Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [120]
I leave the crazy shell-shocked shell of a Hezbollah fighter and climb into the rubble. It’s dirty work and hard climbing over the crushed buildings and broken glass, and I am wearing the same shoes I have had all this time, black leather loafers I brought with me from Cairo, and how long ago was that, anyway? Unblown missiles glint evilly in the sun. There are no walls left standing and so there is no shade, only the enormous sky, pitiless sun, and silence.
A miracle is stirring. The broken, vanished town is full of Lazaruses and they are staggering now into the light. They crawl out on cut legs and bleeding feet, half-dead, half-mad impossibilities, old and fat and weak. They have heard that somebody has come for them. They have crazy eyes and a few things crammed into plastic grocery sacks or cheap duffels. They fall in the rubble and cut themselves. The journalists begin to help. Nobody can bear anymore to stand around taking photographs. They lift the old people and stagger far up the hill where the Red Cross ambulances are stuck, unable to drive into the town that no longer exists on roads that vanished under dunes of wreckage.
A wrinkled woman sits against the lost frame of a shop. Her fingers are coated with clay, as if she has been digging.
We were under the rubble. When I hear that plane it scares me my nerves are shot God help me. Let them come and take me. My brother is ill.
She pours water into his mouth. He is mentally handicapped. He sits cross-legged at her side, giggling and weeping. His tongue lolls out of his mouth.
Are they going to hit us again today?
This is who gets left behind when war comes: poor people, old people, and handicapped people. This is who they are bombing now. In this moment I am numb and still, but I am aware that I deeply hate everybody for letting this happen. I hate the Lebanese families for leaving them here. I hate Hezbollah for not evacuating them, for ensuring civilian deaths that will bolster their cause. I hate Israel for wasting this place on the heads of the feeble. I hate all of us for participating in this great fiction of the war on terror, for pretending there is a framework, a purpose, for this torment. I sit in hatred and write everything down with filthy fingers. An old man perches on the hood of a car that rises from this sea of rubble. His feet dangle bare and swollen from the cuffs of his pajamas. His sister, an old woman, babbles and squints like she is trying to remember something, apologetic and amazed.
Our house fell on top of us. No food no water I’m talking now and I don’t know what I’m saying. He can’t walk at all. I’m talking I don’t know what I’m saying. I can’t even walk. We found muddy water to drink. I’ll never come back to this village I don’t care what they say.
Another old woman is talking to me when I realize I’ve had a rock in my shoe for a long time. This recognition breaks through the glaze of shock—pain has pulsed unrealized. I take off my shoe and it’s full of blood. A thick spike of glass punched through the sole; I’ve been walking on somebody’s shattered window all this while. Well. Oh well. I will tiptoe on that foot. The woman is still talking so I write down what she says. Everybody is cut; neither of us bothers over my bloody foot.
My brother who is blind was living underneath me. He’s still there. I knocked on his door and he said yes I’m still here. I am an old woman staying in my house nobody came for me I can’t walk. I couldn’t take him with me he’s still there every minute I think we are going to die.
Yes, I say. No. You will be all right now. The Red Cross is here now.
The sun is sinking low into the hills. Soon the lull will end and the Israeli bombs will fall again.
SEVENTEEN
I THOUGHT I WAS A SALAMANDER
The war no longer feels temporary. Now there is a hardening, an acceptance of this condition. Roads are death and sky is fear and people scurry down into the scorched earth like moles. The country creaks to freezing under