From The Holy Mountain (41 page)

But before I could leave to visit this town which, according to
Lebanon: The Promised Land of Tourism,
'still rings with the soothing sound of Gibran's peaceful words', I had a morning appointment to keep in Beirut. Fisk had told me that the opposition to the bulldozing of what little remained of historic Beirut

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the so-called Downtown Project - was being coordinated by one Yvonne, Lady Cochrane, who had memorably described the President's ambitious plans for Beirut's redevelopment as 'the dream of a retarded adolescent'. Lady Cochrane was apparently the head of a family of old Beirut grandees who had come by her very unLevantine name when she married a former Irish Honorary Consul in Beirut, now long since dead.

I suppose I had guessed that Lady Cochrane was not going to be living in poverty in some poky flat when, on the telephone, she gave her address as Palais Sursock in Rue Sursock. But even so I had not expected the vision that confronted me when Nouri's taxi dropped me in front of Lady Cochrane's gates.

In the middle of the drive-in Apocalypse that is post-war Beirut, surrounded by the usual outcrops of half-collapsed sixties blocks

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conical termite heaps of compacted, crumpled concrete - there stood an astonishing vision: a perfect Italian Baroque palace, enclosed within its own walled garden. Everything was beautifully kept, with wide terraced lawns framed by a pair of date palms looking down over the smart Christian district of Ashrafiyeh to the blue wash of the Mediterranean far below. A double marble staircase led up to the front door; only the broken balustrade -which appeared to have received a glancing hit from a mortar or a rocket-propelled grenade - indicated that the war had touched this small oasis at all.

I was let in by a servant and conducted to the library. On the wall hung a fine portrait of a seventeenth-century Greek merchant flanked by a series of superb oils of Ottoman townscapes: domes and caiques and wooden palaces on the Bosphorus. Shelves groaned with old leather-bound books; on one side a seventeenth-century escritoire was covered with the latest magazines from London and Paris.

After maybe ten minutes there came the sound of brisk footsteps and a petite but stylish woman walked in, hand extended. She was strikingly beautiful. In the half-light of the library I took her for about forty; only in the course of her conversation did it become clear that she must have been at least seventy, and possibly a good deal older than that.

'Do forgive me,' she said in an old-fashioned upper-class accent, the 'r's slurred almost into 'w's. 'I've been with the lawyer. We're having the most trying time with one of our neighbours. He's recently started behaving like a total gangster. All the institutions in Lebanon seem to have collapsed. Last year this man used his position to help himself to the funds of a hospital donated by my family for the benefit of the poor. Now he is now trying to claim a strip of my garden. You see, unfortunately the boundary wall was destroyed in the Syrian bombardment, and that was the start of the whole problem.'

'You were bombarded here?'

'Several times.'

'Who by? I thought this part of Beirut escaped the worst of the war.'

'The first time, in '75, it was by the Palestinians. Then there was a second, more serious bombardment by the Syrians in '76. I was the other side of Beirut when it began again: couldn't get across the Green Line. Eventually I found someone who was prepared to bribe the Syrians, brave the shells and take me across. I arrived to find that the house had been appallingly battered. My son was here giving out water from the well in our garden to queues of people from the street. The Syrians had cut the water supply.'

'But the house was still standing?'

'Just about. This room was blown out by a phosphorus bomb. Came back to find the place looking like a surrealist picture. That entire wall had disappeared, but the bookcase was still standing, upright against the sky.'

Lady Cochrane arched her eyebrows: 'Next door the chandelier was blown apart in the blast, the mirrorwork ceiling was destroyed and my late husband's remarkable collection of fifteenth-century Chinese bowls was smashed.'

She stood up and led the way to the door into the hall. 'I suppose we were very lucky that none of the shells cut the main load-bearing pillars, otherwise the whole thing would have collapsed. But by pure good fortune most of them went straight through: down the passage, into the dining room and out the other side into the garden. Ruined my borders. Holes everywhere.'

'And you carried on living here, despite everything?'

'Oh yes. We lived in the shell for seven years. You can get used to anything. In time.'

'And you didn't rebuild?'

'There didn't seem much point while the shelling was continuing. It was 1985 before we felt it was worth trying to begin restoring the house.'

Lady Cochrane led the way into the main hall, an astonishing piece of mid-nineteenth-century Lebanese architecture enclosed by a quadrant of Saracenic arches. At the far end she pointed to an empty space on the wall; a shadow and a copper picture-hanger indicated where a large canvas had once hung.

'We had to sell the Guercino to the Met,' she said. 'It was painted for one of my ancestors, but the Syrians were shelling and we were left with no money at all. Couldn't even pay the servants. I panicked and sold it for a fraction of its worth.'

'And this?' I asked, pointing to a Venetian canalscape. 'Canaletto?'

'No,' she said. 'It's Guardi. But it's nice, isn't it?'

Outside the door of the sitting room my hostess paused by a small Baroque table with finely carved ball-and-claw feet. On it were displayed a few lumps of twisted metal.

