We pass more orchards and green waves smashing in off the sea and somebody says, we are here, we are in Tyre. And like the war itself it came up too fast; even those frozen minutes under bombardment have evaporated. We have come this far and there’s no question of going back now.
When you are too close to the bombing, you can’t hear the jets or see them. The explosions erupt upward like ejaculations of smoke, as if they came from the earth and not down from the clear sky. The spy drones click and whine, softly. When you hear them you know the jets won’t be far behind; you’d better go, and you’d better go fast.
The truth is, you don’t know whether any of that is true. Once you arrive you can’t remember anything you learned to prepare yourself for war. I went to war school for a few days on a snowy mountainside in Virginia. Former British soldiers taught us all sorts of useful things: how to hide in underbrush without being seen, how to administer emergency first aid, how to poke a stick in the dirt, looking for mines. I can’t remember any of it. All I remember are the scraps of folk knowledge passed around war zones like sticky pieces of candy. You sock them in your cheek and suck, try to sweeten your days.
I believe that bombing is the worst dangerous thing. I would rather get shot at, risk getting kidnapped, or walk across a field knowing there might be mines. When you move loose over the ground under bombardment, death drops down gracefully from the heavens, from an atmosphere you cannot see or hear. Maybe you will get hit, and maybe you won’t. It feels like God himself is doling out the bombs, and down they come from that clear, empty, infinite sky. Every minute you live or you don’t. Maybe the bombs will come to you and maybe they won’t. No matter what happens, you will be shell-shocked. A few days under bombardment teach you everything about your nerves—where they live in your body, how they can vibrate and ache and make you shake, make you want to bite right through your finger or peel your skin off your body just to get free of them. All around you is the crashing sound of the bombs, the smell of the bombs, the bodies and buildings that have been hit by the bombs. And still you stand, for now. You think all the time about shelter. They tell you it’s best to be in the basement, but why? I don’t want the building to come down on top of me; I don’t want to be crushed and trapped and die a slow death. I imagine myself on the top floor, coasting down gently, afloat on collapsing structure.
I was in Chechnya once, in a time of peace, and an old man looked at me and said, have you ever been where they are bombing from planes? And I said, yes. He said, then you know. That was all we said; it was everything.
The sun is shining like every mad morning in this garish war. I wake up to the crash of bombs and tell myself, just do it for one more day. Anyway you are trapped. If you try to get out of here they will kill you on the road. So do it for one more day. You know you wouldn’t leave, even if you could.
The car skims fast through the empty boatyard, mangy cats poking in overflowing fishy dumpsters, the smell of garbage and fear in a frozen city. They are gathering the dead in the Palestinian refugee camp. There are too many bodies crushed by bombs, people bombed in their homes or on the road trying to escape, and nowhere to put them. The hospital has some old coolers, but they leak and the corpses are rotting. So they’ll dig a mass grave in a vacant lot. Just for now, they say, just to be decent.
The Palestinian camp is not really a camp; the transitory has hardened into permanence. There are paved streets, old buildings, generations of family born and died in suspended exile. Even the refugee camp has been destroyed and built anew in cycles of fighting that span over decades. Now Lebanese refugees hide here from the bombs because they believe the camps are safer than the rest of the south.
The men stayed up all night hammering together the plain pine coffins and stacking them in the hospital yard. Some of the boxes are short for the dead children; no use wasting the wood. Under the pine trees they strung a tarp for families to sit in the shade, but the shaded chairs are empty. Most of the dead have no family in attendance, and nobody who is not a family member feels entitled to a chair.
The refrigerated trailer lurks in the grass, obscene and unmentionable. Nurses in blue scrubs pass surgical masks among the crowd. The permanent refugees and the new Lebanese refugees jam together nervously, pressed against the hospital walls, spilling into the streets beyond.
Soubiha Abdullah rocks back on forth on her feet, hugging herself. She will identify and bury twenty-four people from her family of tobacco and wheat farmers, including her sister and her sister’s nine children. They died trying to escape their village; Israeli planes attacked the road as they drove. Soubiha has been waiting for more than an hour, surgical mask knotted over her hijab, heel-toe, heel-toe, eyes smoldering.
