Seven Days in a Small War

By Roger Rosenblatt

This sunstruck, ruined place where the world's heart beats

Late last month TIME Senior Writer Roger Rosenblatt set out for Lebanon in order to find several children described in a story he had written six months before, "Children of War" (Jan. 11, 1982). The children included a ten-year-old girl named Lara, whose parents were killed by the explosion of a car bomb in Beirut last September; a 15-year-old boy, Ahmed, a leader in a P.L.O. youth organization; a baby called Palestine who was born when her mother's stomach was slit open in a bombing raid of Beirut in the summer of 1981; and Samer, the four-year-old son of Colonel Azmi, head of the P.L.O. forces stationed around Tyre. The hope was to find these children alive after three weeks of war; if not to meet them face to face, then at least to learn of their whereabouts.

The following journal is partly an account of that search, and partly a record of events observed in Lebanon during the week of June 28 through July 4. Although his journey began on June 23, Rosenblatt did not arrive in Beirut until the afternoon of June 27, due to the necessity of going first to London, then to Cyprus, and from Cyprus by container ship from Limassol to Junieh, a small port in northern Lebanon. On the Friday before Rosenblatt's arrival, the Israelis dealt West Beirut the heaviest bombing and shelling of the war to that point. That same day Alexander Haig resigned and Philip Habib announced a "permanent cease-fire." On June 27, Israeli jets dropped a shower of pink leaflets, warning all civilians to get out of the city at once. Rosenblatt's journal begins the following morning.

Monday, June 28

The sun is high at 5 a.m., the air already very hot. The day begins with a spurt of machine-gun fire and a shriek in the street, followed by a low moaning. One learns that these sounds are normal. Late yesterday afternoon, a car bomb exploded a few blocks from the hotel, killing two, shooting a gray-white pillar of smoke into the sky, which turned black before vanishing. Destruction is everywhere. An apartment house on a corner is cracked in the middle like a bone. It sags and heaves. Fragments of cement and wire hang from the structure at impossible angles. A carton of unopened Pepsis rests on a slab, waiting to fall. There is a hole in the building where the garage was; it gives the place the look of an ancient cave. In the rubble a bashed-in Mercedes, a book on the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, a pair of black shoes lying in the Charlie Chaplin position. The air is thick with dust and decay. There is so much glass on the ground, each step sounds like an army's.

From the outside, the hospital does not look as bad as that other building. The hospital for mental and psychological diseases was hit directly on several sides in last Friday's raid, but except for dozens of tiny smashed windows, its main damage shows in a lateral gap high on a wall, the shape of a huge expressionless mouth. When the twelve bombs hit the drab, gray structure, six people were killed and 20 injured. Two female patients sitting in the lounge were sliced to pieces by the shrapnel. It could have been worse. A rocket that hit the children's ward got entangled in a blanket and miraculously never went off.

This is a private hospital for the aged as well as the mentally handicapped and retarded. Among its patients are Lebanese, Palestinians, Maronites, Druze, Sunnis, Shi'ites, Jews; all Lebanon is here. An Armenian lies curled up on the second-floor landing. His stained white shirt hangs outside his blue pants. He wears a gray suit jacket, even in this heat. Flies collect on his bare feet. He pays no attention. He wants to sleep. "There was nothing," he explains when asked about the bombing. He is said to have gone wild when the shelling started.

In the children's quarter a wall cabinet displays a Fisher-Price xylophone, an inflated plastic goose, and a blond doll with her arms flung wide in surprise. Two beds are charred like marshmallows. No children were in their beds when the bombs fell. Still, some tried to leap through the holes the shells created.

A young woman in red cannot control her body. Her arms flail; her legs buckle; she smiles sweetly through her writhing mouth. An old woman sitting in bed confronts a round slice of bread, tearing it to small bits, which she tosses one by one on the floor; this is her project. In the bed opposite, a Bedouin wearing a white shawl and a deep purple blouse turns from side to side in fierce perplexity. On her forehead one tattoo, on her chin another. These are marks of beauty. "She did not understand what happened," says an orderly.

Neither did the children. They have been relocated near the women. Heads shaved, they seem of one sex or of none. Some are naked. They are penned in a small dark space; they smell of urine; their thighs are stained with excrement. They seem to moan continually. One boy shivers, another laughs. A legless girl spoons mush into the mouth of a younger one. A woman lurches forward and shouts in English: "I am normal!"

