'Soon after that the UN transferred all the Christians to the Dbayyeh in East Beirut, leaving Baas to the Muslims. At Baas all the children had been going to a UNRWA [United Nations Relief and Works Agency] school. It was very good and things seemed to be getting better. But with my father's death and the transfer to Beirut, all my brothers and sisters had to leave school and begin work. My brothers got work on building sites; as they were Palestinians they could not get work permits, so they were paid only the lowest day-rates. My sisters and I cleaned houses. When I was a little girl in Kafr Bir'im we used to have three household servants and many workers and tenants. Now we had sunk to begging for the most menial work that was available.'
Outside the rattle of machine guns was getting louder and louder, as more and more guns joined in the shooting. At the window Samira's daughters were still nervously discussing what the cause was. As the traffic was moving freely on the roads they still thought that it must be some sort of celebration rather than fighting or an attack on the camp, but they were unable to think of any event which was due to be celebrated. From the window they shouted out to neighbouring families who were also looking nervously out towards the shooting, exchanging ideas about its possible causes.
'Maybe it is to celebrate the heroes of the October [1973 Arab-Israeli] War?' suggested Sarah, repeating the theory favoured by the family in the apartment immediately above theirs.
'Wrong date,' said Ghada.
'Asad's birthday?'
'That was earlier this month. The sixth is Asad's birthday.' 'What about Basil?'
Inside, Samira shrugged off the din and the chatter of her daughters. She had got into the swing of her story and was anxious to continue.
'So were you still in Dbayyeh camp when the civil war broke out?' I asked.
'Yes,' said Samira. 'We were very nervous. You see, Dbayyeh was in the Christian half of the city, and the Phalange attacked and captured it in January 1976. In some of the other camps they captured - Tel el-Za'atar, Maslakh and Karantina - they shot the inhabitants, even the women and children, and bulldozed the camp. But in Dbayyeh - perhaps because it was Christian -they merely sent in their secret police, and tortured only those they thought were Fatah activists.'
'So the Phalange did not hurt you personally?'
'At first we were unharmed. Then one afternoon in early February they came for my husband.'
'You didn't say when you were married.'
'I was married in 1958, when I was seventeen. My husband was a boy from another big Kafr Bir'im family. We had been married eighteen years and had six children when the Phalange captured the camp. I will never forget the day they came for him. They took him at four o'clock, accusing him of being in the PLO. As soon as they took him I managed to get a message to some Lebanese relations of my grandmother who had contacts in the Phalange. They made calls and within four hours he was back here. But what they had done to him in that time!'
'What do you mean?' I asked.
Samira looked down and began to speak in a low voice. 'They had beaten him with metal bars,' she said. 'They used electricity. They burned cigarette butts into him. They broke both his legs, smashed his kneecaps and snapped one of his arms. Also his chestbone. All in four hours!'
'But he survived?'
'When my relative intervened the Phalange were ready to kill him. My relative told the truth: he said that my husband was also a Maronite. The Phalange did not know there were any Palestinian Maronites. After they released him we had him rushed across the Green Line to the American University Hospital.' She added proudly, 'They sent an ambulance. Because he was an employee.' 'He was a doctor?'
'No,' replied Samira, a little crestfallen. 'In Lebanon a Palestinian could not hold such a job. He was a cleaner at the hospital' 'How long did he take to recover?'
'For four months he was in emergency,' she said. 'After that I made the decision that we would stay in Muslim West Beirut and not return to the east, the Christian half. Before I left Dbayyeh I said to the guards: "I am a Christian like you. But if you treat us like this I will cross to the other side and be protected by the Musulmen."'
'And did they protect you?'
'Yes. The Muslims treated us very well: much better than the Christians. We stayed the rest of the war in West Beirut, but I never heard anyone mention the fact that we were Christians. The Muslims I know are better Christians than most Christians. Jesus Christ said that we should love and care for each other, but the Phalange were very cruel. What the Phalange did was the work of the Devil.'
'The Phalange made me ashamed to be a Christian,' said Ghada, turning her head away from the window for a second. 'The Muslims were much kinder to us. I hated myself for being a Christian when I saw the kindness they showed us.'
'My father was a Maronite,' said Sarah, 'but still I do not like them. The Maronites have no feelings.'
