Three weeks ago was the scariest night of my life. But as I write this I feel helpless dismay wash over me because I know I won’t be able to convey the fear to you. It’s really not much of a story.
Everyone can relate to the ‘almost-terrible-event’ phenomenon. You survive a very frightening experience that resulted in no harm whatsoever coming to you but which has badly shaken you. You're desperate to share the experience with your family and friends. The trouble is, since nothing actually happened to you, the story doesn’t amount to much. No one is terribly impressed.
“You almost had a head-on collision with an ice-cream truck coming backwards up the break-down lane of Deerfoot Trail? Whoa. That would have been bad. You’d have been killed for sure. Say, did you remember to pick up a tube of caulking for the bathtub?”
The whole thing makes you feel like you’ve been spliced in two and now temporarily reside in parallel planes of existence. On the one plane, everything and everyone around you is palpably, assuredly familiar and right. On the other plane, you’ve just shot a passing glance into the bright, beady eyes of Death and are faced with your own mortality, the fragility of life and the preciousness of our time on earth here together. But your husband is going to ask about the tube of caulking.
So, while the story I’m about to tell you is probably not going to sound like much -- in fact, for Lebanese people and anyone else on earth who has led a less sheltered life than me, it isn’t much -- it certainly terrified me. Just how scared was I? Well, my skin mites packed their bags and called taxis, and I became suddenly and fervently repentant over a childhood act of criminality in which the Lambert family of Sundre were relieved of a miniature garden rake.
On the weekend in consideration, both our kids were leaving on school trips abroad. Consistent with what I must assume is a school policy of choosing the worst possible flight times, both kids’ departures were in the tiny hours of the morning. On Saturday M drove Noonie to school for the one-thirty a.m. meeting time. I shuffled onto the balcony to watch them leave and was sleepily pleased to find our neighbourhood buzzing with cozy goings-on at that late hour. A car idling in the middle of the street had the windows open, Billy Ocean on the radio singing “No more love on the run.” In all the buildings around us lights shone from windows. A teenaged girl sat at a desk, head bent under the light of a lamp and in a kitchen fluorescent bulbs flickered on as a man walked over to a bowl of fruit and stooping, considered it for a long moment before reaching out an arm and selecting.
When I got up the next day I had a text message from Noonie saying they had arrived in Doha and were boarding the plane to Colombo. I tamped down the fretting-mother urge bubbling up inside me with some success as I went around making beds and gathering laundry, only wavering briefly when I discovered on Noonie’s bed the towel she was meant to take with her. For anyone else a t-shirt might suffice as a drying implement for a six day camping trip; for Noonie, who had spent twelve hours packing for the trip with the keenest attention to items such as insect repellent, moist towelettes and dental floss, the absence of a towel would be a crippling blow.
M left on a business trip to Dubai later that same morning and in the afternoon I took Dude down to the waterfront to skateboard with his friends. In the evening Dude had a shower, packed his bag, and turned out his light by half-past eight. I was to wake him up at three a.m. for my father-in-law to drive him to the school. I didn’t know why M had insisted that his dad drive him to the school. I had picked him up from his overseas school trip the previous year when they got to the school in the dead hours of the night. But I didn’t protest too much. Someone else is going to drive my kid to school at three a.m.? Fantastic.
Earlier that day there had been a horrible incident in northern Lebanon in which two men – a prominent sheik and his bodyguard – were shot and killed at an army checkpoint. Tension followed, obviously, but what of that? There is always tension here.
I set my alarm for three o’clock and went to bed. I had been asleep for about an hour when I became aware that something wasn’t right. I was hearing noises, muffled by the metal shutters over our windows and the rushing sound of the air conditioner, but which sounded like gunfire. I didn’t react immediately, however, because there is literally always something banging or crashing in the streets around our building. Mainly it is fireworks. Between celebrations at the wedding hall down the street and bored children with easy access to cheap Chinese combustibles, the crack of fireworks makes me jump out of my skin about once every other day. Enclosed by concrete buildings, the street in which they detonate becomes an amplifier. But there are other loud, startling noises from every conceivable source: hammering from the wooden palette cottage-industry right behind our building; shouts of another fist-fight between the simians running the informal minibus depot; stone cutting; tires screeching; motorcycles revving violently and the double tha-thunk of the loose manhole cover in front of our building every time a car goes over it.
Before I’d properly woken up and was still half-dreaming, I thought that it couldn’t be gunfire I was hearing because in such a case there would be other sounds, like people shouting and sirens. But there wasn’t any sound other than the shooting and horrible, heavy whoosh-bangs of what sounded like things exploding. Besides this, the gunfire sounds were almost non-stop. A dispute I witnessed last year in the intersection near our building, in which I’d heard the popping of gunfire, was over within one or two minutes. But the sounds reaching my ears now were going on and on.
