Текст книги "Gate of the Sun"

Автор книги: Elias Khoury

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Текущая страница: 33 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

Shams said that she remembered those days with a strange tenderness, and she felt alienation for the first time when their house in the camp changed. Concrete arrived and you couldn’t change the walls anymore. With the revolution everything arrived, and Ahmad Saleh, whose cousin found him a job in one of the offices of the Popular Front, left his work at the stone crushers and added two new rooms to his house. That was when Shams said she felt at sea. She was nine when everything in the house changed. The roof stopped leaking, the walls no longer were brightly colored with advertisements, and Shams felt some part of her had died.

Her childhood ended when the house was torn down. Her periods started. Her mother told her she was like all the other girls of al-Ammoura: “We’re like that, our girls grow up at nine.” Her mother explained everything to her and told her she had to get ready for marriage. Shams waited for a husband.

She waited for him at the unwra school.

She waited for him while training at the cadets’ camp.

She waited for him as she watched her brother die, hit by a bullet of the Bedouins in 1970. ^*

She waited for him when she saw her father arrested after the closure of the Popular Front office, before finding himself a job in a pasta factory that belonged to the Alwan family in Amman.

She waited for him as she saw the concrete walls of the house corrode and become like the sheet metal that had enclosed her childhood.

Then came the husband and the nightmares.

How can you expect me to tell you about Fawwaz Mohammed Nassar when I only know him mutilated by Shams’ words? When she spoke of him she’d lacerate him: She’d take a small piece of a brown paper bag or a newspaper or a Kleenex or a book and start chewing on it and spitting it out, so I only saw the man drawn on mutilated paper. She would talk and mutilate, and the tears would pour out of her.

Have you ever seen a woman not weeping from her eyes but with everything inside her? Everything in Shams wept as she mutilated Fawwaz Mohammed Nassar and spat out the little shreds of paper she was chewing. And then suddenly she’d wipe away her tears as though it were nothing, as though the woman with tears in her eyes were another woman, and she’d start gobbling the dish of pasta for which she’d made a special sauce of cream and basil leaves. She’d eat and sniff the basil and say the smell intoxicated her. She’d eat as though her appetite had exploded inside her. She’d say she wanted nothing from Fawwaz; she’d just go to Amman, kidnap Dalal, and bring her back to Beirut.

“I won’t start my life without Dalal. Look.”

And she’d take a photo from the pocket of her khaki jacket.

“Look how beautiful she is. She’s the most beautiful girl in the world.”

I’d look. I didn’t see the most beautiful girl in the world, only a sweet child with curly hair and a little brown face devoured by large eyes with long lashes.

“Look at her eyelashes! How can I leave her with that beast?”

When Shams held Dalal’s picture in her hand, she was transformed into another woman. I’d see tenderness and sorrow and weakness gathered on her brow, and when I’d try to hold her, she’d push me away as though she were refusing to share Dalal with me. Then she’d turn to me and say she needed a man to help her kidnap Dalal. If I tried to tell her this man was sitting before her, she’d look at me with pity.

“I need a fedayeen fighter, my dear. Not some doctor like you.”

Then I’d tell her I was a fedayeen fighter and would talk to her about our first camps in al-Khreibeh and Kafar Shouba.

“You? Incredible!”

In fact, I made a mistake. I shouldn’t have told her how the officer made me crawl in front of the platoon and how that incident made me lose my self-respect as a political commissar and as a soldier.

That was an unforgivable slip. I confessed I wasn’t brave enough to prevent the officer from humiliating me.

I wanted to be a blank page with her on which she could draw whatever she wanted. But she wasn’t looking for a blank page. Why, then, did she stay with me? Why was she here with me, and then there with Sameh? I swear I don’t know, I don’t understand how the devils that inhabit our bodies think.

Yes, Yunes. I waited for her until she died. I left the prison and didn’t step foot out of my house until after I got word of her murder. I thought she might come to my place to hide. How naïve I was. Rumors had spread through the camp that I’d stayed home to protest my arrest. No. I stayed in the house waiting for her. Ah, if only she’d come! Every part of my body hurt; separation causes pain in the joints, the chest, the knees.

I waited, not to understand what she’d done, but because I loved her. It no longer made any difference to me whether she’d been unfaithful or not. She was what mattered, not me. But she didn’t come. I’m sure she wasn’t aware I was waiting for her. She was enveloped in her crime, in blood. I can describe her to you, my son, even without having seen her. I can see the red halo around her head, the stains of blood. Ever since we’ve sunk into our own blood, it has dogged us and tied us to it with a long rope knotted around our necks.

