I was lying in bed in John’s room at the AUB apartment, having been woken by a dawn chorus of birds. Samir and Fiona were in Asha’s room, seemingly having patched things up. The previous night, over lamb kebabs and beer at the Commodore, Samir had given Bob a potted history of the Phalangists, albeit a simplistic version lacking the political context Faris might have provided. Fiona was there. She and Samir had arrived in sunglasses looking like international terrorists.
The Phalangists, Samir had told Bob, were Maronite Christians who thought themselves Phoenician in origin rather than Arab (‘Who can blame them,’ he said) and were set up by one Pierre Gemayel, father of Bashir killed not two days ago, who created his organisation after an inspiring visit to Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s.
‘And now they’re allied with the Shlomos? How deliciously ironic.’
Samir shrugged, perhaps not knowing what he meant. He proceeded to tell Bob about what the Phalangists had done in the Lebanese Civil War. In 1976, at the height of the Civil War, the Phalangists had surrounded Tel al-Zaatar (translated as ‘hill of thyme’), a large Palestinian refugee shanty town that happened to lie in east Beirut. That was another summer siege, Samir explained, and the camp was inevitably overrun and 3,000 people were killed. The camp was razed to the ground.
‘They carved crosses on the bodies,’ he added.
I’d explained that the Phalangists were looking for ‘purity of race’ in Lebanon, and were still determined to rid Lebanon of the Palestinians.
Lying in bed I recalled a poster commemorating the Tel al-Zaatar event that had little figures on it representing the number of people killed. There was nothing else on the poster, just the little figures with Tel al-Zaatar written across the top. Earlier that same year Palestinians had retaliated for a massacre in Karantina, yet another shanty town, with an atrocity of their own, evacuating and murdering the inhabitants of Damour, a Christian town south of Beirut. The survivors of Tel al-Zaatar were subsequently housed there. It so happened that my short military training had taken place on the outskirts of that small town. I’d gone with some boys from Sabra camp – rough kids compared to my schoolmates, who had their own cars and black servants. The military aspect of my training was nothing compared to what I learnt about people who had really been through it, even compared to the Sabra contingent. The other boys in the training camp were all orphans from Tel al-Zaatar, with no other prospects than to take up a Kalashnikov. The Sabra boys were God-fearing Muslims, unremarkable in a religion-obsessed country, although slightly at odds with the Marxist-Leninist youth group we were with. I was marked an outsider in several ways. One, I didn’t believe in God, something I’d learnt to keep to myself due to the incredulous and hostile responses this information provoked at school. Two, I was half foreign and looked it, which meant that I was forever being asked things like ‘What’s “cunt” in Danish?’ Three, I was the son of a cadre, which meant that some people there thought me worthy of special treatment. On the first day of training I was ushered by an instructor to the front of the food queue to fill my plate. Even now I cringed at the thought of it. I declined, determined to stand at the back of the line. At the confused response to this I worried that I’d committed a grave offence in the complex but unwritten rules of Arab etiquette. But the other boys appreciated the gesture, and it set the mood for the rest of the fortnight.
The Tel al-Zaatar orphans were crude, foul-mouthed boys and were the first Arabs I’d heard openly and constantly blaspheme in public. By the end of the first day the Sabra boys had gotten into a fight and by the end of the second day they’d had to be ferried back to the relative civilisation of Sabra camp to prevent a major confrontation. I, of course, stayed on and endured, because to leave would have caused my father considerable embarrassment. The fact that I stayed raised my standing even further. The blaspheming didn’t bother me although the constant swearing became tiresome, especially as it was exclusively related to female sexual organs.
I wondered what had became of those boys, whether they’d been on the front line of the latest summer’s siege, and what they would have said if they knew that the Phalangists were planning to finish what they’d started, this time knowing that there would be no resistance to speak of. I thought of Faris holed up in Sabra. I felt bad lying around reminiscing. There must be a way into the camp, I thought. I quickly pulled on my jeans and T-shirt and went looking for Samir and Fiona.
Samir had hard-boiled some eggs to rival the hospital kitchen’s rubbery efforts. I outlined my plan to him and Fiona, which involved trying to get into the camp using the Red Crescent ambulance. Samir confirmed that he still had access to it.
‘Won’t they mind?’ Fiona asked.
‘I don’t know – I won’t ask them,’ Samir said.
We discussed details but Fiona wasn’t enthusiastic about going.
‘We need a Western woman in the ambulance, particularly someone white like you,’ Samir said.
Fiona pulled at her hair and said she would think about it. I told them I would try to convince Bob that smuggling him into the camp in the back of an ambulance was good for his career, although I doubted he’d need much persuasion. We agreed to meet at the Commodore later.
