My grandmother doesn’t know why they killed him.

You, Father, on the other hand, know everything.

My grandmother said you showed up at the funeral when no one was expecting you, appearing among the mourners and raising your hand in the victory sign. You’d covered your face with your kufiyyeh.^* In those days, the kufiyyeh hadn’t yet become our emblem; we didn’t have an emblem. You came with the kufiyyeh covering your face and head and you shouted “God is most great!” and everyone shouted the same thing. Then you disappeared.

Tell me about those days. Tell me how you held onto the courage of the beginning after all that had happened.

You’ll tell me that in those days you weren’t aware of the beginning. You continued your journeys over there as though things hadn’t been interrupted, as though what had been etched on our bodies hadn’t been etched on yours. You moved among the forests and hills of Galilee, continuing your life and returning to the camp. You appeared only to disappear.

I know that things weren’t as simple as they appeared.

I know you were a wolf and like all wolves didn’t like to settle down in one place. In the early years, you felt a strange wildness and a killing loneliness.

But my father.

Why did he die that way?

Why didn’t he go with you?

Why did he leave me?

Dr. Amjad is wrong. Do you know what he told Zainab? He said: “Khalil is going through a psychological crisis driven by the need to find his father; leave him with that corpse until he’s had enough.”

He spoke of you as a corpse, of me as an idiot, and of our story as nonsense. The son of a bitch! I wish I could rip away that shell he hides behind! Camouflaged behind those thick glasses of his, he’s so sure he’s discovered meaning in his life by chasing after money. I know he’s a thief. He steals here, and he works at another hospital, where he dons the skin of the all-knowing, all-understanding doctor — but he doesn’t know a thing. No one who hasn’t crossed a desert like the desert of Shams can know anything about life.

Excuse me, Father, if I say that love is not as you describe it. Love is feeling yourself to be lost and unanchored. Love is dying because you can’t hold on to the woman you love. Shams would slip through my hands, and she made a fool of me, saying that she wanted me, then taking off for some other man. That’s love — an emptiness suddenly filled, or a fullness that empties and melts into thin air. With her I learned to see myself and love my body. Before, I knew nothing. I thought that love was Nuha, her mother’s cooking, and her father’s throat clearing, desire that wakes and then dies away. But Shams taught me to be a man, how to die in her arms and cease to exist. Please don’t laugh. I don’t remember if I became aroused with her the way men do, the way I would when I took hold of my member and discharged it with my hand. With her I didn’t have a member. Naturally, I’d become aroused but — how can I put it? — it was more like melting and coming out of the water. We’d bathe in the water of desire and dissolve — but the desire never died. Her water. . her water would burst forth like a spring emerging from the depths of the earth, and I’d drown.

That’s what Amjad doesn’t know, since, if he had known love, his life would’ve been ravaged as mine has been.

How can you expect me to fix my life now that she is dead?

Should I tell you a secret? My secret, Father, is that now, when her ghost comes to haunt me, I feel the same desire that used to take me into her limitless world, and I tremble with lust, and I’m afraid.

But why?

I used to think that Sameh’s death would be swept under the carpet the way we’ve swept so many hundreds of deaths under the carpet. Why did they sentence her to death?

Was it because. .?

Or because she. .?

But I knew she was going to die, because I could see death lurking in her eyes. You were the one who told me about the death that blazes from people’s eyes. Do you remember that girl, what was her name? Dalal? Yes, Dalal al-Maghribi. Do you remember the suicide operation she carried out in Tel Aviv, convulsing the camp as though it had been struck by an earthquake? We were unable to believe that Dalal, that melancholy, meek girl who worked in the sewing workshop, had been capable of commanding a boat that would set her down in Haifa, of kidnapping an Israeli bus full of passengers and dying that way.

That day you told me you’d seen death in her eyes and explained that you could tell the fighter who was going to die from his eyes, since death covers the eyes like an invisible film and the fighter is bewitched by his own death before he dies, and so goes obediently. I remembered the Lebanese youth, Mohammed Shbaro, who we called Talal. You don’t know him because you weren’t with us during the Lebanese war. That was our war, Abu Salem. I say that in all sorrow because whenever I talk about memories of the Lebanese war, I feel as though my face is falling to the ground and shattering. I could see death in the eyes of that young man, who we called the Engineer because he was a student at the Jesuit University in Beirut. He’d put on his thick glasses, wrap the patterned kufiyyeh around his neck, and go out looking for death. He died in Sanin because he’d decided to die. He didn’t have to die, but you might say he was trailing behind his eyes. The image of the Engineer resurfaced when you were telling me about the connection between my father’s death and his eyes. I know you’ll say that my father carried his death in his eyes, I know that it wasn’t your fault, or Adnan’s, God rest his soul. In those days you were all in a hurry to carry out armed operations, and the central authority that emerged from the Lebanese civil war of ’58 had decided to teach you a lesson. My father was the lesson. They came and killed him to deter you, but in vain. My father died and my mother paid the price.

Did my father understand the danger he’d put himself in? Why didn’t he hide? Why didn’t he flee the house? Why didn’t he get his weapon and fire before he died?

He fell like a sack, as my mother said, or he flailed around in his blood like a rooster with its throat cut, as my grandmother said, or he was a hero, as all of you said.

But shouldn’t he have worried about us?

I know you didn’t worry about your children, but why didn’t he?

Tell me, what was this life you led? You left your children with a woman on her own over there, and you were between here and there, wearing your heroism on your sleeve the way heroes do.

Tell me, is that what heroism’s about? You abandon your children to fear and despair and march off to die?

I told you I hated my father and lived alone with my grandmother. Do you know what it means for a person to live in a vacuum? Do you know why my mother left me, and where she went?

You want the beginning!

That’s the beginning. The beginning, Father, is death. In the beginning my father died, and my mother disappeared. My grandmother knows why she disappeared, and I’m certain she encouraged her to flee; she may have even given her a push. After the death of my little sister, Fatmah, my mother spent five years with us, weeping. Then she disappeared. I don’t remember the day because I didn’t notice her absence. Then it seemed as though it had always been that way. My grandmother said my mother had gone to visit relatives in Jordan, and the visit had turned into a long one. The woman disappeared as though she’d never been, and when I became aware of her absence, it was too late. I used to long for her at night. Just at night, I used to feel like something was gnawing at my chest. I’d get up from the mattress and go to hers, and not find her. I’d sleep next to her when she wasn’t there. Then my grandmother decided to rearrange the house. She bought two beds, one for her and one for me, and my mother didn’t have a place anymore, and I could no longer go to her mattress at night to sleep next to her or smell the scent of her hair. No, no, nothing happened the way it was supposed to happen, like my coming back to the house, for example, and not finding her, bawling, rousing the neighbors and everyone setting out to search for her; my grandmother bawling, surrounded by women giving me pitying looks, and one of them saying, “Poor boy, no father and no mother!” No, nothing like that. I told you, I don’t remember the day she disappeared because I didn’t notice, and then I sort of got used to it. My grandmother never told me what had happened, but I understood my mother wasn’t going to come back.