The woman almost went mad. All the people of Deir al-Asad said the woman lost her mind. She would roam the outskirts of the village as though chasing her own death — going into areas the military governor had placed out of bounds (almost everywhere was out of bounds). She’d roam and roam. Then she would return home exhausted and sleep. She’d never worry about her second son, Salem, whom his grandmother had smuggled out of the house.
It took Nahilah months and months to return to her senses after she gave birth to her daughter, Noor, “Light.” The girl’s name wasn’t originally Noor: Her grandmother named her Fatimah, but Yunes said her name was Noor because he’d seen Ibrahim in a dream reciting verses from the Surah of the Koran called “Noor.”
“Listen to what he was saying.” Nahilah looked and saw a halo of light around Yunes’ head as he recited:
God is the Light of the heavens and the earth;
the likeness of His Light is as a niche wherein is a lamp
(the lamp in a glass, the glass as it were a glittering star)
kindled from a Blessed Tree,
an olive that is neither of the East nor of the West
whose oil wellnigh would shine, even if no fire touched it;
Light upon Light;
(God guides to His Light whom He will).*
Yunes said he’d been able to bear his son’s death because he hadn’t believed it. “When you don’t see, you don’t believe. I used to tell Nahilah that Ibrahim would come back once he’d tired of playing with death. For me, I swear to you, Ibrahim is still alive, I’m waiting for him.”
I CAME INTO your room today laughing. Nurse Zainab had made me laugh by telling me how a woman had smacked Dr. Amjad. I’d thought that Amjad Hussein was a respectable man. I don’t know where they dug him up to play the doctor here. Some say Mme. Wedad, the director of the Red Crescent, got him the job because he’s a relative of hers. But he’s not one of us, because he didn’t fight with us and the Israelis didn’t detain him at Ansar. So where does he come from? Don’t ask me now why I didn’t go to the Biqa’ when our battalion withdrew from al-Nabatiyyeh during the Israeli incursion — that’s just the way it happened. I withdrew with the battalion and went to Ain al-Hilweh, and that’s where I was arrested. A month later they released me and I found myself going to Beirut. I’ve no idea, however, where you disappeared to. You told me that when you learned the Israelis had gone into Beirut, you fled to the village of Batshay and hid there with the priest.
“The priest’s an old friend of mine, he thinks I’m a Christian,” you told me.
Me, on the other hand, they tied up to a barred window that looked like a cage, blindfolded me, wound what felt like ropes around me, and took me to the Israeli prison before I was moved to Ansar.
I won’t tell you right now what I told everyone about our life in the detention camp. In Ansar, I lost fifty pounds, I was frail and sick. Everyone was at the camp except Dr. Amjad. Even Abu Mohammed al-Rahhal, president of the Workers’ Federation, left sick and died two months later. I haven’t told you this dream he used to tell us every day. I don’t know what happened to Abu Mohammed in the detention camp. There were thousands of us in the middle of a bare field surrounded by barbed wire, “treating our cares with our cares,” as we used to say — all of us except Abu Mohammed, who went from one tent to another, telling the same dream.
“Yesterday,” he’d say, “I had a dream,” and he’d repeat the same dream, until it became a joke.
“Yesterday I had a dream that I was, I don’t know how, standing on the pavement with my manhood (he used this odd term for his member) sticking out, and it was — and I apologize for mentioning it — long, very long, longer than the street from side to side, and an Israeli tank came along and drove over it.”
“Did the tank cut it off, Abu Mohammed?”
“Did it hurt a lot?”
Abu Mohammed would say he was afraid he was going to die, because “when a man sees his manhood cut off in a dream, it means he’s going to die.”
“Where did you get that from, Abu Mohammed?”
“I read it in Ibn Sirin’s Dreams,” he answered.
“And who’s this Ibn Sirin? An interpreter of dreams about reproductive organs?”
“God forbid! Ibn Sirin was a great Sufi and a great scholar, and his dream interpretations are never wrong.”
Anyway Ibn Sirin was right, because Abu Mohammed died. This Dr. Amjad, though, wasn’t with us at Ansar, and no Israeli tank cut off his manhood. But he’s here; a respectable man, obsessive about cleanliness. I’ve never seen such a clean man. He lives in the middle of this shit and streams of cologne flow from him. He washes his hands with soap, then dabbles them with cologne and turns his nose up at everything. I don’t know what to make of him. You haven’t seen him, so I’ll have to describe him to you (even though I don’t like descriptions): bald, short, thin, with an oval face, high cheekbones, small eyes. He wears glasses with gold frames that don’t flatter his dark complexion, and his pipe never leaves his mouth. He has very narrow shoulders, and he speaks fast, looking off into the distance to make what he says seem important.
He wasn’t with us in the war or the detention camp, and I don’t understand why he’s working in the hospital here. He says he’s half-Palestinian because his mother’s Syrian, from the region of Aleppo, and he doesn’t speak Palestinian Arabic but a funny dialect that’s a mixture of Classical and Lebanese.
Zainab told me today about a pious Muslim woman wearing a headscarf who struck him because he tried to make a pass at her.
“I heard the woman’s scream, then the sound of slapping. The woman came out, threatening to return with her husband, and the doctor started pleading with her in an embarrassed voice. Later the woman emerged with her husband, who was carrying a bag of medicine, and the doctor thanked the husband, practically falling over himself he was bowing so low.”
Today I’m happy. Dr. Amjad was humiliated, and I want to savor the thought of him bowing in front of the husband, groveling like a dog. I want to have a quiet cigarette and think about life. What more do you want from me today? I’ve bathed and fed you. We sucked out the mucus and everything else. Today I’m happy.
I DON’T KNOW any stories. Where am I supposed to get stories when I’m a prisoner in this hospital? Okay, I’ll tell you the story of the cotton swab. You’re the one who told it to me, I’m certain of that. You know, when I heard the story, I was very aroused, even though I pretended to be disgusted and went into a long tirade defending women’s rights, saying that such degradation of our women was the root of our failures, our paralysis, and our defeats. But when I fell asleep, I was possessed by the demon of sex. That’s all I will say.
In those days, as the story goes, in a small village in Galilee called Ain al-Zaitoun, Sheikh Ibrahim Ibn Suleiman al-Asadi decided his only son should marry. The boy had reached adulthood, his beard sprouting at fourteen. The blind sheikh urged his wife to find a bride for her son quickly, for the sheikh had one foot in the grave, and he wanted to see his grandchildren before dying.
The wife was of the same mind. She, too, wanted her son to marry so that he’d settle down, find himself work, and put an end to his long absences and his life in the mountains with the sacred warriors.
The story is that the young man, who was called Yunes, had no objection to the idea, and when his mother told him she was going to ask for the hand of Nahilah, the daughter of Mohammed al-Shawwah, he agreed, even though he’d never met the girl. He said yes because he liked her name and in his mind drew himself a picture of a fair skinned girl with long black hair, wide eyes, broad cheeks, full hips, and round breasts. He fantasized about a woman sleeping next to him and letting him into her treasures.