“I’m saying, ‘God give me the strength to see them.’ We just want to see them, even if they’re pieces of meat.
“May God curse those who killed them.”
Clouds of formaldehyde catch in the hot sea breeze and carry over the crowd, and the people cough and rub tears from their eyes. The hospital workers haul open the back doors of the moldering trailer, spilling the stench of death. The smell is perverted and cold, like a creeping creature of mist, clamping clammy hands over the flowering shrubs. Somebody shouts, “God is great!” and then others echo—God is great. The crowd is angry. The crowd is not crying. The crowd is hard. Children stand there too, eyes swollen, soaking in their destiny.
Hospital workers holler out the names as they deliver down the remains: stiff long things mummified in sheets of clear plastic or old blankets, bound with duct tape. Some are broken into pieces, loose in black garbage bags. They nail down the pine lids, spray-paint the names on top, and set the coffins out on the sun-baked clay of the camp road. The street fills slowly with coffins, and people stand around and stare.
The masked man in the trailer door holds up a cake box. He pulls out a baby, purple and mottled, so tiny you can’t tell whether it had been born yet when it died. “Look at this!” he shouts.
“Oh no no no,” a man at my side mutters. “God is great!” shout the others.
I pull myself out of the crowd and pace on the grass, where the nailed coffins wait. A doctor looks down at the dead, shaking with anger.
“They can’t fight Hezbollah because Hezbollah is not an army,” he spits the words. “They kill the people because they think it’s the only way to stop Hezbollah.”
This is funeral as indoctrination, and rage is fiercer than grief. The sadness is just a pale shadow on a burning day. The cheap spectacle of rotting bodies and a purple baby is more than a society can tolerate without hardening into hatred. You could stare into the enormous eyes of little boys and watch them turning to rock. You could feel it all taking hold, driving forward, another generation crushed, another generation rising. One war breeds another war. We create what we try to kill. Gaze too long into an abyss and the abyss also gazes into you, Nietzsche said. The Americans, the Israelis, say they want to destroy Hezbollah, but what does it mean? Hezbollah is rooted inside these people, in their houses and neighborhoods and bellies. The more people you kill, unless you kill all of them, the stronger Hezbollah will live in the ones who remain. They would do anything for Hezbollah, yes, and it was naive to expect anything different from Shiites in the south. It is a matter of fact that Hezbollah formed up as a guerrilla force to fight back against an Israeli invasion. These people have it fixed in their minds that Israel finds some reason to invade their land every generation. That is a one-sided view, yes of course, but it’s the one they have, the one all victims will always have. There is a reason we can’t depend upon victims to mete out justice in courts. “Every time there’s an Israeli war, we have a massacre in my family,” one of the women tells me. Now the Lebanese army watches, mute, as a foreign invasion unfolds. The president swims laps in his crystal swimming pool; he can see Beirut burning from his manicured lawns. The prime minister cries on TV and flies to Rome to beg the West to make it stop. Hezbollah snatches up Iranian-bought
guns and fights back. This is not romantic lore; it is cold fact.
“Where are the young men?” An old woman moans a mourning song. “Where are the young men?” She puts her head into an empty coffin.
The dead bake in the sun. The men turn their palms to heaven and pray. The Lebanese army has sent trucks and soldiers to move the bodies. This is the first time I’ve seen the army deploy since the war began. Silence congeals thick as pudding when the coffins pass on the shoulders of soldiers. They load the coffins into green army trucks and drive to a vacant lot littered with telephone poles and bulldozers. They have dug a long trench into the sandy, salty earth. The earth is ready to swallow the bones. The shadows are thin and elongated now. The crowd from the refugee camp stands and watches.
A man with white hair scrambles to the edge of the trench. “Hey Americans!” he bellows. “This is what Bush wants! This is what this dog wants! It’s full of children!”
