Still more leaflets. Printed on crinkled paper of yellow and green, cellophane flowers. Most of which were dropped over the Corniche, only to fall into the churning water or to hang limply, dampening inch by inch on the knife-sharp rocks.More Israeli air raids came to terrorise Beirut with their soprano whine. Bilqis sometimes thought her own laughter was a challenge to that sound: she laughed in the same unstable way, an out-of-breath gurgle and a screech. The raids targeted Palestinian camps in the southern suburbs with American-made cluster bombs. They exploded indiscriminately, showering anyone close by with perfect steel balls and jagged metal fragments.
Bilqis hobbled out of the camp’s air-raid shelter screaming at the planes still hovering above, watching them retreat with the whirring motions of startled pigeons. ‘Bastards! We’re still alive!’
Children chorused around her.
‘Still alive!’
They hugged each other: teenage widows, militia fighters, those stick-limbed, hysterical children, shaking in disbelief at their own good fortune. As the planes circled the camps once again then left, the refugees fell apart from each other to hug themselves, revelling in that moment of aliveness, still watching as the planes disappeared into the light sky.
Still more leaflets. Printed on crinkled paper of yellow and green, cellophane flowers. Most of which were dropped over the Corniche, only to fall into the churning water or to hang limply, dampening inch by inch on the knife-sharp rocks.
You in west Beirut should remember today
that time is running out and
with every delay the risk to your dear ones increases. Hurry up.
Save the lives of your dear ones before it is too late.
‘It’s already too late,’ Sanaya said, as she threw it in the bin. ‘I have no dear ones to save. Except Hadiya, and she’s not even mine.’
She was scrubbing the shower recess with the last of the detergent and dirty water.
What about Selim? She hated him. She loved him. No, it wasn’t that. She hated the public Selim, the one who killed. She loved the private Selim, the one who made her feel safe. She hadn’t seen him for a long while; he was never home when she phoned. What about Issa? Crazy. So was the whole city. He fitted in well.
In the evening, gold streamers of light appeared around the edges of west Beirut. They were from jets firing flares over the rooftops, a carnival of the grotesque. Israelis sputtered on loudspeakers in bad Arabic. ‘Leave the west of the city immediately,’ they droned on and on into the night, disturbing Sanaya’s sleep until she stood on the balcony and shouted back at them. ‘You fucking leave the city! I’m staying here.’
It was her city now, more than ever. Now, in its decrepitude, its clamorous pain and filth, it begged her loyalty as in no other time. When she was younger, when Beirut was vibrant, flaunting wealth and power, she did not feel part of it the way she did now. When the restaurants were filled every night, casinos glittering, swimming pools floodlit and lagoon-blue, actors and directors swanning into waterfront clubs, the city did not need her.
She saw it now from her balcony and suffered. Most buildings were shells, open to sky and rain. Furniture and electronic goods had been carted away from abandoned houses, the only items left behind too sodden or soiled to be contemplated. Cooking pots and saucepans filled with the shit of retreating Israeli soldiers. Vandalised beds and clothes. Walls pitted with scars and graffiti, last-ditch pleas for justice. She couldn’t leave, not now. Now, more than ever, the city relied on her for its very existence.
She sat through the next day and slept through the next, waking only for sips of cold tea. She slept through the beginning of the siege proper, through the electrical power circuits being switched off, water supplies cut totally, no more food allowed into the city from any channels, black market or otherwise. She sipped her tea and saved her dry bread for later, when things would surely get worse.
Two weeks into the siege, she decided to risk going outside. She’d been kept alive by her store of canned food and shrivelled potatoes, scary tubers in the dark of the cupboard. Yet she had been kept from total malnourishment by gifts from Selim: army rations of brittle chocolate and shortbread, oranges and day-old pastries. He’d been coming around much more now, almost every day, checking if she was all right, gently solicitous of her comfort. Something in him had died, she thought. He seemed older and more wary of emotion.
Issa was nowhere to be found, and even Rouba had no idea where he was fighting, or for whom. Sanaya had broken the silence between them. One morning after she saw Hadiya go out into the courtyard to play, she made her glass of tea, put her stale croissant on a plate to have for breakfast. She sat on the balcony to read the paper, as she always did, regardless of the danger, then suddenly thought of Rouba directly downstairs, maybe with nothing to eat at all. She knocked on the door then, watched Rouba open it in her crumpled nightgown and silently handed her the plate.
Now she shared her treats with Rouba most days, pressing food into her hands, sweeping away her feeble protestations. Take it. Eat it in front of me. Both women had grown thinner, sallow and pinched and perpetually hungry. Hadiya’s emaciation was heartbreaking, as if her hair had now sucked all the life out of her. She no longer went to school, waiting until the teacher could resume small classes in her own apartment.
Sanaya tried to wash before going out, an exercise in exasperation, as seawater was all they had now, trickling it over herself, leaving her hair and face greasy with a slick of diesel oil and salt, and hardly reaching the rest of her body.
