Читать книгу The Dream - Mohammad Malas - Страница 10

Surveying and Scouting I

Friday, March 28, 1980

According to Ibn Sireen, it was the prophet Adam who experienced the first vision on earth. God caused Adam to fall into a deep sleep, then from him created Eve in a similar shape, revealing this to Adam in a dream. When Adam awoke Eve was sitting near his head. Then God said, “Adam, who is this sitting near your head?” Adam said, “She is the vision you revealed to me in my dream, God.”

A pharaoh dreamed that a fire came out of the Levant and raged until it reached Egypt. It left nothing untouched, burning all of Egypt’s houses, cities, and fortresses. The pharaoh awoke, horrified.

I feel like my work has begun.

The day’s warmth mingled with the warmth of Jihad’s accent—Jihad was the guide who would accompany me. He had recently come from Gaza to work for the Palestinian Film Association.

On the office staircases are women cleaners dressed in black, tranquility, fresh air, and open windows. A man who had gone in to his office early was drinking coffee and smoking his seventh or eighth Rothman cigarette. This is the office that provides escorts to foreign visitors who want to tour the Palestinian camps.

A stream of foreign women comes out. Languages and questions overlap with the ringing of the phone and a general curiosity about, or attempt to flee from, the different delegations.

Then a voice snaps at me, “Do you have a car?”

We get in the escort’s car and start out for the camp.

Shatila

The escort knocks on a zinc door and calls out:³ “Abu Tareq! Abu Tareq!” The door is low, the wall is low, the alley narrow. The windows are at eye-level. Behind the door is a tall green tree, the rattling of a stove, the clatter of pans and dishes, and a voice coming from below bellowing, “Abu Tareq isn’t here. He’s still at the Committee. Come in.”

The room was green and dimly lit. In it we saw a narrow bed had been laid out, on which lay the young man who had invited us in. He explained straightaway that he had undergone an operation on his nose yesterday, and then resumed lying down.

On the wall was a photograph of a martyr, one of the Resistance leaders, framed in such a way that suggests a personal relationship to the man. I got the sense that the escort had knocked on this first door in order to get rid of us. The house seemed to be one of the first in Shatila; its location and the age of the tree suggested this.

I understood from the conversation that Abu Tareq is one of the camp’s dignitaries and a People’s Committee official.⁴ The escort fidgeted and complained, and then decided his job was done. He withdrew, leaving us free to continue the tour. At two in the afternoon Abu Tareq was ready for us. He started speaking animatedly about the People’s Committee.

“Water and electricity, paving roads, eliminating pot-holes, emptying sewers, cementing alleys, settling disputes . . . .”

We walk toward the People’s Committee headquarters. The camp’s buildings sit snugly against each other, staircases growing around their waists. It is as if this place is the site of first refuge, the way to the heart of the camp.

I have the sense that I am inside a single yard. Television antennae intersect with each other at eye-level like a swarm of insects.

The People’s Committee headquarters is striking.

The public water reservoir towers above the street. The Committee’s room was built beneath it; a staircase had been installed on each side, one by the street, the other by the reservoir.

The interior of the Committee’s room feels like the captain’s room of a sinking ship. The sea breeze and mountain air waft in through the window, but the weight of the reservoir above makes you feel as if you’re sinking into an underground refuge.

In the Committee’s room is a bracelet of long benches, a table, a safe for money and documents, a telephone, a bulletin board.

A noise pierces the air, intertwined with scattered dialogue, a mixture of recollections, memories, and daily problems. Envoys of the Lebanese electricity company were demanding the Committee intervene to collect the camp’s electricity bills, long overdue since the beginning of the civil war. There was no way we could start our survey in this chaos.

Saturday, March 29

Abu Shaker—the eyes

“What do I want to see in the film? I want to see our lives. This is where we’ve ended up, thirty years later.”

We’re sitting at the entrance of his store. A man whose features had shrunk, except for his eyes, which were prominent, almost bulging. His hair is white. His shirt is white. His suit is gray. He talks as if speaking to himself. He says something, then throws the kids whatever they’ve requested—a piece of candy, chewing gum, a composition book, juice.

“This is how bad it’s got, and still we thank God. The sun sets and here I am. The sun rises and here I am. It’s a prison, this house.”

He points to the house opposite the store. The distance between them is probably no more than three meters. Watching his hand point to the house, I thought of opening the film with his walk from the house to the store—and ending with his return from the store to the house.

“What is there to be happy about? For me to be happy, I have to feel that I am safe, that Israel is not constantly bombing me.

“I used to have hope, a lot of it, for myself and otherwise. They were lost, my hopes were held back at borders other than those I had in mind.”

Abu Fuad

He was squatting at the entrance of the store, picking seeds from crushed tomatoes before putting them in a bucket of water. He refused to receive us in the store. He got up and led us to his house behind the store’s facade. In a room painted blue—reminiscent of coastal cities—a painting of the olive harvest done on cardboard by a popular artist hung haphazardly on the wall.

Abu Fuad is a man who gives the impression of being coiled within himself—a slim, lively mass of nerves and motion. While he talks he invites you to sit down, to have a cigarette, a lighter, some coffee. He gets up, brings you the ashtray, pulls a chair over to you, calls out to his wife, sits down, gets up again.

“I’m a merchant. I crossed Palestine extensively.” I was struck by that expression—‘extensively.’

“I was a merchant. Now I’m sixty, meaning I was born in 1918. I was in charge of orange groves in Tantura. Tantura overlooks the sea and Jews used to go there to swim. There is no country like ours in the east. The mukhtar, the Jews’ mayor, came and said, ‘Surrender. There are fifteen thousand armed men surrounding the town.’ And us, what did we have? We had ten cartridges and seventy-five young men. They took the seventy-five young men and shot them. Turns out the mukhtar got three stars for that . . . . They bring the films made here to Israel.

“Someone told me that he saw our neighbor Abu Turki smoking arghile in Germany. What drove Abu Turki to Germany . . . ?”

Abu Turki

“The arghile is man’s best friend because it listens but never talks. You’re here for a reason. If it’s to visit, you are most welcome.

