I

Azza

There wasn't anything about her that caught the eye. To tell the truth, I didn't even notice her until my friend introduced me—in Arabic—to the man from Syria standing beside her. We exchanged a few pleasantries, the way two compatriots do when they meet abroad, restrained good cheer, dubious of what lay behind the words. Then he asked me where I was from. “From the mountains.” When he asked me whereabouts exactly, I said, “Sarmada,” and just as soon as the words “a village called Sarmada” left my mouth, the woman turned to us as if what I'd said had had some impact on her. She addressed me, looking a little out of sorts, and apologized for butting in.

“Did you say you were from Sarmada?” she asked.

“Yes,” I answered calmly, though slightly unsure of where this was going. “Do you know someone from there?” I asked, trying to decipher the look in her eyes. She was in her forties, wearing a black dress, accentuated by beads of the same color. There was a look of smoldering disbelief in her eyes, and her face had become stern, severe even, as she examined me. I smiled placidly.

“What are the chances of meeting someone from Sarmada in Paris of all places?” she said. “Do you live here?”

“No, no. I’m just here on business—a quick trip, I leave tomorrow.”

“How are things in Sarmada? How’s the village doing?” she asked, her stare softening.

“Things are good—but, to be honest, I don’t go back very often. I live in Dubai…” I was interrupted by the sound of heady applause echoing around the hall. The French media personality, in whose honor the Institut du Monde Arabe was throwing this reception, had arrived. The woman’s voice faded away and one of those dapper older gentlemen walked over to her, shifting her attention from our conversation to the party at hand.

Before she left, she said, “My name’s Azza Tawfiq. Do you have a pen?” I felt at my pockets, but I couldn’t find one. She borrowed one from the sedate, dapper old man, who was looking at me icily. She scribbled her phone number down onto a napkin and handed it to me. Her eyes seemed to teem with unspoken words. “Call me. It’s important…,” she said; her voice was swallowed up by the celebratory din. The hall was packed and everyone was speaking French, which I didn’t understand. My friend was caught up in the proceedings, and so I slipped quietly away. I strolled along the river Seine, watching the passing boats and the traffic in the street, savoring the splendor of a stroll through Paris, as my mind began to fill with images of my own tiny hometown. How had that woman suddenly brought Sarmada roaring back into my thoughts? Empty nostalgia had never been able to get its claws into me before. I’d built up defenses against it over the many long years since I’d left that empty place, where lives are crushed, that land of waiting endlessly for what never comes.

Sarmada had never been anything more than a hollow shell that I'd happened to pass through. My bitterest days were spent there, and it had saddled me with pain and fear and selfeffacement. It had taken years to get it out of me. And now, by the banks of the Seine, something new was flickering inside of me, bringing Sarmada back; or at least what little of it remained: a few dusty old faces and some bland memories. There was no special taste or flavor left to tempt you into reminiscing about anyone in particular. As my footsteps quickened, my head began to swirl with crazed thoughts. Can a man ever truly reject the place he was born, try to disown it, to deny its afflictions? So that's how it started, and it was like sinking into mire.

By the time I got back to the Hotel Alba in Saint-Michel, it was past eleven. I packed, took a hot shower, and let sleep swallow me up. I woke up feeling unusually energetic after a night of strange sleep. I went down to reception, settled my bill, took care of a few visa formalities, and left my bag at the desk. Then I called her. The voice on the other end was thickly drowsy, and thoroughly feminine. “It's Rafi Azmi.”

“Who?”

“We met last night at the reception for Alain Ghayouche and you said I should call you.” Something must have clicked because her voice suddenly came to life.

“Oh, yes! Hello. When can we meet? Where?”

“My plane leaves from Charles de Gaulle this evening, so now, if you're not busy.”

“No, fine. Where are you?”

“Cafe le Depart - St. Michel.”

“I'll be there in half an hour.”

It was my last day in Paris and I was off to Damascus to continue researching a documentary I was working on about building bridges between East and West. My work as a filmmaker meant I had to travel all over the place to arrange interviews and scout out shooting locations but, lucky for me, I'd managed to finish everything I needed to do the day before. I'd decided to cap the day off by meeting up with an old friend from university, who'd invited me to the reception where the woman and I had met.

We sat at a corner table opposite the Gibert Jeune bookshop. There was a severity, and a certain subtle sadness, in her brown eyes, and a noble air seemed to overlay her features. She spoke Lebanese Arabic, and after no more than a few words of small talk, delved straight into the heart of the matter. “I'm from the Chouf, and I've got relatives in Sarmada.”

“Right, well that explains everything,” I said, and parried, “So this is all just sectarian sentimentality?”

“No, it isn't that.” She was silent for a beat, and then she looked straight into my eyes and in all seriousness said, “I lived in Sarmada in a past life. If you believe in transmigration, or if you've ever heard of it, you'll know what I mean.”

I didn't say anything. I was too shocked to say anything. Of course, I had been raised in a culture that considered the transmigration of souls to be a key part of everyday faith and loved to tell stories about transmigrators, from the childishly entertaining to the willfully exaggerated—if only to underline the fact that a belief in metempsychosis made the Druze stand out from all the other esoteric sects who believed in transference, or animal, vegetable, and mineral transmutations. Transmigration is when a soul travels from one human being to another, and it's entirely distinct from those other beliefs—about the soul being transferred into the body of an animal, or into a plant, or the worst punishment of all, into a rock, which was reserved for the most tortured of souls, bound and confined within a rock or a boulder, a form of unrelenting punishment until it's decided that the soul should be freed from its rocky imprisonment.

Transmigration, one of many mysterious tenets of the Druze faith, gives the community a feeling of blood purity and unadulterated lineage because Druze souls only ever transmigrate into Druze bodies. Not once in my life had I ever given the topic the slightest thought. I just considered it to be one of the many charming religious spectacles that Syria takes such pleasure in. She continued undeterred, “I was murdered at half past four in the afternoon on the first Tuesday in December, 1968. My name in that life was Hela Mansour. I can still remember a lot about that previous life and—if you're interested—a lot of the details of what happened in the last two and a half hours. I can see it all with perfect clarity as if it were only yesterday.”

I studied her face, my own mouth agape, and saw how her expression became clouded as she told her disturbing story. “I don't really know how to put this,” I said, “but the truth is, I don't actually believe in transmigration, or in much else, for that matter—except reason and science. To me, stories of transmigration are just collective memory. People who think they're recalling a past life are just recalling some common occurrences.” I thought about telling her the joke about the overweight fortune teller, but something about her look—and her patronizing smile—stopped my detached logic in its tracks.

“Listen, Rafi,” she began. “I teach quantum mechanics at the Sorbonne and I wrote my PhD thesis on the development of chaos theory—if you even know what that is,” she added mockingly. “But here I am, and I'm telling you that I had a past life and that my brothers murdered me… I wanted to ask you about them. To ask how they're getting on.

“In any case, scientific logic and my personal life are two different things as far as I'm concerned. I've never told anyone what I'm about to tell you now—or at least not like this—but as Einstein said, ‘If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts.'”

“Are you saying you've got a theory about transmigration?” I shot back with equivalent condescension.

“No, not hardly. My own pride and logic always rejected the idea of my past life, or metempsychosis. And plus, I can’t prove anything empirically. But the truth’s inside of me, I realize that. It’s here, it’s part of me. I’m carrying two lives—at least—inside of me, but that doesn’t bother me anymore: after this life, I’ve started seeing things more clearly, less black- and-white. After all, Einstein also said that ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge.’”

My memory threw out another Einstein quotation—not to provoke her, but to give her something to contemplate: “‘Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.’”

“And in practice,” she added grudgingly, “a persistent illusion beats an idiot’s imagination.”

I felt as if someone was trying to dismantle everything I thought I knew and send me back into the deep anxiety I’d escaped so long ago. I’d thought that God, religion, and all that other hocus pocus would never be able to trouble me again. But she cut in on my silent self-examination and called upon the genius of relativity to boot, conjuring him up with a mystic’s fluency: “‘As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.’” I backed down in the face of such unanticipated resolve, and, to be even more frank, I don’t think anyone in the entire world would’ve been able to resist the certainty and sadness in that lovely woman’s eyes. I let myself listen to her story, holding my judgment for another time.