She walked out into a nightmare. Crooked piles of burning garbage, streets stinking of shit and blood, children running to her with rivulets of snot from both nostrils, begging for coins, scabies reddening their hollow cheeks. The Israeli bombardment had been both discriminate and accurate. Finally those ritualistic words ‘surgical precision’ had become blazingly real to her. True, they were usually meant to denote the targeting of military buildings and few, if any, civilian casualties. Yet as she walked she saw the Israelis had targeted every civilian area possible: schools, mosques, churches, hospitals, apartments, hotels, shops, parks, even the city’s only synagogue.
She walked further, past the Hamra district, toward the Green Line into the dusk. She checked her watch – already nine. The light from the sky didn’t diminish, rather became more distinct with every step. The other people appeared undisturbed by it, yet for her it was like being hunted, found and examined under glass.
She grabbed a young girl by the arm.
‘I’m sorry, why is the city lit up like this?’
The girl looked at her askance, scanned the crowd for assistance. Somebody cut in, shoving her aside.
‘It’s the Israelis, up to another one of their tricks.’
‘But why?’ she asked. ‘Why?’
The people around her shook their heads, tried not to stare, drifted away as she continued to ask why, exchanging glances among themselves, nodding at each other to convey the woman’s strangeness.
By nightfall, the west of the city was robed in a halo of white neon from searchlights erected on the hills, a long-suffering saint under interrogation.
She sat on her balcony the next morning, sipping tea and smoking. More black-market Marlboros brought by Selim. Better than the Gitanes he would bring her last year.
She opened yesterday’s newspaper: 17 September 1982. Somehow the date surprised her; she hadn’t been conscious of so much time passing. The city still retained its summer heat, in the pavements and between building bricks, as if drawing a blanket around itself in defence against some new atrocity.
It had been hard to sleep last night; she sweated in her airless bedroom and considered calling Selim, but in the end decided against it.
She jumped when she heard Rouba’s voice behind her.
‘You scared me. I didn’t hear you come in.’
‘You were humming to yourself.’
‘Was I? I didn’t realise.’
Rouba sat on the chair opposite.
‘Sanaya, something’s going on in the camps.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Something horrible. My friends who live near there said they could hear dynamiting all night.’
‘But the multinational forces are here, Rouba. Surely—’
‘The marines have left us too early, and those bastard Israelis are doing whatever they want.’
Selim and Elie were on a mission with their men. They rode in jeeps through the clean morning and ate rations from US army tins, a welcome change after tinned hoummus and stale baguettes. The Israelis had supplied them with these rations – as well as fizzy sodas and new guns.
They sat around, enjoying the brightness, basking in the sun. They ate, drank and argued. Some said the Palestinians had murdered Bashir Gemayel, as the Israelis had always maintained. They wanted revenge. They wanted to begin right away, but the others cautioned, waving their cigarettes. They countered with their own stories. Bashir was not dead at all, no – he’d been seen walking out of his wrecked car, covered in blood, into a waiting ambulance. He was biding his time, only to appear again when his country needed him.
In the meantime, they prepared for his arrival. They’d been sent to flush out terrorists. The euphemisms were inventive. Neutralise the camps, cleanse the area, mop up insurgents, disinfect the region of aggressors. To kill. They had been instructed to kill every living thing in the Sabra-Shatila camps: old men, women, girls, children, babies, stray dogs, pet birds in cages. They were all to be knifed or machine-gunned to death; no explosions until nightfall, the men were warned, when the dead could be bulldozed into mass graves with their shacks dynamited on top of them. A quick way to hide the evidence. Calm and efficient.
By afternoon, Selim was preparing to begin. Elie had long since retired to the Phalange HQ, after giving the men a rousing speech. Orders had come from the Israeli High Command to start at 5 pm.
Selim’s boys were quiet now, some asleep, others staring into space. Most were high on hashish. Their movements could certainly be slower under the influence but were usually more deliberate. Their judgement was clouded, but that too could be useful. Today he felt as if he’d like a little himself. As second-in-command he operated as if he and the boys were one organism. His desires and needs were communicated to them almost by hypnosis, slow-moving unconscious, epiphany. His movements and expressions suggesting more than his spoken commands could elucidate. Today, the boys’ instincts were trained on him with more intensity and fervour than he’d seen in a long time.
He stubbed out his cigarette in the dirt and led them to the first row of huts near the gates. Behind, more jeeps screeched to a halt and the rest of the Phalangist forces stumbled out into the dust, all in silence and something like veneration. The sky was empty of clouds, the colour of the Madonna’s robes.
‘Advance!’ Selim shouted. ‘In the name of the Virgin!’
He glanced down at his gun butt and the Virgin Mary sticker he’d placed there gazed at him with adoring plenitude. He made the sign of the cross, looked away.
The first Palestinian he saw was a pregnant woman, younger than twenty. She wore a sky-blue scarf and her feet were bare. When she saw the Phalangists rushing into her courtyard she began scurrying here and there like a beheaded hen, always covering the same ground, cowering before them in a cursed circle. He watched one of his boys stop in front of her then saw her crumple to the ground before him, as if accepting her fate. She looked like she would have done anything: kissed his feet, let him rape her, maim her, if he would just let her live long enough to give birth to her baby. The boy put his boot on her neck, then leaned over. Blood shot out of her mouth in small, unpredictable spurts. She made no sound, part of the afternoon’s conspiracy of silence. Maybe it doesn’t hurt her as much. Maybe she’s just too different from us. Was it just like slitting open a pig? An Easter lamb, sweet and pliant? Maybe she wasn’t human after all. Or maybe she was screaming deep inside.