“Talking is better than filming. We can talk . . . I don’t have a problem talking. I even talked to Ted Kennedy when he came to visit the camp. I grabbed his necktie—he was in front of the store—and told him about our problem.”

Abu Turki sits down at the shop entrance, his arghile next to him: “King Saud came here. He stood in the forest. A lot of people have come here, and nothing has changed. Thirty-two years in the camp. When my children change their accents, we say, ‘What’s this, you seem different.’ We don’t say that someone is from such and such camp. No. We say, ‘from this or that village.’

“I had two photographs, one of which I was very proud of. It dated back to 1943. I remember clearly how I went to have my picture taken. There was an Armenian photographer in some street. I was wearing a pullover.” This is a man we have to return to. He has a strong memory and he’s an excellent talker. His face is full of radiance. I will come back to him a second and a third time.

“I have dreams. I sleep a lot during the day, and I dream. And I’m happy when I sleep.

“I once saw Shimon in my dream.⁵ We were sitting in a house. The kids were baking. My hands were sooty because I was cleaning the stove. I found Shimon dressed in white, without that tie of his. He approached me, extended his hand and shook mine. My hands were black. I swear to God, he said, ‘How are you? What are you doing here?’ I said, ‘I live here, as if you don’t know!’ After a while, I found him saying, ‘Gunpowder and canons, gunpowder and canons.’ Then I woke up. I have a recurring dream. I arrive at our village. I get close to the house, and as soon as I approach it, I wake up. Not once have I entered the house.”

Sunday, March 30

Abu Shaker—the eyes

It’s our second meeting, at the house.

I went back to him again, feeling that this man lived in a perpetual state wherein the ground beneath him no longer exists. It was an odd impression, as if he were standing and there was a space separating him from the ground. About to fly away, he would lift his eyes first. Then, calmly and deliberately, he’d rise a few centimeters off the ground. He had agreed to talk to me about the trip to Palestine in 1972, but he would only talk, not film. We crossed the short distance between his store and the house, and in the house I placed a cassette recorder in front of him and let him talk.

The house, like the store, is clean, neat, with everything in white. Iron bars cut across the window, the four walls are adorned with many photographs, including some of Abu Ammar, al-Aqsa Mosque, and a photograph of a young man and woman in their wedding clothes. The recorder captures both his voice and the lively music coming through the window from the numerous speakers scattered throughout the camp. Ah yes, now I recall, I believe it is Land Day. “I made it to Jenin. I took a car from the bridge and said to the driver, ‘I want to go to Acre Province. How much will you charge me?’ We agreed on the fare. This wasn’t right when I arrived in Palestine; it was one of the things that happened while I was there. We were on our way and I asked the driver, ‘Which way would you like to take?’ He said, ‘From here to Nazareth to Haifa, then we reach Acre.’ Our village is between Safad and Acre, around twenty-eight kilometers from Acre. There’s a shorter way than the one the driver suggested, from Jenin to the village. I said to him, ‘There is another way that’s shorter for you. We’ve agreed on the fees.’ He asked, ‘What way is that?’ I told him we’d drive through Afula, then east of this and west of that. He said, ‘I don’t know this route and have never gone that way. Are you sure? Where are you from? Are you a refugee?’ I told him that, yes, I’m a refugee in Lebanon. He asked what year I left and I told him 1948. We drove while I showed him the way, right and left, until we arrived. I asked him, ‘So which is the shorter way—this one or that?’ The young think I’ve forgotten them, that I’m behind the times, old, no longer good for anything.

“We stay up from morning until two or three after midnight. ‘Go now, go to sleep,’ I tell them. They say, ‘No, Uncle, we don’t want to sleep. You’re here with us today; tomorrow you won’t be. We need to get our fill of you.’” I wonder if we could hear the dreams of the thirty-two nights he spent there. “Thirty-two nights and I swear I didn’t sleep, night or day. I swear to God I didn’t sleep.” He cried. “I just sat there, always distracted, distracted.” He cried bitterly. “If I had a dream, I don’t remember it now. After I came back I had many dreams, but these days I’m not alert. I don’t remember.

“I have zaatar, olives, and yogurt for breakfast.

“I teach my son lessons from the past.”

A tiring, anxious meeting. He is constantly distraught, overcome with grief over the land, his eyes bulging and full of tears. I am not sure why, but for me this man is the eyes of the film. I’m considering using the three-meter distance he crosses between the house and the store. I wonder if it’s possible to film the moment he returns from the store at night and lies down on his bed as one shot. What can one do with these two or three meters of space?

Monday, March 31

Burj al-Barajneh

The atmosphere has been tense since morning; perhaps a few clashes have occurred. We’re trying to obtain a written permit to scout in Burj al-Barajneh camp. Jihad and I are waiting downstairs at the entrance to the building; the official hasn’t arrived yet. The employees of the PLO institutions file in gradually, one after the other. It’s a warm day. The sun is shining. There still isn’t much activity but there is an underlying sense of tension in the air that I don’t understand. I hadn’t listened to the radio last night or this morning, hadn’t read the papers. Tired. A little worried. I feel the scouting is being taken over by formalities. I’m not mixing with the people. I’m watching, not scouting. Sometimes I’m engrossed in watching. I don’t have many questions, sometimes none at all, and other times I’m reluctant to ask the questions I have. Time is passing quickly; the results are limited. I don’t know how to find a way to access the present moment of these people. People are afraid of the present. Maybe it’s a feeling of insecurity or maybe it’s the yearning for the past and the shared memory of tragedy, typical of Arabs. I feel that the Palestinian issue is intertwined and entangled with this yearning. Palestinians are cautious, and the idea of the film being about a family is dwindling more and more. I’m becoming more attracted to the idea of people’s dreams and how they narrate them. I’m not at all drawn to how they feel about their dreams, and many of the people I talk to don’t conceal their resentment and surprise when I ask about dreams in this turbulent and tense atmosphere.

We obtained the permit at around ten in the morning, and took a local bus to the Burj. I have never visited this camp. Whenever I’ve passed it, which has happened many times at sporadic intervals in the past few years, I have felt a strong sense of affection for its resonant name and its location in the middle of Beirut. But I always worried about it; to me it looked like a place held tightly by a fist. Today I am happy to have come, because I was here to visit a friend.

