Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War (33 page)

We jounce over the dirt trenches and wrecked roads. Refugees trickle toward us, roll past, and push on, Beirut beckoning them north. You never know what people will bring at a time like this. A cow skids and stumbles in a flatbed truck. Sofas are lashed with clothesline to station wagons. Children turn their faces to us, wary and pinched. I keep my notebook in my lap and write everything down. The notes are a filter; I am watching but not really here. I am on the other side of writing. The car windows are open and there is the sweet breath of honeysuckle, the hum of bees.

There is nothing left for me to do except go south. Nobody is telling Israel to stop the bombs. The Americans say this is the war on terror, part of the New Middle East. There is no end to the war in sight, and nothing to do but go south.

You lie to yourself when you decide to accept more danger.
We will drive to the Litani River, see how it looks, and interview some fleeing refugees. Then, if it feels okay, maybe we’ll keep going
. Israel says there are no civilians left south of the Litani, and so the river is the line where the war loses all mercy. Maybe we’ll keep going: That’s a lie. Of course you will keep going, you will go all the way to the south, to a little bed and breakfast in Tyre. You are traveling with other reporters. You are bringing supplies for people who are already there. You sort of know. But it’s easier to get out of Beirut if you tell yourself that maybe you’ll be back that evening, ordering an omelet and a big cold bottle of water from room service. Just in case, you bring your flak jacket and helmet and satellite phones. Just in case.

We twist up into the mountains. The driver is nervous. He pulls the car over in a village and disappears into a warren of dark, shabby shops where you might find anything at all but nothing of use, like sponges and caged parakeets and old dusty crackers. There are great crowds on the street, everybody pushing around, looking for black-market gasoline, talking about the war, fleeing the war, tasting the war. He comes back with bright orange tape and spells “TV” in big letters on the roof of the car. I am not sure whether it makes us safer or more vulnerable. On we ride.

We can’t avoid the coast road anymore. As soon as cars hit that road they are naked in the crackling heat. They gun it fast, as fast as rusting parts can crank. This is a road of targets. This is a road that is being bombed actually.
Actually
is a word that has been degraded to adornment and punctuation, but it has a meaning too: it means right now, while we are on it. The smoke of fresh strikes snakes up from scorched ground. The sea pokes the horizon like the tongue of a parched man, blue corroded by salt. There are Israeli gunships out in the water, firing in toward us. We are exposed on this road, there is nothing but air between us and the long flat tongue of the sea. We drive in the wrong direction, deeper down into the war. So why shouldn’t they shoot us? I realize that I am forgetting to breathe and swallow down some air.
You
can’t be lucky forever
. My mother has said that to me lately, more than once. She has run out of tolerance. And me, have I? I am conscious of being afraid. In other wars I felt numb, but now some internal Novocain has worn away. Sky, sea, cracked day. Myheartmyheartmyheart won’t stop beating, a dry, sore little hammer pounding at me from within. I breathe deep and it feels like the bones of my chest will crack apart. My jaw is hard and tight.
Don’t think, don’t say a word, not one fucking word, just keep your mouth shut.
I sit and watch and write everything down.

Now the refugees are going fast as hell, flapping undershirts out the windows, bleached rags knotted around their antennas in crude imitation of white flags, begging wordlessly to be spared. Broken-down cars litter the road like forgotten toys; filling stations stand deserted, army checkpoints vacant. We are off the coast road now, following a dirt track through orchards to the river. It is a landscape empty of people, and the soft white powder of the road coats everything. Fruit flashes in the car windows, the green, hard bananas in the trees, dates and oranges, branches pushing in and scraping at my cheeks. Shutters of village houses pulled tight and streets still as plague. We cross the Litani on a sagging makeshift bridge of old wood. We are over the river now and I think of Dante fainting when he crossed the Acheron into hell. I don’t faint, I just sit there thinking about breathing and sensing the planes skimming the sky with dismemberment and death in roaring bellies.

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.