Текст книги "Gate of the Sun"

Автор книги: Elias Khoury

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Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

Dunya talked too much – it was Professor Muna’s fault. He had made her into a tool for fund raising. Let’s contemplate this expression that has entered our language from America. In order to collect money, we need pity, and Dunya could cry on command. Professor Muna Abd al-Karim would make her tell her story, and the fund raisingwent forward. I don’t know what’s come over us since the Israeli invasion of ’82: Every intellectual and activist has started talking about nothing but the international organizations that give out money. The activists have turned into thieves, Abu Salem, with all this fund raisinggoing into their own pockets. Maybe they’re right! I swear I don’t know anymore.

But no.

This has nothing to do with Professor Muna. The psychologist was just doing her job, and maybe she believed that Dunya, being asked to tell her story so often, had turned into an actress. Acting isn’t confession and has no impact on the actor’s life. It seems, however, that Dunya wasn’t acting; she was really telling her story.

I saw her. I was watching the Women’s Conference on television when they announced a “Palestinian testimony,” and I saw Dunya come forward, on crutches. Her feet struck the ground hard, her pelvis swiveled, she walked slowly and calmly. She was neither hurried nor embarrassed, as though she’d learned her role well. She reached the podium, supported her weight on it, and let the crutches fall with a clatter. Dunya paid no attention either to the noise or to the man who hurried to pick the crutches up. She looked straight ahead and started speaking. And she amazed me. This woman was telling a completely different story. I’d no idea she’d been. . had no idea how she could have hidden all these things from us and could now be saying them in front of these foreigners. She spoke in English, sometimes slipping into Arabic, which Professor Muna would hasten to translate.

“I ran,” she said. “Then they raped me.” She said raped mein English and then stopped, to let the hall fill with silence.

“They came into the house and started firing. We were wearing our night clothes and sitting in the living room. Our house has two rooms, one for sleeping and the other for the television. When we heard the explosions, we all went into the television room. The electricity had been cut, but we found ourselves going there without thinking, to listen to the news.”

She said that her whole family was around the television when armed men entered carrying flashlights. “The light from the flashlights was terrifying. We were seated around the silent television with a single candle lit. Then the ropes of light burst in, and the firing. I fled. I went to the door, which the armed men had ripped off before entering. I walked away slowly without looking behind me, I didn’t run. I saw the flares, like little suns. I walked and I walked, then I felt something hot in my right thigh. I started running, or I felt I was running, but I wasn’t. I was moving very slowly in fact. I heard the machine-gun fire as though it were exploding in my ear.”

Dunya said she was running in place when he brought her down. “I thought I’d fallen, but it was that man. I didn’t see his face. The flares didn’t seem to give light, as though they were enveloping the darkened faces with light rather than lighting up their features. He fell on top of me. They all fell on top of me. I’d reached the corner of the main street. From our house to the main street was about ten meters. I was in front of Abu Sa’adu’s shop when I fell and the faces fell on top of me. They raped meand I felt nothing. I thought that the hotness that exploded from my right thigh was blood. Everything was hot, everything was black, everything was. . I can’t tell you long it went on. I was like someone in a coma. I saw without seeing, felt without feeling.”

Dunya’s face filled the small screen; she seemed to have black rings around her eyes. She spoke and spoke, in a flat, white voice without any trace of emotion, as though she were telling some other woman’s story. As though it had nothing to do with her.

Later I learned from Professor Muna that all Dunya did was relate what had happened to her and yet her listeners would be taken by surprise each time by some new thing she hadn’t mentioned on previous occasions. The journalists and representatives of international humanitarian organizations would come, and Dunya would sit in the office of the Association for the Disabled in the camp and speak, and Professor Muna would translate what Dunya didn’t know how to say in English.

Dunya became a story telling its own story.

When Professor Muna came to the hospital to visit her, she said she understood now. “Dunya collapsed because she stopped speaking after the Carlton conference. That was the first and last time she spoke about the gang rape. The story went around the camp, her mother got very angry, and everyone. . well, you know the people here better than me, Doctor.”