In the Armed Struggle Headquarters a young man was assigned to accompany us. He held his weapon and started walking, saying, “Follow me.” We followed him on foot, entering the camp’s alleys. He didn’t ask any questions—I think he thought we wanted to see the camp. I tried to explain the film to him on the way, in case he could introduce us to people. He nodded that he understood. He was a smart and nice young man, and it was clear from his first steps in the camp that the people there knew him and felt warmly toward him. However, honestly, I was quite uneasy scouting while accompanied by a Kalashnikov.

Abu Hatem

Abu Hatem was standing in the alley supervising a construction worker. He had apparently decided to tear out part of the house’s courtyard to convert it into a store. The store was now in the process of being severed from the house.

We greeted him, and he responded with a natural, if confused, warmth then led us to the only remaining room in the house. As soon as our armed escort explained the reason for our visit, Abu Hatem started speaking freely and told us his life story. At first I didn’t manage to place the recorder in front of him, and after he started talking I didn’t want to interrupt his flow. How I regretted that!

“Twenty-five years in the Ghandour factory. They gave me 10,000 Lira in compensation, which I’m using to build a new store.” He is forty-seven now, from Acre Province. He’d moved from Palestine to Anjar, then to Burj-al-Shamali, then to Burj al-Barajneh. “When I came from Palestine, I visited my folks there every single holiday. I used to go alone, secretly. I walked from here, and as soon as the sun set I’d stay hidden in the trees. Then when it got dark, I’d keep walking. One time as I reached our home a man from the village saw me. Later, while I was in the house, the Jews came. They knocked on the door. My father was eighty at that time. They knocked. My father hid me, but they entered and took me. Where did they take me? To Acre Province.” His scorched voice has a special depth. “They interrogated me. The superintendent—known as Abu Khader, an Arab-Jew—interrogated me. He had a Bedouin accent. In those days the Jews used to dump a busload of Arabs at the borders every Saturday. Abu Khader said the government refused to let me stay: ‘We have to deport you, but this time we’ll take you to Abu Tbeekh’s.’ I said, ‘Who is Abu Abu Tbeekh?’ He turned out to be King Abdullah, and I really was deported to Jordan. After he deported me, I went back, fled to my folks for one night and snuck back to Lebanon.” He is married without kids. He reminds me very much of the pessoptimist.

“I once dreamed that I was dead on a bed in a green room. Somebody knocked on the door. I said, ‘Who is it?’ A voice replied, ‘Open the door.’ ‘Who is it?’ ‘It’s a guest.’ I said, ‘The guest of God the Merciful is most welcome.’ I got up, opened the door. It turned out to be my father with two mashayikh. My father was dressed in white. His hatta, ‘aqal, and qumbaz were all white, and his jacket was white too. The mashayikh were wearing green turbans. They came and stood next to me by the bed. I said to my father, ‘What’s the matter? No one told me you died.’ He said, ‘I am dead but alive. Come with me.’ I said to him, ‘Whatever you want. I’m at your command. If you want me to go, I’ll go. If you want me to stay, I’ll stay.’ He said, ‘No, stay. Not yet. Your time will come later. May God make you happy.’ A dream is a merciful thing.

I never dreamed of my mother, but one of my relatives from our village, who is living here now, came to me once and said he saw my mother in a dream. He said, ‘I saw your mother dressed in white. I thought, that must be a good sign. May God grant her a place in paradise.’

“One time I dreamed I was going back to the village. I arrived at the village to find that the house had been blown up—that the house in the village was blown up. And as a matter of fact, in 1936 the British,⁶ not the Jews, blew up this house. At that time, its owner built a house next to it,⁷ not in its place. I thought, ‘How long has it been like this?’ We went to Lebanon, and when I returned to Palestine the man still hadn’t rebuilt his house. I continued on, there was a mosque and a holy man’s shrine further up. I read the Fatiha and said to him, ‘Master, you are one of God’s holy men. Deliver us from this plight.’ I turned around and saw myself surrounded by emptiness. I walked back toward the house but woke up before I arrived.

“I’ve never dreamed about the factory owner, but I did dream about his son once.

“Before he died, the factory owner’s son used to speak to me very rudely. In the dream I said to him, ‘Listen, Nizar. I worked with your brother for sixteen years and never heard him say such things. You’ve been here for three years, and you’ve been out of line three times. Look, two mountains may never meet, but human beings do.’ This is what I told him in the dream, after he died.”

What am I doing? Am I buying people’s dreams? What will I do with them? Serve up a handful of their souls and leave? I forgot to write down that he told me he didn’t participate in the Ghandour factory workers’ strike because he is Palestinian.⁸

Abu Khalid—the vendor

He asks us to produce an informative cinema. “The Revolution subsided, and so did we. For us to sustain our enthusiasm, we must have films that excite us.

“The film should be the pain of the Palestinian people. I want to feel pain and fury at the same time. I, as a storekeeper, can be of great use to you. For example, I can show you what people buy here in the camp.”

The bastard wants an informative cinema and suggests a magnificent documentary idea. Let me elaborate: as we buy people’s dreams, let’s see what people buy for themselves . . .

“We have a miserable situation here. Prices have soared. Some people don’t have money to buy food. There are no jobs. Some people turn to the Revolutionary Council for food. Two hundred grams of meat costs eight liras. Nobody lends money any more; there are no loans. There are only ten pages in my account book.

“Sometimes I have dreams. I feel I’m in Deir al-Qasi cultivating the land. Sometimes I’m sitting under the olive tree, sometimes I see myself sitting in a cage. My father lives with me. He is seventy. I have nine kids. Now my sister has brought her kids here too. She fled Rashidiyeh to escape the bombing. By the way, Rashidiyeh is empty. There is nobody there but fighters.”

Abu Ibrahim

“We’re ruined.”