"This is the worst I have seen," says Hamil, 75. He sits up in the bed in which he slept when the bombs fell.

"Were you in Lebanon during World War II?"

"Yes, I was here. But in that war the world was not so crazy."

At the P.L.O. press office, inquiries are made about the "children of war." There is a swift, sudden commotion. Yasser Arafat enters the room surrounded by bodyguards. He appears diminished, weary; the energy seems forced. Yes, he will take questions.

"When the war stops, what happens to the Palestinians in Lebanon?"

"They remain to put their fingers on the main spokes of the Palestinian issue, the Palestinian cause, the Palestinian rights. We are human beings, and we have the right to live like human beings, with our dignity. We have the right of self-determination. We have the right to go back to our homeland. We have the right to establish our own state."

"Will you give up your arms to the Lebanese army?"

"Would you give up your arms to the Lebanese army?"

A rumor of the day has five Egyptian ships on the way to Beirut to help with the proposed evacuation of the Palestinians. Arafat is asked if he gets seasick. He laughs off the idea as "silly." As for leaving a limited force in Beirut, he says that remains to be discussed with the Lebanese. Would he, under any circumstances, enter into negotiations with Israel?

"Do you think we should negotiate with the Israeli, barbarian, savage, terrorist military junta in Israel, with their hands full of blood?" His eyes strain forward. "Do you think? But I am here." He rises abruptly and goes to his car, flashing the V sign for the photographers outside.

At 5:15 that afternoon, Israeli jets roar high above the city. Two sonic booms follow in quick succession. A cloud of leaflets is produced in midair. It hangs, then floats down very slowly, like a great hive of small white birds beating their wings wildly as they fall.

Tuesday, June 29

There is news of Lara. A few months after her parents were killed, the girl was taken to live with relatives in Jordan. She is said to be well. Nothing on four-year-old Samer or the baby Palestine yet, but Ahmed has been located. He is posted somewhere on the front and is a full-fledged soldier now. His older brother Farouk will try to track him down. Farouk is more self-assured than Ahmed, a bit colder as well. At 31, he holds a high rank in Al-Fatah, the largest faction within the P.L.O. He says very little at first, sizing up the stranger. Their taxi rolls past a fat man who has been forced to drop his pants for a search at a checkpoint in the middle of the street. He stands there helpless before a group of boy soldiers and squeals in rage and humiliation.

At Ahmed's home, his parents are warm and gracious. Within minutes, several of the family have gathered--sisters, brothers-in-law and their children. Soldiers saunter in. The discussion starts out focusing on Ahmed's whereabouts, and soon splinters into everything, from the Syrians to the weather to abstract politics. An old soldier suggests: "People are better than governments." Farouk gets an idea where Ahmed might be, and the taxi is off again, passing a mosque with a charred black wall on which some child has painted a bright blue plane dropping bright blue bombs. Rubbish burning everywhere heats the air from below as the relentless sun works from the top. In a marketplace in a Palestinian camp, where Ahmed is thought to be located, a walleyed woman asks furiously: "What do you think of these dogs, the Arabs?" A camp security guard points out a grape arbor on a roof and explains that Palestinians create such things "to express their relationship with their native home."

Ahmed is in Shuweifat, a Palestinian stronghold (a neighborhood, really) east of the Beirut airport. Both the Israelis and the Phalangists are encamped near by, not 500 yds. away. It is close to noon. The streets are white, deserted. Overhead two jets, flying side by side, make a quotation mark as they veer. Ahmed enters the office to which he has been summoned. Thinner than in September, he is still boy-faced. He shakes hands with all the soldiers sitting around the room. He wears a camouflage suit, a pair of sneakers and a cap that looks like a sun hat with the brim turned up, his P.L.O. badge pinned to the front of it. He plunks down on a couch with a machine gun resting in his lap. Then he gives his visitor the business for publishing the name of his girlfriend in last winter's story. His visitor tells him to watch his manners or the girl's address will be published this time.

"In September you said that you wanted to be a doctor. You also said that if you were at war with Israel and a wounded Israeli needed your help, you would behave as a doctor, not a soldier. Now that you are at war with Israel, do you say the same thing?"

"Yes." He is definite.

"What do you make of this war?"

"I cannot find the words. I don't hate the people. But I do hate the actions of the people."

