I woke up a few hours later when a text message bleeped into my cell phone. It was from Usama, in Baghdad. He wrote: “I hope U R OK and fine. We all here in Iraq feel worried about U.” I was glad to hear from him, but his message was not reassuring.
Mohamad and I drove out to the Ghobeireh intersection, a major artery into dahiyeh. A massive chunk of overpass lay prolapsed in the road underneath, sliced out as if with a gigantic knife, blocking the road into dahiyeh and the road to the airport with one karate chop. Behind the ruined bridge, a larger-than-life-sized cement sculpture of Ayatollah Khomeini scowled out at the scene, practically untouched. He had a few scars, but whether they were from this war or the last one, I couldn’t say.
At the airport, a giant plume of oily black smoke rose out of a ball of orange fire from the bombed fuel tanks. A cherry-red Ferrari parked abandoned. Billboards with vertical slats clacked and rotated with alternating ads for men’s beauty salons, diamond necklaces, and electrical generators. Outside the gleaming, modern terminal, shrubbery had been pruned to spell out the airport’s new name: Rafic Hariri International Airport.
Inside, the terminal was empty except for a handful of soldiers. Electric screens flashed with departure and arrival times for flights that would never happen. From a window overlooking the terminal, a gray-haired man beckoned to us to come upstairs.
In a cramped office, a skeleton crew of three Middle East Airlines employees was answering frantic calls from summer visitors trapped in Lebanon. Shehadeh Zaiter, the gray-haired manager, had kept the office open throughout the civil war. “Don’t worry; we are safe,” he said with pride. “During the war, we used to walk on the roads, between the bombs.”
As he spoke, a missile landed just outside. The terminal shook. Then another, even closer. A soldier ran to the door of the office and shouted at us to come down to the basement. We ran down the frozen escalator, scrambling like a parody of commuters rushing to catch a flight.
Downstairs, surrounded by nervous, hungry soldiers, Zaiter took us aside. Did we think the war would last long?
We didn’t know what to tell him. We said it might.
“God help us,” he said quietly.
My friend Salaam, the Communist, called from Baghdad. “I am sorry to see this happening in Lebanon,” he said. Then he laughed and said fiercely: “I want to see it happening in Saudi Arabia and the other Arab countries.”
By now it was clear that Hezbollah had miscalculated the Israeli response when it kidnapped the two soldiers. Israel had bombed the airport and bridges, blockaded the ports, and killed dozens of people, most of them civilians. After a defiant press conference on the day of the kidnapping, Hassan Nasrallah had disappeared from sight. Rumors circulated that he had been struck by an Israeli missile. People were beginning to wonder if he was dead.
That evening, Friday, July 14, at about 8:30, Nasrallah called in a statement to Hezbollah’s TV station, Al-Manar. He sounded flat and tired, but the photograph that accompanied his speech, somewhat surreally, showed his trademark apple-cheeked smile. He offered condolences to the families of the martyrs who had given their lives “in the noblest confrontation and battle that the modern age has known, or rather that all history has known.” He reminded the Lebanese of the victory they had won on May 25, 2000, when Israeli troops withdrew from southern Lebanon.
Then he did something no one expected. Reminding his audience that he had promised them “surprises,” he announced that they would begin momentarily. “Now, in the middle of the sea, facing Beirut, the Israeli warship that has attacked the infrastructure, people’s homes, and civilians—look at it burning,” he said calmly.
It was a hot night, and we had all the windows open. Manara was a mixed neighborhood, not particularly Shiite, or even exclusively Muslim, but when Nasrallah made his dramatic announcement, we could hear a susurrus of cheers and clapping from nearby apartments.
Mohamad and I ran up on to the roof. We could see an orange glow, like flares, shooting up from the sea to the sky. Out at sea, an Iranian-made C-802 missile had crashed into the warship. Down below, caravans of cars roamed through the streets honking in celebration, as though the death and destruction that had been and would surely follow were a wedding or a World Cup victory.
“This is a war war, this isn’t a civil war,” I said, a sudden vision of nation-states colliding in the air above us like the Hindenburg. “This isn’t like Baghdad at all.”