She asked about the village: about some people I knew, others I’d at least heard of, and a few I didn’t know at all. Little by little, we recreated the village together. We told its story and called forth its characters in that Parisian cafe just over the road from the statue of Saint Michel himself. Our conversation was amiable, full of some unknown cheer. I genuinely needed her help to be able to see the village where I’d grown up, the place I’d abandoned years earlier, and which was now nothing more than a stifling confine I liked to visit every few years or so to see my family and what friends were still around and then to make a hasty exit. Six hours flew by and it was time for me to leave. I told her I'd be back in Paris soon to continue my work and I promised her that I'd go to Sarmada and get the answers she was looking for, and that I'd be happy to see her when I got back. She hugged me and kissed my cheek and we both felt as if we'd known each other for years. When she wished me a safe flight, I felt as if I were saying goodbye to a relative.

Not once during the entire five-and-a-half-hour flight did the story of Azza Tawfiq leave my thoughts. I didn't believe a word of what she'd said, of course, but all the same it had left me with a trace of pity and grief that tempered my cool detachment and filled me with a warm and burgeoning affection. For the first time since I'd left Sarmada years ago, something was happening inside of me, a moment of brightness, of revelation, that made me feel as if I were someone else. I took out my notebook and began recording—“write” isn't the right word—Azza Tawfiq's story, or maybe it was Hela Mansour's, and I forgot all about my to-do list.

I arrived in Sarmada.

I carried her story around with me. I made enquiries, compared, contrasted. The evidence I'd collected in the beginning didn't prove anything: Hela Mansour could have been Azza Tawfiq, but she could have been any other woman for that matter. For a whole week, I roamed around the village and through its ruins, trailing the story, collecting and comparing all the different versions. Azza's voice returned and I could hear her as she told her story. Her words echoing in those places, in the faces of men and women who were still alive after all those years. I prodded at their memories and told the story from the very beginning.

On a Tuesday at noon just after a light shower of rain, I, Hela Mansour, returned to Sarmada from the southern road, my hands free of warts, walking just as I had thirteen years before when I walked down to the Salt Spring. I slowed down as I crossed Poppy Bridge and looked out over the valley stretched beneath me. My eyes surveyed the contours of the village and the houses, which hadn't changed much, and I steeled myself, determined to keep it together for those few moments before I'd have to face the others. I knew full well the law in these parts. The blood of any woman who married against the wishes of the Druze community was considered suitable only for holy sacrifice or permanent banishment. I hadn't cared much about the details when I ran off with Azaday at the age of eighteen. I left my five brothers to endure excruciating pain and much derision, but I'd answered the call of my heart, and run off, driven by a mysterious pleasure laced with the thrill of delicious, fervent fear, and of breaking a stricture that had been around for more than nine hundred years.

“Hela Mansour..Salama repeated the name as if he were suddenly seized by some deep sorrow. He was quiet for a while and then continued, “She was the most beautiful girl in Sarmada—I can still remember how she turned every head in the street. Women would drag their children indoors and old men would climb up to the roofs to get a look at her. The whole of Sarmada was smitten. We never thought they'd actually go through with it, but the look in her eyes told us we’d been wrong. She faced her death with her head held high; she didn’t seem the slightest bit afraid. God have mercy on her and her father. She was one of a kind.” Salama launched into a detailed retelling of that winter day; some of what he said matched what Azza Tawfiq had told me in Paris, but my job was just to collect it all impassively.

I didn’t want transmigration to be real and I didn’t want reality to start transmigrating. I knew full well that life constantly repeated itself, confined to its fixed orbit, impervious to any specific time, and that Sarmada—like all the other small towns of the East—was happy to look no further than itself and never changed much, no matter how much time passed.

Azza Tawfiq’s story appeared and disappeared as I compared it to the different versions I heard from the townspeople; sometimes they corroborated her version and at other times they diverged from it. I decided I wouldn’t make any judgments. I knew my responsibility was to record it all with a documentarian’s professional fidelity, and yet some powerful intuition told me that something was out there waiting for me, far beyond the borders of my comprehension. After all, I thought I was at a safe remove, safe from the bad omen the story portended. What came next would prove me entirely wrong: my life left its customary course and set down a new, unmarked path deep into the treacherous thicket of past and future, as the boundary between different periods of time faded from view.

To discover what had happened to Hela Mansour, I would have to throw open the doors of that locked room, as if to air it out, to dispel the damp and musty torpor Sarmada gave off. One question loomed above the rest: Had I really been born here? Had I actually lived here?

All through the quarter century I had spent here, the overpowering urge to get away from that remote world had kept me from appreciating my reality in all its complexity. So I set about gathering up images I plucked carefully from the landscape to help me compose a story, and in the meantime other stories were preparing to rise up out of the gloom.

When I compared the recollections I’d gathered in the village to what I’d heard from the physics professor, the first scene began to form before my eyes. If I were the type of person who insisted on captioning every last thing, I would have titled this chapter: “Winter 1968: After five years on the run, Hela Mansour returns to her village.”

She walked along calmly, her hands wart-free, and passed by the old houses with her head held high in that supercilious way she’d inherited from her father, who’d fought in the Great Syrian Revolt and was one of the most esteemed men in the village. She walked down the narrow alleyways between the stone houses and caught snatches of what the people were whispering about her. Sarmada looked on, clammy with anticipation.

“She’s fearless,” murmured some of the women.

“She’s not being brave, she just wants to rub it in,” a neighbor retorted. “She should’ve come back quietly. There are still some young men in this village, you know.”

“May God teach her shame,” said another.

“Pray for us, Blessed Virgin.”

“Lord help us,” said one, making the sign of the cross.

“Praise the Lord for making her! She’s prettier than ever.”

“Folks say he kicked her to the curb once he was through with her.”

“Protect us, Lord.”

“Shame on them.”

“She deserves whatever she gets.”

The scattered whispers ran down the village streets to the old family house, which her brothers had abandoned after she’d run off. They’d moved to the outskirts of the village, where they lived in exile with their shame, consigned to a world of wary looks and bated breath. The whispers of onlookers mixed with the fear in the air as everyone awaited the end of this woman, who'd shamed her family, besmirched her father's good name and proud legacy, insulted Sarmada and its ways, and evaded every lethal trap her brothers had set for her over the years. And now she'd decided to return simply to die.

The story's getting a little confusing—I can tell—and if you're not familiar with the details, you're probably a little uncomfortable with where things are headed, so I'll let Azza Tawfiq take over. Let's return to her, sitting in Cafe le Depart on the day we met, and let's listen closely so that the music coming from the Latin Quarter begins to fade away. I studied her voice, her gestures, the way the words slipped out from between her full lips, her eyes as they overran with mystery and wonder, and then, all of a sudden, she stopped. She asked the waiter to bring us another round of coffee and some sparkling water. Then she turned to me once more, and with a mix of compassion and indifference, she said, “Tell me when you get hungry. Lunch is on me.”

We had a few hours still before I had to leave. Thankfully, I'd thought to pay the hotel bill and leave my luggage at the desk. I nodded because I didn't want anything to interrupt the sound of her voice. My body absorbed every single word she said, and filed them in my memory for safekeeping, where I assigned each a shape, a person, a place, a reference until it formed a complete and parallel world. She went on calmly, even warmly, describing the murdered woman's route through the village, as if it were all just a picture she could see right in front of her.

The house she described was one I knew very well. The mulberry tree that Nawwaf Mansour used to guard was one of the highlights of my illicit fruit filching escapades as a child, and it stood directly across from Farida's place. Oh, I should mention to you that Farida and her son Bulkhayr will be making an appearance in our story presently; it's a bit like a relay race, actually, with one runner passing the baton on to the next.

