Gate of the Sun (39 page)

“Doctor, doctor, not dead. Still alive, doctor.”

They threw you down in the emergency room, and that fat young Lebanese man – his white gown almost busting at the seams – begged me to go with him, saying we had to dig around at the grave site: “We may have buried people who're still alive. Please, Doctor, come with me.” I went with him, and there was the smell and the flies. All I remember are the flies. I didn't see the bodies. They were sprinkling quicklime over the piled-up, puffed-up corpses, and the flies were buzzing and making insane sounds. The man in white led me by the hand and I doubled over frightened of the flies. They were like a cloud or a woolen cover of black and yellow buzzing. I bent over and let him guide me, jumping over the corpses. I jumped, too. I let go of his hand and fell down and rolled over in that white stuff and got up again clinging to the ground and to the lime and ran toward the hospital. I ran turning and looking back afraid that he might have been following me. I ran with the quicklime dripping from me. I wiped my eyes with my hands so I could see. The flies were creeping into my hair and taking up residence in the depths of me. I wiped my hair and my face and I kept running. When Zainab saw me enter the hospital, she fled. In those days, Abu Salem, we used to fear the dead. We didn't fear those who killed them, but we feared the people who'd been killed. We feared the quicklime. We were afraid they'd rise up and come toward us, covered with quicklime, shaded beneath their cloud of flies.

That's how the camp lived, and the people died. We covered them with quicklime to kill the germs and wiped away their features before throwing them into the hole, which later became a soccer field.

I didn't tell these stories to Catherine and her group, and I didn't tell
them about Dunya. I walked with them through the streets of the camp and took them to the mass grave, which is outside the camp borders now, and there they saw three children playing soccer. Catherine went up to the fence and laid her head on it. I thought she was going to cry, but she didn't.

“Is that really the grave?” she asked me.

I nodded, but her dancing eyes and short black hair seemed not to believe me. The tall man, whose name I've forgotten, asked me about the numbers.

“Fifteen hundred,” I said.

I told them about the wall and said we'd built one around the grave, but that it had been destroyed during the War of the Camps and replaced with this fence.

The tall man said he wanted to talk to people.

“Of course, of course,” I said.

We went back to the main street and took the first turn on the right. We found children running through the alleys and women sitting in front of their houses washing vegetables and talking. We stopped in front of one of the houses.

“Come in, come in,” said the woman.

“Thank you,” I said. “I have a delegation of French actors with me, and they'd like to talk with you a little.”

“Welcome, Dr. Khalil. It's been ages! How are you? I hope your mind's at peace.”

Oh no, I thought, what I was afraid of is happening. Now she'll ask me about Shams, and I'll have to lie. But she didn't, thank God; I ignored her words and explained that the French visitors wanted her to tell them about the massacre.

When the woman heard the word
massacre
, her face fell.

“No, Son. We're not a cinema. No.”

The woman went into her house and closed the door in our faces.

I was embarrassed because I'd told the French group that the people here loved guests and spoke naturally, and that we only had to knock on the door and go in.

After the first door was closed in our faces, all the others were, too, and no one wanted to speak to us.

The fourth and last woman whose door we knocked on was very kind, but she, too, said she had nothing to tell us.

“My story? No, Dr. Khalil. I don't want to talk about my children. Come and talk to me about something else. Not my children.” Then she came up close to me and whispered, “Don't tell them what I'm going to tell you now, it's a secret. Can you keep a secret? Every time I talk about them, or say something to them, they come to me at night. I hear their voices speaking like the wind. I can't make out what they're saying, but I know them from their voices. I know they don't want me to talk about them. Maybe whenever I talk about them they remember the massacre. The dead remember, and their memories hurt like knives.”

“You're right, Sister. Do whatever you like,” I told her and made a sign to the visitors to leave.

“No, please. Have some tea!”

We drank tea in a living room whose walls were covered from top to bottom with photographs banded with black ribbons. Catherine got up and bent over the sofa to examine one of the photos close up. It showed a girl of about ten standing with her short skirt riding up a little on her left thigh. She was wearing sandals and playing with her braid. Catherine bent even closer until her face was almost touching the picture, but the woman pulled her back and said, “Sit down.” Catherine almost fell over, but she sat down silently. When we left, however, the tall man asked me what the woman had said to Catherine. I told him she'd asked her to sit down and keep away from the picture.

“Why?” he asked me.

“I don't know,” I said.

“We're bothering them, I can understand,” he said.

“We shouldn't have come,” said Catherine.

Then Daniel disappeared. We left the house, walked on a little, and he was no longer with us.

“Where's Daniel?” I asked.

The tall man said Daniel was like that; he had to explore places by himself.

“Do you want to wait for him?” I asked.

“No need,” said the tall man. “He'll figure out how to get back to the hospital on his own.”

“Is that all?” asked Catherine.

“There's the mosque that was turned into a cemetery,” I said, and explained that during the long siege we'd turned the mosque into a cemetery because the original cemetery had been occupied and destroyed.

“I don't want to go.
Nous sommes des voyeurs
,” Catherine said to the tall man, who tried to translate what she had said, to the effect that it was the tragedy of intellectuals and artists that they had to go and look and react, and then they'd forget. When he read Jean Genet's text on the massacre, he said, he felt as though he'd been struck by lightning; he said he hadn't read the words, he'd seen them – the words emerged from the pages and moved around his room. That was why he'd decided to come here: “I had to see the people so the words would go back into the book and become just words again.”

