I walk away and sit next to my friends on a sidewalk nearby.
The restaurants are dusting themselves off.
All eyes are peeled for the smallest change or update to pass it on to the ones that haven’t seen it yet. We see and tell; we acknowledge what happened in order to grasp it, to grasp the magnitude of the death that was thrown into our laps and that was awakened from the past and is hiding behind tomorrow.
Uff, I’m suffocating.
And everyone else is suffocating, too. When we witness a crisis together, our rhythms unite. And when it’s time to put this behind us, we still return to the location, united as well, and attempt to remove death from the scene.
We tell a joke about ourselves, another about our world, and a third, whispered, about nothing.
We calm down a bit. We exchange expressions of happiness for one another’s safety, then break eye contact when we hear moaning. It’s coming from a mother and her son who are looking for his brother. He was practicing in the Nejmeh soccer field. He’s the star player.
We remain silent.
The mother is sitting on the sidewalk nearby us, her head in her hands and her words swinging back and forth between hope and pain. Her son goes to ask about his brother and comes back without an answer. And the lady, in everyday black, stands on the edge that separates mourning from gratitude.
She won’t give thanks because her son’s safety will not be granted.
But we don’t know that yet. We’re still silent, our tears washing our faces. We don’t know what to do aside from wishing that we were invisible, that the earth would swallow us whole. The lady is crying for her son, and we’re standing like idiots around her.
We haven’t lost anyone, so how can we console a mother who just got hit with the image of her dead son?
We withdraw into ourselves.
We shrink and melt into one body.
If we heard her scream for water, we would rush to her with water.
If we heard her sobbing, we would rush to her with tissues.
If . . .
But she doesn’t want anything we can give her. She just wants her son back.
We withdraw into ourselves even further.
And suddenly:
We hear a voice that generates a feeling inside us like an explosion.
It’s a friend of ours from abroad who’s spending a pleasant summer in Lebanon. He was in the area when he heard the explosion, so he grabbed his camera and came running, looking for something good to film.
He’s a civil engineer, and now, suddenly, a social activist as well, living in Paris.
He addresses us: “Thank God you’re safe!”
Please! We don’t want to hear that expression right now, not while the lady whose son’s safety has not been guaranteed to her stands beside us.
I hug my friend tightly and close my eyes, hoping that maybe my silence will rub off on him. I open my eyes and see him back away with the swiftness of a juggler and lift his camera from his hip to his eye level. The camera that had been hanging from his shoulder is now pressed up against his nose.
What do I do? How can I get him to calm down? But first, how can I get him to back off from his self-styled journalism?
I block his camera lens with my hand. We explain to him exactly what just happened to this woman and how we’re feeling toward the entire situation. He calms down a little. “Ohh,” he says, as if he just made an important discovery. What discovery? That an explosion usually results in casualties, injuries, and having to mourn loved ones?
Why didn’t he expect that? Perhaps because he’s spent a long time abroad and has now become used to only seeing this kind of news through a lens, usually followed by a televised dramatic discussion and finger pointing.
Maybe that’s why his first instinct is to grab the camera, so he can see the disaster through the lens—live—just as he’s used to.
It doesn’t matter anyway, that’s his business. Me, on the other hand, I’m not carrying a camera. I can hardly carry myself.
All of a sudden, I see him point the camera at the woman sitting on the sidewalk.
I explode.
“Don’t!”
He ignores my demand and looks at me with a face that says that he understands my distress, in fact he’s as upset as I am, but the picture needs to go on YouTube or Facebook so the world can see this woman’s pain, or else, who would hear about any of this, or of her?
What? Does it even matter if the world hears of this, or of her? And besides, who said she wants “the world” to hear of her, especially at this moment? Maybe she wants to be left alone right now. Maybe she doesn’t want to become an image or a video, not today, tomorrow, not thirty years from now.
Before I can give this man a piece of my mind, the brother of the missing son returns to tell his mother that he is officially missing. The Nejmeh team members were counted, and his brother wasn’t among them.
Oh God.
When I hear this my heart stops.
What’s this? The camera again?
Before my friends and I can react, the brother yells at the cameraman and tells him to leave him and his mother alone. Then he collapses on the sidewalk, weeping. The fresh-from-Europe guy pounces on his prey, camera in hand, assuming the brother is giving in to the lens and not to shock over losing his brother.
I stand up, then my friends follow suit, and we walk away.
If we can’t do anything to keep this overzealous guy from performing his duty, then we’re not going to be his excuse for a performance.
We retreat.
He asks, “Where are you guys going?”
I hiss at him, “Home.”
We walk toward my apartment, fast. Almost running.
We stop and sneak a look at the
