Pumpkinflowers (18 page)

58

I
PLANNED OUR
route for the next day knowing it would take us past the intersection that led up to the Pumpkin. But I still didn't know how to explain why I wanted to go up the hill.

Traveling along the border again that last morning we stopped at the old gate once known as the Good Fence, through which Lebanese villagers used to cross into Israel for work and medical treatment in the days of the security zone. There were Israeli soldiers in a small fortified position a few yards away on the other side, and I worried that someone might recognize me. Israel is so small that this wasn't impossible. I pulled my baseball hat lower.

A Hezbollah sign in Arabic and English recounted a suicide attack in 1988, one of many such signs around southern Lebanon documenting operations against the Israelis. I was taking a picture of the sign when from the corner of my eye I saw a man exit a small building and stride toward me. His beard was neatly trimmed, he was dressed meticulously in black, and his demeanor indicated that he was in charge. Would I have guessed a few years earlier that in my first close encounter with a Hezbollah man I would be armed only with a camera and notebook? He shook my hand, but his gaze remained suspicious.

When he asked, in Arabic, if I was a journalist Ibrahim answered for me: He's a tourist from Canada. Welcome, the man said, still cold, and motioned for me to put the camera away. I signaled in response that this was no problem. We shook hands again, but he didn't smile or move. I got back in the cab.

When we were down the road Ibrahim turned to me, gestured toward the man, and said,
“
Muqawama
.”
Resistance. I nodded, but Ibrahim didn't seem satisfied. “Hezbollah,” he said, and I made sure to look more impressed this time.

59

W
E CLIMBED INTO
Khiam and, after some navigation through narrow streets, reached the Hezbollah museum located on the edge of town. The museum was in the old prison from the years of the security zone, the one run by the South Lebanon Army and our own secret services.

I'm not sure how Khiam Prison would compare to Hezbollah's hostage basements, which have yet to be opened to tourists. But it was a foul place even with the jailers gone. Inside were bare cells and a small exercise yard, and when I looked up I saw the sky divided into squares by strands of barbed wire. The Hezbollah curators had affixed signs in Arabic and English next to doorways; one was labeled
ROOM FOR THE BOSS OF WHIPPERS
. Some of the graffiti left by visitors on the walls was in English: “Jews are AIDS,” “Jews are a cancer to society,” “Kill all Jews,” and so forth. The Christians who staffed the prison seemed to be off the hook.

With us were two busloads of visitors from Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, the men in khakis and carrying video cameras, the women draped in black. We all filed into a small theater to watch a movie that included reenactments of methods of torture. One showed a man being whipped as he lay facedown on the floor with his feet up on a chair. There were a few children in the theater, and one little boy began to scream; his mother tried to calm him in vain, but she didn't take him out. The film ended with footage from the liberation of the prison on the morning after the Pumpkin and the other outposts were destroyed, after the Shiites of the south realized the Israelis were gone, that their own fighters had won: crowds running toward the compound, shouts of
God is great!
, gaunt bearded men reunited with jubilant families. I felt happy for them.

From the prison we descended to the Litani River and picked up the old convoy route. We soon came, as I knew we would, to the little restaurant on the riverbank, the one we used to see from the trucks. It felt as if I had an old reservation. The restaurant was exactly as I remembered it—a ramshackle awning and a few tables. We sat down near the water and the proprietor, a woman with her hair modestly covered, came over. Her two sons were there, Musa and Hassan, and another youth named Issa. There was enough room for my whole platoon, but Ibrahim and I were their only customers.

In our dream of returning one day we would sit in this restaurant, unafraid, and watch the river. In the dream this meal was perfect. But my fish was overcooked and dry, and we were beset by flies. So it is with the realization of dreams. I was so moved to be in that place that it didn't matter.

When we finished I took out my wallet. “How much,” Ibrahim asked in Arabic.

“Fifteen dollars,” replied Issa, in Arabic.

“Twenty-five dollars,” the proprietor translated into English, and I paid. Of course the question of who was tricking whom was not as clear as she thought, and the meal was worth more to me than any other I have eaten, before or since.

Once over the bridge we began climbing west up the Ali Taher range. On the roadside was another Hezbollah sign, this one with a photograph of a young man with a broad smile. He wasn't solemn or sad like most martyrs. He looked like a person it would be nice to meet. He also seemed to be trying to grow a beard with patchy results. The English text on the sign was titled
MARTYR BILAL AKHRAS'S AMBUSH DEFYING THE ZIONIST ARROGANCE
.

At dawn on June 10, 1996, the arrogance of the Zionist army was dealt a painful blow near the strategic “Dabshe” outpost which had been meant by the occupation to be one of the symbols of that arrogance. An Islamic Resistance squad penetrated the Zionist security wall and set a dexterous ambush for a Zionist 15-strong foot patrol.

When the patrol was in the fire range and as it approached the ambush spot, the Resistance men peppered it with a shower of rocket propelled grenades and machine gun fire killing or wounding the fifteen enemy troops.

