Free Sabra Zoo by Mischa Hiller Page A

pulp. A group of people followed the stretcher, their shouting and wailing competing with the boy’s screams. Asha had appeared from nowhere, dragging me into the emergency room.
    â€˜Ivan, tell the boy to keep still. Hold him still,’ Asha ordered. She told Samir to remove everyone who didn’t need to be there. He herded the family outside. His presence was helpful; they took him more seriously than they would me. As I was trying to calm the boy down the film crew, attracted by the tell-tale sounds of decent footage, had found their way into the emergency room, now filled only with the sound of the screaming boy. Asha released a makeshift tourniquet from above his right knee and blood shot from the stump. She tried to find the offending artery and clamp it. The producer looked away, her face white and clammy. A Palestinian doctor was trying to inject painkiller into his arm but the boy was flailing and trying to sit up to look at his legs. Samir helped me hold him down while a nurse tried to find a vein to fill him with morphine.
    â€˜We’ll have to remove this one,’ Asha said, as if talking about an offending hangnail, holding up the frayed left leg which was attached by only skin and flesh to the knee. The cameraman had zoomed in at this point, filling his viewfinder with gore. He lowered the camera. There were tears streaking his cheeks.
    â€˜I can’t do this,’ he said to no one in particular, turning away.
    The doctors were oblivious to him as they prepared the now zombified boy for surgery, wheeling him through the double doors, leaving silence in the air and blood on the floor behind them.
    After telling the boy’s relatives what was going on, I sat in Samir’s latest mode of transport, a Nissan Patrol with black UN markings on the sides, standard United Nations war-zone issue. Ordinarily I would have been curious as to how Samir got hold of the vehicle but I was reliving my aborted conversation with Eli, unhappy at the way it ended, embarrassed about my behaviour. John and Liv were also in the car and I agreed to go for a drink with them at the Etoile, where most of the volunteers were posted. John himself was posted in a smaller hotel, since he hadn’t come with the same charity as the Scandinavians or Asha. He was telling me that Asha was moving out of the Etoile, which she hated, to stay on the AUB campus in an apartment belonging to a literature professor who had left for America in July.
    â€˜It’s on the seventh floor and looks over the sea,’ John was saying. ‘We should visit her when she moves in, sit on her balcony and read books. Asha says the place is full of books. I miss books.’
    I used to read a lot to escape the Danish-Palestinian war that was home, taking refuge under a large pair of headphones to muffle the vocal nature of the conflict. It was a war that had started in 1979, after my brother Karam died falling six floors from a balcony. When he’d fallen he’d broken the family, not just his body. It wasn’t a thing that could be fixed, despite my parents’ efforts. Karam had been as dark as Youssef, taking after my father in looks, whereas I was tempered by my mother’s Nordic genes. Consequently Karam had always been accepted as more of an Arab than I was. I suspected my father preferred Karam for that reason.
    I tried to picture the walls of books in our old apartment, the one we were in before we had to move to the relative safety of where I was now staying. Over the last few months the desire to open a book had dissipated, their imagined worlds paling in contrast to the daily excitement of reality. I made a mental note to visit the old apartment as I’d promised my parents, to make sure that all our things were still there.
    The combination of the UN jeep and white-skinned passengers meant we were waved through a Lebanese army roadblock unchecked. All of us, apart from Samir, avoided the volunteers