‘They must have been dead two days given the state of the bodies and the heat,’ said John. ‘Which means they were killed on Thursday.’ We moved on to the body of Donkey Man and this time I noticed that his right fist was clenched and bent back in an unnatural shape and wondered whether he’d tried to stop his killers.
‘It’s Donkey Man,’ Asha whispered.
I lit a cigarette to kill the smell. There were more bodies against walls. Bob had managed to pick out where bodies had been incorporated into rubble by bulldozers.
‘My problem is that none of it is fucking broadcastable – I’m going to have trouble finding something acceptable to show to our dinner-time demographic back home,’ he said, smiling grimly to himself. We got to new footage that he’d taken after Samir and I had left and there were people now sitting over their dead relatives, weeping and pulling their hair or wandering around in a daze, screaming at the growing comprehension of what had happened. Cut to a six- or seven-year-old girl, her limbs stiffened and raised off the ground in a bizarre way that showed there was no rest even in death. Her chest was bare and a cross had been slashed into it. Cut to a tiny garden where two mature women lay side by side, face down on some rubble from which a baby’s head stuck out.
‘Its eyes are still open,’ John said in a wavering voice.
Cut to a woman crying to the camera, carrying the body of her dead child, still limp and with a large chunk of its head missing. She’s offering the boy up to the camera and Bob flinches in his seat as if he was there again. Now she’s talking to the camera. I translated without taking my eyes off the screen.
‘Apparently she begged them to spare her five-year-old son but they said he would grow up to be a terrorist so they shot him in the head.’
The screen went blurry but I realised it wasn’t the screen. Cut to a small body with detached limbs, like a dismembered doll, the arms and legs arranged on the torso in the shape of a cross, the stumps cauterised with flies. Then it was dark inside a house and I was worried and relieved at the same time that this was the same house I went into, but it wasn’t. It was a man tied to a chair, his face mutilated beyond recognition. I could only tell it was a man because his disfigured genitals were exposed. The camera moved round the room to where a woman was sitting on the floor with a child in her lap. They’d both been shot in the head. We were back in daylight and Bob had focused on a prone body, lying restful in the recovery position, but a close-up revealed a grenade beneath it, ready to go off if someone dared to move it. The tape ended and Bob said he had further material.
‘I can’t see any more, please,’ said Asha.
John stood up. I got up too.
‘I think we’ll leave you to find something usable from that lot,’ John said.
Later on that evening I stood under the hot shower in Asha’s AUB apartment, trying to get rid of that smell which seemed to have lodged in my pores. I sluiced water up my nostrils, in my ears. Samir, Asha, John, Eli and Liv were in the apartment and I could smell onions frying, reminding me that I hadn’t eaten all day. Everyone else had showered and Asha had put the washing machine on twice on a hot cycle.
I came out wrapped in a towel to find Eli and John in the living room. Eli was in men’s clothes that were too big for her. She patted the sofa beside her. I sank into the cushion next to her and watched John, wearing a traditional jallabiyah he’d found, trying to pick a record from the large collection. I could hear Asha arguing with Samir in the kitchen about how the onions should be chopped. I took Eli’s glass from her hand and enjoyed the burning whisky at the back of my throat, the warmth flowing through my veins. I pressed my thigh against Eli’s. She pressed back.
‘Chopin or Bach?’ John asked me, holding up two records. I told him that it didn’t matter, that I didn’t care.
‘Sounds like you need Bach,’ he said, putting the Chopin back and carefully taking out the vinyl from its cover. I was about to ask where Liv was when she appeared in the doorway. Eli tensed beside me and grabbed my leg. Liv was holding the Tokarev in her hands, down between her thighs. She must have found it in my duffle-bag in the bedroom. Her hair was wet and she was in just a T-shirt. The gun looked huge in her hands. I couldn’t see if the safety was on. Her eyes were bright and she was swaying on her feet.
‘What are you going to do with that?’ Samir said, laughing from the kitchen door. He started to move forward but Asha held him back.
