Dunya said she was running in place when he brought her down. “I thought I’d fallen, but it was that man. I didn’t see his face. The flares didn’t seem to give light, as though they were enveloping the darkened faces with light rather than lighting up their features. He fell on top of me. They all fell on top of me. I’d reached the corner of the main street. From our house to the main street was about ten meters. I was in front of Abu Sa’adu’s shop when I fell and the faces fell on top of me. They raped me and I felt nothing. I thought that the hotness that exploded from my right thigh was blood. Everything was hot, everything was black, everything was. . I can’t tell you long it went on. I was like someone in a coma. I saw without seeing, felt without feeling.”
Dunya’s face filled the small screen; she seemed to have black rings around her eyes. She spoke and spoke, in a flat, white voice without any trace of emotion, as though she were telling some other woman’s story. As though it had nothing to do with her.
Later I learned from Professor Muna that all Dunya did was relate what had happened to her and yet her listeners would be taken by surprise each time by some new thing she hadn’t mentioned on previous occasions. The journalists and representatives of international humanitarian organizations would come, and Dunya would sit in the office of the Association for the Disabled in the camp and speak, and Professor Muna would translate what Dunya didn’t know how to say in English.
Dunya became a story telling its own story.
When Professor Muna came to the hospital to visit her, she said she understood now. “Dunya collapsed because she stopped speaking after the Carlton conference. That was the first and last time she spoke about the gang rape. The story went around the camp, her mother got very angry, and everyone. . well, you know the people here better than me, Doctor.”
Professor Muna also said she’d been disappointed. “A German journalist said he wanted to do a piece about the camp and the trauma of the massacre. I told him about Dunya and he asked to meet her. She came, but she didn’t say a word. She told me the pain in her pelvis had come back and was so terrible she couldn’t talk through it. I begged her because I’d told the German journalist about her, and he was very interested. He wanted to hear a story from a victim, but the victim wouldn’t talk. I tried to persuade her, but she shook her head, tears flooding from her eyes, so I left her alone and apologized to the journalist, who was very sad because he wouldn’t be able to use Dunya’s story in his article. Then her mother came and told me that Dunya couldn’t get out of bed and asked me to get her into the American University Hospital. We don’t have a budget, Doctor, for such cases, so I advised her to put her in Galilee Hospital, and you know the rest.”
Dunya lies on her bed sleeping with her eyes open, or so Salim As’ad informed me before he disappeared. He said he went into her room to check because he thought he’d heard a moan, and he saw her swathed in the woolen blanket up to her neck and eyes. . her eyes were open in the darkness, and a white light was coming out of them.
Thinking she was awake, Salim said he’d approached her. “I came closer,” he said, “but she didn’t move. I bent down and whispered her name, but she didn’t answer. I put my ear close to her nose, and her deep, slow breathing brushed my ear. She was asleep with both eyes open. Is that possible, Doctor?”
Salim said he’d been frightened and wanted to ask my opinion, which is, of course, that it’s impossible; no one can sleep with their eyes open. But I don’t know anymore, anything’s possible these days. Isn’t your own death a clinical reality, Father, except that you won’t die? Everything’s become strange. Tell me, is it true the voices of the dead fill the streets at night? I don’t believe such superstitious nonsense, but we weren’t able even to collect the names of the dead properly. The community committee met and decided to make a list of names. We gathered lots of names but still couldn’t arrive at a final record. Differences arose among the various political organizations and the project folded. We don’t have the names of our dead, we only have figures. We put figures next to figures, subtract them, add them, multiply them — that’s our life. Even the Lebanese journalist, Georges Baroudi, who came to the camp and asked for a list of the names of the victims and learned that we didn’t have a complete list, said that would complicate things. He suggested that a memorial be erected to the martyrs. You know how those intellectuals think: They imagine they can solve the problems of their consciences with statues, poems, or novels. I told him that memorials were impossible here because we didn’t know what would happen to us or the camp tomorrow. But he insisted. He came back a few days later with a Lebanese sculptor, in shorts, sporting a straw hat. They roamed around the camp together, then walked to the grave. The women rushed over, yelling and hurling abuse. In those days we were still capable of defending our dead. Only when you intervened did the brawl come to a halt. You dispersed the women, invited Baroudi and the sculptor for coffee, and explained that no one was allowed to walk over graves. They apologized profusely and told you the details of their project, and you asked them to contact me to coordinate it.
More than three weeks later, Baroudi came back and told me that a committee of Lebanese artists and intellectuals had been formed to prepare plans for the Martyrs’ Garden.
“We’re going to call it the Martyrs’ Garden — what do you think?” he asked.
I said the name was fine and asked him for details of the project. He said the committee hadn’t finalized the plans yet and promised to discuss them with me and the community committee before work started. Then he told me he was writing a book about the Shatila massacre. He said there were only two books about the massacre, both by Israelis. One was by a journalist, Amnon Kapeliouk, and the other, the report of Israel’s Kahane Commission. “Don’t you think it’s shameful that we don’t write our own history?” he asked. Baroudi told me he’d translated the Kahane Report into Arabic, but he felt that we should write a book that would gather eyewitness accounts together.
He invited me to lunch at Rayyis’* restaurant in the Jemmeizeh quarter so I said to myself, Why not? We drank arak and ate a good, cheap Lebanese stew. My attention was drawn to the Lebanese man they call Shoukri. He was sitting at a table surrounded by customers, peeling enormous quantities of garlic. Baroudi told me Rayyis’ was the best popular restaurant in Beirut, that he went there regularly to meet a group of young men who’d fought in the ranks of the Lebanese forces, and that he’d heard the story from Boss Josèph, who’d taken part in the massacre himself. What he had in mind was to arrange an encounter between Boss Josèph and me. “A Dialogue between the Executioner and the Victim” would be the first chapter of the book.
He asked me what I thought.
I said I didn’t know because I didn’t know about that kind of book, but it might be a good idea.
We sat and waited, but Boss Josèph never appeared. Baroudi ordered some food and arak, and then he took me on a tour of al-Ashrafiyyeh and told me about the massacre as it had been described by Boss Josèph.
Are you in the mood to hear it? Or are you in some other place and would prefer me to tell you about Salim? I think you liked the story about Salim because he was a pleasant young man, bright, and a real son of a bitch.
Where was I?
Abu Akram came by and invited us to drink tea at the Popular Front office. The tall bald man hesitated, he was waiting for Daniel.
“Where’s Daniel?” asked Abu Akram.
“I don’t know. We lost him in the camp,” said the tall man.