Selim entered the hut and killed her husband with one shot.
‘I’m doing you a favour,’ he said. ‘So you don’t have to see what happened to your child.’
He didn’t stop to check if the man was dead on impact. He could hear a gurgle escape from him, the rush of a deflating tyre. He felt no obvious hatred for the dead man, no acute ache of revenge. His hatred was chronic by now, like a back ailment he just had to live with. A justifiable impediment. A personality trait, like an irritating laugh or stammer.
Revenge was part of it, always had been. Still, the sense of injustice, the heat of anger, was not his motivating force. Nor the memory of his father’s tirades, the red, dragging suffering of his persecuted race. Mostly it was a job he must do, he reminded himself, a task in which he brought his best training to bear.
Even so, he felt at times that killing was like the twinned sickness and satisfaction he felt while masturbating. Secretive, but a performance, no matter how intimate. Like the twisted lozenge of light his bracelet made on the bathroom tiles each morning, killing another human being was the way in which he made an impact upon the world. I’m alive and I can take away your life. In this way I’m doubly living.
Surely it was more than that. After all, the act wasn’t always so pleasurable. At times he felt illogically diminished by this very exercise of his power. Then it was Papa and his tirades; it must be. Something in those whispered taunts, at night in bed when he was half-asleep already and couldn’t be sure he heard right. The signalling cough down the corridor. His father standing by the door with a circle of light around his head. Selim sitting up in bed, still navigating his dreams. What is it, Papa? And Minas bending over with a hand heavy on his cheek. Nothing, my son, nothing at all. Then he would sit at the end of the bed and abuse Selim for not being a good enough son.
After that, long after all the swearing, the disappointment and anger, came the maudlin reminiscences and the crying. And Selim, in his love and shame for his father, would try to keep his eyes tightly closed and keep dreaming, allowing Minas’s voice to weave into his own private images of suffering and war. He became his father: holding the girl from the death camp in a last grasping embrace, retasting her sweet insistence. And I flinched away from her filth, did you hear me, son? Even though I was just as dirty as she was.
Why now, why all this guilt? Selim could remember wanting to say it, yet not having the courage to ask. Papa survived because he had to. She succumbed. He comforted his father with these arguments – or did he? – and Minas repeated them after him so the girl wouldn’t come to him in his nightmares. She wanted him to survive. Yet he left her behind, ran away from her. Just as you, my son, are going to do to me.
Selim lay in bed then and tried to stop the tears escaping from his eyes. It hurt his chest, his cheeks, to hold them back. His father told him to stay home, be good, marry an Armenian girl – but never his cousin. It was wrong. The Arabs did it. At this point Selim’s fatigue got the better of him and he fell into open-mouthed sleep, his father curled up, too, lightly snoring at his feet. And their dreams fed off each other: Selim lying in a gutter somewhere in the warring south of the country, bleeding, calling for his Papa. Or running, running at night when Minas’s own legs shuddered and strained with the effort of keeping up with him. And Selim saw two boys, hand in hand, wading through deserts riven with blood. Two boys; twin Minases and twin Selims, crying and laughing in a crisis of fear and freedom.
Selim knew now what he meant, the cruel subtext to all his father’s ranting. You’ve never suffered, my boy. You don’t know what it is to be Armenian. His father’s voice descending to a hiss. Food on the table, tucked into bed, coddled all your life. You have no idea what we went through to get you here. So as the years went by, he fulfilled the prophecy and withdrew from his father more and more.
Minas, meanwhile, complained to anyone who would listen: Lilit, a worried Siran, bored neighbours, to customers who wandered into the jewellery shop expecting only a glass of tea and some small talk. He contrived to repeat the same thing every time, and Selim would hear it second-hand from Anahit: Selim was always such a good boy. Seventeen now, old enough to know better. And it was dangerous out in the streets, what with Palestinians and Muslim Lebanese running all over the place with their new guns. Another war, just like all the others. It wasn’t really a full-scale war yet, but the Israelis were already rumbling over Arab borders. They even talked about nuclear power. Wipe out the whole region with one flick of a switch. Then those crazy Muslims from all over the region going on about pan-Arabism, socialism, decolonisation. Selim knew Minas only understood enough of those words to dislike them, so he didn’t even try to explain to his father the very real threat Muslims posed to the whole of the Middle East.
Selim thought back to one night he remembered so clearly, perhaps because he’d been so ashamed. On this late summer’s night Minas sat in his chair looking out over the same landscape, muttering the same platitudes as every other night. Telling Selim to look after his family. Wishing he would just stay home and do well at school.
‘It’s your own fault,’ Lilit would interject from her bedroom, where she sat in the breeze that came from the open door. ‘You’re the one who’s been stuffing his head with hatred for Muslims since he was in swaddling clothes. And my daughter too.’ Selim and Anahit exchanged wry smiles.