'When we crossed the Green Line we lost everything for a second time,' continued her mother. 'The Phalange wouldn't let us take anything. Like my mother I had only my jewellery. We left all the contents of our house: the TV, the furniture, our utensils.'
'So you were destitute all over again?'
'Not entirely. The PLO gave us a flat on the seafront in Raoche. It belonged to a Christian family who had fled to West Beirut and was partly furnished. Again we began to rebuild our lives. But in 1982 the Israelis invaded and the Israeli warships began shelling Beirut. As our flat was on the seafront it was very exposed. For fifteen days we were being shelled and bombed from both the land and the sea. It was terrifying. Most of all I was frightened for my children, that somehow I would survive and they would be killed. We stayed all that time in a shelter at the bottom of the apartment block, lying on the floor. There were fifty-five apartments in the building, fifty-five families, maybe 250 people. But the Israelis had invented a special kind of bomb which did not explode until it hit the basement, so even there down under the ground we knew we were not safe.
'One day they used one of these [suction] bombs on the building next to ours. It was completely destroyed. The four hundred families in the basement - maybe a thousand people - were all crushed to death. We had several relations in there, from my father's family. They were from al-Bassa, the next village to Kafr Bir'im. Apparently there was a rumour that Arafat was in the basement of that building. Of course it wasn't true, but what did the Israelis care? At about the same time some other cousins of ours were in a building that was shelled by phosphorus. They were killed too, but with phosphorus it is a very slow death. It burns very slowly from your skin down to your bone.'
I knew a little about the Israelis' phosphorus bombing of civilian areas of Beirut from Robert Fisk's book
Pity the Nation.
In a book filled with horrors, the worst moment of all is Fisk's description of a visit to a maternity hospital shortly after this phosphorus bombardment had taken place. There he met a nurse. After the bombardment had ended she had had to put several burning babies into a big bucket of water in order to put out the flames. When she took them out half an hour later, they were still burning. Even in the freezing cold of the mortuary they smouldered. The following morning the doctor took the tiny corpses out of the mortuary for burial. To her horror, they again burst into flames. I shuddered at the memory of this, but Samira was still continuing with her story.
'After fifteen days,' she said, 'a rocket from one of the Israeli ships hit our building. There was an earsplitting sound and the whole tower moved. It felt worse than an earthquake, but luckily the building did not catch fire. Nevertheless when we ventured out of the shelter we discovered that our apartment had been completely destroyed, and we still had to leave. That night when the bombing had stopped we ran down to Hamra Street, where we were given shelter in another basement belonging to some relations.
'Soon after that the Israelis entered West Beirut and the bombing stopped. I saw them the next day when I went to buy bread. Here were the people who had taken my home, who had farmed my land, who broke my father, murdered my relatives and then bombed my apartment. Yet many of them were just little boys. I looked at them and thought: these are the people I hate?' She paused, then added: 'If you are a Christian you have to learn to forgive your enemies. It is not for me to judge them.'
'But doesn't what has happened to you make you question your faith?' I asked. 'Don't you ever wonder how God could allow the sort of horrors you have witnessed?'
'It's not God's fault,' said Samira. 'Its the fault of people. I thank God that" he has protected us.'
'What do you mean? You've had a horrific time.'
'We are still in good shape. I don't want money or luxury. I haven't lost any of my children. That's what matters to me. We are still alive and still together.'
'But you are still in exile.'
'Of course,' she said. 'After all I have suffered from the Israelis and the Lebanese I would like to go home even if it meant I was naked and starving. Even after forty-seven years I still feel a stranger in this country, feel that I don't belong. Even if I had lived a hundred years here I would still like to go back to Palestine, go back to Kafr Bir'im where no one can tell me that I'm a refugee and that I don't belong.'
'And do you think you will?'
Her daughter Ghada cut in from her watch by the window: 'Of course not,' she said. 'We would all like to go home. That goes without saying. But after Arafat's surrender, what hope is left?'
But Samira just shook her head and smiled: 'It is in the hands of God,' she said. 'We shall see.'
