From The Holy Mountain (39 page)

It turned out that I had been very lucky. Jumblatt was leaving for France in less than an hour, but agreed to see me for five minutes before he left. Armed Druze flunkies frisked me then ushered me into a study. After twenty minutes Jumblatt walked in and asked how he could help.
I
explained what
I
wanted, and he immediately gave his permission.

'Go ahead. Tell my men at the gate that you are my guest. They will show you the mosaics.' Then he added, 'It's so rare to see English writers in Beirut these days. You know Charles Glass?'

'Very well.'

'How is he? Still alive?'

'Becoming rather a playboy in his old age, by all accounts.'

'The Hezbollah should never have let him escape from his captivity,' he said. 'You know he was kidnapped on his way to see me? What about David Gilmour? The last time I was in London he took me to lunch at the Travellers' Club. What's he doing now?'

'He's just written a book on Lord Curzon.'

'David always was an unreconstructed imperialist,' said Jum-blatt. 'But tell me,' he asked politely, 'what are you writing about?'

I explained that I was researching a book about the Middle Eastern Christians, and Jumblatt raised his eyebrows: during the war he had been one of the most formidable enemies of the Christian militias. Despite the fact that the Christian forces were supported by both Israel and the Americans, Jumblatt's forces had managed to drive the Christian militias out of the Druze heartlands in the Chouf, and in the process had gained a reputation for savage tenacity. The Druze, it was well known, seldom took prisoners.

'The Maronites have always been their own worst enemies,' said Jumblatt. 'They have always wanted to dominate Lebanon as if it were an entirely Christian state. They have never been prepared to give the majority their rights, to share power or in any way to bring about democratic reforms.'

'I understand you were no friend of the Phalangists during the war.'

'The Phalange was a fascist organisation founded by Pierre Gemayel after a visit to Nazi Germany in 1936,' he said, with indisputable historical accuracy. 'When they started committing atrocities - slitting the throats of three hundred Muslims at roadblocks on Black Saturday in 1975, or massacring the Palestinians in the camp at Tel el-Za'atar a year later - we had to respond. Coexistence is only possible if the Maronites resist their more extreme right-wing tendencies.'

'So are you pessimistic about the future?'

'Lebanon is an artificial creation,' replied Jumblatt. 'It was created by the French in 1920. Economically and politically speaking it has no future on its own. We need the Arabs. We are the gateway to the Arab world: that is our natural environment. We are not some part of the French dominions, or the Vatican, or whatever it is the Maronites want. If they accept this, then maybe this peace will hold.'

One of Jumblatt's aides came in to say that his car was ready to take him to the airport. Jumblatt pulled himself out of his chair. 'I will miss my plane,' he said. 'I'm sorry. I hope you get to see your mosaics.'

As we walked down the stairs together Jumblatt made some remark about the civil war, and I asked him whether he thought that in retrospect it could have been avoided altogether.

'If the Maronites had been less intransigent,' he said, shrugging his shoulders. 'Then maybe
...
But the ifs of history: if Cleopatra's nose had been one inch longer,' he said, 'would Antony have lost the battle of Actium?'

The road to the Chouf led through the squalid southern suburbs of Beirut. Thirty years ago, this road bordered Ouzayeh Beach. It was once the Ipanema of Beirut, the favourite playground of
le tout Beirut.
Now it is Hezbollah territory, and a vast meandering shanty-slum of tin sheds and breezeblock huts, cheap restaurants and rundown bakeries lines the strip between the road and the now almost invisible beach.

On the central reservation, running between the two lanes of the road, rose a series of giant hoardings depicting the hugely enlarged features of a line of Iranian mullahs. Each cleric stared out blankly through heavy Joe-90 spectacles, under a tightly wrapped and immaculately starched white turban: as strange and surreal a sight as a line of giant Andy Warhol Marilyns raised above a motorway. Interspersed between the mullahs, much smaller and crudely nailed onto a low picket of wooden posts, stretched a line of idealised portraits of smiling, bearded
shaheedin,
the Hezbollah 'martyrs' who had died fighting the Israelis in occupied southern Lebanon. To indicate the heavenly bliss currently being enjoyed by these fighters, their heads were sometimes shown floating on clouds of white cumulus. Other hoardings showed the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, inscribed with a series of fearsome invocations to Free Palestine and Crush the Zionist Entity, along with other varieties of the sort of bloodcurdling threats, promises and admonitions which Shia fundamentalists like to read as they drive into town to do their shopping.

It had turned wet and windy, and each time the taxi dived into one of the deep brown puddles that filled the potholes in the road, an explosion of muddy water splashed over the bonnet and windscreen. As we bounced along, past tumbledown garages, scrapyards and tyre shops, I could see thickly bearded Hezbollah men pottering around with spanners under the bonnets of battered, shrapnel-shattered Datsuns or war-weary Volvos; others were holding pots of paint and paintbrushes with which they dabbed on splashes of colour here and there in an attempt to distract attention from the dents and bulletholes that dotted their cars' chassis. I remarked to the taxi driver, Nouri Suleiman, that I had expected somewhat higher-calibre weapons than sprayguns from these men.

'Guns are not so useful now we are at peace,' he replied. 'At the end of the war a new M-16 used to cost $1,000. Now you can buy one for $100. A pistol used to be $500. Now it's down to $150.'

'So a pistol is now more expensive than an M-16?' 'That's because people still like to have small guns,' replied Nouri. 'Why?'

'They're useful. You can't hide an M-16, but it's easy to hide a pistol. Put it in your pocket or a briefcase. No problem.'

From the back of his glove compartment he whipped out a small snub-nosed pistol and showed it to me: 'You see? Easy to hide. No problem.'

