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Published: April 9th 2007
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I’m sitting outside a Starbucks in Achrafiyeh when a group of men with walkie talkies flood the street. They’re wearing leather jackets and cheap sunglasses and toting around big cardboard boxes that are straining at the bottom. They’ve unfurled a few flags around the square - bright white banners with a single green cedar in the middle - and tied them to the trees and telephone poles. Then they start flagging down passing cars. I go over to see what the commotion’s all about, and they tell me that they’re with the Lebanese Forces, handing out candy for Easter. Sure enough, one of the guys mumbles into his walkie talkie and makes a few quick hand signals across the street, and his partner comes along with a little plastic baggie full of cookies and chocolate eggs. I suspect something is afoot. Back at the hotel, I do a few quick Google searches and discover that the Lebanese Forces are a militant right-wing Christian group, among whose greatest hits was the massacre of as many as three thousand Muslims at the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps outside Beirut.
Happy Easter, indeed.
Only in Beirut do you find
little chocolate eggs to be loaded with such portent. Religion has never come easy to this city, long divided along strict confessional lines. In the ‘80s, the Muslim neighborhoods to the west and Christian areas to the east were all but off-limits to those who eschewed the true faith - whichever faith that happened to be. Christine, a grad student in LA who was born in Beirut, remembers the shockwaves that roared through her Christian neighborhood when three young women in
hijabs first walked down the street. Even today, the call to prayer wails from the minarets in the west, while little sidewalk shrines of St. George and the Virgin Mary line the streets in the east, and massive, bloody portraits of Christ loom from the side of the road.
True, the city’s neighborhoods have spilled over in recent years; the famous “Green Line” that separated east from west is a bit blurrier than before. Someone warned me at a party that you had to watch what you said these days: you could never tell, he whispered conspiratorially, who was standing behind you. But at a sandwich shop in Gemayzeh, the guy behind the counter - loud and
gruff with whorls of chest hair spinning from his collar - shows few concerns. “Lebanon is a great country. Good people, educated people,” he says. “Especially the Christians.”
It’s a mild, sunny Easter Sunday. The church bells are tolling in the east, the little girls in their summer dresses and the fathers looking like square-jawed pillars of hearth and home. I head west, toward the waterfront, suspecting that I have as much business among the soldiers of Christ as I have batting clean-up for the Yankees. The corniche is crowded with power walkers and flirting teens and Muslim families draped in long beards and
chadors. Old fishermen are casting lines into the sea; a group of boys - thin and gangly, the swimsuits hugging their slender legs - are doing cannonballs into the water from twenty feet up. I buy a bag of nuts and seeds from a vendor and watch the little kids wobbling on their inline skates. There are cars parked by the curb, men leaning out the side doors and puffing
nargileh from the pipes they’ve set up on the sidewalk.
The corniche is the place to head if you only have a
single day in Beirut: the city at its most democratic, a place where Christians and Muslims and Druze and godless travel writers can agree on the simple pleasures of sun-crested waves and a gentle sea breeze. I follow the water from the city’s famous “Pigeon Rocks” to the swank seaside restaurants of Ain al-Mreisseh; further on, I’m stopped by a soldier manning a checkpoint near the carcass of the St. George Hotel. Two years after the Hariri assassination, this place is still an active crime scene, the street buckling into a crater as wide across as a couple of SUVs parked end-to-end. Nearby, across from the Phoenicia Hotel, there’s a scent of spring rain and freshly cut grass, an almost shameful sense that hope can blossom from the blood-soaked soil these Lebanese are endlessly fighting for.
Downtown is showing the first signs of life I’ve seen all week. The families have spilled out of mass in St. George and crowded the restaurants and sidewalk cafés. The streets are still half-empty, the soldiers looking warily from left to right under the clock tower, but it’s the most promising day this place has seen in months. I have a coffee
and watch the little kids scooting around the square, chasing each other with toy guns and kicking a soccer ball through the crowd. A few colorful fish balloons are bobbing and swimming in the wind, a flock of birds like an arrowhead shoot across the sky. It’s the sort of day you want to believe in. Then there’s the sound of fireworks nearby, a quick rat-a-tat-tat from the direction of the Hizbollah camps, and a few wary mothers grab their children by the wrists, tugging and holding them close.
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