Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War (6 page)

Everybody wants to hear war stories. They expect the stories to be funny and brave.

It must have been incredible, people said.

Weren’t you scared?

What did your poor mother say?

You are so lucky, they said.

I am lucky, I would repeat, yes I am so lucky. Yes Afghanistan. The people were friendly with us. Really. Even the food was good. Yes, really. There’s something in the light there, a magical quality. An amazing country. Really. No, I haven’t read that, but I should. I know. I don’t know. I am just really lucky.

I was a puppet jabbering in my own hand, filling dead space with words.

I went to see my grandfather in Virginia. He had sounded old on the phone. “A new world order.” He kept saying that. He took me out for dinner and as we sat there drinking whiskey, he started to talk about World War II. He’d joked about it before, about athlete’s foot and drunkenly throwing a Russian soldier down the stairs of an officers’ club. But now he was describing his march across Germany.

The bombs left so few houses intact, he said. When we got tired, we just walked into any standing house we could find and evicted its inhabitants. We sprayed bug killer on the beds, unrolled our sleeping bags, and slept.

I tried to imagine my grandfather, this old man in a tailored suit, peeled of half a century and trudging across Europe, young and uncomfortable. Tried to imagine a war like that, and all the people who had come home to have families and jobs and forget.

“How did the families react to you? Were they scared?”

My grandfather gave me a pointed look. “We had just conquered their country.”

But what was their attitude as they left?

“Sullen.”

Later that night, we sat in the thick quiet of his condominium. The lights of the city quivered in the Potomac far below, marble monuments scattered across its banks like dropped toys. My grandfather scratched at the
Washington Post
crossword, murmuring to himself. I stared at him, wondering how long years of war had faded inside of him. He was bringing up these stories, I thought, to signal to me that I would survive, that we would all survive unless we didn’t, that war was
a condition and part of the continuum. It was something I had touched, and something the country would pass through, and other things would come later. What was the secret to putting war aside, I wanted to ask him. Was it three Scotch whiskeys, taken religiously with dinner? Was it church every Sunday? Was it years? I was too embarrassed to ask, and so I asked him about bigger things.

“How many Americans died in World War II?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I imagine a lot.”

“More or less.”

“Four hundred, five hundred thousand,” he suggested.

“So the World Trade Center was minor, then, after all.”

“Well, yes,” he said. “Except.”

His reading glasses came off.

“America hasn’t known war since Sherman marched through Georgia and left devastation in his wake. That was a war,” he said. “Those of us who went to Europe, we knew, because we saw it. You know now, too. We have that in common.

“But America didn’t know. So that was the worst thing to happen to America in 150 years. And in that context, it is important.”

His enormous grandfather clock clicked and ticked, an hour turned over. He turned his head and frowned at its face.

“How does that clock know when it’s night and when it’s day? It’s a twelve-hour clock, but it never chimes at night.”

He looked at me. His thoughts were pooled behind pursed lips, behind the stitches they laced into his cheek when they cut off the tumor.

“There must be a little man in there. But,” he looked at me hard, “what does he eat?”

He sighed.

“I can’t think of these complicated questions,” he said.

He tugged at his earlobe, smiled like the Sphinx, and padded off to bed.

Before you get somewhere, it’s hard to take seriously the idea that it will change you.

It’s the oldest story going: you head off to make a mark on the
world, but in the end the world marks you, instead. It happened to me, and it happened to the people I knew, and I believe it happened to the country, too.

It doesn’t take long. Once you go a little bit into the business of being a witness, once you have been cut by what you’ve seen, it takes a lot of strength to stop. It doesn’t matter anymore why you went at first; now you are bound to stay. The importance of it gets inside of you, and then nothing else feels important at all, you are pale and flaccid in your days. You sense that you have already lost something in the war, so you stick around waiting for the missing parts to come back, to restore themselves, or at least to lose enough so you don’t notice the gap anymore.

By accident I wound up nowhere, neither here nor there. Listless in Houston. Jagged in New Orleans. Confused in Austin. When the editors asked me to go for a temporary stint in Jerusalem, I told them I’d stay as long as they needed. Then I begged and pleaded and cajoled until they let me move there for good. I would have to go farther, go so far there was no other place to go except home again. I left Texas and moved to Jerusalem, trying to get back home, taking the long way around.

