The poet comes down from his room leaning on a locust.

What! This one too! Why did I ever come here? We embrace. I pat his shoulder to shake away the heaven of sleep. “How are you?” “Pessimistic. This is a strange day, brother! Incredible! They haven’t stopped shelling for a single moment. They’re plowing up the sky. Where were you?” “In my apartment.” “Crazy. Are you out of your mind, my friend? How could you sleep there?” “Tomorrow I’m going to sleep here. But isn’t this all we need, that the fruit of this shelling should be a snail and a locust?” “What do you mean?” “I don’t mean anything.” Ten steps forward, and nine back. The net gain is one step forward. Good! This is good!

Another locust, a frightened one, lands in my lap. Putting on an air of chastity provoked by fear of the jets, she rubs against whatever can be rubbed against. I say to her, joking, advising: “This is going to be a day without end. They have a thousand jets, which can make ten thousand sorties, and if you keep responding to each sortie with this rubbing, I’m going to dry up. I’ll become a spent man.” I turn to the poet: “Tell me, why do young women get excited under the worst conditions? Is this a time for love? This is no time for love, but for sudden desire. Two fleeting bodies collaborate to hold back one fleeting death by means of another—a honeyed death.”

Our great friend F comes over to help me lift the poet out of a phrase he’s fallen into: “Brother, this is impossible. Impossible. Brother, this is absolutely impossible.” He’s come to blows with the expression, choked, and piled on top of it. Help me, F, Help me free the expression from Y’s stammering. We burst out laughing. We laugh and laugh till we upset the young lady at the piano. “This isn’t the time for the piano, for laughter, or for poetry,” we say to her. “This is the time for jets. It’s the time for snails.”

“Are both of you writing?” F asks.

Y writes every day. He reads us one of the snapshots from his sensitive internal camera, which he never goes without.

“And you?” they ask me.

“I’m stocking up,” I say, “to the point of choking. And I’m mocked by friends who say, ‘What use is poetry? What use will it be when the war ends?’ But I’m screaming at a moment when screams can go nowhere. And it strikes me that language must force itself into a battle in which the voices are not equal. Your subdued voice is better, Y.”

—But, what are you writing?

“I’m stammering out a scream,” I answer:

Our stumps: our names No. There is no escape! Fallen, the mask over the mask That covers the mask. Fallen is the mask! You’ve no brothers, my brother, No friends, no forts, my friend. You’ve no water and no cure No sky, no blood, and no sails. No front, and no rear.

Block your blockade then. No escape! Your arm falls? Pick it up and strike your enemy! No escape! I fall beside you? Pick me up And strike your enemy. You are free now Free, Free. Your dead and wounded Are your weapons Strike with them. Strike your enemy.

Our stumps, our names; our names, our stumps. Block your blockade with madness With madness And with madness They have gone, the ones you love. Gone. You will either have to be Or you will not be. Fallen, the mask covering the mask That covers the mask Has fallen, and there’s no one

None but you in this stretch of space Open to enemies and forgetfulness. Let every gun emplacement then Be your home. No! No one! The mask has fallen. Arabs who obeyed their Franks Arabs who sold their souls Arabs who are lost Fallen is the mask The mask has fallen.[18]

“Where will you two go?” F asks.

“To Aden,” Y says.

“And you?” he asks me.

“I don’t know,” I answer.

Silence. Heavy as metal. We were three, but have now become one in the world crashing down around us. It’s as if we were here as caretakers of fragile substances and were now preparing to absorb the operation of moving our reality, in its entirety, into the domain of memories forming within sight of us. And as we move away, we can see ourselves turning into memories. We are these memories. As of this moment, we’ll remember each other as we’ll remember a distant world disappearing into a blueness more blue than it used to be. We’ll part in the pitch of longing. All three of us know the truth: we will pull out of Beirut. And we know a hardship that is so hard no one dares be seen in the act of seeing it: the people are with us precisely because we are leaving.

“I won’t be leaving,” I say, “because I don’t know where to go. And because I don’t know where I’ll be going, I won’t leave.”

“And you?” I ask F.

“I’m staying. I’m Lebanese, and this is my country. Where am I to go?”

I am embarrassed by my question, and by the extent to which Beirut has become my song and the song of everyone without a homeland. And I am embarrassed by the great ambiguity of the Idea.

That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea. And great crowds gathered about him, so that he got into a boat and sat there; and the whole crowd sat on the beach. And he told them many things in parables, saying: “A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured them. Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they had not much soil, and immediately they sprang up, since they had no depth of soil, but when the sun rose they were scorched; and since they had no root they withered away. Other seeds fell upon thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain….”

And Jesus went away from there and withdrew to the district of Tyre and Sidon. And behold, a Canaanite woman from that region came out and cried, “Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David; my daughter is severely possessed by a demon.” But he did not answer her a word. And his disciples came and begged him, saying, “Send her away, for she is crying after us.” He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” But she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.” And he answered, “It is not fair to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master’s table.” Then Jesus answered her, “O woman, great is your faith! Be it done for you as you desire.” And her daughter was healed instantly.^[19]