We’re sitting in his store, silent. Abu Ibrahim is in no state for talking. He sits at the front of the store, not looking at us. He stares ahead, head lifted as he watches the street. He says a few words followed by a long silence; then he says something else, as if continuing his own private conversation. He looks my way cautiously. He watches my hand. He looks at the notebook and the pen. Then he looks at the road again. When our armed escort—it seems Abu Ibrahim likes him a lot and knows him very well—tries to cheer him up and urges him to talk, he shakes his head, looks at me, contemplates the notebook for a while, then goes back to looking at the street, tossing a word or two to the air.

“We’re responsible for what happened.”

It seems he has a son who was martyred recently.

“I just want one thing: to die in my country.”

In the front section of the store hang two photographs in golden frames. One is a photograph of King Faisal, and the other is a photograph of Abu Ibrahim in pilgrimage clothes in Mecca. He fidgets in place, groaning as if suffering from an illness. “We fellaheen like eating spicy food. Now I have testicular inflammation. Before that, I had hemorrhoids and a dermoid cyst.” Fighter planes passed overhead. The noise caused anxiety and tension. This was followed by the sound of rapid anti-aircraft artillery. After quiet resumed, I noticed for the first time the absence of the radios that usually fill the camp with a medley of songs. Now it is silent.

“Take him,” he says, waving toward our armed escort, “to Hussein. Let him fill this notebook of his.” Of course he means my notebook. “We don’t talk about anything except the land.”

When some fighters passed by the store he commented, “They no longer want to be educated or to work. They want to come and go. Whoever is martyred is just dead. No matter how bored you get, Palestinians won’t say anything to you except ‘I want my country.’ Others will tell you the same thing I told you: ‘Open Palestine to Israel? That’s absurd!’” Suddenly he’s shouting, then his eyes fill with tears and he cries. He calms down, and continues speaking about his physical pain in a broken voice.

“I buried my son and father here. I swear to God I won’t leave them here no matter what happens. But we turn toward the Qibla.” For him, the Qibla is Palestine. In Lebanon both Palestine and the Qibla are in the same direction.

I’m thinking about how to shoot this—what if I came to the store, placed the camera here in front of him, and let it record him without anyone asking questions or waiting for answers? I looked carefully at the place, considered the lighting options and chose a spot for the camera, but—damn—these spontaneous moments usually fall apart when shooting.

“I swear I won’t wake up. I lost a son. I swear to God I’ll follow him. No one was dearer to me than my son, except God. He visits me every day in my dreams, he and my father. I always find them there, in Tarshiha. He came to me two or three days ago. He hit me and said, ‘Do you want to die?’ I replied, ‘No.’ He said, ‘You want to die because you want to cry for me.’”

It is hard to determine whether the son said this to him in a dream before he was martyred, hence as a portent of death, or if he meant his son came to him after he was martyred. Dreams mix with reality like a combination of illusion, intuition, and hallucination.

“I’m going to die. If you want to come back here to film, you won’t find me. Palestine is the mother of the poor. Some 140,000 Lebanese used to come, and we would issue identification cards for them, when we were in Palestine. We don’t want identification cards; we just want them to bear with us a little bit. There were thirty-six mortar rockets at my son’s funeral. They took my grandson to Mecca. He’s there now. He is two years and one month old, at Princess Qaoud’s.⁹ Before he died, I knew. I used to say that Mahmud would die when he was twenty-five years and ten days old. A day before he died, I told them that Mahmud would die.” Another attempt to convince himself. “That day I was sitting here, and whenever someone passed by and looked at me, I suspected something had happened to Mahmud. I no longer want our land. I will take my father and son and erect a tombstone and die with them. I will take them, erect a tombstone, lie down, and sleep. We used to have 3,663 olive trees. Now I am sick and dying because I no longer drink olive oil.”

Tuesday, April 1

In the Armed Struggle Headquarters, we asked for the young man who had accompanied us the day before. We were surprised to learn that he had applied for a leave and had traveled to see his family in Yarmouk camp in Damascus.

We entered the Burj’s alleys accompanied by another young man. The day was clear and warm. The Burj’s inhabitants spilled into the alleys. Bits of conversation were being exchanged by those who passed by. Women were coming and going through the alleys and courtyards, carrying vegetables, laundry, bread. Some middle-aged men were getting shaves down narrow side alleys or in small yards. Sounds of life rose and fell. Radios and cassette recorders competed with each other, diverging at times and converging at others. The sound of Warda’s song “Our Loved Ones” floated above the sounds of kerosene stoves and the murmurs that could be heard coming from low windows along the Burj’s alleys. We were walking around. There was a group of men sitting at a corner right behind the alley discussing something with a woman who seemed to have been walking and then stopped. She was carrying things on her head—maybe she had stopped to take part in their conversation. We noticed them as we passed by and stepped back to listen. When we stopped they quit talking, and the woman looked at us then walked away. The men resumed talking—I don’t think they returned to their previous conversation, but they pretended to do so. Now they were discussing Islam, which we’d noticed was a common activity in the camp. One of the men was saying that we have deviated from the path and the law that the Prophet Muhammad provided for us and this was the cause of all that had happened; this is what had brought us rulers such as these: “Is there anything more humiliating than this? And we still don’t know what happened to us.”

Two of the men were sitting on the same box, an empty wooden tea crate. One was tilted forward a bit, leaning on his knees. He held prayer beads in his hand while the other man leaned on the alley wall. Each was speaking without facing the other. A woman on the other side of the alley had come out of her store to find out why we’d stopped. She was looking toward us anxiously; perhaps one of the seated men was her husband. We squatted and started listening without interrupting the conversation. Then an older man addressed a younger one sitting among them, “I want to ask you something. Nowadays, do you still lay a meter of tile as scrupulously as you used to?” The young man swore he did, but the old man didn’t believe him and swore to the contrary. Then the old man turned to everyone and said, “There are no principles any more.”

The camp is overflowing with life. The proximity of the houses and the way they embrace each other creates the impression that each ends and begins with the other. How can I reflect this feeling in the film? When we passed the bakery, a young girl was rolling out rounds of bread dough. The fire’s red glow flickered across the dough and her face, radiating warmth to each passerby.