Professor Muna also said she’d been disappointed. “A German journalist said he wanted to do a piece about the camp and the trauma of the massacre. I told him about Dunya and he asked to meet her. She came, but she didn’t say a word. She told me the pain in her pelvis had come back and was so terrible she couldn’t talk through it. I begged her because I’d told the German journalist about her, and he was very interested. He wanted to hear a story from a victim, but the victim wouldn’t talk. I tried to persuade her, but she shook her head, tears flooding from her eyes, so I left her alone and apologized to the journalist, who was very sad because he wouldn’t be able to use Dunya’s story in his article. Then her mother came and told me that Dunya couldn’t get out of bed and asked me to get her into the American University Hospital. We don’t have a budget, Doctor, for such cases, so I advised her to put her in Galilee Hospital, and you know the rest.”

Dunya lies on her bed sleeping with her eyes open, or so Salim As’ad informed me before he disappeared. He said he went into her room to check because he thought he’d heard a moan, and he saw her swathed in the woolen blanket up to her neck and eyes. . her eyes were open in the darkness, and a white light was coming out of them.

Thinking she was awake, Salim said he’d approached her. “I came closer,” he said, “but she didn’t move. I bent down and whispered her name, but she didn’t answer. I put my ear close to her nose, and her deep, slow breathing brushed my ear. She was asleep with both eyes open. Is that possible, Doctor?”

Salim said he’d been frightened and wanted to ask my opinion, which is, of course, that it’s impossible; no one can sleep with their eyes open. But I don’t know anymore, anything’s possible these days. Isn’t your own death a clinical reality, Father, except that you won’t die? Everything’s become strange. Tell me, is it true the voices of the dead fill the streets at night? I don’t believe such superstitious nonsense, but we weren’t able even to collect the names of the dead properly. The community committee met and decided to make a list of names. We gathered lots of names but still couldn’t arrive at a final record. Differences arose among the various political organizations and the project folded. We don’t have the names of our dead, we only have figures. We put figures next to figures, subtract them, add them, multiply them – that’s our life. Even the Lebanese journalist, Georges Baroudi, who came to the camp and asked for a list of the names of the victims and learned that we didn’t have a complete list, said that would complicate things. He suggested that a memorial be erected to the martyrs. You know how those intellectuals think: They imagine they can solve the problems of their consciences with statues, poems, or novels. I told him that memorials were impossible here because we didn’t know what would happen to us or the camp tomorrow. But he insisted. He came back a few days later with a Lebanese sculptor, in shorts, sporting a straw hat. They roamed around the camp together, then walked to the grave. The women rushed over, yelling and hurling abuse. In those days we were still capable of defending our dead. Only when you intervened did the brawl come to a halt. You dispersed the women, invited Baroudi and the sculptor for coffee, and explained that no one was allowed to walk over graves. They apologized profusely and told you the details of their project, and you asked them to contact me to coordinate it.

More than three weeks later, Baroudi came back and told me that a committee of Lebanese artists and intellectuals had been formed to prepare plans for the Martyrs’ Garden.

“We’re going to call it the Martyrs’ Garden – what do you think?” he asked.

I said the name was fine and asked him for details of the project. He said the committee hadn’t finalized the plans yet and promised to discuss them with me and the community committee before work started. Then he told me he was writing a book about the Shatila massacre. He said there were only two books about the massacre, both by Israelis. One was by a journalist, Amnon Kapeliouk, and the other, the report of Israel’s Kahane Commission. “Don’t you think it’s shameful that we don’t write our own history?” he asked. Baroudi told me he’d translated the Kahane Report into Arabic, but he felt that we should write a book that would gather eyewitness accounts together.

He invited me to lunch at Rayyis’ ^*restaurant in the Jemmeizeh quarter so I said to myself, Why not? We drank arak and ate a good, cheap Lebanese stew. My attention was drawn to the Lebanese man they call Shoukri. He was sitting at a table surrounded by customers, peeling enormous quantities of garlic. Baroudi told me Rayyis’ was the best popular restaurant in Beirut, that he went there regularly to meet a group of young men who’d fought in the ranks of the Lebanese forces, and that he’d heard the story from Boss Josèph, who’d taken part in the massacre himself. What he had in mind was to arrange an encounter between Boss Josèph and me. “A Dialogue between the Executioner and the Victim” would be the first chapter of the book.

He asked me what I thought.

I said I didn’t know because I didn’t know about that kind of book, but it might be a good idea.

We sat and waited, but Boss Josèph never appeared. Baroudi ordered some food and arak, and then he took me on a tour of al-Ashrafiyyeh and told me about the massacre as it had been described by Boss Josèph.

