“Don’t ask me why I did that, Kevork. I’ve been posing the same question to myself without arriving at any clear answer. Was it because I thought those beasts, when they came in and saw the little ones sleeping, would feel pity in their hearts and wouldn’t kill them? Or did I want to spare the poor children the sight of the ghouls who would eat them alive? Or was I simply afraid they would draw attention to us, and I wanted to quiet them down by any means possible? Or was it because I could no longer bear my impotence, their howling, and their fear? I don’t know. In any case, we gave them sleep—and to Nurse Widad as well, for I saw her inject herself as well with the tranquilizer, saying, ‘Forgive me, doctor! I cannot bear another massacre.’ Poor woman! She was one of the refugees from Palestine in 1948.

“I pulled up a chair and sat in the corner of the long room, facing the door. The hours weighed heavily upon me. I thought about my parents, and about Thurayya. Would they renounce me after my death because I abandoned them to stand alongside foreigners and strangers? Suddenly, I sensed a growing calm, even as the air turned cold. In a matter of minutes, the day had slipped away into darkness. Even the sound of bullets receded. A short patter here, a sudden burst there … Then nothing. The silence gave way to screams, orders, pleas, gunshots, and then silence once again. Then, without warning, an explosion knocked over my chair, and shattered glass rained down upon me. Dear God, don’t let it be the clinic! I thought. With all those elderly sick people gathered inside …

“The door crashed open. A militiaman had kicked it down with his army boots. He stood by the door, pointing a powerful flashlight and a machine gun into the interior. I had scarcely made out his spectral form against the smoke that filled the indigo air outside before I leapt to my feet, raising my hands high and screaming, ‘Doctor! I’m a doctor! Don’t shoot!’

“I don’t believe it was my pleas that stopped him from killing me, but rather the sight of the children, stretched out upon their beds and sleeping. They had not moved or reacted at all to the explosion. ‘What is this?’ he shouted at me, appalled, before calling out, ‘Luqman! Come quick!’”

Luqman! Yes, that was the name that my father repeated three times on the night he decided to enter my bed, smeared in blood. The first Luqman. That’s how I ought to call the person whose name I heard as a child when my father recounted what happened to him that night in January of 1976. For many long years, that story lay hidden inside me. The name of the killer secretly took root within me and then returned as a character in a story from the years after the war ended. That one—meaning the second Luqman—was the protagonist of my novel. I thought he was my creation, not realizing he had emerged from the twilight of memory and the unconscious. As for the third Luqman: he’s the one I met recently, retired from the fight, in an internet café in Bourj Hammoud …