After she died, I left my house and roamed the streets of the camp. I walked like a pathetic revenge taker even though pent up inside me was all the sorrow in the world. I didn’t weep for Shams and I’ll never weep for her, for all the tears would never be enough. Like an idiot, I walked with my head held high as though I’d taken my revenge.

The rumors started and I took refuge in the hospital out of fear. I was afraid because I knew her; she was a woman capable of killing all her men. She did kill us all – me and Sameh and I don’t know who else. Crime is like love: We kill another person just as we love a man or a woman – because they are a substitute for another man or woman.

I was a substitute for two men I didn’t know – Sameh, whom I’d never heard of, and Fawwaz, whom I never met. All the same, I was their stand-in. Sameh died, Fawwaz took Dalal, and here I am.

Where were we?

I told you Shams was ready for marriage at nine, and they married her off at fifteen. Fawwaz came along, and he was twenty-four. He married her and took her to Lebanon. But it wasn’t Fawwaz who came, it was Abu Ahmad Nassar. He asked for her for his son, Fawwaz, who’d finished his studies in engineering at Beirut Arab University and was working for the Resistance. Then he took her to Beirut. The girl got to al-Wahdat and became acquainted with her husband in a small house in the Tal al-Za’atar camp, situated in the eastern suburbs of Beirut. She lived a year and a half to the rhythm of bombardments, the explosions of canons, and the rain of bullets.

She said her husband scared her more than the war.

“He’d only have sex with me when we were being shelled. He was the devil incarnate. I never saw him except inside the house. He’d turn up from nowhere covered in dust, having left his position. He’d come to me coated in dust and sweat and take me without taking off his clothes. I never once saw him naked.

“He was an officer in the camp’s militia, but I don’t know anything about his duties. He never told me.

“His father took me to Beirut; we made an exhausting journey by car from Amman. When we got to the house in Tal al-Za’atar, his father stood at the door and didn’t go in. He kissed his son, told him, ‘I’ve brought you the bride,’ and left. During the six hours we spent together in the taxi from Amman to Beirut, he didn’t speak to me. He sat next to me and didn’t say a word. He’d look at me from time to time and say, ‘Amazing!’

“My father said I was going to get married, my mother agreed with a nod, and I got married, like a blind woman. Blindly I crossed the distance between Amman and Beirut, and blindly I entered the house of my husband who I didn’t know. I found myself standing in the house, holding my suitcase, as if at a railway station.

“‘Hello, Shams,’ said Fawwaz. ‘Come in and take a bath.’

“I went into the kitchen, heated water in a basin that I carried to the bathroom. I washed with the bay laurel soap my mother had put in my suitcase, suggesting I wash myself with it before going in to my husband. I bathed and then entered Fawwaz’s world to discover that he wasn’t an engineer, or anything at all. He’d come to Beirut to study engineering, then taken a job in a tile factory close to the Mar Elias camp and then forgot all about engineering. With the beginnings of the civil war, he’d joined the Resistance and had been inducted into the Tal al-Za’atar militia.

“I’m not beautiful,” she said, “but at Tal al-Za’atar I discovered that I’m a woman in the eyes of men avid for life. There was shelling and war and death; everything was coming apart.

“Fawwaz would go wild with jealousy. I can’t describe to you everything he did. At the beginning, he’d bang his head against the wall until the blood ran, he’d sleep with me, and then he’d go back to the wall to bang his head again and again. I didn’t understand. ‘You’re a whore and the daughter of a whore,’ he’d say.

“I was scared. I was living through an interminable war, and Fawwaz didn’t seem to want it to end. I’d ask him when he was going to go back to his work, and he’d look at me in amazement and say he wasn’t an engineer and didn’t want to go back to his job at the tile factory.

“‘What’s wrong with it?’ I’d ask him. ‘Those things aren’t important. My father was a pasta twister, but we still had our dignity. What matters are morals.’

“He’d frown. ‘Morals! Whore! I got stuck with a whore!’

“I don’t know – maybe he wanted me to be a whore, maybe he was afraid of me, but I didn’t do anything. I swear I didn’t look at another man. Well, it did happen, but that was much later, during our evacuation from the camp after it fell.

“Do you know what he did?

“He left his position and rushed over to the house. ‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘I’m going to withdraw with the other fighters. You surrender with the women. We’ll meet in Beirut,’ and he gave me the address of someone called Karim Abd al-Fattah, Abu Rami, in the district of al-Fakahani.

