Sabra Zoo (20 page)

I went and told Bob what we were doing. The general was winding up his impromptu press conference, refusing to answer questions about whether people were taken out of the camp in trucks, whether the Phalangists had used Israeli bulldozers, whether the Israelis had sanctioned what was going on.

‘This is nothing to do with the
IDF
– this is an Arab-on-Arab problem,' he shouted, losing his cool and storming off. Bob and I went back to talk to Samir.

‘I'll probably stay here and take some more footage – before someone clears it all up,' Bob said.

We walked back to the car so Bob could pick up the rest of his video stock and leave the tapes he'd filled. We were approached by the
IDF
interpreter we'd spoken to in Samir's
UN
jeep yesterday at the roadblock. Again he was unarmed and looked nervous. Up this close he didn't look much older than Samir.

‘I knew you were not from the
UN
,' he said, smiling momentarily. We said nothing. ‘They knew what was going on,' he said, pointing to the Israeli headquarters behind him by way of clarification. It was ‘they', not ‘we', I noticed.

‘When did you know?' asked Bob.

‘It was clear from day one.'

Bob went silent. His thing was pictures, not people, as he'd proved earlier, and I wished we had a print journalist with us who would know how to deal with this guy. Thankfully Bob was thinking the same thing.

‘You should speak to my colleagues,' he said, pointing to some of the journalists gathered outside the Israeli headquarters. He started to take stuff out of the car. But it was as if the guy hadn't heard Bob.

‘Do you know what happened in Chile, under Pinochet?' the interpreter asked.

‘What?' Bob's annoyance was now showing in his voice.

‘Where did most people disappear in Chile?' he persisted. Something clicked in my mind, something I'd read or seen or heard.

Bob looked at him, narrowing his eyes. ‘Are you telling me they've taken people to the stadium?' Bob asked him. But someone was shouting ‘Uri' from across the road and he looked behind us.

‘I'm sorry, we are not allowed to talk to the press,' he said in a loud voice, completely changing his tone and moving round us.

‘Fucking asshole,' Bob said.

Back at the Etoile by midday I was relieved to find Eli and Liv. They were both sitting on Eli's bed, sharing whatever vodka was left from the night before. My relief turned to anxiety when I remembered Faris. I didn't know whether they'd seen their roommate; part of me was hoping that they had. They looked exhausted and Eli had clearly been crying.

‘Have you seen Faris this morning?' was the first thing Liv asked after I embraced both women. Samir was downstairs and I was going to have to do this alone. I shook my head, telling her I'd just come from the camp. Before I could elaborate Liv launched into a description of their morning: some militia had come into the hospital early on and asked for all the staff to congregate outside for interrogation. They'd made them walk down Sabra main street in single file. Gunmen lined the street. A Palestinian doctor tried to leave with them but had been taken out of the group and they'd heard shots. Some of the buildings had been bulldozed and they passed bodies on the ground. Liv was spitting this out as she paced up and down, like she was trying to get rid of some foul-tasting thing in her mouth. I lit her a cigarette, which she took without acknowledgement.

‘Was Youssef there when you left?' I asked Eli. But she was looking somewhere else.

Liv stopped pacing. ‘I think so, everything happened so quickly,' she said.

‘They lined us up against a wall,' Eli said. She took a breath. ‘They pretended to shoot us – called us Baader-Meinhof, communists.'

‘All good things,' said Liv, putting her hand on Eli's head and blowing smoke out in thin streams from her nostrils. I sat next to Eli and put my arm round her. She'd started to shake, the shock of the mock execution hitting her in the retelling.

‘I've never been so glad to see Zionists,' said Liv, resuming her pacing. ‘The Israelis took us to their headquarters and handed us to the Red Cross, after showing us how they were treating some of the wounded from the camp.' She snorted to indicate her disdain of this public relations effort and squatted in front of me on the bed, putting her hands on my knees.