I didn't get into a discussion with him because I couldn't understand what lay behind all that finickiness of his. I understood the meaning of
voyeurs
and said one didn't have to be an intellectual to be a voyeur; we're all voyeurs. Voyeurism is one of the human race's greatest pleasures; uncovering what others want to hide justifies our own mistakes and makes life more bearable.

Catherine said the people were right. “Why should they talk to us? Why should they give us information? Who are we to them? It's not right.”

I didn't tell them what the fourth woman had said to me; I felt I had no right to reveal her secret. I also felt a certain pride, believe me, for when we suppress pain it shows we know its meaning. Nothing equals pain as much as the suppression of it.

On our way back to the hospital, we met Abu Akram, and he invited us to the Popular Front office, where I was introduced to Salim As'ad.

You agree that holding your tongue is a noble stand to take, don't you?
They were right not to talk. How could they, after all? We don't tell these tales to each other, so why should we tell them to foreigners? What's the point? And those voices – is it true that the voices of the dead flow through the alleys of the camp?

And Dunya? Why do I keep seeing Dunya, with her wide eyes, in front of the tall French man, speaking to him?

I don't know Dunya. Behind the cemetery fence, I encountered her eyes, suspended in her face. I'd promised to try to work something out for her in Tunis, and then forgot the matter. Later I discovered that Dunya
was
the matter, all because of Dr. Muna Abd al-Karim, professor of psychiatry at the Lebanese University. Professor Muna works with the Association for the Disabled in the camp, and Dunya was a regular visitor. We thought Dunya had found a job for herself, but she hadn't been working, she'd been talking. Foreign journalists would come and Professor Muna would take them to his office, where Dunya would tell her story with Professor Muna translating. Dunya had become a new kind of storyteller, one who tells stories only to foreigners, and she had become a story herself. I don't have any objections – everyone's free to do as they please – but a month after the Carlton Hotel Women's Conference, they brought her here to the hospital and Dr. Amjad refused to receive her. He said that there was nothing he could do for her, that she was untreatable, but Salim As'ad and I admitted her by force. She's living now in a room on the second floor, close to yours. Her situation is precarious because her pelvis has been shattered again. I think there must be some problem with her bones because they're disintegrating. Today Dunya looks like a corpse and needs a private nurse. Her mother visits her every day but instead of helping us, she weeps. And Dunya says nothing. Her eyes, suspended in her thin, wan face, look without seeing, silent.

Dunya talked too much – it was Professor Muna's fault. He had made her into a tool for
fund raising
. Let's contemplate this expression that has entered our language from America. In order to collect money, we need pity, and Dunya could cry on command. Professor Muna Abd al-Karim
would make her tell her story, and the
fund raising
went forward. I don't know what's come over us since the Israeli invasion of '82: Every intellectual and activist has started talking about nothing but the international organizations that give out money. The activists have turned into thieves, Abu Salem, with all this
fund raising
going into their own pockets. Maybe they're right! I swear I don't know anymore.

But no.

This has nothing to do with Professor Muna. The psychologist was just doing her job, and maybe she believed that Dunya, being asked to tell her story so often, had turned into an actress. Acting isn't confession and has no impact on the actor's life. It seems, however, that Dunya wasn't acting; she was really telling her story.

I saw her. I was watching the Women's Conference on television when they announced a “Palestinian testimony,” and I saw Dunya come forward, on crutches. Her feet struck the ground hard, her pelvis swiveled, she walked slowly and calmly. She was neither hurried nor embarrassed, as though she'd learned her role well. She reached the podium, supported her weight on it, and let the crutches fall with a clatter. Dunya paid no attention either to the noise or to the man who hurried to pick the crutches up. She looked straight ahead and started speaking. And she amazed me. This woman was telling a completely different story. I'd no idea she'd been . . . had no idea how she could have hidden all these things from us and could now be saying them in front of these foreigners. She spoke in English, sometimes slipping into Arabic, which Professor Muna would hasten to translate.

“I ran,” she said. “Then they raped me.” She said
raped me
in English and then stopped, to let the hall fill with silence.

“They came into the house and started firing. We were wearing our night clothes and sitting in the living room. Our house has two rooms, one for sleeping and the other for the television. When we heard the explosions, we all went into the television room. The electricity had been cut, but we found ourselves going there without thinking, to listen to the news.”

She said that her whole family was around the television when armed men entered carrying flashlights. “The light from the flashlights was terrifying. We were seated around the silent television with a single candle lit. Then the ropes of light burst in, and the firing. I fled. I went to the door, which the armed men had ripped off before entering. I walked away slowly without looking behind me, I didn't run. I saw the flares, like little suns. I walked and I walked, then I felt something hot in my right thigh. I started running, or I felt I was running, but I wasn't. I was moving very slowly in fact. I heard the machine-gun fire as though it were exploding in my ear.”

Dunya said she was running in place when he brought her down. “I thought I'd fallen, but it was that man. I didn't see his face. The flares didn't seem to give light, as though they were enveloping the darkened faces with light rather than lighting up their features. He fell on top of me. They all fell on top of me. I'd reached the corner of the main street. From our house to the main street was about ten meters. I was in front of Abu Sa'adu's shop when I fell and the faces fell on top of me.
They raped me
and I felt nothing. I thought that the hotness that exploded from my right thigh was blood. Everything was hot, everything was black, everything was . . . I can't tell you long it went on. I was like someone in a coma. I saw without seeing, felt without feeling.”