When we passed in front of an open door, a girl had just finished washing the small courtyard inside. She stood in front of a mirror with the bottoms of her jeans rolled up and began combing her hair. The radio played Umm Kulthum’s song, “I Swear to You.” We sat on the roof of one of the Resistance centers waiting, but it was unclear for what. Maybe to rest a while and drink tea. I think these visits are important. Although the Resistance itself is not part of the survey, the visits help create familiarity and put them at ease with us. I wonder, though, if our work can be limited only to store owners. Most of the people we’ve seen so far are store owners. During the day, the young men leave the camp, and going to people’s houses when no men are home is not easy. That is why we must regroup and change the times of our visits. A beautiful young woman went into a room and then left. She was on the lower level. I looked into the room and discovered that it was once a bathroom or kitchen that had become this woman’s house. Her small children were fidgeting, following her, going in and out, lifting the curtain that separates the room from the rest of the house. Whenever the woman went out to do something, she got into a fight with one of the neighbors. Fighting, shouting, screaming, cursing, spilt water, conversations behind the walls. The fighting ended just as we finished drinking our tea, then started up again. When we visited her, we found her narrow vault clean and tidied with extraordinary care. The air was fresh. Her three small children were lined up perfectly next to each other. Her beautiful young face exuded innocence and tranquility.

Umm Hatem

“I have a lot of dreams. Sometimes I see myself playing by the fig trees, other times I see my aunt feeding me butter.

“Once I saw her making bread by the oven. I told this dream to Fathi to get his interpretation.”

Umm Hatem was talking to us while washing her husband’s clothes in a laundry tub. Her husband was sitting in front of us, ridiculing his wife’s story with a sly grin. A slim young man, Umm Hatem’s husband is a soldier in the Liberation Army living here for his job. His wife had come to visit him from a suburb of Damascus, and although I don’t know why, she didn’t remember anything from Palestine except the tomato seeds.

“I stole one of the loaves my aunt was baking and dipped it in a tub of olive oil—it was amazing.” Olive oil comes up in all of the stories we hear. “Once when I was asleep I saw a plane coming. It was just like the day our house there was hit. In the dream the plane crashed into the window, hitting the wardrobe and breaking all the glass. I started screaming, ‘Auntie! Auntie! The house collapsed on us.’ She said to me, ‘What can I do about that? God will recompense.’ And that day in Damascus, I dreamed that a plane came and shelled us, and the bombing threw me from the bed. I really was thrown from the bed that day, along with the radio that was next to me. Boom! I fell off the bed, and the radio broke. The radio broke for real, not in the dream. God, I’m really afraid of planes. I always dream about them. We were attacked once, in Palestine. I was carrying a plate of food that I was about to serve.”

She overflows with vitality, narrating without us asking questions. Fathi, however, was waiting impatiently for her to stop. “Once in a dream my mother came and brought me a handkerchief. ‘Why, mother, did you bring me a handkerchief? I haven’t seen you in twenty years.’ She said to me, ‘I don’t know. I wanted to give you this handkerchief.’ I took it from her. In the morning, I asked my aunt about it. She said, ‘You’ll have a boy because a gift from the dead is a blessing.’ Sure enough I later became pregnant with a boy, but then he died.

“My father is kind. Sometimes I dream about him. Once, he came and said to me, ‘Go apply for a passport for me. I don’t like living with your aunt.’” He lives in Iraq. “I said to him, ‘Come live with me.’ He said, ‘I’d like to, but your siblings won’t let me.’ He is suffering with my aunt in Baghdad. I said to him, ‘Baba, I can’t apply for a passport for you. You have to do that at the embassy there and then come.’

“Once in a dream I saw a bulldozer creeping up to me, one of the big ones, a scary thing. The street was narrow. If I tried to go here, it would crush me. If I tried to go there, it would crush me. The street was high and narrow, like the streets of Nabatiyeh and so on. I was clinging to the edge of the street, hanging there. I said to myself, ‘If my hand slips I’ll fall, and it’s a long way down. If I climb up, the bulldozer will crush me.’ I awoke from this dream, shaking for almost an hour, and I was very thirsty.”

Umm Yousef

“I stay home all day—cooking, washing clothes, feeding the kids.”

She is a thin woman who seems to be all skin and bones. She was moving around animatedly while she spoke, putting out food for her young son who had just arrived. When a bell sound rang, she’d said, “Ahmad will come now. That’s the sound signaling the lunch break at SAMED.” She was breastfeeding a child in front of us and calming another against her chest. She’d say something to us, then ask if we wanted ashtrays for our cigarettes, coffee too. She said, “Have lunch with us. Please. We haven’t been hospitable enough to you,” then, “eat, please, or time will run out. Don’t be shy. There are no strangers here.

“I’ve been here since my daughter was born. Where is Suad?” She looked around searchingly. “Suad, dear, come over here a while. God, I haven’t seen a movie in a very long time!” She broke into a smile that took her back to a hidden youth, and a strange beauty emerged from the corners of her eyes. “But I saw Palestine. Praise be to God! I saw it twice. How beautiful it is—like a dream, a movie! I went first to the West Bank, then to the lands seized in 1948. I went to Nahariya, Tiberias, Ramla, Acre, and Haifa.¹⁰ But the Jews, those bastards, didn’t allow me to enjoy myself. Some people spoilt it. They sent for me and started interrogating me about my husband. He’s not involved in anything. He works at the syndicate.”¹¹ I don’t know why she told us this about her husband; it was as if she were talking to an interrogator. Something in her eyes suggested that she was leading us on. “My son was with me. Every few days, they took him for interrogation. Maybe they wanted to make us talk because they were asking about this person or that. I’d tell them, ‘I don’t know anyone.’”

When SAMED’s bell rang announcing the end of lunch break, her young son hurried back to work, and we accompanied him.

In the afternoon, I visited a Palestinian writer. I told him about the film, hoping he could help with introductions to Palestinian families or people I could live with and really get to know. I’d tired of talking to storekeepers or people we’d met by chance. But he showed no noticeable enthusiasm for the project. He said, “I thought the film would be an attempt to study the effect of the Revolution on the sociological aspects of the Palestinian camps, with respect to changing values and ideologies. Haven’t you read Frantz Fanon’s book about society and the sociology of revolution?¹² You have to read it. Anyway, I’ll try to help you. There is a nice woman who works at the Women’s Union. I’ll call her, and she’ll lead you to families and homes in the camps.”