Are you in the mood to hear it? Or are you in some other place and would prefer me to tell you about Salim? I think you liked the story about Salim because he was a pleasant young man, bright, and a real son of a bitch.

Where was I?

Abu Akram came by and invited us to drink tea at the Popular Front office. The tall bald man hesitated, he was waiting for Daniel.

“Where’s Daniel?” asked Abu Akram.

“I don’t know. We lost him in the camp,” said the tall man.

“I’ll send someone to look for him. Please come with me.”

So we went with him.

In the office, I had to translate.

Abu Akram delivered a brief lecture in his awkward English on the sufferings of the Palestinian people. He was followed by a man I hadn’t met before; his stomach hung down over his leather belt, the smoke from his cigarette filtering through his thick moustache; he held forth. The tall man and Catherine found their attention wandering, and I translated a bit. I skipped the slogans because they bored me, and also because they sounded ridiculous in English. China taught me a valuable lesson. There I was required to translate whatever I said in Arabic into English, and I discovered that I could dispense with half the expressions we use. Even my way of speaking changed: I started to avoid the lengthy introductions we usually put in front of whatever we have to say and went straight to the point instead.

The fat man’s speech resisted translation. How was I to translate the words for suffering, torment, oppression, and persecution that the man used, one after the other? He’d string together adjectives without indicating what he was describing, so I summarized his long Arabic sentences in brief English ones.

He interrupted me to say, “I said more than that.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I told him. “English is a condensed language.”

“But you cut out half my speech. How do you expect them to understand our sufferings when you cut them out?”

He looked at the tall man and asked if he understood what he was trying to say.

“Translate, Son, translate. Ask him if he understood what I was trying to say.”

“I understood,” said the tall man in response to my translation, adding that the aim of their visit was to acquire knowledge. He didn’t say one word to indicate solidarity, as Abu Akram and the fat man expected he would. He said he’d come to learn so he’d be able to transfer an accurate picture to the stage.

Salim was sitting behind the room’s only table, while Abu Akram, the fat orator, and the rest of us sat on low sofas against the walls. Salim said nothing during the speeches; his glances moved between the French woman and me. But when we’d subsided into silence and were sipping our coffee, he asked me, without any preliminaries, why I didn’t dye my hair!

“Why should I dye it?”

“To make you young again,” he said.

“I am young. I don’t need to prove it.”

You know that my hair started to go white when I was twenty-one. My grandmother, God rest her soul, told me it was in the family, that my father’s hair was completely white before he was twenty-five.

My grandmother said my father had loved his white hair because it made him look old and young at the same time. She also told me she’d insisted on washing his hair before he was buried. She got a bowl of water and washed his hair, which had been stained with his blood, until it was white as snow. And she wept. My grandmother said she didn’t weep until the hair was shining white once more. It was then that she understood her son was dead, and she plunged into a bout of weeping; her tears only dried up when she died. I wasn’t in the house when she died. They sent me a message to tell me the end was coming, and I came up from the south. She gave me the cushion and the watch and the Koran, but she didn’t die. Her last days dragged on, so I went back to the base in the south. She died in my absence.

Salim asked me why I didn’t use a shampoo to dye my hair. He said he had a wonderful French shampoo. “Would you like to try it?”

“No, thank you.”

“I use it, look at my hair.”

“You?”

“Certainly. I’ve been using it for eighteen years.”

“You!”

He said the shampoo had removed all traces of white from his hair. He then told me his story.

Now that’s a story, I said to myself. No one had agreed to describe his experience of the massacre to the French people, so I asked if he’d let me translate this into English.

Salim said he could speak English if he wanted to and didn’t need me to translate, but he didn’t want to tell them his story.

When Salim said his hair had turned white, Abu Akram shrugged his shoulders as though he already knew and looked at me in amazement, as though I should have known, too.

I asked him apologetically how his hair had come to be white, and he smoothed it with his right hand and said it had turned white during the massacre.

“How old were you?” I asked.

“Five,” he said. He said his mother had picked him up; they had both been bleeding, and his mother had run through the fire.

“There wasn’t a fire,” I said.

“Oh yes there was,” he said. “The fire was everywhere, and we jumped over it.”

“It was the flares,” said Abu Akram.

“No,” said Salim.

“Of course,” said the fat man. “What’s the problem? Everyone tells the story his own way. There wasn’t any fire, Son, it was the flares, but you were young, how would you know.”

