Sabra Zoo (19 page)

‘Is there any alcohol in here?' I asked, back in the room.

‘Yes, I think Liv has something – but drinking is not going to help, Ivan.'

That's exactly what it's going to do, I thought. I found some Finnish vodka in Liv's bedside locker. I also found a picture stuck to the inside of the locker door. It was of her and Faris, taken – maybe even by me – on one of the evenings they were in my apartment. Faris was sitting on a chair laughing, cigarette in hand. Liv was on a cushion on the floor next to him, looking up at him with a quizzical smile. It looked like she'd just unintentionally made him laugh and didn't understand why. I took a slug straight from the bottle and showed the picture to the anaesthetist. She fetched a couple of plastic cups and I poured vodka into them.

‘Beirut is not such a good place, I think,' she said, raising her cup to her lips.

‘Maybe you're right.' I drank from my cup and held the vodka in my mouth until it burnt and I had to swallow.

When I woke I was in Eli's bed with my clothes on. My roommate was warm and pressed against my back, with her arm over me. She also had her clothes on. For a moment I had to think about what had happened during the night. I could see the near-empty Stolichnaya bottle on the bedside table, and I'd had enough of it to wonder at some point what it would be like to sleep with this woman, compared to Eli. She'd had enough to admit that she needed company, although I wasn't so far gone as not to understand that she didn't want sex. Her soft snoring didn't waver when I lifted her arm to go to the toilet; so I couldn't take credit for all the missing vodka. I drank lots of water from the tap then urinated the same amount, bracing myself against the bathroom wall. My urine was the colour of tea. She was still asleep as I let myself out. I never knew her name.

It had just gone 10.30 when I caught Bob getting into Samir's taxi outside the Commodore. He yelled for me to get in. Samir was in the driving seat, looking like he'd slept badly, in his clothes, and it was the first time I'd seen him with stubble. He didn't have his sunglasses on and the colour of his eye had moved into the dark end of the blue spectrum. He attempted a jovial greeting and drove slowly towards the camp as if he was in no hurry to get there. Bob filled me in on what he knew.

‘A
BBC
journo has just come from the camp, things are worse than we thought. We'll see for ourselves,' he said, checking video stock and battery packs. He wouldn't tell me anything else.

Samir just shook his head when I asked him if he'd seen anyone. I watched the city move past my window, closing my eyes to my hangover and imagining that I was in my grandparents' car on the coast road from Skagen. Soon I would open my eyes and see sandy beaches and we would unload the car for a picnic on the dunes. When the car did stop, however, I opened my eyes and there were no dunes but just the dusty road outside the camp.

The Israeli roadblock we'd been stopped at the day before was gone; they'd regrouped further back up the road, huddled together outside the headquarters we'd just passed. I could see soldiers on the roof with binoculars. Perhaps they'd moved back to escape the smell coming from inside the camp. A sickly sweet smell that you get with old meat. It could have been coming from the bloated and decaying mule I could see lying stiffly on some fresh rubble. This rubble was everywhere on the perimeter, as if someone had started to make the camp smaller, working from the outside, then decided it was too big a job and given up. Bob had his camera on his shoulder. I carried his video pack. Another carload of journalists arrived. The Israelis looked on as we walked into the camp.

The smell inside was worse, you couldn't escape it by breathing through your mouth. You could taste it. I had to hold on to my stomach to stop from retching. How could one mule smell this bad? Then there was the noise. Although there were people, mainly elderly women, roaming the camp, the only noise was the buzzing, an underlying drone that I thought must be part of my hangover. We reached a stack of six or seven bodies in front of a destroyed house. The bodies were difficult to distinguish from the masonry as they were covered in the same dust and there'd been a half-hearted attempt to cover them with debris. Bob was filming and I was pulled towards them because I was attached to him through the video pack. As he got nearer he disturbed the flies, and the soundtrack to this scene became apparent as thousands of them took off from the wounds on the bodies, the pitch of their buzzing changing like a flock of birds suddenly taking flight. Although there were recognisable bullet wounds in the corpses, there were also gashes in the head, open wounds cleaved through flesh and bone into whatever was inside that I couldn't look at. Their wrists were swollen around the cord used to tie their hands together. Bob was saying something about them being lined up against the wall. I wanted to tell him about the English nurse in the Etoile the night before and her axe wounds but was afraid to open my mouth in case I vomited.