Minas didn’t want his son to fight. He always said Selim was too precious to be wasted on an idea. Of his own fighting days he said little, only that it was a necessary war, to establish French control in the region. Assisting their only protectors at the time. Now these same great powers had their own huge armies and allies from all over the world. ‘Why should Selim be called upon? Let the French and English and Americans be killed for a change,’ he replied to his sister. Lilit called these justifications, then threw back her head and laughed. When she did this Selim felt all of four years old, and secretly hated his aunt for being so prescient.
Selim knew that Minas approved of Anahit. He thought it was a good thing Anahit was so adamant, so fundamentalist, so very Armenian. Gone were the stories she was fed by her mother about her Turkish heritage. She spoke Armenian and Arabic and French fluently, did well at school but stopped to work in the jewellery shop. Her mother urged her to go on and try for the American University, but Anahit said she would rather work with Uncle Minas. She professed to hate Muslims as much as he and Selim did, screwing up her nose in disgust when she spoke of them. She hated the way they drank their muddy coffee, the way they spat in public at her feet, the way they treated their women. Selim had watched his father in the jewellery shop countless times. Whenever a rich Muslim came into the quarter expressly to visit their shop, having heard how fine Armenian craftsmanship could be, it was all Minas could do to prevent Anahit from refusing to serve him. ‘I hate them as much as you do,’ he whispered. ‘But we need them in business, they need us. See?’
On the summer night Selim was now remembering, Anahit came between Minas and him, handing her uncle goat’s milk and honey. She knew he needed it to soothe his stomach ulcers before bed. Selim watched her silhouette as she leaned over the old man. As she sat down next to him. He studied the way she clasped her hands around her knees, holding her slim, braceleted wrists, and rocked forward, looking into the patchwork of lighted windows and roofs as if she could somehow discern something in the sloping streets. As if sensing his thoughts, she turned to him and sighed.
‘I hope you’re safe out there at night.’
‘He should be home every night reading his schoolbooks,’ Minas grumbled at them both. ‘It’s his last year.’
She pouted. It was something Selim noticed her doing often these days.
‘Uncle, you know you’re proud Selim’s such a patriot. And so am I.’
His father huffed but resumed sipping his milk. Selim sat still, willing himself to be cold as moonlight. She continued.
‘I love my cousin a great deal, you know that, Uncle, don’t you?’
Selim waited for the reverberation her sentence made to be over, his embarrassment acute. Rivers of shame and desire coursed up his throat and into his cheeks, and he was thankful the night was dark and the balcony lit only by a guttering lamp. She stood, leaned over Selim and kissed his forehead.
‘But your son, my dear uncle, is single-minded. And high-minded. He never even looks at me.’
Minas drained the last of his milk and gave the glass back.
‘Anahit, he’s your first cousin. I’ve told you before, we’re not Arabs.’
Now Selim began walking again, conscious that some of his men were looking at him strangely. Usually he was one of the first to instigate violence, to push the boys into higher and wilder states of frenzy. Usually the fantasy of his Crusader forbears, crashing and straining in their mediaeval armour, buoyed him. But today he felt strangely sickened. He forced himself to move from hut to hut, checking how quickly the camp was being cleared, watching the shooting and knifing from afar, taking care of rhythm and structure. He blocked out the cries and screams, the swearing. There was always swearing from both sides. He settled his mirrored sunglasses more firmly in front of his eyes. Terrorists. Refugees. Same thing. He never once thought of himself as refugee; he was a Lebanese citizen; he was born in Beirut. He was Lebanese, they weren’t. Dirty Muslims. Stink of sweat. What are they doing here anyway, living off our land?
He stopped again in the middle of the street. Of course he thought of himself as a refugee. Every day, in fact. At school, in his father’s jewellery shop, on the street, in the stiff volumes he was forced to read on the genocide. He spent his Sunday afternoons looking at the glossy photographs in those weighty, expensive books, a reluctant voyeur. Sasoun, Bitlis, Kars. Dead Armenians hanging on meat hooks. Wellgroomed Turks in fezzes, looking on and smiling for the camera. Skulls on tables. Heads on sticks, freshly killed, with the same expression of bewildered affront he saw – and had inflicted – many times since. Dead babies piled in baskets like rotten fruit.
He was ashamed to be looking at the corpses along with those men, somehow complicit in their hermetic grins. At the same time he knew it was necessary, this collective memory – no, more than that, this collective guilt at not being there to suffer too. Sivas, Trebizond, Diyarbekir. Armenian heads displayed on shelves like trophies. His father’s guilt at surviving to tell the tale. Der ez Zor, Rakka, Ras ul-Ain.
He remembered Minas quoting the Turkish gendarmes: ‘No man can ever think of a woman’s body except as a matter of horror, after Ras ul-Ain.’ And the double shamelessness of those men, blithely photographing such horror. Armenian mothers and babies eating the flesh of a dead horse by the roadside. Stick figures with blank, unaccusing eyes. Musa Dagh, Urfa, Erzerum. He was conscious as he leafed through those books that his was a responsibility to look, to re-emphasise the ordeal, to bear witness to the memory.
