I still remember his smile, which betrayed a certain simple-mindedness — or perhaps he was intelligent to a degree I could no longer, or was simply unable to, understand. When he was in secondary school, he outdid me in the baccalaureate and entered the faculty he wanted with a fairly high score.

This young man was a blend of a bygone era in the life of our society — an era that found expression in the mixed marriage between a Shia woman and a Sunni man; in that calm, comfortable life; in the mingling of poverty and ease, of hardship and happiness; and in the daily trials of raising fathers, children, and grandchildren.

His mother belonged to the Shia sect and his father to the Sunni; his father's origins lay in a district of Syria's Qalamoun, that region intermixed with migrants from families that had come — so I believe — from Egypt or from here and there, and settled in al-Nabk. And as Muhammad al-Nabki put it, with his blunt humor and the laugh that was his trademark, saying mockingly: "A donkey was offered the chance to become a Nabki — it refused." A clear jab at people who come from al-Nabk.

This young man, born the youngest of his brothers — the gap between him and his eldest brother nearing twenty years — his mother feared at his birth that he would be deformed, and she had wished he would be a girl. Yet before his death she bonded with him to an extraordinary degree; before he was "martyred" — in the words of those loyal to them — she would walk with him as far as the farthest point she could see him off to.

I still remember the scene of the coffin raised in the courtyard of his home, which was a hawsh — a compound enclosing several households. That was how people lived in the Jewish Quarter of Damascus, a quarter slowly emptying of its Jewish residents and filling with Palestinian migrants driven by force from their homes, and with Syrians likewise uprooted — by poverty, by the concentration of power, by the need to earn a crust of bread. People moved from villages and towns far from Damascus to inhabit anything at all inside the city, and the Jewish Quarter was one of the areas settled by those two migrations that filled it. And the migrants fell into conflict among themselves.

Thanks to his mother's gift for driving people away, she managed to expel the Palestinian family and take the hawsh — the big house — for herself and her family alone, which included her mother-in-law and several of her husband's sisters.

The coffin in which Alaa lay was raised, after a struggle between life and death brought on by a shard of shrapnel that struck his liver. That scene, as his brothers lifted it high, spoke — in their eyes — of defiance, of strength, of victory drawing near: that victory was coming, and that sacrifices carry no weight and hold no place in our reckoning on the road to the goal.

That was their unspoken language, for they knew that patience and waiting serve the achievement of aims — especially since they lived in a Shia milieu still crystallizing around the Party — Hezbollah — and still crystallizing around the strong state, the impregnable state, the state that triumphs, sooner or later, through the sacrifices of its honorable sons, through their devotion, their blood, and through the devotion of mothers and their tears for their sons.

They were certain of victory, and so they raised the coffin high — with the strength of arms, the strength of numbers, the strength of the people gathered around them — defying reality, defying the future, defying the past, utterly convinced of an inevitable triumph under an unshakable leadership: the Shia leadership of Hezbollah, and the leadership of the state. And though they concealed it — or overlooked it — or had been made blind to it: those who give the orders, steer the armies, and weave the international and local relations are the Alawites, who fashion this resplendent victory crowned with the blood of martyrs.

Alaa departed, and Alaa remained in his mother's womb. He had long sought a child; he waited more than ten years without being blessed with children, and he strove — yet he was denied the sight of his child. The boy was named "Al-Waleed," after him. He resembles him to a wondrous degree, as though he were a copy of him. His wife said to his family: "I am of you, and you are of me; do not leave me, and I will not leave you — even now that Alaa the elder has gone."

Alaa departed, after writing on social media a burning elegy that said:

"To my family, my friends, my people, my clan: God remains, and God is the foundation; and the glitter, the ornament, and the falseness you live among will pass — they will never equal the hereafter, nor weigh against a single drop of my otherworldly life. This world has no weight; this world has no value beside the long life of human beings after this world."

His moving words, and his death — which they described as martyrdom — set off wave upon wave of faith in his sanctity, his exaltation, his station. Yes, he became a saint, after having been that simpleton boy who imitated Superman and mimicked the cartoon films after 4:45 in the afternoon, when the cartoon slot ended on Channel One.

But the state of sanctity did not last. One day his mother said: "He went for nothing!"

Oh, the wonders of man! Oh, the wonders of gloating over death among human beings! Yesterday he was a saint, while the scales tipped toward this side; today he is a dead man "for nothing" — without value, without weight — now that the scales have tipped to the other side.

What matters is not who won or was defeated; what matters is: who remains of mankind? What was their stance? And what value remains in them? After human beings annihilated one another and only a band of people remained, what is left of the worth of the human being? After his communion with the human, what is left of humanity?

This question… has no answer once the wars are over. And this answer, and those questions… neither the victor nor the vanquished can speak them. And whoever is able to think them cannot reach the future.

Perhaps there are human beings who died in body, and human beings who died… in soul.