We moved on, following the sound of wailing. We came across elderly women, beating their chests and wailing inconsolably as they crouched beside a group of misshapen and mutilated bodies. Bob filmed them and we moved on, still on the main street, now seeing corpses everywhere and Samir stopped beside one, an old man in traditional ankle-length Arab dress. I recognised Donkey Man by the walking stick lying by him and the kufi that was knocked from his head, now split open, resting in a dusty pool of dried blood and brain matter. There were streaks of dried blood running down his cheeks. Samir pointed out that his eyes had been gouged out. I tried not to look at his eye sockets but didn’t know where else to look. Since there were no eyeballs in his head his eyelids were concave rather than convex.
‘Why have they done that to his eyes?’ I asked Samir.
‘Because they are animals,’ he said, as if I was stupid. I wanted to ask why they were animals but we were moving on. We came across a young woman who walked up to us. She looked calm and smiled at us. She could have been an aid worker or an Arab journalist, but she looked too young.
‘Come, come,’ she said in English. Not waiting for an answer she moved down an alley and we followed until she reached a one-storey breeze-block building. Outside lay a toddler on the ground by the wall. His head was caved in. She pointed at a blood stain on the wall above him.
‘They smash his head against the wall,’ she said. ‘Again and again. By turn,’ she said. Bob wasn’t filming. ‘He is my brother.’ She led us into the house.
‘My parents,’ she said, in the same matter-of-fact voice, pointing to two slumped bodies on the floor of the living room. They had gaping wounds in their faces, fresher than the ones we had seen up until now.
‘This is from last night,’ she said, anticipating our question. She straightened the front of her dress. ‘They did bad things to me,’ she said in whispered Arabic. She glanced at her dead parents as if worried they could hear. She held up her fingers. ‘Five men. Phalangists.’
Samir said nothing, though Bob wanted to know what she’d said.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Samir, giving me a look of warning. I wished Asha were here, she would know what to do. We just stood there looking at the girl’s dead parents. I was desperate to get out. The girl started to clear up, picking up crockery and clearing the table from what looked like the previous evening’s meal. Samir asked her if she had other family in the camp, asked her her name. She shook her head. I was terrified that any second she would break down.
‘Please don’t tell anyone about what happened to me. Please,’ she said to Samir in Arabic. She had a Lebanese accent. Tears began to stream down her face.
‘Don’t worry, sister,’ Samir said.
I removed the video pack from my shoulder and left the house. Outside I tried to get as far away from the boy with the smashed head as I could before I knelt down and released the sparse contents of my stomach by the side of the footpath. When I was done I took involuntary deep breaths of putrid death, and vomited again. The others were standing beside me waiting.
Samir handed me a lit cigarette. ‘Here, this helps with the smell.’
We moved on. There were more people on the street now and more wailing as relatives were found. People were coming out of their houses, they were talking to journalists. Bob now had the video pack and I was free to roam but I stuck with Samir.
‘Shouldn’t we send someone to help the girl?’ I asked him as we moved down the street.
‘Who can help her now?’ he asked angrily, moving away, now holding a handkerchief to his nose. I looked round for Bob and saw him disappearing down an alley. I could see a hand poking out of some rubble next to me. The fingers were outstretched, as if waiting to catch a ball. I went down the alley I thought Bob had gone down, and the voices faded behind me as the alley got narrower.
‘Bob?’ I called, but all I got was the sound of flies. I passed another body lying on its side, hands and feet swollen round the cord that bound them. His trousers had been pulled down round his ankles. I swatted the flies from my face. There were doors either side but one was open further up.