Soon my mind became sufficiently perturbed to haul me up out of the depths of dream-state to consciousness. The mental alarm bell had grown louder, becoming a strident, this-is-not-a-drill kind of siren. I don’t even remember getting out of bed. I just remember that by the time I stumbled out into the kitchen I knew what I was hearing and my heart began hammering so hard in my chest I felt sick.
I went straight to the kitchen window, hunkered down and looked out of the corner. Outside it was very dark -- Beirut streets aren’t very well lit at the best of times -- and at first all I could see was the big intersection, usually humming with cars at any hour of the day or night, now eerily deserted but for two of the army’s APC’s (Armoured Personnel Carriers – the things that I have been up until this week incorrectly calling tanks for the highly defensible reason that that is exactly what they look like) crouched silent and still in the middle. Then I saw a few spots of light from cell phones or cigarettes and made out the dark outlines of several men standing in the shadow of a small shop. The horrible gunfire and low, heavy booming continued but I couldn’t see the gunmen.
I was shaking like a leaf and almost stupefied with fear. The thing that didn’t make any sense to me was that there wasn’t any sign of police or ambulances or soldiers (excepting whoever was huddled inside those APC’s). There wasn’t even a sound from our building. Where was everybody?
Dude was still sleeping but I was far too agitated to wonder at that. In reflection, I think it’s simply that the fireworks we hear are much, much louder than gunfire and he has grown accustomed to tuning out the noises of our neighbourhood.
I turned on the tv to see if I could learn what was happening outside. Of course I can’t understand the local news (in formal Arabic) and the BBC wasn’t mentioning anything. I opened my computer to The Daily Star website and they had a little information, saying that in response to the murders earlier in the day there were ‘clashes’ involving machine guns and rocket powered grenades in the neighbourhood adjacent to ours.
I thought about calling M in Dubai but what could he do for us? He would only be distressed to hear my panic. It was clear to me that whatever was actually going on outside the best thing to do was stay in our apartment. Come morning if the fighting was still going on my father-in-law would advise me what we should do.
At one point I suddenly heard footsteps rushing up the stairs outside our door and I ran, heart in throat, to engage the heavy duty lock on our door (eight metal bars which are anchored in a solid metal core).
For the first two hours or so I was literally too frightened to think straight and did nothing else but comb the internet with shaking hands. The fighting didn’t let up. A couple of times when I peeked out a corner of the window and looked across the intersection I saw darting movements – someone running; another ducking behind a dumpster. There were more scrabbling footsteps heard in the stairwell and once I saw through the peephole Hamoodi, the son of our building watchman, running upstairs to the roof. It pierced through my fear that he was here alone (his father was in Syria) and that if I was scared, he must be much more so.
At about quarter to three I called M’s dad. He said he and my mother-in-law had been lying awake listening to the fighting and asked if I was scared. Then he said he was coming up and a few minutes later he rang the doorbell. Although he was clearly agitated he didn’t say anything about what was happening outside but simply asked if Dude’s class trip was cancelled. I said what difference did it make if it was cancelled or not, there was shooting outside. M’s dad insisted that we try to contact the school but I didn’t have the phone number of any teacher chaperoning the trip. I decided to send an email to Dude’s English teacher, who had always been helpful and communicative with me, in the hope that she carried a smart phone and would read it. In the message I said that I didn’t know what was happening in the rest of Beirut but that our neighbourhood was a warzone and we couldn’t leave the building.
My father-in-law really wanted me to try to talk to someone at the school so I called their switchboard and dialled the emergency extension number that was given in the menu. A man answered and I asked him if the grade seven trip to Turkey was cancelled and he said yes.
M’s dad then suggested that Dude and I to go downstairs and spend the rest of the night in their apartment but I just wanted to let Dude sleep. Why wake him up to hear such terrifying things? Before M’s dad left he said to call him for anything and not to open my door to anyone. He also said that I should go into Noonie’s room since it doesn’t have any windows facing the intersection, so I did that. For another two hours I sat glued to the internet, unable to learn much about what was happening but too distraught to do anything else. During those long, frightening hours as I picked through every news site I could find and flipped through the channels on TV all I found was story after story about the death of Robin Gibb from the Bee Gee’s.
At about four o’clock the fighting seemed to be letting up. And at 4:30 my cell phone rang. It was a number my phone didn’t recognize and I picked it up thinking it must be someone from the school.
“Hi,” said an American voice. “Is your son coming with us today?”
It was Dude’s English teacher. I was utterly flabbergasted. Clearly the English teacher was thousands of miles away on another planet. “But -- how -- the trip is still on?”