“‘I’ll go with you,’ I told him.

“‘No. This is safer,’ he said.

“He looked at me with fierce eyes. ‘You’re afraid of getting raped!’ and he left.

“What can I tell you? Of course I was afraid, and I didn’t understand why he wouldn’t take me with him. Did he want me to die? What had I done to him? I’d lived through the toughest times with him. You know what life’s like during a siege. All we could find to eat were lentils. I lived on my own like a stranger. I’d go to the public water pipe and wait in the line of death: The water was in their line of fire. We called it ‘the blood pipe.’ I lived alone with nothing to do but wait for him. He’d come, caked with dust and gravel, sleep with me, and leave. He wouldn’t eat the lentils I’d cooked because he’d eat with the boys.

“All I wanted was one thing – to go back to my family in Amman. But how could I leave? The camp was closed by the siege. I wanted him to pay attention to me, but I didn’t dare ask for anything: He was a fighter and we were at war. Even his visits and his sex were rapid-fire. And every time he slept with me, he’d bang his head against the wall, accuse me of being unfaithful, raving that I was a whore and that my body was a place of evil.

“He came to tell me he was withdrawing and asked me to surrender with the women.

“I knew what I could expect, so I decided to withdraw with the fighters and went toward the eastern edge of the camp. I put on jeans and a green shirt and went to look for Fawwaz. I couldn’t find him. It seems he was in one of the first groups to withdraw.

“That was when I met Ahmad Kayyali, who gave me a Kalashnikov and said, ‘Come with us.’

“We crossed the Monte Verde, which is full of pines. We walked by night and laid up by day. And there, in the midst of the scattered bullets and the nights of death, I made up my mind to leave Fawwaz. If I lived, I wouldn’t go back to him. Ahmad was my first lover. With him I discovered I had a body and that my body deserved the pleasures of life. When Fawwaz had sex with me, he’d say, ‘Pleasure me,’ but I had no idea how to ‘pleasure’ him. All I was aware of was his panting on top of me and that thing that penetrated me below, as though it were wounding me. With him I’d reach the edge of pleasure but never get there. Ahmad was different. I asked him to come to me, and I slept with him. We were lost in the forest, we’d left the camp with about twenty fighters, and we walked the entire night. When dawn came, we decided to split up to wait for dark. They started setting off in different directions, but I didn’t know what to do. Ahmad took me with him, and we hid on a rocky slope, not daring to breathe. He was around my age, and like all the men, he’d use colloquial mixed with Classical Arabic to make me feel he was serious. He asked me where I was going to go in Beirut. I said, to the house of Abu Rami, Karim Abd al-Fattah.

“‘Do you know him?’ he asked.

“‘No. They gave me his name,’ I said.

“‘And your family, where are they?’

“‘In Amman,’ I said.

“‘Mine’s in Nablus.’

“‘Why did you come to Beirut?’

“‘To join the fedayeen. And you?’

“I felt tears streaming down my cheeks. Ahmad moved closer to me and put his hand on my head. I said, ‘Take me,’ and he took me. With him I discovered what it means for a woman to make love with a man. Ahmad disappeared after that; he disappeared at Hammana, when we got to the assembly point. I don’t know where he went, I didn’t know anything about him. We reached Hammana, he disappeared, and I went down with the groups of fighters to Beirut and considered not going to Abu Rami’s house. But where could I go? I thought of going to one of the Fatah offices, but I wasn’t a member and didn’t carry a card. Stupid – who’d have asked for a card in those days? So I did go to Abu Rami’s house, and I didn’t find Fawwaz. Umm Rami said he was staying with the boys in the museum district, waiting for me.

“‘Go to him now,’ said Umm Rami.

“‘But I don’t know Beirut – I don’t know the museum, or anything else.’

“She asked her son, Rami, to accompany me. I got into the orange Renault 12 next to him, and we left. Suddenly, he stopped the car so he could open the back windows; I must have smelled awful. He parked the car in a side street, pointed out a square where people were congregating, and said, ‘Over there.’

“I got out, my rifle in hand, and walked among the crowds. I was exhausted and Ahmad’s smell went with me everywhere. I looked for Fawwaz for a long time before I found him among the weeping women. Lamenting and wailing, the women had just been dropped off in Lebanese Red Cross vehicles. Women, children, tears, pushing and shoving in front of the missing persons registration office; women telling of rapes, of executions against walls, of bodies being dragged through streets like in Roman times. Fawwaz was in the middle of them. I went up to him until I was almost right in front of him, but he didn’t notice me, perhaps because I was wearing trousers and carrying a rifle. I forgot to mention that he’d forbidden me to wear trousers.

