Almost Every Sound
Two days before the wedding, I type “Lebanon news” into a blank search window and read that a senior commander has been killed near the border. I hold my phone out to Elias and ask if this a big deal, but what I really want to know is if it’s still safe to go. Missiles have flown back and forth the southern border for the past eight months, but things have escalated in the last few weeks.
He shrugs, blue light illuminating his face and says, looks like more of the same.
I’m not sure what to believe. When an illegal storage of fertilizer exploded at the Beirut port four years ago, the windows of his parents’ apartment cracked. His mother got pulled out onto the balcony, then sucked back inside again, by the force of the blow. His parents have lost almost everything in an economic crisis with no end in sight. But Elias assures me of my safety so often that every time we visit, I put my fingers into decades-old bullet holes and pull them out clean, like a non-believer of everything that’s happened there.
*
The morning of our departure, I read that acres of olive trees are burning from the white phosphorus bombs sent from the south. I expect an empty flight, but the plane is so packed we have to fight for space in the overhead compartment. As the plane rumbles down the runway, I lean into him, my head on his shoulder, my body mirroring his.
Elias was nearly ten years old by the time he experienced his first year of peace, but he knows that I am still unaccustomed to uncertainty. That the biggest catastrophe that happened in my childhood was the year my hometown got four feet of snow over Halloween weekend. That for four days, daylight grew dimmer and dimmer as snow piled up against our double-paned windows. That it buffered, too, almost every sound from outside, so that my family and I were enclosed in a soft womb of snow that I hoped would never melt.
*
The ceremony is on the patio of an old stone palace tucked far in the mountains, an hour’s drive from Beirut. The couple exchanges vows under a vaulted arch that overlooks the valley and beyond it, the sea. After the ceremony, as the rest of the wedding party funnels inside for cocktails and dancing, Elias takes me to the edge of the patio where the view south is clear. If I squint into the space where the mountains meet the sea, I think I might be able to make out where the fighting is.
Listen, he says, and I listen for gunfire, for the pop of something I’ve never heard before. But I hear nothing. I close my eyes and try again. Behind the din of the wedding guests, I hear a bird, then another. Then the sound of the wind as it makes its way through the trees — we have a word for that sound, hafif, Elias once told me — then, farther still, the call of a shepherd, a hey-oh! over and over, and the soft chime of a bell on a faraway goat. It is a layering of sound, a whole world behind my closed eyes that is all at once so evident, so rich, that I don’t know how I didn’t notice it before. Thank you, he says when at last I turn to him, as if my listening was a gift I had given to him.
Together we turn and walk towards the light, where inside, the party has already begun.
