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Published: April 29th 2007
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A few days after their disappearance this week, the two Sunni youths are found dead on the side of the road near Sidon. There are nervous nights in Beirut. In my hotel lounge, the owner’s watching the news with his
nargileh pipe planted between his lips, the smoke piping from the corner of his mouth and a grave look on his flushed features. “Chouf,” he says, gesturing to the screen with his eyebrows. In a village in the Chouf Mountains, men are pouring into the street - not quite outraged, but clearly up to no good. Words are racing across the bottom of the screen in Arabic. For all I know they’re giving weather reports for the weekend - “Sunny and mild in Marjayoun”; “Mostly pleasant in Chtaura” - but on this night they look calamitous.
The next morning, in Kitsch, Margolie - a pretty young waitress with a complexion they would’ve once called “alabaster” - looks unnerved. She spent an anxious night in front of the TV at a friend’s place. “There were fireworks outside and we thought it was guns,” she says. “None of us could sleep all night and then I came straight here.” I
rest a consoling hand on her shoulder and stroke her hair - distress, it seems, triggering certain predatory impulses in my no-good heart. Houssam is sitting behind the counter, reading the paper. “As
The Daily Star went to press,” the front page gravely intones, “there were reports of men gathering in Wata al-Mosseitbeh, the Beirut neighborhood where Qabalan and Ghandour lived.” Again this town is inching closer to the edge. Oh, Beirut: you poor, hapless city. Will you ever manage to get a good night’s rest?
And why is it the basket cases, exactly, that always win my heart? For the first time in months I’ve imagined a new life for myself. Morning coffees in the Gemayzeh Café, the sunlight spilling through the windows. Sunset walks along the corniche, with the girls powerwalking and the old men peddling roasted cobs of corn. Weekends in the mountains, or along the coast, the same sea that the Phoenicians once mastered now fronted by swank resorts and private beaches that charge a $15 entry fee.
In spite of its woes - and partly, perhaps, because of them - this city’s snared my heart. And I’m not the only one. I’ve met
young writers and rappers and a spaced-out painter who sloshed her wine on the floor as she went digging through her purse for a business card: each of them, in their own way, trying to make sense of their troubled home, a problem child they seem to love more the more it goes astray.
I spend a few afternoons saying my goodbyes, taking long walks down familiar streets, with the women working their sewing machines in the shop windows and the old men sitting in cluttered stores piled high with boxes of shoes. Turn a certain corner in this city and you’d think you stepped into some little mountain village: the sidewalk shrines, the flower markets, the men playing backgammon in the shade. But on Monot, or in the ABC mall, the scene is unmistakably Beirut. The girls totter in their heels and pack their store-bought breasts into skimpy tank-tops, showing off their taped noses like medals of honor. With summer just around the corner there’s still time for the surgery to heal, their stout Lebanese chopped down like those famous cedars.
What was it a friend said about her countrymen? “How do you know the Lebanese? They
spend money they don’t have on things they don’t need to impress people they don’t know.” And yet I’ve seen these same girls all but come to blows over a bill at the dinner table: generous to the last aching cent. Even Hizbollah, in their own rambling, proselytizing way: they showed me kindness at their sit-in downtown, in those half-empty tents with the cheap foam mattresses and mangy blankets. They shared their croissants, still warm and stuffed with thyme, eager to hear an American view on the political stalemate in Lebanon. Maybe I’d pop by for the occasional tea in my new Beirut life, to grumble about the deadlock in parliament or the difficulty of getting a stubborn stain out of your
kuffiyah.
You wonder if there’s hope for Beirut, if it will ever step away from the brink. In January, on that dreadful night of riots, they were burning tires on the street corners and hurling rocks at the young soldiers. It might’ve only taken a single bullet to open up all the old wounds, but the army kept their guns at their sides and appealed to the crowds for calm. “
Shweya, shweya,” they said. Easy, easy. And
even now the politicians are trying to keep the country together, to make sure that this week’s murders don’t spark reprisals. You have to raise an eyebrow whenever these politicians start playing to the crowds, but it’s just a matter of time before this won’t be their country to ruin. Kids my age, or younger - all born under the cloud of a 15-year war - have had enough of fighting, of politics. They want to have a normal summer and get on with their normal lives. They want Israel and Syria and America and Iran to keep to themselves, thank you very much, and to give Lebanon a chance to just be Lebanon. If they could only agree on what that means.
On my last Saturday night in Beirut, Solveig takes me to see a friend, a musician, in his cluttered two-bedroom in Achrafiyeh. We find him on a stepladder in his bedroom, his black-framed glasses slightly steamed: he’s turning the room into a studio and has been gluing egg cartons to the ceiling all night. He shakes my hand and offers me a drink, pale pockets of fat poking from his white tank-top. We sit on the sofa and talk about his new project, a plan to gather the country’s underground musicians - the rappers and DJs and snarling punk bands - under the same banner. To find some sort of unity in a country that’s used to everything but.
“No one’s done anything like this in Lebanon before,” Solveig says. She’s planning to work with Zaid on the administrative side, cracking the whip that will keep his wild creative impulses in line.
RGB and another rapper show up, and then a tall, willowy beauty blows into the room with a bagful of DVDs. She’s just put the finishing touches on a recording of a rap show last month, and we huddle around Zaid’s laptop while she walks us through it. It’s a smart package she’s put together, and there’s a congratulatory air as we watch a few breakdancers whirling on their backs, or RGB’s oversized head bobbing its way through a rhyme. Zaid has connections overseas, and he’s anxious to get started on distribution: to show the world a different face of Lebanon than the troubled one splashed across TVs.
We head to a party nearby, in a swank, airy pad where ambient techno bumps and throbs toward the high ceilings. I sit on the sofa with a handful of peanuts. There’s a guy beside me, a Palestinian, playing a flute he’s carved by hand. He’s an English teacher working toward some ambiguous Master’s degree, it seems, in Palestinian flute-playing, and when Solveig draws near he breaks into a crisp, pitch-perfect Norwegian. So it goes in Beirut, with its gorgeous, mixed-up soul. The next day, in Kitsch, I say my goodbyes to Houssam, and along with promises for a speedy return -
inshallah - I offer the best advice I can give:
“Don’t do anything stupid while I’m gone.”
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