The conventional view of these women in Europe is of scarved heads hanging washing to dry on bicycle wheels. Bless. But then Europeans also think that these camps are like Bedouin tented communities, or the kind of medical and feeding station we parked our stolen truck beside in Sudan. Listen, people, how many decades do you think they’ve been there? This isn’t temporary displacement – nor are they shanty towns so much as ghettoes, where Palestinian families have been raised and have rotted since the ethnic cleansings of Israel in 1948 and 1967.
I worked across twelve such camps in Lebanon, out of a base in north Beirut. The nearest was Burj el-Barajneh and I spent most of my time there, quickly learning that the other camps had their specific characteristics: there was Beddawi, edgy with its youths tattooed with Arabic slogans. Al Jaleel in the Bekaa Valley was an old French barracks, where the mountains rose towards the Syrian border, as rooted in its history as the ancient ruins of Baalbek. Then there was the big Burj el-Shemali camp at Tyre, with its cordon of Lebanese security and ring of red oil drums, with sand-bagged bunkers to stop building materials from getting in. And Mar Elias, the smallest of the camps, populated with Christians expelled from Galilee in 1952.
And there was this well-built man in his early thirties, tall with a wavy burst of dark hair and a ready smile. Yusef would drive me between the camps, making connections, patiently explaining background. In the heat and the dust and the smell of diesel, with a hint of lavender, I came secretly to cherish our drives along the rudimentary dual-carriageways of the coast as we dodged ancient grey Mercedes, stunted palms marking our way in the central reservations. I wore sunglasses I’d found on an airport seat and put my feet on the dash of Yusef’s 4x4 and imagined we were in a low-budget road movie.
I liked him for his sense of silence between bouts of effortless chat. We’d chew gum or smoke for half an hour, then talk about the cleverness of a Roman viaduct which now ended abruptly by the road like some pointless ski-jump, or about how the woman we’d met that morning was the sole survivor of a Phalangist mortar attack. I sensed that Yusef had previous, as ex-pats in the region had come to call it, but then so had I, and neither of us felt compelled to delve.
I’d just been checking out educational resources for primary children in Barajneh and we were heading back towards Beirut when Yusef said, “You must come home for tea.”
I laughed. It sounded more Home Counties than Lebanon. “Is this how Arabs do a first date? Are you asking me home to meet your family, Yuse?” I said. I’d started to abbreviate his name and he seemed to like it, sometimes calling him Yuseless when I pretended to be cross with him. He smiled when I said it anyway.
“I suppose so. They’re there anyway. How much have you seen of how we live in the camps?”
I knew his challenge was right. I met women’s collectives in day centres and schools and UN officials in offices and at the consulate. I didn’t actually know much about everyday life in the camps.
“I’d like that,” I said, afraid that I may have offended him with a glib response.
“You’ll like my uncle’s cake,” he said.
So, the next afternoon, I walked up the little alleys that were cambered higher at the sides to run what was all too often raw sewage down the gully in the middle, around a couple of breeze-block doglegs, which I took to be stopping child cyclists getting up too much speed, and we were at Yusef’s stable door. His uncle leaned against it from the inside, smoking a filterless Gitane.
“You’re late for a goy girl,” he said, one side of his mouth breaking to show shiny teeth in a guileless smile.
“She’s out of your class,” said Yusef, in English for my benefit. “And don’t speak Yiddish in my house. Come inside, Natalie.”
A leathery old lady I took to be his mother sat by a cabinet in a rocking chair that looked absurdly out of place. French, probably. She was holding a cat in a shawl and was about no other business. I would learn that she sat like this endlessly, with a studied detachment from her surroundings, but not without contentment, her place a simple statement of presence. “Her name is May,” said Yusef. “Say hello to Natalie, May.” May held up a hand, nodding and smiling.
Yusef had a son, spare and skinny in a clean white vest and nylon tracksuit trousers, Western-branded. I could hear the relentless ricochet of a plastic football against concrete as Asi played with his friends out in the yard, shushing them if they shouted, as he had been told. He was ten.
Yusef brewed some tea and poured a couple of chaser shots of a clear, home-distilled spirit that tasted of pastis, only far stronger, and we sat in the little front parlour, his mum smiling distantly over the cat and never rocking her chair. There was a framed poster of a Renaissance Madonna and Child above her. The whole place smelled strongly of a kind of industrial disinfectant that was commonly used for family hygiene. The towels and underwear drying in the kitchen showed that this was the bathroom too – I knew from conversations with young mothers that there would be a communal loo out at the back, shared between three of four households. These would be kept as well as they could be, but the sheer volume of family waste
