Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [85]
“Okay.”
“All the Shiites are not poor,” she pressed on indignantly. “All the Shiites are not from the south. Look at me. I am a Shiite, too.”
She was a small, lithe woman in her thirties. She looked quintessentially Lebanese, meaning she looked beautiful in a contrived and doll-like way—a beauty concocted from hair dyes and foundation creams and expensive clothes. She wore spike heels, tight jeans, and a sequined Daisy Duck T-shirt under a stylishly distressed leather jacket. A diamond pendant dangled from her neck; her fingers tapered into manicure; glossy hair swished to her shoulders. She was roaming with three shiny-haired, perfumed girlfriends carting signs that said “No to foreign intervention.”
“So what are you saying?” I asked her.
“I’m a Shia. I go to the beaches in my swimsuit. I studied with the nuns. I went to the American University of Beirut. My kids don’t know whether they are Christian or Muslim. Last time somebody asked my son, ‘Are you Christian or Muslim?’ he didn’t know.”
“So,” I said, “do you feel like these demonstrations are creating sectarian trouble?”
“We are with the people over there,” she replied, pointing down the hill to the anti-Syria camp. “But some of them are racist, they’ve been dealing with Israel. They want to divide the country. I have four kids, and sometimes at night I can’t sleep because I’m so worried that my kids will live what I lived during the war.”
“You really think it will come to that?”
“I don’t know. I am very, very worried.”
She was gone, swallowed by the crowd.
The announcer bellowed surprise news: Sayed Hassan Nasrallah is here.
That name! It stirred the bodies and lit the faces. Nasrallah, hunted by Israel, a famous ghost who flitted through underground chambers and hidden offices in the warrens of the southern suburbs, would show his face in the heart of Beirut for the first time in years. “Thank you to Syria,” the announcer cried, heating up the crowd. “Thank you to President Assad.” The men leapt up and down, fists pumping. The women’s faces tipped skyward, saintly and pale, eyes swelling to take him in.
And there he stood, impossible as a hallucination, on a balcony over the Buddha Bar and the Casa del Habano cigar shop. Silence grabbed the crowd by the tongue. But Nasrallah wasn’t talking to them; they were merely his context. Nasrallah was talking to the world.
“If you really want to defend freedom in Lebanon and democracy in Lebanon, then you must look with your two eyes,” he said. “Are we not the people of the Lebanon you love? We tell you we want to maintain and protect our historic ties with Syria and we believe in the resistance.
“Now let me turn to America,” he said.
Fists drove to heaven. “Death to America!”
“You’ve made a mistake with your calculations. Lebanon will not change its name or its history or its politics,” Nasrallah informed America. “Do you think the Lebanese are afraid of American fools? Don’t interfere with our internal affairs. Get your fingers off our country.”
As darkness settled over the streets, there was grogginess in the air; the alarm had shrilled and the dream was gone. This was real. This was the danger that nobody wanted to write or talk about: The “popular revolution” existed only in one half of the country. The dancing in the streets, the fast push for toppled governments and new days, was tearing the country in two. In the tent city on Martyrs’ Square, the activists shivered and stood their ground.
“Those weren’t Lebanese,” they said irritably. “They bused in Syrians. They bused in Palestinians.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But there were Lebanese, too. A lot of Lebanese.”
“Those people are not Lebanese.”
That’s the essence of it, I thought. They see only their sectarian mythology, the stories they tell themselves. They are wrapped in dreams, believing only the narratives of their own creation.
“If they represent half, then we’re the other half,” a student spat out. His tone was almost desperate.
“We can’t get rid of them,” said another student, “and