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When he woke that morning, he couldn’t explain the feeling of foreboding that gripped him. He pressed his memory in the hopes of finding a reason in one of his dreams from the night before, but could recall nothing in particular. The dreams seemed muddled and confused, their beginnings and endings tangled together, and he was still feeling uneasy after he’d finished getting dressed. When he got on the bus, he found himself in no mood to speak to his colleagues, so he buried his head in a newspaper to keep their droning voices from reaching his ears. He didn’t realize something was up until a hand reached out from behind to shake his shoulder, and a voice abruptly said, “Have you heard the news? They’ve arrested Wasfi.”

For a moment, the bombshell that had just been dropped didn’t penetrate his mind, and he started to look back at his paper, but the hand returned to shake him, and the voice returned to say, “You look like you don’t believe it. They’ve arrested Wasfi.”

This time, he felt the newspaper slip from his fingers, and he barely knew what he was saying when he turned to the man behind him to ask, “Are you sure?”

“What do you think?”

Apart from him, the bus was carrying more than twenty other employees. The hum of their voices grew louder and their comments flew back and forth, silencing the chatty telephone operator who would watch a movie every day and then proceed, unprompted, to retell its story in agonizing detail. The comments ranged from fake displays of sympathy to gloating disguised as righteous indignation. As for him, he didn’t know what to say. His heart beat faster, and the newspaper print swam in front of his eyes.

Eventually, the bus stopped in front of the relief agency, as it had done every morning for the past eleven years. He went in to take his place in the spacious office, conscious of the pointed looks sent his way by those who had arrived on an earlier bus; his close friendship with Wasfi forced them to be more guarded with their comments.

As he walked past one of them, he heard the man telling his colleague at the next desk that some employees had begun to smell very fishy. He swallowed the insult and sat down, trying to get a hold of himself as he checked the distribution lists, but his eyes passed over the names in a haze. When the office telephone rang, he felt at once that the call would be for him, and he got up to take it before being asked by the person nearest to the phone. He lifted the receiver with a trembling hand and listened as his manager, with no trace of emotion, asked to see him in his office. He didn’t go back to put away his papers, but instead made his way to the door with twenty curious eyes fastened on him.

He walked down the corridor and knocked on his manager’s door, pushing it open without waiting for an answer. With great effort, he forced a greeting from his lips and then stood in front of his manager, who didn’t invite him to sit, but told him that suspicion had fallen on Wasfi over the recent embezzlements at the Third Distribution Center, leading to his arrest the day before. Because of his friendship with Wasfi, he was to appear in front of the agency’s private investigator, who would ask him a few questions that might assist with the investigation. The manager hoped, he continued, that he would answer them honestly and objectively. He was to go directly to the investigator’s office on the floor above.

The manager stopped talking, and he took the silence as an invitation to leave, so he nodded and walked out of the room. He made his way back through the long corridor and climbed the staircase’s twenty steps, all while wondering why he felt so uneasy, as if this was all new to him. But hadn’t he himself suspected Wasfi and tried to visit him when the embezzlements were discovered three days ago? He had failed to find him at home, even though he’d visited at different times of the night and day… He needed to get a grip on himself and be calm for his meeting with the investigator. Here was his office, the third on the right. The door was halfway open, so he went straight in.

The man looked at him questioningly. He had forgotten that the investigator knew the employees only by name, so he had to tell the man who he was.

“Oh, it’s you. Sit.”

He sat. And tried to look relaxed under the man’s searching gaze. Remaining quiet, the man lit a cigarette from a pack, but didn’t offer him one. He took two long drags without moving his eyes from him. The man’s voice finally addressed him firmly. “Sorry to bother you, but I’m told you’re a close friend of Wasfi’s, the one who has been charged with embezzling from the distribution center—please don’t interrupt. Yes, a charge of embezzlement. Maybe you can give us information that would help our enquiries. No, no—don’t say anything before hearing my questions, perhaps there’s nothing to defend.”

The investigator stopped speaking for a moment. Perhaps he’s trying to choose his questions carefully. Should he, or should he not, tell him the truth?

