“And your job? Why don’t you go back to your old job?”
“What job, Cousin? Is there anyone left in the camp who reads newspapers?”
“Go to Beirut and get a job.”
He said he couldn’t work in Beirut any longer. The week before, a policeman had stopped him when he was selling papers on the Mazra’a Corniche and asked for his papers. When he saw he was Palestinian, he threatened him and said it was forbidden for Palestinians to work in Lebanon without a permit.
“Now you need a work permit to sell papers, Cousin! So he confiscated the papers and chased me away. He said if I hadn’t been an old man he’d have thrown me in jail.”
“What about the camp? Work in the camp,” I told him.
“You know that nobody here reads newspapers any longer. Anyway, no one has the money to buy them, and people have their television and video now. What am I to do?”
He started talking about his problem with videos, and about how he couldn’t see: Everyone else could see, but he couldn’t. “They sit around their televisions and run the tape, and they see things I don’t. That isn’t Palestine, Cousin. Those pictures don’t look like our villages, but I don’t know what’s got into everyone, they’re glued to their television sets. There’s no electricity, and they still play them, signing up for Hajj Ismail’s generator just for the video. They pay twenty dollars a month and go hungry so they can watch the tapes; they sit in their houses and stare at those films they say are Palestine. We’re a video nation and our country’s become a video country.”
Abu Kamal said that after the incident with the policeman he tried to work in the camp. “I opened a news stand, and my only customer was Dr. Amjad, but he didn’t pay. He’d take the papers, read them, and return them, while I sat all day long with nothing to do. Can’t you find me a job here?”
“Impossible, Abu Kamal. What could you do here?”
“My brother, my friend, I want to eat. I can’t go on like this. Are you willing to see your Uncle Eggplant become a beggar? We’ll have seen it all! To hell with this miserable life!”
I tried to help him up but he refused.
“Get up, Uncle. Come on, let’s sit in the room.”
But he wouldn’t get up.
“Get up. You can’t stay here like this.”
He said he didn’t want to go into your room because he was afraid.
I told him there was no money and things were tough.
He asked for a cigarette and smoked it greedily, as though he hadn’t had one for a long time. I offered him the pack, but he refused it. He accepted one more, smoked it, and went off.
No, before he left, he went into your room to say farewell, and I saw a kind of jealousy in his eyes, as though he envied your long sleep. Then he gave me a few words of support and left the hospital.
I felt so bad for Abu Kamal Sinounou, but what could I do for him? You don’t know him so you won’t understand why my heart is so heavy. He’d transformed himself from a newspaper seller in Acre into the owner of the largest shop in the camp. Then his shop was destroyed and his life with it; his third wife died, and he ended up alone and poor.
Why are all your stories like that?
How could you stand this life?
These days we can stand it because of video; Abu Kamal was right — we’ve become a video nation. Umm Hassan brought me a tape of al-Ghabsiyyeh, and some other woman brought a tape of another village — all people do is swap videotapes, and in these images we find the strength to continue. We sit in front of the small screen and see small spots, distorted pictures and close-ups, and from these we invent the country we desire. We invent our life through pictures.
But how did your generation bear what happened to you? How did you manage to block up the holes in your lives?
I know what your response will be; you’ll say it was temporary. You lived in the temporary; the temporary was your way of coming to an understanding with time.
You’re temporary, and we’re video. What do you think?
ABU KAMAL used to sell newspapers in Acre and made his life up as he went along. He was about fourteen when he started. He’d leave al-Kweikat on his bicycle each day and reach Acre some forty-five minutes later, pick up his bundle of al-Sha’b,* and sell them. In the afternoons, he carried a big sign around the streets shouting, “Make it an evening at Cinema al-Burj!” inviting people to buy tickets for The Thief of Baghdad, and receiving half a lira for his efforts. Adding this to the lira he’d earned from selling papers, he’d return to his village.
Abu Kamal was known as Eggplant in his own village, too. It must be said, my son, that we brought with us both our nicknames and our real names. Eggplant proved he was wilier than all the rest of Kamal Sinounou’s children, however. His three brothers worked with their father growing watermelons, but he found himself a job on his own. He went to Acre, saw a paper seller, and asked if he could work with him. The vendor took him to the Communist Party’s Acre office, where he met a short man with whom he came to an agreement to sell the paper.
Abu Kamal wasn’t a communist; he wanted to leave the village because he didn’t like working in the fields. But it seems that his job selling al-Sha’b had its influence on how he spoke, since for the rest of his life he’d mumble certain phrases he’d picked up from the paper’s headlines about workers’ rights, Arab-Jewish brotherhood, and so on.
When things started to get complicated, he stopped going to Acre and joined the al-Kweikat militia as a bodyguard for Mohammed al-Nabulsi, the only man in the militia who owned a Bren gun. When the village fell and Mohammed al-Nabulsi died, Eggplant found himself part of the wave of people who moved out. They didn’t go to Amqa because of the famous dispute between the two villages that followed the rape of a girl from the Ghadban family by an Amqa boy.
All the people of al-Kweikat went to Abu Sinan, and they all took up residence under the olive trees, where they set up their tents of blanket and canvas. They stayed in the fields of Abu Sinan for about a month. I won’t go into what we know now about how people went back to their villages by night to steal provisions from their houses whose doors hung askew, and about how Qataf, an eighteen-year-old girl, died from an Israeli soldier’s bullet as she was leaving her house carrying the demijohn of oil, her blood mixing with the oil, and about how, and how. .
“There was nothing left for us to do but pillage our own houses,” said Umm Hassan. “Is it possible to steal from yourself? But what else could we do, my son?”
I didn’t ask Umm Hassan why they didn’t try to take their villages back the way you did in Sha’ab instead of creeping into their houses and stealing from themselves, because I knew her answer would be, “Go on! All that about Sha’ab, and it still fell. Enough nonsense!”
Anyway, Yunes, where were we?
Things have gotten strangely mixed up in my head. Even the names are mixed up. A name will fly away from its owner and settle on someone else. Even names have lost their meaning.
I wanted to say that Abu Kamal tried not to live in the temporary. After Qataf’s death and the madness that seized the people of al-Kweikat, everyone left Abu Sinan for Jath, and from Jath in Palestine they went to Rimeish in Lebanon, and from Rimeish to Rashaf, and from Rashaf to Haddatha.
Abu Kamal lived in Haddatha for about two years, working on the construction of the Haddatha-Tibnin road, but he left after a quarrel with his sister-in-law. He then traveled to Beirut, where he worked in construction. He stayed in Beirut for about a month and then went back to Haddatha because of exhaustion and the swelling that had developed in his hip from carrying containers of concrete behind the master plasterer. He returned to discover that the Palestinians had been rounded up and put in the Burj al-Barajneh camp in Beirut. He went to Burj al-Barajneh, but he couldn’t find a camp; all he found was a bit of empty land and people sleeping out in the open. A foreign official came, with a Lebanese at his side, and they started distributing tents. They distributed two or three and then stopped for one reason or another.