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has chosen our fate. I’ll tell you about this city that was a party to our love, and that went on to become a reason why we split up and where the beautiful scene of our destruction played out.
    What would you have talked about? Which man did you write about? Which one of us did you love? Which one of us would you have killed? To whom were you faithful? You who exchanged one love for another, one memory for another, one impossibility for another.
    Where do I rank on the list of your loves and your victims? Perhaps I’m in first place, because I’m closest to the original version. Perhaps I’m the fake copy of Si Taher, one not transformed by martyrdom into a replica. Perhaps I’m a fake father figure, or a fake lover. You – like this nation – are the expert in faking and turning the tables without effort.
    Henry de Montherlant said, ‘If you are unable to kill someone you claim to hate, don’t say you hate him. That is to prostitute the word.’
    Let me admit that right now I hate you and that I write this book to kill you. Let me try out your own weapon. Perhaps you were right, novels are just pistols loaded with words. And the words are bullets. But I won’t use a silencer as you do. A man who’s carrying a gun at my age can’t take so many precautions. I want your death to resound as much as possible. I’m killing more than one person along with you. Someone had to be daring enough to shoot them one day.
    Read this book to the end. Afterwards, you might stop writing fake novels. Review our story afresh. One shock after another, one wound after another. Our meagre literature has known no greater story, nor witnessed a more beautiful ruin.

Chapter Two
    The day we met was extraordinary.
    Fate was no extra. Right from the beginning it played the lead. Didn’t it bring us together from different cities, from another time and another memory, for the opening of an art exhibition in Paris?
    I was the artist that day; you were a visitor, curious in more ways than one. You weren’t exactly a young art lover, nor was I a man who felt threatened by younger women. What brought you there that day? What made me stare at your face? Admittedly, I was drawn to faces, because only our faces reveal us and give us away. I could love or hate because of a face.
    Even so, I am not fool enough to say I fell in love with you at first sight. Let’s say I was in love with you before first sight. There was something familiar about you, something that attracted me to your features. I was already disposed to love them, as if I had once loved a woman who looked like you, or had always been ready to love a woman just like you.
    Out of all the other faces, yours haunted me. As your white dress moved from picture to picture, my incredulity and curiosity also turned white. The gallery, filled with visitors and colours, became completely white.
    Could love be born from a colour we have not necessarily loved?
    White suddenly drew near and started talking in French with another young woman I hadn’t noticed before. Perhaps when white has long black hair, it obscures other shades.
    Looking at one of the paintings, White said, ‘I prefer abstract art.’
    The colourless one replied, ‘Personally, I prefer to understand what I’m looking at.’
    In preferring to understand all she saw, the stupidity of the colourless one didn’t surprise me. Only White surprised me – how uncharacteristic to prefer the obscure!
    Before that day, I had never been partial towards the colour white. It had never been my favourite colour. I disliked categorical colours. But at that moment, I inclined towards you without thinking and found myself saying to that young woman, as though continuing a sentence you had begun, ‘Art is not necessarily what we understand. It is what stirs us.’
    The two of you looked at me in surprise. Snatching a glance before you said anything, you spotted the empty sleeve of my jacket, the cuff tucked into the pocket in shame. It