Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [18]
“How does that clock know when it’s night and when it’s day? It’s a twelve-hour clock, but it never chimes at night.”
He looked at me. His thoughts were pooled behind pursed lips, behind the stitches they laced into his cheek when they cut off the tumor.
“There must be a little man in there. But,” he looked at me hard, “what does he eat?”
He sighed.
“I can’t think of these complicated questions,” he said.
He tugged at his earlobe, smiled like the Sphinx, and padded off to bed.
Before you get somewhere, it’s hard to take seriously the idea that it will change you.
It’s the oldest story going: you head off to make a mark on the world, but in the end the world marks you, instead. It happened to me, and it happened to the people I knew, and I believe it happened to the country, too.
It doesn’t take long. Once you go a little bit into the business of being a witness, once you have been cut by what you’ve seen, it takes a lot of strength to stop. It doesn’t matter anymore why you went at first; now you are bound to stay. The importance of it gets inside of you, and then nothing else feels important at all, you are pale and flaccid in your days. You sense that you have already lost something in the war, so you stick around waiting for the missing parts to come back, to restore themselves, or at least to lose enough so you don’t notice the gap anymore.
By accident I wound up nowhere, neither here nor there. Listless in Houston. Jagged in New Orleans. Confused in Austin. When the editors asked me to go for a temporary stint in Jerusalem, I told them I’d stay as long as they needed. Then I begged and pleaded and cajoled until they let me move there for good. I would have to go farther, go so far there was no other place to go except home again. I left Texas and moved to Jerusalem, trying to get back home, taking the long way around.
FOUR
TERRORISM AND OTHER STORIES
Armageddon is a place in Israel. I drove there on a golden morning in apricot season. In Hebrew, the name for Armageddon is Megiddo, and Megiddo is an ancient crossroads watered by centuries of blood. The warriors and zealots who prowl the Holy Land have paused for centuries there to decide which direction to take. The roads stretch west to Tel Aviv and the Mediterranean Sea; east to the Galilee; north toward Lebanon; or south toward what is now known as the West Bank. At Megiddo Junction stand a military prison, an old kibbutz, and a bus stop.
The number 830 commuter bus was hit on the dawn run from Tel Aviv to Tiberias, crowded with dozing, daydreaming soldiers, men and women in their late teens and early twenties, on their way to military bases that pepper the mostly Arab-populated Israeli farmlands. A seventeen-year-old boy from Jenin had stolen a car and packed it full of homemade explosives, pulled up alongside the bus’s gas tank, and blown himself up. The boy, Hamza Samudi, had been sent by Islamic Jihad. The Palestinian prisoners in their cells heard the explosion and cheered.
On that June morning, clean breezes and honeyed light fell on the watermelon fields of Armageddon. Sunlight sprayed the yellow grasses and fresh pine trees shaded the road. Pieces of people had gotten blasted onto the roadsides. Sheets of bus siding lay tangled in barbed wire at the prison’s edge. Men in long beards and rubber gloves, Orthodox Jewish volunteers, combed quietly through the grassy slopes, hunting for pieces of human flesh, gathering every last bit of dead body for proper burial. Later that day I found the bus driver in a hospital cot, and he talked about the soldiers in their smart khakis. He knew their faces and their schedules, where they climbed aboard and where they hopped down. They reminded him of his sons, of his own younger days fighting in the 1967 Middle East War. “They were wonderful,” he said.
That was the first suicide bombing I covered, and it sticks there in my memory, the brightness and the death of it. A morning in June; a morning in apricot season. Night had dragged itself out of morning’s way, but no freshness