If he wanted to be truthful, he’d have to say, “Yes, I must admit I’ve noticed that Wasfi has been spending more than usual. He spent a hundred lira on a single evening at the nightclub! And when one of the performers took a shine to his gold lighter, he gave it to her willingly, just because she was a blonde. Yes, how could that not make him look guilty? I myself thought he was guilty. He always used to borrow money off me, and then, three months ago, he just stopped. I wasn’t too shy to ask him about it. He claimed, as he flicked a speck of cigarette ash off his new suit, that his uncle—a building contractor in Kuwait—had started sending them money. But where was that uncle of his when he’d had to cut off his brother’s education halfway through high school and get him a job as an office boy at a bank? I didn’t buy the story about his uncle. And even though I pretended to believe it, my eyes gave me away. He became afraid of me. My friendship began to annoy him. He started to avoid going around in the same car as me, and he didn’t include me in his evening outings. That contractor-uncle story was just a laughable, worn-out yarn.”

Oh, the man’s asking questions now. I should try to listen. Did I notice anything unusual about…? How could I have failed to notice? But why would I tell you all that? No, I won’t tell. I can’t take on that casual attitude of yours and toss out our friendship. It was a friendship of blood and bullets, of hunger and lost homes and wandering. He’s no lowlife. Wasfi is not a lowlife. He nearly hit a doctor who wouldn’t write a report to get a poor woman into the hospital after gangrene had almost eaten her leg off. And he’s no thief. The small handouts he gives his widowed aunt and unemployed cousin come out of his salary first, before any other accounts are settled.

You weren’t with us when we used to dream of a day when a miracle would send us to the border, and that we’d be driven there by a purpose more powerful than our miserable fates. You weren’t with us when we collected donations for a magazine that would carry our nation’s name and the weight of its worries. No, don’t expect me to be frank, because I will never respect you, or love the truth as much as I love Wasfi—or as much as I’ve begun to hate him now, as I watch him turn into a thief. Wasfi’s reckoning won’t come at your hands, it’ll be between me and him. As for you, I can only defend him in front of you. Don’t accuse me with your eyes. All I have to say is, “I’ve known Wasfi since he was a child. We were students together and we worked together. It’s not easy for me to believe he would stoop so low.”

My God, what a bitter pill you’re forcing down my throat when you say, with your foreign wisdom: “My friend, in circumstances like yours, who knows when anyone might be driven to become a thief?”

The investigator shifted in his swivel chair, indicating that he should leave, so he got up, feeling the blood in his body pushing in a sudden mad rush to his head, as if he’d broken out in a fever that was eating away at him, reaching the very ends of his hair. He went back the way he came, somehow managing to stumble his way down the stairs to his office. When he walked into the room, heads lifted inquiringly from the papers that sat in front of them, but they soon bent down again when faced with his angry red eyes.

The distribution lists were still waiting, countless names with no beginning and no end, a caravan of lost souls waiting for him to dole out their daily bread. He grabbed the papers and mindlessly tore them up, throwing the pieces into the bin and then cradling his head in his hands as he tried to ease the sting of the words that buzzed around in it.

“Who knows when anyone might be driven to become a thief.” That man… What he’d said was no lie. And although the investigator had been stony-faced—those people were too sly to show emotions of any kind—he wished he could say those words himself, just as cleverly, and that he could add, “or a criminal or a lowlife or a whore!”

Yes, he would watch his people fall, one after the other, when that “moment” imposed itself. He got up from his desk, sat back down, then got up again and walked to the window, where he smiled pityingly at a fig tree in a nearby garden. Winter had left its stiff, dry branches bare, and it looked like a twisted skeleton whose limbs were long dead. With his eyes on the tree, he smoked three cigarettes while his thoughts blazed ahead at such speed that he grew tired of keeping up with them.

He threw his third cigarette out the window and went back to his desk. Something had sprouted in his head that looked nothing like those branches. Something which, if it flourished, would eat away all the dryness. He looked around for someone who could think out loud with him, but of all the faces scattered in every corner of the big room, there wasn’t a single one he felt comfortable with. He reached into the drawer, looking for a pen, because he had to say something before leaving this place and never coming back.

What should he write? Should he tell the story of the brother who had become a thief? It was common knowledge now. And every one of these people would chew it over with his family at the table, not realizing that he himself, in the eyes of the investigator, was a potential thief.

So let him instead tell the stories he had come to know during his long days at work: the stories of the criminal, the whore, and the sonofabitch.

*  *  *  *  *

Fayyad Al-Hajj Ali used to be a farmer in one of the villages up north. When he was drunk, he would say the grain in his field was as tall as a man, although, if he described it before he’d gulped down half a bottle of arak, neat, with no water, then it reached no higher than a man’s waist. In our country, his land was always green because our sky was generous and our soil forgiving, and our arms were neither idle nor weak.

