Beirut, Part 2

In keeping with my “Helena eases herself back into Beirut gradually” approach
to my current existence I’ve been… okay, easing myself back into things
here pretty gradually. That has involved calling a few folks here– but slowly;
reading the Daily Star-IHT combo that’s sold here daily; lying around
reading a bunch of things not about Beirut; buying and trying
to read substantial parts of Al-Hayat every day (we had to buy an entirely
new Hans Wehr dictionary, since we left both of our existing copies of it
at home, by mistake); running every other day as usual; but most of all,
walking, walking, walking round the city trying to relearn it through the
soles of my feet and all my other senses.

Of course the big story here is the status of Lebanese-Syrian relations,
especially in view of the Security Council’s recent resolution (1559) that
called for a speedy Syrian withdrawal from the country, and the allied strong
push by the Syrians to get the parliament here to prolong the term of President
Emile Lahoud for a further three years after it expires in, I believe, late
November.

Poor old Lebanon, eh? Always the football for one or the other (or
both) of its two, much more powerful neighbors’ realpolitik. In
the current circumstances, Syria is still evidently majorly spooked by having
the US army poised along its 450-mile eastern border (the one with Iraq),
while it still has the IDF perched on the slopes of Jebel al-Sheikh (Mount
Hermon), overlooking Damascus itself. So the idea that international
pressure might force it also to open up its satrapy, Lebanon, to the probable
infiltration of solidly pro-western forces… at a time when plenty of people
in the Bush administration are still loudly baying for regime change in Syria…
Well, you can imagine how spooked the Syrian regime folks must be by
all that.

I haven’t been to Syria since late 2002, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq.
It was an interesting and fairly disquieting visit. (Read about it here.)

So anyway, for our afternoon hike today, I dragged Bill around some of my
old haunts in town. Beirut is a city that is perpetually in the midst
of an extreme makeover. Okay, quite a lot less extreme today than in,
say, the summer of 1982, when Sharon’s army was bombing the bejeesus out of
it. You can still see many traces of Israeli-invasion and just plain
civil-war fighting, even on very posh-looking streets. In addition what
you see are the fruits of many years, now, of hectic building and rebuilding efforts– and the combined results of 60-plus years of an extremely laissez-faire approach
to governance in this country that means there are almost no shady, refreshing
public spaces in the whole city– except the Corniche, as I mentioned here Tuesday, which can be refreshing
but is certainly not shady (or quiet)…

Basically, Beiruti property owners tend to build right out to, or well over the edges of,
their lots; and to build as high as they can currently afford. Setbacks?
Zoning restrictions? Planning for public parks, car-parks, means
of mass transit, or pedestrian accommodations??? You godda be kidding!

So the narrow streets are just ablaze with the incessant honking of the
perennially backed-up cars. (That’s why walking is a far better way
to get around– even if it does involve dicing with death whenever you need
to cross moving traffic.) The streets are much cleaner than they were
when I lived here during the early years of the civil war, and probably cleaner
than when Bill and I were briefly here in 1999. Today, too, I saw a
sight that gladdened my eyes: at a busy intersection that had no traffic
lights, a single traffic cop was directing the four busy incoming streams
of cars– and they all obeyed his commands!!!! Wow!!! That would
scarcely have happened even in the pre-war days. Maybe the people are
learning a new civility??

Power outs are a huge issue here. We scarcely notice ’em since
AUB has its own generator. But when you walk along a side-street and
see all the shops closed because of the power-out, you just have to know that
the crisis in the national electricity company is hurting people really badly.

That is just one of the many corruption-related issues here that people
seem to lay at the door of the Syrians. (I’m not sure what the relationship
is there, but doubtless someone’ll fill me in soon.)

Well, we walked along a Hamra Street that seems still badly diminished from
its previous glory days. Even the iconic Horseshoe Cafe seemed just
a pale imitation of its former self. But at least it still
exists in some form– unlike many of the other landmarks by nwhich I used to chart my way around (and my life in) the city. From the corner where the Canadian Embassy used to sit
catty-corner across from the An-Nahar offices we walked uphill to
the south, made a mistake by heading along toward Aisha Bakar instead of
Verdun, then corrected ourselves by walking to Verdun past the vast and very
solid-looking new Druze Community Building.

Okay, where S. and I used to live back in the 1970s, you used to get to
by saying, “Sharia Verdun, right behind the UNRWA depot there”. But
the UNRWA depot no longer exists! It’s been leveled and asphalted and
is used as a car park. Where does UNRWA store all the emergency supplies
for its refugee camps in Lebanon these days, I wonder? Certainly, not
here.

We used to live on the top (7th) floor of a good, big building close behind
there, which also used to house two Druze family-affairs courts. It
still does. I looked up at the apartment that S and I had done so much
to improve… You could still see the extra 18 inches of railings we put on top of
the existing ones when we had kids. I did not go in to see if Abu
Khodr and Abu Hussein–the janitors who ran the place when we lived there–were
still around. Maybe another day I will…

That was kind of poignant and sad. The last time I went into the apartment
there was in late 1981, after that marriage broke up. S was still living
there. I was living in London with the kids, and had gone back to Beirut
for a few days en route home from an assignment in Cairo. S and I met
in a cafe somewhere. “Well, we might as well divide all our stuff now,”
I said. “Yes,” he said. “I mean now.” “Now?” (A look
of startlement on his face.)

“Yeah, now. Why not?”

“Oh, okay.”

So we walked slowly together around the apartment one last time, being ever-so-mindful
(in general) of each other’s feelings. “You always liked that rug: you
have it.” “Oh, okay. And you have that one–and those pictures.”
“I have no need of a sewing machine: you take that.” “Good idea.
Well in that case you keep all the darkroom stuff…. ”

In every single room. A whole life we’d built together.

He even volunteered to get all “my” stuff packed up and shipped out–to
the US, the country to which I’d shortly be moving.

Four months later the shipping company in Boston called me to arrange the
delivery, and soon thereafter I was unpacking the boxes on our floor there,
to the huge delight of the kids–discovering old family treasures–and myself!
(Yeah! Reunited with my sewing machine at last… Except, of course,
I still needed to locate and install a whole new 110-volt motor for it.)

Well, that was the apartment. And now another family was living there.
Maybe some of those same big plant-pots we could see up there had originally been ours? Maybe some of the same plants? (Many
of the pots came to us with a great story, and a good surprise. We inherited
them from S’s photographer friend Manouq Manouqian, when Manouq finally called
it quits and left for LA during the war. I guess we hauled them up
to the apartment one fall, half-filled with earth but with nothing much growing…
The next spring, a wondrous crop of marijuana plants suddenly burst forth.)

Right over from our place was where the Palestinian spy-chief Abu Hassan
Salameh used to live with his second wife, the Lebanese beauty queen Georgian
Rizq. Security was ultra tight around their building. Then one
day, as I was visiting our friends David and Leila Pierce down the street,
there was a huge car-bomb on the street, which killed Abu Hassan and four
or five passers-by. The Israelis were very proud of that one.

… Gosh I can see that just by being here I could write books’ and
books’-worth of extremely rambling and possibly uninteresting stories. I
assure you I won’t just be spending all my time here stumbling somewhat gaga
down a totally idiosyncratic series of Memory Lanes.

Indeed, we might actually have ended up being here at a rather significant
time in Lebanon’s long-troubled history. I have a bunch of people I
plan on seeing here, and will let you know how it goes “at the appropriate
time”. In the mean-time, forgive me if I ramble on a bit, okay?