“No, it’s not,” said Mohamad. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
Downstairs, Umm Hassane was unimpressed by Nasrallah’s dramatic gesture.
“Why is Hezbollah doing this now? What are they thinking?” she complained. “Look at Egypt and Jordan, and all the other Arab countries—they’re not attacking Israel. It’s only in Lebanon that we carry the board sideways.”
On Saturday morning, in the southern village of Marwaheen, the Israel Defense Forces ordered people to evacuate. When they did, the IDF fired on the convoy of fleeing villagers and killed at least sixteen.
In Beirut, people focused on details, on little tasks that seemed irrelevant but had the virtue of being something they could control. Umm Hassane stopped me just as I was about to go out reporting and urgently inquired if I was planning to mop the floor. Our entire neighborhood did laundry. Buildings flapped and rippled, suddenly festive, like the rigging of a ship. Sheets, towels, pillowcases bleached in the sun. A city of white flags. Mohamad understood the snapping white sheets in a way that I did not—as a sign that water and electricity would not last—and suddenly became bent on doing laundry. He wanted me to do it while he worked.
“Why should I do the fucking laundry?” I shouted.
“Because I have a fucking job, and you don’t,” he snapped.
I was working just as hard as he was: I had four stories due and had just turned down a fifth assignment. But as a freelancer I made a fraction of his salary.
“You’re divorced!” I shouted.
He apologized. I apologized. We did the laundry together.
I called Hania, an animal rights activist who had helped me after I adopted Shaitan. She was going around the city feeding stray cats and dogs. “So, you’re still here,” she said. “I was wondering if you are one of the people who are going to leave, or if you are going to stay, being married to a Lebanese.”
I went to Smith’s to see if there was any milk (there wasn’t). There was a young butcher at the meat counter who always told me terrible jokes in order to practice his English. He attempted one, something about a chicken wearing an egg around its neck. It didn’t make a lick of sense, but I laughed anyway, because his face had the anxious look of someone trying not to burst into tears.
“Are you going to leave?” he said, as he handed me my chicken.
“No,” I said. “I live here.”
Back home, I stood at the kitchen sink eating a sandwich and looking out at the old black-and-white-striped lighthouse from the window over the sink. The electricity was out; I would have to cook the chicken right away, and then I would finish my stories, and then—
There was a loud metallic ping that seemed to come from all around, as if the sea were a giant metal bowl rapped with a ball-peen hammer. The windows sucked in and then bellied out, the glass as pliable as plastic wrap. Shaitan ran into the pantry and crouched underneath a shelf. The Israelis had bombed the new lighthouse, a tall silver tower not far down the Corniche. The bombing was exquisitely targeted—the tower was unharmed except at the very top, where metal hung lopsided.
It took me a few minutes to work out the obvious: the old lighthouse was just outside our kitchen and living room. If they bombed it next, no matter how precisely, the entire front of the apartment would be full of flying glass.
“Umm Hassane, we have to leave,” I said. I had no idea where we would go, but we had to get out of the apartment.
“I’m not leaving,” she said, flipping her chin up and settling back into the sofa with her arms
folded. “I’m not going anywhere. Let them kill me, ma btifru maai—it’s all the same to me.”
Aunt Khadija’s house was bombed. Aunt Nahla’s house in Bint Jbeil was bombed. Batoul and Hajj Naji’s house was bombed. A series of relatives showed up at our apartment, bearing suitcases and anxious expressions, and sat in the living room with Umm Hassane while they tried to figure out where to go next. Hajj Naji stayed with his cousins; Aunt Nahla stayed with her brother; Aunt Khadija’s son stayed with us until he went somewhere else. It was a game, musical people, and all of Lebanon was playing it.
Every day people were streaming into Beirut, bearing ragged duffel bags of clothes and plastic sacks of bread. Drivers were charging $400 or $500 to bring people up from the south, about forty times the peacetime price. The cost of gasoline had risen, in some areas, up to 500 percent. Schools, hospitals, and the few public spaces were all packed with refugees. By the time the bombing stopped, a month later, there would be close to a million internal refugees—almost a quarter of Lebanon’s population.
