Sitting beside a sleeping Colin as our bus winds through the boundless green mountains of northern Lebanon toward the Syrian border at Aleppo, I abandon the photos in my guidebook for the view through my open window. I look upon gargantuan mountains. It smells like the beginning of spring, though it’s the middle of October. I stick my face out the window and breathe deeply. The air is clear and fresh. I can smell someone’s lunch cooking in one of the towns we’re approaching. It smells like roasted goat.
“Soon we will stop for the last place in Libnan before Suria, close to city Tripoli,” the Lebanese man sitting in front of us turns to say. His English is quite perfect, yet he refuses to refer to Arabic-speaking countries by their English name. “Oh, good! Thank you! Colin, we’re almost at Suria,” I say while I wake him up, more for the benefit of the man than for Colin, who barely opens his eyes. With the border looming soon after our next rest stop, I begin to study my guidebook again, searching for the section on Syrian etiquette.
Once the roasted goat begins to smell burnt, I know we’ve arrived at our lunch stop. I look up from my book for a moment to glance out the window, and unconsciously lose my page as I realize that the burning meal I smell is actually coming from what was left of the former city across the road. The thought that I imagined it was lunch now makes me want to vomit, and when we stop right there, right on the road where my body is already developing an emotional allergy to roast goat, I’m unsure whether I should be relieved or horrified to get off the bus.
The terrain at the rest stop is flat and dusty. It’s a soft, deep brown and gray silt that covers my shoes and gravitates up toward my ankles and calves as I walk. I stand separately from the other passengers beside Colin, and we look across the road silently.
I think of the dollhouse I had as a child, which had one of its sides removed so I could see the different rooms and arrange the furniture. As a child, I arranged my dollhouse with a proud and painstaking precision. But the furniture left here is in disarray: many of the floors are missing, and broken beds and bureaus and bassinets and picture frames and perfumes from different apartments are piled on top of one another, mixed together like the fate of all the people who lived here. Of one former building, there remains just a single wall. I can tell where the different rooms were when people lived there, based on where one rectangle of paint ends and another color begins. There is a gray stripe between the different colors, where I assume the wall that separated the rooms once stood. On one section of the wall, I can see peeling pink wallpaper with a border of ducks, or maybe geese on it. It’s a child’s room.
Was a child’s room.
I try to scour the expanse of thousands of pieces of concrete, metal and plaster that were once apartment buildings or schools or hospitals thoroughly, so I can reconstruct the city in my head. I can’t envision the city that is now in pieces any more than I can imagine its people, whose lives, I’m sure, are in the same state.
I look out, and all of a sudden I don’t know if my eyes hurt because it is sunny or windy or sandy or not due to the weather at all. Have I blinked? I let my head droop and I close my eyes just as they begin to water.
From behind me, the people from the bus stand on the wood porch of the general store smoking Cleopatra cigarettes, spitting into the dust, chatting casually in Arabic, which I cannot understand. I hear them laugh. I suddenly hear Colin’s camera say “tch!” from a few yards to my right. Of all the sounds I hear, this is the only one I can comprehend. “Tch!” Once, and then twice more, in quick succession. It brings me back to attention. I open my eyes in time to see Colin put his camera in his backpack swiftly as a Lebanese solider approaches him to indicate, I am sure, that photos are prohibited and he has to hand over his film. By feigning misunderstanding to buy time, and then apologizing with false sincerity, and then changing the subject, Colin is able to keep his pictures. The others from the bus take as little notice of this encounter as they seem to have taken of the fallen city across the road. I drag my feet through the dust toward the bus, and ascend the steps with brown sneakers, which are blue again by the time I get to my seat.
Colin sent me copies of the Nahr al-Bared pictures later. I googled the name of the former refugee camp, and came upon a New York Times article from four months earlier: “A Lebanese army helicopter attacked suspected militant hideout in a Palestinian refugee camp of 40,000 people with missile and machine-gun fire,” it reported. I looked at the black holes that pocked every single white wall that stood in Colin’s photos, and furiously wondered how many of the buildings could have possibly held “suspected militants” in a city of 40,000 people. I wondered how many of the inhabitants of the city had already had to rebuild their lives in a new place once before, and of those, how many had survived the missiles and machine-gun fire to do it again.