Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [81]
Somebody was reading prayers; the voices rang off the walls:
God is strength.
Nothing exists or was born or is created that is stronger.
There is no God but God.
The people in these rooms had the power to take the country someplace, but they had to decide where. We stood in a dwindling circle of time. Somewhere a cleric prayed; his voice piped through the rooms. The voices turned panicked as private grief swelled into something public and general. Soon they would move into the street, they would put Hariri in the ground and turn to face this new Lebanon.
“May God grant us victory over our enemies and avenge the crimes of the killers,” the cleric said. “The enemies give us no methods to make up for this loss.”
A middle-aged woman turned to her friends and spread her hands. “We’re not going to remain silent anymore,” she wept. “He wouldn’t speak, but we’re going to speak for him now. Speak, and don’t be afraid.”
We were moving then, past the green lawns and the boxwood hedges, into streets that seethed with souls. Steel paddles of news helicopters pounded the day. They waited for miles, in lines that stretched all the way down to the center of town, and everybody was yelling now, spitting out their slogans.
They’ve killed progress by killing Hariri!
May God break the heads of those who’ve broken our backs!
Bashar, what do you want from us? Just leave us alone!
We waded down in the trail of the coffin, pushing against strangers’ skin and breath, and all along the road people cried, people screamed about Syria and Hariri and God, people waved flags, people stepped on one another and collapsed in the arms of strangers. Down at Martyrs’ Square they flooded the pavement, blanketed rooftops, dangled like spiders from the construction crane at the side of Hariri’s mosque. Because, yes, Hariri had been building a mosque, the biggest and most sumptuous Sunni mosque Beirut had ever seen. He died before the mosque was finished, but they laid him to rest in its shadow all the same, with thousands of flowers and candles and drugged white doves blinking dazedly into flashing cameras. Lebanon is stuffed with martyrs, but Hariri would be the most resplendent martyr of all time. They wedged him right into the heart of Beirut. Whatever he did in life would be nothing compared to what his death could achieve. There was nothing Hariri’s followers wouldn’t do in the name of his blood.
There is a chunk of Beirut that stands on a foundation of garbage. Like many of Lebanon’s curiosities, the explanation for it traces back to the civil war. The city cleaved into two during the fighting, split by a no-man’s-land that cut through the middle of town, from the shore past the prime minister’s office and back toward the airport, and everything wound up on one side or the other. The municipal garbage dump was east of the divide. So people in west Beirut threw their trash into the sea, and the toilet paper and broken plastic things and rusting hubcaps piled and fermented and packed and gelled into solid ground. The dump became earth and the size of Beirut grew. Things like that happen during a war; they happen to people and to cities, too. The landscape changes; the ground shifts forever. And then afterward you’ve got a city built on garbage, a place smooth and cured on the surface, but rotten at its roots.
I thought a lot about that garbage the first time I visited Beirut. It was back in 2003, and I came to write about the city’s architectural rebirth. Hariri had razed the shell-chewed skeletons and put in a Tower Records and sidewalk bistros and Häagen-Dazs. New limestone was quarried down out of the mountains and all the destroyed buildings were put back together, pane by pane, stone by stone. The apple smoke of water pipes hung in the streets; Gucci and Rolex opened boutiques where gold watches and alligator shoes never went on sale because the Saudis and Kuwaitis poured in with their bottomless purses. Few honest Lebanese could afford to shop or eat there, it was true, but the tourists came flocking back and, anyway,