Corridors of Terror
October 14 started like any day would start in Beirut. Shopkeepers went to their shops, children to their schools, and employees to their jobs. Little did they know that their city would turn into a civil war that day and bring back a ton of memories of a time in the country’s history a big part of the population that lived it desperately wants to forget.
The overdue Beirut Explosion investigations are just beginning a year and two months after the day it scarred the city and its people’s memory taking away innocent souls that did nothing but be at the wrong place at the wrong time. A year and a couple of months after that unforgettable day, the judge leading the investigations was doing his job calling politicians into question. The two people he recently called into question happen to be representing two ally political parties that form a big part of the opposition. Their angry loyal thugs took the streets of a bunch of the Furn Al Chubbak area in the city but spread terror throughout the whole country and beyond it.
A picture was widely shared of school children hiding under their desks and another one of the children gathered in a corridor. The school supervisors and teachers followed one of the country’s war generation tips and tricks of trying not to die. By definition, a corridor is a room used to connect other rooms’. To people like my mother, it is so much more than that. It’s a safe space. My mother says that it’s better to hide in a corridor when the war’s outside your window as it’s a narrow space away from glass and any object that may collapse and hurt you in case a bullet or missile slipped through your window. However, that trusted space betrayed my mother in the past.
24 hours after the civil war’s final ceasefire was to be effective, impatient missiles were raining one more time around the home of my then 24-year old mother. When my sleep-deprived mother was walking through her house that night, she found my grandmother using the corridor as her bed for the night. After a brief conversation with her, my mother returned to bed, not knowing that she just saw her mother alive for the last time. A sneaky missile penetrated the corridor wall and took my grandmother’s life away. When the conversation comes along on any day now, my mother and the rest of her family share the incident in brief bullet points. They once said that there are details they never want to say out loud, a desperate attempt by them to move past that day and remember their loving mother as the beautiful, cheerful woman she was, not the helpless corpse lying on their corridor floor.
That wasn’t the only memory that shared photograph brought back to me. A few minutes before 6:07 on August 4, my mother was enjoying a cup of juice in the living room balcony with me sitting not so far away from her. When the first explosion took place, she involuntarily walked swiftly towards the corridor as I followed her, startled and terrified. I don’t recall every single second of that traumatic day, but I remember how my sister and brother, as frightened as we were, joined us in what I can describe as a loose group embrace. We were lucky that the explosion spared us, and here we are, living to tell, remember and hopefully only remember that day, hoping not to again live a similar one to it.
I read this morning that thirty-two people got injured and six people died the other day. One of these victims was a mother who was looking through her window and was ready to retrieve her young daughter from kindergarten when a stray sniper’s bullet got her. Another is a man who was doing his job delivering some items around that area. The remaining deaths and injuries are young men who left their homes and risked their lives for a couple of politicians that don’t know or care about their very existence.
Three years ago, I took the above picture on a sunny day in January when I sneaked into Beit Beirut, a restored house that witnessed the atrocities of the civil war. For a while, it was taken over by one of the war’s militias who took advantage of its many openings, viciously firing at the people of their city they were taught are their enemies. Little did I know how relevant it was surprisingly going to be to a piece I am honestly sad to be writing as it combines two main elements of this piece, corridors and snipers.
It is intriguing how my mother chose to still trust the corridor knowing very well how it betrayed her mother, whose loss she never recovered from. I believe the one you’re desperate to save your life, you have no choice but to trust anything or any place that gives you a glimpse of safety. R.I.P to the man and woman who never deserved to die that day that was supposed to be like any other, and to the four men who paid their lives for a cause that will eventually lose its validity.
Sadly, most people will share the photos of the victims and the terrified corridor children for only a few days. It is sad, but that’s how humans are. We will forget and move on. I end with a quote from my mother whose life taught her countless lessons one of which: ‘As we are alive and breathing, it is our duty to live every day we are blessed to have as fully as possible.’