An elderly woman in black perches like a crooked crow at the edge of the grave. “My darling Mariam, my only daughter,” she moans. “Twenty-seven years old, my darling, twenty-seven years old.”
Somewhere close by, a muezzin sings the call to prayer, gentle as blown cotton over the fields. The shadows grow longer still on the quaking dirt. Somewhere close by, bombs are falling.
Allah hu akbar. God is great.
Noses tip up into the sky. What will they do, somebody asks, bomb us here? Maybe they will, says somebody else. Maybe they will even kill the dead.
Somebody will stop it. They must, because it can’t continue. The United States will call for a ceasefire. “We are urging restraint,” Bush says. The bombs keep falling. A ceasefire would be “a false promise if it returns us to the status quo,” Rice says. These words sound like rusted tin, scraping at skin, breeding infection. Anonymous Washington officials tell reporters that they won’t even try until next week. Hezbollah needs to be defanged, they say. How many will die before next week? The two soldiers are no longer the point; it’s turned into something bigger, about defeating terrorism and this interminable fight for something intangible.
A dead body rots in an old sedan. The car was hit on a dirt road that dips through the shadows and green leaves of a banana grove. The Mediterranean rolls nearby. The car is blown open on one side. Somebody keeps saying, “That’s a body? I can’t see it.” Maybe that was me. All I hear now is the voice, high and weird against the dead silence of war. And somebody else says, “There. There. See the head? See the arm?” I am not a photographer and I feel dirty, like we’ve paid to peek at something pornographic. The body is a dark gelatin mold, melting, spreading, vanishing into the fabric of the car seat, into the shirt he wore the day he died. In a nest of man-made things, the flesh is the first to go. We, the people, are the most delicate of all. The stranger rots as the war goes on. Finally, somebody comes and cleans everything away. We drive by one day, and the car is gone.
One day there is a tiny baby girl. She washed into the Tyre emergency room in a wave of bloodied families who’d been bombed trying to drive north. Nobody knows which family is hers. She is dressed in little overalls with rainbows and bears—six to eight months, the nurse says. I don’t know whose baby it is, I just found it here. I stand and look at her and she looks back at me from the nurse’s shoulder. Her body smells of burned meat. Her baby hair is scorched to her scalp, each strand shocked straight out, the end dipped in charcoal. Her sausage arm is bleeding. Her face is bruised.
The baby doesn’t make a sound. She lays limp and passive, sucks on a pink pacifier, and stares at the wailing, bleeding emergency room through brown eyes, one frozen pinpoint in a swirling storm. The baby is in shock. I didn’t know that babies could go into shock—shock without language, without reason. They will take her to see a doctor, so the nurse lays her down on the cold plastic sheet of a big adult stretcher. The baby shatters back to emotion, she writhes and screams, and they put a hand on her belly to keep her still and wheel her away, parentless and burned. I look at my cell phone. It’s only noon and the whole day is still to come.
Then a bomb crashes to earth just outside the door, and I run to see.
Another day, I am in a tiny hillside hospital in Tibnin. The grass is on fire from Israeli shells, heaving up smoke and confusion. The hospital is packed with 1,500 refugees and Israeli shells slam to earth outside. There is nothing but fear here, no doctors or food. More hungry, thirsty, crazy people pour in every hour to curl together in hunger and shiver in the heat. They have no clean water and they are wracked by diarrhea.
I climb down the stairs, into the deep caverns of the hospital basement. People lurk like medieval things in their grotto. Quivering light leaks from a few broken candles. Babies cry in the darkness. The elderly and the sick are strewn like crumpled scrap paper on the floor. I am walking through another age, a medieval prison, something that can’t exist now. I turn a corner and the air is a sheet of black, embroidered with voices.
There’s no water.
The road is closed.
There’s no water, no water.
We’re tired, we’re tired. Our kids’ nerves are shot. They are terrified.
A throat rich with decades of cigarettes. A voice without a face.
I was at home and a missile struck the house but we weren’t killed. We could have been chopped to pieces.
Look how people are living. Our children are going to die of thirst.