‘I never thought I could use one of these. I’ve never wanted to before,’ Liv said. She lifted up the gun to examine it more closely. Her thumb was covering the safety catch.
‘It isn’t the answer,’ Asha said in a soft voice, moving in front of Samir. I could hear something frying in the kitchen, I could smell the onions. Samir went back through the door and the sound faded. Eli said something in Norwegian which I couldn’t understand but Liv just shook her head.
‘Is it loaded?’ Samir asked me in Arabic.
‘I can’t remember,’ I said.
Liv’s eyes flitted between us as we spoke.
‘You know it’s rude to speak Arabic in front of people who can’t understand you. Faris would never do that,’ she said.
‘You’re upset,’ said Asha in her soft voice. ‘We’re all upset about Faris, but you are especially of course.’ She stepped forward but Liv stepped back, keeping the distance between them.
I felt stupid sitting on the sofa wrapped in a towel but didn’t want to get up too suddenly.
‘Don’t be such a fucking drama queen, lassie,’ John said in a loud voice. He’d just finished cleaning the record with the special duster and was carefully placing it on the turntable. All of us, including Liv, looked in his direction. ‘This crap is going to help no one – we’ve got to cope with this thing in our own ways – but we’ve got to keep it together as well.’ He pointed at Asha. ‘Now she has God, a lost cause as far as I’m bloody concerned given what’s happened, but the rest of us have to find some other way of coping with this shit.’
I looked at Asha but she was looking at Liv who was studying John through red eyes. He must have looked ridiculous to her in his traditional peasant dress, similar to the outfit Donkey Man was wearing when he was butchered. He smiled at her. ‘Surely your Communist Manifesto has something to cover this sort of thing?’ he said. ‘Chapter four, section three: when the ruling class uses one section of the proletariat to subdue another, or something along those lines.’ He was chuckling to himself. I saw Liv’s mouth twitch but something had changed in the way she was holding the gun, like she didn’t know what to do with it.
‘It doesn’t deal with the reality of all’, gesturing with the gun, ‘this …’ Her voice sounded like it had been sapped of life.
Asha stepped forward and put one hand on Liv’s shoulder and the other on the gun and Liv was letting it go. Eli stood up. Asha handed the Tokarev to Samir by the trigger guard as if it carried a virus.
‘Get rid of it,’ she spat.
He took it from her and Asha and Eli led Liv, now crying and shaking, back into the bedroom. Samir sat down next to me on the sofa and started to unload the automatic.
Asha came back in. She didn’t look at me or Samir.
‘John, do you have something in your black bag to help Liv?’
‘If I had something that would help I would be taking it myself, or giving it to the survivors in the camp.’
‘This isn’t the time to be funny, John,’ Asha said sharply.
John rolled his eyes at me and looked for his doctor’s bag. The Bach started to come through the speakers. When they’d both gone into the bedroom Samir tapped the side of his head.
‘These foreigners are crazy,’ he said.
21
The following morning we were driving back to the camp in Samir’s car. Liv had had no luck in finding Faris at the national stadium – the IDF had refused all entry – but had learnt from the relatives amassed outside that some people had been transported from there in trucks. Samir had heard
that trucks with prisoners had been seen passing through the Christian villages beyond east Beirut. None of this was good news.
Eli had protested at being left behind with Liv but not too forcefully; part of her was relieved not to be going back to the camp, and besides, Liv couldn’t be left alone as she was still medicated. I wasn’t that keen to go back myself but wanted to make sure Youssef was OK. Now, as we approached the camp again I could see the Lebanese army were in place and that the IDF were nowhere to be seen. Apparently they’d retreated to the airport, probably hoping that distance from the camp would weaken their association with what had gone on. When we arrived the camp was full of post-massacre activity. Journalists, aid workers, relatives, diplomats, politicians and the curious all moved among the dead. Bodies had been lined up in rows and were being buried in a large trench dug by a bulldozer. Asha was livid when she saw this from the car.