'And these,' I said. 'Giacometti?'

'No, no,' said Lady Cochrane. 'Those are shells. All of that lot landed inside the house. Those ones on the left are mortars: used to come whizzing through the house six at a time. Made a terrible racket. We keep them just to remind us what we went through.'

We sat at a table and Lady Cochrane called for coffee. She then talked about her views on the redevelopment of Beirut: how the town had once been a green Ottoman garden city and should now be trying to return to that ideal rather than aiming at a sort of Middle Eastern version of Hong Kong, all high-rise blocks and plate glass. The brutalist architecture, she believed, was partly responsible for the brutalisation of Lebanon.

'In the past rich and poor had their own green space,' she said. 'A workman had something to look forward to: a peaceful evening sitting with his family round a small fountain surrounded by sweet-smelling herbs. Now he comes back to a concrete box in a slum. His children are screaming, the television is blaring. It's no wonder the Lebanese turned somewhat irritable and aggressive during the 1970s.'

A servant padded in with a tray of coffee. Lady Cochrane poured me a cup. In the background a telephone rang and a minute later the servant reappeared and whispered into his mistress's ear. She smiled a broad smile

'Good, good,' she said. 'That was my lawyer. He's rung to say my neighbour has just received the order to stop building in my garden. Ah, but life is so trying these days! The Lebanese who are even remotely civilised are now reduced to a tiny minority. Before the civil war there was an artistic life: painters, musicians, actors. Now there is a terrible exodus of brains and honest people - the best Lebanese, Christian and Muslim, have all left, or are in the process of leaving. Among the Maronites 300,000 - a third of the total community - fled the Middle East in the course of the war. We're left with the bottom of the barrel.'

'Are you a Maronite?'

'I'm Greek Orthodox,' said Lady Cochrane. 'My family were Byzantines from Constantinople: the name Sursock is a corruption of Kyrie Isaac, Lord Isaac. They left at the fall of the city in 1453 and settled near J'bail.'

I asked how much responsibility she thought the Maronites had to bear for what had happened to Lebanon.

'The Maronites presided over both the birth and the death of Lebanon,' said Lady Cochrane. 'Without them, Lebanon would never have existed. With them behaving as they have a tendency to do, it can't go on. Of course, the war brought out the worst in everyone. The Muslims all turned into terrorists and the Christians into mafiosi: kidnapping and robbing people, protection rackets and so on. At the beginning they were so brave and honourable: we willingly gave them money, and even our own sons. But by the end we refused: it was just people like Geagea. Gangsters.'

'I'm off to Geagea territory - Bsharre - this afternoon.'

'Well, you be careful,' said Lady Cochrane briskly.

'What do you mean?'

'During the war my son Alfred went up there to see some friends. On the road, he was stopped by the Marada militia. They put a gun to his head and tied him to a tree. When Alfred was at Eton he quickly learned how to get out of beatings, and this experience came in very handy on this occasion. They said they were going to execute him. He kept telling them he was great friends with the Franjiehs - the ex-President's family who commanded the militia - and said that he was going to spend the weekend with them. Of course he had no such plans, but the lie eventually did the trick. Most of the militia men did not believe him, but Alfred kept going on about his important Maronite friends and eventually one of them got cold feet. The others were saying, "Let's just shoot him and ask questions afterwards," but the one with cold feet said, "No, we must telephone the Franjiehs and check what he's saying." So they did.

'Luckily they got the former President, Suleiman Franjieh. He was a little surprised to hear that Alfred thought he had been invited for the weekend, but he told the militiamen to release Alfred immediately nonetheless. The next day Robert Franjieh, the President's son, rang up here. He and Alfred had known each other since they were in playpens together: it's a very small world here in Lebanon. Robert said: "I'm so sorry, Alfred. Rotten luck. Won't you come to lunch?"'

'And what was Alfred's reply?'

'He said, "Thanks a lot, Robert, but not today. I'm afraid I'm a little busy."'

Oddly enough, before I left England a journalist friend had given me Robert Franjieh's number. Intrigued by Lady Cochrane's story, before I left Beirut for Bsharre I gave him a ring and received an invitation to lunch later in the week. Unlike Alfred, I accepted.

The main road north from Beirut hugged the coast. The cliffs of the mountains rose steeply to our right while a ribbon of new seafront high-rise blocks towered to the left. We headed past the harbour with its phalanx of bulldozers pushing great piles of rubble and tangles of reinforced concrete into the sea, then crawled slowly through a long traffic jam past the casinos, nightclubs and restaurants of Jounieh. A little to the north we passed along a small stretch of six-lane motorway elaborately decorated with strange road-markings and numbers. As none of Lebanon's roads normally have any markings at all (or, indeed, traffic lights, signposts or lighting for that matter), I was baffled by the complex network of characters and symbols, and asked Nouri what they were.

'They were for the planes, sir.'

'I'm sorry?'

'Aeroplanes, sir. During the war, when Beirut airport was on the front line, the air force moved here. This side was the main runway, while the other lane was where the planes were parked.'