We drove on through the uncontrolled ribbon of Beirut's rambling southern suburbs, past the sad, huddled slums belonging to the landless Shias and the barbed wire and collapsing shanties of various miserable-looking Palestinian refugee camps. Half an hour later we arrived at the outskirts of Damour, the Christian town that had suffered most severely in the civil war. First it was attacked and pillaged by the Palestinians in revenge for Maronite atrocities against them in Beirut. Most of the inhabitants escaped by sea, but 350 remained in their homes. When Arafat's gunmen stormed into the town on 20 January 1976, the Fatah guerrillas machine-gunned the men, raped the women and dynamited the houses. It was then that the Palestinians, apparently dissatisfied at having had the chance to wreak revenge on so few living Maronites, hit upon the idea of exhuming their dead and scattering the cadavers around the ruins of the town they had just desecrated. Later on, the town was captured and destroyed a second time, on this occasion by the Israelis, before being resettled on their departure by the Druze. Jumblatt now keeps his principal office in Damour. But there are no Christians living here any more.

We drove quickly through what was left of the town: a few houses, all riddled with bullet and shrapnel holes; the odd ruin of a sixties bungalow, now overgrown with vines and creepers; a scrappy plantation of banana palms; a few old Druze men sitting around on their covered verandahs looking out into the drizzle in their white
keffiyehs
and baggy black
shalwar
pantaloons. We then took a left turn and began winding upwards into the steep, thickly-wooded slopes that led into the Chouf.

It was raining hard now, and the gleaming road was slippery with fallen leaves. Cars coming down from Beit ed-Din sluiced past us, windscreen wipers on full. Low cloud obscured the tops of the mountain peaks rising above us; below, the valleys fell away in a steep precipice of abandoned cultivation terraces and balding beech trees, their few remaining leaves turning bright autumnal yellow. For the final twenty minutes of the journey, as on the way into Beirut, we found ourselves crawling uphill behind another pair of the ubiquitous Syrian tank-transporters, each weighed down with its cargo of two Soviet T-72 battle tanks. Looking at

the map, I realised that the Israeli Occupation Zone, the current front line between the armies of the Jewish state and the local Hezbollah guerrillas, lay only twelve miles to the south.

At the top of the mountain, in Deir el-Qamar, the driver stopped to fill up with petrol and to let his battered radiator cool down. Deir el-Qamar was a fine medieval town and, uniquely in Lebanon, had been well preserved, thanks to Walid Jumblatt's interest in conservation. It was built of warm honey-coloured sandstone and was full of old Ottoman khans and churches, lovely even in the rain. As I sat in a cafe, warming my hands around a glass of tea, I caught sight of a Maronite priest in black cloak and biretta hurrying along the road outside, a bent figure scurrying under the shelter of a wide umbrella. I had understood that the Christians of the Chouf, like those of Damour, had been driven out of the area during the fighting. Surprised, I chased after the priest and invited him into the cafe to join me. Clearly as amazed to see me as I was to see him, Pere Abbe Marcel abi-Khalil accepted.

The old priest shook his wet umbrella and folded it up. 'Before the fighting,' he said, 'Deir el-Qamar was half Christian and half Druze. The Chouf was traditionally a Druze area, but the Maron-ites began to migrate here from the north in the eighteenth century. By 1975, before the fighting, there must have been five thousand Christians living here, maybe twice that number in summer.'

He sipped his tea. 'Then there was the War of the Mountains,' he said, 'and all the Christians left. Today there are no more than one thousand of us living here.'

'So some Christians have returned?'

'Yes. They've started trickling back. Jumblatt is giving them a little money to help them start again. He is a good man. He has suffered himself - his father was assassinated - so he knows what it is to suffer loss. He wants to heal the wounds.'

'I'm surprised to hear a Maronite say that.'

'In 1860 the Druze and the Christians fought each other, but from then until the war we lived happily side by side. In our school we used to have 150 Christians and 350 Druze.'

'Druze? In a Christian school?'

'Mais oui,'
said Fr. Marcel. 'The fathers taught everyone, whatever their religion.'

'So what went wrong during the war?'

'It was Geagea and his Phalange. Before he came to the Chouf, we had lived together peacefully for generations. But while the Israelis were here in 1982, Geagea's men fought against the Druze in the Chouf and in Sidon. Geagea treated the Druze very badly. He made many murders. The Israelis pretended not to see and let Geagea do what he wanted. As a result, when they withdrew, everyone attacked the Christians. We were besieged and for three months there was nothing to eat: only grass. The Red Cross sent food but the Druze ate it on the way. In the end the Syrians supported Jumblatt and Geagea lost his war. Because of what he did, the Christians were expelled from both here and Sidon. We have a saying: "Where Geagea sets foot, no Christian remains." With a champion like him, we need no other enemies.'

'Did you meet Geagea?'

'Bien sur,'
said the priest. T hid him in the school for two months. It was in 1983, after he lost his little war. Personally I did not like him. In fact he almost made me embarrassed to be a Christian. When he left - walking over the mountain, by foot, in disguise - I was glad. He created only trouble for us.'

The driver came into the cafe and said that the car was ready. Fr. Marcel swallowed the last of his tea and we both stood up.

'Now Geagea has gone and the war is over, it is better in the Chouf,' said the priest as we walked outside. He raised his umbrella. 'The Druze have even begun coming to church again.'

'The Druze come to your church?'

'They always have. We have a miraculous picture. When they need babies or are ill or in difficulties they come here. They give oil and incense and are healed.'

He shook my hands warmly. 'In this part of the world,' he said, 'for all our difficulties, religion has not just torn people apart. It has often brought them together. It is important to remember that.'

The great early-nineteenth-century palace of Beit ed-Din lay a short distance away, on the opposite side of the valley. Its double