Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [118]
No, we are going forward.
There’s nobody there. Nobody at all.
They won’t take us.
We haven’t been able to get out of the house for twenty days.
The car rolls by slowly, rocking and rising over the dents in the road. Little boys sit crammed in the trunk. Everybody looks. Nobody speaks. Their eyes are empty and dead. When we try to interview the refugees, they interrupt to beg.
There’s nobody there. Nobody there. Take us to Tibnin. We’ve been in the shelter two weeks, they’ve been hitting us, they hit the house. When we heard there was a ceasefire we left. We are just eating apples we can find, drinking water from the wells.
I found a pack of cigarettes in a store. I will give you some. All of them. Please.
The cicadas sing in the dying grasses. The cicadas will sing on the bones.
They won’t take us.
We drive on, through the dying grass, leaving the refugees to fend for themselves. I tell myself we will find them on the way back. I remind myself this is the right thing to do. I am sick with myself.
On the edge of town there is a hospital on a traffic circle. A lone doctor stumbles from the shadows, blinks his green eyes, and says, “It’s been like hell.” There is no power and no light. He has hauled a dusty cot over to the open doorway where the sun is smacking the pavement outside.
“We’re trying to work over here where there is light.”
Blood crusts the cot and the floor and hangs in the air. He has no staff left, only a bottle of iodine and this cot hauled over into filtered sunlight.
“You see there is not much we can do except first aid and CPR.”
They bombed the hospital. Light pours through the hole in the roof.
“The other day we were sitting here counting shells and in half an hour we counted 350 bombs. All the people here are supporting Hezbollah—if you live here and see your people being killed and tortured. There are times we sit and cry because children are in pieces. You have to have somebody to fight for you to protect you. It makes you sick because you see what is happening to you and all the world is talking about you, but it doesn’t stop.”
Shafts of sunlight fall through the ceiling onto mattresses coated with dust. The doctor is fleeing. He says: “Not much you can do anymore.”
We head deeper into town. You have to keep going. Not because it is your job but because it is inevitable. Because you got onto this road and it goes only forward, not back, and you can’t change it.
Bint Jbeil was a small, hilly town with buildings and streets, but now the center of town has vanished. The buildings were crushed and crumbled into great dunes of wreckage, mighty and unmovable, as if they were swept into place by centuries of wind. The streets have disappeared underneath the dunes. Consider this word, wreckage. It means every thing in town, mangled and mixed. The buildings smashed into chunks of concrete, tangles of rebar, broken doors and windows and screws and nails and framed pictures and stoves and refrigerators and beds and closets. It is toys and lamps and bowls and potted plants. Mostly it is the broken buildings themselves. When you melt it all down, the structures are greater than their content. You can’t drive into town because there are no more roads. You can only look down at the awesome tides and dunes of a broken city and surmise where the roads once ran. The silence is enormous and relentless. The sky is full of God and sun and Israeli warplanes, looking down from one vast, blank eye.
We park and I can see there was a road leading down the hill, and so I walk along it over the wrecked buildings, the frames and thresholds of shops gaping on either side, vomiting their dirty guts of toys and soda pop and dresses and medicine. I found a pack of cigarettes in a store. I will give you some. All of them. Those refugees on the road, where did they come from? There can be no life here.
There is a noise over to the right, the mewing of a wounded cat. But I look and it is worse; it is an old woman.
“Take me to the hospital,” she calls. “I want a drink.”
There are some other