BEIRUT, LEBANON
The apartment house was on the Avenue du Gen. Charles de Gaulle, on a cliff at the edge of the sea and its whitewashed facade was stained by the cold steady rain. I asked the cabdriver to come in with me, but he glanced out at the sea, and puffed on a cigarette and said he would wait in the cab. He turned off the lights of the 1971 Impala and kept the motor running. It was very dark.
The entrance to the 10-story building was around to the side, and more apartment houses climbed away behind it, each positioned for a clear view of the sea. There were lights showing in some of the windows, with wooden screens pulled down to the floor of the balconies. A few blocks away was the ruin of the St. George’s Hotel, destroyed two years ago in the civil war.
In the old days, this was one of the wealthiest sections of the city, with apartments renting for as much as $2,000 a month. But then the civil war happened and, when it ended, not many people wanted apartments in Beirut. So the owners kept them off the market rather than rent for less than the accustomed price. Then Israel invaded southern Lebanon and almost 265,000 refugees began making their way to Beirut. Some of them had guns.
One of them was standing right inside the door as I walked into the lobby. He was about 19, with a dark face gullied by acne. He was wearing a dirty dark-green uniform, and he was holding a submachine gun.
He said something in Arabic, barking out the words, and looking menacing. I smiled and slowly put my hands up.
“Press,” I said. “Reporter. I’m an American reporter.” He was very nervous and so was I. Then he shouted something over his shoulder, and another young man came out of the shadows from where the elevators must have been. His boots made a clacking sound on the marble floors. The first kid put the nose of his machine gun against my belly.
“What do you want?” the second one said, in faulty English.
“I am a reporter,” I said, as quietly as possible. “I want to talk to some refugees.”
“Reporter?” he said.
The first one took the tip of the gun away and started searching me. He found my wallet. There was a press card inside.
“For a newspaper,” I said to the second one. “In New York. Here’s my press card.”
“In New York?” he said. “Are you Jew?”
“Irish,” I said. He blinked.
Then the first one found my money clip. It contained some Lebanese pounds, some Italian lire, some dollars: a perfect roll for a spy. He showed it to the second one. They spoke quickly in Arabic.
“If you want to see migrants, you need to help them,” the second one said.
“With money?” I said. My hands were at my side now.
“Yes. Money,” the second one said. A huge truck groaned along the boulevard and the first man stepped to the front of the lobby and looked out. He kept moving the machine gun from one hand to the other.
“Of course,” I said, nodding at the money. “Take all of it.”
The second one had slung his gun over his shoulder, with the barrel pointing at the floor. He seemed relieved that he wouldn’t have to take a shot to get the money. He jerked his head, indicating I should follow. He said something to the first young man, who went back into the shadows. The elevators weren’t working, so we walked up two flights. He produced a flashlight from some where.
“You’re Palestinian?” I said.
“Yes.”
“Were you in the south during the fighting?”
“Yes.”
“What was it like?”
He shrugged. “Soon we go back.”
We stopped on the second floor and he led the way down the hall. He knocked on a door: bop-bop, bop-bop, bop. Something heavy scraped on the tile floor behind the door and then it opened. I could smell dampness and human beings and babies. The door frame was shredded where it had been smashed open. A chain hung from a sprung lock.
I couldn’t see anything in the apartment, but the young man said something in Arabic and a small oil lamp was lit.
“No electric,” he said to me. “They stopped all electric.”
My eyes adjusted to the dim light, and then there seemed to be people everywhere. An old man, with a beaked nose, a dirty white shirt, and a dark vest came forward. Behind him was a girl about 18, a woman in her 60s, and others: two boys about 10, a boy about 14. Somewhere in another room a baby was crying.
“Ask them how long they’ve been here,” I said.
“Three days,” the young man said, without asking. He said something in Arabic, apparently explaining who I was. They all started talking at once. I could see now that we were in a living room area, and people were asleep on two couches and on the floor.
“They want you to write about them,” the young man said. “They have been in a bad time for a week. They come from Burj al Shemali. They were bombed by airplanes. The Jews destroyed all their homes.”
Yes, there were some PLO commandos in the village, but they had all left for the south the night before the bombing. The Israelis bombed them a second time and four people were killed, including the husband of the teenage girl. That was when they decided to leave. No, they were not all related. They had joined the other refugees on the main highway for the north, and crossed the Litani River. It took them two days to walk to Beirut. They had left everything behind, cows, clothes, food. On the way north, they lived on oranges taken from plantations.
The old man said something, a long and complicated complaint, and the young man with the machine gun nodded.
“He said that when they came here there is no house to stay in. Too many people everywhere. He said that it was so cold here and they were all afraid because there was shooting in the street. He said that is why he came to this building.”
