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shingles door, she said that her ungrateful son hadn’t lived there for years. I should tell the coldhearted mother-hater that the woman who conceived him, the woman who carried him for nine painful months and cared for his every need as he grew up, needed bread.
    Ahmad had moved up in the world, out of Sabra.
    Forgive me a brief digression here. It’s only to offer you a fuller idea of Sabra.
    Years later, after the war, in the midnineties, a local artist asked me to help him sell prints of a map of Beirut and its suburbs that he had lovingly painted by hand. He was obviously smitten with our city. He’d painted Beirut as if it were the whole world, complete within itself, each neighborhood a different country with its own color, streets as borders, the tiniest road documented, every alley, every corner. He’d even drawn in little hydrographic symbols (fleurs-de-lis) where all the water wells are supposed to be—Beirut, whose name is derived from the word well in most Semitic languages because of the abundance of its belowground water.
    A complete sphere, Beirut as the total globe, the entire world. The painter even created a Greenland effect, stretching the longitude lines at the top and bottom, with increasing distortion of size as one moved north or south of the city. In the map, Beirut existed outside of Lebanon, apart, not part of the Middle East. It was whole.
    As a Beiruti through and through who in a long life has spent only ten nights away from the suckling breasts of her city (Grünbein: “Travel is a foretaste of Hell”), I considered the map a chef d’oeuvre, a stunning, glorious work of inspiration. The more I lauded, the wider his smile. We stood side by side in my bookstore, staring at the print I had hung on the wall. He tried to light a cigarette, but his hand shook too much. I told him he couldn’t smoke inside. He confessed nervousness. I led him outside, carrying the map. “Let’s see it in Beiruti daylight.” In front of the store window, he shrugged off his uneasiness and regained confidence. I noted that the streets of Sabra were not named and were less delineated than the other streets.
    “I tried,” he said, “but everything worked against me. The streets were impermanent, transmogrifying at night into something else as if to trick me.” The books behind the glass window were witnesses to what he said next: “The streets and alleys of Sabra multiply at night like rats—like rats, I tell you.”
    He had painted the Sabra camp a very light blue, like the Siberian tundra in some maps. The cartographer must have been loath to include the camp in his map. I considered giving him Bruno Schulz’s book, which negotiates a similar situation. Schulz wrote: “On that map . . . the area of the Street of Crocodiles shone with the empty whiteness that usually marks polar regions or unexplored countries of which almost nothing is known.”
    Ah, Cinnamon Shops is still one of my favorite books. That map of Beirut still hangs on my bedroom wall.
    Sabra? I haven’t been back there.
    Back to Ahmad. I first met him when he was a timid teenager in 1967, lanky and wispy, a character out of a Chekhov story, with peach fuzz and kaffiyeh, trying to emulate his hero Yasser (George Habash and the Popular Front, which was beginning to form that same year, wouldn’t come into his life for a while yet). He wore bone-framed glasses that were too big for his face. I didn’t notice him standing before my desk until he ahemmed. I was confronted by the smell of licorice and anise, his tooth-crushing candy drops. He was sent to me by another bookstore in the city, told that no one else could help him. He was looking for a book by an Italian, but couldn’t remember the title or the name of the author. He had to give me a little bit more to go on, I told him. Italians had been writing books for hundreds of years.
    He said, “The hero of the book was not a hero, he killed many lizards.”
    I didn’t laugh, but my