Of course he was always a refugee. Mount Ararat on the wall in the parlour, the same cheap reproduction hanging in every Armenian house. Ani, ancient city of a thousand and one churches. Stories of Lake Van and the grandparents he’d never known. Displaced, wiped out, cursed to be forever far away from home. This loss was present in the drawn, haggard faces of the men here in Beirut, on streets named after destroyed villages, in the women’s insistence on feeding their children until they grew as fat as those Easter lambs they gorged on each year. It was heightened each time he left the Armenian quarter and ventured out into the city. He skulked about the Corniche or downtown, hands in pockets. Wondered if this one or that was a Muslim, a fanatic, a bloodthirsty gunman. At first it was fear, yet as he grew into his teens it became swagger, bravado, hatred. I’m the son of a genocide survivor. I have every right. He picked fights at streetlights, in queues, at anyone who dared look sideways at him. Palestinian, Lebanese, Muslim Druze. He had no idea whom he was fighting. Now he stopped in the middle of the camp and thought perhaps he was fighting his father all along.
One night, not long after the episode with Anahit, he found his father alone in the kitchen. Minas enjoyed cooking late at night when everyone else was asleep, liked to listen to the radio and perfect ever more elaborate recipes as the clock ticked into another day. Dishes Selim’s grandmother had cooked in the half-forgotten days before the genocide, when there was a sense of plenty and no fear. Milk-fed lamb with almonds and apricots. Trout baked in parchment. Selim loved those dishes. Special yeasted recipes for feast days, with fat raisins and far too many eggs. The secrecy of his father’s act enhanced its pleasure.
That night, Minas looked up from his kneading, fingers glued together with bread dough, and saw Selim standing at the side door.
‘And what time do you call this?’
He gestured with one hand to the clock on the wall and a blob of dough fell to the floor. Selim bent down, picked it up and placed it on the table.
‘It’s not so late, Father.’
He picked out one of the raisins and chewed it thoughtfully, trying to act unconcerned.
‘You have university tomorrow! What am I going to do with you?’
‘Nothing. I want to leave and join the army.’
‘Which army? Not one of the militias?’
‘I don’t care, so long as they’re not Muslim.’
Minas fought to get his hands free of the dough.
‘Fighting! More fighting. No, I can’t have that at your age.’
Selim straightened up and poked a finger at his father.
‘You fought with a militia when you were younger than I am. You escaped one of those camps. You fought for years. And look at you now, reduced to this—’ He broke off, gesturing at his father’s handiwork helplessly.
‘My son—’
Selim shook his head, not wanting to hear any more.
‘Don’t. You—I looked up to you. Now I’m ashamed of you.’
Now, all these years later, Selim could imagine what his father had felt, thought. Now, being a grown man, he could cringe with the poignancy of it, the loss. After he went upstairs, his father would have sat down, leaving his dough to dry out on the table. He would have clasped his old hands together on his lap and looked at them. Gnarled, criss-crossed with cuts here and there, pale dough caught under the fingernails. Hands that could fire a gun, kill, maim women, children.
Was there any use thinking about it? Selim didn’t want to torture himself, but the image came unbidden. His father sitting there, weeping with the futility of all he had ever done. What was the point of joining, killing and being killed, if there would only be more wars?
Selim remembered hearing him call down the hall, not caring if he woke anyone.
‘My son!’
And there he was, stumbling in the dark to Selim’s bedroom, blind through his tears, those old man’s hands of his groping for the door, the rattling knob. ‘You have no idea what it was like,’ he shouted. ‘You would never have made it. You would have died out there – not like me.’
But he had said all this to Selim before: in those late-night rants when he collapsed on the bed, in lectures when Selim came home from school with ruined clothes, in admonitions when he played out on the street too often and didn’t study, at formal dinners when Selim merely stared at his plate and ate nothing. A smack on the side of the head. Tearful protestations from his mother before the guests. His father’s glare at the two women and the young girl whose anger sparked the air: Siran and Lilit and Anahit. Minas was unrepentant. ‘At your age, Selim, I had nothing. Now go upstairs hungry and think about that.’
That night, with Minas in his room, Selim shifted awkwardly under the glare of the overhead bulb. He was already undressed, ready to jump into bed. Minas stopped and Selim could see, uncomfortable, how his father slowly surveyed his heavy, marbled chest, the tapering waist. Those muscular arms. All those nights spent at the gymnasium.
Now Selim thinks, I was only seventeen.
‘What is it, Papa?’
He hadn’t called Minas Papa since he was a little boy, when he would take him to the markets, teaching him how to haggle with Arabs – they pretend they’re poor but they’re richer than we are – showing him how to count out the exact amount of change for the Palestinian cab driver and no more – they don’t need tips, they get too much money from our government as well as working on the sly – telling him how you could pick a Muslim girl just from the way she walked, even if she wasn’t wearing a veil – they walk like they’re teasing you, do you know what that means, son?
Selim repeated his question.
‘What’s wrong, Papa?’
Minas merely stood there, tears gluing his lashes together. He turned and left the room.
Selim stalked now through disorderly lines of huts, looking for somewhere to hide. But he couldn’t. His soldiers needed him.
