In Lebanon the rains usually start around the end of October. There is little transition from summer. One day the weather is fine. The next great squalls come off the sea accompanied by thunder that shakes the walls. So we were cutting it close, planning our wedding for October 7. It was to be a garden wedding, and hostile skies would certainly spoil everything.

That morning I woke up hazy from dinner the night before. The mountain air was a little brisk, but the sky seemed clear. I stood over the stove waiting for the rakweh to boil and letting the chill soothe my hangover. I checked my messages to see which guests might be lost on their way to the village, whether the caterers and DJ were going to be on time.

The first was from a childhood friend who had traveled from London. “Should we be heading to the airport? A colleague’s telling me this is going to be really bad.” I asked him what had happened, and he suggested I check the news.

Youmna looked aghast when I told her that Hamas fighters had broken out of the Gaza Strip and were attacking kibbutzim. One hand went to the little bump, no bigger than a good meal, that raised her dress. Then her face organized itself in front of me. “No.”

“What do you mean, no?”

“No, not today. Tomorrow. We’ll deal with it tomorrow.”

That afternoon and into the night, we filled the garden, and the foreigners got a lesson in making a lot of noise to drown out the sound of inevitability. We planted a clementine tree and everyone threw a handful of dirt into the hole, laughing and smiling like confused mourners.

Somebody asked me whether all this would affect Lebanon.

“Definitely, but not yet. It will take some time to come here.”

It took a day. The next morning taxis took travelers to the airport as early as possible, and Hezbollah began firing into Israel.

***

I once read that a group of D-Day veterans were shown Saving Private Ryan and asked whether the beach-landing scene was true to life. They all replied along similar lines. Everything that happened in the movie, every horrible death and dismemberment, had happened before their eyes, but not in such a concentrated manner. The space between had mattered. The time between had mattered.

Our son, Sharif, is now two and has lived his whole life in the space between terrible events that he knows nothing about. Maybe not nothing. On the day they killed Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, the storm of bombs that left Youmna crouching over him in the hallway might have inserted a film of trauma between the layers of his psyche. Then again, perhaps not. When I arrived home half an hour later Youmna was downstairs smoking through trembling fingers while Sharif giggled with the barmen and pulled at their beards.

For almost a year after October 7, Israel’s war with Lebanon remained an oddly prim, choreographed conflict on the border, leaving Beirut largely untouched. When it blew across the whole country the following September, friends and family abroad could not understand why we decided to stay. They watched footage of buildings and people being consumed by hellish fireballs and thought us insane for remaining, with a baby, in the middle of what they assumed to be a maelstrom of death.

I tried to explain that the space between matters. I tried to reassure them that we, in our Christian neighborhood, were the uncomfortable beneficiaries of Israel’s attempt to divide the Lebanese with religiously selective death. It was hopeless, of course. They just heard me explaining that the odds are actually quite good in Russian roulette.

***

During that first chapter of war in Beirut, Sharif was just a few months old. He had begun to eat solids, to smile, to swim along the floor on his belly. He watched constantly: consuming, labeling, and cross-referencing with his eyes. In our apartment, the world moved in time with the rise and fall of his chest. Outside it moved to a beat played by gray men holding Xbox controllers in Tel Aviv basements.

I reported on bomb sites where blasts had brought everything sacred down into the mud. In a pretty mountain village, I interviewed a man in front of his house, which was still festooned with the remains of his neighbors. In another, a young girl had been riding her bike outside her house when it was hit. While I stood on the street talking to neighbors and village officials, the girl’s father arrived and began to collect her shoes from the rubble. He looked like a hanged man, moving each limb with the last vestiges of his own life force. I watched him stoop in the dust, trying to pick up a small sandal while God’s foot ground down on his neck. When I got home, I stared at Sharif’s shoes in the hallway and felt sick.

Despite the relative safety of our neighborhood, the tension accumulated. I made an appointment with a physical therapist to do something about the constant, nagging ache in my back. Sharif filled his diaper as I was leaving, and I struggled through a last-minute nappy change before windmilling out the door, already late. As I was starting the car, the IDF issued an evacuation notice for an area close to the clinic; a tweet with an attached map, detailing which buildings were about to be leveled. The messages urged immediate evacuation “for your safety and the safety of your families.” Sometimes they were signed off with a heart symbol, which was confusing on several levels. I checked the map and judged that the distance between the imminent strike and the clinic was far enough.