Allow me to return to Azza as she tells us about Windhill, Hyena's Rise, Poppy Bridge, and how the village looks in winter. How this elegant Parisian, with her authentic Lebanese accent, knew the names of these different spots and byways in a neglected village overrun with oblivion, dust, and tedium, was beyond me, but it did tickle me! There was simply nothing as heart-rendingly delightful as hearing her say all those names that I'd locked up in my memory. Some had gone missing, some had mutated, but here they were; it was as if we shared the exact same childhood memories. Nevertheless, I'll let Azza tell the story so that I can try to put off my own memories, which had suddenly been brought back to life, and imagine a Sarmada I'd never known before. In that hypnotic voice she described her past life and how she arrived at her family home, which was near collapse since her brothers had abandoned it in shame. They had withdrawn to the outskirts of the village, leaving their old house at the mercy of armies of ants, roaches, spiders, and moths. The physics professor described her ar- rival—or Hela Mansour's—as follows:

“I came to the ruins of the old house and walked through the gate made out of thin steel that rust had all but eaten away. I looked at the walls. I missed every stone in the place. I could smell the scents of my childhood locked away in each one. I prayed to God they wouldn't come just yet; that they'd give me some time. I didn't want to die there. I was worried that some of my blood would spill down to the mulberry tree, my old childhood friend, my dream companion. Me, my mother, and the tree, we were the only women in a house full of men, full of manliness. My mother had been buried beside the tree even though everyone was against the idea of her being so far away from the family plot up at the Khashkhasha cemetery. I couldn't stand the idea of my blood seeping down into the darkness for my mother to taste.

“I was sad to see the decrepit old tree and her withered, leafless branches. She seemed smaller somehow, like a senile old woman. Can you imagine what it's like to know that you'll be dead in an hour?

“What are you supposed to do in an hour?

“But to tell you the truth, you can make an hour last a lifetime. And that's what I did. I dug a hole in the muddy earth around the massive tree trunk about a half-yard deep and buried a copy of my will. The will wasn't important—I don't even remember what I wrote—but I felt that I needed to leave something behind, some trace, whether on the earth or underneath it. I buried my mother's silver bracelets, too, and a little bell that had once hung around the neck of a cow that'd been my childhood friend and given me my first reason to grieve. I prayed to my parents' souls to forgive me and to forgive my brothers for what they were about to do.

“The funny thing is that, to this day, when I remember going to the house, I get upset because I didn't sweep up or water the plants. I didn't spare a thought for the camellias, the lilies or the tulips; I didn't prune the jasmine to bring it back to life.

“Well, yes, I had run off with a stranger years before. I had abandoned my family because I loved him. But the day I did it, it was just an accident, a passing fear or a desire—I don't know. I can't really remember, and I probably won't ever be able to explain it.

“My brother Nawwaf slapped me with that massive hand of his. The shepherds had already told them that I'd been meeting Azaday in the northern orchards. They'd found us embracing, sharing a kiss—my first. My first kiss became a scandal that swept through the entire village. It was also my first slap; no one had ever hit me before. My brother took a step back when he saw the blood pouring out of my nose and covering my face. He was furious, but he let me go and stormed off.

“Mother had died by then, and I was left in their care. I was the youngest, I was the only girl and I was spoiled. Every pore of my skin gave off the scent of their mother and they’d been more liberal with me than any other brothers in Sarmada. The day I was caught kissing a stranger and the news of the scandal spread throughout the village was a disaster for them. In Sarmada, you can keep anything a secret for as long as you want, no matter what it is—except for love. Love is a disgrace. I’m not talking about sex or about a physical relationship; everyone has a physical relationship of some form or other. As long as it stays purely physical, then there’s no shame in it. But for whatever reason, when it comes to love and something brings it to the surface, inevitably it’s exposed. It shoots out from wherever it starts, meets with universal disapproval, and finds its way onto every tongue.

“In the room looking out over the garden, I wept as the blood continued to flow from my nose, while they debated what they were going to do to him. They were threatening either to kill him or to beat him to within an inch of his life just so they could teach him a lesson he’d never forget. I couldn’t stand to see him tortured like that, so I knew I had to go and warn him. He was scared and confused, sure, but I knew he wouldn’t have run away. I walked calmly over to the water bucket by the front gate and washed and combed my hair, which was tangled and matted with blood. I put my hair up in a ponytail, grabbed a small bag and stuffed a few trivial things in it—I have no clue, for example, why I put the cowbell in—and then I slipped quietly away. They paid no attention to me, distracted as they were with their shouting and rage. It never occurred to them that I’d dare to leave the house after a scandal like that.

“I listened to them improvising oaths, swearing on their honor, and I slipped out right behind them. All it would’ve taken was for one of them to turn his head to see me leaving, but they carried on bellowing. I walked unseen through Sarmada and I knew exactly where to find him. We'd gotten used to operating in secret and we'd figured out where we could go to be safe from prying eyes. It didn't take long to find him near the vineyard. We clung to each other. We were both terrified and I can remember seeing tears in his eyes. I begged him to leave the village right away. I told him my brothers were planning to kill him, or to make an example out of him, and there was no point in trying to fight them. I begged him to leave Sarmada and I promised to love him forever. He pushed me back violently and then grabbed me by the shoulders. ‘I'm not leaving you,’ he said. ‘Either I die here or you come with me. Only death can keep us apart.’ He was shouting and swearing that he wouldn't move an inch, that he wouldn't leave without me. He was deadly serious, resolute, insistent. And he had the most beautiful angry eyes in the world.

“I embraced him and said yes. I melted into him. All I remember is giving myself to him body and soul, just as he'd given himself to me. All it took was a few drops of blood and my virginity was lost. I'd shed all my bonds now. It wasn't a whim or a moment of weakness, it was a reality I'd chosen for myself without knowing. I lay in his arms, half-naked, coated in dirt and dust and pleasure. ‘Fine. I'll come with you,’ I said.

“We spent all those years in exile walking together. The road and the villages and towns we passed through ate away at our feet. We tried to flee the country and failed, but we never stopped walking, on and on. The loveliest memory, the thing I'll never forget, is that we walked together, side by side. After that day, I felt as if I'd been born to walk, but there was still a short distance I had to cross to reach my final—fated—destination. And so, after I buried my will, the cowbell and my mother's bracelets, I walked out of the house and headed towards them.”

Everything I'd managed to learn confirmed the fact that the day after Hela ran away was a total nightmare for Hamad Mansour's five sons. The villagers had all gathered in the square, some to gloat at their misfortune, others offering to help, and the brothers stacked the Epistles of Wisdom, the Quran, and the Bible all on top of one another and swore a savage oath: they announced that their sister had run off with some hotshot—as they'd taken to calling him—and they swore that they wouldn't light a single fire, or receive a single guest, or pronounce a single word about village affairs, or even trim their beards until they'd slit her throat. Salama told me what it was like to watch the scandal unfold: “The brothers made that oath to hide their shame and to put an end to all the dirty gossip in the village. People are ruthless when it comes to those who violate the accepted customs, and to anyone associated with them.

“Over the next five years, the brothers grew more and more isolated, and their beards grew longer so that you could barely tell them apart, and they themselves struggled to tell one day from the next. It was a strange sight to see them going around together dressed in the same clothes, the same faces hidden behind long beards, with the same gloomy look. They were serious about killing her. The only thing that mattered to them anymore was tracking her down and killing her.”

Father Elias, the priest, who was not only caring but thoughtful, hugged me and asked me how I'd been. Had I missed him? He'd been a kind of godfather to everyone in my generation. He'd baptized all the children in Sarmada and ministered to them all—Christian, Druze, and Muslim—for they were all God's flock. Similarly, he insisted that the Christian boys in the village be circumcised like all the Druze and Muslim children. He was known for his easy-going sense of humor and his ability to find something to laugh about in any situation no matter how bitter it was.

It had been customary in Sarmada for the villagers to have their children baptized ever since people had come and settled here from the Lebanon three hundred years ago. It was both a religious and a social rite for everyone in the village, regardless of confession or sect, although no one really understood how it managed to work. In civil war Lebanon, people were killed based on their sect, they were raped with whisky bottles, their corpses were mutilated, their skulls were gouged with power tools and their throats slit with razor blades. The people of Sarmada, on the other hand, lived together peacefully. I'll never forget how in 1983 two families, one Christian and one Druze, escaped over the mountains from Lebanon and took refuge with relatives in Sarmada. Lebanon's sectarian thinking could never understand how a majority Druze village would consent to be led by a Christian! Or why the Christians in Sarmada would donate money to help build a majlis, the Druze house of worship!

