(Credit: The @oldbeiruthlebanon account/Rauli Vitranen)
The last photo taken on his phone in her southern Lebanese village near Nabatieh dates back to Sept. 14. From October 2023 until that day, every few mornings, her father would call the cousins who had stayed behind, and if they told him that things “seemed rather quiet today,” he would immediately say to L, “Let's go, get ready.” Together, they set off for Nabatieh with both a heavy heart and the consolation of knowing that, despite everything, the south was still possible.
There, from the terrace of the house whose rattan furniture had been hastily packed away in old sheets in mid-October 2023, L could see, week by week, the clouds of smoke billowing over the surrounding hills. Week by week, these interludes in her childhood home became shorter and shorter. Each time, it was necessary to return earlier, before nightfall, and sometimes it was even necessary to leave right away, as the bombardments were getting closer to home. Week after week, on the way back to Beirut, L and her father would not say a word, and in silence, they would pray for the house in the south to remain there.
Leave or die
At the end of September, L's family, who had refused to leave the south for the previous 11 months, had only a handful of minutes to evacuate their house. Avichay Adraee, the Israeli army's Arabic-speaking spokesman, had appeared on their screens, showing a map of their village next to Nabatieh, with a building a 100 meters from their home marked in red, which he claimed housed a Hezbollah arms depot, and ordered the surrounding residents to leave.
L's cousins had a handful of minutes to choose between leaving or dying. A handful of minutes to look, just like that, at the house, their bedrooms, the kitchen, the garden, the olive trees, the family photos lined up on the piano, the entirety of a life, and decide what to take, and what was worth saving, knowing that anything not salvaged now could never be seen again.
They had to leave. They did not die, but part of their souls had been ripped away from them. The next morning, a dented voice announced in a phone call to L's father that their house and that of the cousins had miraculously escaped the bombardment. At the other end of the line, it was the village baker who, the day before, after Adraee's 'warning,' hadn't wanted to hear anything. He had said, “If I'm going to die, I want to die here, on my land, with dignity.”
L had burst into tears; her childhood, her memories, her roots had dodged the worst. None of it had been affected. Not yet, but until when? Last week, the bulldozer of death that is the Israeli army chose to attack Nabatieh. Behind her screen, L saw the old souk where, as a child, she would go to buy Cortina ice cream and fireworks in the summer. This old souk, where L and her parents before her had left part of their childhood, was now just a mound of ashes and dust. Then, suddenly, the worst happened: In another video, it was her house in flames. She recognized it, she knew it by heart. This house that had survived so many storms, this house that had withstood the invasion of 1978, the invasion of 1982, the occupation until May 2000, the war of 2006 and all the Israeli aggressions in between, had evaporated in volutes of fire and white phosphorus. Everything was gone and lost.
Taking a beating
Lost was the terrace where L first fell off her bike, the field of olive trees where, in October, her grandfather carried her on his shoulders to pick the last stubborn olives. Lost was her childhood bedroom, where she used to hide under her comforter when Israeli soldiers passed by during the occupation. Last week, L had watched it all disappear before her eyes and realized, like her parents and ancestors before her, that to be Lebanese is simply to learn loss, all the time.
This article was originally published in L'Orient-Le Jour.