‘Bob?’ I called into the gloom. I heard a movement inside but no answer – he probably didn’t want voices on his soundtrack. On the other hand I didn’t know how he could be filming in such darkness. I stepped inside and it was cool and the smell was not so bad, just sickly, like in surgery. Something scurried off into the other room. I waited for my eyes to grow accustomed to the dark; the only light was provided by a small window opposite the door. I was slippery with sweat. I made out a table in the middle of the room. My foot disturbed a bottle. I looked down to see an empty bottle of whisky. Something was discernible on the table and something, a form, on the floor. I heard a noise from the other room. I tried to call Bob’s name but nothing came out of my mouth. It was round, the something on the table, the size of an elongated watermelon. The form on the floor, I could now see, was a body. The arms were stretched above the head and the clothes pulled over the face, a dark mass around the stomach and chest. My eyes flitted between the table and the body. My hand searched for the door frame behind me as I realised that I was standing directly in front of the door and blocking light into the room. I stepped to one side but my foot went into something soft and yielding. Instinctively I lifted my leg and lost my balance, stumbling forward onto the floor. On my knees I could see that it was a woman on the floor but that she had no breasts, not any more. She had a huge lateral wound in her stomach with lots of loose skin. I crawled backwards, feeling for the door opening with my feet. All I could think was that I mustn’t vomit inside. I looked up onto the table and saw a tiny head, tiny hands and feet. I couldn’t understand what had happened here, my eyes moved between stomach wound and small body, which looked like it was attached to the stomach wound on the body on the floor by a cord. I turned round and scrambled on my knees out of the house into the alley. My retching wracked my body and nothing came up but bile which mixed with my tears in the dust.
I was aware of screaming. ‘They are coming back! They are coming back!’ Maybe a man’s voice, but in terror indistinguishable from a woman’s. I got on my feet and ran down to the main street to see people scattering. Like everyone else, I was filled with terror. Even the journalists and Red Cross workers in face masks and gloves had been caught in the hysteria. I followed them as they ran back towards the Israeli position, but it turned out to be a false alarm. Bob was there and he’d found an IDF officer.
‘Do you know what has happened in there?’ he asked him.
The officer shrugged, no expression on his face. ‘I just arrived today,’ he said.
Bob started trembling. ‘That’s fucking crap. I saw you at a roadblock two days ago. You stopped me coming into the camp,’ he shouted.
The officer was looking around for help but several journalists had gathered round, interested in the exchange. ‘I don’t know what’s happening. I wasn’t on duty.’ His voice was high-pitched with panic. A general came up to the group, spoke to his officer in Hebrew. Another journalist, English, started asking the general when he knew, or suspected, what was going on in the camp.
‘How could we know what was going on?’ he said. ‘We have not been in the camp.’
‘You can smell what has been going on in the camp from here,’ interjected Bob, his face red with anger.
The general smiled at Bob as if he was mentally ill and needed humouring. He raised his voice over the questions.
‘Early this morning we helped some foreign workers to safety, once we realised they’d been held by the Phalangists,’ he said. His deflection worked, some of the journalists seemed interested in this information. Fair-skinned people in trouble equated to front-page news at home. I looked to Samir but he was standing back, hadn’t come up to the Israeli position. I realised that he’d never stood this close to an Israeli soldier. Perhaps he didn’t trust himself.
‘What about helping the locals?’ said Bob, in a calmer v
oice, but his question was lost in a barrage of questions about the foreign workers. I gathered from the answers that they’d been handed over to the Red Cross after being evacuated from the hospital early that morning by the militia. I went back to tell Samir what I’d learnt.
‘OK, let’s go back and see if we can find them. We have to tell Liv about Faris,’ he said.
I went and told Bob what we were doing. The general was winding up his impromptu press conference, refusing to answer questions about whether people were taken out of the camp in trucks, whether the Phalangists had used Israeli bulldozers, whether the Israelis had sanctioned what was going on.
‘This is nothing to do with the IDF – this is an Arab-on-Arab problem,’ he shouted, losing his cool and storming off. Bob and I went back to talk to Samir.
‘I’ll probably stay here and take some more footage – before someone clears it all up,’ Bob said.
