Now, on this day in Lebanon, it doesn’t work: there is no divider, no case around me, no audience and no costumes. I am just me, and I am wholly here. I feel like I sleepwalked out onto the interstate and opened my eyes just in time to see the trucks blocking out the sky, groaning down. I said yes, yes, yes. I went along every time. If you want to succeed in journalism, you should say yes, yes, yes. Yes, I’ll go. Yes, I’ll stay. Yes, I’ll write it. Yes, I’ll rewrite it. Yes, of course I’d like to go back. You should never say no.
There is an ancient belief that salamanders can live in fire without getting burned. Zelda Fitzgerald, languishing in an asylum, drew a picture of a salamander and wrote: “I believed I was a salamander, and it seems I am nothing but an impediment.” We have all tried to be salamanders, but nobody really survives the fire. The mystery is that some get burned worse than others; some get burned in ways that are livable, and some do not.
The Palestinian owner is made of sterner stuff than the doctors. Her name is Adela Dajani Labban, a great sprawling lady of unspoken age and iron-colored hair. “I am the wife of the late Dr. Labban, who made this hospital,” by way of introduction. Swathed in black, roped with jewelry, she lounges under chandeliers in a vast drawing room. Her dead husband smiles beatifically down from the wall, enshrined in black and white. She smokes one slim cigarette after another. Her phone lines have been cut for days, and the crash of bombs kept her awake all last night, but she stays. She has lived her life as a refugee, and she is too implacable to keep running.
“I went down yesterday to see them and it was ‘I want my mother, I want my father,’” she sneers a little at the patients’ fragility. “Where am I going to go with 250 people? We can’t go anywhere.” She painted a big red cross on the hospital roof, fashioned white flags from bedsheets, and goes about her business.
“The Israelis are my enemies until the day I die,” she says. “I was born in Jerusalem. My parents died in Jerusalem, and I still have a hospital in Jerusalem. In my class there were seven Jews. Four of them were my friends.”
Labban doesn’t smolder with fury; she doesn’t howl with grief; she doesn’t even seem particularly frightened. It’s as if she can’t be bothered to be impressed by Israel. She has seen all of this before; she was ensconced in this same hospital when Israel occupied south Lebanon in 1982. The soldiers had swarmed over the asylum grounds. “I was very rude to them. Mind you, they did not answer. Ahlan wah sahlan. Welcome. Let them come. I will free the patients and maybe one of them will make a problem,” she cackles.
I stare at her, at her knickknacks and the owlish face of her husband, and think hard. I know everything that I am supposed to know. How she came to be here, and the other facts that shaped the biographies of the Middle East. I see all of it in one glance, how the borders were drawn, religion swept over deserts and through empires, colonialism came and went and came again. I’ve read the books and considered the arguments. I signed up for the listservs of professors and writers who argue over Islam’s perpetual promises and America’s eternal interests. Everybody lying; everybody failing a little, then failing some more. The powerful tripping along, blinded by their own mythology, led astray by their morals. I can see all of it. I am bogged in facts. But here I stand among the mad and maybe that’s all it’s ever been. The Middle East goes crazy and we go along with it. So many of my generation have trooped here for these latest wars—the soldiers, the sailors, the UN workers, the State Department enfants terribles, Mad Max contractors with guns strapped to beefy thighs, the writers and volunteers and freelancers and adventure-hungry travelers. We chased it all down into the Middle East and we came up dry, coughing on other people’s blood.
And now, in the depths of this war, I believe that nobody will ever see this, that Israel will never really look, and America will never really look, either. This is real to nobody. This would never be real to me if I were not here. Oh God just make it stop. Make the bombs stop. There was this policy, and that policy. One war and then another, all of it clumped together. It must have meant something—it seemed to mean a great deal—back when we all went into Afghanistan. Somewhere between Afghanistan and Iraq, we lost our way. The carnage of it and the disorder, all to create a new Middle East. But naturally there would be no new Middle East because the old Middle East is still here, and where should it go? Only a country as quixotic, as history-free, as America could come up with this notion: that you can make the old one go away. Maybe you can debate until it makes sense from a distance, as an abstraction. But up close the war on terror isn’t anything but the sick and feeble cringing in an asylum, babies in shock, structure smashed. Baghdad broken. Afghanistan broken, Egypt broken. The line between heaven and earth, broken. Lebanon broken. Broken peace and broken roads and broken bridges. The broken faith and years of broken promises. Children inheriting their parents’ broken hearts, growing up with a taste for vengeance. And all along, America dreaming its deep sweet dream, there and not there. America chasing phantoms, running uphill to nowhere in pursuit of a receding mirage of absolute safety.
