Why, come to think of it, was I ever afraid?

How did fear come to possess me and make me its prisoner? I was afraid of everything, always looking over my shoulder, although no one was behind me. I’ve lived these long months in nothingness. For six months I’ve been with you, paralyzed by fear. Your new infancy has just liberated me from it. Fathers aren’t allowed to show fear in front of their sons.

My fear is gone.

Do you think I could get you out of here? Why don’t we go back to the house? No, we won’t go back now; we’ll be patient. We’ll be patient for two more months, until the birth.

I’m talking to you and I don’t believe my eyes.

I was leaning over you when, out of nowhere, Abu Kamal appeared at my side. How did he get in?

“What are you doing here, Abu Kamal? What brought you here?” I asked him to sit down, but he remained standing next to you as though he couldn’t hear me.

“What were you saying?” he asked me.

I told him I was treating you.

“Treating him with words?”

“I’m treating him. What business is it of yours? Please, sit down.”

But Samir Rashid Sinounou, Abu Kamal, wouldn’t oblige. He went over to you, bent over the bed and then drew back. I heard what sounded like a sob and I thought he was weeping, so I put my hand on his shoulder, but then I saw that he was laughing.

“What’s this? Incredible! This is Yunes Abu Salem? How the mighty have fallen!”

And he went on laughing.

I tried to grab him by the shoulders and push him out of the room, and I saw his tears. He was laughing and weeping. His tears were streaming around his gaping lips, and his choppy laugh was a sort of cough.

The bald man of about sixty, known in the camp as Eggplant because of his black skin and oblong face, seemed to have lost his balance and dropped his head as though he were about to fall to the ground. I calmed him and made him drink some water.

“How the mighty have fallen,” he said. “Is this how a man ends up? This is Abu Salem — God, he’s become younger than a suckling child. What kind of illness turns men into babies?”

I took his hand and led him out into the corridor.

“What has brought you here, Abu Kamal?”

Eggplant hasn’t visited you before, and I don’t believe you were friends; he inhabits a different world and cares only about marriage. He married three times and had ten children, and now he’s alone since his third wife died and his two divorced wives refused to come back to him. His children have all emigrated and his life’s over, as Umm Hassan said. Umm Hassan felt sorry for him and would visit him and send him food; he was from her village. Abu Kamal is from the Sinounou family, which left al-Kweikat when its people were expelled in ’48.

“What brought you here?” I asked.

“Poverty,” he said.

When I took him out of your room into the corridor, he stood leaning against the wall, but when he uttered the word poverty, he collapsed onto the floor and started his complaint. He asked me to find him a job in the hospital. He said Umm Hassan was a relative of his, he knew the esteem in which I’d held her, and he’d come to ask for work.

“I can do any kind of work. Things are unbearable.”

“But Abu Kamal, you know the situation better than I do. Things aren’t too good here.”

“I don’t know anything,” he said. “I don’t want to die of hunger.”

“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.