Sometimes I’m sitting under the olive tree, sometimes I see myself sitting in a cage. My father lives with me. He is seventy. I have nine kids. Now my sister has brought her kids here too. She fled Rashidiyeh to escape the bombing. By the way, Rashidiyeh is empty. There is nobody there but fighters.”
Abu Ibrahim
“We’re ruined.”
We’re sitting in his store, silent. Abu Ibrahim is in no state for talking. He sits at the front of the store, not looking at us. He stares ahead, head lifted as he watches the street. He says a few words followed by a long silence; then he says something else, as if continuing his own private conversation. He looks my way cautiously. He watches my hand. He looks at the notebook and the pen. Then he looks at the road again. When our armed escort—it seems Abu Ibrahim likes him a lot and knows him very well—tries to cheer him up and urges him to talk, he shakes his head, looks at me, contemplates the notebook for a while, then goes back to looking at the street, tossing a word or two to the air.
“We’re responsible for what happened.”
It seems he has a son who was martyred recently.
“I just want one thing: to die in my country.”
In the front section of the store hang two photographs in golden frames. One is a photograph of King Faisal, and the other is a photograph of Abu Ibrahim in pilgrimage clothes in Mecca. He fidgets in place, groaning as if suffering from an illness. “We fellaheen like eating spicy food. Now I have testicular inflammation. Before that, I had hemorrhoids and a dermoid cyst.” Fighter planes passed overhead. The noise caused anxiety and tension. This was followed by the sound of rapid anti-aircraft artillery. After quiet resumed, I noticed for the first time the absence of the radios that usually fill the camp with a medley of songs. Now it is silent.
“Take him,” he says, waving toward our armed escort, “to Hussein. Let him fill this notebook of his.” Of course he means my notebook. “We don’t talk about anything except the land.”
When some fighters passed by the store he commented, “They no longer want to be educated or to work. They want to come and go. Whoever is martyred is just dead. No matter how bored you get, Palestinians won’t say anything to you except ‘I want my country.’ Others will tell you the same thing I told you: ‘Open Palestine to Israel? That’s absurd!’” Suddenly he’s shouting, then his eyes fill with tears and he cries. He calms down, and continues speaking about his physical pain in a broken voice.
“I buried my son and father here. I swear to God I won’t leave them here no matter what happens. But we turn toward the Qibla.” For him, the Qibla is Palestine. In Lebanon both Palestine and the Qibla are in the same direction.
I’m thinking about how to shoot this—what if I came to the store, placed the camera here in front of him, and let it record him without anyone asking questions or waiting for answers? I looked carefully at the place, considered the lighting options and chose a spot for the camera, but—damn—these spontaneous moments usually fall apart when shooting.
“I swear I won’t wake up. I lost a son. I swear to God I’ll follow him. No one was dearer to me than my son, except God. He visits me every day in my dreams, he and my father. I always find them there, in Tarshiha. He came to me two or three days ago. He hit me and said, ‘Do you want to die?’ I replied, ‘No.’ He said, ‘You want to die because you want to cry for me.’”
It is hard to determine whether the son said this to him in a dream before he was martyred, hence as a portent of death, or if he meant his son came to him after he was martyred. Dreams mix with reality like a combination of illusion, intuition, and hallucination.
“I’m going to die. If you want to come back here to film, you won’t find me. Palestine is the mother of the poor. Some 140,000 Lebanese used to come, and we would issue identification cards for them, when we were in Palestine. We don’t want identification cards; we just want them to bear with us a little bit. There were thirty-six mortar rockets at my son’s funeral. They took my grandson to Mecca. He’s there now. He is two years and one month old, at Princess Qaoud’s.9 Before he died, I knew. I used to say that Mahmud would die when he was twenty-five years and ten days old. A day before he died, I told them that Mahmud would die.” Another attempt to convince himself. “That day I was sitting here, and whenever someone passed by and looked at me, I suspected something had happened to Mahmud. I no longer want our land. I will take my father and son and erect a tombstone and die with them. I will take them, erect a tombstone, lie down, and sleep. We used to have 3,663 olive trees. Now I am sick and dying because I no longer drink olive oil.”
Tuesday, April 1
In the Armed Struggle Headquarters, we asked for the young man who had accompanied us the day before. We were surprised to learn that he had applied for a leave and had traveled to see his family in Yarmouk camp in Damascus.
We entered the Burj’s alleys accompanied by another young man. The day was clear and warm. The Burj’s inhabitants spilled into the alleys. Bits of conversation were being exchanged by those who passed by. Women were coming and going through the alleys and courtyards, carrying vegetables, laundry, bread. Some middle-aged men were getting shaves down narrow side alleys or in small yards. Sounds of life rose and fell. Radios and cassette recorders competed with each other, diverging at times and converging at others. The sound of Warda’s song “Our Loved Ones” floated above the sounds of kerosene stoves and the murmurs that could be heard coming from low windows along the Burj’s alleys. We were walking around. There was a group of men sitting at a corner right behind the alley discussing something with a woman who seemed to have been walking and then stopped. She was carrying things on her head—maybe she had stopped to take part in their conversation. We noticed them as we passed by and stepped back to listen. When we stopped they quit talking, and the woman looked at us then walked away. The men resumed talking—I don’t think they returned to their previous conversation, but they pretended to do so. Now they were discussing Islam, which we’d noticed was a common activity in the camp. One of the men was saying that we have deviated from the path and the law that the Prophet Muhammad provided for us and this was the cause of all that had happened; this is what had brought us rulers such as these: “Is there anything more humiliating than this? And we still don’t know what happened to us.”
Two of the men were sitting on the same box, an empty wooden tea crate. One was tilted forward a bit, leaning on his knees. He held prayer beads in his hand while the other man leaned on the alley wall. Each was speaking without facing the other. A woman on the other side of the alley had come out of her store to find out why we’d stopped. She was looking toward us anxiously; perhaps one of the seated men was her husband. We squatted and started listening without interrupting the conversation. Then an older man addressed a younger one sitting among them, “I want to ask you something. Nowadays, do you still lay a meter of tile as scrupulously as you used to?” The young man swore he did, but the old man didn’t believe him and swore to the contrary. Then the old man turned to everyone and said, “There are no principles any more.”
The camp is overflowing with life. The proximity of the houses and the way they embrace each other creates the impression that each ends and begins with the other. How can I reflect this feeling in the film? When we passed the bakery, a young girl was rolling out rounds of bread dough. The fire’s red glow flickered across the dough and her face, radiating warmth to each passerby.
When we passed in front of an open door, a girl had just finished washing the small courtyard inside. She stood in front of a mirror with the bottoms of her jeans rolled up and began combing her hair. The radio played Umm Kulthum’s song, “I Swear to You.” We sat on the roof of one of the Resistance centers waiting, but it was unclear for what. Maybe to rest a while and drink tea. I think these visits are important. Although the Resistance itself is not part of the survey, the visits help create familiarity and put them at ease with us. I wonder, though, if our work can be limited only to store owners. Most of the people we’ve seen so far are store owners. During the day, the young men leave the camp, and going to people’s houses when no men are home is not easy. That is why we must regroup and change the times of our visits. A beautiful