We moved on, letting the flies settle again. A woman rushed up to us begging and pleading for us to help her. She was pulling at Bob's sleeve, saying, ‘They have taken my husband, help me find my husband.' Samir had to gently prise her off and she went over to the pile of bodies we had left and I watched her search the bloated and disfigured faces for her missing husband. Bob filmed her.

We moved on, following the sound of wailing. We came across elderly women, beating their chests and wailing inconsolably as they crouched beside a group of misshapen and mutilated bodies. Bob filmed them and we moved on, still on the main street, now seeing corpses everywhere and Samir stopped beside one, an old man in traditional ankle-length Arab dress. I recognised Donkey Man by the walking stick lying by him and the kufi that was knocked from his head, now split open, resting in a dusty pool of dried blood and brain matter. There were streaks of dried blood running down his cheeks. Samir pointed out that his eyes had been gouged out. I tried not to look at his eye sockets but didn't know where else to look. Since there were no eyeballs in his head his eyelids were concave rather than convex.

‘Why have they done that to his eyes?' I asked Samir.

‘Because they are animals,' he said, as if I was stupid. I wanted to ask why they were animals but we were moving on. We came across a young woman who walked up to us. She looked calm and smiled at us. She could have been an aid worker or an Arab journalist, but she looked too young.

‘Come, come,' she said in English. Not waiting for an answer she moved down an alley and we followed until she reached a one-storey breeze-block building. Outside lay a toddler on the ground by the wall. His head was caved in. She pointed at a blood stain on the wall above him.

‘They smash his head against the wall,' she said. ‘Again and again. By turn,' she said. Bob wasn't filming. ‘He is my brother.' She led us into the house.

‘My parents,' she said, in the same matter-of-fact voice, pointing to two slumped bodies on the floor of the living room. They had gaping wounds in their faces, fresher than the ones we had seen up until now.

‘This is from last night,' she said, anticipating our question. She straightened the front of her dress. ‘They did bad things to me,' she said in whispered Arabic. She glanced at her dead parents as if worried they could hear. She held up her fingers. ‘Five men. Phalangists.'

Samir said nothing, though Bob wanted to know what she'd said.

‘It doesn't matter,' said Samir, giving me a look of warning. I wished Asha were here, she would know what to do. We just stood there looking at the girl's dead parents. I was desperate to get out. The girl started to clear up, picking up crockery and clearing the table from what looked like the previous evening's meal. Samir asked her if she had other family in the camp, asked her her name. She shook her head. I was terrified that any second she would break down.

‘Please don't tell anyone about what happened to me. Please,' she said to Samir in Arabic. She had a Lebanese accent. Tears began to stream down her face.

‘Don't worry, sister,' Samir said.

I removed the video pack from my shoulder and left the house. Outside I tried to get as far away from the boy with the smashed head as I could before I knelt down and released the sparse contents of my stomach by the side of the footpath. When I was done I took involuntary deep breaths of putrid death, and vomited again. The others were standing beside me waiting.

Samir handed me a lit cigarette. ‘Here, this helps with the smell.'

We moved on. There were more people on the street now and more wailing as relatives were found. People were coming out of their houses, they were talking to journalists. Bob now had the video pack and I was free to roam but I stuck with Samir.

‘Shouldn't we send someone to help the girl?' I asked him as we moved down the street.

‘Who can help her now?' he asked angrily, moving away, now holding a handkerchief to his nose. I looked round for Bob and saw him disappearing down an alley. I could see a hand poking out of some rubble next to me. The fingers were outstretched, as if waiting to catch a ball. I went down the alley I thought Bob had gone down, and the voices faded behind me as the alley got narrower.