He is all soldier now. He will not speculate on what course the P.L.O. should take. "It is up to our leaders." Asked if it came to a choice between laying down his arms and living to fight another day, or fighting it out to the end, he says: "There is no alternative. If we lose our identity, native. If we lose our identity, we lose everything." When pressed for a choice between reason and honor, he says, after some thought: "If I have to make priorities, I would choose honor first, but I don't know the answer, really." Sitting beside his brother, Farouk adds: "I would never place logic before dignity."

Out in the street, Ahmed points to the left, where the Phalangists are positioned, and to the Israelis on the right. At times he can see the enemy quite clearly. He can see their faces, but it disturbs him to think of them as individuals. Shuweifat is dead still; the apartment houses are still; the alleys like alleys in a painting. Suddenly there is a barrage of gunshots from the Phalangist side, but no one and nothing is hit. The P.L.O. soldiers return the fire. A skinny cat runs for cover. A chicken rapidly crosses the road, answering at least one question. More gunfire, then silence. Ahmed must return to the others. He hesitates before saying goodbye, then goes off with his comrades, trotting back for a moment to hand his visitor the badge from his cap. He apologizes that it is all he has to give.

Late that afternoon, it is learned that the baby Palestine is living safely with her father's sister's family in Syria. Oddly enough, however, a new Lebanese baby has just been born under similar circumstances. The mother, shot in the abdomen, died as the child was delivered. The father is unknown. The boy, called Samer by the nurses, is olive skinned and weighs barely 4 Ibs. One has to hold it close to the chest to prevent it from slip ping through.

Wednesday, June 30

The news of the morning clatters through breakfast. The U.S. is The news of the morning clatters through breakfast. The U.S. is trying to keep Israel from invading West Beirut; the Israeli Cabinet will hold a special session on Lebanon today; Israel will allow the P.L.O. to leave Beirut carrying small weapons, but they must leave; Lebanese Christians and leftists go at each other in the mountains east of Beirut; Saudi Arabia's King Fahd telephones President Reagan. Will the day see more leaflets or the real McCoy? Reporters trade guesses around the Commodore Hotel swimming pool, itself a point of danger in Beirut. The pool is deep but empty, and there is little room to walk around its sides. By the end of the week one man will have fallen in, severely injuring his head and breaking a leg, while another, in a bizarre decision to jump to his rescue, will have broken his leg too.

Near by, the Hotel Triomphe has been converted to an emergency hospital. In the unlit lobby restaurant, twelve beds are set out where the tables once were. A label on the door to the room states that American Express cards are welcome. There are more patients upstairs. A Lebanese man named Said was in his home when it was hit by a phosphorous bomb. His face glows pink where the layers of skin have been burned away. It seems wrapped in cellophane. Said's head is swathed in bandages. He looks surprised, open-eyed, as if amazed at the removal of his face. He makes removal of his face. He makes candies for a living.

A Syrian in a crew cut was in the street when a shell hit. His right leg was blown off at the knee. He is engaged to be married. His fiancee in Syria does not know what has happened to him. He wonders if she will still love him.

An alert, handsome woman in a red-orange dress sits up in bed as a friend ceremoniously combs her wet black hair. The cluster bomb that hit her home killed her 22-year-old daughter and injured the legs of her 16-year-old son. She was born in 1936; she knows all about war. She says she is comfortable in the Hotel Triomphe.

The Maqassed Hospital is a real hospital. Two hundred have died there since the bombing began. Twelve-year-old Houda had her stomach slit open by shrapnel, but she feels well now and smiles to show it. She does not know what this war is about. Mahmoud, also 12, had his forehead burned by a phosphorous bomb. His black hair sticks up in points. He says that God will take revenge for him.

The emergency nature of the cases has been hard on the hospital staff. Only seven doctors were available for 100 patients. Five specialists had to work on one patient alone, so much of the man was either injured or missing. The patients who were transferred from the shelled mental hospital presented a particular problem. They would stare at their wounds and break out in laughter, or they would tear at their bandages.

One man was brought in with part of his abdomen hanging outside his body. He was fully conscious. With his left hand he tried to scoop his intestines back inside.

A 17-year-old boy had his testicles blown off. He used to work in a printing office. He wants only peace.

