Can I get at your truth?

What does your truth mean?

I don’t know, but I’ll discover things that had never crossed my mind.

“And you?” you’ll ask.

“Me?”

“Yes, you. What about you?”

“Nothing.”

“And the French actress?”

“Nothing.”

“And Shams? Where is she?”

Please don’t say anything about Shams. I promise, I’ll forget about Claire and the olives dripping with lemon juice and everything else, but please, not Shams.

So let’s close this chapter and return to the summer moon and Nahilah.

That night, the moon was bright in the skies of Galilee. Yunes tapped on the windowpane and left, but he heard her whisper. He turned and saw her standing at the window, the moonlight pouring down onto her long black hair. He went closer and she said, “The Roman tree. Go on ahead and meet me at the Roman tree.”

He went to the tree, wondering why she didn’t want to go to the cave, guessing that she might be indisposed, because at that time of the month, she’d come to him at Bab al-Shams and ask him to go out with her into the fields, and he’d stubbornly refuse. The game would end with him kissing every crevice of her body while she screamed at him, “Stop it! Stop it! It’s a taboo!” and he’d give way before this taboo and be content with expending himself between her small breasts.

He went to the Roman tree, but instead of waiting for her beneath it, he got inside its huge, hollow trunk, which was wide enough to hold more than three people, and the idea rushed into his head that he could possess her there. He hid in the trunk, held his breath, and heard her circling the tree looking for him. She was like a small child lost in the fields. His love caught fire. He waited until she was close to the opening of the trunk, pulled her to him and brought her inside, while she trembled with fright and called on God for protection. He drew her to him.

“It’s me. Don’t be afraid.”

She yielded to his hands, and kisses, and his hot breath that enveloped her, while saying: “No, no.”

He pulled her closer, his back against the trunk, and tried to lift her dress. She pulled back, and her head struck the trunk. The pain made her groan. He tried to take a look, but she pushed him away with both hands and slipped outside. He followed her, reaching out like a blind man searching for something to grope.

“Listen,” she said and sat down.

“Sit there,” and she pointed.

He asked about her head.

“It’s nothing. Nothing.”

She spread the provisions she’d bought out in front of them. “I brought you some chicory and midardara.”

“No,” she said, escaping his grasp. “Today you have to listen.”

He listened as he ate, the femininity of the moon creeping inside him and chilling his body. She talked and was born through her own words. That day the seventh Nahilah was born.

The first Nahilah was his young wife that he didn’t know, because he was in the mountains with the fighters.

The second Nahilah was the beautiful woman who was born in the cave of Bab al-Shams as she trod the grapes and married her husband.

The third Nahilah was the mother of Ibrahim, the eldest who died.

The fourth Nahilah was the mother of Noor that Yunes clung to in the cave and called Umm Noor, Mother of Light, whenever she came to him with light shining from her eyes.

The fifth Nahilah was the heroine of the funeral who came out of prison to announce the death of her husband and lamented in front of everybody.

The sixth Nahilah was the mother of all those children who filled the square at Deir al-Asad.

And on that night, the seventh Nahilah was born.

Beneath the olive tree whose branches were drenched in the green moon of Galilee, the seventh Nahilah was born. She was approaching forty, wrinkles ran down her long neck, and sorrow extended from her eyes to her cheeks.

The seventh Nahilah had grown exhausted with all there was to exhaust her. A woman alone and poor.

“You know nothing at all,” she said. “Sit down and listen. I’m worn out, Yunes, you have no idea. You know nothing at all. Tell me, who are you?”

Did she ask him “who are you?” or was it enough to recount her torments? Did he see himself mirrored in her words?

Yunes sat down and discovered he knew nothing. He’d been concerned only with his Nahilahs, as though he’d married seven women who were different in every way but united by one thing: waiting.

All of a sudden, Yunes saw his life as scattered fragments — from Palestine to Lebanon, from Lebanon to Syria, from one prison to another.

He had lived for his long journeys to Galilee, when he had to get through the barbed wire, past the dangers and the Border Guard and the machine guns that mowed down border crossers.

