If I could, I’d go to Shams’ family and tell them the truth and let them do what they want. I’m innocent of her murder, of her love, of everything, because I’m an imbecile. If I hadn’t been made a fool of. . everything might have been different.
Tell me, who in the story of Shams wasn’t made a fool of?
She killed him, the bitch! She told him, “I give myself to you in marriage,” and then she killed him.
She loved him, and he loved her, but, like me, he felt she would slip out of his hands. Is it possible for a man to marry a woman who leaves someone else’s bed to go to him?
Why did she kill him?
Was the fact that he’d lied to her enough to make her kill him?
We all lie, so it really seems unreasonable. Just imagine — if the penalty for lying were death, there’d be no one left alive on the surface of the earth.
Now I’ve started to doubt everything. I’m not sure it was a matter of honor. Shams is the first woman in the history of the Arab world to kill a man because he was unfaithful and tricked her.
But let’s slow down. .
Did she kill him?
They said she killed him in public. Everyone saw her, but does that mean anything? What if everyone’s lying? What if everyone just believed what they’d heard from everyone else, who had heard what they’d heard from others?
No, that’s impossible. If that were true, my whole life might have been an unbearable lie, which it is anyway. Shams lied to me, and everyone is lying to me now. Death threats are being passed on to me, and I’m afraid of a lie. When you’re afraid of a lie, it means your life is a lie, don’t you think?
I’m scared and I hide in the hospital, and the memories pour down on me and I have no idea what to do with them. What would you say to a novel-writing project? I know you’ll tell me I don’t know how to write novels. I agree, and I’d add that no one knows how to write because anything you say comes apart when you write it down and turns into symbols and signs, cold and bereft of life. Writing is confusion; tell me, who can write the confusions of life? It’s a state between life and death that no one dares enter. I won’t dare enter that state, I say this only because like all doctors and failures, I’ve become a writer. Do you know why Chekhov wrote? Because he was a failed doctor. I imagine that by becoming a writer he was able to find the solution to his crisis. But I’m not like him; I’m a successful doctor, and everyone will see how I was able to rescue you from the Valley of Death.
I’m certain she killed him, because I know her and I know how death shone in her eyes. I used to think it was love that changed her eyes from gray to green, then back to gray, but it was death. Gray-green is the color of death. Shams used to talk about death because she knew it. My grandmother didn’t.
Shahineh didn’t dare say the child had died. She said they went by Beit Jann and were afraid. The airplanes were roaring above their heads, and when night fell their journey to Lebanon began.
My grandmother said she found herself in the middle of a group of about thirty women, old men, and children from the village of al-Safsaf wandering the hills looking for the Lebanese border. “With my daughters and my son, we walked with them. I don’t know how we ended up in that terrified group. We were afraid, too, but not like them. When they spoke they whispered. When we got to Beit Jann, they refused to go into the place. Their leader said they’d rob us and ordered us to continue marching. I told him not to be afraid, but he told me to shut up, and we left. When we got to Lebanon, we’d lost our voices because the old man had made us whisper so much.”
It seems that on that journey my grandmother’s voice became husky. I forgot to tell you that my grandmother had this husky voice, like it was coming out of a well deep inside her, which made it seem broad and full of holes.
“The child began crying from hunger. A child of three or four sobbing and whining that he was hungry, while everybody looked askance at his mother and asked her to make him shut up. The woman didn’t know what to do. She picked him up and started shushing him, but he wouldn’t let up. And there was an old man. . I’ll never forget that old man.”
My grandmother always used to threaten me with the old man of al-Safsaf. When I refused to eat her greens, she’d tell me she’d ask the old man of al-Safsaf to come and strangle me at night, and I’d be scared and chew my prechewed roughage.
She said she realized why they were so terrified when they reached Tarshiha. There their fear disappeared and they ate and wept, and the old man told the story of the white sheets.
“We received them with white sheets. We went out waving the sheets as a sign of surrender, but they started firing over our heads. Then they ordered us to gather in the square. They chose sixty men of various ages, tied their hands behind their backs with rope and stood them in a row. Sixty men of various ages standing like a wall threaded together by the rope linking their hands. Then they opened fire. The sound of the machine guns deafened us, and the men dropped. The people gathered in the square fled into the fields. Death enveloped us.”
“After we reached Tarshiha, he became a different man,” said my grandmother. “But on the road, during those silent nights, he was a monster. A tall, thin man with a hunchback. His moustache looked like it had been drawn with a pen. His hair was gray, his moustache black, and he ordered us about furiously. We could see the sinews of his small, veiny hands as he motioned to us to be silent.”
My grandmother said she gave the mother the one pita bread she had underneath her dress. She said she was afraid of the old man because he was determined to kill the child if he kept crying. The woman tried her best to make her son shut up — holding his hand, lifting him up, carrying him, putting him back down on the ground, letting him walk between her legs; but the child wouldn’t stop crying. The woman took the round loaf from my grandmother and divided it in two. She gave her son half and the other half she gave back to my grandmother. But the boy refused; he wanted a whole pita and started crying again. The old man came up to him and took hold of his clothes and started shaking him. My grandmother rushed over and gave her half to the mother, who gave it to her son. But the boy wanted a whole pita, not two halves. The woman put the two halves together, extracted a needle and thread from the front of her dress, threaded the needle, and started sewing up the pita bread.
My grandmother said she saw things as though they were wrapped in shadows. The meager crescent moon that would slip out from among the branches of the trees turned people into colliding shadows. I listened to the story and was scared of my grandmother’s husky voice, which swallowed up the scene and made it a story of djinn and afrits.
The woman sewed up the pita bread and gave it to the boy, and he stopped crying. He took it joyfully, until he discovered that it wasn’t a normal pita. The woman had sewn it hastily in the dark and hadn’t made the stitches tight. The boy took the bread and the stitches started to pull apart — the gap between the two halves widening. And he started to cry again. He held the pita up to give back to his mother and cried.
The old man came forward, took the pita bread, put it in his mouth, and started gobbling it down. He swallowed more than half of it along with the thread and went over to the woman.
“Kill it,” he hissed at her.
“Throw it down the well,” said a woman’s voice from the within the shadowed crowd.