“I know alright,” said Salim and pointed at his head.

He said his mother ran with him, picked him up and ran, and they were shooting in all directions. He’d clung to her neck, then suddenly, everything went sticky and bloody, and he’d come to in the hospital with his hair as white as snow. The nurses had been afraid of him.

“In America I shaved my head.”

He said he’d gone to America with his mother after all the members of his family had been killed. “My mother emigrated to join her sister in Detroit and took me with her. That was in ’84, but they refused to give me a resident’s visa. I stayed with her for two years in secret, then I came back. She told me, ‘You go back to Lebanon and I’ll send for you when they give me a Green Card.’”

“And did she send for you?”

“No. I waited and waited but it was no use. Abu Akram is my father’s first cousin. He took me in and is letting me live in this office until my mother sends for me. I wrote her letters, but I received no responses. It seems the Americans don’t like white hair, or she’s forgotten about me. God knows where she is now. I asked to meet the American ambassador in Beirut. I phoned the embassy several times, but they never gave me an appointment, I don’t know why, even though I spoke Classical English to them.”

“There’s no such thing as Classical English,” I said.

“What are you talking about, man? All the languages are the same. There’s colloquial Arabic and Classical Arabic and there’s colloquial English and Classical English, am I right?”

“No,” I said, “but it doesn’t matter.”

“Do you want some shampoo?”

He got up and fetched a black leather case, opened it, and took out a number of bottles.

“I sell shampoo to keep myself busy.”

He went over to the actress and indicated that she should buy some. Catherine took a bottle and seemed embarrassed, not knowing what she should do.

I snatched the bottle from her and gave it back to Salim.

“Forget it. Try it on someone else.”

“Let them make up their own minds, brother. Maybe they would have bought some.”

“Leave it alone, Son. Forget it,” I scolded him in a loud voice.

“Why don’t you buy some, Doctor, and dye your hair,” said Salim.

“What’s he saying,” asked the tall man.

“He’s selling dye,” I answered, and quickly told him the story of Salim’s white hair.

“Don’t tell him,” said Salim. “If you want, I’ll tell him myself. But did you believe my story? I only tell it to sell shampoo.”

I looked at Abu Akram and saw his lips curling in a kind of smile, and his small white teeth – as white as those of a young child – appeared.

“What? What?” asked Catherine.

“Buy the shampoo, and I’ll tell you,” said Salim.

The girl took the bottle of shampoo and asked how much it was.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Salim. “Pay whatever you want.”

Catherine took a hundred-franc note out of her little purse and gave it to Salim. Salim took the note, looked at it for a while, then handed it back to Catherine and turned to me, “No, Brother. I was just joking.”

“Which part was the joke,” I asked him, “the shampoo or the white hair?”

“You guess.”

Salim took the bottle from Catherine, put it back in his leather case, said goodbye, and went off.

Abu Akram then explained that Salim joked around all the time, treating his tragedy as comedy; he is alone in life and needs work.

“What did he study?” I asked him.

“Nothing, my friend,” he said. “We’re all children of the revolution, and what can you study in the revolution?”

“Tell him to come and see me at the hospital. Maybe I can find him some work. But is his story true?”

“Of course, of course,” said Abu Akram. “He’s the only one of his family to have survived.”

“What about his mother?” I asked.

“His mother died, but he insists on saying she picked him up and escaped with him. She didn’t pick him up. They found him under the bodies; they pushed the bodies away and took him to the hospital, and there they discovered that every hair on his head had turned white.”

“And America?”

“What America, Brother? His aunt lives in Detroit, that’s all. Do you think someone like Salim or like us can get a visa for America? Out of the question! He just loves the cinema. He sees Al Pacino’s films dozens of times each and learns the dialogue by heart. He puts the films on the video machine and says the words along with the actors. That’s how he learned English – monkey see, monkey do.”

“And the shampoo?” I asked.

“That’s a different story,” he said. “The shampoo came after the Ekza. Do you know what he was doing for a living last year? He’d go out to al-Fakahani with a bunch of small bottles, stand in the middle of the road and shout, ‘Ekza for pain! Ekza for rheumatism! Ekza for impotence!’ He’d invented a medicine he called Ekza and he’d package it in empty bottles and sell the bottles for three thousand lira each.

