From my window

(This was supposed to be posted last week, but we've not had internet until now.)

Life in my neighborhood since the bombing has remained quiet, with only a few indicators of the tension that's burst into violence in other parts of the city.

these two have been posted here since Saturday, photo from my window

I don't know if I can express the strangeness that I feel, living in Beirut now. I've been surrounded by acts of violence, but such a distance that I can only feel the barest breath from their passing. I understand that this is a moment of great import for the country, surrounded by terrible possibilities, but it's difficult to really feel the danger in the way I suppose I should. 

This is what I've felt and seen in the past few days.

On Friday night, there was a military truck posted on the divider directly outside of our apartment, but that was the only sign of anything out of the ordinary. No tire or garbage burning, no gunshots, and the streets were only a little quieter than every other day.

On Saturday morning the truck was gone, and the only reason I saw more of the effect the bombing has had on the city was because my roommate and I went to the area surrounding Sassine Square so she could gather material for a report on the rebuilding effort. Military and police vehicles dominated the scene, clustering along with news crews at the blocked-off entrance to Sassine Street itself, where the bomb detonated. We wandered through the nearby streets, seeing apartment buildings and storefronts with windows cracked or shattered entirely from the frame. Much of the debris had been swept from the streets, and lay in neat piles along the edge of the road or heaped in the ubiquitous green garbage bins. On the other side of the blocked-off street, we walked close to the barricade and through the lines of red and white tape I saw what had once been a car and was now a blackened and twisted mass of steel, leaning against a more intact vehicle. That sight still echoes through my head. The neat, black metal of the soldiers' machine guns, the white of the emergency trucks behind them, and that shape beyond, now neither natural nor man-made, with the calm sunlight glinting off of it. 

On Saturday evening, when we returned to our flat, the two soldiers had taken up their post on the corner, and four more stood at the overpass on the building's other side.

Sunday, the day of Wissam al-Hasan's funeral and a mass protest in front of the Grand Serail, was quiet here with one exception. In the afternoon, a short while after the funeral began, I heard shouting and when I looked out the window I saw a convoy of young men (and some women) on motorcycles and scooters driving up the street, beeping their horns and waving their hands. They passed by four or five times, the last time carrying the flags of Hezbollah and Amal (a Shiite party allied with Hezbollah and predominant in this neighborhood) and an enormous Syrian flag. 

In the evening, Sana and I walked down to Hamra, and the normally crowded street in front of the American University of Beirut was almost empty.

We took a taxi to Sodeco to meet some potential renters, and as we drew closer to the building I heard a huge sound, not loud but penetrating, that seemed to rise from the street in front of us. I looked ahead and saw that it was a line of tanks on the move, filled with soldiers. By now I've grown used to seeing tanks; there are two stationed along Istiklal street that I pass on a regular basis, but I'd never seen or heard one underway before.

In front of Sodeco was a group of twenty or so soldiers, chatting with each other, red caps and camoflage in shades of grey. 

We walked back from the apartment and on the street that separated East from West Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War stood a thicket of tanks, guns pointed skywards at the same neat angle. Besides the tanks there were police cars, and personnel trucks, soldiers gathered in groups. Nobody seemed to care that we walked directly through the center of the group, and again I felt the sense of total alienation that I'd experienced at the scene of the blasted car. Beneath those rows of long guns I understood the differences there are in the world, that though people are people and concrete is concrete no matter where you go, individuals and edifices are surrounded by circumstances that are widely and truly different. It may sound naive to say so, but many times here I haven't felt the strangeness of being in a different country, just the sense that I am in a place in the world. I don't know if I can explain it more clearly than that.

On Monday, the soldiers on the overpass were gone and the two on the corner remained. I heard no sound of the fighting that occurred in other parts of the city, and again saw no form of protest. Some shops and businesses were still closed, but other than that the neighborhood was normal.

On Tuesday, the traffic was as loud as it had been before the bombing, and the shops that had been closed were open. 

Today, the situation seems stable, though I heard of more fighting during the funeral of the Palestinan man killed on Monday. I'm keeping an eye out; we'll see what the week brings.