V
The Monastery of Mar Saba, Israeli-occupied West Bank,
24
October
1994
Again I inhabit a bare cell with white walls and a blue dado. Again, through the window, I hear the quiet rumour of hushed monkish talk, the occasional peal of bells, the purposeful rustle of habits. On the balcony next to mine a black-robed figure with a short beard, long hair and a tall cylindrical hat - Fr. Gregori, the monastery cook - is watering his pots of basil and tending his orange trees. Nearby a myna bird chatters in a cage. It could be Athos, and indeed an old oleograph of the Holy Mountain is framed on the wall of a corridor outside; but one glance at the bare rock wall of the cliff-face opposite my cell places this monastery firmly in the wilderness of Judaea, far from the cooling waters of the Aegean.
This is the desert where John Moschos took his vows and where he spent most of his monastic life, and tales of the monks of these bare hills fill most of the pages of
The Spiritual Meadow.
Having read so much about these Judaean desert fathers it is strange finally to see the austere landscape that forms the background to their exploits. It is stranger still to find many of their superstitions, fears and prejudices alive in the conversation of the monks who still inhabit this, the last of the ancient monasteries of the Holy Land to survive as a functioning community. But the stories of devils and demons, visions and miracles which sometimes seemed ludicrously outlandish when I first read them under a grey London sky sounded quite plausible last night, when told in the starlight looking out onto a cliff-face honeycombed with the cells of long-dead hermits and holy men.
'Look at it!' said Fr. Theophanes, the monastery's tall, gaunt Guest Master, waving a hand at the dark rocky gorge beneath us. 'There it is: the Valley of Doom. The Valley of Dreadful Judgement.'
Below us the monastic buildings of Mar Saba fell away in a ripple of chapels, cells and oratories, each successive layer hanging like a wasps' nest from a ledge on the rockface. Opposite, the top of the cliff wall had turned an almost unnatural shade of red in the last of the evening light. The rock was pitted with caves, each formerly the cell of a Byzantine monk. All were now deserted.
'It's very beautiful,' I said.
'Beautiful?' said Fr. Theophanes, rustling his robes in horror. 'Beautiful? See down there at the bottom? The river? Nowadays it's just the sewage from Jerusalem. But on Judgement Day that's where the River of Blood is going to flow. It's going to be full of Freemasons, whores and heretics: Protestants, Schismatics, Jews, Catholics
...
More ouzo?'
'Please.'
The monk paused to pour another thimbleful of spirit into a small glass. When I had gulped it down, he continued with his Apocalypse. 'At the head of the damned will be a troop composed of all the Popes of Rome, followed by their deputies, the Vice-Presidents of the Freemasons . . .'
'You're saying the Pope is a Freemason?'
'A Freemason? He is the President of the Freemasons. Everyone knows this. Each morning he worships the Devil in the form of a naked woman with the head of a goat.'
'Actually, I'm a Catholic'
'Then,' said Theophanes, 'unless you convert to Orthodoxy, you too will follow your Pope down that valley, through the scorching fire. We will watch you from this balcony,' he added, 'but of course it will then be too late to save you.'
I smiled, but Fr. Theophanes was in full swing and clearly in no mood for joking. 'No one can truly know what that day will be like.' He shook his head gravely. 'But some of our Orthodox fathers have had visions. Fire - fire that will never end, terrible,
s
terrible fire - will come from the throne of Christ, just like it does on the icons. The saints - those who are to be saved, in other words the Orthodox Church - will fly in the air to meet Christ. But sinners and all non-Orthodox will be separated from the Elect. The damned will be pushed and prodded by devils down through the fire, down from the Valley of Josephat, past here - in fact exactly the route those Israeli hikers took today - down, down to the Mouth of Hell.' 'Is that nearby?'
'Certainly,' said Theophanes, stroking his beard. 'The Mouth of Hell will open up near the Dead Sea.' 'That is in the Bible?'
'Of course,' said Theophanes. 'Everything I am telling you is true.'
I had arrived at the Great Lavra of Mar Saba earlier that afternoon. From Beirut the distance is less than three hundred miles, but this being the Middle East it took a six-hundred-mile detour via Damascus and Amman - three and half days' non-stop travel -to get here. I finally crossed the Jordan into Palestine at noon yesterday.
