Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [116]
Allah hu akbar. God is great.
Noses tip up into the sky. What will they do, somebody asks, bomb us here? Maybe they will, says somebody else. Maybe they will even kill the dead.
Somebody will stop it. They must, because it can’t continue. The United States will call for a ceasefire. “We are urging restraint,” Bush says. The bombs keep falling. A ceasefire would be “a false promise if it returns us to the status quo,” Rice says. These words sound like rusted tin, scraping at skin, breeding infection. Anonymous Washington officials tell reporters that they won’t even try until next week. Hezbollah needs to be defanged, they say. How many will die before next week? The two soldiers are no longer the point; it’s turned into something bigger, about defeating terrorism and this interminable fight for something intangible.
A dead body rots in an old sedan. The car was hit on a dirt road that dips through the shadows and green leaves of a banana grove. The Mediterranean rolls nearby. The car is blown open on one side. Somebody keeps saying, “That’s a body? I can’t see it.” Maybe that was me. All I hear now is the voice, high and weird against the dead silence of war. And somebody else says, “There. There. See the head? See the arm?” I am not a photographer and I feel dirty, like we’ve paid to peek at something pornographic. The body is a dark gelatin mold, melting, spreading, vanishing into the fabric of the car seat, into the shirt he wore the day he died. In a nest of man-made things, the flesh is the first to go. We, the people, are the most delicate of all. The stranger rots as the war goes on. Finally, somebody comes and cleans everything away. We drive by one day, and the car is gone.
One day there is a tiny baby girl. She washed into the Tyre emergency room in a wave of bloodied families who’d been bombed trying to drive north. Nobody knows which family is hers. She is dressed in little overalls with rainbows and bears—six to eight months, the nurse says. I don’t know whose baby it is, I just found it here. I stand and look at her and she looks back at me from the nurse’s shoulder. Her body smells of burned meat. Her baby hair is scorched to her scalp, each strand shocked straight out, the end dipped in charcoal. Her sausage arm is bleeding. Her face is bruised.
The baby doesn’t make a sound. She lays limp and passive, sucks on a pink pacifier, and stares at the wailing, bleeding emergency room through brown eyes, one frozen pinpoint in a swirling storm. The baby is in shock. I didn’t know that babies could go into shock—shock without language, without reason. They will take her to see a doctor, so the nurse lays her down on the cold plastic sheet of a big adult stretcher. The baby shatters back to emotion, she writhes and screams, and they put a hand on her belly to keep her still and wheel her away, parentless and burned. I look at my cell phone. It’s only noon and the whole day is still to come.
Then a bomb crashes to earth just outside the door, and I run to see.
Another day, I am in a tiny hillside hospital in Tibnin. The grass is on fire from Israeli shells, heaving up smoke and confusion. The hospital is packed with 1,500 refugees and Israeli shells slam to earth outside. There is nothing but fear here, no doctors or food. More hungry, thirsty, crazy people pour in every hour to curl together in hunger and shiver in the heat. They have no clean water and they are wracked by diarrhea.
I climb down the stairs, into the deep caverns of the hospital basement. People lurk like medieval things in their grotto. Quivering light leaks from a few broken candles. Babies cry in the darkness. The elderly and the sick are strewn like crumpled scrap paper on the floor. I am walking through another age, a medieval prison, something that can’t exist now. I turn a corner and the air is a sheet of black, embroidered with voices.
There’s no water.
The