Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [119]
God brought you. God brought you. I didn’t want to die alone.
Somebody has gone into a broken store and found a small bottle of yellow juice, and she sits up and drinks. Her blue bathrobe is slick with dust.
“Don’t leave me. Six days without food. Please take me to the hospital. I can’t walk, I walk a little and I fall down. I’ve spent six nights sleeping down here, there was a little water left in the puddles and I was drinking. I am a widow. I have a daughter in Beirut. I fell on my hand. I can’t hear I can’t hear, there were so many bombs I can’t hear. I’m an old woman. I got tangled up in the electrical lines and tangled up in the stones.”
Other reporters are ministering to her, taking notes and foraging for bottles of water, and I slip away from them. This was a pharmacy once and now it spills its contents, bars of soap, boxes of flu medicine, aspirin—the archaeology of that exquisitely organized time commonly referred to as a few weeks ago. Somehow this is still a summer afternoon and a dragonfly lights on the rebar. The blasted fixtures of a chandelier shop poke at crooked angles. Somebody’s lingerie drawer hangs open, bras dripping down like vines. I hear music and look down to see a singing birthday card open on the ground, chiming “Happy birthday to you,” over and over again.
At the water reservoir at the bottom of the hill, a middle-aged man wanders abstractedly. He wears an old plaid shirt and a baseball cap advertising a tire shop.
“If you write a thousand words it’s not worth one bullet in the head of an Israeli. Thank God there are some tomatoes left in the ground. What’s the benefit? I am asking why. Because I am Muslim? The whole world is crying for Israel to stop and they don’t care. Why do I fight? Why did God create me? Not to be a fighter but it’s an emergency. You think I like it? I hate it. All the time, fighting, fighting, fighting. They occupied Lebanon for twenty years.”
When he talks about Israel he turns and points over the hill. I hear the walkie-talkie scratch from his pocket and understand that he is with Hezbollah. But he is not like the disciplined others. He has been driven a little crazy.
“I can’t tell you my name. What does it matter? I am one person. The only thing that matters is after the war is over we gather money and buy rockets and buy missiles and buy guns. Because nobody in this earth loves us. I can’t believe it. Just because we are Muslims. We won, so what? We won on our land, so what? It is our land, we will win in the end.”
The bombs drive everybody crazy, and there isn’t much you can do about it. He says he is a forty-three-year-old schoolteacher and a fighter.
“There is some resistance, they are seeing you but you can’t see them. It began since fifteen days. Every night, shelling. I saw the tanks burning with my bare eyes. Excuse me for a second.”
He walks across the dirt and snatches a yellow Hezbollah flag from the dirt.
“You know it’s our flag. It can’t be down.”
He stuffs it down his pants. “My friend has been martyred in battle,” he says. Then he starts to cry.
“I wish I were in his place and martyred instead of living this dog’s life. People think we like to fight. They don’t think we want to live with our children and raise them. If you live without your dignity it’s a dog’s life. I swear to God two days ago I had a can of tuna and a dog went by and I couldn’t eat without giving it to the dog. I wonder how God will judge people. Why did God create the earth, why? There is a bright side and a dark side. You stay with one or another. There is no gray side. The gray side is the dark side. Tomorrow they will come and give us a few dollars and say, okay, let’s forget everything, let it pass. But I’ve lost friends, I’ve lost family. You cry for people you lost. You cry for the town. You cry for history. You cry for the Jews too because I know very well they will be