Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [113]
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