Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [115]
Hospital workers holler out the names as they deliver down the remains: stiff long things mummified in sheets of clear plastic or old blankets, bound with duct tape. Some are broken into pieces, loose in black garbage bags. They nail down the pine lids, spray-paint the names on top, and set the coffins out on the sun-baked clay of the camp road. The street fills slowly with coffins, and people stand around and stare.
The masked man in the trailer door holds up a cake box. He pulls out a baby, purple and mottled, so tiny you can’t tell whether it had been born yet when it died. “Look at this!” he shouts.
“Oh no no no,” a man at my side mutters. “God is great!” shout the others.
I pull myself out of the crowd and pace on the grass, where the nailed coffins wait. A doctor looks down at the dead, shaking with anger.
“They can’t fight Hezbollah because Hezbollah is not an army,” he spits the words. “They kill the people because they think it’s the only way to stop Hezbollah.”
This is funeral as indoctrination, and rage is fiercer than grief. The sadness is just a pale shadow on a burning day. The cheap spectacle of rotting bodies and a purple baby is more than a society can tolerate without hardening into hatred. You could stare into the enormous eyes of little boys and watch them turning to rock. You could feel it all taking hold, driving forward, another generation crushed, another generation rising. One war breeds another war. We create what we try to kill. Gaze too long into an abyss and the abyss also gazes into you, Nietzsche said. The Americans, the Israelis, say they want to destroy Hezbollah, but what does it mean? Hezbollah is rooted inside these people, in their houses and neighborhoods and bellies. The more people you kill, unless you kill all of them, the stronger Hezbollah will live in the ones who remain. They would do anything for Hezbollah, yes, and it was naive to expect anything different from Shiites in the south. It is a matter of fact that Hezbollah formed up as a guerrilla force to fight back against an Israeli invasion. These people have it fixed in their minds that Israel finds some reason to invade their land every generation. That is a one-sided view, yes of course, but it’s the one they have, the one all victims will always have. There is a reason we can’t depend upon victims to mete out justice in courts. “Every time there’s an Israeli war, we have a massacre in my family,” one of the women tells me. Now the Lebanese army watches, mute, as a foreign invasion unfolds. The president swims laps in his crystal swimming pool; he can see Beirut burning from his manicured lawns. The prime minister cries on TV and flies to Rome to beg the West to make it stop. Hezbollah snatches up Iranian-bought guns and fights back. This is not romantic lore; it is cold fact.
“Where are the young men?” An old woman moans a mourning song. “Where are the young men?” She puts her head into an empty coffin.
The dead bake in the sun. The men turn their palms to heaven and pray. The Lebanese army has sent trucks and soldiers to move the bodies. This is the first time I’ve seen the army deploy since the war began. Silence congeals thick as pudding when the coffins pass on the shoulders of soldiers. They load the coffins into green army trucks and drive to a vacant lot littered with telephone poles and bulldozers. They have dug a long trench into the sandy, salty earth. The earth is ready to swallow the bones. The shadows are thin and elongated now. The crowd from the refugee camp stands and watches.
A man with white hair scrambles to the edge of the trench. “Hey Americans!” he bellows. “This is what Bush wants! This is what this dog wants! It’s full of children!”
An elderly woman in black perches like a crooked crow at the edge of the grave. “My darling Mariam, my only daughter,” she moans. “Twenty-seven years old, my darling, twenty-seven years old.”
Somewhere