A 13-year-old girl named Waffa was asleep when her home fell on top of her. She is asleep now too. Her head is shaved where they operated. Her left ear is blackened, her left eye swollen red. Below it, her cheek is sheathed in a purple-gray plaster. Her brain is damaged. She will be partly paralyzed for life. Beside her bed sits her older sister, who cannot bear to look. She stares instead at the open window.

Noon at the Palestinian cemetery. The air is unusually cool under trees that look like umbrellas. Photographs of the dead are planted over the graves instead of headstones. They look like yearbook pictures. Four new half-dug graves lie open in the red soil. The older ones are festooned with the kinds of ribbons used on candy boxes. A discarded stretcher lies off in a corner beside a green hospital mask. There is shelling to the south. Back at the Commodore a message comes through that Colonel Azmi is reported killed in Tyre. Is the boy Samer alive?

Thursday, July 1

An excursion across the Green Line into East Beirut and a new world. Shops show pretty summer dresses. Beach balls hang in clusters in the toy stores. Hibiscus glows red in the dark green hedges. It is on the high ground, East Beirut; the air is almost cold. Except for the Jeeps and the armored personnel carriers, you would not know there was a war in the vicinity.

At the bottom of a high hill the Beirut airport lies open and vacant, except for the carcasses of two scorched jets on the runway. To the left stands Shuweifat, where Ahmed is on patrol. The vantage point is Israeli headquarters, a secondary school beside a music conservatory. Armored vehicles rest in the parking lot. It is here that one must arrange for an escort to the south, to Tyre. The trip is scheduled for Sunday. The Israeli officer is helpful. He laments the war. "The world has not been fair to the Palestinians." He tells of a Palestinian mother, the wife of a P.L.O. officer, who escaped West Beirut with her baby and came to the Israeli headquarters for protection. Mother and child were cared for and escorted safely south to Nabatiyah. The story is not told to create a good impression. The officer is 58, jaded, a former air force pilot. Having survived four crashes, he claims the right to optimism.

North to Byblos. Ads for Woody Allen movies and a curious recurring road sign, BABY LOVE ME, that seems to have no reference. Here one is yet farther from the war. Not a soldier in sight. Only the ancient city and the ancient port, still protected by a Crusader fortress. Kids in bathing suits dangle their legs from the tops of the walls. Pleasure boats bob in the water where the Phoenicians once sailed. Is this Lebanon too? At lunch at the Fishing Club restaurant, one makes cheerful conversation with the owner, Pepe Abed, half Mexican, half Lebanese, who boasts pleasantly about the celebrities who have dined at his place. Producing a huge, elaborate guest book, he points out the autographs of Candice Bergen and David Niven. Below the restaurant, a museum bar displays statuettes snatched from the sea--Phoenician, Hittite, Greek, Roman, Persian--headless, armless relics of former powers.

Where did you say the war was? Or is this the real Lebanon, the restaurant civilization that has survived every invasion, every destruction, and flourished on trade? Is the customer always right?

Back in West Beirut by sundown, at the shelled stadium. The topmost stands are crumbled like stale cake. The poles, where pennants flew, are down or bent. Great fissures mark the walls. The clock and Scoreboard are stopped cold. Gray stones are piled like giant's chalk, where steps were, where thousands upon thousands roared for the winners. A dog scavenges in the shadows. More shots from somewhere. Near by, a bomb crater filled with water serves the people as a swimming hole.

At night the moon makes a perfect crescent, cradling a star between its points like an Arab flag. At 2 a.m. Israeli jets fly low over the hotel, creating astonishing booms. The ears ring, stunned. In the black sky two sulfurous flares glow sickly yellow, blaze momentarily, then disappear before an orange spray of machine-gun bullets.

Friday, July 2

At the P.L.O. press office again, seeing it for perhaps the last time. Residents of the apartments above it are hauling box springs and couches through the lobby. Mahmoud Labadi, chief press spokesman and a thoughtful, mysterious man, has not yet arrived. His office looks as if it had been deserted months ago, all the leaflets and propaganda material lying in dust on the shelves. Down the street, bombed so frequently, stores remain enclosed behind sheets of corrugated metal. Sandbags are piled on oil drums. An officer finally arrives to announce that there will be a press conference on the subject of cluster bombs at 1 p.m. The casings are on display, as are the small steel pie wedges where the "bomblets" were contained. They are spread out on a table beside a small ornate chess set. An idiot in a blue jogging suit wanders by twirling a silver automatic, which he believes to be empty.