The West Bank, and with it East Jerusalem, were captured by Israel from the Jordanians following Israel's great victory in the 1967 Six Day War. To create a buffer zone between the Jewish state and its hostile Arab neighbours East Jerusalem was annexed, while the West Bank was placed under Israeli military occupation. In defiance of international law both areas have since been subject to a campaign of colonisation: around 150 exclusively Jewish settlements have been established in the conquered territory, between them containing some 280,000 Israeli settlers (including the 130,000 settlers living in East Jerusalem). The military authorities have also appropriated 80 per cent of the West Bank's water, most of which is now piped south to Israel.
The Palestinian
intifada
made this great tract of land familiar territory, images of which were broadcast nightly into the world's sitting rooms, the backdrop to countless scenes of stone-throwing Palestinians confronting the Israeli army. Despite the stumbling peace process and the handing over of some Arab towns to Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority, the area, like Bosnia or Rwanda, still seems inexorably linked to violence, refugee camps and army patrols.
What is therefore so surprising when you first leave the small Jericho oasis and your taxi climbs through this great expanse of rolling hill country, past the Bedouin encampments with their brindling sheep and chickens, is the astonishing, unexpected beauty of the West Bank's dry, stony hills. Many of the valleys appear at first to be empty: dry hills whose pale rocks are scattered like lumps of feta cheese amongst the scrub-gorse. But as you wind your way down the slopes, under the weak light of a winter sky, forms begin to take shape: the stone roof of a steading hidden by a small cypress grove, the domes of an abandoned caravanserai, the minaret of a ruined mosque, the gently rolling slopes topped by newly harvested olive groves. It is a familiar Mediterranean picture; the same carefully polled olive slopes form the background to a hundred Tuscan paintings, and nearly a millennium before that, to the landscape mosaics of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus.
The ancient Palestinian villages that you pass are built of honey-coloured limestone which changes tone according to the colour of the sky. Shepherd boys lead their flocks out into the valleys; old men in full Arab
jellaba
and
keffiyeh
suck hubble-bubbles in the shade of vine trellising; from cafes you can smell the charcoal scent of cooking kebabs and the hot, sweet odour of Turkish coffee. At first sight, the modern West Bank is still much closer to David Roberts's prints of mid-nineteenth-century Palestine than to the harrowing television images of refugees and razor wire.
Yet beautiful as it is, the signs of conflict are still there. In some valley bottoms where there should be cornfields, there are UN camps, home to those Palestinians expelled from their ancestral homes at the birth of Israel in 1948: huge, shockingly dirty shanty towns surrounded by army watchtowers and floodlights. Above them squat newly built Israeli settlements, modern suburban housing estates made up of ranks of detached whitewashed bungalows, with long lines of solar panels glinting on their roofs. Two different peoples, separated by thick tangles of razor wire and a small matter of legal status: the settlers have guns, vote in elections, enjoy Israeli civil justice and can join the army; the Palestinians under Israeli occupation are forbidden to own weapons of any sort, cannot vote in Israeli elections and are subject to the arbitrary and dismissive verdicts of military courts.
The largest of the Israeli settlements is Ma'ale Adumim, a ring of concrete blockhouses, cranes and half-completed apartment blocks, recently built over the site once occupied by the great Byzantine monastery of St Martyrius. It is currently home to thirty thousand Israelis - mostly new emigrants from Russia, Canada and the United States - yet despite the peace process the Israelis have announced plans to double the town's population over the next decade. Around the settlement's perimeter stretches an electrified razor-wire fence. Above it cluster blocks of identical eggbox houses: Milton Keynes transported into the landscape of a medieval Italian fresco.
Just beyond Ma'ale Adumim the road splits. The main branch heads on to Jerusalem. The smaller branch - potholed and neglected - winds off to the south. We bumped along this track for a few miles before arriving at a ledge overlooking the cliffs of the Valley of Kedron, a deep, arid canyon of wind-eroded chalk-like rock. At the top of the far side of this ravine stood a domed Greek Orthodox church, enclosed by a towering wall. Before
I
did anything else in Palestine - and certainly before
I
headed on to Mar Saba for the night -
I
knew I had first to make a pilgrimage to this shrine.
The driver parked the car in front of the gatehouse and I pulled at the bell rope; there was a distant ringing, but no one appeared. I rang the bell a second time, and soon afterwards the wimpled head of a nun peered suspiciously down over the parapet and