Voices murmur as we pass from room to room in the women’s section, and patients perch like drooping birds in their barred space, human ornaments against white walls.
“Do you know my brother? He’s in Riyadh,” says a woman named Mariam Khalil. She is curled onto a cot, eyes chasing shadows around the walls. “I’m trying to fly to London. I want to go out of here but I don’t know how to go with the war. I don’t know how to go, how to do.” She asks me to call her children. She wheedles and bosses until I write down her husband’s name and telephone number. Tell him to come and get me, she says.
I move toward her neighbor, but Mariam doesn’t want me to go. “She don’t understand anything,” she shouts. “I tell her there’s a war …”
“I don’t know,” echoes the other woman. “There’s a war. The airplanes.” She hauls her knees into her soft chest, and begins to rock back and forth. “They are just hitting and hitting.” And then she giggles.
I wade deeper, and feel the excitement in the room rise. The women are thrilled by the diversion of a visitor. They touch my clothes, my hair, peer anxiously into my notebook, eyes gobbling up words they don’t understand. The frenzy grows, blurring the cascade of awful thought. A woman with dark, matted hair bats madly at her own head, driving away invisible insects; another laughs hysterically.
There is a fifty-five-year-old woman who has colored her fingernails blue and purple with a magic marker. Somebody has shorn her hair unevenly; it spits out at odd angles, thinned to her scalp. A woman in teal hides her face in the corner. A woman pulls on her hair and looks out the window. A woman sits with her mouth frozen downward, as if she will frown for the rest of her life, through war and peace, just sit and frown.
Does everybody here know there’s a war? I ask.
“We all know there’s a war,” one of the women says. Her face cracks and she begins to cry. The other women see her and they start, too. Everybody around her sits and weeps like children, with the purity of contagious emotion.
I move along to another room, leaving the weepers behind, and a woman grabs at my hand. There is fever in her brown eyes, in her flushed cheeks. “Make a party for me this evening!” she breathes. “I will fall in love with you.”
A fat young woman flops onto a cot on her back, and bops her feet up and down to unheard beats. “Elvis Presley, Elvis Presley, Elvis Presley …” she chants.
“Can you afford to make me teeth?” another woman asks me.
I let myself get lost in the flow of free associations and interruptions, slipping further and further off the axis. It feels good.
A woman is singing opera. “I’m Armenian,” she informs me, spreading her robed self like a proud butterfly showing off its wings. “I am an opera singer.”
At her back, not to be outdone, the Elvis fan begins to sing, too.
“Let’s twist again,” she belts at the ceiling, “like we did last summer …”
<
br /> The song follows me out of the ward as I walk away from the delirium, back to the war and the madness that lurks outside the gate.
The war was over a few days later. Israel agreed to a ceasefire and, as a last gesture, dropped more than a million cluster bombs over southern Lebanon. It was a dirty end to a dirty war. Cluster bombs are nasty and deadly, lying in the grass like innocent plastic things, tempting children and still killing them months later, when the winter settled over the earth and Ramadan came to wrecked towns. Long after the world had relegated the war to history and the madness of summer, kids and poor farmers with their rough hands tripped over them in their olive groves, and died.
When peace came I drove out of Lebanon the same way I’d come, crawling along that bomb-wrecked road to the Syrian border, past the burned-out cars and craters of a blasted landscape. The refugees poured in the other way, rumbling homeward again. They grinned and hung from their cars, flashing victory signs, waving Hezbollah flags and pictures of Nasrallah. The scorched road was a party of honking and kissing and blaring stereos. They believed they had won; they believed that Israel had lost. And I was limping away, scattered and shaking.
