This Is Running for Your Life (18 page)

Nasrallah picks his moments well. Having successfully ended the Israeli occupation of Lebanon in 2000, he won the support of 87 percent of the Lebanese population during the war he essentially started in 2006. Since then he has focused on building Hezbollah's influence as a political party. They won 14 of Lebanon's 128 parliamentary seats in 2005 and have forged opposition alliances with Amal—another Shia faction—and the largest Christian bloc in parliament, led by former military commander Michel Aoun. In a 1985 manifesto Hezbollah made its agenda plain: they sought to eject Western colonialism from the country, bring the Phalangists to justice for the atrocities committed during the civil war, eradicate the “Zionist entity” of Israel, and bring the Islamic revolution lockstepping through Lebanon.

Nasrallah has lately stood down on that last item. His more immediate concern is acquiring veto power for Hezbollah in the cabinet, a provision that has thrown the government into chaos. Lebanon will come in at number eighteen on the Failed State Index for 2008, just two down from North Korea, two up from Yemen. Months have passed in the parliament without agreement on the makeup of a national unity government, each party cleaving to its demand for greater power. The cabinet is unwilling, in other words, to stay together for the kids. They won't even share custody.

*   *   *

Felicia suggested a second drink at an old Beirut beach club, where we could sample some of the city's ruined glory. The journey began with a common error in judgment—the decision to drive—and we spent the better part of an hour making excruciating, frame-by-frame progress down a few blocks in Felicia's car. We had plenty of time for pedestrian-gazing on Hamra Street—mostly women of aggressive glamour, the head of every fourth or fifth one wrapped in a hijab. “You never used to see that,” Felicia said, nodding her big sunglasses toward the street. When it's completely unavoidable, on assignment to Saudi Arabia, say, Felicia will wear a hijab. She'll even take a little pleasure in picking one out, mitigating the annoyance with maximum cuteness. But the sight of them here at home made her wistful.

Today the club where Felicia says all of fabulous Beirut would come to show off their new sun hats and sip brightly colored drinks looks like a shelled-out bunker. The seating area is a couple of green plastic tables and chairs scattered across a vast slab of concrete. Though it feels like taking a seat in a condemned public lot, discreet waitstaff appear before long. Our waiter regretted to inform us that there is no longer a working kitchen, so we ordered sodas and a bowl of the house's salted soybeans. The wind was sharp off the water, sucking our hair and voices relentlessly back into the city.

We didn't stay long. The club seems resigned to accommodating gestures of patronage rather than actual patrons, fond visitors like Felicia who come to pay respect to what is essentially a tombstone. On the way out Felicia pointed to the spot where an anti-Syrian member of parliament had been killed by a car bomb in June of 2007. He died between the lighthouse rebuilt after a 2006 Israeli bombing at one end of the corniche and Hariri's 2005 assassination site at the other end. The guided tour of Beirut's latest misfortunes is nothing if not compact.

Felicia was convinced that traces of mineral-hardened water in the previous night's fattoush had done me in. Even natives aren't immune to its devilry, she said. After a few months away, her homecoming might include a good puke as well. She dropped me off at the hotel, and I flopped out on the bed, assuming the sad, crampy little
z
I call “downward-facing tourist.” There was a party in Felicia's honor later that evening and I was resolved to go.

A few hours later four of us—me, Felicia, and a pair of her friends—were in a blue BMW and headed for Gemmayzeh, a Christian enclave known for the clubs you won't find in its Muslim counterpart. Like many of the young Lebanese I met, Felicia is well-connected, geographically: she has already lived in more countries than many Americans will ever visit, including the United States, where her family waited out the civil war. Her stunning, raven-haired girlfriends were also raised primarily in the U.S. and could toggle between frankly accented American English and the rhythmic, glottal flow of Arabic.

The empty streets clapped out our footsteps as we approached Kayan, a low-lit pub that serves bad music and big, strong drinks. We commandeered a corner and waited for Felicia's guests, including a BBC News producer, a former
Daily Star
reporter, an NGO worker, and Neill, a mysterious, British ladies' man with a nonprofit day job none of them could quite fathom. Before his arrival it was speculated, by people I can only assume count him as a friend, that their Neill might be a spy.