He told them he was sick, something he ate. He started throwing up, his composure shattered, at the same time trying to direct them to other areas if he felt they were too immersed in one killing, too fixated on one woman or a crying child. The well-oiled machinery mustn’t bog down, mustn’t slow, no matter how he felt. When he saw a soldier being self-indulgent, he barked out a reprimand and watched the boy leave the job half-done, unsure of what to do next.
‘Finish up!’ he boomed. ‘Get onto the next thing!’
He was panting. He estimated the time this would all take before they could stop and let the bulldozers in. A day? Two days? He kept an ever lower profile as he advanced further into the camp. He was becoming more and more afraid to be involved at all. At the same time frightened to become the deserter, the enemy they might turn on. On this day, any call to mercy – or even efficiency – could be construed as betraying the cause. So he stood aside, lit a cigarette to settle his stomach, and gave the impression of monitoring their progress without allowing himself to look.
He didn’t feel as if he was missing anything. There was always a terrible sameness to the appearance of dead bodies, or half-dead bodies, the wounded, the unvarying expressions on an anguished face. It became tiresome after a while. An older woman stood her ground and screamed.
‘Animals! Filthy swine!’
She was crying from rage, not fear.
‘You’re worse than the Israelis. I spit on your mothers’ graves.’
He watched one of his men drag her away. He was feeling better now, detached again. Must have been the cigarette. He strode down the main road of the camp, into streets where the killing hadn’t started yet. Phlegmatic now, seemingly unconcerned. He lit another cigarette, forced himself to inhale with measured calm. Yet there was something wrong with his breathing again. He usually cultivated a studied indifference in these situations; it was the only way to survive. Battles, bombings, assassinations, massacres. He slowed down and caught himself. Did I say massacres? Is this a massacre? No, it was a mission, an operation, that’s what it was.
A young girl ran into his peripheral vision. She didn’t look Muslim, wasn’t wearing a scarf. He threw down the cigarette, pulled out his gun.
‘Stop right there!’
Her arms flayed wide as she wheeled around to face him. She pulled out a wad of cash from the folds of her skirt, and he could see even this far away she was holding close to ten thousand lira.
‘Please, please,’ she cried.
For a moment, her incredible fragility stayed his hand. A moment, and her upright body rested weightless on the earth. She let the money fall. He shot her in the chest and she swayed into the dirt, her full skirt scattered like a blowsy tulip. It was the image of Sanaya. It was the pimpled girl from the death camp. He had one chance to honour his father’s memory, and he’d blown it. He stumbled across to her and fell to his knees, cupping her lolling head in his hand. If it were only the girl from the death camp, he would have saved her. He wouldn’t have left her there to die. He bent closer to her face. Her plait touched his cheek and he shuddered.
‘Please,’ he said. ‘Are you awake?’
She exhaled. The sound broke his concentration. He shook himself, let her head fall back again to the ground. When he got up off his knees, his first thought was to light another cigarette. He tossed the empty packet down, stood above her and watched ash fall on her bright chest, the barest hint of cleavage.
‘I had to do it,’ he told her.
He finished his cigarette and pulled a notebook out of his pocket, walking away from the young girl to some shade and noting down the time, 5.25 pm. He calculated how long he would like it all to take and noted down that time as well. He prided himself on his precise nature, calm and efficient under any circumstances.
Candles guttered in all four corners of the room. Outside in the southern suburbs, distant flares of a mandarin hue shocked the camps into seeming daylight.
‘Selim?’
‘Hmm?’
He was busy unfastening Sanaya’s blouse. Calm and efficient.
‘I heard the news on the radio.’
‘Which news?’
His gold crucifix glittered in the half-light.
‘The massacres. At Sabra-Shatila.’
‘And?’
He cupped one of her breasts, watching the way it stayed full and round in his palm, let it fall. Overhead, Israeli planes crisscrossed the night sky, raining shells down on the south coast.
‘Were you part of it?’
‘You know what I do.’
She turned away, threw her blouse over her shoulders.
‘Sanaya! Don’t blame me like this. We had our conversation, the night that Palestinian was here. Enough. It is what it is.’
‘How can your grand ideals be corrupted so much you’re killing mothers and babies? Your own neighbours?’
‘Is your Palestinian friend any better?’
‘I’m not saying that. All of you, you’re all the same.’
‘My dream is of a Christian Lebanon.’
‘What about me?’
‘I’ll make an exception.’
‘You make me sick.’
‘Don’t be so dramatic. It’s not worth all this.’
‘This—this what? This myth of an equal Christian and Muslim country everyone wants to believe because it’s such a nice idea?’
‘I’m not advocating equality, except when I talk to diplomats and journalists—’
‘Let me finish. This dream you espouse reinforces everything you like to think yourselves to be: civilised, urbane, compassionate, reasonable. But you’re none of those things.’
‘I’m not pretending I am. I’ll say it again: it’s your Palestinian friend downstairs who pretends to be so concerned about the welfare of his fellow human beings when all he wants to do is kill everyone – Christian, Jew, Sunni, Syrian, anyone who’s not Shia. We get more trouble from those Shias than any other Muslim faction combined.’
