Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [80]
The day of the funeral, I made my way to that house through the streets of West Beirut. The capital was in shock that day. Overnight, Hariri had become the martyr of a new Lebanese mythology; his image was washed clean and his critics fell silent. Hariri’s death had been the obliteration of an idea, an improbable promise. He had told the Lebanese that it was all right to leave the civil war behind, divorcing them day by day from guilt and blood. Hariri had bestowed sweet forgetfulness on a stripped and silent place, a country withering under the weight of memory. In the end they could overlook the suspicion that he had cheated them—and which Lebanese leader had truly clean hands?—because he had restored a national faith, and Lebanon had discovered that faith was something it needed more than money. These ideas were embedded in the image of Hariri, and that was part of the shock. The assassination told the Lebanese that violence would suck them back down. People believed Hariri had been killed for turning against Syria, and his assassination became a focus for all resentment amassed in the fifteen years since the end of the war—for the sense that Syria had hijacked the country into a military occupation, thick with corruption and heavy with political repression. Sunnis, Christians, and Druze vowed a revolution, an intifada, to drive Syria out of the country.
Now mourners poured into the Hariri home, jammed the metal detectors and thronged the steel elevators that slid silently between immaculate floors. I was carried along by anxious bodies, through marble hallways and reception rooms as big as bowling alleys, laid with Persian carpets and cornered with Phoenician artifacts. Hariri’s wife, sister, and daughter waited in the women’s sitting room, their red faces and black dresses and blown-out hair draped in scarves. Women filed in to kiss their cheeks and squeeze their hands, then stood whispering through painted lips. Waiters circled with thimbles of bitter yellow coffee and teacups fragile as skin. It was almost time to take the bodies out, to start the slow parade down into the city center and sink Hariri into the dirt. The women were nervous and sick with it; they didn’t want to see the bodies go. His coffin was in the hall, smothered in a Lebanese flag and flanked by the coffins of his dead bodyguards. Everybody drifted and milled, wringing hands, dabbing eyes.
“God raise them,” somebody called, and all the grief tamped down under polished skin and polite faces suddenly throbbed in the hall. Women wailed and bent, bodies wilting over the coffin. Men with steely hair and tailored suits thrashed the air with strings of prayer beads, dropped heads into hands, and keened. “If you love him, let us lift him.” Pallbearers tried to peel the women off the box that held whatever pieces remained of Hariri.
Marwan Harmadeh limped through the crowd to the edge of the coffin, swaying heavily between a walking stick and a young nurse in a white coat. Harmadeh had been an early, outspoken critic of Syria and he had been targeted first; that was four months earlier and he still couldn’t walk properly. The bomb killed his driver but he survived. Now another man stepped briskly to Harmadeh’s side, and a look of understanding slid between them. It was Talal Salman, the editor of As-Safir newspaper, whose cheek had been trenched by a bullet during the civil war. We are scarred, just like our city, Salman had told me a year earlier. All the lions are here, I thought. The two men stood straight and haughty, and stared at Hariri’s coffin. They looked and looked until tears spilled down their faces, these proud and body-broken men. Then they stood together