In the Sanayeh Gardens, the public gardens, refugees from bombed-out homes encamp under strange tall trees that bulge at the top. Families make walls with rugs and laundry strung from ropes. Not long ago, this park was used almost exclusively by the city's rich. Now half-dressed babies waddle among their parents' last possessions. Shirts hang on bushes like oversize blossoms. A woman does her wash in a plastic bucket. Four elders play cards. They are ashamed of their plight and shoo strangers away.

Either there is great tragedy or great aimlessness. In another makeshift refugee camp, a modern secondary school, children drift in clusters from corner to corner in a large playground. Jomaneh, 10, explains that she had to leave her house "because all the windows were broken." The most beautiful thing in the world, she says, would be to go home. Everybody waits: the P.L.O., the Israelis, the outside world. After a week of leaflets and flares, tension verges on boredom.

The "Lebanese Forces" also wait. They have been waiting nearly eight years for the opportunity the Israelis have provided them, and now, clearly, they taste victory. Of course, they would not exactly say they were "grateful" to the Israelis. The head of "G5" is speaking. He is a deadly serious young man with gray eyes and a low strong voice. He sits in uniform behind his desk. Not grateful; but he would say that his side could "benefit from recent actions." He explains that one must be careful with terms. For example, it would be wrong to confuse the Lebanese Forces with the name by which everyone knows them: Phalangists.

He is both better and worse than he sounds. At 31, he thinks himself wise for being clever, yet he is honest, forthright, committed. And he has been through a good deal of fighting, including the battle at the Palestinian camp of Tal Zataar in 1976, which to the Palestinians was a massacre and to the Phalangists a major campaign. Not eager to answer questions, he presents the recent history of Lebanon. He is remarkably precise, naming days and months as well as years, pointing out places on the wall map, moving deliberately through the whole dreadful story of his country's pain. He talks of the shelling of Lebanese schools and hospitals by Syrians and Palestinians. He is making a verbal pre-emptive strike against the subject of the destruction in West Beirut now. Still, does he not think of the civilians?

"Sure. But it's a decision you have to make. You believe in something and you fight for it. And you know that from a humanitarian point of view, there are terrible consequences. But you stick to your belief. Either that, or you have no beliefs. In all the history of mankind, civilians were killed and soldiers were killed. I don't know why we should differentiate between soldiers and civilians."

"One is equipped to defend himself."

"Yes. But one also takes more risks than the other."

"Because he is a professional."

Annoyed. "I don't see myself as a professional of warfare. I was obliged to fight for my liberty. It could cost my life. It has cost the lives of many soldiers. It is the civilian who at last benefits from war. And I will have the memory of killed people in my mind." He pauses. "I am a lawyer. In eight years of war I could have made much money, had a future, a family. I missed all that for the sake of others. I missed the best part of my life. But if Lebanon is free again, I will have achieved something."

The day ends with two rumors afloat: an imminent Israeli invasion and a reported visit to West Beirut by Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden.

Saturday, July 3

The last hours in West Beirut. Tomorrow the journey south, first The last hours in West Beirut. Tomorrow the journey south, first to Sidon, then to Tyre, to try to find Samer. It is difficult to tell why this quest remains important. A four-year-old, his father dead. What does one have to tell him? What does he have to say to anyone? Still, he offers a goal, a purpose, in a place where purposes are hard to come by or confused. This day, then, will offer one last look at the torn half city. There is an odd sense of loss and regret at the prospect of leaving. Why? Nothing is whole here. The buildings and bodies broken. Nothing is safe. What has happened so far is terrible; what may happen, more terrible still. Yet this is the center of the world for the moment. This parched, sunstruck, ruined place is where the world's heart beats. Across from the hotel, a woman mops her balcony. Finished, she stands and stares straight at the one who is staring at her.

Shortly after noon, the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish comes by the Commodore. He has written no poems about the war. "I write my silence," he says. "I need distance to be a witness, not a victim." Since words are powerless against tanks, he feels that his silence is stronger than words. Still, a poem has power. Is Palestine itself a poem? "Yes," he says. "Because a poem is an unachieved desire."

Yet, at the moment, he is "fed up with poetry and refugee camps and walls." He believes that "Beirut is our last stand. From here to the grave, or to the homeland." Then he relents a bit. "We have to save the idea before we save Beirut. Beirut is not the capital of our idea." Darwish is 40. He has been a refugee four times and has been thrown in jail. "If the Palestinians find a homeland, they may discover the same dilemma as the Jews. The Jews were great creators in the abstract. Now only their army is great. Israel is the grave of Jewish greatness."