“‘It’s me, Fawwaz.’

“When he saw me, he jumped like a madman. ‘I was wrong,’ he said. ‘I’m crazy. I should have brought you with me.’

“He took me by the arm and lifted the rifle from my hands as though he wanted to toss it aside.

“‘That’s my rifle. Leave it alone.’

“I snatched the rifle back, and we left. He stopped a car and told the driver, ‘To Hamra.’ There, near the Cinema Sarola stop, we went into a cheap hotel, where he rented a room on the second floor. As soon as we got inside the room, he attacked me and started tearing at my clothes.

“‘Take it easy. I want to wash.’

“He slept with me with Ahmad’s smell still clinging to me. I don’t know if he smelled the other man, but he hit me. Before that, he’d banged his head against the wall and cursed at me. But in the hotel on Hamra Street, he hit me after he’d had sex with me two times in a row. He said he’d fixed up a house in the camp in Burj al-Barajneh.”

Shams lived in Burj al-Barajneh until 1982, in other words, until the fedayeen left Beirut. She led with Fawwaz a wild sort of life that can barely be believed. True, I’m a doctor, or something like it, and true, doctors – through contact with their patients – come to understand the psychologies of their patients, since at least half of all illnesses are psychological in origin. But still I couldn’t understand. I asked Shams about Fawwaz’s childhood, but what she knew of it didn’t provide me with an explanation.

“Did you cheat on him, and he found out?”

She said she never betrayed him except with Ahmad, but Fawwaz made her forget the taste of the love she’d experienced in the Monte Verde.

She said Fawwaz was always afraid of her, always accusing her and repeating that he’d got stuck with a whore, and abusing her because she didn’t get pregnant.

“I don’t know why I didn’t get pregnant in Lebanon and why I did in Jordan, but after the night in the Monte Verde I wanted to get pregnant so I could have a boy like Ahmad. But it didn’t happen, and I forgot Ahmad; the only thing I remember was his lips on my breasts – God, how sweet that was! It was the first time a man had taken my nipple between his lips. Fawwaz would rub my breasts and then bite them. But when Ahmad took my nipple between his lips, the waves rose within me and I felt my depths moving toward him and taking him. Fawwaz was nothing like that. He was a beast. He’d crucify me half-naked and say he could only get aroused when he heard gunfire, and I would lay there beneath him as he would fire his gun, terrorized.

Shams thought that’s what life was like, and then the Israeli invasion had come and saved her. Fawwaz left with the fedayeen, and Shams went to her family’s house in Amman. She found a job in a sewing workshop owned by Mme. Hend Khadir and forgot she was married.

Two weeks later, he came and announced he’d decided to settle in Amman – the revolution was over, he didn’t want to go to the camp in Yemen, and he was going back to his original work.

“Meaning you want to be an engineer again?” said Shams sarcastically.

“Shut your mouth!” her mother shouted. “Women don’t have the right to make fun of their husbands.”

“In al-Wahdat, he no longer needed to fire his gun to become aroused. He stopped beating me and became kind. He’d go to work in his father’s shop and would come back in the evenings to eat and sleep. He’d tell me that he’d dreamt that he’d had a son. The poor man didn’t know I’d had a diaphragm inserted and wouldn’t get pregnant if all the semen in the world were stuffed into my guts. Then I got an infection, so the doctor took out the diaphragm, and Dalal arrived.”

IT’S NIGHT and I want to sleep. My eyelids are weighed down with stories. Now I understand why children fall sleep when we tell them stories: The stories infiltrate their eyes through the lashes and are turned into pictures too numerous for the eyes to process. Stories are for sleep, not for death. Now it’s time for us to stop telling stories for a while, because one story leads to another, and night blankets the words.

But first tell me, what is the story of that spirit woman and that man who drowned in the circles of the red sun?

That happened at the beginning, but even so, it comes just at the end of the story.

Nahilah explained it to you, it was a simple misunderstanding. You thought she was a spirit, and she thought you were a prophet. You ran away, she knelt down, and Nahilah laughed and laughed.

You told me you named the tree Laila. You used to sleep by day inside the trunk of the Roman olive tree, and when you were with Nahilah you’d talk to her about Laila, and see the jealousy in her eyes.