I went to a small public park called Sanayeh Garden with Jackson and our friend Abdulrahman, who was going around Ras Beirut buying food and medicine for refugees with his own money. Several hundred people who had fled the bombing in southern Lebanon were sleeping on the pavement and under trees. One family had camped out under a tree and hung a birdcage with a canary from its branches and set up a small gas stove. A baby waddled around the perimeter of this outdoor kitchen, gnawing on a biscuit, and a four-year-old boy shyly handed me a cookie.
We walked around and talked to the refugees for an hour. There was nobody, not a single official or representative, from the Lebanese government; no evidence of what President George W. Bush had nervously referred to earlier that day, while receiving a barrel of pickled herring from German Chancellor Angela Merkel, as Lebanon’s “fragile democracy.” The only people handling the refugee crisis in Sanayeh Garden were a handful of students in their teens and twenties, one of them wearing the splint and bandage of a recent nose job. Most of them were from the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, a secular group aligned with Hezbollah.
“You have militias taking care of refugees,” said Abdulrahman in disgust, as we walked out of the park. “Mish maaoul”—unbelievable.
It was the same story all over the city. Most of the refugee centers we visited, in schools and other empty buildings, were being managed by Amal. In Tayuneh, a few blocks from Umm Hassane’s apartment, there was a shopping mall under construction. Deep below the earth’s surface, several thousand refugees were huddled in the underground parking lot. Hundreds of refugees packed into each level of the stone catacomb; the further down you descended, the more miserable they were, like rings of hell. The smell pressed against you and snaked inside your mouth: shit and piss and rotting food, babies throwing up and old people coughing, the sweat and recycled breath of hundreds of human beings. Enormous generators hummed and kept the flickering fluorescent lights barely alive.
To get in and out, or to move between levels, lines of people squeezed simultaneously up and down a staircase only wide enough for one. Each family had set up a temporary living room inside the painted lines marking off parking spaces. They sprawled on blankets and on straw mats, with diapers and rumpled clothes ranged around them.
Four stories below the earth, Jackson and I ended up talking to a twenty-three-year-old political science student in a pink cotton shirt, a pretty blonde with red-rimmed eyes. Her name was Rowina. “You are the third person who has come to see us,” she said. The first person to descend to the refugees was from Hezbollah. The second was from Amal.
She had left her house in Haret Hreik three days earlier, after Halutz issued his warning, and ever since the warplanes bombed her apartment, she had been underground. “Sitting. Just sitting,” she said, holding on to her seven-year-old sister, Fatima. “If somebody comes from outside, we ask him, ‘What’s the news?’”
I asked Rowina why she didn’t go upstairs, why so many families stayed in the darkness. Wasn’t the air much better above ground? “Yes,” she replied, “but when we go upstairs, the bombings might come.”
If the shopping mall was bombed, they would all be buried alive, but I did not point this out. Tensions were rising in the fluorescent half light of the parking garage. Men started shouting and pushing one another. When people are packed like rats underground for days, it doesn’t take much for fighting to start. I left.
As we walked up the parking ramp, out of the reeking underground city, we ran into Hezbollah functionaries on their way down. They were wheeling five shopping carts full of groceries down the long slow curve of the ramp. The people shuffled up slowly in a patient mob, gathering silently in front of the grocery carts, waiting to be fed. As they handed out the food, the Hezbollah men intoned over loudspeakers: “Allah Karim”—“God is generous.”
When I told Umm Hassane about the people sleeping in the park and the hundreds of families in the parking lot underground, she was furious.
“People are sleeping on the ground, and the Sayyid doesn’t care,” she said, referring to Nasrallah.
In a speech, Nasrallah had promised to rebuild the decimated villages and neighborhoods with the help of “friends,” which was understood to be Iran. The bombed areas would be like new, he said—better than new, full of light and air.
“He said he was going to make Lebanon like it was before,” she said, echoing a comment Aunt Khadija had made earlier. “Is he going to bring the dead people back to life?”