One of the young men sitting with us turned to him and said, “Abu-l-Haytham, how about taking him to Saint Simon and letting him see what’s there.” He said it as if he wanted to show me hell. This depressed me. People always say, “Come look at this,” “you have to film these things,” “come and see what’s happening over there.” No wonder cinema has been caught up in presenting and framing tragedy and trauma when people come to you with such things, their souls full of anguish and grief.

I didn’t show any enthusiasm at his offer. At first, I interpreted this as the kind of thing usually suggested by eager young people whose understanding of cinema is linked to their hostility to propaganda films and those films put out by certain organizations or national film industries. The young man himself caught my attention more than the name ‘Saint Simon.’ He had been silent throughout the whole meeting; then he spoke haltingly, slightly confused. He was shy and mysterious. What also caught my attention were his clothes: the loose beige pants that had become the uniform of the intellectual newly arrived in the city and the brown shoes with raised heels and a broad toe that curled upward. The writer turned to him and said, “Good idea. Let them tell him about Maslakh and Karantina.” Then he turned back to me and said, “Brother Ghazi is one of the youths of Jordan and he lives here in Saint Simon. He is a progressive young man. Arrange everything with him. Besides, he’s interested in literature and fiction. You can talk and sleep at his place. It’s no problem.” I was tempted by the idea of spending the night with the people and waking up early to see the camp. I thought I was going to a real Palestinian camp.

So this is Saint Simon? No, it’s Saint Michel. Saint Simon is there, behind the wall. We crossed through a hole in the middle of the wall. Ghazi said, “I live here in this chalet.” It was not a camp. It was a beach on the seashore where displaced Lebanese and Palestinians had taken refuge.

The weather was hot, suffocating and humid. The sky was blue, as was the sea. There was an air of vague, anxious tranquility, heavy and sluggish, so disorienting that you’re not sure what it is you’re feeling as you cross the muddy white sand. You struggle with a number of apprehensions, seeing how several subtle changes have transformed a customary scene of summer vacationers into a portrait of another reality. The chalets were packed with people. The few spaces between the chalets were crammed with children. Men and women walked by in their everyday clothes. Air vents had been blocked to protect from the cold and winter rain. Families were stuffed into the casino halls and restaurants. Some huts had sprung up, selling basic goods to people.

This hot, humid air had driven people from their rooms. Everyone was out in the open spaces. There was a dense motion, giving you the sense that people were coming and going, driven by a strange force inside them. The further you advanced into the passageways, the less you felt you were at the sea and more you felt you’d wandered into a maze of optical illusions. The further you went, the more it felt like you were entering into a hell made up of worlds that could no longer be concealed. You wonder whether it’s the sea that enables you to see a strange, inner nakedness or whether these people no longer care to cloak their souls. Sounds reach your ears—fragments of stories, questions, looks, desires, missing people, husbands, women yearning for strangers’ faces. They never tire of asking about someone they have lost—husbands or daughters—still carrying the hope of a sudden return. You feel that each gaze at a newcomer is an attempt to make out the features of that missing person. “Maybe it’s him.” “It is him, but time changed something in him.” “Maybe he grew a beard.” “Maybe he shaved.” “Maybe he lost that much weight.” “Maybe he aged that much.”

The evening was approaching, and with it, the dark night. They went out to observe the last light of a departing day that would be added to the long list of days that have gone by since the missing disappeared. You walk. You turn. These gaps, this motion, this overlapping coming and going crush you. Some people are returning after a day’s work. Some have woken up from a nap, disturbed by nightmares. Different faces. Sometimes you feel you’re in a world enslaved. Why don’t we shoot the film here? Let it be a Saint Simon film in every sense of the word!

I have the feeling that the key to the puzzle is here in this spot, like a knot: as soon as you get hold of one thread, you feel you must keep going until you reach the other end. Other times, while walking, you get the sense that clandestine things are going on everywhere. Some faces were undoubtedly planted here to spy for somebody. You swallow, and the taste of your saliva pierces your throat with the hidden schemes, plans, and plots being made . . .

We stood on the sand at the border between Saint Simon and Saint Michel. My escort called out to a man in the biggest chalet. Then he turned to me and said, “First you have to meet Abu Khalid. He’s an old man, and he talks. He’s also a sheikh, the head of a tribe. He manages people’s business here.”

Abu Khalid Saint Simon

The big hall in the chalet was clean. The bed still had the blue and white sheets that belonged to the former owners. Rugs and pillows were spread on the tile floor, brought at moments of escape or expulsion. In the corner of the hall was a large copper brazier and a coffee pot set on charred pieces of wood on the tiles. The windows were open onto the sea, bringing in a humid breeze that blew forcefully and made you yearn to shed your skin. A colorless light lingered on things, canceling out the remains of a fading intimacy. You could hear the sound of the sea, and from time to time the screeching sound overhead of a commercial jet about to land. Abu Khalid entered, repeating to somebody behind him in a strict, arrogant way, to bring the coffee. Then he came over and welcomed us. His voice was gravelly and moist, but with a Bedouin accent. His sunburned face sagged from the humidity. He wore a brown qumbaz and dark jacket. He sat cross-legged on the rug and said to us, “There are lots of people here in Saint Simon and Saint Michel. It’s a problem. Some people you know and others . . . only God knows! There are lots of strangers, from Maslakh and Karantina, some from al-Zaatar, Nab‘a, Burj Hammud, and the South. People flooded here and mixed together. We, Bedouins of Raml came from Maslakh.” He seemed to resent this integration.

