Victory in Lebanon
The Shaitos came from Tiri, a southern village set into a gully a few kilometres from the border. Most of the extended family lived in Beirut’s southern Shi’a suburbs and returned to the village at weekends and in the summer. They had sheltered in a relative’s house there when the war began, fifty of them together. Twelve days passed. The children wailed through the bombing, the toddlers imitating the boom-boom noises, and food began to run short. All day, all night, they could hear Israeli drones humming overhead. Hiba’s father, Mohammed, was always fond of birds and he had brought a bulbul, a little songbird, with him to the house; one night, driven mad by the bombardment, it flew into a wall and died.
The Shaitos had only three cars and no one wanted to have to divide the family into who went and who stayed. Finally it was decided to send as many as they could in the three cars, and the rest would hire a minivan and driver to take them the next day. A sum of $1,000 had been agreed. In the morning, the driver arrived with his minivan and the eighteen remaining Shaitos packed in: Ali and Abbas and their sister and their mother; Hiba and her sister; her parents, their grandmother and several others. Ali and Abbas’s father, Yayah, Hiba’s brother Amin, and Hiba’s fiancé stayed behind: they had their duties.
The driver locked the doors so that they wouldn’t fly open around the bends as he drove, and set off. He drove fast through the hills of southern Lebanon, past deserted villages and petrol stations blown to ashes. There were craters in the road and sometimes the driver had to slow down and coax the van, low on its axles, across the earthen culverts. Around a bend, the road fell steeply into a valley to their right; on their left was a hill planted with an olive grove. Ahead they saw a car that had been hit only a few minutes before. It was still smoking. The driver was dead — there was just a black figure of solid unmoving shadow at the wheel — but his passenger was crawling on the ground injured. He seemed to be calling to them or reaching to them. The driver, worried, drove faster. Some of the Shaitos said they should pick him up, but he did not want to.
‘No, we cannot stop,’ he said. Then a missile hit the road close. The explosion swayed the van and the windows broke into tiny, nicky pebble pieces. Ali thought to himself, ‘Khalass, that’s finished, we’re gone now. They are going to hit us.’
Then the second missile hit. There was a silence of shock and burst eardrums. Everyone was covered in blood. Still they were quiet; no one screamed. Ali and Abbas had their clothes torn to shreds, their faces blasted with sooty debris. ‘When we were hit,’ Ali said, ‘there was no sound, only blood splashing.’ The missile had hit almost directly in the centre of the roof of the van and torn a ragged hole. Underneath the hole sat the half-headless body of Hiba’s father, Mohammed, his arms resting surreally on the window. Ali jumped from the window and dragged his mother to safety. Their sister Ghadir hopped, her whole face red with blood, holding her left hand awkwardly.
It took twenty minutes, maybe a little longer, for the Red Cross to reach them. Behind the ambulances were two or three cars of journalists. As an aunt was prised carefully out of the wreckage and the rest of the survivors loaded into ambulances, a photographer knelt and took pictures of Ali’s mother reaching with her hand to touch her son’s face. Mother and child; almost a pietà. Her left arm was nearly severed at the bicep and she was almost unconscious with pain. She looked up at Ali and told him to take care of his brother Abbas and his sister Ghadir. Then her eyes rolled back into her head.
All this Ali and Abbas told me later, at the hospital. A nurse stopped at the door and asked if anyone knew who the parents of an eight-month-old baby were. Ali kept repeating, ‘My grandmother was still breathing. She was still breathing. She was trapped inside and no one could get her out.’ Hiba nodded, quiet, very still and fragile, as she told me her father was dead.