‘Bob?' I called, but all I got was the sound of flies. I passed another body lying on its side, hands and feet swollen round the cord that bound them. His trousers had been pulled down round his ankles. I swatted the flies from my face. There were doors either side but one was open further up.

‘Bob?' I called into the gloom. I heard a movement inside but no answer – he probably didn't want voices on his soundtrack. On the other hand I didn't know how he could be filming in such darkness. I stepped inside and it was cool and the smell was not so bad, just sickly, like in surgery. Something scurried off into the other room. I waited for my eyes to grow accustomed to the dark; the only light was provided by a small window opposite the door. I was slippery with sweat. I made out a table in the middle of the room. My foot disturbed a bottle. I looked down to see an empty bottle of whisky. Something was discernible on the table and something, a form, on the floor. I heard a noise from the other room. I tried to call Bob's name but nothing came out of my mouth. It was round, the something on the table, the size of an elongated watermelon. The form on the floor, I could now see, was a body. The arms were stretched above the head and the clothes pulled over the face, a dark mass around the stomach and chest. My eyes flitted between the table and the body. My hand searched for the door frame behind me as I realised that I was standing directly in front of the door and blocking light into the room. I stepped to one side but my foot went into something soft and yielding. Instinctively I lifted my leg and lost my balance, stumbling forward onto the floor. On my knees I could see that it was a woman on the floor but that she had no breasts, not any more. She had a huge lateral wound in her stomach with lots of loose skin. I crawled backwards, feeling for the door opening with my feet. All I could think was that I mustn't vomit inside. I looked up onto the table and saw a tiny head, tiny hands and feet. I couldn't understand what had happened here, my eyes moved between stomach wound and small body, which looked like it was attached to the stomach wound on the body on the floor by a cord. I turned round and scrambled on my knees out of the house into the alley. My retching wracked my body and nothing came up but bile which mixed with my tears in the dust.

I was aware of screaming. ‘They are coming back! They are coming back!' Maybe a man's voice, but in terror indistinguishable from a woman's. I got on my feet and ran down to the main street to see people scattering. Like everyone else, I was filled with terror. Even the journalists and Red Cross workers in face masks and gloves had been caught in the hysteria. I followed them as they ran back towards the Israeli position, but it turned out to be a false alarm. Bob was there and he'd found an
IDF
officer.

‘Do you know what has happened in there?' he asked him.

The officer shrugged, no expression on his face. ‘I just arrived today,' he said.

Bob started trembling. ‘That's fucking crap. I saw you at a roadblock two days ago. You stopped me coming into the camp,' he shouted.

The officer was looking around for help but several journalists had gathered round, interested in the exchange. ‘I don't know what's happening. I wasn't on duty.' His voice was high-pitched with panic. A general came up to the group, spoke to his officer in Hebrew. Another journalist, English, started asking the general when he knew, or suspected, what was going on in the camp.

‘How could we know what was going on?' he said. ‘We have not been in the camp.'

‘You can smell what has been going on in the camp from here,' interjected Bob, his face red with anger.

The general smiled at Bob as if he was mentally ill and needed humouring. He raised his voice over the questions.

‘Early this morning we helped some foreign workers to safety, once we realised they'd been held by the Phalangists,' he said. His deflection worked, some of the journalists seemed interested in this information. Fair-skinned people in trouble equated to front-page news at home. I looked to Samir but he was standing back, hadn't come up to the Israeli position. I realised that he'd never stood this close to an Israeli soldier. Perhaps he didn't trust himself.

‘What about helping the locals?' said Bob, in a calmer voice, but his question was lost in a barrage of questions about the foreign workers. I gathered from the answers that they'd been handed over to the Red Cross after being evacuated from the hospital early that morning by the militia. I went back to tell Samir what I'd learnt.

‘
OK
, let's go back and see if we can find them. We have to tell Liv about Faris,' he said.