They'd find it no less astonishing, of course, to know that after the village church was consecrated, the first wedding to be held there was for a Druze couple. You just can't understand the secret of a place like Sarmada and its special harmony unless you've lived there or in one of the other small towns in Syria. I mean, there was even a very brave Christian among the leaders of the Great Syrian Revolt. The colonial-minded French who'd tried to divide the country up into petty states and factions could never understand why Christian freedom fighters or revolutionaries would rebel against them, and they had to denounce the whole lot of them as traitors. Or how when they threatened to confiscate the secret Druze Epistles of Wisdom, the people simply hid them with Muslim and Christian families for safekeeping.

Father Elias had grown old quickly, for sure. I hadn't seen him in years, but that captivating benevolence still shone in his smiling eyes. When I asked him if he remembered Hela Mansour's murder, he became downcast. “Why do you want to go digging up the past?”

“I need to hear the whole story so I can find out exactly what happened. We might make a film about it...” I said.

“He that is without sin among you…” he repeated Christ’s famous words a few times. Then he took a deep breath and let out a long sigh. “You know, Rafi, the cruelest death is a death for honor’s sake. Christ came and purified us of the sins of the body and the mundane pleasures of the flesh, but you still see things like this happening. What happened to Hela Mansour, though, that was something else. It was the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

He looked distressed and took a few steps toward the rectory. “I can still remember how the air smelled that night. The whole place reeked of death. The brothers had heard that she’d come back, so me and a few others ran over to see them. At first, I figured it’d be better to take refuge in the church, to pray and spare myself the spectacle of a public death, but after I saw her with my own eyes, I felt I had to stop her brothers from behaving so stupidly. We went to their house—the one beside the flour mill—and we found Nawwaf, the eldest brother, there all by himself. He just stared at us indifferently until his other brothers all came running in and crowding around us. They were all on edge and smoking frantically. After they’d all arrived, one of them said, ‘She’s back.’”

“‘Where is she?’ asked Nawwaf.

“‘She’s at the house,’ answered the youngest brother and then in the blink of an eye they scattered—as if they’d practiced the ritual a thousand times before—and rooted out their rustiest weapons: razors, knives, and cleavers. They started scraping off the rust and sharpening the blades as we begged them to see reason and to let her go in peace. We said we'd find a way to get her to leave Sarmada, but Nawwaf just loaded his shotgun and shot a few rounds into the air.

“He blew up, screaming at us, ‘Whoever feels like getting buried today, just stay right there for one more minute!’ He was deadly serious, you could see he was in torment and there was no way to soften his heart. We were terrified ourselves, so we turned to leave. He called after us, in a strangled voice, ‘Look, listen here!’ When we turned back to look at him, he said…” Father Elias stopped to take a sip of the bitter tea. His ordinarily forthright expression was roiled as he told me the story of that day, which he'd long since buried in the depths of his heart. “Nawwaf said, ‘Anyone who tries to protect her is going to give his mother a reason to grieve today. Just stay out of it.’ He fired a couple of more bullets into the air to emphasize his point.

“I prayed to Our Lady. And all of Sarmada prayed for Hela and her brothers. That was the most we could do… I guess, maybe we could've done something, but there was no one who felt they could do anything at the time.”

After Father Elias had regained some of his customary good humor, I left him promising I'd come back to see him and the others, whom I thought of as my family, very soon. As I walked away, I asked myself: Is anything clearer now? Does there even have to be a story here at all? And yet, I'd come across something enticing, even seductive, in the way the villagers told their stories, in that melange of confession, atonement, and senseless chatter. I headed over to the oldest shop in the village, where people gathered to exchange the latest news and gossip. Mamdouh, the shopkeeper, welcomed me warmly just as he'd always done every time I returned, and we sat down together on the bench in front of the shop. I asked him about Hela's brothers.

“What do you want to know about them for?”

“No reason in particular,” I said. “I'm just curious. What happened to them? Who were they? Anything really.”

He poured the coffee and began: “I was just a young boy back then, you know, about seven or eight years old. I remember they used to come to the shop when my father was alive. I was terrified by the look of them, but my father—God rest his soul—always treated them very kindly. I asked him about them once and all he said was, “Son, there's nothing more precious in life than your honor and your good name. God help them.”

“They'd come to the shop and give a one-word greeting, if that. Sometimes they wouldn't say anything at all, or they wouldn't return our greeting. They bought what they needed, usually paying in eggs or milk. Some of them would just up and disappear for a while; they were off trying to track her down. They even used to pay a reward to anyone who brought them information about her whereabouts. I saw them once, just in front of the shop here where we're sitting, they gave some Bedouin a hundred lira to go looking for her.”

Salama came over, carrying his rusty shovel; I hardly ever saw him without it. He joined us at the front of the shop and, as usual, made a few sarcastic comments, and took up the story where Mamdouh had left off. He explained that it was all Sarmada's fault. That all the villagers were to blame for what'd happened in one way or another. “For a whole year after she ran off with that stranger, no one dared talk about it or take pleasure at the brothers' bad luck. And then, slowly with time, no one felt bad for them anymore. People started to say that it was their own damn fault.

“A group of us went to see them: the Druze Initiates from the mountains, the village shaykhs, Father Elias, the archbishop; we all went over to talk to them. We tried to get them to move on with their lives. We told them that none of us were questioning their manhood. All those men of the cloth, all those local dignitaries reeled off parables and words of wisdom about God's will and submitting to fate and begged the brothers to forget about their sister. They told them that all they had to do was disown her and that her Creator would judge her for what she'd done. Everything's part of God's plan, they said, you've got to accept it. Nawwaf, the eldest brother, wasn't going to hear it, he was stubborn.”

Salama said he could still remember exactly what Nawwaf had said to one of the shaykhs who told him to be reasonable, to have some perspective and obey God's will: “‘This has nothing to do with God, Shaykh,’ he answered softly. ‘It's a lot bigger than God.’” Old man Salama was all worked up and he was making wild circles in the air with his shovel: “Well, naturally the shaykhs and the other village elders weren't going to sit there and listen to all that blasphemy, so they just up and left, and let the brothers find their own way out of the wilderness of heartache back to right and reason. Not long afterwards, the brothers abandoned their family house in the center of the village and moved out next to Majlis Hamza to get away from everyone else.”

I asked the other people at the shop about Azaday, the guy who'd stolen Hela away. Some of them had nothing but contempt for him, but a few others talked about him more ambiguously, more deferentially. As more and more people came to the shop, the conversation expanded to include other versions of the stories, with everyone pitching in with his or her individual contribution. Some people remembered the story as their families had passed it down, while others had lived through the events themselves. A few had heard about what the couple had done and were full of respect for their courage. At that point, Shaykh Shaheen, the village elder, spoke up: “Murder is a sin. You know, by running off and marrying someone outside the faith, she was really just returning to her origins.”

“What do you mean?” we asked him. The shaykh had to choose his words carefully: he wasn't allowed to reveal to us, the Uninitiated—we who'd not yet received the secrets of our faith—any specifics about the sect's esoteric wisdom.

“The Druze call to faith was first made back in 408 AH, you know, 1018 AD,” said the shaykh. “It was announced to all the different denominations, sects, and religious communities in Fatimid Egypt and it spread into the Levant and the Taim Valley in particular. The creed was first set down by Hamza ibn Ali al-Zuzani, causing a schism with the Ismaili Shiites, whom they called ‘The Belated Shaykhs.’ It was the first time in the history of Islam that polygamy was forbidden. Then the call to faith was completed in 436 AH. Anyone who joined the faith afterwards had to write out a formal declaration and swear that they held no remaining affiliations to any other sect or religion, and that they would never again hold such affiliations until the end of time, not even when their souls underwent periods of transmigration, which we call ‘Episodes of Revelation.’ Since at the time, a number of perfidious souls hid among the new Druze and pledged their faith, in every life and in every generation a number of non-Druze souls must be culled. These people leave the community of the faithful. They return to their origins, marrying outside the faith, and therefore, killing a woman who leaves the faith is obviously a sin; on the contrary, we should welcome their departure. It's simply a kind of automatic cleansing of the community, a purification of our blood and minds.” His view was supported by the Holy Epistles of Wisdom, which gave a religious justification for the act of leaving the custody of the closed community. It absolved the runaway for turning her back on the faith without any need for bloodshed.

