Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [124]
Voices murmur as we pass from room to room in the women’s section, and patients perch like drooping birds in their barred space, human ornaments against white walls.
“Do you know my brother? He’s in Riyadh,” says a woman named Mariam Khalil. She is curled onto a cot, eyes chasing shadows around the walls. “I’m trying to fly to London. I want to go out of here but I don’t know how to go with the war. I don’t know how to go, how to do.” She asks me to call her children. She wheedles and bosses until I write down her husband’s name and telephone number. Tell him to come and get me, she says.
I move toward her neighbor, but Mariam doesn’t want me to go. “She don’t understand anything,” she shouts. “I tell her there’s a war …”
“I don’t know,” echoes the other woman. “There’s a war. The airplanes.” She hauls her knees into her soft chest, and begins to rock back and forth. “They are just hitting and hitting.” And then she giggles.
I wade deeper, and feel the excitement in the room rise. The women are thrilled by the diversion of a visitor. They touch my clothes, my hair, peer anxiously into my notebook, eyes gobbling up words they don’t understand. The frenzy grows, blurring the cascade of awful thought. A woman with dark, matted hair bats madly at her own head, driving away invisible insects; another laughs hysterically.
There is a fifty-five-year-old woman who has colored her fingernails blue and purple with a magic marker. Somebody has shorn her hair unevenly; it spits out at odd angles, thinned to her scalp. A woman in teal hides her face in the corner. A woman pulls on her hair and looks out the window. A woman sits with her mouth frozen downward, as if she will frown for the rest of her life, through war and peace, just sit and frown.
Does everybody here know there’s a war? I ask.
“We all know there’s a war,” one of the women says. Her face cracks and she begins to cry. The other women see her and they start, too. Everybody around her sits and weeps like children, with the purity of contagious emotion.
I move along to another room, leaving the weepers behind, and a woman grabs at my hand. There is fever in her brown eyes, in her flushed cheeks. “Make a party for me this evening!” she breathes. “I will fall in love with you.”
A fat young woman flops onto a cot on her back, and bops her feet up and down to unheard beats. “Elvis Presley, Elvis Presley, Elvis Presley …” she chants.
“Can you afford to make me teeth?” another woman asks me.
I let myself get lost in the flow of free associations and interruptions, slipping further and further off the axis. It feels good.
A woman is singing opera. “I’m Armenian,” she informs me, spreading her robed self like a proud butterfly showing off its wings. “I am an opera singer.”
At her back, not to be outdone, the Elvis fan begins to sing, too.
“Let’s twist again,” she belts at the ceiling, “like we did last summer …”
The song follows me out of the ward as I walk away from the delirium, back to the war and the madness that lurks outside the gate.
The war was over a few days later. Israel agreed to a ceasefire and, as a last gesture, dropped more than a million cluster bombs over southern Lebanon. It was a dirty end to a dirty war. Cluster bombs are nasty and deadly, lying in the grass like innocent plastic things, tempting children and still killing them months later, when the winter settled over the earth and Ramadan came to wrecked towns. Long after the world had relegated