“The Bedouins of Raml are from Raml in Haifa.¹³ I can take you to visit them and observe. As for others, I can’t go with you and I don’t know what they’re doing here. Only God knows. The Bedouins from Raml lost their land in 1936. The land was first taken by the British army.” The sound of a civilian aircraft roared overhead, making some of his words unintelligible. “I swear to God Almighty, I used to work naked like the day I was born because of my love for the land, and the land was desirable.” Once again, a plane roared above us. “Then we hired a lawyer, by the name of Ahmad al-Shuqeiri. I worked on the land like the day I was born. We cultivated wheat, barely, potatoes, cowpeas, onions, and other things—Arab cultivation. Mr. Ahmad al-Shuqeri is a patriotic guy, a Muslim. He continued to defend our land until a ruling was issued in our favor by the Land Court in Jerusalem. He came to us and said, ‘Good news, Bedouins. We got a ruling for the land.’

“We said to him, ‘Your news is a good omen, God willing.’ We went to him and brought him food—a lamb, some butter, and some milk. But the events of 1948 happened, and we went to Lebanon.” Another commercial jet roared loudly above. “Tribes are not a product of today; they’ve been around a long time, maybe since the time of Adam. We, the Bedouins of Raml, are from Swayt, but there are many Palestinian tribes, such as Sobieh, Hamdun, Hayb, and Fayez.”¹⁴

A man suddenly entered the room—he was tall, slender, nervous, and carried a black Samsonite briefcase. He seemed to have a specific and urgent mission. Somehow he gave the impression that he was delivering salaries. He sat on the bed, opened the briefcase, took out what looked like a receipt book, then stopped suddenly and said to me, “Welcome, friend. How are you? Tell us how you’re doing. I hope you are happy.” But Abu Khalid got up and said to us, “Let’s go visit the people so you can take a look around.” We rose and left the room for the sea. At that moment, the sun was a yellow waxen disk approaching the sea’s surface in the far horizon as clouds started to darken the sky.

After some moments, Abu Khalid joined us. We walked together. We crossed through the hole in the wall that separates Saint Simon from Saint Michel. In the yard, a family had taken their food out into the open and started eating. It seemed to be the family of a laborer who had just returned from work. Abu Khalid stopped at the first house and said to me, “This is my daughter’s house. She lives in the first house of Saint Michel, and I live in the last house of Saint Simon. That’s why I made this hole in the wall. She lives with her five kids. We say that her husband is missing, but he died in Maslakh.” Then he called out to her. The kids rushed in through small darkened doorways. He asked them about their mother. They said she went to buy something, so we left intending to come back.

Abu Adnan—the keys

He’s an old man—seventy, pale, and slender. It’s impossible to tell whether he’s dressed in pajamas or street clothes. He seems to be a collection of separate pieces, soul out of body. He babbles, walks, fidgets; he emerges from a dark doorframe and strolls into another. At all times he carries a round keychain with a bunch of small keys in his hands. He talks to us while walking. Sometimes he sits, so we have to sit. He stands up and leads us to another place. This is how we discovered his interest in certain places, such as what was previously the beach bathroom. He has devised a door and fixed it, then placed a small lock on it that reminded me of the kind used for luggage. He opens the door and lets us in. Once inside, we discover that this is no longer a bathroom but now a coffee room. Inside, the coal is still lit and the coffee pitcher sitting in the ashes is still hot. He talks a bit, then gets up, and we follow him. Maybe the place we’re going to is underneath the cement passageway of the beach. We sit on empty broken wooden boxes that used to contain whisky and beer. He talks to us. The only thing he’s confused about is the two exoduses: the first from Acre and the second from Maslakh.

What I recall now is the overall impression, the unlimited cursing of current and former Arab leaders: “Here is the sea, so let them toss us in it.” This sentence resonates in my ears. “They put me somewhere. I looked around and I saw something strange. I thought to myself, ‘Maybe it’s a morgue.’ I said, ‘That’s it.’ Three people came, looked at me, and said, ‘How old are you?’ I said, ‘Seventy.’ One of them said, ‘Stretch out your hand.’ I did. They had hatchets. I came from Palestine to Maslakh. When people started building in Tel al-Zaatar, we built in al-Tel al-Zaatar. In Haifa, a lawyer came and said to us, ‘Go to Acre.’ We left for Acre. We found that the people in Acre were leaving. We left Acre. They bring back married women after they take them, but girls never come back. They use the same hatchets on Palestinians that were used by the Haganah.¹⁵ I can’t protect anybody, and nobody can protect me. Can you say, ‘That’s my brother?’ Can you say, ‘That’s my father?’ Everyone is on their own. That’s how we left. I left on my own. I didn’t know where my wife was. Later, she followed me. My son is in Germany.”

The vendor with the paralyzed hand

The evening came. Saint Simon himself vomited.

People dispersed into dark pockets of air. Beirut in the distance was bustling with light, while here the black sea emitted its mysterious monotony. When the vendor emerged from his glass stall—maybe it used to be the stall where ice-cream was sold—the paraffin color of the Lux receded into the background,¹⁶ and the vendor with the paralyzed hand looked like an old butterfly emerging, trembling, from a halo of light. His movements were carefree, his features pure. He wore gray pajamas that were as clean as crystal. He said, “I was the first person to land in this place. The beach owner told me to live here, and I did. I was fleeing from the hell of Shayah. Then others came, then more. When torpedo boats came here and struck, all the people fled. I didn’t. Where would I go? I can’t walk, so I stayed. Maybe I’ll die and maybe not. The owner of the beach comes here frequently, but he never gives me anything. Whenever he comes, he drops by and starts counting dishes, spoons, forks, and knives. I used to say to him, ‘Count on God, man! Nobody takes anything with them when they die.’ My daughters come from Shayah to visit every Sunday, on the weekend, that is. They bathe me, clean everything, cook, and then return.”

An old woman, over a hundred years old

“I’m over a hundred years old. I came from Haifa to Maslakh. I know them by their voices even if they’re masked. They take girls and kill young men. They followed us here to bomb us. Everybody is against us. Even God is against us. Our young men are gone. Our dignity is gone. What can I say? Let sleeping dogs lie. There is no Islam or anything. Only humiliation. Nobody throughout history has been humiliated as much as we’ve been. My son’s son, my brother’s son, and my daughter’s two sons are all dead. Ahmad died when he was delivering ammunition to al-Zaatar.¹⁷ Marwan died in Kahale. Omar died in Antelias, the sea. Muhammad died in Damour. When the morning comes, I go buy vegetables. I put them here, and the old man sells them. We earn enough to buy bread.”

