Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

Pointing to the monument, Baroudi said the massacre was an instinctive act of revenge, and he just wished Boss Josèph had come so I could hear his version of the events.

I said I knew very well what had happened; I didn’t need Josèph to tell me because I’d been there.

“You know nothing,” he said and told me what Josèph would have told me. As I listened, the cold crept into my bones, as though the words were bits of ice dropping onto my spine.

What did he hope to achieve?

I’d believed at first that he sympathized with us and wanted to build a memorial to the victims. Then he brings me to this café and talks to me as though he were Josèph.

When I think of him now I can only see him in the form of Josèph. After that trip to al-Ashrafiyyeh, he disappeared. He gave me a lift to the entrance of the camp and promised he’d come back with the plan for the memorial garden, but he didn’t. The war started up again, and with it the long siege that destroyed the camp and the cemetery and the memories of the massacre. As with all disasters, the only thing that can make one forget a massacre is an even bigger massacre, and we’re a people whose fate is to be forgotten as a result of its accumulated calamities. Massacre erases massacre, and all that remains in the memory is the smell of blood.

Baroudi disappeared; he never contacted me again. I phoned the newspaper where he worked a number of times but didn’t find him. The switchboard operator said he wasn’t in even though I was sure he was there. I didn’t want anything from him, I just wanted him to publish our news, for in those days I was living within two deserts: My little desert was the blockade, and my big desert was Shams.

I left the camp to get some antibiotics, got held up in Mar Elias, and couldn’t go back to Shatila. In the Mar Elias camp I met Shams and was smitten, and then she disappeared. When I think of that day, Father, I feel ashamed, but I wasn’t interested in the fate of the camp, I was running after the shadow of that woman. Something inside me was stronger than I was. Something made me forget everything and nailed me to the cross of her eyes. I was like a madman. You understand; you must have gone through a similar experience with Nahilah. Like me, you weren’t married. Okay, well, let’s say that your marriage wasn’t like a marriage. You didn’t possess the woman you loved in such a way that could quench your thirst, and you were suspended between places just as I was during the siege. I used to feel a cruel loneliness, that’s why I phoned Georges Baroudi, but he avoided me because he didn’t want to get involved.

That day at Joachim’s Café, however, Baroudi forgot himself and assumed the character of Josèph. At first I thought he was going on the way he was because he was drunk, but then again maybe he was with them in the camp! How, though? He was an intellectual, a writer, a journalist, and those people don’t go to war or get involved; they observe death and write about it, believing they’ve experienced death.

On that rainy day, however, he was different.

I forgot to mention it was raining and in Beirut, as in Haifa, the rain comes down like ropes, then suddenly stops. I almost said the man was raining! I can see him in front of me through the café window, the ropes of rain around his thick lips, the smoke rising from his cigarette abandoned in the ashtray; his words hurt my ears, and the sloosh of the rain drowning the road that descends from Place Sasin to the church of Our Lady of the Entry.

Why did he tell me all that?

I’m certain he wasn’t seeking my reactions — a drunk doesn’t observe a drunk. So why? Because he was one of them? Did he want to confess? Christians confess in front of a priest. Their confessions are like the self-criticism sessions I learned in China and tried to apply here. It was ridiculous. I’d call a self-criticism session and start with myself to encourage the others, and the meeting would end in jokes. No one was capable of assuming responsibility for his mistakes, and they’d all find justifications for their actions and blame others. To put an end to the joking around and the obnoxiousness, I’d be forced to agree with them that we hadn’t made any mistakes at all, even in the case of the village of al-Aishiyyeh in South Lebanon, which we entered in the summer of ’75 after a grueling battle with the Phalangists. Our commanding officer ordered the armed fighters who’d surrendered to stand against a wall and executed them all with machine guns. The execution of prisoners is forbidden, as you know, by the laws of the Fatah Movement, but we found justifications for the criminal error that we’d committed. We said we were taking revenge for the massacres that had been committed against us, that civil wars always involved massacres, etc. Rasim, the militia commander, God rest his soul, went as far as citing Sholokhov’s novel And Quiet Flows the Don , saying that during the civil war in Russia the Bolsheviks would ask their captives to take off their clothes before executing them so they wouldn’t get torn by the bullets. Standing naked in the snow, shivering, they waited their turn to be executed, before falling into the graves they’d dug with their own hands.

“We’re more merciful than the Bolsheviks,” said Rasim. “We aren’t forcing them to dig their own graves or take off their clothes.”

That was when I became convinced that self-criticism was useless, since everything will be found to have its motives, its pretexts, its special circumstances, and so on.

Sitting in the café, Georges Baroudi took advantage of the rhythm of the rain with its long ropes to confess. He said he’d recorded more than three hours of confessions by Boss Josèph and wanted to publish them in a book that he’d call The Banality of Man . He said he’d brought a tape recorder with him to record our conversation, and that he’d make that the introduction to his book. But Josèph didn’t come, so he asked me to tell him my version of what happened, so he could put the two versions into the book. “A page for you and a page for him — what do you think? The killer and the killed in conversation.”

“But I wasn’t killed,” I said.

“You represent the dead,” he said.

“The dead don’t talk and they don’t have representatives,” I said.

“Aren’t you a Palestinian like them? Look at Israel; it represents the victims of the Holocaust.”

“That’s the difference,” I said. “I don’t believe victims have representatives, that they. . that they. .”

“You understand nothing,” he said.

I told him his project didn’t make sense, that you couldn’t sit the victim down next to the perpetrator. “Your book will be as banal as its title.” Then I burst out laughing.

At that instant, the man before me was transformed. Even his white face became tinged with green. He said, as though it were Josèph speaking, “They took us to the airport — I was leading a detachment of twenty boys. We were wasted. Bashir died and Abu Mash’al gave me a load of cocaine and asked me to distribute it to the boys. We were sniffing cocaine like a snack, as if we were eating pistachios. Then we went down to the camp and began. We didn’t take any prisoners and there was no face-to-face combat. We went into the houses, sprayed them with bullets, stabbed and killed. It was like a party, like we were at scouts’ camp dancing around the campfire. The fireworks came from above, from the flares the Israelis were sending up, and we were down below having a party.”

“A party,” he said!

Boss Josèph had come across three children. He’d asked one of his comrades to help him grab them. He’d asked his comrade to push them together on a table. “I took out my revolver. I wanted to find out how far a shot from a Magnum could go. One of the children slipped off onto the floor. The light was burning our eyes, and I asked my comrade to turn his face away. He didn’t understand what I wanted, so he let go of the two children and left the house. I went up to them. I wanted to tie them up and then move back from them but I couldn’t find a rope, so I jammed them together, put the muzzle of the revolver close to the head of the first one, and fired. My bullet went through both heads, so they died right off. I didn’t see the blood, I couldn’t see it, in that strange Israeli light. When I left the house, I came across the third child, the one who’d fallen. I stepped back and fired at this small moving thing, and it came to a sudden stop where it was.”