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