The broken clock says "4 TUE" and its hands point to 6:07, the time it stopped working on Aug. 4, 2020. Photo taken in 2023. (Credit: Yara Malka/L'Orient Today)
August 2023: Broken clock
It was August 2023, and the scorching late-summer sun had finally set on my friends’ Mar Mikhael apartment. We sat on the fuzzy worn-out couch as the classic fluorescent light above us, a staple of the scant power we’ve nominally adjusted to, twitched and flickered.
There was a knock on the door. We were not expecting anyone. There was another knock, this time more poignant. One of us got up from the couch with a puzzled look and went to answer it.
He opened the door to a young woman with a solemn expression. I couldn’t hear what they were saying. His perplexed expression suddenly turned into a sympathetic, unguarded nod. He let her in. She said hello and walked into the apartment, slowly entering every room. She then stopped in one of the rooms, gazed out the window then closed the door behind her.
I held my tongue until she was inside then asked my friend what that was about. Why did a stranger just waltz into the apartment and disappear into the back bedroom?
“She said she lived here during the Beirut blast,” my friend whispered. “She just wanted to take a look and get some closure. She hadn’t been here since, so I let her in,” he added. I quickly concurred.
We all looked at each other in silence. One of my friends looked up at the clock which hung over the living area, bringing the room together. I had never noticed it. It was like the colorless, un-shattered window glass: Inconspicuous, but perpetually looming.
He said, “You know, this clock apparently stopped working when the explosion happened, from the pressure at 6:07 p.m., I guess.”
“Well, that’s a fitting reaction,” I commented.
I often feel that time stopped on Aug. 4, 2020, at 6:07 p.m. It’s as if, despite the world turning, this country and our lives have not moved since.
Aug 4. 2020, 5:31 p.m.
Aug. 4, 2020, had started out as a painfully ordinary Beirut evening. I shuffled through my Hamra apartment in the Covid lockdown aftermath. I received a call from my friend Samer at 5:31 p.m. We had been invited to an impromptu game night at our other friend’s Mar Mikhael apartment.
It had been months since I’d visited the area. So, for the first time in a long time, I said, “Yeah, why not? That sounds fun.”
“Cool,” he responded. “I’ll pick you up at 5:45.”
5:55 p.m.
We headed to Mar Mikhael. The road through Gemmayze and towards Mar Mikhael was especially congested. We rolled down our windows and put the radio on.
6:00 p.m.
Drudgery, traffic and heat: The day had been tedious, but nothing new. As we neared the once-famous Shawarma El-Kbir (which has since shuttered its doors) next to the EDL building (which, theoretically, still functions) Samer told me he would maneuver through the next alley to escape the traffic. I said no: “What if the traffic’s just as bad there? Just keep going. What’s the worst that can happen?”
Frustrated, he drove into the next side street anyway.
6:06 p.m.
Samer was right. We had skipped most of the traffic and neared our friend’s building at the end of Armenia Street. I spotted a single parking spot – a rarity – in the shadow of a mound on the other side. “Wait, there’s a spot! In the shade, too … Perfect,” I said to Samer as he parked the car.
We both slammed our doors and headed to the elevator when I remembered something. “Hold on, I left my window open. Let me roll it up,” I said. Samer unlocked the car doors. I got in and reached for the button.
6:07 p.m.
A sudden sound boomed in the distance. Then, a nearly deafening pressure blew sand from the mound into our faces as we looked at each other incredulously. I screamed for him to get in. He did. I hid my head under the dashboard and pulled him towards the seat.
Then, it felt like everything under the sun had imploded.
It all happened in the span of a few seconds.
The car leaped, then shook, then trembled. We got out to what seemed like a different planet. It did not look like anything I had seen before. It was biblical and dystopian, like Armageddon.
Sirens and clouds of dust consumed the street. Screams and glass shattering obscured the sudden collapse of social parameters. People shrieked at each other for answers. There was no such thing as a stranger.
“It’s Israel! Run!”
“No! Stay put! If it was Israel, then they will strike again!”
Everything was running: Time, people, blood.
A man with a bursting head wound called out to us to get into the basement of the building.
Samer and I glanced at each other. I said we should run to the basement. He said we should drive away. Neither of us knew who was right. All we knew was that whatever usually unremarkable decision we made from then on would either save or cost us our lives.
He said, “Whatever we do, we should decide now. It’s raining glass.” That was a new phenomenon for me. I never knew windows could shatter into so many shards. We ran towards an awning near the elevator’s entrance and stood under it.
The man with the head wound told us the elevator was crushed, the elevator we had been seconds from entering were it not for the ajar car window.
6:10 p.m.
We drove away, toward Hamra. Everywhere I looked out the car window was a bloodied face, a bashed head, a loose arm, pools of reddened glass on the floor, chaos and screams of agony and bewilderment.
A woman on the sidewalk pressed her hand around her eye as a man held her hysterically.
The road downtown swarmed with huge firetrucks and teams of people digging through the rubble to search for anyone who might have been trapped. It looked like the whole city was one large crowd, in a collective haze of confused horror.
Through the panic and seeing red, I tilted my head back. My hands and arms became numb, then my legs followed. I could not breathe. Then, a solemn sense of radical acceptance fell over me. I told Samer it was time to call my family, and that he should too.
6:25 p.m.
I tried to call my mother. She was not in the city; none of my family was. I thought to myself strategically: “Okay, so how do I, in the quickest way possible, tell my mother I might die?” The best I could do was a warning, and time was of the essence.
My mother did not pick up. I called my siblings abroad to alert them first, then friends and anyone I could think of in Beirut to ask “Are you alive?”
Service was especially bad, so I turned my attention back to the flaming city. Firefighters carried people, some men were working to retrieve someone from under a huge slab of concrete, and a woman ran frantically along the road, a child clasped in her arms. But no one knew where to run. No one knew what they were running from. Were we next?
6:35 p.m.
We made it back to Hamra. That was the last thing I remember.
On Aug. 4, 2020, the devil was in the unremarkable
Sophisticated words fail to relay the magnitude of the tragedy; on Aug. 4, 2020, the devil was in the unremarkable.
A decision to leave the house at a particular time, to take a different path saved us from what could have easily been our unspeakable deaths.
Choosing a parking spot near a shielding mound and slightly rolling down a window saved us from pressure-induced glass maiming.
Reentering the car upon remembering the ajar window saved us from a grim elevator ride that I do not want to imagine.
But we hadn’t known that yet. Looking back on the port explosion now, I have run out of fear and grief. I have developed chronic anxiety from the trauma, as many Lebanese people have — the ones who made it out alive. But mostly I am contemptuous that precious lives were lost or ruined in an incompetent state where injustice prevails, and for what?
So on Aug. 4, 2020, the devil was in the ridiculous.
As I did a year ago, I still feel like I am in that car today. I am white-knuckling the dashboard and mourning the ones who could not escape. But outside on the streets of Beirut, I now watch a facade of moving on, thinly veiling profound stillness and defeat. Since that wretched, once unremarkable day, every little gimmick of normalcy has been a travesty.
In many ways, I relate to the broken clock.