Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War (34 page)

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.

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.”