Within an hour the bar was packed with heads nodding in time—improbably, I felt—to Cornershop and Roxette. Two drinks in I was struggling to explain myself to Rob, the NGO worker from Florida. Rob was rangy and kind and made jokes about whether it was too early in the evening to send a booty text. Dipping in and ducking back in the birdish choreography of a first, loud conversation, he told me that even a year ago, even right after the war, he would have said the entire country had a 10 percent chance of spinning out of control on any given day. “Now,” he shouted, raising his eyebrows and working his palms like pistons to ensure I got the point above the music, “fifty-fifty.”

A young Lebanese man with a blazing white bandage fitted across the bridge of his nose was seated at the bar. A punch-up seemed unlikely for such a slickly drawn boy; Rob said it was probably a nose job. Beirut has become the plastic-surgery capital of the region, a Middle Eastern counterpart to its similarly middle-class-less, expatriate satellite country, Brazil. Last year Lebanese banks began offering multithousand-dollar loans specifically for plastic surgery, and it is currently the investment of choice; bandages are worn like Hermès scarves. “It makes no sense!” I yelled over Rob's shoulder, as Felicia bounced to the beat at the next table. It was Friday night and everyone was glad to be alive and in good company. And yet it makes perfect sense: in the face of astronomical disarray, perhaps the sanest impulse is to fix what you can.

Felicia invited me to join the group on a ski trip the next day, and I had to confess that I have never been on skis in my life. “I'm a big fan of traction” is what I always say when the subject comes up, and I said it then.

Instead I began that Saturday the way I would the next several mornings: calling a tour company to see if they had attracted the single other customer needed to merit their running a day trip into the countryside. I was still the only taker. A few floors up, in the hotel's hushed dining bay overlooking the sea, the continental breakfast spread had been reduced to coffee, a few squares of poreless bread, and a fruit salad spotted with black olives. I plucked one up with a pair of small, serrated tongs, then dropped it through a salutary puff of fruit flies.

I decided to walk over to Gouraud Street and sip away a few hours in Le Rouge Café. It was the weekend rush; chattering couples and families filled every table of the small front room. A bar at the back opens onto a galley kitchen, and English literary quotes are stenciled onto the walls in various fonts and sizes. From Günter Grass:
The job of the citizen is to keep his mouth open.
Oh really, Günter?

I was close enough to the three old-timers beside me, merry chain-smokers who received staff members throughout the meal with copious kisses and handshakes, to feel a part of their fun. In fact I sat through an entire service without catching my waiter's eye. After a further half hour spent wondering if I had managed to offend, something about the polite sweep of his gaze across the empty chair opposite me every time he passed suggested it had not occurred to him that I would be dining alone. When I told him just that, he popped up straight with a mortified look, quickly slipping me a second Diet Pepsi as consolation.

This is where the Parisian influence ends: one does not eat alone in Beirut. It's seen as a rather sad, confusing thing to do. To be alone signals misfortune or just misjudgment—in any case a kind of defeat. I had asked Felicia if Beirut had any movie theaters, and she told me they were all on hiatus; people were too afraid to go out at night. But today the mood is almost jubilant, defiantly so. When the restaurant falls to darkness and the kitchen's whirring cuts out with a kind of needle drop, the waiters don't break their step and no head turns. Eventually the owner, a hale and gracious gentleman named Hamil, stopped by my table to wonder if I had any quotes to add to the wall. I had been pretending to write in my notebook to keep from collecting looks from my fellow diners that could as easily have passed between us at the funeral of my firstborn son. I couldn't think of a quote for Hamil, or at least I didn't tell him what came to mind:
Oh really, Günter?

*   *   *

After lunch I walked south into Ras El Nabaa, where I had Lebanon's National Museum to myself on a Saturday afternoon. One guard was on duty, and we played a lethargic game of cat and mouse as I lingered over two floors of mosaics, Bronze Age baubles, and Roman sarcophagi. Every thirty feet or so I heard the jingle of the guard's keys a respectful distance behind, as he rose to limp toward an adjacent corner and continue his surveillance. This kind of thing would usually make me laugh, but it was one of those days when I can't understand how anyone makes it down the street with all of the shit they have inside them. So it just made me want to cry.

