A Writer's World (5 page)

It is the perfect place for exile. It lies in a wide declivity in the western desert, about 140 miles west of the Nile, overlooked by burning bluffs and surrounded on every side by waterless sands. So unfriendly is the desert, so brooding of appearance, that it feels as though at any moment the sands may reach some momentous decision, and engulf the whole oasis, palm groves, villages, detention camp and all. A rough road, once the route of slave caravans from the Sudan, runs away north-east to the Nile; but the easiest way to get to Kharga is to take a diesel rail-car from a place on the river called Nag Hamadi. This endearing little vehicle (the locals say its father was a steam train, its mother a bus) starts very early in the morning and arrives in the shallow bowl of the oasis just as the terrible heat of the sun is at its most blistering. The passenger thus disembarks feeling rather as though he too has been fostering schisms.

I spent a couple of days learning something of Kharga’s curious character. It had a hushed, swathed quality to it, I thought, well befitting a collection of small villages of so bleak a position and so ominous a reputation. The sand of the desert, moving restlessly and irresistibly with the prevailing winds, was in fact marching upon the place inch by inch through the years. Some of the outlying settlements had already been swamped. Some had built great protective walls around themselves. In one small hamlet a single householder was left in possession, and he too was preparing to leave, for a brutal yellow sand-dune was poised above his shack. ‘The sand has its needs,’ he said philosophically. ‘We must allow the sand its rights.’ Everywhere there were broken walls, shattered houses and discredited barricades, all half-buried in the dunes.

The detention camp was several miles away in the desert, and nobody seemed very keen to take me there, so I settled down in the main village of the oasis hoping to find some friendly guard or prisoner at large, but content enough to drink my coffee in the rambling main square of the place. Its manner was deadened but soothing; its people, mostly Berbers, listless but friendly. Many of the narrow streets were roofed with wood and earth, to dissuade the wild Beduin marauders of old from riding pell-mell down them on horseback. Along these shady paths
the people moved with padded footsteps, carrying baskets decorated with odd little tufts of wool, and at night lanterns swung down side streets and over the open fronts of stores (with piles of beans, big glass pots of spices, and silent shopkeepers lounging against shutters). Hardly a woman was to be seen in this town of rigid tradition; only one cringing soul, embalmed in black, did I meet scurrying from the square in the shadow of a wall. The weather was excessively hot, and the hours of Kharga passed heavily.

On market day, though, the place was transformed, and then I found a trail to my prisoners. The main street was lined with butchers’ stalls, piled high with white fatty camel-meat which the butchers, after a few brusque strokes with the chopper, tore between their bloody hands with a noise of rending flesh and muscles. Piles of this horrible stuff, I noticed, were being loaded into a small truck, guarded by a couple of policemen, and when I asked where it was going they said: ‘To the prisoners.’ Oho, I said, might I come too? Certainly not, they said. They were political prisoners, and obviously no foreigner could talk to them – what would the Governor say? However, somebody added with the suspicion of a wink, I might be interested instead to visit the hospital of Kharga, just over there, turn right at the square, and very interesting I would find it. So I went along that morning, and a young and agreeable doctor showed me round the place. In one ward we found a number of grumpy and scrofulous patients lying on palliasses on the floor. ‘What’s this?’ said I. ‘Not enough beds, then?’ ‘Oh, we have enough normally,’ said the doctor casually, ‘but just at the moment we’ve got a ward full of prisoners from the camp. Care to meet them?’

And there they were, those successors of Athanasius, propounders of very different faiths: some of them communists, some Muslim Brethren. They looked a murderous lot, all the more sinister because of the bandages and plasters which covered their eyes or supported their limbs. We talked of this and that, of the past and the future, of the conditions of their detention and their hopes of release. Every morning, I learnt, they were given a lecture of indoctrination by a representative of the regime, but something in their eyes told me they were far from brainwashed. Two grey-haired police guards watched us from the veranda as we talked; and now and then a savage old reprobate lying on a bed in the corner intervened with some caustic witticism, delivered in the most cultured of English accents and with the bite of an educated and incisive mind.

Thus Nestorius might have spoken, I thought, during
his
exile at Kharga.

Beirut is the impossible city, in several senses of the adjective. It is impossible in the enchantment of its setting, where the Lebanese mountains meet the Mediterranean. It is impossible in its headiness of character, its irresponsible gaiety, its humid prevarications. It is impossible economically, incorrigibly prospering under a system condemned by many serious theorists as utterly unworkable. Just as the bumble bee is aerodynamically incapable of flying, so Beirut, by all the rules and precedents, has no right to exist.

Yet there it stands, with a toss of curls and a flounce of skirts, a Carmen among the cities. It is the last of the Middle Eastern fleshpots, and lives its life with an intensity and a frivolity almost forgotten in our earnest generation. It is to Beirut that all the divinities of this haunted seaboard, the fauns and dryads and money-gods, orgiastically descend. It is a tireless pleasure-drome. It is a junction of intrigue and speculation. It is a university city of old distinction. It is a harbour, a brothel, an observatory on the edge of the Arab deserts. Its origins are ancient but it burgeons with brash modernity, and it lounges upon its delectable shore, half-way between the Israelis and the Syrians, in a posture that no such city, at such a latitude, at such a moment of history, has any reasonable excuse for assuming. To the stern student of affairs Beirut is a phenomenon beguiling perhaps, but quite, quite impossible.

Beirut stands on no great river, commands no industrious hinterland, and all through the centuries it has been chiefly significant as a gateway and a conduit, the threshold of Damascus and the outlet of Syria. It has been a
halting place or transit camp, through which successive civilizations have briefly tramped, leaving a stele here, a carving there, a legend in a library or a pillbox on a beach.

