Victory in Lebanon
On the second day of the ceasefire I set out for Tiri to see if I could find out what had happened to Amin, Yayah and the rest of the Shaito family. I stopped at Tibnine to confer again with Mohammed Maki at the Red Cross. He told a black post-war anecdote: a man had stopped an ambulance outside a village and flashed a V sign at the Red Cross drivers. Victory! ‘No,’ said the man. ‘Two. There are just two houses still standing in the village.’
All along the roads in the villages in the south Hezbollah had strung up yellow banners:
WE STAYED; WE WERE PATIENT
WE WON THE BATTLE
RICE: THEY WILL NOT SEE UR NEW MEDEAST
Up towards the border, the land stood still, scarred, ochre and sinuous. Along the road, stone terracing, olive groves, fields of dry gold tobacco, purple thistles, goats nuzzling in the needle shade of a few pine trees, cacti and fig trees; in the villages, concrete houses bitten with shell-holes. We drove under arches with pictures of Khomeini, past an old woman sweeping rubble into dust clouds, past wheat fields with burnt patches, craters, boulders, shallow tank embrasures, upturned wedges of road, wrecked cars. The fizz of cicadas filled the air.
‘To Tiri. Okay ahead?’ I asked a man on a tractor dragging the carcass of a bloated cow behind him. He waved me on towards the border frontline. Apart from a couple of fighters sitting sullen in a car with a smashed windscreen, he was the only person I saw to ask.
On the ridge above Tiri I saw the antennae of a UN base in Lebanon, and next to it a field full of collapsed and abandoned Israeli tents. The village below seemed deserted. There was a house pancaked into concrete layers, tank tracks scratched into the tarmac, the bullet holes of small-arms fire. From the opposite direction came a red car and I stopped and asked them through the window, ‘Yayah Shaito? We’re looking for Yayah Shaito.’
The two men in the car brightened, recognizing the name, and told us to follow them. They’d just been watching Israeli tanks withdraw over the ridge. They did not seem to mind a journalist’s intrusion. Yayah was alive, they said, down in the village. ‘But don’t tell him about his brother Mohammed — he only knows there was an accident with the minivan and that his wife was injured. He doesn’t know about his brother being killed.’
The centre of the village was a mess of rubble and smashed masonry; the windows in the mosque were broken. A cluster of men gathered around the car. They all seemed to be fighters: smiling, relieved, sad, proud. They went to find Yayah. One man came out of his basement, where he had been sheltering with two small children for more than a month. I peered inside: the ceiling was bowed from an artillery shell that had come through the floor of the room above it. Dank, dark, no bread, some canned food, no electricity for weeks — he said his seven-year-old son had recited Ali Ali Ali Ali to calm himself through the bombing. An old woman walked past; they said her nephew had been martyred and his body captured by the Israelis. She was tremulous and in tears; the men told her to be patient. Then Yayah came around the corner with a great black pirate beard. I told him I had news from Beirut, that his wife was fine, that his daughter was injured but recovering, and that his sons Ali and Abbas had been very brave.
He was pleased to hear this; he asked a little more about his wife’s injuries and I explained what I knew. The men stood around. There were maybe fifteen or twenty of them, hollowed and tired like the other fighters I had seen; they wore silver Qu’rans on chains around their necks, their pinkie fingernails were kept long. ‘Hiba?’ one asked. A young man pushed forward, thin face, lank hair: it was Jamil, Hiba’s fiancé. His black hair was longer than in the picture Hiba had once shown me, and flopped into his eyes. His forearm was bandaged; he had a red scratch across his nose. He said his arm was not too bad, a little burnt. A burst from an Apache helicopter had killed a friend standing next to him. The others handed me a can of pineapple juice and teased Jamil about Hiba.
‘Don’t talk to him about Hiba! His heart is beating so hard when he hears her name. Look, he will start crying!’
Jafar, a fighter with dirty blond hair and an easy-going air, went to get a rucksack they had found on the body of an Israeli bulldozer driver they had killed. He roared back on his dirt bike; in the tenuous calm it sounded like a tank grinding up the road. It made me nervous, which made him laugh. It was an ordinary black rucksack with red Hebrew lettering on it. Inside, a life for a few days: underwear, an empty can of Red Bull, a packet of Winston cigarettes.
‘Red Bull — look, he needed energy to drive his bulldozer,’ one of them said.
‘Does it work, Red Bull?’
‘Yes, when I went on Haj I had two cans. It really keeps you awake.’
They had the dead Israeli soldier’s wallet and they showed me his army card. A young man, born in 1981, handsome, olive-skinned — he looked the same as the circle of faces peering into his personal effects. He could have been any one of them and there was a respectful quiet as they recognized this, sifting through the redundant credit cards, turning on his mobile phone — it still had some power and the display came up in Hebrew.
Jafar pulled out a picture of the dead soldier’s baby son. Then he took his own wallet out with a picture of his own son, the same age with the same chestnut curls. The dead Israeli was a mirror.
‘It was too bad he had children. Poor guy,’ said Jafar, enmity spent.
‘He was small. He was not a big man,’ said one of the men.
‘In a way he was just like us.’