Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [111]
He looked at me sharply. He sighed. “This is crazy. It’s not worth the money to get killed.”
“I’ll give you another hundred dollars.”
“For a hundred dollars?”
“What do you want? One fifty.”
He sighed again. He shrugged. He nodded toward the car and we trudged over, climbed inside, and shuddered off into war. Bombs and burning spiced the summer darkness. The road twisted and dipped; we wrenched the car through villages to evade bombed-out bridges and fresh, gaping craters. A checkpoint reared from the darkness and a Lebanese soldier filled the windshield, face twisting, screaming at us to get off the road. “There are Israeli jets overhead!” But we kept driving, hearing and smelling the bombs. News flashed on my cell phone: Heavy bombing cuts road from Beirut to the border. I turned it over on my thigh. “We’re almost there now, right?” He ignored me. Long, cold minutes passed. They destroyed the road around us as we drove.
At last the car dropped out of the hills, spun down to the rim of the Mediterranean Sea, out of the dark countryside and onto the empty roads of a city hushed. The driver’s body eased; he chattered and joked. At the curb in front of the hotel, I gave him the money and some guilty words of thanks. Of course, he said as he counted the bills, it was no problem.
I am at the desk of the Commodore Hotel and a huge bellow of sound shakes everything. “What was that?” I snap. The clerk is young and thin and serious. He is running my credit card. He freezes and looks at me. I see him cast for something false to say, but then he simply says, “It’s a bomb.”
“Oh.” I laugh. He does, too. It sounds like we are strangling. I had known anyway. I just wanted somebody else to say it.
Most of the bombs in the capital are falling in the Dahiyeh, the district of sprawling, poor Shiite neighborhoods run by Hezbollah in the southern suburbs. I couldn’t get Hezbollah on the phone so I took a taxi to their offices. I expected to find them, like always, in their shabby rooms, sipping tea under morose portraits of Iranian ayatollahs. Instead I found everything scattered and broken, the Dahiyeh tensed in the unnatural urban silence that means you have come to the wrong place. Israeli planes had started the bombing that would crush the neighborhood to a fairy-tale forest of smashed apartment blocks and yawning craters. Dolls dangled in fallen wires in the shell of a baby clothes shop; cars were twisted to rubble; highway overpasses snapped and collapsed. Hezbollah security recruits buzzed their scooters along cratered streets that reeked of cordite and garbage. They shook their heads: What are you doing here, you’d better get out of here—look at that. They pointed at an unexploded missile; it lay in the gutter in front of Hezbollah’s media office. The Israelis are up there, they said and pointed to the sky.
“The only thing that will scratch your skin is your own nail.” That was the taxi driver on the way out of the Dahiyeh. He meant that Hezbollah did well to kidnap those soldiers. We have Lebanese detainees over there, he said, and what does our government do to get them back? Nothing. At least now we have something to trade. At least now we can bargain. We know we can always depend on our own leaders, on Sayed Hassan Nasrallah.
Refugees pour into Beirut in ragged caravans, abandoning the Shiite places where the bombing is the worst—the southern suburbs, and the entire southern third of the country. They wash into scabby parks and fading schools and distant relatives’ apartments. They wilt in molten July, hungry and thirsty and dirty. Nearly one million people have been displaced, and many of them are poor. It’s a disaster. The Americans can’t get their citizens out fast enough. There are about twenty-five thousand U.S. citizens in Lebanon when Israel begins to attack the country with American bombs. They are shocked, in that American manner of people who are used to liability insurance