A stele, a pillbox – nothing more substantial has been left behind by the conquerors, for the texture of Beirut is flaky and unretentive. Earthquakes and fires have destroyed much of its heritage, but mostly it is the character of the place that makes this a city without a visible past. It is always contemporary, shifting and tacking to the winds of circumstance. It is the capital of a state that is half Christian, half Muslim, and it remains poised between the Eastern way and the Western, between the Francophile and the Afro-Asian, between the suave hotels that line the waterfront and the tumbled oriental villages spilled on the hillside above. It is not one of your schizophrenic cities, though: on the contrary, it has triumphantly exploited its own dichotomies, and become the smoothest and most seductive of entrepreneurs. Everything is grist to this mill: a crate of steel bolts, a letter of credit, a poem, a navigational system, a cocktail, a tone of voice, a power press, a soup – Beirut accepts them all, processes them if necessary, and passes them on at a profit.

It lives by standing in the middle, and by the itchiest of itchy palms. There is almost nothing this city will not undertake. It will pass your wheat inland to Damascus, or ship your oil westward to Hamburg. It will paint your upperworks, translate your thesis, introduce you to the Sheikh of Araby, accommodate you in pampered splendour in an air-conditioned suite beside the water. It will perform your atonal music at an open-air festival, or feed you with unreliable statistics about political controversies in Zagazig. It will, without a flicker of surprise, convert your Norwegian travellers’ cheques into Indian rupees and Maria Theresa dollars. It has nothing of its own, no resources of iron or coal, no factories to speak of, no big battalions, but it will do almost anything you ask of it, providing you pay properly.

No, that’s unfair – it is not all for cash. Beirut is also an entrepôt of ideas, linking the bazaars with Cambridge and the Sorbonne. Whether a man comes from Peking or Pittsburgh, he will soon find some corner of this liberal place where, lapped in eroticism or deep in the discussion of philosophical concepts, he is sure to feel at home. There is a tang in the Beirut air, bitter-sweet but easy-going, that survives nowhere else on earth: for it is compounded of an old alliance between east and west, washed in the humanism of the ancients and bathed in the incomparable Mediterranean sunshine. It is the spirit that created old Alexandria, and it makes Beirut,
for every lover of the classical mode, for everyone of generous instinct, a city of nostalgic regret.

Regret always, for Beirut is a prodigy of the second class – a sideline city. It stands on the rim of the Arab world, peering inside with a wry and sceptical detachment, and its conscience is rudimentary.

This undeniably makes for fun. All the Middle East makes for Beirut. Here you may see the political exiles, talking dark and interminable subterfuge, or the resplendent hawk-nosed sheikhs, in all the gilded refulgence of the Arab patrimony, fingering their beads and indulging in flamboyant bickering. Here are the silken ladies of Syria, svelte and doe-eyed, and here are the waterside harlots, curled but smouldering, Semite with a touch of baroque. There are many poets in Beirut, and artists of visionary tendencies, shaggy existentialists in frayed sandals, dilettantes by the score, spies by the portfolio. Sometimes you may see Druse tribesmen in the city, out of the eastern hills, ferociously hirsute and gloriously swaggering. Sometimes the fleet puts in (British, American, French or Greek) and the waterfront bars are loud with ribaldry. And when one of the perennial Middle Eastern crises erupts into the headlines, then the imperturbable hotels of Beirut are crammed again with foreign correspondents, the hall porters brush up their jargon and sniff around for tittle-tattle, and the whole city seems transformed into one sensitive, quivering antenna.

But in Beirut you are seldom in the heart of things. The firemen are always visiting, the crisis is usually somewhere else. It feels a transitory place, like an exceedingly corrupt and sophisticated girls’ school. Such a way of life, you feel, cannot be permanent: it is all too fickle, too fast, too make-believe and never-never. It is Alexandria without the philosophers, without the Pharaohs, perhaps even without Cleopatra (for age does distinctly wither the
grandes
dames
of Beirut, waddling with poodles and sunglasses from salon to couturier). For all its age and history Beirut feels a rootless city – salacious but not earthy, virile but infertile. A breath of wind, it seems, a shift of fortune, and all this bright-painted fabric would be whisked away into oblivion.

Such is the nature of the place. Beirut is the small capital of an infinitesimal republic, and its events do not often feel crucial. Give it time, Beirut always whispers, don’t fuss, wait and see, have a drink. You can usually find a blind eye here, a hole in the corner, the back of a hand, the underneath of a counter. This is not an earnest city. Proper Victorians would have hated it. Harvard economists or British civil servants, examining its
improbable methods, its flibberty-gibbet charm, its blatancy and its blarney – men of sombre purpose, deposited one scented evening in Beirut, would probably pronounce it irredeemable.

But who would redeem such a place, in a world of false redemptions? Club-women and bluestockings infest our age, but the frank and lovely libertine still makes the heart lift. Such a heedless delight, such a glint in a blithe eye, is the gift of Beirut. This is a city without much soul, but with allure immeasurable, and above all it is graced by a celestial beauty of setting: beauty of a classic and timeless kind, a blue and wine-dark kind, with bewitchment such as you dream about in long damp northern evenings, as you pine for a beaker of the warm south. The city of Beirut often feels second-rate, but the setting of Beirut is superlative. At this point on the Levantine coast the mountains of Lebanon stand in magnificent parallel beside the sea, so close that the citizens of Beirut may, if the wild whim takes them, ski in the morning and swim in the afternoon. It is the presence of these fine hills, all around the city, that elevates Beirut from the entertaining to the sublime, and provides, in its contrast between the ephemeral and the eternal, a marvellous foil to the bubbling frivolity of the metropolis.