The close range confrontation turned into a direct encounter carried out by Resistance man “Bilal Akhras” who was martyred during the operation as he advanced toward the patrol troops, inflicting more casualties in their ranks.

“Dabshe” was the Arabic name for our hill. There were thirteen men, not fifteen, in the Israeli squad. But it was otherwise an accurate description of the Falcon Incident, from Avi's time at the Pumpkin, in which five soldiers died and the rest were wounded. Yaacov, the new soldier, saw a running figure but hesitated to shoot, and the sergeant fired and killed him instead. That was Bilal. I have a photograph taken the following morning, given to me by one of the medics. It shows Bilal in forest-green fatigues, sprawled crooked-limbed on his back among some bushes.

60

T
H
E INTERSECTION APPEARED
as I knew it would—a right turn onto a road cutting upward toward one of the peaks at forty-five degrees. This was where a few of us crouched on our first day in Lebanon, gun sights trained on two men who turned out to be looking not for us but for game.

The turn was unmarked, as I assumed it would be, and there was no way a first-time visitor would know what was up that road. I had come all the way back here for this, but if I said anything Ibrahim would know I had been there before. I had no idea who he was or whom he might tell. My courage failed. I said nothing, and the turn leading to the Pumpkin receded behind us.

I conducted a furious argument with myself, the intersection growing more distant with every second. I changed my mind and asked Ibrahim to stop the car.

I touched the camera around my neck and said I wanted to go up to the top of the hill we had just passed. I want to take pictures, I said, and there must be a nice view up there. I knew it was implausible. Ibrahim looked unhappy. I reached into my wallet and found a twenty-dollar bill. “For the gas,” I said, and put the bill in his hand and closed his fingers around it. He put the car in reverse and drove backward all the way to the intersection.

When I was a child the Royal Ontario Museum had a dark hallway lined with dioramas illustrating the life of prehistoric man, life-sized figures wearing skins, cooking mammoth meat, fashioning arrowheads. I saw something similar now as we drove up the hill. In the vegetation to our left I saw us checking the route for bombs, my friends spread through the brush, sweating through our uniforms in the heat. The dog was out in front and behind it the sturdy shape of Harel, foot raised in midstride.

We reached the bend in the road where a soldier once mishandled a machine gun and fired a burst into the asphalt beside me. I remembered the silence after that happened, the way we looked at each other. I knew the boulders along the road. I had searched the ground for trip wires dozens of times. I struggled to pretend I had never seen any of it before and suspect I was doing a poor job, but in the driver's seat beside me Ibrahim didn't seem to notice or care. I did my best to look surprised when a jumble of concrete finally came into view at the top of the hill. “Israel radar,” Ibrahim was saying, but in my ears was shouting in Hebrew—
Run—
and the rumble of trucks. He stopped the cab in the convoy yard and switched off the engine. Everything was still.

When my feet touched the ground I found myself looking out over a river valley leading toward a brown-sloped massif; it was the end of a long summer and the hills were dry, their colors dun. It was still beautiful.

I left Ibrahim to think whatever he was thinking and proceeded alone. I didn't run. On concrete slabs I saw Hebrew graffiti, as unlikely now as hieroglyphics. One read, “Aryeh, we want invitations to the wedding.” At the outpost's entrance I saw a black car parked beside the gate. It was empty. I saw no one at all, and there was no answer when I called out. So preoccupied was I in those moments with the realization that I had actually returned that the odd presence of this car receded. I walked past it into the Pumpkin.

Inside the embankments were enormous concrete pieces and twisted metal rods, the remnants of the roof brought down on the last night. I sat on one of the blocks. There was a familiar smell of dust and baking cement which I had forgotten. The outpost was always alive with soldiers laughing, cursing, or shouting, the clanking of tanks, radio static. The hill had been crowded and energetic, but the people who animated it were gone, and it felt dead.

Atop the western embankment a Hezbollah flag flew at last, but it was just a ragged scrap of fabric that had once been yellow. For a time this hill was worth our lives, but even the enemy seemed to know that now it was worth nothing at all. That seems like a universal lesson for a soldier, knowledge available if you are lucky enough to get through your trials unscathed and able to make it back afterward to whatever hill you were once told to capture or defend—and if you are willing to listen to what these places try to tell you about the insignificance of your decisions, about the way you were borne this way and that by tides beyond your comprehension.

It was late in the day, but the stillness made it seem like Readiness with Dawn again, a pause for heightened attention. Be quiet, look around. Listen. Who is here with you?

I was alone.

Are you ready?

There was nothing to be ready for. History had left this spot and moved on.

Where are you? I was on a hilltop in the Middle East, a place on the periphery of the periphery, a parched hill like thousands of others, a good vantage point from which to look at the world. In the years that have passed since I stood on the rubble that day I have been trying to understand what I saw. What I grasp changes with time, but two lessons are clear.