It was the beginning of the fifties, and Yunes was making one of his trips to Bab al-Shams. That day, he hid inside the Roman olive tree on the outskirts of Tarshiha. When the sun began to set, he came out of his tree and saw something he’d never forget.

He said he’d never in his life forget that woman.

“She was wearing a long black dress, and had covered her hair with a black headscarf. She saw me and came toward me. I shrank back against the tree. I was wearing my long, olive-green coat and carrying my rifle like a stick. The woman was approaching me. She was far away, the sun was in my eyes so I couldn’t see her silhouette clearly. I saw a black phantom emerging from among the red rays of the sun and coming toward me. Then, when she was two hundred meters away, she stopped in her tracks as though she were rooted to the ground, knelt down, rubbed her brow with dust, and raised her face toward me. She put her hands together and said something in an Arabic that I wasn’t familiar with. Then she rose, stumbling over her long dress. I took advantage of the moment to hide inside the trunk of the tree, slipping inside it with my heart beating like a drum. I stayed inside the trunk until night had covered everything. There was something strange in her eyes. I thought she was a spirit even though I don’t believe in spirits; but I was afraid, very afraid.”

When Yunes told Nahilah how he’d stood close to his tree, wrapped in the red rays of the sun, and how the spirit woman had appeared to him at a distance and how she was going to carry his mind off like in the stories, Nahilah laughed for a long time.

“A spirit woman! The Yemenis are everywhere. That must have been a Yemeni Jewess.”

Nahilah told Yunes about the sobs they’d heard coming from the moshavthe Yemenis had built over al-Birwa and about the mysterious rumors of children dying and disappearing. She said the Yemeni Jewesses would go out into the fields and lament like Arab women and that she’d started to fear for her children. “If the children of the Jews are disappearing, what will happen to ours?”

“That spirit woman was no spirit,” said Nahilah. “She was a poor woman like us who must have lost one of her children. So when she saw you, she probably thought you were a vision of the prophet Elias.”

Nahilah laughed at you and called you Elias, saying that with your beard you’d started to look like a Jewish prophet.

You can’t forget the scene – a black ray emerging from the red rays of the sun, a woman kneeling on the ground and crying out in a voice to rend the heavens. You thought of her as “Rachel the spirit,” and on your way to see Nahilah, you’d enter the Roman tree and invoke the Yemeni woman. You told Nahilah that you were a Yemeni, too. “We come from Yemen. Our tribe migrated from there when the Ma’rib dam collapsed; the dam collapsed and drowned Yemen, and we fled. I’m Yemeni and my sweetheart’s Yemeni, I have to look for her.”

Nahilah would be a little jealous, but then she’d take you into the space at the back of the cave that she christened “the bathroom,” where she’d make you take off you clothes and would bathe you. You’d stand naked and she’d be wearing her long black dress, which would get soaked and cling to her body, kindling your desire, and you’d grab her with the soap still all over you, and she’d slip out of your grasp and say, “Go to your Yemeni woman. I don’t care.”

I told you about the Yemeni woman to wish you sweet dreams.

I, too, need to sleep so that tomorrow I can try to convince Zainab not to leave the hospital. I don’t know anything about Zainab. I’ve been living with her here for more than six months, and I know nothing. She’s been here since the beginning. During these months everything has changed, as you know: Dr. Amjad comes only rarely, I’ve become head nurse and acting director of the hospital, the nurses have disappeared one after another, the hospital’s been converted into a warehouse for medicine, but Zainab’s still here, immovable. She limps a little, her shoulders droop, she has a short neck and small eyes. She moves like a ghost and takes care of everything. The cook left so Zainab has become the cook. Nabil went abroad so Zainab took over responsibility for the operating room. The Syrian guard disappeared so Zainab’s become the doorkeeper. Zainab is the hospital. I don’t care anymore. I spend most of my time with you, convinced that it’s no use struggling for the hospital’s survival. I had many discussions with Dr. Amjad, and I’ve tried with Mme. Wedad al-Najjar, the Palestine Red Crescent official in Lebanon, but it’s no use.

No one wants this hospital anymore, as though we’d all agreed to announce the death of Shatila.

The camp is besieged from the outside and demolished on the inside, and they won’t let us rebuild it. The whole of Lebanon was rebuilt after the war, except here; this testimony to butchery must be removed from our memories, wiped out just as our villages were wiped out and our souls lacerated.

