But no.
This has nothing to do with Professor Muna. The psychologist was just doing her job, and maybe she believed that Dunya, being asked to tell her story so often, had turned into an actress. Acting isn’t confession and has no impact on the actor’s life. It seems, however, that Dunya wasn’t acting; she was really telling her story.
I saw her. I was watching the Women’s Conference on television when they announced a “Palestinian testimony,” and I saw Dunya come forward, on crutches. Her feet struck the ground hard, her pelvis swiveled, she walked slowly and calmly. She was neither hurried nor embarrassed, as though she’d learned her role well. She reached the podium, supported her weight on it, and let the crutches fall with a clatter. Dunya paid no attention either to the noise or to the man who hurried to pick the crutches up. She looked straight ahead and started speaking. And she amazed me. This woman was telling a completely different story. I’d no idea she’d been. . had no idea how she could have hidden all these things from us and could now be saying them in front of these foreigners. She spoke in English, sometimes slipping into Arabic, which Professor Muna would hasten to translate.
“I ran,” she said. “Then they raped me.” She said raped me in English and then stopped, to let the hall fill with silence.
“They came into the house and started firing. We were wearing our night clothes and sitting in the living room. Our house has two rooms, one for sleeping and the other for the television. When we heard the explosions, we all went into the television room. The electricity had been cut, but we found ourselves going there without thinking, to listen to the news.”
She said that her whole family was around the television when armed men entered carrying flashlights. “The light from the flashlights was terrifying. We were seated around the silent television with a single candle lit. Then the ropes of light burst in, and the firing. I fled. I went to the door, which the armed men had ripped off before entering. I walked away slowly without looking behind me, I didn’t run. I saw the flares, like little suns. I walked and I walked, then I felt something hot in my right thigh. I started running, or I felt I was running, but I wasn’t. I was moving very slowly in fact. I heard the machine-gun fire as though it were exploding in my ear.”
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.