Asked what he thought when he saw that the other Arab states would desert the Palestinians, he looks stricken: "In this moment, right here, I am ashamed to belong to the world." He considers what he has said. "If we escape, however, I think a new world will be born."

The afternoon news is that the Israelis have closed the Green Line at the museum, the most frequently used crossing point. It is necessary to get to East Beirut right now, so as not to be locked in West Beirut tomorrow. The taxi driver knows a different way across the line, around by the port. In an hour that exit will be blocked as well, and West Beirut sealed off. Once out, out totally.

From a hotel window in East Beirut, the western zone is almost entirely visible. It sparkles noiselessly in the clear night. Two images of the city recur. One is of a strange statue in the heart of West Beirut: that of a Lebanese politician. The statue is charcoal in color, about twelve feet tall, standing on a pedestal in a public circle with nothing interesting around it. The politician wears goggle-like glasses and a business suit. He looks both oracular and cartoonish, the presiding deity of the middle class.

The other image was caught this morning, in the council room of the Grand Mufti of Lebanon. Like parks and schools, this room too has been turned over to refugees. At 9 a.m. three young women lay sleeping on benches beneath an inscription from the Koran. They did not know they were observed. They looked serene and beautiful. One of them, with long black hair, stirred softly in her sleep, making a quiet sigh. Through the room's high windows, the sun touched her. Awakened by the light, she stretched and smiled.

Sunday, July 4

Time to decide who is right in this war. The Israelis, the Time to decide who is right in this war. The Israelis, the Palestinians and the Lebanese, to be sure; all of them are right. And their supporters are right, of course: those who pull for one side, two or three. And the soldiers are right too; and the politicians and the poets. All are right. The dismembered are right, as are the paralyzed and the mad. The apartment houses and the stadiums are right. The bombmakers, the jets, the noise and silence. History and the future, both right. The dead are certainly right.

So it is settled, then, and not a moment too soon. The car is ready to head south by 4 in the morning. It takes the long way around by the Damascus Road, passing an institute for the deaf along the way. The institute was shelled. What is it like not to be able to hear the shell that falls on you? In the back seat of the car sit two Israeli soldiers, making muted conversation. Dan is the official escort. Eli goes along for the ride. He will meet up with other troops farther south.

Eli is a historian by trade, when he is not functioning as a chicken farmer on a kibbutz. He took his Ph.D. at the Sorbonne, and teaches Jewish history at Tel Aviv University. No, he does not think that this is his nation's last war: "We are always among enemies." Eli is 40, but his full beard makes him look older. He is tall and heavy in the shoulders, a powerful soldier. A major now, he has fought for Israel in three wars. His son was close to tears when the father went off to this one. Eli is not sure that this war was necessary, but he will fight it. Among the prophets, he most admires Amos, for the combination of faith and realism.

Later in the day, Dan will find Eli in despair. Eli will reach unconsciously into his breast pocket and pick out a playing card, the nine of hearts. Several days earlier he took it away from one of his men, in order to prevent card playing on duty. The soldier from whom he took it was new to battle, quite young, and scared. He made an error of judgment the next day, and was killed. Eli had forgotten about the card.

As the car rolls south, Israeli trucks roll north. One has a feeling that a push is on. The car reaches Sidon by 8:30 a.m. So much is destroyed here. Yet there was always destruction in Sidon. It is hard to tell ancient ruins from modern ruins. The historian, Eli, does not mind seeing damaged stones: "Children, yes." Dan, an artist in civilian life, says that he could never paint any of this. His hair is totally gray, but he looks younger than Eli. He rarely speaks. In the dust beside a crushed house, a 1-mil coin marked PALESTINE and dated 1942 is found. When it was used as currency, the whole world was at war. One wonders who preserved the coin in Sidon.

Above the city, on a high hill, stands a ten-story | statue of the Virgin holding the baby Jesus. A metal halo is riveted over the Virgin's head. One can enter the monument at the base and climb up inside it. Dan hesitates at the top because the protective wall has been shot away. This was a recent P.L.O. position. An antiaircraft gun was set up there. Below the Virgin, the Israeli army mills. "I hate war," says Dan, out of the blue.