“Well, then, why didn't the Mansour brothers accept it?” I asked the shaykh.

“It was all about tradition,” he replied. “Custom. To those who can't comprehend—or even appreciate—reason, sometimes tradition can seem more important than religion itself.”

“Do the Epistles of Wisdom say anything about whether killing is ever justified?” I asked.

The shaykh was resolute in his wisdom. “One isn't even allowed to strike or rebuke. This, too, is immoral and will not be tolerated. For us Druze, with our special understanding of God's oneness, all men and women are equal. Men aren't women's keepers. A man isn't allowed to have more than one wife, and women have the same rights of inheritance as men, or as specified in the will of the deceased. A Druze woman enjoys the same freedoms and is bound by the same obligations as a Druze man. Moreover, men aren't allowed to divorce their wives, or even threaten to. If he does, he can never take her back; it's unforgivable to even say the word. This is intended to make divorce as difficult as possible.”

As I was saying goodbye to the people at the shop, Raifeh Umm Ibrahim came up to me and whispered, “I was a friend of Hela's. She told me all her secrets. I even went with her a few times when she went to see him. He was such a stunning boy, just gorgeous. Nobody could resist him.” I walked with Raifeh as far as Poppy Bridge and along the way she painted a picture of the boy who'd snatched Hela away. “He was so kind. His secret, his magic, was that he was a stranger. Strangers are always desirable, and Hela wasn't the only girl who was in love with him. He cast a spell on every girl in Sarmada. He was like a window onto a different world, colorful and exciting, not boring like this place here.”

Picture fragments began to come together as the scene formed mosaic-like before my eyes. I knew I was getting closer to Hela Mansour. At last, I'd arrived at something that resembled—if only superficially—the story Azza Tawfiq had told me. Yet it was still disconcerting: these kinds of stories were always traveling from person to person, being taken up—in a way, transmigrating. There was nothing to do but dig deeper, to extract more from more people, to jog memories to see what people had lived through at the time, to find out what they remembered about Azaday, and what happened to him.

The Sarmadans all said he was a wanderer from North Africa, one of those folks who went from village to village selling combs, lucky charms, and candied flattery, carrying around ancient maps to look for clues in their search for hidden treasures. He arrived in Sarmada and set up camp. There he polished brass, repaired pots and pans, and decorated amulets with the magic ink he'd inherited from his soothsaying ancestors in the Aures Mountains. People said he could interpret the secret code of Dahiya bint Lahiya, the seer of al-Bata al-Zanatiya, the greatest of the Amazigh tribes. Now, of course, the seer initially won her fame by resisting the armies of the Muslim conquerors to avenge the murder of her lover, Kusayla ibn Lamzam, but she remained a symbol of the Amazigh spirit throughout the early periods of Islamic rule in North Africa. Legend ascribed to her all manner of fantasy and mystery and she became the authority upon whom all who chose to spend their lives among the occult sigils that could unlock the talismans of life relied.

Azaday was a member of the Lamzam family and could trace his lineage all the way back to that Amazigh general himself. The man who'd died defending the Aures back before Islam had extended its rule over the whole of North Africa. And yet, beneath the ashes, the Amazigh character remained. Azaday, who'd been brought up in the circus of the Auresian landscape, cut a striking figure in small-town Sarmada. He could move a broom with his eyes and take a sand grouse flying along in a migrating flock and bring it crashing down to the ground in front of his audience. He played a strangely shaped wooden guitar that made Daham the leper's dog howl all night long, even though it'd been dumb for years. Once he was done amazing Sarmada with his marvels, he'd sit down and sing to them with his enchanting voice. They were crazy about his songs, which remained in their heads for weeks on end. He even won the respect and approval of the five brothers, who were charmed by his many talents. The middle brother went so far as to invite him over.

They stayed up all night, getting drunk with the help of a bottle of matured arak. Hela came in, carrying a huge tray bedecked with all manner of mezze. She sat opposite Azaday, the Algerian come to the East—although they called all North Africans “Moroccans”—and examined him silently. Her gaze was all curiosity; it was her love of discovery, her heart laid bare. Something about him caused her to forget all the advice Druze girls were given: beware strangers, for there's no happily-ever-after for Druze who stray outside the confines of the sect.

He was thirty-one and vigourously—arrestingly—masculine. After a second glass of arak, he started to sing a strange ballad called Aynuva and Ghariba, and the wide and empty room filled with his mesmerizing voice. Mysterious Amazigh words that carried the mountain air of the Aures, and which none of them could understand—apart from “beast” and “O Father! O Father!”—faded into nothingness. They asked him to explain the lyrics, so he did his best to find Arabic equivalents.

O Father, open the door!

Daughter, silence your bracelets' clanging.

O Father, I fear the beast in the woods!

Me too, dear daughter, me too.

His songs transformed the house into a trap of gentle affection. Hela was being worn down, and as she sat there across from the door, her heart opened up wider and wider; the bolts of good counsel be damned. The song carried her off to another clime and when he turned to look at her, a secret thread began to stitch her destiny to that of this vagabond Berber. He could feel her stare swirling around him and he knew that his extraordinary journey—from the Algerian mountains in remotest North Africa to Sarmada—had all been for this: to delight in that gaze as it set his heart alight. He'd promised himself that he'd be nothing but a neutral observer, only an itinerant earning his daily bread and seeking out his roots here in the Levant; she made him want to go back on his word.

A band of young Africans were playing music in front of the statue of Saint Michel and people had gathered around to listen. Nonetheless, neither the sound of banging drums and clattering shakers, nor an African voice filling the air, could keep me from listening closely as the physics professor continued her tale. I was beginning to doubt whether folk memory alone could have produced all those astonishing details, preserved all those expressive images and reflections from one generation to the next. She'd buried the little cowbell, her will, and her mother's bracelets beneath the mulberry tree and walked out of the house to face them. She continued, recounting all that her memory granted from beyond the grave.

They'd run away to Damascus and got married there. They used fake names because they were being hunted by a team of dogged trackers, but it was difficult to disguise their true identities as they'd failed to cross the border and get false papers printed. Because of her father's legacy as a hero of the Great Revolt, all those with higher authority in the mountains spread the word at the border passes that Azaday was a dangerous criminal who was wanted by the security forces, and so they were harassed everywhere they went. They became a couple of easy targets, who were ever vulnerable to blackmail and the threat of exposure. It wasn't very hard to figure out who they were, what with his Algerian accent, and it was all but impossible for them to hide out.

There was nothing left for them to do but to take refuge with the Shammar tribe of Bedouins for a while. Azaday spent years trying to get them into Iraq and Turkey to no avail and twice they fell into the hands of Camel Corps soldiers whom her brothers had bribed. They never stayed in one place for more than a week, and constantly being on the run had ground them down completely by the time they reached Zabadani. They remained there for a week with the smugglers and then Azaday daringly crossed the border into Lebanon and back alone to make sure it was safe. He returned ecstatic and hopeful: they'd cross the border with the smugglers. He'd tested the route himself and confirmed that nothing could go wrong. Promise shone once again in the distance and announced an end to their days of banishment. They would get as far away as they could, and go back to Algeria. Dreams surged out before her. Hela smiled, but there was some sadness in her eyes. She'd bet against time. She'd got news of her brothers from the itinerant peddlers and coppersmiths who passed through Sarmada, but the overwhelming relief of a death forestalled was undeniable all the same. She'd heard about what had happened to them, how they'd abnegated and consecrated, and now it was time to decide: vanish or go back?

Azza Tawfiq laid out in detail the events of that night. Azaday was thunderstruck when Hela told him she'd had enough and had decided to go back. “I can still hear his voice, the echo of his words, how he begged me to stay, not to be stupid and go back. He started cursing in Amazigh and pleading with me in my mountain Arabic. He tried everything he could to get me to change my mind: charms, begging, threats and promises. I answered every attempt with a single refrain, uttered calmly but firmly, ‘I have to go back.’ He lost it. He started beating his head against the wall. He tore at his clothes. He threw himself at my feet.

