Creek Running North

I have not written anything on Lebanon.  I have until recently found myself with nothing to say, aside from “No.”

I have watched as reports come in of devastation of the countryside, again. I have read of women widowed, children burned to death, I have read the prevarications and the spin, seen the pundits split the hairs of civilianry. I have seen the old ugly accusations of anti-Semitism dusted off and hurled at anyone who opposes bombing without regard to the symbols painted on the sides of the bombs — the accusers themselves often the sort who would have jeered as the cattle cars passed on their way to Bergen-Belsen.

I cannot stop thinking of kisses.

I loved someone, long ago, who left someone she loved for me. She was smouldering and troubled. He was hurt. He was Lebanese, a Maronite, a sensitive and young man who did not understand why she had left him. She was a Russian Jew by ancestry, a New Yorker by birth, and she broke me as surely as she did him, but that came later.

She told me he had bragged to her that Lebanon would be invaded. Israel had enlisted the Maronites, Lebanese Christians, as allies. Tanks would roll over the border soon, he told her. I dismissed it as boasting to impress her, a man in his early twenties trying to raise his estimation in the mind of a woman packing her bags.

She curled my hair around her finger as she told me, and a breeze from the open window played over her. She was getting ready to leave for New York. I would meet her there three weeks later: There was a huge rally planned to oppose nuclear weapons on June 12. Israel invaded Lebanon on June 6. I read the news. I wondered if I should have said something.

And then came life, and loss, and the passage of years, and my heart scoured from the inside. I sought it out. A friend invited me for dinner; she was a gardener, planting vegetables and tilling soil for the rich who had no time, and we ate the hummus she had made from her mother’s family’s recipe, handed down for a few generations back in Lebanon. We watched from her balcony as the sun set over Bethesda, and a breeze raised the skin on my neck. She curled a finger in my hair.

How self-absorbed, how trite: an old man delves his memories for metaphor, the sufferings of thousands watered down, recollections of idle dalliance with which to trivialize reciprocal and escalating atrocities. But we are the same, we are the same. Arab and Jew and American mongrel, the same. Our lips part with little gasps the same, love and desire catch in our throats with the sultry air, our hearts aflame and numb to the certainty of coming wounds. We ache, the same. We long, the same. The same we lose sleep over our loves, the same we grieve our losses. Let us be honest: we kill ourselves. We kill ourselves.