When I went back to the Pumpkin in the fall of 2002 I thought it was a conclusion—an end to that war, and to the disquiet it left me and the others it touched. But I sensed then, and know now, that I was wrong. It wasn't a conclusion. On the hill we had been at the start of something: of a new era in which conflict surges, shifts, or fades but doesn't end, in which the most you can hope for is not peace, or the arrival of a better age, but only to remain safe as long as possible. None of us could have foreseen how the region would be seized by its own violence—the way Syria, a short drive from the outpost, would be devoured, and Iraq, and Libya, and Yemen, and much of the Islamic world around us. The outpost was the beginning. Its end was still the beginning. My return as a civilian was still the beginning. The present day might still be the beginning. The Pumpkin is gone, but nothing is over.

When I scrambled up to the top of the embankment I found the trench sunlit and undamaged, the floor covered in toppled sandbags of tan and burgundy. Some were my own handiwork. I walked above the trench, exposed. This was something we could never do in daylight, and because old instincts had reappeared I had to keep telling myself not to jump down to safety. It took no time to remember the view. I might have been on guard duty that morning.

Looking north I saw the slope where Mordechai was wounded in his tank and Lior killed. Farther to the north were the ruins of Red Pepper.

I walked along the rim of the trench until I stood by one of the posts abandoned by its sentry in the Pumpkin Incident of 1994, near the spot on the floor beneath the parapet where a soldier lay that day on his back, still warm. Today he would be forty-one.

From there I could see south toward the Forest, where the bomb crippled our vehicle on the night Natalie got undressed; where I once crouched and saw our missiles float toward the town; where the engineers were surprised and cut down near the Falcon Bend.

Under the embankments, the entrance blocked by rubble, were the old sleeping quarters, dark rooms that might now remain sealed for centuries. If, in the future, someone goes to the trouble of uncovering the doorway, they might see faint Hebrew scribbling on the walls, or pick up an ancient cigarette carton. But they won't know the lives of the people who once rolled bleary from bunks inside and went to do what others asked, and who sometimes did not return.

From where I stood atop the outpost I saw that with no one to tend to the hilltop, nature was taking it back. You would like everything to stop, to acknowledge that the disappearance of human beings matters, but of course nothing stops. There is a song about that in Hebrew, written by a woman from a kibbutz that lost eleven men in the war of 1973. She repeats the words “but the wheat is growing again,” because she can't seem to believe that's possible.

The trench was filling up with the contents of disintegrating sandbags. Vegetation sprouted between concrete slabs. We have a list of hills that will exist forever in our shared memory. The Pumpkin will never be one of them.

I passed the guard post where Eran, the altruist, was hit by a rocket. He is still an altruist.

Weeds grew around the gun emplacements where Avi once looked at the hills of Lebanon, as green in the rainy season as the ones awaiting him in Donegal or Cork.

Upon returning to these events years later I found myself drawn in the evenings, after a day of writing or interviews, not to literature from my own country or era but instead to the poems and reminiscences of men like Edmund Blunden and Isaac Rosenberg from the Great War of a century ago. They had been torn from normal existence and dispatched to the very edge of life, beyond the edge—

I, too, have dropped off Fear—

Behind the barrage, dead as my platoon,

And sailed my spirit surging light and clear

Past the entanglement where hopes lay strewn

That's Wilfred Owen. The church bells in his town were ringing to announce the armistice when his parents' doorbell rang and a telegram informed them of his death. I wasn't sure at first why these writers had my attention now. This was all in the distant past, and my experiences did not compare with theirs. It was, I realized, their perception, so much clearer than mine, of the thinness of the line between here and gone. This is the second lesson the Pumpkin taught me, and still is teaching me—how flimsy is the border between those two states, between Avi and me. This is the debt I owe that place, and the reason I am grateful for my time there.

I happened to be lucky on the hill, and so remained convinced of my invincibility, of the impregnable nature of the line. Only now do I understand it's just an angle, a moment, a clerk's stamp on a piece of paper, a step in one direction or another. This belated insight provoked an unexpected feeling that pursued me throughout the writing of this book. The feeling was retroactive fear. My twin sons are seven and my daughter three. Sometimes when the boys are wedged on either side of me, listening to a story, or when I'm pushing the little one on the swings in the afternoon and she points the tips of her red sandals at the top of the cypress trees, I know I could have missed this. I almost missed it. Others did.

I continued along the outpost's western embankment, a warm wind beginning to pick up. It was then that I saw a shape move outside the trench a few yards away.

The shape was the back of a young woman's head. Her hair was dark and sleek. My first thought was that there couldn't be a woman at the Pumpkin—that was one of the inviolable laws of the place. But there she was, seated on the outer slope of the embankment near where the flag had once been planted, facing away from me and toward the town spread beneath us on the plateau.

She hadn't noticed me, and I stood still. I'm not sure I could have moved had I wanted to. I heard a murmur coming from her direction, but it was too deep to be hers. It belonged to a man. Then her head dipped down and out of my line of vision, and the murmuring stopped. Only after a few seconds of silence did I understand who and what had finally taken the hill.

The cab was waiting in the old convoy yard. The Pumpkin receded through the rear window, and I knew I wouldn't see it again.