We walked back to the car so Bob could pick up the rest of his video stock and leave the tapes he’d filled. We were approached by the IDF interpreter we’d spoken to in Samir’s UN jeep yesterday at the roadblock. Again he was unarmed and looked nervous. Up this close he didn’t look much older than Samir.
‘I knew you were not from the UN,’ he said, smiling momentarily. We said nothing. ‘They knew what was going on,’ he said, pointing to the Israeli headquarters behind him by way of clarification. It was ‘they’, not ‘we’, I noticed.
‘When did you know?’ asked Bob.
‘It was clear from day one.’
Bob went silent. His thing was pictures, not people, as he’d proved earlier, and I wished we had a print journalist with us who would know how to deal with this guy. Thankfully Bob was thinking the same thing.
‘You should speak to my colleagues,’ he said, pointing to some of the journalists gathered outside the Israeli headquarters. He started to take stuff out of the car. But it was as if the guy hadn’t heard Bob.
‘Do you know what happened in Chile, under Pinochet?’ the interpreter asked.
‘What?’ Bob’s annoyance was now showing in his voice.
‘Where did most people disappear in Chile?’ he persisted. Something clicked in my mind, something I’d read or seen or heard.
Bob looked at him, narrowing his eyes. ‘Are you telling me they’ve taken people to the stadium?’ Bob asked him. But someone was shouting ‘Uri’ from across the road and he looked behind us.
‘I’m sorry, we are not allowed to talk to the press,’ he said in a loud voice, completely changing his tone and moving round us.
‘Fucking asshole,’ Bob said.
20
Back at the Etoile by midday I was relieved to find Eli and Liv. They were both sitting on Eli’s bed, sharing whatever vodka was left from the night before. My relief turned to anxiety when I remembered Faris. I didn’t know whether they’d seen their roommate; part of me was hoping that they had. They looked exhausted and Eli had clearly been crying.
‘Have you seen Faris this morning?’ was the first thing Liv asked after I embraced both women. Samir was downstairs and I was going to have to do this alone. I shook my head, telling her I’d just come from the camp. Before I could elaborate Liv launched into a description of their morning: some militia had come into the hospital early on and asked for all the staff to congregate outside for interrogation. They’d made them walk down Sabra main street in single file. Gunmen lined the street. A Palestinian doctor tried to leave with them but had been taken out of the group and they’d heard shots. Some of the buildings had been bulldozed and they passed bodies on the ground. Liv was spitting this out as she paced up and down, like she was trying to get rid of some foul-tasting thing in her mouth. I lit her a cigarette, which she took without acknowledgement.
‘Was Youssef there when you left?’ I asked Eli. But she was looking somewhere else.
Liv stopped pacing. ‘I think so, everything happened so quickly,’ she said.
‘They lined us up against a wall,’ Eli said. She took a breath. ‘They pretended to shoot us – called us Baader-Meinhof, communists.’
‘All good things,’ said Liv, putting her hand on Eli’s head and blowing smoke out in thin streams from her nostrils. I sat next to Eli and put my arm round her. She’d started to shake, the shock of the mock execution hitting her in the retelling.
‘I’ve never been so glad to see Zionists,’ said Liv, resuming her pacing. ‘The Israelis took us to their headquarters and handed us to the Red Cross, after showing us how they were treating some of the wounded from the camp.’ She snorted to indicate her disdain of this public relations effort and squatted in front of me on the bed, putting her hands on my knees.
‘Enough about us. Tell us, what’s the situation in the camp?’ Her face was full of concern. I wanted to tell them what I’d seen: the bodies in the street, the ones buried under the rubble, the mutilations, the children, the rape, the eviscerations. I didn’t know how to tell it or where to begin. Besides, I had Faris to deal with first.
‘It’s bad,’ was all I could say before taking the vodka bottle from Liv and putting it to my lips. The rawness helped with the smell from the camp that still clung to the back of my throat. ‘There’s something else that I need to tell you first though,’ I said, putting the bottle down and taking her hands to stop mine from shaking.
