On a quiet night during which Beirut is getting used to sleeping drowned in the sound of shells that we have learned to trivialize since the start of the offensives, a quintuple, sextuple, sevenfold explosion gave birth to the echo. Or was it the echo of reality in our beds: in mine where my daughter, Inès (10 years old), slept, and not far away, on a makeshift mattress placed in the walk-in closetAlexandra, his youngest child (8 years old)? Since the extension of the southern conflict to Beirut, they have gotten into the habit of huddling in the cocoon of my room under the illusory pretext that a mother can protect them from the war. I nourish this belief. I make them believe that in every mother there are roofs and frames more solid than the anger of men.
Just before going to bed, we discussed their security and the logic of war. Inès, 10 years old, talks to me about the animal nature of the humans who cause them. I tell him to be careful to choose the words carefully: animals only kill to survive, not humans. Inhumanity suits wars better than the notion of animality. Without transition, she explains to me that for her, unlike her sister, it is not my affection that makes her feel safe but the fact of knowing that she is rationally safe. I reassure her, tell her that she is, despite our house perched on a residential hill 2 kilometers as the crow flies from the southern suburbs which have been relentlessly bombed since the start of the clashes in Beirut. Her little sister interrupts her, as usual: “For me, it’s your affection, mom, that reassures me. Where you are I feel good.” A month earlier, it was she who had also told me with a heart haloed with surrealism that on each of my trips she had the feeling that the entire house was destroyed except her room, intact in the middle of the ruins.
Yesterday, the explosions imploded where it hurts. In memory. At the first explosion, I didn’t move. I said to myself: target reached. With this Pavlovian reflex inherited from our childhoods in the shelters, I waited for the second one. The third. Closer and closer. Violent. The loudest ever heard. The sound of shells is half the war. On the fourth day, I jumped out of bed, shook my daughter awake with a start, and called her sleeping younger sister. I scream his name. “Alexandraaa, get up. Quickly into the corridor!” As if these corridors which had served as bulwarks against the shells of the 1980s still had something to do with current Israeli military technology. Gaza and the latest events in Lebanon are proof of this. There is an asymmetry between a strike force capable of transforming a building into puff pastry, and Hezbollah’s rockets. My survival reflexes in the face of danger make them believe in some remaining security. So much the better. The big girl no longer controls anything. Everything inside her is trembling. His lips. His body, his face. Two days earlier, she explained to me that it was possible to die without losing your life. “You know mom, there are people who escape the shells but that doesn’t mean they aren’t dead from the inside. All it takes is that they lose a loved one.” Or innocence, I refrained from replying.
Childhood is like that. It takes your breath away. Yesterday, it was out of fear that we had our breath taken away. Once sheltered in a small makeshift room in the heights of the Metn, away from the sounds of detonations and shells, fear loosened the tongues of the two little girls. We didn’t have to wait long to get into the car, which was being driven at full speed. A luxury. We knew that when we woke up, we would return to our house, intact, because, a priori, in a safe zone, not infiltrated by Hezbollah cells, concentrated in the southern suburbs region and its surroundings. I have a thought for these families on the run, in their pajamas, with the guarantee of finding ruins the next day. As the feeling of security took hold, Inès rebelled. “All of this is truly unjust. We cannot kill like that, without giving those who risk dying the opportunity to respond. The victims have nothing. Neither missiles, to react, nor even the possibility of responding with a letter. It’s unfair, we should give those who are exposed to death the right to respond to what they feel about violence. Maybe even send a dove. I don’t understand. not what Israel gains. They got what they wanted. They got Hassan Nasrallah. What more do they want? to gain, if they have already won?
It’s Alexandra who answers him, at the age of 8: “Fear. They gain fear. With that, they can continue to make us believe that they are the strongest.” Inès is silent. She is looking for composure. She still has tremors in her voice as the car zooms by. Once we reached a safe place, her tear-filled eyes looked at me. “I’m proud of you, Mom,” she said. “For what ?” “Because you have good reflexes. You are also a soldier of war. But you, to save lives. Our lives.” I am exhausted by emotion, take her in my arms, suggest that we go upstairs and rest in the room. It’s one o’clock in the morning. Neither can sleep. Inès, however, tries to doze off. In a final burst of conscience in the face of what crushes but does not kill, she said to me: “The real question, I think, is whether there is love in all of this.”
I’m sick of it. I try to console her for the lack of love in the gentlest way possible. Mechanically, I am about to confirm that there is indeed no love in wars. She doesn’t give me time. “The answer is yes,” she continues. “Of course there is. That’s all there is in wars. The love of people who help each other to alleviate the pain and misfortune of the victims. welcome them. There is the message in love. That night I was ashamed of my privileges. Of those of my daughters, not orphans. Speaking with them is a privilege. We weren’t dead, from the inside. Their childhood is a tug of war between hope and reality. I suggested they sleep. Tomorrow will be another day.
* Hyam Yared, Lebanese poet and novelist, is notably the author of Under the arbor, Beirut as if forgotten, Everything is hallucinated, Implosions…
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