I TOLD THE armed men who broke into the hospital that I was Turkish. I spoke English to them and told them I was a Turkish doctor and couldn’t permit them to violate the sanctity of the hospital. And they believed me! You know what they did to the Palestinian nurses, but me they believed, or forgot about. So I ran away from the hospital. I know I should have stayed, but I left crazed into that night illuminated with fire. Dear God, all I remember of that night are the shadows. I ran, and the houses would emerge from the darkness into the light and then fall back again into darkness. I ran to Umm Hassan’s house, trembling with fear. I’m telling you now, and I’m ashamed of myself. A man can become, in an instant, what he truly is and then forget. I’ve forgotten those tears that turned me into drops of water at Umm Hassan’s. Umm Hassan cried, too, but she never reminded me of my weeping and my fear, not even on the day when we finally succeeded in building a wall around the mass grave. You remember how the women congregated and wailed, and how Umm Hassan upbraided them, saying: “No tears! Let’s thank God we were able to bring them together in death as fate had brought them together in life!”

She said it was forbidden to weep, and everyone fell silent.

Then Umm Ahmad al-Sa’di let out a long youyou and cried, “We won, everybody. We won, and we have a grave.” Umm Ahmad al-Sa’di, who was trilling and leaping about, had lost her seven children, her husband, and her mother in the massacre; all she had left was her daughter, Dunya. She trilled and leapt, and the tears started. Everybody left the grave and gathered around the woman.

Umm Ahmad al-Sa’di held more sorrow than the grave. She said that her belly was a grave. She said she could smell death in her guts, could smell blood.

The people gathered around Umm Ahmad, whose daughter was standing there, leaning on her crutches. I saw Dunya again today. She was just a pair of eyes suspended in an oval, wan face, eyes that looked as though they’d fallen from some distant place and got stuck in that sand-colored face. A yellowish ochre shade of sand. Leaning on her crutches, she stood wide-eyed, looking around, hoping someone might speak to her. I went over and asked how things were. She said she was looking for work, and I suggested the hospital, but she said she’d spent two years in hospitals and couldn’t stand them. She said she wanted to go to Tunis and asked if I could do anything.

At that point I didn’t yet know her story. For me she wasn’t much more than a lump of bloody flesh thrown down in the emergency room. I tried to treat her, before proposing that she be moved to the American University Hospital because we didn’t have the means to treat her. She was a wreck. Fractures in the chest and pelvis. Blood and holes everywhere. They moved her to the American University Hospital, where she stayed for about two years, and it never occurred to me to visit her; like all the others, I was flabbergasted by her mother’s loss. Umm Ahmad was the story, and the strange thing is that the woman never mentioned her daughter, as though Dunya had died along with the others.

Dunya was standing next to the wall. I asked how things were, and she asked about the possibility of going to Tunis to work in one of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s offices.

When I left, she joined me.

She said, “I’ll walk with you to the hospital.”

“I’ll walk with you to your house,” I responded.

She smiled and said she was strong now. I asked about her injuries, and she said she didn’t remember anything, or rather, she remembered running through the street, and when she woke up, she was in the hospital.

She told me how the men from the Lebanese Red Cross had discovered she wasn’t dead. They were at the entrance to the mass grave, sprinkling quicklime on the bodies, when a fat man discovered her, picked her up, and rushed with her to the hospital. He stood in front of me sobbing like a child.

“Doctor, doctor, not dead. Still alive, doctor.”

They threw you down in the emergency room, and that fat young Lebanese man — his white gown almost busting at the seams — begged me to go with him, saying we had to dig around at the grave site: “We may have buried people who’re still alive. Please, Doctor, come with me.” I went with him, and there was the smell and the flies. All I remember are the flies. I didn’t see the bodies. They were sprinkling quicklime over the piled-up, puffed-up corpses, and the flies were buzzing and making insane sounds. The man in white led me by the hand and I doubled over frightened of the flies. They were like a cloud or a woolen cover of black and yellow buzzing. I bent over and let him guide me, jumping over the corpses. I jumped, too. I let go of his hand and fell down and rolled over in that white stuff and got up again clinging to the ground and to the lime and ran toward the hospital. I ran turning and looking back afraid that he might have been following me. I ran with the quicklime dripping from me. I wiped my eyes with my hands so I could see. The flies were creeping into my hair and taking up residence in the depths of me. I wiped my hair and my face and I kept running. When Zainab saw me enter the hospital, she fled. In those days, Abu Salem, we used to fear the dead. We didn’t fear those who killed them, but we feared the people who’d been killed. We feared the quicklime. We were afraid they’d rise up and come toward us, covered with quicklime, shaded beneath their cloud of flies.

That’s how the camp lived, and the people died. We covered them with quicklime to kill the germs and wiped away their features before throwing them into the hole, which later became a soccer field.

I didn’t tell these stories to Catherine and her group, and I didn’t tell them about Dunya. I walked with them through the streets of the camp and took them to the mass grave, which is outside the camp borders now, and there they saw three children playing soccer. Catherine went up to the fence and laid her head on it. I thought she was going to cry, but she didn’t.

“Is that really the grave?” she asked me.

I nodded, but her dancing eyes and short black hair seemed not to believe me. The tall man, whose name I’ve forgotten, asked me about the numbers.

“Fifteen hundred,” I said.

I told them about the wall and said we’d built one around the grave, but that it had been destroyed during the War of the Camps and replaced with this fence.

The tall man said he wanted to talk to people.

“Of course, of course,” I said.

We went back to the main street and took the first turn on the right. We found children running through the alleys and women sitting in front of their houses washing vegetables and talking. We stopped in front of one of the houses.

“Come in, come in,” said the woman.

“Thank you,” I said. “I have a delegation of French actors with me, and they’d like to talk with you a little.”

“Welcome, Dr. Khalil. It’s been ages! How are you? I hope your mind’s at peace.”

Oh no, I thought, what I was afraid of is happening. Now she’ll ask me about Shams, and I’ll have to lie. But she didn’t, thank God; I ignored her words and explained that the French visitors wanted her to tell them about the massacre.

When the woman heard the word massacre, her face fell.

“No, Son. We’re not a cinema. No.”

The woman went into her house and closed the door in our faces.

I was embarrassed because I’d told the French group that the people here loved guests and spoke naturally, and that we only had to knock on the door and go in.

After the first door was closed in our faces, all the others were, too, and no one wanted to speak to us.

The fourth and last woman whose door we knocked on was very kind, but she, too, said she had nothing to tell us.

“My story? No, Dr. Khalil. I don’t want to talk about my children. Come and talk to me about something else. Not my children.” Then she came up close to me and whispered, “Don’t tell them what I’m going to tell you now, it’s a secret. Can you keep a secret? Every time I talk about them, or say something to them, they come to me at night. I hear their voices speaking like the wind. I can’t make out what they’re saying, but I know them from their voices. I know they don’t want me to talk about them. Maybe whenever I talk about them they remember the massacre. The dead remember, and their memories hurt like knives.”