No one wants this hospital anymore, as though we’d all agreed to announce the death of Shatila.
The camp is besieged from the outside and demolished on the inside, and they won’t let us rebuild it. The whole of Lebanon was rebuilt after the war, except here; this testimony to butchery must be removed from our memories, wiped out just as our villages were wiped out and our souls lacerated.
I’ve lost hope. I said, “If they don’t want it, too bad,” and I built an imaginary wall around your room and won’t let anyone come near you. At first Amjad tried to make me believe that the decision to move you couldn’t be revoked, then I forced him to back down. I thought I’d scored a victory, but I discovered he simply didn’t care. No one cares. They said, “He’ll eventually get tired of it, and if he doesn’t get tired of it, the old man will die anyway,” and no one expected my treatment method would be so successful. Amjad used to think your death would be a matter of days, and Zainab said you wouldn’t see the end of your first month, but here we are, past the sixth and into the seventh. We have to hang on to the end of the seventh month. If we get through the seventh, we’ll definitely get to the ninth, and the ninth is where salvation lies. But they don’t know. They’ve shut us in here and left us to rot. If only they knew. I’m certain that no one has the slightest notion of what’s going on in this room, here with the world, the women, the words.
I told you Zainab’s become everything, meaning nothing. When someone becomes everything it means they’ve lost their particularity. Zainab’s like that: I wasn’t aware of her presence beyond the fact that she was present. I didn’t ask her for anything. Then two days ago she came to me and said she’d decided to stop working. It never crossed my mind that Zainab could stop working: She exists because she works.
She came to your room and said she wanted to speak to me.
“What, Zainab?”
“No, not in front of him,” she said.
“Speak up, Zainab. There are no strangers here.”
“Please, Dr. Khalil. I’m afraid to talk in front of him. Please come with me to the office.”
I followed her to Dr. Amjad’s office, which would have become my office if people took things seriously around here. Zainab went out and returned after a few minutes with a pot of coffee. She poured us both a cup and said that the children wanted her to stop working.
“You’re married and have children, Zainab?”
“Of course, Doctor.”
“I’m sorry. I never knew.”
“‘Cripples don’t marry,’” she quoted and smiled.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.”
“But I’m not a cripple, at least I wasn’t a cripple when I got married. This is from Tal al-Za’atar.”
“You’re from Tal al-Za’atar?”
“I was there. I left with the women, my husband disappeared in the Monte Verde. We walked toward the armed men with our hands in the air, and they fired on us. I was with my children. They were between my legs, and I was trying to cover them with my long skirt. Then a man came, and the firing stopped. We kept going until we reached the armed men, and the Red Cross convoy that had been sent to take us to West Beirut were there. That man came. I don’t know why he picked me out of the crowd. ‘Over there!’ he screamed, but I pretended I hadn’t heard and kept going. Then the hot red fluid covered my thigh and bathed the head of my daughter, Samiyyeh, who was still between my legs. I kept going until I made it to the truck. I don’t know why he only fired one shot, just one, or why he didn’t kill me. These are things I don’t understand now, but at the time everything was logical and possible. Our death seemed so logical that we weren’t capable of protesting against it. They took me to Makased Hospital, and you can imagine what that did to my children. We reached the museum crossing when they decided to transfer me to the hospital. They put me in an ambulance, and the children started crying. I’d lost half my blood or more but somehow I managed to jump out of the ambulance to stand with my children. Then the nurse understood and let them come with me. At Makased Hospital, they put me in a room with more than ten beds and the children stayed with me. The eldest, Samiyyeh, was twelve and couldn’t understand anything, and the youngest of them was three. Five boys and three girls, God protect them. I stayed in the hospital instead of going with the others to al-Damour. It’s out of the question! I thought, when I heard they’d decided to house the Tal al-Za’atar people in al-Damour, which had been cleared of its Christian inhabitants. I thought, that’s what the Jews did to us, and we’re going to do the same to the people of al-Damour? It’s not possible; it’s a crime. And I stayed in the hospital. There was a doctor there from the Lutfi family in Tyre — do you know him? Dr. Hasib Lutfi? God bless him, he told me I could work in the hospital and found me a small apartment nearby. We lived there, me and the children, until 1982. After the invasion and the massacres, we came to Shatila, and I started working in this hospital. I’m not a nurse, but I learned on the job at Makased Hospital. I came here, and as you know very well, there was no one, so I did everything. But I’m tired, Dr. Khalil. And what are we doing here anyway? You’re guarding a corpse and I’m guarding a storeroom of medicine. Also, Shadi, God bless him, is going to send me a visa and a ticket for Germany.”
“You’re going to Germany? What will you do there?”
“Nothing,” she answered. “There nothing, here nothing. But I’m tired. And Shadi’s wife — I didn’t tell you, Shadi married an Iraqi girl who lives in Germany, a Kurd and political refugee. She arranged asylum and residence for him — a refugee like us, so, like they say, ‘Refugees marry refugees,’ and she’s expecting, so I’ll go for the child.”
I said I’d feel alone without her.
She said she knew Shams and her husband, Fawwaz, and knew that she was mistreated: “Everyone in Tal al-Za’atar knows how he treated her. He was mad and heartless. It was like a demon possessed him. Could anyone be that crazy about his wife? He was as crazy about his wife as if she were the wife of another man. He told my late husband, Mounir, that he’d fire over her head and around her feet to drive the demons out of her. He was insane, and he drove her insane. He wouldn’t let her leave the house or receive anyone either. She didn’t dare open the door. We’d knock and she’d yell from inside that no one was there. And Fawwaz didn’t sleep at home. He’d sleep with the fighters and would go to her by day, and we’d hear the sound of the bullets and imagine her tears. God knows how she stood it. It was said she’d fled with the fighters. Why did she go back to him? I haven’t seen her since the Tal al-Za’atar days, and I haven’t heard anything; after all that happened there, people have stopped asking about everyone else. Instead of searching for those who have disappeared, we look for photos of them. I swear we are an insane people, Doctor. The only lesson we’ve learned from our families is that we shouldn’t leave home without our photos. Can you believe it! We were in that Red Cross truck, and I was on the point of death I was bleeding so much. People were piled on top of each other like sardines, and you’d see a woman pull a photo out of the front of her dress and compare it with those extracted from the front of some other woman’s dress. It’s almost as if we think that by carrying around the pictures of our dead with us, it will save them from death. The photo of Abu Shadi, God rest his soul, has completely faded. I framed it, but photos fade even behind glass. The man disappeared. We know nothing about what happened to him, and I wasn’t able to look for him at first — I was in the hospital hovering between life and death, and I had my children with me. Without God’s mercy and the generosity of Dr. Lutfi, my children would’ve been lost, as thousands were. A husband may die or disappear and we get upset, of course. But a child — God forbid!