We want a ceasefire, we want peace. I was born in war and I am forty years old and I live in war. We build our homes and they destroy them.
Don’t leave us here! Send airplanes for us, please …
There is no water.
In the dark I write as fast as I can, and upstairs voices are screaming that it’s time to go, we have to go. I don’t understand why we have to go, the shells are coming thicker, but there is only one coherent idea in my mind: if I get abandoned in this dark, rich whale belly overnight I will lose my sanity. So I clamber up into daylight, into the thick crowds of weakened humans who crawl into the sunshine because they can’t bear the hospital bowels anymore. “A chain is broken in the ambulance,” a Red Cross volunteer yells. They climb under the ambulance, shake their sweaty heads, and talk fast. We followed the ambulance here, clinging to its wake for thin protection. Israel is bombing ambulances now, too, but still it seems like a shield. The shells are crashing, smoking, chewing the dirt. Soon it will be dark. The Red Cross men tell us to go away. They think the Israelis are shelling around the hospital because we are here, because the ambulances gave cover to the journalists. They want us to leave on our own because maybe once we are gone the shelling will stop. So we creak back through ghostly towns and bomb-scorched valleys, past the sign reminding us that RESISTANCE IS A NATIONAL DUTY. My heart is in my mouth. I know what this phrase means now. The heart swells, slicing off breath, sending beats in echoes through your skull. My heart is in my mouth and we drive as fast as we can.
Adrenaline is the strongest drug. When it floods your veins the world smears around you in a carousel spin, except that each detail is crisp and hard, the colors are not negotiable, the hardness of shadow and sunlight cut you but they feel good and real and you keep on standing. Words drift for hours and days on the surface of your thoughts, gathering like algae. Ever since the mass funeral I have had these words in my head: killing the dead, killing the dead. People look like ancient animals, lurching over some primordial land. A single bird’s cry is clean and hard enough to carve your skin. This is why people get addicted. When adrenaline really gets going you can’t get sick, you don’t need sleep, and you feel you can do anything. I know when this is over it will be like dying.
It is the last day of July and the land has no mercy, it dries out and flakes off, bearded by yellow grasses. The whine of the cicadas rings in my ears like the voice of heat itself, higher and faster until you think the vibrating song will lay you flat in the dust. There is no other life left in the hills, only the space left over, the empty dent where the
noise of drones, jets, and explosions used to be. Suddenly they have stopped and there is only the space they left.
Israel has stopped bombing for forty-eight hours. They just killed a lot of civilians at Qana, and the world is angry, and Israel says it will investigate. I was in Qana yesterday and now I am going to Bint Jbeil. That is where the fighting has been the worst and nobody has managed to get there. You know there is a war going all over the south but you can only know what you can reach. By now they have wrecked all the roads and everybody knows they aren’t kidding: they will kill us if we get in their way.
The refugees are coming out of Bint Jbeil and we are going in. They look like hell, or as if they have recently been there. Coated in dust, faces cut sharp by hunger, dry as the yellow grasses. They are packed into cars or staggering on foot. They put their dead eyes on our faces and beg us for help.
Can you take us to the hospital? We can’t walk anymore.
No, we are going forward.
There’s nobody there. Nobody at all.
They won’t take us.
We haven’t been able to get out of the house for twenty days.
The car rolls by slowly, rocking and rising over the dents in the road. Little boys sit crammed in the trunk. Everybody looks. Nobody speaks. Their eyes are empty and dead. When we try to interview the refugees, they interrupt to beg.
There’s nobody there. Nobody there. Take us to Tibnin. We’ve been in the shelter two weeks, they’ve been hitting us, they hit the house. When we heard there was a ceasefire we left. We are just eating apples we can find, drinking water from the wells.
I found a pack of cigarettes in a store. I will give you some. All of them. Please.
The cicadas sing in the dying grasses. The cicadas will sing on the bones.
They won’t take us.
We drive on, through the dying grass, leaving the refugees to fend for themselves. I tell myself we will find them on the way back. I remind myself this is the right thing to do. I am sick with myself.
Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War Page 26