When the land went, the only thing that remained of the harvests was the image he had of the grain that was sometimes as tall as a man, and other times only reached his waist. He became one of those hundreds whose hunger was almost never sated as long as there was more for them to eat, and whose sole comfort—once they got tired of stuffing their faces—was in getting their women pregnant.

He came to the refugee camp with a wife and one child and, by the end of eleven years, the card he presented at the start of each month showed he was supporting a wife and five children.

On distribution days, he was always first to arrive, holding out his card and taking the rations: flour, margarine, worm-ridden dates, and dried beans that were more chaff than grain. He was one of the few who didn’t lose their tempers, or swear at me, or hold me entirely responsible for the weevils eating away at their bread.

Once, about a year ago, he came up to me, carrying the humble card in one hand and a gunny sack in the other. My assistant hadn’t yet started to measure out his share when a woman with a swollen belly walked into the center. She grabbed my sleeve and kissed my hand, begging me, in tears, not to hand over the rations to that lowlife because he would sell them at the door and get drunk with the price of them, leaving his wife and children to starve for the whole month. Before the woman had finished speaking, her husband had turned on her like a vicious wolf, and her red eyes widened in fear. He laid into her with his fists and feet, punching and kicking while my assistant and I tried in vain to hold him back.

The woman dropped to the ground, her blood rushing out, staining the edges of the flour sacks. And when I called the agency to summon an ambulance and it came time to transfer the patient, the hospital refused to admit her without a report from the agency’s doctor. Before I had time to find the doctor and get the report, the woman had lost too much blood, and all that was left was her swollen, waxen body.

She didn’t last long at the hospital: by midday she was dead.

Fayyad Al-Hajj Ali wasn’t a criminal.

He used to be a kind-hearted farmer, but he lost his dignity when he lost his land. That’s what one of the old men at the camp said; he told me that, back then, Fayyad had been gentleness itself, and that his father had slaughtered five sheep when he married him off to his beloved cousin.

I don’t know what happened to Fayyad’s children because they left to live with their uncle in another camp, but I can confirm two truths: their ration card now gives them supplies for five people instead of seven, and Fayyad is serving a sentence of fifteen years of hard labor. And if Fayyad, as he strikes his pickaxe on the roadworks, were to talk to the other inmates about his crops, he’d say—since there’s no alcohol in there—that the grain was only half as tall as a man, and that his land was always green, because the soil was forgiving and the sky was generous and the men’s arms were never idle or weak.

*  *  *  *  *

And I’ve met the whore.

No, don’t look for her name in the torn-up distribution lists; I know her from somewhere else, and her new name is not the one she had in her country.

At the end of each month, clutching what was left of our salary, which we’d struggled to split between rent, groceries, and school fees, we used to try to forget that we were miserable by getting drunk. And when we were drunk, our footsteps would take us in search of one of those places where red lights beckoned, oozing with sin.

Once, Wasfi was with me. He went in first— everything comes in turn, that’s what we tell the people we give rations to—but soon came out again. He was pale and trembling, and he dragged me by the arm out into the street. When I tried to object to this rude treatment, he nearly broke down crying. “Do you remember Ahmed, our trainer back when we were in the guard?” he asked. “Remember that day when he was killed in a Jewish raid at the edge of town, and his friends brought us back his body? And we refused to wash him because he was martyred, so we buried him covered in blood after mourning him with a hundred poems and speeches, and swearing to take a thousand heads in return for his? Do you remember? Well, I saw a picture of him in there, the same one we used for the funeral flyers; it was hanging off the corner of a broken mirror. I stared at that picture and froze. And when I finally turned to face the woman, I didn’t dare ask. She had the same chin, the same fine upturned nose… My desire dried up as I held the picture, and I put it back in its place and walked to the door. She followed me and spoke in a trembling voice, as if to apologize for this bitter ending.

“We had no one but him to rely on. And when my mother died while we were in exile, this was the only path left for me to take.”

Wasfi and I walked along in silence; the effects of the drinks we’d downed quickly dissipated, and a feeling of loss squeezed our hearts. And from that day on, we began to fear those houses that were lit by lanterns dripping with sin—some of our own sisters might have ended up there if the Jewish fighters’ bullets hadn’t missed us.

*  *  *  *  *

And I’ve met the sonofabitch, too.

Who would it be, if not Abu Saleem?

His tent is the biggest in the camp, and he’s added three smaller ones to it. He can always be found in front of the big tent’s door, next to a wooden cart piled high with all sorts of goods, which he sells to the refugees at any price he wants.

