On the edge of town there is a hospital on a traffic circle. A lone doctor stumbles from the shadows, blinks his green eyes, and says, “It’s been like hell.” There is no power and no light. He has hauled a dusty cot over to the open doorway where the sun is smacking the pavement outside.
“We’re trying to work over here where there is light.”
Blood crusts the cot and the floor and hangs in the air. He has no staff left, only a bottle of iodine and this cot hauled over into filtered sunlight.
“You see there is not much we can do except first aid and CPR.”
They bombed the hospital. Light pours through the hole in the roof.
“The other day we were sitting here counting shells and in half an hour we counted 350 bombs. All the people here are supporting Hezbollah—if you live here and see your people being killed and tortured. There are times we sit and cry because children are in pieces. You have to have somebody to fight for you to protect you. It makes you sick because you see what is happening to you and all the world is talking about you, but it doesn’t stop.”
Shafts of sunlight fall through the ceiling onto mattresses coated with dust. The doctor is fleeing. He says: “Not much you can do anymore.”
We head deeper into town. You have to keep going. Not because it is your job but because it is inevitable. Because you got onto this road and it goes only forward, not back, and you can’t change it.
Bint Jbeil was a small, hilly town with buildings and streets, but now the center of town has vanished. The buildings were crushed and crumbled into great dunes of wreckage, mighty and unmovable, as if they were swept into place by centuries of wind. The streets have disappeared underneath the dunes. Consider this word, wreckage. It means every thing in town, mangled and mixed. The buildings smashed into chunks of concrete, tangles of rebar, broken doors and windows and screws and nails and framed pictures and stoves and refrigerators and beds and closets. It is toys and lamps and bowls and potted plants. Mostly it is the broken buildings themselves. When you melt it all down, the structures are greater than their content. You can’t drive into town because there are no more roads. You can only look down at the awesome tides and dunes of a broken city and surmise where the roads once ran. The silence is enormous and relentless. The sky is full of God and sun and Israeli warplanes, looking down from one vast, blank eye.
We park and I can see there was a road leading down the hill, and so I walk along it over the wrecked buildings, the frames and thresholds of shops gaping on either side, vomiting their dirty guts of toys and soda pop and dresses and medicine. I found a pack of cigarettes in a store. I will give you some. All of them. Those refugees on the road, where did they come from? There can be no life here.
There is a noise over to the right, the mewing of a wounded cat. But I look and it is worse; it is an old woman.
“Take me to the hospital,” she calls. “I want a drink.”
There are some other reporters walking near me and we draw close to her and she gazes up. She is filthy and sprawled in a sea of broken things. Flies crawl all over her blackened face but she smiles a dreamy smile.
God brought you. God brought you. I didn’t want to die alone.
Somebody has gone into a broken store and found a small bottle of yellow juice, and she sits up and drinks. Her blue bathrobe is slick with dust.
“Don’t leave me. Six days without food. Please take me to the hospital. I can’t walk, I walk a little and I fall down. I’ve spent six nights sleeping down here, there was a little water left in the puddles and I was drinking. I am a widow. I have a daughter in Beirut. I fell on my hand. I can’t hear I can’t hear, there were so many bombs I can’t hear. I’m an old woman. I got tangled up in the electrical lines and tangled up in the stones.”
Other reporters are ministering to her, taking notes and foraging for bottles of water, and I slip away from them. This was a pharmacy once and now it spills its contents, bars of soap, boxes of flu medicine, aspirin—the archaeology of that exquisitely organized time commonly referred to as a few weeks ago. Somehow this is still a summer afternoon and a dragonfly lights on the rebar. The blasted fixtures of a chandelier shop poke at crooked angles. Somebody’s lingerie drawer hangs open, bras dripping down like vines. I hear music and look down to see a singing birthday card open on the ground, chiming “Happy birthday to you,” over and over again.
At the water reservoir at the bottom of the hill, a middle-aged man wanders abstractedly. He wears an old plaid shirt and a baseball cap advertising a tire shop.
