...of the vanquished

Down below, the alleys of the camp lie in impeccably straight lines. Each day, it has slowly bcome our prison, and who knows if it shan’t be our cemetery? On the arid rocky plain, bordered in the east by the dry wadi, the Nour Chams Camp makes a large dark smear, the colour of rust and mud, at the end of the dusty road. I love to sit up here in the afternoon silence and imagine the rooftops of Akka - all the different sorts of flat roofs, domes, high towers, the ancient walls overlooking the sea where you could watch the seagulls gliding on the wind and the thin crescent sails of the fishing boats. Now I realise that all of that will never again be a part of our lives. Akka - Arab soldiers in tatters, heads bleeding, legs wrapped in rags that served as bandages, unarmed, their faces sunken with hunger and thirst, some of them no more than children whom exhaustion and war had already turned into men; and the throngs of women, young children, cripples that stretched out all the way to the horizon. When they arrived at the walls of Akka, they didn’t have the courage to enter the gates of the town so they simply lay down on the ground in the olive groves waiting to be given water and bread, a little buttermilk. That was in the spring, and they told of what had happened in Haifa, they told of the fighting in the narrow streets, how it spread through the covered market in the old part of town, and of all the bodies lying face down on the ground. So the people had walked toward Akka following the sea, on the immense sandy beach, all day long in the burning sun and wind, until they reached the walls of our city.
I remember, that evening I wandered out alone, wearing a very long dress, covered with veils, I stooped over and carried a walking stick so I would look like an old woman searching for a little food, because people in town said there were bandits hiding among the fugitives, and that they raped young girls. At the gates to the city, I saw all those people lying on the ground, amid the thorn bushes and the olive trees, like thousands of beggars. They were exhausted, but they weren’t sleeping. Their eyes were wide with fever, with thirst. Some of them had managed to make little fires that were glowing here and there in the dim twilight on the beach, shining on their vanquished faces. Old men, women, children. As far as the eye could see on the beach and in the dunes, all those people strewn about as they’d been flung down upon the earth. They didn’t complain, they didn’t say anything. And the silence was more terrifying than cries or laments. Every now and again the whimpering of a child arose, then stopped. And the sound of the sea on the shore, the long waves rolling placidly in, washing up against the beached skiffs.

[Wandering Star, Le Clézio, J. M. G.]