‘They’re burying all the evidence,’ she said, trying to escape the car before it had even stopped. As she opened the door the heat and smell grabbed me by the throat; it was sweeter and sicklier than the day before. Most of the Red Cross and Red Crescent workers had masks on. Samir preferred chain-smoking as a way to cover the smell and I took his lead, determined not to throw up again. Asha found a Lebanese army officer to march up to, with me trotting behind. The officer was surprised at Asha’s claim that she’d been in the camp hospital when all this was happening.
‘He asked why anyone would want to be here that didn’t need to be,’ I translated.
‘Because we are – or were – trying to help these people, tell him,’ she said, but I shook my head, knowing that this would be met with equal disbelief.
‘I don’t think he considers that necessary,’ I told her, hoping she’d drop it. She looked at me in despair and strode off in small steps, finding a foreign-looking worker in a Red Cross vest.
‘Is someone counting the dead and cataloguing the type of injuries?’ she asked him, not even bothering to introduce herself. He looked flustered and hot; his mask was hanging from one ear, obviously ineffective against the smell.
‘We are trying to prevent a health hazard,’ he said in a French accent. ‘And the Lebanese army want everything cleared up quickly.’
‘I bet they do,’ said Asha.
The Frenchman moved away to supervise two people who were having trouble getting a body into the ditch in one piece. They kept having to pick pieces of it up and put them back in the blanket. I glanced down at the line of bodies I had tried to avoid looking at. Mercifully they were covered in sheets. Survivors, mostly women, moved down the line, trying to find missing relatives. Luckily there was too much activity for the flies to settle but, when the women lifted back the sheets to check the faces, I could see that they’d been left with a legacy of maggots. John suggested we head for the hospital. I hoped to find Youssef there.
John and Asha went into the hospital ahead of me as I finished my cigarette with Samir. We watched people carrying their belongings, either coming back or leaving, it was impossible to tell. Some of them would be refugees for the second, third or fourth time.
The lobby was empty. I worked upwards floor by floor but I couldn’t find Youssef on the children’s ward and the orthopaedic ward had just one body in it, covered by a sheet, the head end bloodstained. I noted with relief that it was an adult-sized body. I moved up a floor and found activity in the Intensive Care ward, where it looked as if all the remaining patients had been placed. Asha was there with John and they were getting status reports from the medical staff, none of whom I recognised. The Egyptian doctor who used to run the ward wasn’t there, and most of the people who were, even the nurses, were foreign. They were confused about where the rest of the patients had been taken. I was now getting worried about Youssef’s whereabouts.
An Italian doctor was talking to John in broken English. Asha was examining patients, greeting them like old friends.
‘Yes, some of the patients were removed by the Phalange after you left,’ said the Italian. ‘Some went home on their own and the badly injured were taken to another hospital by the Red Cross.’ No, he didn’t know where they were all taken. I told them about the inhabitant on the orthopaedic ward.
‘I haven’t had time to move him – they are telling me he was shot in his bed by the Phalange,’ said the doctor, waving his hand dismissively: a patient murdered in his bed was the last thing he needed to worry about. I left Asha and John to do whatever they had to do and found Samir on the street, lighting one cigarette with the end of another.
‘Youssef is gone,’ I told him.
‘He’s probably back home,’ Samir said, slapping the dust off his shoes with a handkerchief. I looked at him but he ignored me. I looked at him some more. ‘Damn your father, you want to go searching for him, don’t you?’ He ground his cigarette butt with his heel.
‘We’ve got to do something, Samir. We have to rescue something from this …’ I waved my hands.
‘I know I said I’d look out for you, but chasing camp kids is not something I thought we’d be doing. Do you even know where he lives?’
I shook my head. ‘I know his family name though, and I know he lived with his aunt.’
‘OK, OK, let’s see if we can find the little son of a bitch.’
Several questions later and we were knocking on the iron door of a small house with shrapnel holes in the outside wall. It swung open and my heart started to thump.