“If you write a thousand words it’s not worth one bullet in the head of an Israeli. Thank God there are some tomatoes left in the ground. What’s the benefit? I am asking why. Because I am Muslim? The whole world is crying for Israel to stop and they don’t care. Why do I fight? Why did God create me? Not to be a fighter but it’s an emergency. You think I like it? I hate it. All the time, fighting, fighting, fighting. They occupied Lebanon for twenty years.”
When he talks about Israel he turns and points over the hill. I hear the walkie-talkie scratch from his pocket and understand that he is with Hezbollah. But he is not like the disciplined others. He has been driven a little crazy.
“I can’t tell you my name. What does it matter? I am one person. The only thing that matters is after the war is over we gather money and buy rockets and buy missiles and buy guns. Because nobody in this earth loves us. I can’t believe it. Just because we are Muslims. We won, so what? We won on our land, so what? It is our land, we will win in the end.”
The bombs drive everybody crazy, and there isn’t much you can do about it. He says he is a forty-three-year-old schoolteacher and a fighter.
“There is some resistance, they are seeing you but you can’t see them. It began since fifteen days. Every night, shelling. I saw the tanks burning with my bare eyes. Excuse me for a second.”
He walks across the dirt and snatches a yellow Hezbollah flag from the dirt.
“You know it’s our flag. It can’t be down.”
He stuffs it down his pants. “My friend has been martyred in battle,” he says. Then he starts to cry.
“I wish I were in his place and martyred instead of living this dog’s life. People think we like to fight. They don’t think we want to live with our children and raise them. If you live without your dignity it’s a dog’s life. I swear to God two days ago I had a can of tuna and a dog went by and I couldn’t eat without giving it to the dog. I wonder how God will judge people. Why did God create the earth, why? There is a bright side and a dark side. You stay with one or another. There is no gray side. The gray side is the dark side. Tomorrow they will come and give us a few dollars and say, okay, let’s forget everything, let it pass. But I’ve lost friends, I’ve lost family. You cry for people you lost. You cry for the town. You cry for history. You cry for the Jews too because I know very well they will be in hell. Those who remain quiet and don’t speak the truth, they are silent devils.”
I leave the crazy shell-shocked shell of a Hezbollah fighter and climb into the rubble. It’s dirty work and hard climbing over the crushed buildings and broken glass, and I am wearing the same shoes I have had all this time, black leather loafers I brought with me from Cairo, and how long ago was that, anyway? Unblown missiles glint evilly in the sun. There are no walls left standing and so there is no shade, only the enormous sky, pitiless sun, and silence.
A miracle is stirring. The broken, vanished town is full of Lazaruses and they are staggering now into the light. They crawl out on cut legs and bleeding feet, half-dead, half-mad impossibilities, old and fat and weak. They have heard that somebody has come for them. They have crazy eyes and a few things crammed into plastic grocery sacks or cheap duffels. They fall in the rubble and cut themselves. The journalists begin to help. Nobody can bear anymore to stand around taking photographs. They lift the old people and stagger far up the hill where the Red Cross ambulances are stuck, unable to drive into the town that no longer exists on road
s that vanished under dunes of wreckage.
A wrinkled woman sits against the lost frame of a shop. Her fingers are coated with clay, as if she has been digging.
We were under the rubble. When I hear that plane it scares me my nerves are shot God help me. Let them come and take me. My brother is ill.
She pours water into his mouth. He is mentally handicapped. He sits cross-legged at her side, giggling and weeping. His tongue lolls out of his mouth.
Are they going to hit us again today?
This is who gets left behind when war comes: poor people, old people, and handicapped people. This is who they are bombing now. In this moment I am numb and still, but I am aware that I deeply hate everybody for letting this happen. I hate the Lebanese families for leaving them here. I hate Hezbollah for not evacuating them, for ensuring civilian deaths that will bolster their cause. I hate Israel for wasting this place on the heads of the feeble. I hate all of us for participating in this great fiction of the war on terror, for pretending there is a framework, a purpose, for this torment. I sit in hatred and write everything down with filthy fingers. An old man perches on the hood of a car that rises from this sea of rubble. His feet dangle bare and swollen from the cuffs of his pajamas. His sister, an old woman, babbles and squints like she is trying to remember something, apologetic and amazed.