In Tyre at last, inquiries are made at Israeli headquarters whether anyone knows where Colonel Azmi's family might be. The commander suggests that the Greek bishop would have some information; it is believed that Azmi's wife and son Samer lived with the bishop for a time after the colonel was reported killed. The bishop says no; he thinks that Mrs. Azmi stayed with a Roman Catholic priest for a while. It is so. The priest says that she and Samer lived with him two weeks, but that they left two days ago to stay with friends. He provides an address.

The apartment house is in a shady alley. Two women come to the door and appear friendly but apprehensive. Yes, Samer and Mrs. Azmi were there in the building, but they are gone now. They have moved to a town outside the city, which they name. Later it is discovered that there is no such town on the map.

An Israeli captain suggests the probable: "You will never find the boy. First, no one is absolutely sure that Azmi is dead. The burned body they discovered was only assumed to be his. So the woman will be waiting for him, and she will want to stay clear of strangers. Second, her husband was a well-known leader. She probably fears for her life. You would be looking for the kid forever."

Still, one pokes around Tyre a little while longer, peering foolishly into the faces of four-year-olds.

There is one last place to see: the roof of the bunker where Samer and Colonel Azmi were encountered last September. At the time, this roof was a room, an office, with straw walls, a straw roof, furniture and people. Over there stood the colonel's Swedish modern desk, disproportionately large and stylish. Red fake-leather chairs were positioned with their backs to the walls on two sides of the office. On them sat a dozen of the colonel's men--his inner circle perhaps. None spoke but the colonel, though all nodded approvingly at his harangue.

He never let up for a minute. It was America that brought on all this trouble. It was America that gave help to the Nazi Begin. America the warmonger . . . while the peaceful P.L.O. sought only to regain the land that was rightfully theirs, and so forth. He was a first-class haranguer, the colonel. He had the eyes for it and the fists. He could thrust his body forward like a cannon or draw back his chest in open innocence, a gesture embellished with a why-me? look. Just when you thought he was vulnerable to the point of collapse, he shot forward again, and you were hit between the eyes. Even now the pop of his words reverberates in the memory.

But only in the memory. The colonel is not here. The desk is not here. Nor the men, nor the roof, nor the walls. Nothing remains on top of this bunker any more, including a portion of the roof itself, heaved high in a corner by an Israeli artillery hit. Where the colonel delivered his harangue, the noon sun drills. There is nothing else but silence and loose straw. No one who did not know what function the straw originally served could possibly guess that this was once a place of importance.

It was during the colonel's harangue last September that little Samer entered the office and was called to stand before his father. He wore matching checkered shirt and pants, and black laced shoes; highly polished and grown up. He stood about 3 1/2 ft. high before the desk. The colonel put him through his paces:

"Who is Sadat?" he asked the boy.

"Sadat sold Palestine to Israel."

"Who is Jimmy Carter?"

"Carter supported Israel."

"Who are you?" The colonel regarded Samer with mock intensity.

"I am from Palestine," fired back his son. "From Hebron!"

Then the visitor asked Samer what he would like to be when he grew up. Samer said that he would like "to marry." The soldiers roared. The boy, not realizing that he had said something funny, froze in bewilderment. In answer to another question, Samer said that he would like to live in a world without soldiers. He said so there, standing where the Swedish modern desk was, where the straw shifts back and forth now. After the boy left the room his father swore. "If I am killed, my son will carry my gun."

With the walls down, one can clearly see the Mediterranean from the roof, not 500 yds. to the west. The mind sails it; first into the past, then north up the coast to where the past is now, to the besieged city with its sonic booms and rubbish fires and damaged children. It was for children this trip was taken in the first place. Two are known to be safely out of Lebanon. One is well in Beirut, though in a perilous position. The fourth is probably all right, in hiding with his mother, who will be protected by her people for being the widow of a warrior and hero. The story is done. Along the way, another story told itself; but that is a very old story. Everybody knows about wars.

The mind continues to sail in the white heat. Silently, in slow motion, the colonel's office comes back to its original shape. But the colonel is away today, and his men are not here either. It is Samer sitting behind the Swedish modern desk, his head barely showing over the top. This time the visitor enters the room to stand at attention. The boy looks him over with deep curiosity. "Who are you?"he asks, as if he were his father. He is puzzled by the absence of an answer. --By Roger Rosenblatt/Beirut

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