The young man looked around the dimly lit apartment.
“We took this place for them,” he said proudly. “Why is it empty when people are cold? So we come here and took it. The rich don’t care if people die.”
I asked if the people here would be going back to Burj al Shemali. The teenager started shouting, getting nearly hysterical, then suddenly kicked at a glass-topped table. It tipped over and glasses fell to the floor and smashed.
“She says that there is no more Burj al Shemali.”
Then he turned to me. “Are you finished?” The girl was crying now and the young machine gunner seemed embarrassed. I offered him a cigarette.
“No, you go now,” he said. “Not safe. You go.”
I said goodnight to the people in the room and followed the young man to the door with the baby still crying behind me. In the lobby, the first kid came over, more jittery than ever. His hands were on the gun and he pointed it at me, saying something in high-pitched, rapid Arabic, the barrel of the gun bobbing as he emphasized his points. The second one made a disparaging expression and casually touched the barrel, pushing me aside slightly, and tapping me on the back in the same motion. He was saying goodnight, and telling me to go while the going was good.
The cabdriver was still there and seemed surprised to see me. The rain fell steadily. I got in the back and lit a cigaret and tried to control the shaking of my hands.
TYRE, LEBANON
We left in the morning, heading south along the coast. Men climbed telephone poles near the refugee camp of Ouzai, repairing lines wrecked in the Israeli bombing. A woman picked through the ruins of a house. The road was an inch deep in mud from two days of steady rain and the skies were a sullen gray.
But yesterday, as the first United Nations troops moved south to create a buffer zone between Israel and those Palestinians who live in Lebanon, the first signs of peace appeared. A man with his face wrapped in a faded blue kaffiyeh herding sheep along the edge of the road; farmers with dark sun-scorched faces selling lettuce and lemons; a young girl smiling and waving plastic sacks of oranges at the passing cars. The Syrian soldiers at the first roadblock were relaxed and pleasant, waving us on without a check.
But the aftermath of the brief week of war was everywhere. Trucks loaded with furniture, bedding and human beings still moved north, the contents piled impossibly high, held together with ropes and wires. In Doha, refugees squatted listlessly along the sides of the road, or moved into old abandoned luxury hotels with names such as Hawaii Beach Club, Milio’s and Kangaroo Beach. On the hotel balconies, I could see uniformed young soldiers of the Palestine Liberation Organization, watching the roads, cradling their Kalashnikov assault rifles.
“Everybody here from before went away in the civil war,” the cabdriver said. “Nobody came back. Now it is for the refugees. They just take it.”
A PLO armed personnel carrier went by in the other lane, a mustached young man in a blue sports shirt standing up as if posing for a poster, his hands on the grips of mounted twin .50-caliber machine guns. He was followed by two truckloads of bananas, being hurried north to market in the interval of peace. Another truckload of refugees, another checkpoint, and then we were in Damour.
Some of the most ferocious righting of the civil war took place here. Every building in sight had been demolished or hit. There were mounds of broken bricks everywhere, twisted steel girders, caved-in rooftops. A small grove of olive trees withered in the spaces between two damaged buildings. After all the previous destruction, the Israelis had bombed it again last week. Damour made the South Bronx look like 57th St. And still people were living there: Two men in a makeshift grocery store, listening to a syrupy ballad on the radio and arguing in Arabic; a man alone in an improvised liquor store set up in a shed; six Arab women in brightly dyed gowns pounding laundry in flat pans, living in a garage.
“Most of them are from Tal al Zaatar,” the driver said, shaking his head. “Now they have to live in these places.”
He was referring to the Palestinian refugee camp in northern Beirut that was under siege for 17 months before falling to the Phalangists in August 1976. Between 1,400 and 2,000 of the refugees were massacred then.
“That was terrible,” the driver said. “I was not involved in the war. I am Muslim. I want people to live together, Christian, Jew, whatever. But Tal al Zaatar, that was criminal.”
There was a traffic jam outside Sidon, as eight huge diesel trucks unloaded supplies that had been driven from Iraq. In the main street, kids played pinball in a place called the Morison Club, and others lined up at a small moviehouse to see “MacKenna’s Gold,” with Gregory Peck. Spray-canned political graffiti covered all the walls. For the first time we saw refugees heading south, instead of north.
“We want to go home before the Christians steal everything from our homes,” said a man driving a tractor, upon which were piled his family and seven black plastic bags full of clothing and food. “We left when the fighting started. Now the radio says the fighting is over. So we are going home.”
We passed the last Syrian checkpoint into PLO territory. Cypress trees lined the road. PLO fedayeen were everywhere, all of them carrying guns, a number of them young women. Some were hidden in trees, others walked in twos and threes along the road. They had their own checkpoints, announced in advance by rows of truck tires in the center of the two-lane road.