“‘I have to go back...’

“He grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me. He squeezed my hands, his nails dug into my skin.

“‘I have to go back…’

“I just couldn't explain to him that I'd made my decision for the good of us all. I wanted to give him the chance to have a life free of fear. We'd been moving from town to town for months on end. We'd tried our luck in every inch of Syria, from the north to the south, from the coast to the desert, scrambling like stalked prey. The mere hint that someone else nearby was from the mountains made us run off in a panic. My brothers' plight had won the sympathy of everyone in the Druze mountains and the news that they'd isolated themselves from the rest of society had spread beyond the region and won them pity beyond the sect. Not a single person who heard the story forgave me for what I'd done. I'd been sentenced to death for the lives of five of Sarmada's best. We were cursed. There was nowhere left for us to go, not in Syria, maybe not even in the whole world.

“I knew how stubborn my brothers could be. They'd inherited that bloody-mindedness, that severity, from our forefathers; it was like a masochistic ritual with them. It was like I was committing murder a thousand times a day. There was nothing I could do except go back and let them live again. I held him that night. It was an agony I'd only ever felt twice in my life: the day my mother died and the day Princess was put down. For a moment, I felt that perhaps we could make it to Beirut and from there to somewhere safe and that I could be as happy as the rest of God's creation, but I just didn't want to go on anymore.”

At dawn, she slipped out of the rented house in Zabadani without waking him and went to Damascus. There she caught a bus from the Bab al-Musalla station and reached Sarmada on Tuesday evening after a light rain. She walked to her old house to pray that God would be merciful to her mother, and to commemorate her old life, to ask the old place to forgive her, and to bury her will. She then continued down the path that ran alongside Princess' cliff to face them in the square like a lamb leading itself to the slaughter. She'd left him behind, the man who'd been so good at inventing stories, at dazzling even the most frigid hearts, and a dozen things besides. The man who aroused wonder wherever he went, who sold potions and handkerchiefs perfumed with good fortune, who played that strange guitar and sang songs he made up on the spot in that enchanting voice, who interpreted dreams. He was sound asleep when she left him. He'd finally gotten her to promise that she'd go to Beirut with him in a couple of days. She knew it was a lie when she said it.

Azza Tawfiq stopped speaking. Her mood changed and she asked me for a cigarette. She lit it and her gaze drifted, not off into the distance, but deep inside. Her left foot bobbed constantly as she spoke as if she were casting off a long-kept silence, as if she were finally shedding a heavy burden after endless toil. I had nothing to say. She looked out absent-mindedly toward the Seine. You could see the Louvre in the distance and the Latin Quarter buzzing with life. She began to stroke her left palm. There was a small wart and dark spots where two warts used to be. She noticed I was looking at her palm, but she didn't hide it. She whispered, sardonically, “I never could get rid of these warts. For that you need a psychologist. The only way to get rid of them is the power of suggestion. One difference between Hela and me is that she managed to do it by using an old Aramaic cure. But me, in Paris in 2010, I've had three laser procedures for them and they're still not fully cured. Maybe I need to go back to Sarmada, to the Salt Spring, to cure them.” Azza looked me in the eye. “You know the Salt Spring, of course?”

“Yes, I remember it. We used to go there when I was little to drink the cold water. We'd walk down four stone steps and scoop the water up. It tastes better than Evian if you ask me.” That was my attempt at lightening the mood, but she didn't react. There was only a wan smile sketched on her lips. She went on, confident and unwavering; she wanted me to know every last detail, to convince me it was true, and to free herself.

“I was rubbing my hand as I walked towards them, remembering the Salt Spring and my cow, Princess. I'd cured my warts with Aunt Rosa's remedy on the same day Princess fell from the cliff...

“I was there the day she fell down off the cliff. I was only about eight years old and I was following the old Aramaic cure that Aunt Rosa, the old Christian medicine woman, had given me along with two lumps of rock salt. ‘Don't speak to anyone,’ she said. ‘Don't look behind you. And don't return anyone's greeting. Just go to the spring and throw the salt in, and then come back the same way you went.’

“I went to the Salt Spring, performed the rite, and repeated three times: ‘My warts, O Spring, dissolve, as salt dissolves in water!' I went home and fell asleep in my mother's arms. I woke with a start: outside there was a commotion. I got up to see what was going on. My father and two other men were sharpening butcher knives and then they hurried off. I followed them to the cave in the valley below the cliff where people used to take shelter from French air raids. The village thoroughfare ran alongside the cliff that overhung the cave and there was a sliver of rock that jutted out and came to a dead end.

“I saw all the villagers heading for the bottom of the cliff, looking up at the huge cow as it mooed plaintively for help. I can still remember the look in her eye: a faint glimmer of hope that they might save her from her fatal predicament.”

Old man Salama had been one of the ones preparing himself in case Princess should fall. He said he could remember it as if it were yesterday: Princess was the most famous cow in the whole region. No one could quite understand how exactly she'd managed to set the terms, how she'd won them all over, silenced their mocking, and maintained her poise until they finally realized that she was something special. They ended up giving her a name that matched her imperious bearing, breaking the longstanding tradition that only thoroughbred Arabian horses merited such names.

“Princess never wore a halter, so she'd nearly trample the village cowhands when they came to take her to pasture. She once went two days without any water because she refused to drink with the other cows in the herd and when they tried to stall her with another cow, she knocked down a pair of wooden doors and slammed her stubborn head against the wall. Her milk was the best, though, the most abundant and delicious in the whole region.”

Salama went on, reviving the memories of his peers gathered there with us in front of Mamdouh's shop: “One time she was in heat and the village bull couldn't mount her, so she had to spend a whole week in heat until we brought her a proper stud bull from the north. After hours of resisting and butting, he finally mounted her. She got that prize bull in the neck with her horn, but at long last she let out a moan of pleasure that rang through the village. Women came ululating and we danced the Dabke till the morning. It was the first time we'd ever put on a wedding for someone that wasn't human.” He laughed, as did everyone else.

“Well then, how come this super-cow suffered such a disgraceful death?” I asked them, hoping to compare the memories on the ground to what Azza Tawfiq had told me in Paris.

“The cow followed strange whims,” Salama said. “She wandered off, following the green grass that took her from the safety of the familiar toward the lure of the unknown. She walked along the edge of the cliff, looking for the freshest virgin shoots. She drifted off her usual route in search of sweet mallow and tempting clover.”

Salama stopped and pointed to the nearby cliff. He turned to me. “See there? Every day she went down that path towards the Salt Spring to drink. Except that day, she stopped unexpectedly near where the cliff hangs over the cave; she'd spotted a little path that took her right up over the roof of the cave. To her right there was a massive drop and to her left a wall of basalt. The path was narrow and a boulder blocked the way forward. It was barely wide enough for her; she couldn't go back, she couldn't go forward, and of course she couldn't turn around and head out front first.

“She ate her fill and then when she realized she was stuck, she mooed a few times. A crowd gathered and we tried everything to save her from what seemed like certain death. We tried to use strong ropes, but the climbers couldn't get to her to wrap the ropes around her body. We went around to all the houses in the village and got all the foam mattresses out of the parlors, and the women collected tattered clothes and stuffed sacks with straw. Hamoud supervised the creation of a safety net made out of blankets, mattresses, rugs, and yarn. In the heat of the moment, he even tore off his carefully pressed coat and threw it on top of the surreal pile of textiles. I bet that was the weirdest safety net ever made. But, you see, the problem was that it wouldn't have saved a mountain goat let alone a cow as big as Princess! The ground wasn't level and the whole idea was sort of absurd. People can get rather foolish and childlike when they're desperate.

“After four hours we still didn't have anything to show for all our effort. All we could do was pray for a miracle—maybe the cow would sprout wings. When our imagination had gone as far as that, we knew it was time to start getting out the knives and cleavers. We spread out along the bottom of the cliff and started sharpening, just waiting for her to fall!”