I went to visit my friend Paula. She was a friend of mine and Munir’s, a sociologist with a husky laugh and intelligent eyes and crazy hair. She lived with her mother in a tiny apartment just a few blocks away from us. We sat in the kitchen chain-smoking her Davidoffs and squeezing lemons into vodka. She was supposed to be finishing her doctoral dissertation on “Women Entrepreneurs in Postwar Lebanon.”
Paula’s mother was sitting at an old wooden table in the kitchen, “correcting” a package of pita bread. She did this by pulling apart the two halves and laying them in the bag back to front. It’s an old Lebanese housewife’s trick: by exposing more of the bread’s surface area to the air, you delay the inevitable invasion of mold, and thus prolong its life—a useful technique in peacetime, but even more essential during war. There was flour for now, but Israel had bombed the roads and bridges, imposing a blockade by land, sea, and air. Who knew how long supplies would last? And so Umm Paula was correcting the bread.
In Lebanon, parents are usually known by the names of their firstborn sons, not daughters, so her real nickname was Umm Pierre. But I always called her Umm Paula, and she always laughed. Umm Paula had a square face and a sarcastic way of summing things up. She rolled when she walked, favoring one leg, like an old boxer. In 1963, she and her husband named Paula’s older sister Golda, after Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir—not the most popular person in Lebanon, considering that the two countries have been at war since 1948. When I asked Paula why, she made a fist, smacked it into her open palm, bared her teeth in a savage grin, and said, “Because they wanted her to be tough.”
I asked Umm Paula something I’d been wondering about: What kept people going during the long, fifteen-year civil war? What sustained them? What did they eat?
She sat silent for a few moments. She picked up a piece of pita, peeled it apart, and laid the two halves back down again. She did it one more time. And then she spoke.
One day, said Umm Paula, a woman collected six stones. She lit a fire in the low clay oven in her yard. Kneeling in front of the oven, she set the stones on top of it. Laying the stones out in neat little rows, she sprinkled them with salt, and she began to cook.
A man passed by and stuck his head over the wall. “What are you doing—cooking stones?” he teased her, laughing.
“They’re for my children,” she replied. “We have nothing to eat. But I don’t want them to know that. When they see the stones, they’ll think I’m making them somethin
g for dinner, and they won’t be hungry anymore.”
Chapter 22
Mighli
THE SKY IS Sad for Lebanon,” said Abu Hussein. His tired old taxi-wheezed up Bishara al-Khoury Street, carrying Mohamad and me into dahiyeh through the murky light. “The sky is crying for us.” But it wasn’t rain. It wasn’t the sky. The heavy gray thundercloud was part of the city itself, suspended in midair: the pulverized remains of several hundred buildings, several thousand apartments and small businesses, and all of their contents, blasted into a fine powder and shot up into the heavens like confetti. The bomb clouds hung over Beirut and seemed to change the climate itself, conjuring an eerie yellow eclipse weather that people had already started calling “the war wind.”
Nine days into the conflict, Israeli warplanes had bombed 55 bridges and dozens of roads, killing 330 people in Lebanon, most of them civilians. Anyone with a foreign passport was trying to leave the country. U.S. Marines had returned to Lebanon for the first time in twenty-two years, to evacuate American citizens aboard a Navy transport vessel. Nasrallah swore not to give up Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, the two Israeli soldiers Hezbollah had kidnapped, even if “the whole universe” came to get them. Hezbollah was firing rockets into northern Israel almost every day. And almost every day Israeli fighter jets roared over Beirut and dropped bunker-busting bombs on Haret Hreik, the neighborhood we were driving toward, where a photographer friend had told us that Hezbollah would be leading a “tour.”
I recognized the smell right away: wet ashes, smoldering fires. Burning plastic. And something else, less definite, the collision and rearrangement of all the unnoticed organic and chemical matters that make up our everyday lives. Eight square city blocks had been bombed into a concrete goulash. A haze of cement dust blanketed the wreckage, softening sharp edges and muffling all sounds in its dreary crepuscular light. The smashed apartment buildings looked utterly abandoned.
Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War Page 28