Our house fell on top of us. No food no water I’m talking now and I don’t know what I’m saying. He can’t walk at all. I’m talking I don’t know what I’m saying. I can’t even walk. We found muddy water to drink. I’ll never come back to this village I don’t care what they say.
Another old woman is talking to me when I realize I’ve had a rock in my shoe for a long time. This recognition breaks through the glaze of shock—pain has pulsed unrealized. I take off my shoe and it’s full of blood. A thick spike of glass punched through the sole; I’ve been walking on somebody’s shattered window all this while. Well. Oh well. I will tiptoe on that foot. The woman is still talking so I write down what she says. Everybody is cut; neither of us bothers over my bloody foot.
My brother who is blind was living underneath me. He’s still there. I knocked on his door and he said yes I’m still here. I am an old woman staying in my house nobody came for me I can’t walk. I couldn’t take him with me he’s still there every minute I think we are going to die.
Yes, I say. No. You will be all right now. The Red Cross is here now.
The sun is sinking low into the hills. Soon the lull will end and the Israeli bombs will fall again.
SEVENTEEN
I THOUGHT I WAS A SALAMANDER
The war no longer feels temporary. Now there is a hardening, an acceptance of this condition. Roads are death and sky is fear and people scurry down into the scorched earth like moles. The country creaks to freezing under blockade. Nothing comes in or out. Hospitals are empty of medicine. There isn’t enough food or clean water. The worst thing is you get used to it. If the bombs would just stop for one minute, I could calm down, organize my thoughts, breathe. But quiet brings no peace. When the bombs stop, all you hear is the possibility, the promise, of another bomb. The quiet is pregnant with contained fire, about to fall.
The car lurches and tears along empty, sun-blasted roads, through the popping yellow silence of a summer afternoon. I can’t remember what day it is anymore. Daylight rolls into darkness and then blasts back again. Schedules, school buses, markets: none of these things have any meaning left. They are empty. The way the body senses the physical presence of another person in a dark room, by magnetic field or gravity or the secret stirring of air—with that same instinctive, physical knowing, I feel the steel bombing machines above us, circling like great mute sharks in the cloudless blue. I am too nervous to talk. I am jumping out of my skin. Except for interviews, I can hardly stand to interact with people anymore. Conversation demands a calm I have lost. I can summon the manic focus of journalism, or I am adrift on nerves. I put headphones in my ears and stare out the window, breathing in and out. We have no illusion of safety. We keep quiet and follow the road map. Deaf and lost are the children, Radiohead whispers in my ears.
Heat shimmers around the man at the psychiatric hospital gate, and the steady, urgent stream of Hezbollah’s wartime news pours out from a transistor radio at his feet. His plastic chair is nested in a flame of hibiscus and rose. He holds a rope in his hands that pulls the gate down or slackens to let it up. As we approach, he snaps off a taut salute.
We are journalists, we say. We would like to visit some of the patients.
“I’m a patient,” he says in a strange, high voice. “I’ve got family problems.”
He smiles up at us, rubs at his thinning crew cut, and fidgets his fingers. “I am a schizophrenic,” he says.
So what are you doing with your days? we ask.
“I wake up, have some breakfast. Then I sit down and listen to the radio. What can I do?” he says. “I’m in charge of the gate.”
Where are the doctors?
They ran away.
The other staff?
“Because of the war,” he sighs. “Nobody comes.”
“It’s because of the grass,” he adds.
Aren’t you afraid?
“There’s no human that isn’t afraid. Everyone is afraid.”
He looks at us, and pronounces the next two words blissfully:
“It’s normal.”