I left Salama at the shop with the other men and walked over to the cliff. The place hadn't changed in all that time. It was the setting of my childhood, too, but I don't want to force my memories into the story just yet. I thought back on my life and work, about constantly being swamped making those films about bridging East and West, those interminable months of research and discussion—everything had to be just right so the camera could make concrete images out of my paper ideas—and then I met Azza Tawfiq in Paris. She not only upended my schedule, but—as I'd later discover—she was also the spark that set my whole life up in flames.

I looked up at Princess's cliff, half-expecting Hela Mansour to walk past. It was as if time were commixed. A place can't be a frozen moment. All it takes is a little memory and some storytelling, and time begins to flow. It was my job to set the scene just as Azza Tawfiq had seen it in her previous life, just how she'd told it to me, and also how the people of Sarmada were recounting the story, here and now. Once I'd added some of my own perspective and imagination, it went like this:

Three knives, two daggers, and a cleaver waited below as the body fell through the air to the sound of the bell ringing around her neck. The blades plunged into the carcass from every side. They cut off her limbs, and blood gushed over their faces and clothing. Her final groan terrified the crowd, but it faded away and the precious cow fell silent. The crowd jumped back to avoid the spurting blood and its sticky splatter, expanding the circle of spectators that had grown tighter and tighter around the stiff and crumpled carcass lying on the rocky ground. One of the most skillful butchers was put in charge of beheading the creature. One carefully gauged blow of the cleaver and the little bell fell from its neck and rolled down to the foot of the cliff. Hela Mansour's youngest brother went after it and brought it home to her as a token of the day.

The tale of Princess's demise was over, I felt. Now it was time to head over to the Salt Spring and circle around the cliff, waiting for Hela to arrive at the mercy of this summer heat that simply wouldn't let up. I stopped to examine the craggy cliff face and to look down the path all the way to the end, where Hela Mansour was slaughtered. I spent a long time just looking in the midst of what seemed like a thicket of oppressive calm. Steam rose up from the asphalt as if it were about to melt and the air was heavy with an alien heat. My body felt weighed down suddenly, and then instantly lighter. I trembled and broke out in a cold sweat. Something like a light drizzle fell on my face. Hela Mansour's body had settled, it seemed, inside my own. We'd melded and she now occupied my body. I didn't realize it, but suddenly I was walking along beside her, or through her. I'd become her, she'd become me, and together we returned to that Tuesday evening in 1968.

She spotted her brothers coming toward her in the distance—a gang of bearded men carrying knives and cleavers like the ones she'd seen thirteen years before, on the day Princess fell from the cliff.

She closed her dark eyes—just as she'd done when she watched that scene with her brothers all those years ago—and arrived on the stage for a scene she'd never imagined would be replayed on her own body as the price for her deadly defection with an outsider. They slowed down and eventually stopped, standing in a semicircle. I stepped forward into the center. Their beards masked their faces, but she knew each one by the look in his eyes. She wished she could throw her arms around them, embrace them one by one, and say, “I'm tired of running,” but she didn't. She just listened to the eerie silence, which was broken only by the cold whistling wind coming down from the North. One brother's eyes articulated sorrow and longing as if to say “I missed you,” but his voice, sad and cracking, said only, “Why'd you do it?” and seized up.

Rain didn't fall, although the sky darkened with clouds. Nawwaf came up to us—to me who'd become her—roaring and snarling, and plunged his knife through her scarlet shirt into her chest as it rose and fell rapidly. A shivering spasm came over her whole body as she sank to the ground. Together we watched the heavy clouds break and become snowflakes. I could feel the blade burying itself in my chest as I watched. As she fell to the ground, she looked up to the sky and summoned up all her remaining strength. “Are you satisfied now? Anything else you want from me, God?” she cried, her voice passing through the cloying blood that tasted salty in her throat.

I screamed alongside her, “Anything else you want from me, God?” Her memories appeared before her eyes in an uncanny flow as her numb body longed only to lie and rest. And yet the lightness gave her the feeling of flying. I watched the tape of her life streaming before me: school papers, old friends, her brothers carrying her around, laughing at her mischief, passing her from shoulder to shoulder, her father's kindly eyes, her mother's divine laugh, the mulberry tree at her old house, berries sweet like nectar.

He withdrew his knife and took a step back, permitting the others to come forward and stab her in the neck, the back and torso. She glimpsed the Salt Spring as she fell. The swift current of her memory whirled. Milk thistle didn't help with the warts. The old medicine woman. The church bells she loved so much. The muezzin calling morning prayer. Druze shaykhs reciting the Epistles of Wisdom or the story of Judgment Day on the last evening of the Feast of Sacrifice. The scent of lit candles in the majlis. Milk sloshing melodiously in stomach bags. Women lamenting a death.

The fourth knife pierced her windpipe just below the neck. She tasted only salt; her body grew torpid; her head teemed with memories. Gushing blood stained her mind.

The smell of roses on the morning of Holy Wednesday. Running to pick the supplest red poppy anemones, oleander, daisies, sweet clover, pennyroyal and rosemary, which she soaked in an earthenware pot and left out under the stars of the spring night sky. In the morning on the second Wednesday in April, she'd wash her body with the flower infusion, as was the ritual, to be protected from snakes and scorpions for an entire year. Old tales. Weddings and pranks. Amulets and strings that could change one's destiny. My warts, O Spring, dissolve!

Her belly was rent open from one hip to the other. She fell to the ground and thrust her hands into the muddy dirt that was mixed with her own warm blood. My warts, O Spring, dissolve. Her mind was clear but for a gentle peal that withered into a still whiteness.

At that point, I left her to collapse, dead, and came out of her; or she came out of me—I don't know which. But I watched the final scene, standing there by the cliff, soaked with sweat, searching my soul. There was a gluey taste in my mouth, acrid like blood. One of them stepped forward and drove his knee into her back. He pulled her head back by the hair. With a twitch of her neck and a swift movement, her head was severed. They took out their razors, smeared their faces with her blood, and began to shave their beards off in clumps that fell onto her corpse. They didn't say a word. They stood and took in the scene as a light drizzle of rain began to fall, and an unfamiliar numbness pricked their faces. A great burden had been lifted, but it was as if it'd flowed out with the blood and settled somewhere in their chests; the burden was a voice they didn't want to hear. They squeezed their eyes shut to hold back the tears that burst out despite them when the wind blew away the tufts of hair covering her body. They retreated hastily and were met with cheering women ululating and men standing dry-eyed as rain fell from the gloomy sky.

The taste of blood in my mouth was real. I fainted. The neighbors carried me over to their house, where I was given a glass of cold water and began to regain some of my strength. Friends and relatives came running, “What's wrong? Is everything okay?”

“Nothing to worry about,” answered the man of the house. “It's just a touch of sun.”

Panning the video camera, I captured the whole of Sarmada from the top of the hill—a panorama of the quiet little village. When I got down from the hill, I filmed the paths, focused on the old stone houses, the cliff, the Mansour family's detached homestead by the old mill, Cannon Hill—it got that name because it was where the French had set up their cannon when they were shelling the town and its environs. I filmed the rest of the valley, Farida's shed, the terebinth tree, the myrtle, Wool Creek, until I got to the Mansour family's old house. The aged smell of the place enveloped me as I kicked open the old gate, which hadn't been replaced in decades. It opened with a screech. The dotty old mulberry tree stood in the center of the garden. It made me feel as if we'd known each other for years. I filmed everything I could and then sat down to contemplate the ruination. It occurred to me to search through the soil under the mulberry tree, so I started to dig. My hands were no use, so I went round to Salama's house to borrow a shovel.

I got down to work. I dug up the earth around the trunk down to an arm's length, but found no sign of the will, or the bracelets, or the bell. I suddenly realized I was being ridiculous and stopped. Salama, with his narrow brown eyes and wrinkled face, came over to see what I was up to and asked me what I was looking for. “Nothing... It was just a stupid idea I had.”

“You're not the first person to go looking for treasure under there,” he said. “We've dug down under the ruins of this house two or three times already and we didn't find anything except for an old copper cowbell.” I was dumbstruck. “The bell's round the neck of one of the cowhand's cows now.”

“Really?”