Najwa was still not at her apartment, which I was grateful for as it meant I didn’t have to explain what I’d done with the passports. I did need to tell her about Lazy Eye though. I found a napkin in my jacket pocket from Samir’s falafel place. I scribbled on it in English: ‘Our old friend has made a surprise visit with some of his new friends’, hoping she’d understand what I meant. I spent five minutes trying to get the napkin under the door without scrunching it up, and just as I succeeded the door opposite opened and an old woman stood there looking at me with undisguised hostility. I put on my best smile.
‘You’re always coming round here, you and that other man,’ she said, pointing a crooked finger at me. I assumed she meant Abu Hisham. ‘What do you want here?’
‘She’s a friend of my mother’s,’ I lied, although I wanted to ask her if it was any of her business. ‘I’m just visiting. Have you seen her?’ I asked.
‘Do you think I watch her every coming and going?’ I bet you do, I thought. She retreated into her apartment and slammed the door. I could see her beady eye glued to the peephole, where it probably was before she opened the door.
On Hamra Street Israeli soldiers were patrolling in a fairly relaxed style; there were even a couple of officers sitting at a pavement café. The other coffee drinkers eyed them with disdainful curiosity – an army who couldn’t or wouldn’t enter the city when it was full of fighters but now patrolled its streets as if victorious was no army in their view. Bob was in the editing suite, splicing together footage from yesterday. He showed me a video taken last night from the roof of the Commodore, which had been a favourite vantage point for filming F-16 raids during the summer. He’d filmed flares being fired over the south of the city, keeping whatever was underneath lit up like daytime.
‘I’m pretty sure that’s over the camps,’ he said. I thought of Eli and the others stuck in the hospital, Faris somewhere in the camp. The flares kept a constant illumination going, but for what? Nothing good, that much was certain.
‘I’ve got an idea on how we can get into the camp,’ I said.
He looked at me. ‘Go on.’
‘We go in the back of an ambulance. Samir will drive it and Fiona will be the nurse up front. Well, she is actually a nurse.’ I was talking too quickly but he was thinking about it. ‘We’ll travel in the back.’
‘It’s worth a try,’ he said, but he wasn’t exactly jumping up and down with excitement.
I told him Samir and Fiona would be at the hotel by lunchtime.
‘As long as they don’t pull up outside the hotel in an ambulance, otherwise we’ll have every journalist in the place trying to get in.’
I said that I didn’t think Samir was that stupid, but we gave each other a look.
The Commodore lobby was full of talk. Lebanese stringers told of people coming out of the camp and reports of terrible things going on, but it was difficult to distinguish fact from fiction in this volatile atmosphere and I knew that they were prone to exaggeration. This was true during the siege, when the official PLO version of events bore a proportional relation to the experience described. So fifty killed became a hundred, as if the truth wasn’t bad enough. This stretching of the facts was probably a response to the lethargic reaction of the rest of the world to what was going on in Beirut. As Samir was fond of saying, ‘What has to happen before people do anything?’
A Danish cameraman came in with his equipment, obviously straight from filming a story. Bob and he exchanged greetings and Bob introduced me. I got to speak my first bit of Danish since my mother left and it felt familiar and safe, like sitting in my grandmother’s house in Skagen. I was filled with an urge to leave: walk out of the lobby into a taxi for the airport, get on a plane straight for Copenhagen, then get the train and ferry to Skagen. I could be there some time tomorrow if I left now, could register at Copenhagen University on Monday. Except the airport was closed and Eli was in the camp and Faris was missing and who knows what Youssef was doing. The Danish cameraman was telling us that he’d been refused entry into the camp but that he had some interesting film he wanted us to see.
So we were back in the TeleNews edit room where Bob stuck the Dane’s tape into the machine and did a fast rewind.
‘I filmed this after we were refused entry. It’s a little bit shaky because I was using a telephoto lens.’
I listened to some technical talk between the two men as we first saw the Israeli checkpoint; the soldiers looking towards the camera, unsure as to whether to allow filming. An Arab voice off camera asked the camera man ‘if he could see that’ and the picture zoomed beyond the twitchy IDF to a military truck about a hundred metres behind them. It started to get wobbly then settled down but we could see a few civilian men sitting in the truck. An armed militiaman stood with them and some more men were being loaded in, pushed and pulled up as their hands were tied. The video blurred and the Dane explained that an Israeli soldier was walking towards the camera and that soon we’d lose the picture. I could see more people being loaded onto the truck and my heart stopped. But the truck was no longer visible and the screen was filled with the angry face of a blond soldier who was pointing his Galil at the camera.
‘That’s all there is,’ the Dane said. I felt sick. I tried to turn the knob on the edit deck but my fingers were shaking.
‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost,’ Bob said.
I rewound the tape slowly, the Israeli soldier walked backwards and went out of focus. We could see the truck again and got five seconds of clear steady footage. I couldn’t mistake his lanky frame even though I couldn’t see his face. His hands were bound and he was being manhandled onto the truck. But when he sat down he was facing the camera and his long angular face looked towards the roadblock in resignation. It was Faris.