He leaned over close to her face and she could smell the stiff pomade, sourly sweet, that he put through his hair. Or was it something else she could smell? Had he washed since he came back from the camps? She could hardly hear what he was saying.
‘Listen. My father was a survivor from one of the worst genocides the world has ever seen. And who did it to him? Muslims. It’s my duty to fight them and avenge my family’s honour.’
He pulled down his underpants.
‘Come on, I don’t have much time.’
When the horn honked downstairs before dawn, he was dressed and ready in a minute. Sanaya noticed his hands looked old: splodgy, soft-knuckled. She looked away. He gave her a light kiss on the shoulder, pushed her down onto the bed.
‘Sleep now. You look terrible.’
In the rear of the Mercedes, he settled back but somehow couldn’t find the right position. He looked out the window at the deracinated palms, the first intimations of heat-shimmer on the sea. He looked down again at his hands folded in his lap. I’m the son of a genocide survivor. I have every right. He tapped on the glass dividing him from Gilbert.
‘Stop for a coffee in Achrafiye. At my regular place.’
He looked at his old bracelet, fingered the large silver links with affection. He checked his watch. Still early, he could stop for a while before reporting to headquarters. Gilbert was driving fast, racing to the Green Line before shooting for another day began in full force.
Selim smoothed the tiny creases on his pants near his thighs precisely, with the tips of his square-cut nails. We’ve suffered so much we’re absolved of all guilt. He looked down at his hands again, clenched and unclenched them in his lap. My hands are clean. I didn’t rape any of those girls pleading with me, didn’t torture any men. Even that last girl, she didn’t suffer for a second. He bit a hangnail from his thumb, spat it onto the floor of the car.
He remembered the blood rush to his head, the euphoria of power. It came on especially strong after the doubt he had experienced earlier, hot on the heels of his creeping shame. He had run into the centre of the camp after the killing of the young girl, barking further orders, weaving between the hovels and alleys behind them and the winding stairways that led to flat roofs. It was just before sunset.
He stood high up on one of those roofs, legs wide apart, surveying the swarms of militiamen advancing like a black fire into the camp. He could see no opposing gunmen, no terrorists, only old men and women and hysterical children. No answering shots rang out. There was no resistance from the inmates of the camp. Subtly and insidiously, the shapeless doubt took hold of him again.
He’d swerved, scanning the lane below. Heard a rat scurry to his left. A woman looked up and saw him and started running away. Her fat behind waddling. He’d bounded down the steps, his rifle banging against his shoulder. She turned her head and he caught a glimpse of her face in profile, a flash of eye and cheek. He stopped at the foot of the stairs panting, aimed his rifle but didn’t fire. She had seen him, looked him straight in the face. And he just stood there, wiping the sweat from his forehead with one hand, the violence of his breathing causing the gun to shake in his grip.
He stared vacantly out the car window now, the streets blurring into unrecognisable movement. I just eliminated them. That’s all I did. Except for that woman. I let her run away. Don’t know why I did that. Maybe she wasn’t worth chasing. She’ ll drop dead of her own accord, anyway, when she sees all those bodies.
They were just Muslims: Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians, Turks. All Turks, his father would say. Good for nothing other than killing. Selim went one step further. No race has a monopoly on cruelty. If they hurt us, we will hurt them a hundred times worse. His argument flowed sluggish in his veins and he closed his eyes, thinking of Sanaya, of his daughter.
All day Bilqis and Amal could smell corpses from their hiding place. It was a high, stinging smell that cut into their noses and forced them to breathe through their mouths. It even cancelled out the discomfort of staying crouched together in so small a space behind the bed, in the mouldy concrete hollow they found.
Throughout the day the smell drove out any question of pity or compassion or even fear: in the morning, when they were too cautious to get up and forage; at midday, when they were too sick to contemplate eating; at sunset, when Bilqis forced herself to gnaw at a UNRWA biscuit.
Amal was in shock. She sat, her back against the wall, shaking. She couldn’t eat. Bilqis tried to give her a cup of water mixed with sugar, but she couldn’t swallow and the liquid dribbled over her chin. As the sun began to go down Bilqis wrapped her in blankets, told her to lie on the bed and sleep.
‘I’m going outside. Don’t worry about me. I’ll bring you back a hot drink.’
All that was left in Bilqis now was a white-hot anger: against the Israelis, the Christians, the Syrians, the PLO, even against the corpses themselves. She wanted to push the smell away, forget it, if she could, distance herself. She hated the corpses, who forced her to smell them. She hated the corpses with the same level of passion she assumed the perpetrators did when they killed living, breathing, fleshy, human beings.
As she opened the door, she could see her porcelain and glass figurines crowding the windowsill, taunting her, mocking her luck at being alive. These gifts were from grateful journalists and UNRWA workers she spoke to honestly and without taking sides. There was the Swedish correspondent – a young woman with a grave face who came with a local translator Bilqis knew was an Israeli collaborator. There was the American journalist who tried to trick her into saying she hated Jews. And the aid worker from Italy who clasped her hands together and cried. No more gifts. It was time to take sides. They shone like avatars from some unwritten past, these smiling shepherdesses and solemn china cats and glass ovals, incarnations of divinity.