A
rmageddon is a place in Israel. I drove there on a golden morning in apricot season. In Hebrew, the name for Armageddon is Megiddo, and Megiddo is an ancient crossroads watered by centuries of blood. The warriors and zealots who prowl the Holy Land have paused for centuries there to decide which direction to take. The roads stretch west to Tel Aviv and the Mediterranean Sea; east to the Galilee; north toward Lebanon; or south toward what is now known as the West Bank. At Megiddo Junction stand a military prison, an old kibbutz, and a bus stop.

The number 830 commuter bus was hit on the dawn run from Tel Aviv to Tiberias, crowded with dozing, daydreaming soldiers, men and women in their late teens and early twenties, on their way to military bases that pepper the mostly Arab-populated Israeli farmlands. A seventeen-year-old boy from Jenin had stolen a car and packed it full of homemade explosives, pulled up alongside the bus’s gas tank, and blown himself up. The boy, Hamza Samudi, had been sent by Islamic Jihad. The Palestinian prisoners in their cells heard the explosion and cheered.

On that June morning, clean breezes and honeyed light fell on the watermelon fields of Armageddon. Sunlight sprayed the yellow grasses and fresh pine trees shaded the road. Pieces of people had gotten blasted onto the roadsides. Sheets of bus siding lay tangled in barbed wire at the prison’s edge. Men in long beards and rubber gloves, Orthodox Jewish volunteers, combed quietly through the grassy slopes, hunting
for pieces of human flesh, gathering every last bit of dead body for proper burial. Later that day I found the bus driver in a hospital cot, and he talked about the soldiers in their smart khakis. He knew their faces and their schedules, where they climbed aboard and where they hopped down. They reminded him of his sons, of his own younger days fighting in the 1967 Middle East War. “They were wonderful,” he said.

That was the first suicide bombing I covered, and it sticks there in my memory, the brightness and the death of it. A morning in June; a morning in apricot season. Night had dragged itself out of morning’s way, but no freshness broke through a swelter that warped the windows and stuck to the skin, even at dawn.

Israeli news wires are trails of gasoline; the bombs are matches. News races, burns, and gallops. Seventeen people died at Megiddo, most of them burned alive. Eighteen, if you count the teenaged bomber, and I think we should. Islamic Jihad bragged that it had carried out the bombing on the “Zionist bus.” The group’s leader, Sheikh Abdullah Shami, said the attack marked the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Middle East War, when Israel seized the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights, and East Jerusalem, wresting the land from Arabs. “We say to the enemy, we will continue to destroy the protective shield Sharon talks about,” the sheikh said. “They will never enjoy security as long as occupation exists in our land.”

In that spring of 2002, the second Palestinian intifada was nearing two years old. Suicide bombers came by day, and at night Israeli tanks seized Palestinian turf in the West Bank. Things had gotten out of control. Violence fed violence. Blood washed blood. The Israelis launched Operation Defensive Shield, which later morphed into Operation Determined Path. Behind the names, it meant that Israel was reoccupying the West Bank. It meant that the Oslo Accords, the exhaustively argued framework for peace and a Palestinian state, were lost.

It was late afternoon when I drove back into Jerusalem from Megiddo. By then everybody had seen the pictures of the burned bus and the dead soldiers. Israeli tanks had already groaned into Jenin, the bomber’s hometown. I sat in the car, waiting for a light to change at the edge of East Jerusalem. The heat hummed and buzzed. Hasidic boys in their brimmed hats tripped along toward the walls of the Old City, carrying bottles of soda pop, sweating into long-sleeved oxfords.
An older Palestinian man crossed their path and they surrounded him, jeering and taunting. They crunched their features in disgust and threw their shoulders back, unscrewed a bottle of Sprite and splashed the older man’s face and shirt. These are our streets and our city, their stances said. They were poking the Arab and spitting on him. A taxi squealed to the curb; the Arab driver pushed up his sleeves as he ran, shoes slapping clumsily over the pavement. Another Arab man leapt out of another car. They pulled the old worker away with pats on the back, threw glowers and threats over their shoulders. The Orthodox boys shuffled off. Jerusalem rearranged itself. The light changed and I drove away. It was over, except that it was never over.

