Wednesday moving into Thursday, 1:30 am
Single deadliest day of the assault on Lebanon so far, with Israeli strikes mostly in South Lebanon and the Bekaa killing 57 civilians and a Hizbullah fighter. It was quieter in Beirut proper today. Two very loud air strikes about 24 hours ago then this evening around 7 pm maybe four more.
Reports today that Israel hit a neighborhood in East Beirut - Achrafieh - for the first time. Evidently a helicopter dropped a bomb on two trucks parked in an empty lot off Abdel Wahab al-Inglisi street. Fifteen minute walk uphill from my house. Eleven minute walk back down. The area is known for its beautiful Ottoman-era architecture and upscale dining. One night I had a steak dinner on the rooftop patio of a nice hotel there. No Hizbullah around that I saw. Two decent sushi joints up there as well. Loaded onto the trucks reportedly was some well-drilling equipment that may have been mistaken for artillery. Or they might have been sending a message. It sounded like a relatively dainty strike, with the use of a helicopter instead of a jets. I wonder if they would have been so careful, had the trucks been sitting in West Beirut. Actually I don't wonder.
They've been hitting trucks. Yesterday a truck carrying medical supplies donated by the UAE was demolished as it made its way toward Beirut from the Syrian border. How do I know they were medical supplies? Maybe they weren't. I didn't notice which wire service reported it.
Then last night, Tuesday night, I was talking to an American acquaintance, a freelance photographer who has been living in Beirut for a year. He had just made it back into the country from Cyprus where he had been traveling when the bombardment started. Magazines and newspapers were calling asking what he had for them. First he switched his ticket from the suddenly nonexistent Beirut International Airport to Damascus, but the Syrian embassy in Cyprus denied him a visa. So he switched his ticket to Amman. From Amman he hired a cab to drive him to Beirut for $500. He said they made him wait about four hours at the Syrian border and then let him in and were really nice about it. They got inside Lebanon, switching from highways to side roads. On one of the highways they drove up to a burning truck just sitting there, in its lane, on fire. The truck driver was on fire too. The American's driver refused to stop so that he could document it. "I'm not afraid but I have kids!" the driver told him.
I was leaving the newsroom tonight and was surprised to encounter, near the receptionists' station, one of the drivers who works for the paper walking by basically in his pajamas. He was wearing an undershirt, boxer shorts and flip-flops. It wasn't that late; it wasn't like I was turning out the lights behind me - there were a dozen people still working. He gave me a smile.
I left the paper and after about an hour and a half returned. Two people were still in there typing. After emailing for a while I walked down the dark hall to the restroom. Just beyond the restroom is the kitchen. The TV was on in the kitchen, which was strange because it didn't seem like anyone was around to watch it. I used the restroom and when I came out I glanced over my shoulder and there was one of the security guys, playing with the volume on the TV, also dressed in his PJs - T-shirt, boxer shorts and flip-flops. The boxers were blue with a stars-and-stripes pattern on the ass (in a rah-rah America way, I think, as opposed to an America = ass way).
Later I found out that the two had had to evacuate their families from another part of Beirut - the southern suburbs, I assume - and are now living in unoccupied office space on the floor below the newsroom.
Finally, tonight I was walking home at 1 am. I was asking myself if the silence was creepy or peaceful. I was leaning toward creepy. I get to the foot of the large beautiful stone staircase/avenue which I live halfway up and I'm stopped by a hissing sound. I look up and there's this ancient woman in shorts and a cotton shirt standing on her balcony off the second story shaking a plastic bag at me. (It was a night of seeing Beirutis in their pajamas.) No one else around. Not a pedestrian, no traffic, not even a cat.
She says something to me I don't catch. Then I realize the plastic bag is tied to a rope and it's her version of the dumbwaiter arrangement that homemakers use throughout the old areas of Beirut - lots of balconies, few elevators - to send down cash and haul up produce when the veggie vendor comes by with his truck in the morning. (This morning was the first morning since the bombardment began that I noticed the produce vendor back on my street. On almost every one of my days off I've been annoyed with him because he comes sort of early and uses a megaphone to announce that he has arrived and that yes he has brought tomatoes, lots and lots of tomatoes: panadora panadora panadora. This morning I was happy to hear him.)
I'm sorry? I said to the old woman (she was 85 I'd say, maybe a young 90). Her arms were moving up and down and she was shaking the plastic bag and squawking at me and I just couldn't understand her Arabic. But I realized she intended to lower the bag and I was to put something in it. I was smoking a cigarette; did she want a cigarette? That wasn't it. Then I understood that she was saying al-arid, al-arid, on the ground, on the ground. And then I remembered that something similar had actually happened to me once before, soon after my arrival in Beirut: One afternoon I was walking in the same neighborhood and an old lady on a balcony had got my attention and somehow she had dropped a thousand-lira bill (two-thirds of a dollar) - or maybe someone else had - and she got me to pick it up and put it in her dumbwaiter rig, I think that one incorporated a plastic bucket.
So I looked around on the ground for cash. Nothing. But then she realized that I was going to give her a hand and got really emphatic about whatever it was she wanted me to pick up, positively flapping her arms and almost yelling, it seemed like, for how quiet it was otherwise. It looked like the mating ritual of a long-extinct bird. We went through a ridiculous series of mimes and pointing and misunderstood Arabic and I tried if she spoke French but she didn't and then we finally worked out a kind of "hotter/colder" system, with me crouched on the pavement and her squawking at me and it was the damnedest thing because I was looking down right at the pavement where she wanted me to and there was just nothing there. Nothing. Did she drop a dime bag? Something under the car parked nearby maybe? Nope.
All kinds of things were going through my head. Was it some kind of prank? What kind of 90-year-old lady stays up late playing pranks on passers by? Was it a trap? Was I finally losing it? Imagining it? The scene was perfectly of a piece with the week past, for crazy value.
Then I saw that there was something there. A small, maybe 10-inch length of galvanized wire, twisted in a loop, lying on the manhole next to me. It was catching light from a streetlamp; when I realized that that was what she wanted it suddenly seemed to glow with light. I touched it and Aye! she said, and I went to take it to her but then she wanted something else. The next one was easy: a cellophane gum wrapper, also catching the light. The third one, a dirty tissue, was a little trickier and unpleasant to touch. I didn't even try to ask if she was sure about wanting the tissue.
That was it. I walked over and she lowered her bag. It was on a blue nylon string. There were two heads of garlic in there. Why not? Sinkweight I guess, for dead-of-night assisted-trash-collecting in heavy winds. I put the stuff in and she hauled it right up and I could still hear her thanking me as I rounded the corner home.
2:55 am. There's a plane. Terrifying. How can it take so long for a jet to fly over and away? Seems like it's hovering up there. 3:10, impact, rather far off. Jets, jets, jets. 4:05. jets. But I can barely make out the impacts, and sometimes not at all. Either they're bombing farther away tonight - probably the case - or they're just flying over in an attempt to scare the shit out of Hizbullah. Somehow I don't think that's going to work.