She walked out of her hut, unsteady, in a daze of humid evening heat. Flies settled on her nostrils, the edges of her mouth, in the corners of her eyes so she could hardly see where she was going. A massacre. An atrocity. A war crime. None of those epithets let even a glimmer of understanding in. No understanding, no analysis. Only the rotten, sweet air filling her nostrils and choking her breath deep in her throat. There were Mariam and Maha, young women with blank faces and torn undergarments in the yard next door. Were they raped in front of their husbands and sons? The rats had already arrived, scurrying over their bodies in the too-bright moonlight.
She walked further down the main road of the camp. Her knees had turned to water. Scattered school shoes, a tarnished spoon with a dent in it, old photographs charred black and frilled around the edges. She picked one up, marvelling at the composed faces and high, rigid collars. She carried the photograph with her as she reached the middle of the camp, where most of the Shia Lebanese lived. Had lived. Where her in-laws had lived.
She stopped, looking down. She stepped back, dropped the photograph. It was easy to miss the corpses in the half-light, grey as those desperate rats, they were too mixed up in the garbage and detritus of a retreating army: half-eaten rolls of bread, empty soda bottles, ration tins, ammunition stamped with ‘made in USA’ and torn clothing, fluttering, fluttering over the faces of the dead.
She peered closer. She sat down in the rubble for a moment to be nearer to them. Perhaps she could comfort them, stop their crying. Wasn’t that a baby’s wail she heard behind that building, carried on the wind? She found the old photograph again at her feet, studied the black and white faces with intent. Were they from Jaffa too? They looked like her own mother and father, could even be her grandparents posing for a wedding memento, the only photograph they could afford their whole lives.
She looked up and became distracted by the patterns made by bricks on a wall, some crooked, laid slapdash, some already crumbling, and she wished to set them straight. Who did such a bad job? She was sitting like this, staring, still rearranging the bricks into neater configurations in her head, sobbing softly, when another woman helped her to her feet, clucking, and ushered her away.
There was panic among the few survivors on this, the first night of the massacre. Rumours the Phalange were coming back to finish their work. With the arrival of the foreign journalists Bilqis relaxed somewhat. They spoke to her in English and French, in incomprehensible German. ‘There were also Israelis at the massacre,’ she told them. ‘I heard them speaking in Hebrew while I hid.’
She wailed now, flung her hands about, pointed to the corpses and pronounced the names she knew. The journalists wrote them down in fat notebooks with diligent flourishes of the pen. Named. This one small gesture of respect at least.
She was silent most of the next day and following night, seated at the window in Rouba’s kitchen. Not even her granddaughter Hadiya, with her child’s wit and dolls and laughter, could rouse her from the blackness. Amal was in bed in another room, still shaking as she lay there. The canary filled in the silences with short, exhausted trills whenever somebody moved.
‘Issa?’
‘He’s somewhere fighting, Mother. He told me he’d be back next week.’
She subsided into silence again. Rouba turned on the radio and after much fiddling with the dials tuned in to her favourite station, Radio Monte Carlo.
‘At last count, more than three thousand Palestinian and Muslim Lebanese residents of the Sabra-Shatila refugee camps have been killed or have disappeared. We suspect those not yet accounted for have been taken to unknown destinations in Phalange army trucks.’
Rouba turned off the radio.
‘I’m sorry, Mother.’
Bilqis twitched; she seemed not to have heard.
‘Some noodles? Or maybe you should go to bed? I’ve made up a sofa in the room where Amal is. You haven’t slept at all.’
Bilqis sighed and turned her face to the window. Rouba persisted, against her own better judgement.
‘There have already been demonstrations against this even in Israel. And all over the world.’
A smile – could it be a smile? – played across Bilqis’s lips.
‘You know, Rouba, I’m remembering this thing. It will not leave my head.’
‘Please try to forget, Mother. I’m sorry I turned on the radio. It’s not good for you.’
‘Listen. A British journalist once asked me, Why are you in such a hurry to leave the camps? The children seem to really love it, such a perfect playground for them.’
‘Yes?’ Rouba asked gently.
No answer. Bilqis was back there, beside the journalist, listening to his clipped BBC tones and answering the interpreter in monosyllables. She stood at the door of her hut, sun westering behind the hills, one hand shielding her squinting eyes. The photographer took many shots, told her to pose with her hand on her hip, leaning into the doorframe as if she were tired. Mahmoud and little Issa played in the dust at her feet with intermittent squeals of frustration at the sharp stones, those eddies of dust, at cockroaches that crawled over their legs if they stayed down there too long. Bilqis looked at the squalid dwellings all around her, their roofs of corrugated iron weighted down by bricks, their homemade walls of squashed petrol cans, herbs growing in rusting tins, clouds of flies, stink of animals and shit, the long line of women just like her queuing at the UNRWA truck for a small bag of rice, kerosene, or a few kilos of flour. She felt a shudder of desire for her childhood home: that small bare orchard overlooking the sea. Then she merely looked at the journalist. He understood her contempt for him, and left.