“‘Ekza!’ he’d shout, opening a bottle and drinking the contents in front of everyone. ‘Drink and get well! Rub it on where it hurts and the pain will go away!’ And people bought the stuff. Then they arrested him.

“They took him to the police station on the new highway, where he confessed that Ekza was a mixture of water and soya oil, and that it was harmless. The officer smiled and told Salim that he’d overlook it this time on condition that he didn’t do it again. But instead of leaving, Salim took out a bottle and offered it to the officer saying he’d give him a good price and sell him the bottle for two thousand, now he’d become his friend, and that Ekza cured everything, especially constipation.

“The officer lost his temper and ordered him to be beaten and put in jail. They practically beat him to death and left him to rot for more than a month.

“When he returned to the camp, he said they’d released him because they were scared of him and his hair that had turned white overnight.

“After his ordeal in jail, Salim decided not to leave the camp. He stopped making and selling Ekza and started selling shampoo. Yesterday, if you’d seen him, you’d have understood how he works.”

“And is it real shampoo?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” said Abu Akram, “but he stands in front of the mosque, washes his hair, and people buy.”

“What’s he saying?” asked the tall man.

As I told him the story of the shampoo, I was looking at Catherine, expecting a reaction, when we heard a racket outside the door. The bodyguard Abu Akram had sent to look for Daniel had returned with him. Daniel came in with three children larking around while he handed out chewing gum and chocolates and they argued over them.

“Get the children out of here!” shouted Abu Akram.

“Where were you?” I asked.

“Walking around,” he said. “And, as you can see, I like children.”

The tall man stood up and Catherine got ready to go; it seemed they’d lost interest. They didn’t ask for more information about Salim.

Abu Akram asked if I’d taken them to the mosque-cemetery.

I said no.

“I’ll take them,” he said. “Thank you, Doctor.”

I was on the verge of leaving when Catherine asked me what Abu Akram wanted.

“He’ll take you to the cemetery,” I said.

“But we’ve already seen the cemetery,” said the tall man.

“The one at the mosque,” I said, and explained how we’d turned the mosque into a cemetery during the siege.

“Another cemetery!” exclaimed Catherine, and her lower lip started to tremble. “I don’t want to, I don’t want to. I want to go back to the hotel.”

I told Abu Akram that our friends were tired and it would be better to take them back to the hotel, but Abu Akram insisted and asked me to translate what he said. He started talking about death, and about how we as a people regarded the dead as holy, and that if Shatila hadn’t stood fast during the siege, the Gaza and West Bank intifada ^*would never have happened.

I interrupted and said I wasn’t going to translate. “Can’t you see, my friend, the woman’s crying and the man’s trying to calm her down, with his pale face and his bald spot shining with sweat? Drop it and let them go.”

I heard the girl whisper to the tall man that she wouldn’t do the part: “I’m scared. I won’t do the part, and I want to go back to the hotel.”

I translated this to Abu Akram, and the fat man said he understood and went over to pat her on the shoulder. The moment his hand touched her, she trembled and pulled back, as though she’d received an electric shock, and I saw a sort of fear mixed with disgust in her eyes.

I left them there and walked out without saying goodbye.

Shit!

Is this what things have come to? They’re afraid of the victim! Instead of treating the patient, they fear him, and when they see, they close their eyes. They read books and write them. It’s the books that are the lies.

But why does the image of Catherine stick in my mind? Perhaps because she’s young and inarticulate, or perhaps because of her short hair, cropped like a boy’s. I must have felt something for her, especially when her lower lip started trembling. It started when I translated parts of the anecdote about Salim, and especially the part about how he used to stand in front of everybody and dye his hair in order to sell the shampoo. Catherine didn’t laugh like me and Abu Akram and the tall man. Her face seemed obscured by a dark veil, as if she’d seen us playing out our own deaths. I think she thought we were beasts. How can we take all that and not implode?

In fact, Father, wouldn’t it be better if nobody saw us? Otherwise, why would they want to build a wall around the camp? The Lebanese journalist I told you about spoke to me about the wall. He said the government would soon complete the rebuilding of Sports City, which was demolished by Israeli planes, and that Beirut was going to host the next Arab Games, and it would be better for the Arab athletes if they didn’t see.

They solve the problem by covering their eyes. And maybe they’re right! In this place, we’re a kind of a dirty secret. A permanent dirty secret you can only cover over by forgetting it.