The mother of the man with lung disease

An old woman stretched out her fingers and wiped the surface of the ground. Then she kissed her fingertips, raised her hand to the sky and said, “Thank God! God above saved them.” She meant her son and husband. “Maybe because I have no one else but them. That day I ran, I knocked on every single door, even the door of Gemayel’s son.¹⁸ Whenever I told anyone about them, they’d say, ‘Oh! They were butchered.’

“We’ve been in Burj Hammud since the day we left Palestine. Four years. Before we never mixed with refugees, we only got to know such people here.”

The violation of honor. Honor—honor is the obsession. The kidnapping of their girls torments them tremendously. Honor replaces the obsession with olive oil in the camps. Many of the women try to give the impression that they fear and are apprehensive of the moral environment shaped here. Behind their words are innuendos of alcohol and debauchery, sometimes drugs. Here, dreams of usurped land disappear from the conversations of the camp’s inhabitants and are turned into feelings of defeat, humiliation, and contempt, sometimes with a tinge of immorality.

The woman resumed, “It seems we’ll be staying here for a long time. Maybe we will.” As the night grew darker, she became more worried about her son with lung disease, who had been summoned by the Armed Struggle and taken at sunset. For her, there was no difference between him being summoned and him being taken. What mattered to her was that armed men and the authorities came and took him. “We’ve been here for four years and they’ve never summoned him. What do they want from him? I’m scared.” Worried, she twisted in her seat. Her mind strayed; her words were scattered. Everyone here feels surrounded by spies. The chalets don’t provide them with a feeling of security. A belief that people are eavesdropping, prying, prevails. The adjacent sea becomes a sky and horizon of the unknown and its impending invasion. Everything is possible. Assassination is likely. It’s the spirit of apprehension that pervades the world of smugglers, especially now that the Amal movement—which they don’t trust at all—is expanding around them. Before we left this woman, her son with lung disease returned, safe and sound.

Umm Bassam

At night we visited Umm Bassam, the daughter of Abu Khalid, the man who ripped open the wall separating the two saints. He had set her up in the last chalet of Saint Michel, next to himself in the first chalet of Saint Simon.

When we entered, Umm Bassam had set many dishes for dinner on the floor. Her sons sat around them and she started serving beans and rice.

As soon as she finished filling the plates, a man showed up as if by appointment—he said, “I heard you have beans and rice, so I came for dinner.” He sat by one of the dishes. Everybody was engrossed in the food. There was one full plate that remained untouched. I wondered if Umm Bassam had served it for her husband, missing for years, in the hope that he might suddenly return to find his dinner hot.

“I thought he went to Burj Hammud. The next day, a Tuesday, the Phalangists came to the mill. In the afternoon. . . They came to the mill. Around half past ten at night, I looked up and suddenly found Eissa, my husband, with us. ‘What?’ I said to him, ‘You came back?’ He said, ‘There was fighting. I couldn’t go.’ I asked him to come closer. He did. I gave him a cigarette. I don’t remember whether he finished it or not. The Phalangists summoned him. They took my husband and two other men; I haven’t heard anything of him since. They also took two women and one girl at the time. The women weren’t gone long. One stayed forty-five minutes, the other an hour, the girl an hour-and-a-half.

“The girl returned crying. We gave her a piece of cloth. Instead of putting it underneath her, she put it on her head, over it. She sat there with her face covered for around three hours, crying. When she complained to one of the guys, he said to her, ‘Do you know the man who did this to you?’ She replied, ‘I know him.’ He loaded the gun and said to her, ‘Come with me.’ She went with him, but she never came back.

“I saw him twice in my dreams.

“Once there, at the door to the house. I said, ‘You deserve it, I sent you to Burj Hammud. What brought you back to the Phalangists?’

“In the second dream, he’d been released through mediation. He was totally transformed. He stood in front of our house. I said to him, ‘First, thank God you were released. Second, who was there with you? Tell us so we can get him released.’ He said, ‘I don’t know any of them except Ahmad, son of Yousef the Khalili.’”¹⁹

While crossing through the ripped open wall separating the two saints, I watched a girl dance for a group of her female friends to the sound of Arabic music coming from the television.

Ghazi, who was hosting us, commented, “These people are from Beirut’s poverty belt in the suburbs. They live in constant misery. Their Bedouin origins just barely keep them from falling apart. There is a rift between them and the leadership. The leadership didn’t succeed in achieving the fighters’ ambitions. That’s why, as you see, they’ve lost their sense of security and suffer from rising prices. They wonder why they fought.”

I spent the night at Ghazi’s chalet. I lay down on a military bed under gray blankets that had an odor. Ghazi turned out the light, and I plunged into confusion and darkness. I awoke very early. Looking out the window, I was stunned by the sight of children in blue school uniforms. Watching the children under the cloudy morning sky, as they crossed small puddles left by last night’s rain, was like remembering a good dream. I wondered if I should focus on Umm Bassam’s family, structure the film as a cinematic diary of Saint Michel and Saint Simon, telling the story of getting up early, what they do, what they dream, what they eat, the rain, the sun, the missing father as described by his kids, the lost salary or allowance. I was determined to look around and do more research.

When I asked about the beautiful nursery school in the camp, they answered that it’s the same kindergarten they had in Maslakh. When they moved here, it came with them.

Wednesday, April 2

Qasmiyeh

Umm Qasim said, “I remember Khalsa like a dream.

“I’m thirty-seven years old. We’re like despair; we’ve passed through many stages and have achieved nothing.” As soon as we entered Umm Qasim’s house another woman rushed in behind us, frightened, thinking that the only reason for our strange arrival must have been an accident, or news—someone’s death or something else. Then, after making everyone swear oaths as to our real intention, she started talking. “My name is Umm Nemer. We want your film to show and talk about how oppressed we are and how nobody thinks well of us. We don’t like foreigners to see us because they always criticize. God help us!