*   *   *

We were leaving Beirut, circling into the valley beneath the nasty gap in the middle of the Mdairej Bridge. “We're about to get a terrific view of what accurate munitions can do,” said the Irishman sitting directly in front of me. From the low angle of our detour, the damage to the Middle East's tallest bridge was even more spectacular. The Palestinian woman beside me began taking pictures, centering the long blank space in her digital monitor. The Israelis had bombed the bridge in 2006, taking out a two-hundred-foot support beam and crippling Beirut's supply traffic.

After a week of early-morning calls, there had finally been enough people for a trip to Anjar and Baalbek to go forward, and so four of us were in the back of a minivan: Peter, the Irishman, and his wife, Margaret; Nisrine, the Palestinian; and me—along with our Lebanese guide, Raaida, and Bilalo, who was huge, bashful, and drove like the blazes.

Nisrine had not been to Lebanon since she was three years old. She felt the odds that her sponsor—the producers of a documentary she was working on—would secure a visa were almost nil, so the trip was sudden and a considerable surprise. Now she was cramming her schedule with sights like Godard's
bande à part
racing through the Louvre. The Irish couple had toured Damascus the previous day and enjoyed the city very much. “Maybe I could borrow your passport,” Nisrine said, with what would become her trademark, edgy deadpan, “and see it for myself.” Over fortysome years she had traveled the world, but never entered the countries bordering her own. Nisrine seemed surprised and a little pained by the green of the mountain vegetation bordering the Bekáa Valley; she had almost forgotten how Palestine used to look. When we hit a patch of scrubby, desert bush she muttered about this being more like it. Earlier she had turned to me, by way of introduction, and asked if I was interested in seeing the Jeita caves with her the next day. “If there are two people,” she said, eyebrows all but waggling, “they have to take us.” I liked Nisrine immediately. I would go; I wouldn't let her down. She kept asking throughout the day, just to be sure.

Raaida was wide-mouthed and willowy. Wrapped in sunglasses and two wool sweaters, she chatted about our itinerary while the rest of us exchanged dippy comments about the weather, the food, the countries of our birth. Late into his sixties and all but retired, Peter was in Beirut consulting. He had spent a career as an electrical engineer building power plants around the world; his accent seemed diluted by equal parts travel and time. “You've come to fix our power!” Raaida exclaimed, twisting in her front seat to face us. Peter chuckled. “God himself couldn't fix the power here.”

President Bush was in the region, but he wasn't coming to Lebanon. He had been photographed goofing off with Saudi sheikhs and exchanging backslaps with Israeli emissaries. These images, Nisrine said, confirmed Bush's unseriousness about the Palestinian cause. President Clinton—now he almost got there. There might be peace today, she said, had it not been for that chubby tramp and her big, red lips. Here Margaret chimed in from behind her massive sunglasses for the first time that morning. It was unclear if her approving murmur was meant to affirm the tragic subversion of the Clinton administration's agenda for peace in the Middle East or the notorious sluttery of young American women.

Less than fifteen kilometers from the Syrian border in the east of Lebanon, Baalbek is the birthplace of Hezbollah. The first members began training there in 1979, and today it is considered the group's strategic headquarters. The ruins at Baalbek are devastating. The site encompasses the largest Roman temples ever built and evidence of a settlement dating back to the Bronze Age. Excavation in the area—like all excavation in the archaeologically larded Lebanese countryside—halted with the civil war and has not resumed. Tourism, once a lifeblood industry, is increasingly untenable. There were no guards, no barriers, and no other visitors. We drifted through the heady sprawl of this minicivilization, picking and wobbling and jumping back at the treacherous drop that divides the temples of Jupiter and Bacchus. The noon call to prayer began to sound throughout not just the city but the valley, the loudest and most plaintive I had heard. It wended through the towering pillars below, in no rush to reach our ears.

On the way back to the van we were beset by four or five grizzled, older men hawking gum, scarves, and green-and-yellow Party of God commemorative gear. They tugged at our elbows and shook Chiclets under our noses, surrounding us in an impressive formation. When it became clear that they were going to follow us the several blocks back to the van, a mixture of embarrassment and a more complicated tension overtook the group.