On an ordinary day, in regular life, I would be anxious, walking into a mental institution. A place like that cuts too close to the nerve: its medicine smells and white rooms and trees hang in imagination as the collapse of time and logic, the ultimate swoon of surrender, the end of trying. It is said that people are afraid of heights because they secretly fear they might jump. That is the feeling I get when I think of psychiatric hospitals.
But every place is horrible now, and so it doesn’t matter anymore. A morgue or a mental institution is better, in a way. There is no engrained expectation that it will be pleasant—abnormality feels normal, and normal feels good. Thick, spicy pine groves huddle around the buildings. Orange butterflies flicker in the flower beds. Bars slice the windows, but a clean breeze breathes through, cooling the quiet corridors.
Only two members of the medical staff remain. This nurse’s name is Hossam Moustapha. He is twenty-six years old and dipping into the anxiety medications. “We get depressed, man.”
The pills are running low and the patients are now on half doses, which may or may not be enough to keep them in control of themselves. There isn’t enough food left. And every night, the bombs come.
The men’s ward is dim and vast and barred off like a jail cell. Patients loom over picnic tables and smoke cigarettes into the gray air. We look at them through the bars. A few of them stride over and stare back at us, mouths hanging open, grinning or puckering their faces in scowls.
A haggard, pale man speaks to me in English. “I lived in Michigan.”
“What were you doing in Michigan?”
“I worked at a gas station. When they hear the bombs,” he confides, wiggling his brows toward the other patients, “they do get frightened. I’ve been here twenty days. I’m new here. Matter of fact, I almost don’t belong here. My father is old-fashioned. He brought me in here. He tricked me because I stopped taking my medicine. I felt more normal without it.”
He doesn’t believe he’s seen a doctor since June 12. Today is August 4.
The other patients’ wariness melts, and they begin to shout.
“Why are you here?” one of them demands. “Go to your own country!”
“We are with Hezbollah!” another yells.
“Who’s crazy?” somebody hollers. “Us or them?”
The former gas station attendant breathes through the bars, “Write this down, write this down.” He whispers a telephone number in Beirut and watches me write the digits. “Call my mother,” he says intensely. “Tell her to get me out of here.”
“Hush,” calls Hossam.
“Th
ey’re getting too excited,” he tells me.
We walk into the waiting room, where a mounted television blasts and flashes in the stillness like a tiny contained storm. Like everybody else in south Lebanon, the staff is watching al Manar. This is Hezbollah’s station and they have constant war coverage, even a reporter who is embedded with the guerrillas. I look out the window into the afternoon of bombs and yellow, yellow sunlight. Here we are a small island of people. The rest of the day is empty of people. They have gone into hiding.
Everything is moving too fast. I stand there on the white floor and try to think for just one minute. You are in the middle of an insane asylum. You are in the middle of a war. You are under bombardment. You can get killed driving out of here. Maybe you will. Don’t think it can’t happen, because it can. Take some of that realness, and ingest it.
We are walking back out, through the pines and butterflies. One foot before the next, down to the main building, but all the time the words won’t stop. This war around me now doesn’t feel like a dream. That’s the problem: I have been dreaming ever since Afghanistan. I let myself get tougher and smaller, pulled myself back, back, back, behind my face, behind the interviews, behind the stories. The uglier it got, the harder it got, the more I drew myself in, the more I distracted myself with colorful myths. I am a foreign correspondent. I am covering the story of our times. I am covering the wars. It all matters. It is worth everything. You turn yourself into something separate, something absent. There and not there. It works, putting thick glass between you and the world. You can be anywhere if you’re not really there. You can walk into any room, drive down any road, ask any question, write about anybody’s pain. You tell yourself you are unscathed. You stand smooth and count yourself unaffected. And basically, it’s true—compared with the people around you, the civilians and soldiers, you are unscathed and unaffected. That works fine until all of a sudden it doesn’t work at all. It occurs to me now that maybe this is the most American trait of all, the trademark of these wars. To be there and be gone all at once, to tell ourselves it just happened, we did what we did but we had no control over the consequences.
Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War Page 27