Cradled in his arms was a one-year-old child, Abbas Hashem, the twenty-seventh victim of the bombing of Qana. Moments later, a rescuer rose from the ruins, back slightly stooped. As a donkey brayed, a terrified cat shot through the rubble while Israeli shelling thundered in the distance. A tattered Persian rug jutted out the back window of an old Chevy, hurled from somewhere by an explosion.
Yet on this summer day, olive trees with gnarled trunks perhaps a century old were split like toothpicks. Some Lebanese believe that it was here, amid grape arbors, olive groves, and fig trees, that Jesus performed his miracle, turning water into wine. I had arrived in Qana to see webs of wire dangling along the suggestion of a street. Their smells seemed fresh and bracing, promises of renewal, until I discovered that the actual trees had been destroyed hours before. The request repeated itself to me as, searching for some telling detail for another story to appear in the Washington Post, I noticed the fragrance of cedars and pines. In the path of a bulldozer clearing the wreckage of lives was what would remain: a bag of onions, a can of beans, a blood-stained blue mattress, a teakettle, a photograph of a young boy, posing uncomfortably, backing awkwardly into manhood. The village, its voices and stories, plates and bowls, letters and words, its history, had been obliterated in a few extended moments that splintered a quiet morning. In the Lebanese town of Qana, where Israeli bombs caught their victims in the midst of a morning’s work, we saw the dead standing, sitting, looking around.
This had become my daily fare as a reporter in the Middle East documenting war, its survivors and fatalities, and the many who seem a little of both. Some suffering cannot be covered in words. ‘Slowly, slowly.’ It seemed that I heard in their voices all the others of those I had known over the years who had lost their homes. In typical Shadid fashion, he wrote twice as much as his publisher expected, and spent the next year or two wrestling it down to size.‘Slowly,’ the townspeople had cried to the man driving the bulldozer flattening what remained of their town. He showed us around the house's dirt cellars and ruined foyer and talked about making it beautiful again. Even though it took special permission from the military to get south of the Litani River, Anthony was in heaven - grilling fresh trout, drinking beer in the sun. I visited him while he was at work on the project in 2008. The book details Anthony's restoration of a house in his grandparents' village in south Lebanon. He set up a base in Beirut and started a labor of love that became his last book, House of Stone, which is due out next month. As his marriage ended, he talked about how much he missed his daughter and wanted to show her the places he cherished in the Middle East, especially Lebanon. 11, 2001, brought America crashing into Afghanistan and then Iraq, work took him away from his family.
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