He’d built up political and military cells composed of the tattered remnants of men who wanted to get back to their land. He’d joined various organizations. He’d started as an Arab nationalist with the Heroes of the Return and the Youths of Revenge and moved on to Fatah after meeting Abu Ali Iyad, and there, he became an official in the Western Sector.

“I was living in a no man’s land,” he told Nahilah, “as though I weren’t living, and you were here on your own, and I did nothing for you. Come with me to Lebanon.”

She said no. “The children have grown up, and it’s over. What do you want me to do in Lebanon? Live in the camp? Become a refugee? No. You come back here. I know you can’t because they’ll kill you or put you in prison here. You can’t come and I can’t either. You’re my husband, and I’m your wife. What kind of life is this, Abu Salem?”

The green moon cast its light over Yunes, and the story stole into his eyes and drowned them in a sort of drowsiness. It wasn’t tears; things rooted themselves in his eyes and spread out before him, and he became like a blind man who sees. He had been seeing without understanding. This was Yunes’ state in the presence of the seventh Nahilah — hearing and seeing and dissolving in the light of the moon that emanated, pure and green, from the woman’s eyes.

She spoke of the world she’d divided into two halves, her life she put into little compartments, her children. She didn’t talk about the little compartment of fear, she didn’t talk about how the children — their children — wore her down with their questions and their fearful eyes. She didn’t say she’d waited for him to say, “Come with me,” and that she’d thought he hadn’t said it because of his parents, so she’d waited, and when they’d died, leaving was no longer possible. She said only that things weren’t as impossible anymore, that Salem and Mirwan had started working in Mr. Haim’s garage in Haifa, and that they were happy. Then a certain hesitancy began to punctuate her speech, stretches of silence began inserting themselves between words.

“You don’t know,” Nahilah said. “You don’t know anything. You think life is those distances you cross to come to me, carrying the smell of the forest. And you say you’re a lone wolf. But my dearest, it’s not a matter of the smell of the wolf or the smell of wild thyme or of the Roman olive tree, it’s a matter of people who’ve become strangers to each other. Do you know who we are at least? Do you know what happened to us when we found ourselves being led by a blind man? Your mother saved him from death, she yanked him out of their midst, and the Israeli soldier looked right through her. She said she asked God to blind them so they wouldn’t see her. Then they killed them all. You know what happened at Sha’ab. We found ourselves with bullets flying over our heads — no, before we fled, they led the men in front of the pond, the Israeli officer was shouting: ‘To Lebanon!’ Your mother took your father by the hand and tried to lead him to where the officer was pointing, but your father walked in the opposite direction. So we followed him. A blind man leading two women and a child toward the unknown. ‘Go with the others,’ your mother told me, but I didn’t go. I was afraid to leave them, afraid to meet you in Lebanon, afraid of you and of those crowds racing against one another and stomping over one another, and I said, ‘No, I’ll stay with you.’ So we walked. Night came, but the sheikh didn’t notice. It was the first time the sheikh failed to distinguish between night and day. Your mother said that was the day the sheikh went blind. You know your father better than me. The sheikh knew the times for prayer by the way the sunlight fell upon his closed eyes, but that night he lost the ability to distinguish. Two women walking behind a blind man, in the blackness of the night, in a devastated land. We walked for endless hours. Then the sheikh stopped and said, ‘We’ve reached Deir al-Asad. Take me to the mosque.’ The sheikh had decided that Deir al-Asad was his new village, and in the morning your mother went to the headman, who was related to your father; his name was Awwad. But the headman pretended he didn’t know them. In those days, no one knew anyone anymore; we’d all become strangers. The village sheikh intervened. He came to the mosque and told your mother there were plenty of abandoned houses, and that they should go to any house. We went to the first house we found, and it was beautiful, close to the caves that came to be known as Bab al-Shams, and surrounded by an olive grove. It was the house of Ahmad Karim al-Asadi, who had fled to Lebanon with his family at the time of the unforgettable incident in the village square when everybody lay down in the road to stop the Israeli bulldozers. Ahmad Karim al-Asadi didn’t join them in the square. Like many others, he fled. So we moved into the house; it became ours. And the village became our village.