The truck passed through and the people weren’t able to stop it. The driver didn’t take his hand off the horn as he tried to get through and the man standing in the bed of the truck begged the people to get out of the way. Despite being so close to the bodies, no one dared lift the white sheet from their heads.
Kamileh suddenly stopped following the truck, turned around to me and asked me to go home with her.
‘Just walk with me and don’t ask anything.’
I went with her. I wanted to go to my house just for one minute to check on my family, but she wouldn’t let me go. I said to myself that Kamileh had gone crazy. She walked ahead of me at a fast pace. ‘Muntaha! Follow me!’ she was saying.
She must have said it twenty times as I walked behind her.
We reached her house, but she couldn’t find her key. In all the commotion, she had lost it. We got the neighbour’s son and lifted him up to the window. He got in. He was small and easy to lift. He was able to push his head through first, then his body. Before he was able to get to the door and open it for us from inside — that is, go through the living room and get to the front door — in those few seconds Kamileh pounded on the door at least a hundred times. I swear to God, a hundred times or more. She pounded so hard her knuckles started to bleed.
‘Where are we going, Kamileh?’
‘Follow me, Muntaha!’
That was all she knew how to say.
She headed towards the bedroom and pulled out one of the cupboard drawers. The edge of the drawer landed on her foot so she screamed. She put the drawer on the floor and sat down beside it. It was full of men’s socks. It was her husband’s sock drawer. I didn’t know that a man could own so many pairs of socks. I was comparing it with my father’s and brother’s, with their three or four pairs of socks, no more. We used to wash their socks and darn them when they got torn with the help of a light bulb. We would stuff the light bulb inside the sock which, with the right kind of thread, made it easier to darn.
Kamileh sat on the floor and started searching the drawer. She was tossing the socks right and left, as if playing some sort of colour game.
‘Navy, navy, navy…’ she said.
She’d grab one pair of socks, and unsure of its colour, hold it up to the light coming from the window. Then she’d ask some of the people around (some neighbours had followed us in).
‘Is this navy or black?’
How could we answer? We all thought she’d gone crazy. More neighbours came into the house. I grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her to make her speak. She did.
‘He’s gone, Muntaha. He’s gone!’
‘Where did he go, Kamileh?’ I asked, trying to lighten the atmosphere. She stopped talking. ‘OK, how do you know he’s gone?’ I asked.
‘I saw his feet in the truck.’
I shook her and then I hit her. I slapped her on the face to snap her out of it.
‘OK, you saw his feet. What does that mean?’
‘I saw his socks. Navy with white stripes. I know his socks, every one. Who washes them? I do. Who pairs them together? I do. Who mixes brown with beige? I do. And now, where are the navy ones? Bring me the navy socks and I’ll shut up. Today he put on the navy socks and went to Burj al-Hawa, Muntahaaaaaa!’
Her mother arrived and shouted at her to stand up. She shouted at her like a mother does, as if Kamileh had reverted to being a child again. She picked up the socks from the floor and put the drawer back in the closet. She just couldn’t bear to see her daughter become a spectacle in front of everyone. She asked the neighbours to leave. Then we persuaded Kamileh not to give up, maybe she was mistaken.
‘No one knows anything. They’re saying the bodies in the truck are strangers.’
‘Strangers?’ she mocked us. ‘We don’t kill strangers. We only kill our cousins.’
‘There are many rumours. Don’t believe them, Kamileh. At first they said our neighbour Abu Mansur was killed, but half an hour later he came back home safe and sound. Don’t believe what you hear…’
‘I don’t believe what I hear. Nobody told me Yusef is dead. I know it…’
We went back out to look for him again, hoping he was only wounded. Kamileh and her mother and I. Three women. The sun was going down. Who would take us to Tripoli?
‘No one but Hamid al-Semaani can help you,’ we were told.
We went to Hamid al-Semaani. We begged him to take us in his car. He had a blue Chevrolet of which he was very proud, and always very protective. We begged him. Kamileh’s appearance must have got to him. Her eyes were out of focus and one could read death on her face. He and his wife whispered to each other before he agreed to take us. His children were scared, little children who kept poking their heads around the door from the room inside. True, he was a member of our family, but he acted like he was a stranger. His wife was a stranger, from Al-Mazraa.
I remember him making the sign of the cross before we took off. On our way, we saw the army entering the town. Kamileh was silent. She had a lost look in her eyes.
We went down into the city. We checked all the hospitals. We met others searching, just like us. They sent us from one hospital to another until we found him. We found him. Dead. He didn’t have his identity card on him, but they told us some other people who were also searching for missing family members had recognised him. They had written his name on a piece of paper and placed it in his jacket pocket where he liked to put a handkerchief that matched his tie, or a sprig of Arabian jasmine, when he went out to those parties where the wine made everyone’s heads spin.
Yusef al-Kfoury was a handsome man. He had blue eyes. Kamileh’s two sisters had fallen in love with him, but he only had eyes for Kamileh. Kamileh was the youngest of her sisters, but the most sought after by the young men. She hadn’t wanted him. She told me that a hundred times. Her sisters convinced her to marry him in order to get rid of her, because if she didn’t get married, they’d never find husbands. And now there he was, laid out in a room in the basement of the hospital. He was covered with a white sheet except for his head and shoulders. He looked like someone lying on his back, asleep.
We stood there before him and the first move Kamileh made was to lift the sheet from his feet. Then she looked at me and said, ‘Do you believe me now, Miss Muntaha?’
I didn’t understand what she meant until I saw her go approach him and start removing his socks. When I saw her holding the socks and waving them in the air like some kind of war booty, I burst out laughing.
‘You believe me now?’
I believed her.
She repeated the question. She wanted me to admit it.
‘I believe you, Kamileh. I swear to God.’
The best I could do was keep her quiet, hold her, and prevent her from talking as much as possible.
Getting him out of the hospital was not an easy task. Kamileh insisted we take him with us. They didn’t have an ambulance to transport him.
‘I want to know who else was killed with him.’
‘We don’t know yet.’
‘Tell me!’
‘There were fifty killed.’
I exaggerated how many out of a sudden feeling that a large number might make her feel better.
‘I want to take him with me, right now!’
We screamed at them. We three women exploded. Hamid al-Semaani was trying to negotiate with the nurses. We didn’t get anywhere. A doctor who I thought might be the owner of the hospital came through the door and told us, with a dry look on his face and in the matter-of-fact tone of someone who’d had a long experience of dealing with dead people, ‘You want him? Take him.’
As well as a nonchalance towards death, or at least to seeming accustomed to it, his voice also carried some contempt for us.