Victory in Lebanon
Ali, Abbas and Hiba were evacuated to Beirut. I went back to the capital, too. The hospital in Beirut was the same as in Tyre: a war of corridors. A juxtaposition of clean white blandness and sobbing figures in black; of efficient nurses and X-rays and the mess of torn flesh that the bandages hid. Everywhere journalists tried to jot down particulars of scabbed faces, yellow bruised jaws, loops of IV tubes. The stories seemed all the same, the war flattened into two dimensions: large bombs and bleeding civilians. A stark, uneven propaganda. The photograph of Ali and his mother was printed on the front page of newspapers all over the world. Ali and Abbas’s sister needed plastic surgery on her face; their mother had pins put in her arm.
Shaito relatives kept sombre vigil. The women were wrapped in black hijab; the men were piously courteous, touching their right hand to their heart in greeting instead of shaking my hand. For days, their lives seemed narrowed to the corridor itself. The Shi’a under bombardment retracted into outraged victimhood and leaned on sufferance for solace.
‘Somehow God will revenge all of this.’
‘Be patient, God will revenge. They are suffering as we are suffering. They will go back to the diaspora, in time, and they will suffer what we are suffering now.’
Hiba had moved her gold engagement ring from her bandaged right hand to her left. She introduced me to her brother, called Haidar, a policeman who guarded the Cypriot embassy. She was leaning on his shoulder for support; he was whispering to her the bereavement mantra of patience. He was barely twenty, tall, taut, lithe, with black winged eyebrows and a sense of brooding, coiled temper, cut with a wide, shy smile. He was dressed in the sharp uniform of Shi’a cool: tight jeans with architectural seams and a tailored black shirt with white stitching detail and poppers on the cuffs. Around his neck was a heavy silver chain with a sword of the martyr Ali. His hair was grease-gelled into curly, spiky quiffs and the fingernails of his pinkie fingers were grown long.
A week later Haidar met me in a cafe in deserted downtown Beirut. It was a Sunday afternoon and we could hear the heavy thuds as the southern suburbs were being bombed. A few days before, he had driven south to retrieve the body of his and Hiba’s father from the minivan. The body had been there for ten days, foetid and rotting. He said his father was just a yellow inflated torso with legs; dogs must have taken the arms.
‘Even if I am dead I will see this scene, even when they are putting me in my own grave.’
I could feel Haidar’s distracted energy, angry and helpless. He kept calling friends in the southern suburbs to see what buildings had been hit and getting up to check the ticker-tape news scrolling across the TV screen.
‘They are going to hit every building with a Hezbollah flag on it.’
I saw Haidar a couple of times in those middle weeks of the war. He was in a torment and he seemed to swing between laughing depression and bravado fear. He was not sleeping; every day there was more bombing in the southern suburbs and he would take his moped and speed down there, looking for new damage, drawn to the danger, escaping, returning. He told me, ‘I feel like I am going to explode.’
Once Haidar showed me a photograph on his mobile phone. It was taken on Jerusalem Day, the Israeli national holiday on which Hezbollah organizes martial displays in front of crowds waving green and yellow flags with the party’s fist and Kalashnikov logo. It was a picture of a Hezbollah paratrooper in full camouflage fatigues, black webbing and an M16 across his chest and a black balaclava over his head, abseiling down a building for show.
‘This is my brother Amin,’ he told my translator proudly, and then recanted — Hezbollah secrecy — telling him to say it was a neighbour instead.
But now Haidar had received a telephone call from a sheikh in Tiri with the news that Amin had been seriously wounded. Amin was older than Haidar, disciplined, pious, modest, fair-haired and well thought of. Haidar said that people were always telling him he should be more like his brother; he twitched a laugh, shrugged. He was trying, but — his father was dead, his elder brother may be dying too. I asked him how he felt about his brother. He tried to be patient in the face of God’s will.
‘He has chosen this road and you can’t get sad about it.’