I’ve lost hope. I said, “If they don’t want it, too bad,” and I built an imaginary wall around your room and won’t let anyone come near you. At first Amjad tried to make me believe that the decision to move you couldn’t be revoked, then I forced him to back down. I thought I’d scored a victory, but I discovered he simply didn’t care. No one cares. They said, “He’ll eventually get tired of it, and if he doesn’t get tired of it, the old man will die anyway,” and no one expected my treatment method would be so successful. Amjad used to think your death would be a matter of days, and Zainab said you wouldn’t see the end of your first month, but here we are, past the sixth and into the seventh. We have to hang on to the end of the seventh month. If we get through the seventh, we’ll definitely get to the ninth, and the ninth is where salvation lies. But they don’t know. They’ve shut us in here and left us to rot. If only they knew. I’m certain that no one has the slightest notion of what’s going on in this room, here with the world, the women, the words.

I told you Zainab’s become everything, meaning nothing. When someone becomes everything it means they’ve lost their particularity. Zainab’s like that: I wasn’t aware of her presence beyond the fact that she was present. I didn’t ask her for anything. Then two days ago she came to me and said she’d decided to stop working. It never crossed my mind that Zainab could stop working: She exists because she works.

She came to your room and said she wanted to speak to me.

“What, Zainab?”

“No, not in front of him,” she said.

“Speak up, Zainab. There are no strangers here.”

“Please, Dr. Khalil. I’m afraid to talk in front of him. Please come with me to the office.”

I followed her to Dr. Amjad’s office, which would have become my office if people took things seriously around here. Zainab went out and returned after a few minutes with a pot of coffee. She poured us both a cup and said that the children wanted her to stop working.

“You’re married and have children, Zainab?”

“Of course, Doctor.”

“I’m sorry. I never knew.”

“‘Cripples don’t marry,’” she quoted and smiled.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.”

“But I’m not a cripple, at least I wasn’t a cripple when I got married. This is from Tal al-Za’atar.”

“You’re from Tal al-Za’atar?”

“I was there. I left with the women, my husband disappeared in the Monte Verde. We walked toward the armed men with our hands in the air, and they fired on us. I was with my children. They were between my legs, and I was trying to cover them with my long skirt. Then a man came, and the firing stopped. We kept going until we reached the armed men, and the Red Cross convoy that had been sent to take us to West Beirut were there. That man came. I don’t know why he picked me out of the crowd. ‘Over there!’ he screamed, but I pretended I hadn’t heard and kept going. Then the hot red fluid covered my thigh and bathed the head of my daughter, Samiyyeh, who was still between my legs. I kept going until I made it to the truck. I don’t know why he only fired one shot, just one, or why he didn’t kill me. These are things I don’t understand now, but at the time everything was logical and possible. Our death seemed so logical that we weren’t capable of protesting against it. They took me to Makased Hospital, and you can imagine what that did to my children. We reached the museum crossing when they decided to transfer me to the hospital. They put me in an ambulance, and the children started crying. I’d lost half my blood or more but somehow I managed to jump out of the ambulance to stand with my children. Then the nurse understood and let them come with me. At Makased Hospital, they put me in a room with more than ten beds and the children stayed with me. The eldest, Samiyyeh, was twelve and couldn’t understand anything, and the youngest of them was three. Five boys and three girls, God protect them. I stayed in the hospital instead of going with the others to al-Damour. It’s out of the question! I thought, when I heard they’d decided to house the Tal al-Za’atar people in al-Damour, which had been cleared of its Christian inhabitants. I thought, that’s what the Jews did to us, and we’re going to do the same to the people of al-Damour? It’s not possible; it’s a crime. And I stayed in the hospital. There was a doctor there from the Lutfi family in Tyre – do you know him? Dr. Hasib Lutfi? God bless him, he told me I could work in the hospital and found me a small apartment nearby. We lived there, me and the children, until 1982. After the invasion and the massacres, we came to Shatila, and I started working in this hospital. I’m not a nurse, but I learned on the job at Makased Hospital. I came here, and as you know very well, there was no one, so I did everything. But I’m tired, Dr. Khalil. And what are we doing here anyway? You’re guarding a corpse and I’m guarding a storeroom of medicine. Also, Shadi, God bless him, is going to send me a visa and a ticket for Germany.”

“You’re going to Germany? What will you do there?”

“Nothing,” she answered. “There nothing, here nothing. But I’m tired. And Shadi’s wife – I didn’t tell you, Shadi married an Iraqi girl who lives in Germany, a Kurd and political refugee. She arranged asylum and residence for him – a refugee like us, so, like they say, ‘Refugees marry refugees,’ and she’s expecting, so I’ll go for the child.”