“Follow me.” He led me to Poppy Bridge. A man was leading a herd of nineteen cows back from the poppy fields. The herd walked calmly past us; each cow had a copper bell around its neck. Salama went up to one of them and snatched off its bell. It was about as big as a fist and slightly dented. He held it out to me and said, “I found this buried in the Mansours' garden.” I started laughing and imagining how the physics professor would react when I handed her the bell. It didn't prove anything, not that transmigration was real or that reality could transmigrate. Anyone could be Hela Mansour or not. And yet, had she not come over me? I'd taken the stabs alongside her. I'd choked on the sour blood in her throat. I watched her memories soar and touched the awesome darkness as she lay there, motionless.

I left her body, or she left mine. And then the place I'd fled from opened up before me: Sarmada. I hadn't realized that Sarmada was a part of me, and that I was a part of it. But now I could see—without eyes—and hear the rush of people's stories and dreams; the simple setting teemed. I wasn't the same “me” anymore. I wasn't dying to get away as I usually was during my visits. I wasn’t oppressed by the customary, crushing boredom. The dull sluggishness of life here didn’t remind me of the brisk city rhythms of my beloved Dubai, Paris, Amsterdam, and London. I craved Sarmada all of a sudden, preferred it, and for the first time, I realized that I’d merely been searching for something within myself the farther afield I went and that I could only find it here.

I ambled over to my old house and went in. With new eyes, I discovered mulberries, pomegranates, prickly pears, a chicken coop, and a pen for sheep and goats in our garden. Versions of me appeared: the baby, the child, the teenager. I watched time flow. Who had I been? How come I hadn’t known him before? I’d spent all that time struggling to change who I was, to run away from myself; masquerading in a different language, a different guise, to be accepted by another place, another time. I examined the small, dented bell, ignoring a torrent of phone calls. I began to discern my inner self, to see the deformed masks I’d been wearing for all those years fall away. Time, it seemed, had passed over our house; it had passed over Sarmada entirely. Things had only gotten smaller, and worn out.

I went up to the second floor, my favorite room upstairs in my grandfather’s house; it was my childhood stamping ground. The plains of the Hauran ran down to the horizon, bordered by a vast and rocky stretch of basalt that continued deep into the heart of the Lajat. Old sounds, images, and smells came toddling forward and a loss-laden epiphany throbbed within me. A voice came over the village loud speaker: “We regret to announce the passing of Farida bint Fadda. May God show her mercy and comfort those she leaves behind.”

The town broke out in whispers: how crass! Whoever decided to broadcast the news of Farida’s death had clearly intended to ridicule her passing. The sounds of mourning wrenched me away from Hela Mansour, Azza Tawfiq, and my momentary fancy of sinking into memory, and returned me to reality. I realized—with a start—that it had been a week and I still hadn't told anyone in Dubai what I was up to. I'd come under the pretext of work and was actually meant to be in Damascus, not here. Tenacious reality set me back on track: I called my boss and told him there'd been a death in the family. I asked for a week off, promising to make up the time I missed, and he grudgingly gave in. I answered a text from the physics professor, who said she wished she could be there with me and see what I was seeing. I told her I'd bring her a Sarmadan surprise and turned off my mobile.

I walked downstairs and joined a group hurrying over to Farida's place. I asked why they'd cheapened her death by announcing it like that, but the only person who'd answer me was Salama. “Farida was free-spirited,” he said. “She opened her door to every young man in the village. She slept with any man she felt like. God have mercy on her. Her secret's with the Lord and she's his problem now.”

“What do you mean ‘She opened her door to every man in the village?’”

“She was a whore, son!” he barked at me. “Don't you get it?” He stormed off, muttering to himself and leaning on his battered old shovel.

People were getting louder and louder until they were almost shouting. The village, normally oppressed with silence, was rife with tension. I walked toward the uproar. A group of men were carrying the corpse and improvising a slapdash funeral service; the shaykhs had refused to pray over the body. She was buried that evening far outside the town limits. Other people, meanwhile, rummaged through all her possessions. The time had come to settle the score for her liberal youth. It was like a group assassination of someone who'd tried to break through the strictures of all that was accepted and approved.

I couldn't understand why no one had said anything about Farida while she was still alive. Why hadn't they put her on trial or killed her even? They'd all consented to Hela Mansour's murder after all; they'd stood by and done nothing. How exactly does memory get passed on from one generation to the next? How does it pass down the stories of scandal, of those who've violated the tyranny of hidebound sectarian and tribal law? How could the people have tolerated a woman who'd corrupted all the young men in Sarmada year after year? She'd allowed them to express their manhood directly through her body rather than through masturbation, or having sex with farm animals, or exploring male bodies and discovering the anal and phallic thrills of gay sex. Classic Freudian questions, but in a place so secretive and so harsh, the ready-made answers can't help but seem silly. If Farida had lived in the West, she'd have been prosecuted, and maybe even locked away for life as a child molester. True, they weren't exactly children, although they were under eighteen, but some people got married as young as fifteen in the village. A whole generation of men in Sarmada crossed into manhood over her body's bridge. But in the East—and maybe specifically in Sarmada—what she'd done was more like saint's work, and the trial only took place now that she was dead.

Let's put moral judgments aside for a moment and tell the tale from the very start. Let's try to put the story back together, and maybe Sarmada will give me a few more clues to help me try to understand how I fit in with these people who made me who I am, who imprinted their rashness on me, who nursed me—though I don't know from where—with the waters of rage, fear, joy, and gloom.

Farida struck my thoughts like a bolt of lightning, driving out Azza Tawfiq, Hela Mansour, and everything else that had happened, or at least setting them aside for later. I was pelted by the memories swirling around me and by the memory of that delightful day. Farida appeared to me, as I tried to remember her, the way she looked when I was ten years old.

I had an aunt who was the most famous seamstress in the whole region. She used to receive her customers in her bedroom, which she’d made into a workshop, and she used the south-facing room as a fitting room. I used to love that room and often slept there. I discovered that the women weren’t embarrassed to change in front of me because I was so young, especially not when I pretended to be asleep. The ritual of covertly watching the women undress was my little secret. It was thrilling, although I didn’t yet know why. Except Farida had figured me out; she knew I used to watch her undress. One day, she came in as I was pretending to be asleep, with the covers pulled over my head except for a tiny gap through which I could see her body. With her inimitable delicacy, she slowly stripped off her blouse and squeezed her breasts together with a knowing smile. I felt a stab of pain as she undid her bra and let one of her pomegranate breasts spill out. It bobbed slightly and fell still. She tucked her breast back into her bra and began to take off her skirt in a kind of striptease. She pinched her skirt and slid it down to the floor, shimmying her hips, exposing her oaken torso, which rested on tender and bulging thighs of an intoxicatingly dark brown. Aware that she was being watched by a young voyeur, she twirled around completely, showing off her African-round bottom. Her underwear did nothing to conceal it, just divided it into two equal halves that each called out to me wildly. Her vulva nearly pushed through her shiny black panties; the top was rounded, but you could make out the beginning of her slit and at the sides there were a few red bumps from frequent shaving. The sight of her nakedness destroyed me. A hyena was whooping inside of me. I felt numbing pulses tickling my pelvis. And here was my first erection, come to herald the beginning of a tortuous relationship between me and that skinny body lying beneath the sheets, completely covered but for a tiny aperture on that hot summer day.

When she heard the deep, hot, reptilian panting I couldn't hold back, she grinned. She tried on the new dress and then quickly took it off. She put her own dress back on and on her way out, crept up to my lair and tore the covers off my sweaty face. She laughed loudly, causing my aunt in the next room to ask if everything was all right. She winked at me and smiled the sweetest sinful smile. “What would you say if I told your aunt, you little runt?” And walked out. Those were the only words I ever heard her say.

Of course, I told my aunt about it and was immediately banished from that exquisite ambush. She screened off the fitting room and forbade me from ever going in there again. Farida remained a longed-for fantasy, which faded with time until I forgot all about it—only to remember it tonight. The only reason I'd been brought here was to bury Farida, I felt, or rather to revive her, to bring her back to life—for that alone. The professor's voice echoed in my mind, as she repeated Einstein's saying, reminding me to free myself, to open my memory and live life up to the very fullest: “As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.”