“I’d like to forget, too,” I told Baroudi when he invited me to Rayyis’ restaurant.

I’d prefer to forget, and my encounter with Boss Josèph changed nothing because I’m not seeking revenge.

Can you believe it? The man invites me to meet with one of the butchers of Shatila, and I tell him there’s no point because I don’t hate them.

“There is a point,” said the journalist. “I want you to come because I’m going to write about reconciliation and forgiveness.”

“But I haven’t forgiven him or the others,” I answered.

“Never mind, never mind. What matters is how you feel.”

“And what about how he feels?” I asked.

“About what who feels?” he asked me.

“This Josèph that I don’t know.”

I went out of curiosity, since I don’t know East Beirut, and I’d never had the chance to meet someone we’d fought. The civil war had become a long dream, as though it had never happened. I can feel it under my skin, but I don’t believe it. Only the images remain. Even our massacre here in the camp and the flies that hunted me down I see as though they were photos, as though I weren’t remembering but watching. I don’t feel anything but astonishment. Strange, isn’t it? Strange that war should pass like a dream.

What do you think?

If you could speak, you’d say that the whole of life seems like a dream. Maybe in your long sleep you’re floating over the surface of things, as eyes do over pictures.

We went to Rayyis’ restaurant and waited, but he didn’t come.

We sat at a table for four. The journalist ordered two glasses of arak and some hummus and tabouleh, and we waited. Then a group of young men came in. Their hair was cut like youths in the Lebanese Forces.

“Nasri!” yelled Baroudi, who jumped up from his seat to embrace him.

“What are you doing here?” asked Nasri.

“What am I doing? I’m getting drunk,” answered Baroudi.

“Come and get drunk with us,” said Nasri.

“I can’t. I have a guest. And we’re waiting for Boss Josèph.”

I found myself at their table. There were six young men and a young brunette in a very short skirt and a low-cut blouse. It seemed to me she must have been Nasri’s girlfriend because whenever she got the chance she’d put her hand in his.

They laughed and drank and ate and told jokes. I tried to match their mood, but I couldn’t, it was as though my mouth were blocked with a stone, or I was ashamed of my Palestinian accent.

Baroudi broke the ice and told them who I really was: “I forgot to tell you that Dr. Khalil works for the Palestine Red Crescent in Shatila.”

“Welcome, welcome,” said Nasri. “You’re Palestinian?”

“Yes, yes.”

“From Shatila?”

“Yes. Yes, I live in Shatila, but I’m originally from Galilee.”

“I know Galilee well,” he said, and he started to tell me, to the delight of his companions, about a training course for parachutists that he’d taken part in in Galilee.

“Have you visited Palestine?”

“No.”

“I know it well. You have a beautiful country. It’s a lot like Lebanon, but the Jews have fixed it up, and it’s in good shape. The way it’s organized is astonishing – gardens, water, swimming pools. You’d think you were in Europe.”

He said they’d done their training in a Palestinian village. The village was just as it had been, but weeds had sprouted up everywhere.

“What was the name of the village?” I asked.

“I don’t know. They didn’t tell us, and we didn’t ask.”

“It was a small village,” said another youth, called Maro. “In the center of it, there was a big rock.”

Nasri said he’d fired at a tree, to amuse himself, and the Israeli trainer had scolded him and told him that he was lucky he’d missed because in Israel they loved trees and forbade anyone to cut them down or do them any harm.

“They’re taking care of our trees,” I said.

“If only you could see it, the whole area is planted with pine trees. God, how lovely the pines are! You’d think you were in Lebanon.”

“Pine trees! But it’s an area for olives.”

“The Jews don’t like olive trees. It’s either pines or palms.”

“They killed the trees,” I said.

“No. They uprooted them and replanted.”

Nasri would throw in a few Hebrew words that I didn’t understand to prove that what he was saying was true. He said he’d been a fool because he’d believed in the war, and that this war was meaningless. He was leaving for America soon to continue his studies in computer engineering.

The strange thing was that I listened to this young man who’d jumped with his parachute over Galilee without feeling any hatred. I’d imagined that if I ever met one of those people, I wouldn’t be able to hold myself back, but there I was drinking arak and laughing at their jokes and watching the girl as she tried to hold Nasri’s hand and he pulled it out of hers, while Baroudi observed me and looked at his watch and grumbled because Josèph was late.