The physical therapist, a hippieish guy with a shaved head and a gentle demeanor named Halim, had me take off my shirt and sit on a couch. “You said you had pain in your back?”

“Yeah, I feel like the muscles under my shoulder blades are constantly contracting.”

There was a thunderous explosion in the middle distance, and the windows rattled. Halim winced and asked, “And is there a particular situation that provokes this sensation?”

Before the first ceasefire came in November 2024, we had managed to get a flight to visit my family, who had not yet met Sharif. Their pleasure at seeing us was enormous, but their incredulity that we would return hung unspoken—the English leave large things unspoken—above every meal and every walk. For a week nobody mentioned the war, until, after dinner one evening, I was washing the dishes with my brother-in-law. He looked around furtively, as if he was preparing to ask me about an affair. “So, what’s it like in Beirut?”

“Frightening sometimes, but manageable.” 

“Isn’t it just insanely dangerous?”

“Not really—our neighborhood hasn’t been bombed. It probably won’t be. It doesn’t make sense for them.”

He laughed. “Your neighborhood hasn’t been bombed? But Beirut’s tiny!”

I shrugged, suddenly feeling unreasonable. “Yeah, I suppose it is. I guess it’s still bigger than a bomb.”

***

We happened to fly back on the day that the ceasefire was announced. In the hours before it came into effect, Israel bombed intensely, the way that a dog will guzzle frantically as it sees you reaching for its bowl. When we landed, the Beirut airport was deserted. The air was so thick with the scent of burning and explosives that it became a flavor. The ride hawkers were nowhere to be seen, so a soldier went to find us a driver, who quoted us twice the normal price and shrugged. “We can’t take the airport road, they bombed Selim Salam. It’s okay, though, we’ll come off at Cola and take the backstreets.”

Needing to occupy my hands, I took out a cigarette. With Sharif in her arms, Youmna looked tense and slightly awestruck.

“I want one, too,” she said.

“Here, give him to me,” said the soldier. He pushed his rifle behind his right hip and gently took Sharif on his left. He cooed and lifted the rifle to show it to Sharif, who fingered the sights and then looked up and took the man’s nose in his starfish hand. The soldier smiled and turned to regard his reflection in a window. He squared his shoulders and stood for a moment, admiring the way that my son’s soft little body played against his rifle and uniform.

In the following weeks, relieved of the sense of chronic, low-key emergency, the weight of parenthood came rushing in. Now it wasn’t enough to simply keep him alive. Now we had to try not to fuck him up as well. Now we had to make sure that he would be able to love, that he wouldn’t become a junkie, that he would have a sense of self-worth and live well with others. This felt like a far more intimidating task than getting through the war.

***

More than a year passed, and he grew strong and fast. He became a confident and miraculous boy, known around our apartment as Malak al hay—king of the neighborhood. Even though Hezbollah had ceased their attacks, the Israeli drones continued to watch and hunt at will, picking out a man on a motorbike or a family in a car almost every day. Sharif also continued to watch, seeing everything, looking to us to derive the meaning that I had always assumed was somehow embedded in the world. If we leaped up in anxiety and commiseration when he fell, he cried. If we clapped, he got up and moved on.

Although the war never really stopped, the spaces between events expanded for a period, and Sharif filled them as though they were made for him. But then the gray men and their gray hardware took over once again. For a moment, as U.S. and Israeli planes hammered Iran, Lebanon became a sideshow. But soon enough, the between spaces collapsed in on themselves with nauseating familiarity, as the drones herded hundreds of thousands of people onto the street and set about destroying their houses and lands.

The city shrank again. The country shrank again. One evening, driving back from the north along the highway that is squeezed between the sea and the mountains, an Iranian missile tracked south overhead. It sparkled almost cheerfully, as if moving with a sense of purpose. When we arrived at home, friends were eating in the hotel next door. We joined them and updated one another on what we’d heard, what we knew. Six or seven detonations rang out in quick succession from the suburbs. A couple of people stood up abruptly before realizing there was nowhere to go and nothing to do. They sat down again. A woman threw her hands to her mouth and leaped into her friend’s arms, gasping. I forced cheerful words out of my mouth and grimaced what I hoped was a smile toward Sharif. But I saw him staring, watching the woman who had panicked as though she knew a dangerous secret.

Jacob Russell is a writer and journalist living in Beirut. His work has appeared in numerous international publications and he runs the Substack 1010, Falling More Slowly.