“The Israelis are over there,” one young PLO officer said, pointing to the rocky hills about three kilometers away. “They have not come any closer. The UN is supposed to go up there today and get them out.”
Outside Aadlun, we saw the shot-up hulk of a maroon Mercedes taxicab, one of two ancient cabs into which 16 members of two Lebanese families had piled to escape the Israeli shelling of Tyre. They left in the early hours of March 17, heading for Beirut. But they were stopped by a group of Israeli commandos who had come ashore looking for a Palestinian leader. The commandos opened fire on the cabs. Fourteen people, including four children under age 5, were killed. At dawn, when reporters reached the site, the two cars were still jammed with corpses. Now the cabs lay like the shells of strange giant beetles, picked clean by ants.
The driver moved along more slowly now. We went through lemon and orange groves, and suddenly we were at the bridge over the Litani River. Lebanese soldiers waved us on. A dead horse lay at the side of the road, its neck jerked back at a right angle. It was beginning to swell.
Then we could see the long low curve of Tyre, with minarets sticking up against the sky. I counted 15 ships, from freighters to fishing boats, sunk in the harbor. We went up Ramel Road, where five apartment houses had been hit by Israeli shelling. Two Arab teenagers came over to see us when we stopped, one of them holding the rusting case of a hand grenade.
“They were out in the water and kept shooting,” said the first boy, who lived in a six-story apartment house with blue trim and white walls. He spoke in a mixture of English and Arabic. “Then the airplanes came from the other side, shooting.” He went around to the back of the house where he had lived, and showed us huge holes in the building’s wall. Blue Venetian blinds rattled in the wind off the harbor. The building was abandoned.
“Nobody was killed here,” the boy said. “They died down there, in the souk.”
In the souk — a casbah of winding narrow streets next to the harbor — there were three shell craters, from 15 to 20 feet wide, filled with brown, stagnant water. A three-story house had fallen into a mess of broken concrete, wood beams, plaster and corrugated iron.
We drove out to the abandoned night club on the edge of the city where the International Red Cross had set up its headquarters. It was right on the beach. A Swiss woman named Nicole (she said her last name “was not important”) was running the office.
“We had to move the first aid station into the center of the city, because it was too dangerous for the wounded to come out here,” she said. “So now we are just trying to help the refugees locate each other. So many got separated during the shelling and bombing. We have more than 700 messages here. All from people trying to find each other.”
Outside her office was the old dining room of the night club. Rain pelted the windows. Out on the veranda a huge Red Cross flag was held in place by rocks. One of the windows had been smashed. The wind made a ghostly sound.
We left the Red Cross building and went back into town to make our way to the UN command post. There were PLO soldiers at the bottom of the hill, most of them sitting aimlessly on piles of rubble. We started up the hill, heading east, and suddenly a man in civilian clothes ran out waving his hands.
“Don’t go,” he said. “Don’t go. Bad there. Shooting.”
About 50 yards ahead, we saw PLO soldiers running in our direction. Some dived into ditches beside the road. I could hear the snapping of small arms fire. And then the heavier chung-chung-chung of an automatic. The driver pulled violently off the road, and went to the side of a building, out of the line of fire. We got out and peered around the side. The PLO was firing now, a mixture of carbines and machine guns, but there was no return fire from up the hill.
Then, as quickly as it had begun, the firing mysteriously stopped.
“Lebanese army!” the man in civilian clothes said. “Not UN! Mistake. Small problem. Not UN, not Israeli!”
We looked around the building again and the PLO soldiers were climbing out of the ditches, peering up the road. All the firing had stopped. Later it would be reported, without details, as a minor incident involving a dispute with a local commander of Christian Lebanese troops. But on this road, in the soft rain, it was men shooting at each other with real guns and real bullets. The man in civilian clothes ran up the road, out of sight. A young girl in a yellow dress came out of the bushes across the way, peeling an orange. We never made it to the command post of the United Nations.
SAIDA, LEBANON
The tents were dark blue and wet with the rain and they were pitched in a grove of date palms between the road and the sea. Children ran from tent to tent in the rain. A chicken-wire fence surrounded the enclave, and a PLO soldier stood at the gate, with a Kalashnikov assault rifle under his poncho.
“We are happy you are here,” said Labib Androuous, a Lebanese Catholic who was supervising the camp for the civil defense section of the government. “Welcome. Do you want a cigaret?”
Androuous was in his late 30s, with graying, black hair, and he nodded at the PLO soldier and took me into the camp. There were children everywhere, and women in shawls and long gowns, and teenage boys with wrinkled suit jackets that did not match their trousers. These were only a fraction of the estimated 265,000 refugees driven out of southern Lebanon during the brief, savage little war that was fought here last week.
