Kadem hesitated, pressing his lips together. Bahia’s hands tormented each other as she awaited his response.
“All right,” he said, yielding. “I haven’t tasted my aunt’s cooking in a long time.”
“I did the cooking tonight,” Bahia declared, crimson-faced. Then she dashed down the stairs, as happy as a child at the end of Ramadan.
We hadn’t finished eating when we heard a distant explosion. Kadem and I left the table to go and have a look. Some neighbors, soon joined by the rest of their family, appeared on their terrace, too. Down in the street, someone asked what was going on. Except for the tiny lights shining through the orchards, the plateau appeared serene.
“It was a plane,” someone cried out in the night. “I saw it come down.”
The sound of running footsteps moved past the house in the direction of the square. Our neighbors started leaving their terrace, eager to hear the news in the street. People came out of their houses and gathered here and there. In the darkness, their silhouettes loomed together distressingly. “A plane crash,” people said, passing the words around. “Ibrahim saw a burning plane crash to the ground.” The square was teeming with curious villagers. The women stayed behind their patio doors, trying to gather bits of information from passersby. “A plane crashed, but very far from here,” they were told reassuringly.
Suddenly, two automobile headlights emerged from the orchards and zoomed toward the trail. The car bore down on the village at top speed.
“This is bad,” Kadem said, watching the vehicle bound and pitch as it hurtled toward us. “This is very bad.”
He made a dash for the stairs.
The car nearly fishtailed as it bounced onto the smaller trail leading to Kafr Karam. We could hear the blasts of its horn, indistinct but disturbing. Then the headlights reached the first houses of the village, and the horn blasts catapulted pedestrians against walls. The car crossed the soccer pitch, braked in front of the mosque, and skidded a good distance before stopping in a cloud of dust. The driver leaped out while people were still running toward him. His face was distraught and his eyes white with terror. He pointed at the orchards and babbled unintelligible sounds.
Another car roared up. Without taking the trouble to get out, the driver shouted to us, “Get in, quick. We need help at the Haitems’. A missile came down on the party.”
People started running off in all directions. Kadem pushed me into the backseat of the second car and jumped in beside me. Three other young men piled in around us, and two more sat up front.
“You’ve got to hurry,” the driver shouted to the crowd. “If you can’t get a ride, come on foot. Lots of people are buried under the rubble. Bring whatever you can — shovels, blankets, sheets, medicine kits. Don’t dawdle. Please, please, come quick!”
He made a U-turn and gunned the car in the direction of the orchards.
“Are you sure it was a missile?” one of the passengers asked.
“I don’t know,” said the driver, obviously still stunned. “I don’t know anything. The guests were having a good time, and then the chairs and tables blew away, like in a windstorm. It was crazy…. It was…I can’t describe it. Bodies and screams, screams and bodies. If it wasn’t a missile, then it must have been lightning from heaven.”
A bad feeling came over me. I didn’t understand what I was doing in that car, tearing along in the dark, nor was it clear why I’d accepted an opportunity to see horror up close, me, when I wasn’t yet over my last awful shock. Sweat poured down my back and rolled off my forehead. I looked at the driver, at the other men in the front seat, at those with me in the back, including Kadem, who was gnawing his lips, and I couldn’t believe I’d agreed to go with them. A voice inside me cried, Where are you going, you poor fool? I couldn’t tell whether my body was rising in revolt or being slammed about by the ruts in the trail. I cursed myself, grinding my teeth, my fists clenched against the fear that was rising like a solid mass in my belly. Where are you running to, stupid? I asked myself. As we approached the orchards, the fear grew so large that a kind of torpor numbed my limbs and my mind.
The orchards were sunk in a malignant darkness. We raced through them. The Haitems’ house looked intact. There were shadowy figures on the staircase leading to the entrance, some of them collapsed on the steps, their heads in their hands, and others leaning against the wall. The focal point of the tragedy lay a little farther on, in a garden where a building, apparently the hall the family used for parties, was burning at the center of a huge pile of smoking debris. The force of the explosion had flung chairs and wedding guests thirty meters in all directions. Survivors staggered about, their clothes in rags, holding their hands out in front of them like blind people. Some mutilated, charred bodies were lined up along the edge of a path. Cars illuminated the slaughter with their headlights, while specters thrashed about in the midst of the rubble. Then there was the howling, drawn out, interminable; the air was full of pleas and cries and wails. Mothers looking for their children called out into the confusion; the more they went unanswered, the louder they shouted. A weeping man, covered with blood, knelt beside the body of someone dear to him.
A wave of nausea cut me in half the moment my foot hit the ground; I fell on all fours and puked my insides out. Kadem tried to lift me up, but before long he left me and ran toward a group of men who were busy helping some injured people. I crept over to a tree, put my arms around my knees, and contemplated the delirium. Other vehicles arrived from the village, filled with volunteers and shovels and bundles. Anarchy added a dimension of demented activity to the rescue operation. With their bare hands, people lifted burning beams and sections of collapsed walls, searching for a sign of life. Someone dragged a dying man to a spot near me and begged him, “Don’t go to sleep.” When the injured person started slipping weakly into unconsciousness, the other slapped him several times to keep him from fainting. Another man came up and leaned over the body. “Come on, there’s nothing more you can do for him.” The other kept slapping the injured man, harder and harder. “Hold on,” he said. “Hold on, I’m telling you.” The third man said, “Hold on to what? Can’t you see he’s dead?”
I got to my feet like a sleepwalker and ran toward the fire.
I don’t know how long I was there, yanking, heaving, and turning over everything around me. When I came out of my trance, my hands were bruised and my fingers lacerated and bleeding; I sank to my knees, wretchedly sick, my lungs polluted with smoke and the stench of cremation.
The sun rose on the disaster.
Wreaths of smoke from the blasted hall rose into the sky like burnt offerings. The air was heavy with horrid exhalations. The dead — seventeen of them, mostly women and children — lay under sheets at one side of the garden. The injured sprawled here and there, groaning and surrounded by medical workers and relatives. Ambulances had reached the scene a short while before, and the stretcher-bearers didn’t know where to begin. Although the level of confusion had subsided, agitation grew as the true extent of the tragedy became apparent. From time to time, a woman screamed, setting off a new round of cries and wailing. Men went around in circles, stunned and lost. The first police vehicles arrived. The officers were Iraqis, and their leader was immediately taken to task by the survivors. The situation degenerated; then, when people started throwing things at the cops, they jumped back into their cars and sped away. An hour later, they returned, reinforced by two truckloads of soldiers. An extremely stout officer asked to speak to a representative of the Haitem family. Someone flung a rock at the fat officer, and the soldiers fired their weapons into the air to calm everyone down. At that moment, some foreign television teams turned up. A grieving father shouted at them, indicating the carnage. “Look! Nothing but women and children! This was a wedding reception! Where are the terrorists?” He grabbed a cameraman by the arm, showed him the corpses stretched out on the grass, and said, “The real terrorists are the bastards who fired the missile at us.”