Unlike his neighbors, Abu Saleem isn’t poor. He used to have a job at the port and still gets a pension from the Mandate government. Plus, two of his sons work in Kuwait and have never stopped supporting him. His wife’s arms are loaded with gold spiral bangles and he’s rich enough to lend his neighbors money at rates of fifty or sixty percent.

Abu Saleem is the camp spy; he’s the first to track a refugee’s every movement and the first to tell the agency when someone dies so it can cancel their rations immediately. But he himself—and we don’t know how—collects rations for his sons in Kuwait and his mother who died five years ago.

A big tent called “the school” stands at the center of the camp. More than a hundred children are crammed into it, where they’re taught by an ancient schoolmaster, a relic from the Ministry of Education in Palestine whose eyes can barely read what his hand writes on the worn-out blackboard.

In winter, rain leaks in from big holes in the tent, turning the ground into a muddy sludge. It’s impossible for the children to sit cross-legged on damp mats in the mud, so the school goes on a break that lasts for as long as a merciful God keeps watering the fields and livestock without reserve.

The camp residents complained to me about this misery known as a school, so I suggested that they raise a petition and threaten to keep their children away from that filthy sty until the agency built them a new one from stone.

They tried to get the teacher to write the petition, but he was too scared to do it, so I volunteered to write it myself. Barely three days later, I received a warning from the agency, instructing me not to interfere in matters that didn’t concern me—my mission started and ended with the distribution center.

I never doubted that Abu Saleem was the source of the “intelligence,” and the school went on being a tent with knowledge pouring out of its holes.

The worn-out teacher also remained, and when he got tired, there were five prefects to teach in his place; they disciplined his students with a stick, which, in his opinion, was by far the most useful means of correction.

The only thing that changed at the camp was that Abu Saleem bought a television set; he put it up in the front section of his big tent and fixed the aerial onto the tent pole. He charged an entrance fee for whoever wanted to watch it: a quarter of a lira for adults and ten piasters for children, and woe betide anyone who tried to peek in through the holes in the tent.

Yes, I know each and every one of them.

The thief, the criminal, the whore, and the sonofabitch.

And they’re no worse than anyone else. They tried to find themselves identities that would set them apart from the herd, which had been reduced to mere numbers in the lists, growing with every birth and shrinking with every death. Half the herd was spitting up blood, and everyone who belonged to it had been stripped of the power to reject anything.

No, you didn’t lie, Investigator, when you said, “My friend, in circumstances like yours, who knows when anyone might be driven to become a thief?”

And tomorrow, when you read my words and I am in another place, please don’t consider them an apology. I did it because I don’t want to become a thief, or to live forever a traitor who feeds his people rocks to suppress their despair by way of their stomachs.

*  *  *  *  *

The ghost who ambled leisurely in the light drizzle that washed the street seemed no more than a loiterer, someone who couldn’t muster the enthusiasm to go home after a dull evening in a café. The half-blind lights’ reflections in the small puddles lent a little color to the dark desolate street, but did nothing to expose the flushed face that burned with a feverish glow.

Nothing broke the sound of night except the cries of a sleepless, willful rooster who didn’t care when he crowed, even on a night when the moon had died, and the dry cough of a watchman whose chest rattled with cheap tobacco.

People had gone to sleep, holding their worries close, and leaving him to face the world on his own with the flat bottle that he’d filled with gasoline and hidden in his back pocket, and a box of matches that he’d paired with a lighter, in case the matchsticks let him down.

His heavy footsteps knew where they were going; they slowed down only to ward off any suspicion that might attach itself to feet hurrying through a sleeping neighborhood.

Before stopping at the door of the distribution center, the ghost headed, seemingly casually, toward the watchman. He gave the man an offhand greeting that he hoped would pave the way for a throwaway conversation and allow him the chance to offer the man a cigarette.

The watchman received the greeting kindly and, when the passerby lingered, said that the night was warm despite the rain, but its warmth didn’t make it any shorter, and he cursed his job, which turned other people’s night into his day.

And when he heard a sympathetic answer, he didn’t refuse the cigarette the man offered him; he sucked it down till the last breath before realizing the face in front of him was that of a stranger to the neighborhood, since he knew all the faces here, one and all. But that meant nothing; the nights were never free of loiterers, and this one had been good company. He wished the stranger could stay a little longer so he would have someone to listen to him, instead of having to talk to himself. But the other man soon resumed his shuffling walk, not bothering to avoid the potholes full of rainwater, or to shelter from the drizzle that hadn’t let up since the early hours of the night. The road curved to one side and swallowed him up, and the watchman had the street to himself again.