‘Enough about us. Tell us, what's the situation in the camp?' Her face was full of concern. I wanted to tell them what I'd seen: the bodies in the street, the ones buried under the rubble, the mutilations, the children, the rape, the eviscerations. I didn't know how to tell it or where to begin. Besides, I had Faris to deal with first.

‘It's bad,' was all I could say before taking the vodka bottle from Liv and putting it to my lips. The rawness helped with the smell from the camp that still clung to the back of my throat. ‘There's something else that I need to tell you first though,' I said, putting the bottle down and taking her hands to stop mine from shaking.

In a makeshift press room at the Commodore Asha and John were talking to journalists, telling an expanded version of the story Liv had told me. Samir had just dropped Liv and me off, leaving Eli to sleep in her room. Liv was remarkably calm on hearing about Faris and had been talking through a plan which involved taking someone with clout to the national stadium in the hope that that was where Faris had been taken for questioning. To my shame I'd not considered the possibility that we could do something to find him. She, however, was assuming that he was still alive.

Samir had held on to me as I was getting out of the car. ‘Tell her she's wasting her time,' he said in Arabic. ‘But in a nice way, like you know how,' he'd added.

Now, once the journalists realised that they weren't learning anything new from Asha and John, they started to drift away. I went up to them both as they got up from the table that was acting as a rostrum. Although pleased to see me they looked confused, unsure of what they were supposed to be doing next. John wanted to go to the British embassy, to report what had happened. They were pale and had dark rings under their eyes. Asha was pulling at a stray wisp of black hair. I told them about Faris and Liv's plan to go to the stadium.

Asha shook her head, put her hands to her face. ‘Is there anything else that can happen in this place?' she said through her fingers. She took her hands from her face and looked at John. ‘I need to get back to the hospital,' she said.

‘The hospital will be fine without you for a few hours,' John said. ‘There are plenty of people who've been resting up for the last three days who are already on their way. You need to get some rest. Can you get to the
AUB
?'

Asha nodded but then shook her head. ‘I'd rather come with you to the embassy,' she said.

Liv approached us and she and Asha hugged. I could see Liv holding back her tears. John gave her a pat on the back.

‘I've found a Norwegian journalist who will go to the stadium with me. Maybe we can speak to someone in charge there,' she said.

‘Do you even know Faris's full name – or that Faris is his real name?' John asked.

Liv shook her head. ‘I have this,' she said, taking something out of her back pocket and handing it to John. It was the photo of her and Faris I'd found in her bedside locker, taken in my apartment. John looked at it and handed it back. I could see he was struggling for something good to say.

‘I hope you find him.'

Liv nodded. Her mouth was set rigid, like if she let it slacken the rest of her would follow. She put the photo back in her pocket.

‘I'll come with you,' I said, without thinking. I wanted to believe that there was a chance that Faris was alive, that maybe he'd just been taken away for questioning. I felt a need to do something, anything, to gain control of even a small part of what was going on around me.

‘Thanks, Ivan, but you've seen enough today,' Liv said, smiling and shaking her head in a way that meant she didn't want me to press it further. She went off to find her Norwegian. Bob came into the lobby with some other journalists and he waved at me and headed over.

‘Was Youssef at the hospital when you left?' I asked Asha.

She nodded and Bob appeared at our side, smelling of the camp.

‘You guys have just come from the camp, right?' asked Bob.

‘Like we told the others, go and see for yourself,' John said, his face hard.

‘He's
OK
. I know him,' I said.

‘Did you see what happened?' Bob asked them.

‘We were in the hospital,' Asha said. ‘We only became aware that something was going on when the place started swarming with people thinking it was a safe place to be.'

‘Plus of course the types of injuries we were getting through the door,' John added.

‘So you don't know what actually happened in the camp?' Bob asked.

‘Only what I've heard, and what we saw when we were escorted out,' John said. ‘I know how people can blow things out of proportion here.' He looked at me. ‘No offence intended, pal.'

I shrugged.

‘You couldn't exaggerate this stuff,' Bob said. ‘Why don't you come and see for yourself?' He patted his video pack.

Back in his editing room we sat round the screens. I steeled myself to relive the morning's sights.