It was a festival night in Amman. Fireworks exploded into the sky because the war in Lebanon had ended, because it was summer, because there were weddings. My boyfriend, Tom, came from Iraq and met me there, in the city destined to be passed through on the way to someplace else. We went to a cigar lounge and sat out on a limestone terrace in the summer night. Jordan spread out like a jewelry box laid open, its velvet darkness studded with dusky lights. We smoked and watched the night. The heat pressed our skin. I smelled like a shower, like soaps and creams. Clean clothes lay soft as flower petals on hardened skin. I felt like a reptile, dressed up. Underneath the cleanness of the non-war, I was still not there. I had survived, I was alive. The shadow of death had passed over my body. But I had left myself there, in the salt and blood and crazy sunlight. I was stuck there and I didn’t know what to make of pasteurized Jordan, dark and lush and humane, the whisper and tinkle of a summer terrace. Sparks and blasts burst up from the horizon, fireworks set off by laughing men on dark hilltops, fading even as they bloomed, their crashes ringing in the valleys, up to the stars. Each explosion shook my heart like a bomb, every crash brought the war back around me, and then I felt tears on my face. Tom looked at me and I sat there crying. “Let’s get the check. Please.” We crossed Jordan in a taxi and I locked myself back into the sterilized womb of a hotel, with smooth sheets and satellite television and thick robes, with the heavy door that kept the world away. Clean and removed, like a little piece of America. I stayed there all night, until morning came.
This is the first thing I learned about war. Remember?
You can survive and not survive, both at the same time.
EPILOGUE
I don’t want to write this last part with any decorations or adornment. I don’t really want to write it at all. By now I have given up on pulling poetry out of war.
Raheem’s son got killed. U.S. soldiers shot him in the chest.
His name was Mohammed, and he was twenty years old. It happened on a Tuesday at noon, April 2007, out on his block in Baghdad.
The soldiers were rumbling in a convoy on an overpass leading to the Green Zone. The overpass ran alongside Raheem’s street. One of the armored vehicles hit a homemade bomb. The soldiers shot into the streets below.
Mohammed had gone to the neighborhood store to buy ice cream for his younger brother. The store was six doors down. He was on the street at the wrong time. They shot him in the chest.
He crawled over to a door and banged on it. He was bleeding badly. At first the people hiding inside didn’t move. The soldiers were still shooting in the street; they were too scared. Mohammed lay there bleeding until the shooting stopped. When quiet came the neighbors dragged him inside the shop and called his mother. She appeared and washed his face and sat with him. She tried to talk with him, but he couldn’t speak.
It took Mohammed two hours to die. The soldiers had sealed off the neighborhood and closed all the roads. Nobody could take him to the hospital. They said later that if he’d gotten to the hospital, they could have saved him. But movement was impossible, and so he bled to death in a convenience shop.
Two more months, and he would have finished high school. He wanted to study physical education. He wasn’t much of a student, but he was a good athlete. He lifted weights, swam, and played soccer.
The grocery store is called Hathal’s Shop. That is the name of the man who owns it. Now Raheem turns his eyes away because he can’t stand to look at it.
Raheem was reporting in the southern port city of Basra when his son died. Basra was under the control of Shiite militias at that time, and it was a lethal assignment. He had called home and chatted with Mohammed half an hour before what Raheem now refers to as “the incident.”
Raheem asked his son how he slept. Mohammed said that he had slept well, and that he had seen a television program about Iraqi poetry. They both loved poetry. Raheem reminded him to study, not to waste too much time watching TV. Then they said good-bye.
When they phoned Raheem from the hospital, he was working on a computer in the hotel. A relative of his, a young woman who worked at the Yarmouk Hospital in Baghdad, was on the phone. Her father had driven Mohammed to the hospital when the roads opened.
“Mohammed was shot by the soldiers,” she said. “He is injured.”
This happens a lot in Arab countries. People lie to soften the blow. It’s considered socially acceptable; it’s considered necessary. Doctors don’t tell terminal patients they are dying. But Raheem is a good reporter. He could smell the lie.
“Please tell me the truth,” he said.
So she did.