“Yes.”
“But the fighting. I called the school, they said the trip was cancelled.”
“Who told you that?”
I explained quickly, and also told her about the fighting in our neighbourhood. She had not read my email note but said the trip was definitely on and that if we left straight away there was still time for Dude to catch up with them at the airport.
By this time the gunfire had stopped but it was still pitch black outside and creepy as hell. No cars were around, the streets were deserted; only APC’s occasionally rumbled noisily up the street.
I didn’t know what to think. I knew that M’s dad would be glued to the news and would know better than me if the violence had been well and truly stopped. I called him and told him what Dude’s teacher had said. He said that it was okay now to drive to the airport and that Dude should go. It would be a shame for him to miss his trip, he kept saying, which sounded completely cracked to me. Who cared about a stupid trip to Turkey when there were bullets flying around? Not Dude, I was pretty sure. But I trusted my father-in-law’s judgment in this situation, and though I was absolutely terrified of letting Dude go outside and get into a car there wasn’t time to dwell on it.
I called Dude’s teacher back, said that Dude could be at the airport in fifteen minutes, and went in to wake him up. He was in a very deep sleep (understandably, since it 4:30 in the morning) but I gently pressed his shoulder and told him that we were late and he must hurry. He rolled out of bed and quickly pulled on his clothes while I explained that there had been trouble outside and that was why we were late but that his classmates and teachers were waiting for him at the airport. He asked what kind of trouble and I said shooting and stuff and he said he didn’t want to go outside if there was shooting. I said that it was over now and that his grandfather wouldn’t agree to take him out if there was still danger. I regretted having to mention it at all to him but felt that he should know a little about what was happening. How can he trust me if I don’t always tell him the truth?
He must have taken his cue from M’s dad and me – both of us were acting calm on the outside, at least -- and put on his new, bright green Adidas runners we had bought the day before without further comment. I hugged him good-bye at the door and they left. M’s dad hadn’t wanted me to go with him – I don’t know why – but I immediately regretted not insisting on accompanying them because of course the half hour I had to wait until he got back was one of the most unbearable stress. I couldn’t believe I had let Dude go out into such a night and had to keep telling myself that M’s dad knew what he was doing. The biggest thing that calmed me was the fact itself of the school trip happening. Since it hadn’t been cancelled obviously the rest of Beirut must be quiet.
M’s dad returned with the news that everything had gone well and the teacher who had stayed in the entry of the airport to meet Dude texted me a short time later to say that they were in the plane and Dude was sitting right beside him.
The sun came up about an hour later, bright as anything and giving every sign of a fabulous summer day ahead. By eight o’clock people were out in numbers, cars clogged the streets; there was an email in my inbox from a local women’s group advertising a jumble sale; it was as if nothing had bl**dy happened.
M called around nine and said he had known about the fighting but was hoping I slept through it. He offered to come back from Dubai early but I said I was okay. I asked him how he had felt, knowing his son was being taken out and driven in a car on the airport road while the fighting was going on. He only said that everyone in Lebanon was used to this kind of fighting and that they’d seen a lot worse.
The newspaper said that two people had been killed in the night’s fighting, and 18 others injured. The men I had seen by the light of their cigarettes had been journalists; as had the ones I heard running up to the roof of our building -- they had been setting up cameras.
The papers also said that fighting stopped when the army came in. Well, that sounds comforting, doesn’t it? But I saw the army APC’s there at least three hours before the shooting and grenades stopped. Now, I’ll admit that I know nothing about military equipment but the Lebanese army trucks and APC’s appear to me like they might have seen action during the Korean War. They’re that old, and I’m not sure they’re grenade-proof. And since there were rocket powered grenades flying all over the place that night the soldiers couldn’t have simply rolled their APC’s into the fray with merry abandon. Anyway, APC’s don’t even fit into the little side-streets around this neighbourhood.
What all this means to me is that, while giving the army its due, I don’t think they can help me and my family if the faeces really hits the turbines. Well, just think for a moment about the civil war here or the 2006 Israeli invasion. The army was here, UN peacekeepers were here. But they couldn’t stop the violence.
This line of discussion is edging dangerously close to the political. As I have determined to steer far and wide of such topics I won’t go any further. I will just say this: I was g.d. scared that night and I’m still scared and I don’t think I can brush it off. In fact, I think it’s wretchedly depressing that people do brush it off.
M told me that day that if fighting broke out again the following night – it didn’t, thank heaven, though the residents of Tripoli were not so fortunate – and I judged the gunfire to be too close to our building the safest place to be was the bathroom that has no external windows. No mention of it being time to get out of this country, that this sort of thing is perhaps a bit much. Nope. You grow up in a war, you brush these things off.
@#$%