We went past the bloated mule, then up close to the pile of bodies with their wrists swollen over their bonds. The smell hit me again as the flies took off. I couldn't get it out of my nostrils.

‘They must have been dead two days given the state of the bodies and the heat,' said John. ‘Which means they were killed on Thursday.' We moved on to the body of Donkey Man and this time I noticed that his right fist was clenched and bent back in an unnatural shape and wondered whether he'd tried to stop his killers.

‘It's Donkey Man,' Asha whispered.

I lit a cigarette to kill the smell. There were more bodies against walls. Bob had managed to pick out where bodies had been incorporated into rubble by bulldozers.

‘My problem is that none of it is fucking broadcastable – I'm going to have trouble finding something acceptable to show to our dinner-time demographic back home,' he said, smiling grimly to himself. We got to new footage that he'd taken after Samir and I had left and there were people now sitting over their dead relatives, weeping and pulling their hair or wandering around in a daze, screaming at the growing comprehension of what had happened. Cut to a six- or seven-year-old girl, her limbs stiffened and raised off the ground in a bizarre way that showed there was no rest even in death. Her chest was bare and a cross had been slashed into it. Cut to a tiny garden where two mature women lay side by side, face down on some rubble from which a baby's head stuck out.

‘Its eyes are still open,' John said in a wavering voice.

Cut to a woman crying to the camera, carrying the body of her dead child, still limp and with a large chunk of its head missing. She's offering the boy up to the camera and Bob flinches in his seat as if he was there again. Now she's talking to the camera. I translated without taking my eyes off the screen.

‘Apparently she begged them to spare her five-year-old son but they said he would grow up to be a terrorist so they shot him in the head.'

The screen went blurry but I realised it wasn't the screen. Cut to a small body with detached limbs, like a dismembered doll, the arms and legs arranged on the torso in the shape of a cross, the stumps cauterised with flies. Then it was dark inside a house and I was worried and relieved at the same time that this was the same house I went into, but it wasn't. It was a man tied to a chair, his face mutilated beyond recognition. I could only tell it was a man because his disfigured genitals were exposed. The camera moved round the room to where a woman was sitting on the floor with a child in her lap. They'd both been shot in the head. We were back in daylight and Bob had focused on a prone body, lying restful in the recovery position, but a close-up revealed a grenade beneath it, ready to go off if someone dared to move it. The tape ended and Bob said he had further material.

‘I can't see any more, please,' said Asha.

John stood up. I got up too.

‘I think we'll leave you to find something usable from that lot,' John said.

Later on that evening I stood under the hot shower in Asha's
AUB
apartment, trying to get rid of that smell which seemed to have lodged in my pores. I sluiced water up my nostrils, in my ears. Samir, Asha, John, Eli and Liv were in the apartment and I could smell onions frying, reminding me that I hadn't eaten all day. Everyone else had showered and Asha had put the washing machine on twice on a hot cycle.

I came out wrapped in a towel to find Eli and John in the living room. Eli was in men's clothes that were too big for her. She patted the sofa beside her. I sank into the cushion next to her and watched John, wearing a traditional jallabiyah he'd found, trying to pick a record from the large collection. I could hear Asha arguing with Samir in the kitchen about how the onions should be chopped. I took Eli's glass from her hand and enjoyed the burning whisky at the back of my throat, the warmth flowing through my veins. I pressed my thigh against Eli's. She pressed back.

‘Chopin or Bach?' John asked me, holding up two records. I told him that it didn't matter, that I didn't care.

‘Sounds like you need Bach,' he said, putting the Chopin back and carefully taking out the vinyl from its cover. I was about to ask where Liv was when she appeared in the doorway. Eli tensed beside me and grabbed my leg. Liv was holding the Tokarev in her hands, down between her thighs. She must have found it in my duffle-bag in the bedroom. Her hair was wet and she was in just a T-shirt. The gun looked huge in her hands. I couldn't see if the safety was on. Her eyes were bright and she was swaying on her feet.