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.”
“You’re right, Sister. Do whatever you like,” I told her and made a sign to the visitors to leave.
“No, please. Have some tea!”
We drank tea in a living room whose walls were covered from top to bottom with photographs banded with black ribbons. Catherine got up and bent over the sofa to examine one of the photos close up. It showed a girl of about ten standing with her short skirt riding up a little on her left thigh. She was wearing sandals and playing with her braid. Catherine bent even closer until her face was almost touching the picture, but the woman pulled her back and said, “Sit down.” Catherine almost fell over, but she sat down silently. When we left, however, the tall man asked me what the woman had said to Catherine. I told him she’d asked her to sit down and keep away from the picture.
“Why?” he asked me.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“We’re bothering them, I can understand,” he said.
“We shouldn’t have come,” said Catherine.
Then Daniel disappeared. We left the house, walked on a little, and he was no longer with us.
“Where’s Daniel?” I asked.
The tall man said Daniel was like that; he had to explore places by himself.
“Do you want to wait for him?” I asked.
“No need,” said the tall man. “He’ll figure out how to get back to the hospital on his own.”
“Is that all?” asked Catherine.
“There’s the mosque that was turned into a cemetery,” I said, and explained that during the long siege we’d turned the mosque into a cemetery because the original cemetery had been occupied and destroyed.
“I don’t want to go. Nous sommes des voyeurs,” Catherine said to the tall man, who tried to translate what she had said, to the effect that it was the tragedy of intellectuals and artists that they had to go and look and react, and then they’d forget. When he read Jean Genet’s text on the massacre, he said, he felt as though he’d been struck by lightning; he said he hadn’t read the words, he’d seen them — the words emerged from the pages and moved around his room. That was why he’d decided to come here: “I had to see the people so the words would go back into the book and become just words again.”
I didn’t get into a discussion with him because I couldn’t understand what lay behind all that finickiness of his. I understood the meaning of voyeurs and said one didn’t have to be an intellectual to be a voyeur; we’re all voyeurs. Voyeurism is one of the human race’s greatest pleasures; uncovering what others want to hide justifies our own mistakes and makes life more bearable.
Catherine said the people were right. “Why should they talk to us? Why should they give us information? Who are we to them? It’s not right.”
I didn’t tell them what the fourth woman had said to me; I felt I had no right to reveal her secret. I also felt a certain pride, believe me, for when we suppress pain it shows we know its meaning. Nothing equals pain as much as the suppression of it.
On our way back to the hospital, we met Abu Akram, and he invited us to the Popular Front office, where I was introduced to Salim As’ad.
You agree that holding your tongue is a noble stand to take, don’t you? They were right not to talk. How could they, after all? We don’t tell these tales to each other, so why should we tell them to foreigners? What’s the point? And those voices — is it true that the voices of the dead flow through the alleys of the camp?
And Dunya? Why do I keep seeing Dunya, with her wide eyes, in front of the tall French man, speaking to him?
I don’t know Dunya. Behind the cemetery fence, I encountered her eyes, suspended in her face. I’d promised to try to work something out for her in Tunis, and then forgot the matter. Later I discovered that Dunya was the matter, all because of Dr. Muna Abd al-Karim, professor of psychiatry at the Lebanese University. Professor Muna works with the Association for the Disabled in the camp, and Dunya was a regular visitor. We thought Dunya had found a job for herself, but she hadn’t been working, she’d been talking. Foreign journalists would come and Professor Muna would take them to his office, where Dunya would tell her story with Professor Muna translating. Dunya had become a new kind of storyteller, one who tells stories only to foreigners, and she had become a story herself. I don’t have any objections — everyone’s free to do as they please — but a month after the Carlton Hotel Women’s Conference, they brought her here to the hospital and Dr. Amjad refused to receive her. He said that there was nothing he could do for her, that she was untreatable, but Salim As’ad and I admitted her by force. She’s living now in a room on the second floor, close to yours. Her situation is precarious because her pelvis has been shattered again. I think there must be some problem with her bones because they’re disintegrating. Today Dunya looks like a corpse and needs a private nurse. Her mother visits her every day but instead of helping us, she weeps. And Dunya says nothing. Her eyes, suspended in her thin, wan face, look without seeing, silent.
Dunya talked too much — it was Professor Muna’s fault. He had made her into a tool for fund raising. Let’s contemplate this expression that has entered our language from America. In order to collect money, we need pity, and Dunya could cry on command. Professor Muna Abd al-Karim would make her tell her story, and the fund raising went forward. I don’t know what’s come over us since the Israeli invasion of ’82: Every intellectual and activist has started talking about nothing but the international organizations that give out money. The activists have turned into thieves, Abu Salem, with all this fund raising going into their own pockets. Maybe they’re right! I swear I don’t know anymore.