Raheem yelled at the driver to pay for the rooms, and ran to collect his things. They reached Baghdad at nine that night. The next day they buried Mohammed in Najaf, and soon Raheem was back at work.
Raheem was supposed to be the one in danger, working as a journalist. Mohammed didn’t like it. He had pestered his brothers, reminding them not to mention their father’s job outside the house. Sometimes he asked Raheem to cancel his reporting trips out into the provinces. Raheem never did.
As for Mohammed, he was as safe as anybody in Baghdad. He rarely left the neighborhood. His school was a stone’s throw from the house.
Nobody in the family goes into Mohammed’s bedroom anymore. They gave his clothes to the poor. Raheem guesses the rest of his things are still in the room, but he doesn’t know because he can’t stand to look. Only Bashar, the younger brother, is able to cross the threshold. The only time Raheem dreamed about Mohammed, it was about the room. It was a simple dream. Mohammed was looking out of his room, smiling at his father.
More than a year later, I asked Raheem if he thought he was beginning to heal.
“Whenever I am alone, I can’t control my tears,” he said. “Even when I am walking in the street. Alone in the house, and even when I am sitting on my computer during the working hours. But I am always trying to be strong in front of my family.”
Raheem’s wife can’t stand the house anymore.
“Everything in it reminds her,” he says.
I was in Cairo when I heard about Raheem’s son. By then, I had already packed up my apartment. I was staying in a hotel, waiting for a Russian visa. I had asked for another job, and I was going to Moscow, in large measure because I didn’t expect to find any war there. When I got the note about Raheem’s son I was sitting among boxes and dust-streaked notebooks in the Los Angeles Times bureau, packing up all the things I’d written down during six years of chasing war. When I read the news I dropped my head into my hands and cried for a while, sitting there at the computer. I thought about quiet Raheem and the careful, proud way he spoke of his children. Then I wrote him a note. There is nothing you can say. Even if I were there I wouldn’t hug him. We have never touched. And he wrote back, sounding hollow and gracious,
saying thank you. And then I cried some more, even though if there’s one thing I learned at Raheem’s side, it’s that crying doesn’t do any good at all.
For a while Raheem was trying to get a visa to live in the United States. He worked with an immigration lawyer. He fretted over how he would find a job. What kind of job do you want? I asked him. Anything, he said, so that I can offer something to my family. He was fifty-five years old, ready to pick up and start from scratch all over again. Ten years in the Iraqi army, eight years in the hell of the Iran–Iraq war, nine years living alone in foreign countries, missing his children’s childhood so that he could buy them a house. Six years and counting of this latest war. Quiet all the way. Courteous and dignified and careful. Laughing despite it all, listening, offering friendship. All of that and he was still chasing this meager dream: to live in peace and earn enough money to support his family.
I was a little surprised when he told me he was hoping for a U.S. visa. Didn’t he resent the land whose soldiers killed his son? I asked him. Wouldn’t it be hard to live in the United States after what happened to Mohammed?
“Do you mean because he was killed by U.S. soldiers?” he said. “Of course I don’t have such feelings against the Americans.”
“So you don’t blame the Americans for what happened?”
“Not in general. As you know, in each society there are good and bad people. I blame those who have a quick decision of shooting at civilians.”
“For the war itself, for invading Iraq?”
“I don’t blame them for that,” he said. “I was one of those supporting such a step.”
It was true. I remembered our trip into the south. Raheem had been happy. He had been optimistic. I remembered the small smile on his face when he watched the Shiites march in public for the first time. The ice-cream parlor in Nasiriyah that we’d visit at dusk, when the white owls rose out of the swamps and little boys scampered barefooted after a soccer ball in the darkening streets. His morning strolls to the market, the chats he had with strangers. The wonder in his eyes as he savored the days, as we wandered through Iraq together, watching history happen. Back then the future looked clean and good, and Raheem was full of simple hope—that he and his sons would find stable jobs because Saddam was gone. I’ve never seen him so happy again. Every time I made it back to Baghdad in the subsequent years, at some point one of us would say to the other, “Remember that first trip down south?” We’d talk about the people we met, about the amazing things they’d said, about the stories we found, and we’d smile. Iraq had never been that good again.
Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War Page 28