care of your son: Rabbah is a martyr and is buried God-knows-where. Forget his grave and look after the living. Go, God keep you, and if you pass by Ain al-Hilweh, ask for my son Is’af and tell him his father wants to see him before he dies.”

My grandmother said she was convinced.

“Listen well, Daughter,” said Abu Is’af. “Death is destiny. Someone who was destined to die in Palestine and wasn’t able to, will die somewhere else.”

He said he’d wanted to die there himself because “Palestine is closer to paradise.”

My grandmother said she stayed in al-Ghabsiyyeh and didn’t want to move out with the others three days before the battle because her father was fighting there, but he soon disappeared. “I waited for him at the house during the shelling, but he never came. So I got myself and the children ready and left. They were bombarding as we fled, the houses were collapsing. They died: Mohammed Abd al-Hamid and his wife Fathiyyeh, Ahmad al-Dawoud, Fayyad al-Dawoud; I saw them lying in the street, as though they had been hurled out of their houses.” She said, “The houses were still standing, but their roofs had flown off.”

I didn’t want to believe my grandmother. The story of that birdman who fell from the minaret with his hands folded across his chest seemed like an image that had broken loose from memory and alighted in the woman’s consciousness.

“That’s history,” you’ll tell me.

But I’m not concerned with history anymore. My story with you, Abu Salem, isn’t an attempt to recapture history. I want to understand why we’re here, prisoners in this hospital. I want to understand why I can’t free myself from you and from my memory. In becoming the head nurse, I’ve returned to the position I deserve, as the hospital’s effective director.

Is that because the hospital isn’t a hospital any longer, that, in fact, it’s been turned into something less than a clinic?

Or because I saw in you an image of my own death and rushed toward death to talk with it?

Or because, deep down, I’m afraid of Shams? I’ll tell you her story later, then you’ll understand why I’m afraid. I’m not afraid of death but of Shams, yes — of her, of her hoarse voice when it shudders with anger and passion, and of her body marked by sex, men, and death.

I don’t believe my grandmother, and I don’t believe history either, but that day I found myself wearing the name my grandmother had given me. She’d dressed me in the name of her dead son, ruffling my hair and weeping for her husband who’d died in the Revolution of ’36 in the neighboring village of al-Nahar, and whom they brought back to her in a shroud, so that she was unable to see him.

My grandmother said she smelled the same odor when Yasin died.

“He was basted in his blood, and the odor of it escaped from the cracks of his disintegrating body until the whole house was filled with it, there in al-Ghabsiyyeh and here in the camp.”

“Like that smell, Grandmother?” I asked sarcastically, pointing to the pillow.

“It was our smell. The smell of the al-Awad family, the smell of blood mixed with the scents of flowers and herbs.”

She ran to her pillow.

“Smell it,” she said.

I clasped the pillow to my chest and took in a deep whiff of it; I chuckled and snorted at once.

“It’s the smell of henna, Grandma. It’s the smell of your head. Did my grandfather dye his hair with henna?!”

She snatched the pillow away from me angrily. “You don’t understand anything,” she said. “When you grow up, you’ll understand what I’m saying — the same dream and the same smell. They brought my husband and his smell came off him and filled me up. They took him into the house for a few minutes and stopped me from going to the grave. They carried him around the house and asked me to let out some ecstatic youyous, but I didn’t, not because I don’t believe in God, as they claimed, but because I couldn’t. The smell had overwhelmed me, and I could feel it creeping into my bones and inhabiting them. You have to trill for martyrs, and I’ve trilled for many. In fact, our lives are punctuated by youyous. We’re all martyrs, Son. But when they brought him to the house, I couldn’t; his smell reigned everywhere.”

She recounted my father’s death.

When she recounted his death, she’d rise and enact the crime. The truth of the matter is that the story changed after my mother disappeared. When my mother was here, she was the one who’d tell the story. My mother would speak, and my grandmother would sigh. My mother would say the man fell like a sack, motionless, as though he’d died before they shot him.

My mother said she opened the door, with Yasin behind her, and saw three men. Yasin said, “Is everything okay? Please come in.” One of them pulled out his revolver and fired three bullets. She said she was standing in front of him, saw the gun and heard the shots. She said that everything happened very fast — they shot him and left.

“I turned and saw him on the ground, motionless. I bent over him. His mother came and pushed me away. Then everyone came.”

My mother said my sister died two weeks after my father. “He took my daughter and went away,” she said, “so what am I doing still here?”

I don’t remember my younger sister, Fatmah. My grandmother said she was pink and blond and white, like the middle of the day, and that the Jew, Aslan Durziyyeh, when he visited us, couldn’t believe she was my father’s daughter, she was so beautiful and white. The old woman yawns and raises her hands to her head as though she’s going to throw the days behind her. “God bless him, Aslan Durziyyeh. I don’t know what’s become of him.”

My grandmother doesn’t remember my sister well. I ask her and she says she doesn’t know. “I told Najwah, ‘You take care of Fatmah, and Khalil’s mine,’” so the work was divided between the two women from Fatmah’s birth. But Fatmah died; she was struck by an intestinal infection.

“We got up in the morning, and she was like a piece of cold wood. Your mother picked her up and ran with her to the doctor. He told her she’d dehydrated.”

I lived alone. My mother stayed up at night, waiting for the moon of al-Ghabsiyyeh that she never saw, and my grandmother wept and called me Yasin. Between the two women I listened to stories I thought were mine and got confused. I would tell stories about my father as though I were telling them about myself. I’d imagine him through my mother’s eyes and see him fall like a sack. Then I’d see him in my grandmother’s words, see the blood staining his white hair as he convulsed between life and death on the threshold of our house.

But why did they kill him?

The papers wrote that he’d been killed because he’d resisted the police patrol that came to arrest him. My mother said he was behind her when he went to the door and didn’t possess any weapons. And my grandmother says the weapons were there, but they didn’t find any. “They came the next day and turned the house upside down. I’m the daughter of Rabbah al-Awad and you think they’re going to find the rifle? The rifle’s there, Son, and when you grow up you’ll take it. But they were liars. He didn’t resist. If he’d resisted, he’d have killed them all. He went out to greet them because he didn’t know they’d come to kill him. The sons of bitches.”