“There are about 1,400 people in this camp,” Androuous said. “We have 145 tents and every tent has a number. We know from the number how many people there are in each family, and how much food they need for each meal. They get lunch meat and cheese, some sugar, some rice. We have also set up small gas fires for each tent, so that people can cook. And we have even given them eating equipment, knives and forks.”
He was obviously proud of the camp’s organization, and moved easily through the milling crowds of women, old men and children.
“Everybody here is Muslim,” he said. “Everybody. They are all Lebanese, not Palestinian.” His eyes moved uneasily to the PLO guard at the gate. “All of them are very poor. Most of them are farmers. They are without guns. Nobody here has guns.”
The rain had turned to a fine drizzle. One of the teenage boys came over with two small plastic cups of dense black coffee. He asked in Arabic where the visitor lived. In New York, he was told. New York? His eyes brightened, and he yelled to some friends that this stranger was from New York.
“It’s like telling him you are from the moon,” Androuous said, smiling and sipping the coffee. A group of teenagers crowded around. In New York were the buildings very high, like in the movies? Yes, they were very high. Is it cold there? In the winter, yes, with a lot of snow. Did I know Elvis Presley? No, I said, and besides, he’s dead. They nodded gravely as the words were translated. To the left, sheltered under a giant palm tree, a group of women watched in silence. An old man without teeth stood alone, staring at the new arrival.
“Where are the men?” I asked, looking around at the old people, the women, the teenagers and the children.
“Many of them stayed behind,” Androuous said. “These people are farmers.…When the invasion started, they had to leave. But they could not take the animals. So the fathers stayed behind with the animals. A cow can be the most rich thing in a family. For a week, many of them have not heard from the fathers, and now they are anxious to go back.”
He paused, and looked at a line of women waiting at a supply tent where blankets were being issued.
“Of course,” he said, “some of them have nothing to go back to.”
That was the growing reality of Lebanon. Every day as new refugees came down from the mountains, and reporters moved into the towns they left behind, it had become clearer that the Israeli intention was to wipe some towns off the face of the earth. Their people would then be moved far from the Israeli border. The strategy has hurt, but not destroyed the PLO, and has certainly left a lot of innocent human beings with “nothing to go back to.”
One such woman sat in a corner of a tent with a 4-month-old infant loosely cradled in her arms. She had cinnamon-colored skin, and high cheekbones, and hard white teeth. She was 28, but looked 10 years older. She sat there, making a low keening sound, like women in the west of Ireland when they are overwhelmed by grief.
“She is from Abassiyeh,” he said, as if that explained everything. Abassiyeh was a hill town behind Tyre, overlooking the coastal plain and the sea. Before the invasion, it contained about 8,000 people. But all reports indicate that it has been completely leveled by Israeli artillery bombardment. The town was bombed one final time from the air, a few hours before the cease fire.
“When the first bombs fell,” Androuous explained, “her husband told her to go out of their house, to take the children and go into the country and hide in the fields. He was packing their belongings. She was already outside when the shelling from the boats started. She looked back and there was no more house. She tried to go back, but the house was exploded.”
The woman was still squatting there alone, beyond communication, when we walked down to the sea. Over to the left was the stone shell of the old Hotel Saida, long abandoned, but now filled with refugees. At the base of the front steps a group of small boys took turns riding a green tricycle. A mound of orange peels, empty meat cans, and flattened milk cartons was growing at the water’s edge.
“We have a doctor now and a nurse,” Androuous said. “Some of these people have never seen a doctor. Not once in their life. They are simple people. They are not involved in politics. They want to be left alone with their land.”
Another woman, fat and bulky, came up to Androuous talking quietly in Arabic. He listened gravely, nodding his head, his arms folded across his chest. Then he spoke to her for a while and she went away.
“She wanted to leave right now,” he said. “With her four children. I told her it would be better to wait a day, until it was safer. Who knows? Maybe her town is gone, too. She wanted to know if the Israelis were leaving, or if they would stay for a long time.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I said I didn’t know. I said the United Nations troops were here now, and we would know soon if it would be safe.”
The sea was pounding hard against the empty beach, drowning the din of the camp. He walked me back to the gate and shook my hand and wished me a good journey. The road was heavy with traffic. Iraqi trucks moved along slowly, their cargoes covered with wet yellow tarpaulins, presumably weapons for the PLO. A truck full of refugees came from the other direction and slowed to look at the camp.
The driver exchanged some words with the PLO guard, shook his head and moved north. Androuous walked through the crowd, nodding, listening, doing his work. Just past him I could see the woman with the cinnamon-colored skin, cradling her baby, squatting in her tent. She was still crying, for everything.