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By Root 416 0

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!”