Piecework

Outside Aadlun, we saw the shot-up hulk of a maroon Mercedes taxicab, one of two ancient cabs into which 16 members of two Lebanese families had piled to escape the Israeli shelling of Tyre. They left in the early hours of March 17, heading for Beirut. But they were stopped by a group of Israeli commandos who had come ashore looking for a Palestinian leader. The commandos opened fire on the cabs. Fourteen people, including four children under age 5, were killed. At dawn, when reporters reached the site, the two cars were still jammed with corpses. Now the cabs lay like the shells of strange giant beetles, picked clean by ants.

The driver moved along more slowly now. We went through lemon and orange groves, and suddenly we were at the bridge over the Litani River. Lebanese soldiers waved us on. A dead horse lay at the side of the road, its neck jerked back at a right angle. It was beginning to swell.

Then we could see the long low curve of Tyre, with minarets sticking up against the sky. I counted 15 ships, from freighters to fishing boats, sunk in the harbor. We went up Ramel Road, where five apartment houses had been hit by Israeli shelling. Two Arab teenagers came over to see us when we stopped, one of them holding the rusting case of a hand grenade.

“They were out in the water and kept shooting,” said the first boy, who lived in a six-story apartment house with blue trim and white walls. He spoke in a mixture of English and Arabic. “Then the airplanes came from the other side, shooting.” He went around to the back of the house where he had lived, and showed us huge holes in the building’s wall. Blue Venetian blinds rattled in the wind off the harbor. The building was abandoned.

“Nobody was killed here,” the boy said. “They died down there, in the souk.”

In the souk — a casbah of winding narrow streets next to the harbor — there were three shell craters, from 15 to 20 feet wide, filled with brown, stagnant water. A three-story house had fallen into a mess of broken concrete, wood beams, plaster and corrugated iron.

We drove out to the abandoned night club on the edge of the city where the International Red Cross had set up its headquarters. It was right on the beach. A Swiss woman named Nicole (she said her last name “was not important”) was running the office.

“We had to move the first aid station into the center of the city, because it was too dangerous for the wounded to come out here,” she said. “So now we are just trying to help the refugees locate each other. So many got separated during the shelling and bombing. We have more than 700 messages here. All from people trying to find each other.”

Outside her office was the old dining room of the night club. Rain pelted the windows. Out on the veranda a huge Red Cross flag was held in place by rocks. One of the windows had been smashed. The wind made a ghostly sound.

We left the Red Cross building and went back into town to make our way to the UN command post. There were PLO soldiers at the bottom of the hill, most of them sitting aimlessly on piles of rubble. We started up the hill, heading east, and suddenly a man in civilian clothes ran out waving his hands.

“Don’t go,” he said. “Don’t go. Bad there. Shooting.”

About 50 yards ahead, we saw PLO soldiers running in our direction. Some dived into ditches beside the road. I could hear the snapping of small arms fire. And then the heavier chung-chung-chung of an automatic. The driver pulled violently off the road, and went to the side of a building, out of the line of fire. We got out and peered around the side. The PLO was firing now, a mixture of carbines and machine guns, but there was no return fire from up the hill.

Then, as quickly as it had begun, the firing mysteriously stopped.

“Lebanese army!” the man in civilian clothes said. “Not UN! Mistake. Small problem. Not UN, not Israeli!”

We looked around the building again and the PLO soldiers were climbing out of the ditches, peering up the road. All the firing had stopped. Later it would be reported, without details, as a minor incident involving a dispute with a local commander of Christian Lebanese troops. But on this road, in the soft rain, it was men shooting at each other with real guns and real bullets. The man in civilian clothes ran up the road, out of sight. A young girl in a yellow dress came out of the bushes across the way, peeling an orange. We never made it to the command post of the United Nations.

III.

SAIDA, LEBANON

The tents were dark blue and wet with the rain and they were pitched in a grove of date palms between the road and the sea. Children ran from tent to tent in the rain. A chicken-wire fence surrounded the enclave, and a PLO soldier stood at the gate, with a Kalashnikov assault rifle under his poncho.

“We are happy you are here,” said Labib Androuous, a Lebanese Catholic who was supervising the camp for the civil defense section of the government. “Welcome. Do you want a cigaret?”