After midnight, tanks and bulldozers arrived at Palestinian Authority president Yasir Arafat’s Ramallah headquarters, the Palestinian government center just over the line from Jerusalem. By first light, the compound had been demolished and Arafat, the crooked president of a country that still doesn’t exist, waddled through the remaining rooms. The walls were blasted off the soldiers’ sleeping quarters, the floors toppled like a fallen layer cake, clothes and wires dripping from the squashed rooms. A skinny soldier shimmied like a child on a jungle gym, sweating and grunting in sock feet, to rummage in the wreckage. Finally he tugged his shoes free of the rubble and held them aloft like trophies; his comrades cheered from the ground below. The summer light came thick and naked, laying it all bare, and Palestinian families walked aghast through the wreckage, silent and stunned, entire clans come together as if on picnic to inspect the broken structure of their national dreams.

Twenty-four hours in Jerusalem spread like a road map to misery.

I knew a Palestinian woman who lived in Jerusalem. She was pretty and slim from living on cigarettes and Nescafé, but her eyes were old and sad. Sometimes she drank iced vodka until she was drunk, leaning over with curses falling out of her mouth, stabbing the night with a cigarette, roaring in broken laughter.

She was still a teenager when Israeli soldiers arrested her for membership in an underground Palestinian political movement. That was back in the bad old days of the first intifada.
Break their bones
.
That’s what Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin told the Israeli soldiers, or so the story goes. Some Israelis insist this was a command to be soft with the Palestinians.
Break their bones but don’t kill them, beat them but don’t shoot them
. But an American reporter who covered that intifada told me he saw Israeli soldiers systematically break the arms of little boys, one by one, working their way through a village, so they couldn’t throw rocks. Israel is merciful; Israel is brutal. The two deathless story lines of the Jewish state, crowding the streets and minds of Jerusalem. Most people believe one or the other, and believe it fervently. It is hard to find anybody who acknowledges that both might be true, and then some.

The Palestinian woman told me her own story one night. We were both drinking and I didn’t take notes, but I never forgot it: When they arrested her and brought her to jail she made the soldiers angry because she yelled at them,
Fucking Jews
,
I wish I were Hitler
. She was embarrassed about yelling those things.
I was so crazy
, she said.
I was just crazy.
She told me that she was tortured for days, beaten, abused, threatened with rape. One day a particularly brutal Israeli interrogator wounded her breast with a nail, left it bleeding. She pulled her blouse aside and showed me the scar, deep and permanent. Then she told me about the young Israeli guard. This stranger, this anonymous Israeli man, sat with her hour after dark hour, fanning her raw wound with a magazine. And all the while, he cried.

I saw her scar, I listened to her words. I don’t know if the story is true, in that I don’t know if it actually occurred. It may have been apocryphal. These are my memories of her memories. And this is Jerusalem, world capital of dubious stories, centuries of stories half forgotten and passed on, stories of saints and prophets and torturers, everybody fighting for the best story, the one that gives you a religion, a claim, a right. But I never doubted the emotional truth behind this one story, and I have kept it because it encapsulated the things I could sense but not say: that after their awful history, locked in a death match for survival, Israelis and Palestinians had become what they never wished to be—one people after all, each one half of a whole, locked together in a union you could not touch or understand from the outside, torturing one another, tarnishing their own souls with each other’s blood, speaking hidden words in voices pitched so only
the other could listen, maybe even loving one another in some secret and sublimated way. Each capable of a cruelty that is deeper because it understands exactly what it does, because it is not blind. It is a story not only about pain inflicted, a strong torturer and a helpless victim. It is that story, yes, but it’s also a story of a weeping teenager confronting the underbelly of his own country, fighting his conscience with nothing but a magazine to flap in the dark. It’s about the pain that turns back to gnaw on the tormenter, about the damage we do to others because we want to protect ourselves, and how that damage echoes back into our own souls. This is not, perhaps, a productive way to think about foreign affairs, least of all in the Middle East, where power is currency and weakness must be hidden at all costs. In this part of the world, statesmen survive because of what they smash, not because of what they say. And yet there was truth and humanity in this story, and so I kept it. Maybe I needed the story, and need it still, to organize my thinking. Maybe I clung to it because it helps, when people are killing their neighbors, to believe they cry over it in the dark. Years later, I do not track down the woman who told me the story. I don’t want to double-check. Maybe I am afraid she will take it away again. I have lived with it too long to give it back now; it has become mine, and that is how the stories of Jerusalem have worked for centuries.