In a makeshift press room at the Commodore Asha and John were talking to journalists, telling an expanded version of the story Liv had told me. Samir had just dropped Liv and me off, leaving Eli to sleep in her room. Liv was remarkably calm on hearing about Faris and had been talking through a plan which involved taking someone with clout to the national stadium in the hope that that was where Faris had been taken for questioning. To my shame I’d not considered the possibility that we could do something to find him. She, however, was assuming that he was still alive.
Samir had held on to me as I was getting out of the car. ‘Tell her she’s wasting her time,’ he said in Arabic. ‘But in a nice way, like you know how,’ he’d added.
Now, once the journalists realised that they weren’t learning anything new from Asha and John, they started to drift away. I went up to them both as they got up from the table that was acting as a rostrum. Although pleased to see me they looked confused, unsure of what they were supposed to be doing next. John wanted to go to the British embassy, to report what had happened. They were pale and had dark rings under their eyes. Asha was pulling at a stray wisp of black hair. I told them about Faris and Liv’s plan to go to the stadium.
Asha shook her head, put her hands to her face. ‘Is there anything else that can happen in this place?’ she said through her fingers. She took her hands from her face and looked at John. ‘I need to get back to the hospital,’ she said.
‘The hospital will be fine without you for a few hours,’ John said. ‘There are plenty of people who’ve been resting up for the last three days who are already on their way. You need to get some rest. Can you get to the AUB?’
Asha nodded but then shook her head. ‘I’d rather come with you to the embassy,’ she said.
Liv approached us and she and Asha hugged. I could see Liv holding back her tears. John gave her a pat on the back.
‘I’ve found a Norwegian journalist who will go to the stadium with me. Maybe we can speak to someone in charge there,’ she said.
‘Do you even know Faris’s full name – or that Faris is his real name?’ John asked.
Liv shook her head. ‘I have this,’ she said, taking something out of her back pocket and handing it to John. It was the photo of her and Faris I’d found in her bedside locker, taken in my apartment. John looked at it and handed it back. I could see he was struggling for something good to say.
‘I hope you find him.’
Liv nodded. Her mouth was set rigid, like if she let it slacken the rest of her would follow. She put the photo back in her pocket.
‘I’ll come with you,’ I said, without thinking. I wanted to believe that the
re was a chance that Faris was alive, that maybe he’d just been taken away for questioning. I felt a need to do something, anything, to gain control of even a small part of what was going on around me.
‘Thanks, Ivan, but you’ve seen enough today,’ Liv said, smiling and shaking her head in a way that meant she didn’t want me to press it further. She went off to find her Norwegian. Bob came into the lobby with some other journalists and he waved at me and headed over.
‘Was Youssef at the hospital when you left?’ I asked Asha.
She nodded and Bob appeared at our side, smelling of the camp.
‘You guys have just come from the camp, right?’ asked Bob.
‘Like we told the others, go and see for yourself,’ John said, his face hard.
‘He’s OK. I know him,’ I said.
‘Did you see what happened?’ Bob asked them.
‘We were in the hospital,’ Asha said. ‘We only became aware that something was going on when the place started swarming with people thinking it was a safe place to be.’
‘Plus of course the types of injuries we were getting through the door,’ John added.
‘So you don’t know what actually happened in the camp?’ Bob asked.
‘Only what I’ve heard, and what we saw when we were escorted out,’ John said. ‘I know how people can blow things out of proportion here.’ He looked at me. ‘No offence intended, pal.’
I shrugged.
‘You couldn’t exaggerate this stuff,’ Bob said. ‘Why don’t you come and see for yourself?’ He patted his video pack.
Back in his editing room we sat round the screens. I steeled myself to relive the morning’s sights.
We went past the bloated mule, then up close to the pile of bodies with their wrists swollen over their bonds. The smell hit me again as the flies took off. I couldn’t get it out of my nostrils.
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