No. Ever since that day, when he suddenly appeared before me in a shirt stained with blood, with dazed eyes and a face drained of all color, my father was not alright. At the time, he did not utter another word, but stood up, stripped off his clothes, and dropped them at his feet. Then he eased into my bed and encircled me in his arms. He gave off a strange smell, different from the one he usually had when coming home—the one Thurayya never stopped complaining about—a mixture of sterilizers, anesthetics, detergents, and medicines for inflammation and ulcers. There was another smell that I hadn’t encountered before, sharp and pungent, a little like the smell of rusted metal. I almost asked what it was before I realized that it was certainly the smell of the blood that covered his clothes. For the first time, I was smelling blood. “Whose blood is this, Father?” I wanted to ask, but I was too afraid. The important thing is that it isn’t your blood, Father, and that you are here at my side. You didn’t go to Thurayya or to Sa’id, but to me.

My father drifted off to sleep and snored a little at first. I timed the movement of my breaths with his until they were perfectly in rhythm, and that put me to sleep. He murmured frequently in his sleep, waking me each time. Yet each time I would fall back to sleep, overwhelmed by my drowsiness. His mutterings become more and more vehement and included fragments of speech. Then there were some words, the clearest being a strange name that my father repeated three times.

When I woke in the morning, my father was gone. No doubt he had gone to inform Thurayya of his return, or else to take a shower and get that disgusting smell off him. I closed my eyes and tried to recall the name he had uttered the previous night, which I had never heard before, but had no luck.

For days, my father remained a prisoner in the house. He neither went out nor received any visitors or patients. He didn’t answer the phone. He locked himself in his office and came out only when Sa’id or I returned. He would sit with us in the evening, but he didn’t address us, and he didn’t respond if we spoke. We would nearly have sworn that he didn’t even see us. Thurayya watched him out of the corner of her eye, and since she saw him looking grave and absent, she feigned indifference, pretending that she did not see him either. It was as though she were taking the matter personally, as something directed specifically at her and not connected with his coming home late that one night, drenched in blood.