But he didn’t have the street to himself. From behind the curve, a head quickly looked out and disappeared, then came out again. Gleaming, eager eyes searched for signs of the heaviness that grew in the watchman’s head, watching him as a delicious numbness spread to his limbs and head, and he struggled to sit down on the short-legged chair that he kept under a low balcony so he could shelter from the rain whenever it grew stronger. He dropped his body down onto the chair, with his shotgun across his knees, and his head was soon drooping into a sleep that he couldn’t fight off—after all, sleep rules everyone, even watchmen.

The stranger lurking behind the curve roused himself and groped for the key to the center that the man carried with him, laughing at the irony that had turned him into an outlaw, like the ones whose stories were made into countless films. His footsteps were light as he headed for the door and gently opened it, avoiding any squeaks so the drugged watchman wouldn’t wake up and ruin the adventure that was burning away at his heart.

He pushed the door shut, using the key to lock it behind him. Nobody knew the ins and outs of this warehouse like he did, and he reached out confidently to feel for the light switch.

Light flooded the place and disturbed the feasting rats, who grew fatter and more immune to the red poison pellets by the day. Even the rats took liberties with the refugees’ property, but their thievery ended with the needs of their bellies. If only Wasfi was as honorable as those rats… The jest would surely make Wasfi laugh in his cell if he heard it. He’d tell him tomorrow when they met, the thief and the… what? What name would he carry tomorrow? The agency hadn’t come across a case like his before. It had known thieves and bribe-takers, blue-eyed activists who preached humanitarianism for more than a thousand dollars a month, and know-it-alls who claimed that politics stopped at the agency’s door—so what names would they choose for him tomorrow?

It was a question he couldn’t dwell on for long; he had to choose a spot for the fire. And he needed to collect some empty sacks and pour gasoline over them from the bottle he was carrying, then let the flames devour all this food. Beans, flour, dates, and raisins: a feast fueled by humiliation… Oh, why was he dragging his feet? Was he afraid the watchman would wake up and that he’d be arrested for stealing, and then no one would ever acknowledge him as anything but a thief?

He hurried to collect the sacks, stacking them one on top of the other and pouring every last drop of gasoline onto them before throwing the empty bottle at the far wall, where it splintered. Next, he lit a match and brought it to the edge of one of the sacks, holding the lighter to the other side. The sack sucked the fire in, and the flames spread through it from both ends, soon drawing closer to each other, then mixing and embracing. Leaving the sacks, he went to bring the jars of fat closer, then scraped out a few lumps from them, throwing them onto the pile. He went round to the other side, smeared fat onto a few more sacks, and fed them a spark from a match. His fire flourished and blossomed, singeing his dark skin with its heat and making his blood run hot in his veins. A savage elation came over him, prompting him to take his knife and slash the bellies of the bloated sacks. Their contents scattered at his feet and he trod all over them with lurching steps. He took pleasure in laughing as he imagined the foul-mouthed swearing mob tearing at his skin with their nails and burying him under their curses.

Calm down, I have things to say tomorrow when I’m taken—when I take myself—to the police station. So don’t throw your stones at this despicable man whose sins have outshone the sins of the thief, the criminal, the sonofabitch, and the whore.

Save your stones and grope in the ashes of my fire for your new life. Look at me threshing your flour with my shoes and soiling my feet with the dust from your beans. I’m teaching you to go hungry so your despair will rise up and rebel, so you can grow, grow beyond the grip of a humble loaf of bread.

When he got to the door, he leaned his back against it, his burning eyes drinking in the sight of the wild, ravenous flames. He felt for his cigarettes with a shaking hand, remembering the watchman’s cigarette with a smile. What would the watchman say to the authorities tomorrow, when the center had become a blackened lump of coal? That it was an accident, the hand of fate? It may have been fate, but it was shaped by human hands!

The tongues of fire rose higher, and the flames began to roast him, their crackling now audible as they came closer to the edge of the only window in the eastern wall. The fire would eat away the wood and melt the iron, and then a blazing portal would open out onto the night, lighting up a new path. And everyone would know—all the refugees, everyone at the agency, and the investigator in particular—that he was something bigger than a thief and better than a sonofabitch, and that his people would not curse him if they went hungry. After all, he’d only burned their food, and let his fire loose over the spoils of rats and thieves because… because he loved them!