Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [123]
The Palestinian owner is made of sterner stuff than the doctors. Her name is Adela Dajani Labban, a great sprawling lady of unspoken age and iron-colored hair. “I am the wife of the late Dr. Labban, who made this hospital,” by way of introduction. Swathed in black, roped with jewelry, she lounges under chandeliers in a vast drawing room. Her dead husband smiles beatifically down from the wall, enshrined in black and white. She smokes one slim cigarette after another. Her phone lines have been cut for days, and the crash of bombs kept her awake all last night, but she stays. She has lived her life as a refugee, and she is too implacable to keep running.
“I went down yesterday to see them and it was ‘I want my mother, I want my father,’” she sneers a little at the patients’ fragility. “Where am I going to go with 250 people? We can’t go anywhere.” She painted a big red cross on the hospital roof, fashioned white flags from bedsheets, and goes about her business.
“The Israelis are my enemies until the day I die,” she says. “I was born in Jerusalem. My parents died in Jerusalem, and I still have a hospital in Jerusalem. In my class there were seven Jews. Four of them were my friends.”
Labban doesn’t smolder with fury; she doesn’t howl with grief; she doesn’t even seem particularly frightened. It’s as if she can’t be bothered to be impressed by Israel. She has seen all of this before; she was ensconced in this same hospital when Israel occupied south Lebanon in 1982. The soldiers had swarmed over the asylum grounds. “I was very rude to them. Mind you, they did not answer. Ahlan wah sahlan. Welcome. Let them come. I will free the patients and maybe one of them will make a problem,” she cackles.
I stare at her, at her knickknacks and the owlish face of her husband, and think hard. I know everything that I am supposed to know. How she came to be here, and the other facts that shaped the biographies of the Middle East. I see all of it in one glance, how the borders were drawn, religion swept over deserts and through empires, colonialism came and went and came again. I’ve read the books and considered the arguments. I signed up for the listservs of professors and writers who argue over Islam’s perpetual promises and America’s eternal interests. Everybody lying; everybody failing a little, then failing some more. The powerful tripping along, blinded by their own mythology, led astray by their morals. I can see all of it. I am bogged in facts. But here I stand among the mad and maybe that’s all it’s ever been. The Middle East goes crazy and we go along with it. So many of my generation have trooped here for these latest wars—the soldiers, the sailors, the UN workers, the State Department enfants terribles, Mad Max contractors with guns strapped to beefy thighs, the writers and volunteers and freelancers and adventure-hungry travelers. We chased it all down into the Middle East and we came up dry, coughing on other people’s blood.
And now, in the depths of this war, I believe that nobody will ever see this, that Israel will never really look, and America will never really look, either. This is real to nobody. This would never be real to me if I were not here. Oh God just make it stop. Make the bombs stop. There was this policy, and that policy. One war and then another, all of it clumped together. It must have meant something—it seemed to mean a great deal—back when we all went into Afghanistan. Somewhere between Afghanistan and Iraq, we lost our way. The carnage of it and the disorder, all to create a new Middle East. But naturally there would be no new Middle East because the old Middle East is still here, and where should it go? Only a country as quixotic, as history-free, as America could come up with this notion: that you can make the old one go away. Maybe you can debate until it makes sense from a distance, as an abstraction.