‘Wait here,’ Samir said. I didn’t object as he disappeared inside alone. I lit a cigarette and watched an elderly couple wheel their belongings down the street on a barrow. A scrawny cat sat on the front acting as look-out. Samir came out, white-faced. He took deep breaths and leant against the wall. I gave him my cigarette.
‘Tell me the worst,’ I said.
‘The good news is that Youssef isn’t there …’ He took a drag. ‘The bad news is that his aunt is.’
‘Shit, shit, shit. Maybe he was taken to another hospital by the Red Cross?’
‘We’re wasting our time,’ Samir said.
I looked at him. ‘I need to know,’ I said.
He sighed and rolled his eyes, shook his head.
‘I need to know,’ I said.
Two hours later we were parked outside our third hospital.
‘This is the last place we try,’ he said. ‘This time you’re on your own. I’m sick of hospitals.’
I left him trying to find music on the radio.
This place was huge and bustling. Near the Green Line, it was a Lebanese government-run institution that didn’t smell of disinfectant like the camp hospital. Nobody stopped me as I walked from ward to ward, past beds full of people surrounded by relatives. I eventually came to a set of closed double doors behind which I could hear the sound of children laughing and shrieking. Inside it smelt of piss and shit. Cots with bars lined the walls – cots in which naked children of various ages were lying, either in a foetal position or flat on their backs, staring at the ceiling. They all had shaven heads. One of them had climbed out of his cot and was laughing and jumping around, banging on the cot of his neighbour, who was looking out through the bars with a stupid grin on his face. The escapee kid’s left wrist was tied to his cot with a torn-up sheet. Looking again I saw that all the children were constrained in the same way. They yelled and shrieked when they saw me, some of them jumping up and down. A man in a white jacket and shaven head was sitting in a chair at the opposite side of the room to the door. He was reading a newspaper which he put down, annoyed at being disturbed. He didn’t get up. He had to shout over the din.
‘What do you want?’
‘Children’s orthopaedic ward.’ He pointed to the ceiling. On the other side of the doors I stopped to take a deep breath, tried to focus on why I was there.
The ward upstairs was a mixed orthopaedic ward, with no distinction between adults and children. I walked between the rows of beds on either side but there was no sign of Youssef. I noticed a balcony at the far
end, on which there were several patients smoking. A small boy in an oversized wheelchair, his back to me, had his hands on the railing, looking down the five floors to whatever was there. His injured leg was on the floor, the bandage dirty and rust-coloured with dried blood. I could see a large spotting of fresh red at the heel. I went to the balcony door. My knees weakened as I stepped out onto the narrow space. I called but he didn’t hear me. I moved closer, my stomach lurching as Youssef put his head over the railing to get a better look below.
‘When’s the last time you tried your crutches, boy?’ I said, in an official-sounding voice. He swung his head round, his dirty face beaming at me, then he caught himself and scowled.
‘Where have you been, you shit?’ he said, his mouth trembling.
I couldn’t help smiling some more.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ I said, bending to lift him from the chair, keeping my eyes off the railing. He put his arms round my neck and I lifted him by his skinny legs. His face crumpled and he buried it in my neck. I had never heard him cry before, except when in pain, but that was different to this sobbing. I moved into the ward. A doctor, changing a dressing, shouted to me as I passed him but I looked straight ahead, pretending I hadn’t heard. Then another doctor stood in my way as I walked towards the entrance, my neck wet with Youssef’s tears.
‘You, where are you going with the boy?’ he said.
I stopped. ‘It’s OK,’ I said, stepping round him, ‘I’m his brother.’
Back in the outpatient clinic in Sabra Hospital Asha changed Youssef’s dressing, the smell of which Samir had complained about all the way back in the car. Youssef swore and grimaced as the last bits of gauze came off, stuck as they were to his wound. Asha called John in and they peered and prodded at his foot. I concentrated on looking at Youssef’s face. A sweat had broken out on his forehead.
‘Is my aunt dead?’ he asked, as if asking the time.
I nodded. He winced but it was from physical pain. I heard John say he was going to inject a local anaesthetic.
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