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Mar Mitr

And in the morning, with the clumsy fingerprints of yesterday's storms still soaking into the windowsill, there is a moment of quiet to pause in, outside the heavy wooden door with its French and Lebanese flags, before tipping down the stone stairs and through the metal front gate. On the other side of the street is a forgotten shell of a building, its stone balustrades rotting away and terraces cluttered with pre-war rubbish. Neighbouring balconies suggest geraniums, and inquisitive green tendrils test the air. The ugly corporate facade of the supermarket at the end of the road is undermined by the minute open-backed van painted in primary blues and yellows that stands by its delivery entrance, disgorging trays of oranges and guarded by a grubby old man with a wizened beard and dubious keffiyeh.

And before you climb onto the number 2 bus, before you hand over your noisome green lira notes, before the bus driver lights his cigarette and blows it all over the baby in the front seat to the tune of Fayrouz, before you clatter along Gemmayzeh and turn left at the vast Pop Art poster of Bashir Gemayel, and long before you trudge up the hill to the wearisome office that is no longer your home, you know that this is right. Even as you walk towards the front gate, the street beckons with an old lady in a zebra-skin hat and patent leather boots, and outside the manoushé shop next door a bleary old man is wearing grey pyjamas over his pendulous belly and cackling corpulently over his morning zaatar. You can look back at the house you came from, at its terracotta pink exterior and questionable art deco mouldings, and remember passing it all unknowing, many months ago. Along the road to Dora there is light over the sea and on the mountains, men already bent over oily engines in Armenian repair shops, grandfathers in peaked felt caps wandering amiably and inconsequentially past the determined commuter traffic, and a pair of indescribably filthy old women lugging sacks of scrap metal in early morning incomprehension and heartbreak.

***

The day before, Valerie gives me tea and keys in the kitchen, and we make a rental contract on the back of an envelope. Mina sits on a third chair and rests her chin on the kitchen table in a doomed effort to appear human, blue eyes faintly crossed. You live here alone? I ask her, la belle Parisienne. Oui, she replies, je suis solitaire. I nod. Moi aussi. We understand each other.

So the pink house on Mar Mitr has another solitaire, with not much money but a room of her own, and who in the mornings pads past the red theatre curtains and the plants dark against the early sunlight, and out into the day.

And then ...

We are going to see the apartment, he announces at the end of class. I have become more resigned to Zouk recently, or at least appeased by the money that I save, and faintly regret my grumblings that have led to this unplanned late-night excursion. But in French I must needs be even less intelligent and diplomatic than other times, simply because I cannot keep up or spontaneously express myself with delicacy, if at all. So we drive through Beyrouth in the dark, leaving faint nervous smudges of social awkwardness in our wake.

So because I do not have the presence of mind to say no, I find that the building is old and beautiful, the domain of enormous plants and graceful iron railings. The landlady is an exceptional French beauty, a filmmaker, with a malleable Siamese cat who answers infrequently to the name Mina. Her apartment is high ceilings, dark walls and Byzantine furniture. Up dappled flights of stairs, she pauses on a verdant terrace and opens a door to a tiny theatre, polished floors and red velvet curtain and fading posters, where she encourages the youth of Beyrouth to express themselves on weekday afternoons. Tiny costumes hang from railings, and plastic cutlasses lie on a sideboard. Beyond this is bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, all mine for the asking, and the whispering hum of the city insistent outside. We go back down and are entertained by an inedible effort at a Lebanese cake, and I try to keep my wits about me in French after three hours of Arabic and eight of proofreading. I feel far removed, yet aware that this is a rare chance.

A sleepless night and nervous morning later, I manage to remind myself why I came to Lebanon, and that I enjoy challenges and beauty and independence. Still, it feels like Zouk had almost tamed me, and there is a feeling akin to that experienced before a scary party where you are afraid you won't have anything to say.

I will be much poorer. I will have to learn to commute again, in a land without trains, after indulgent months of tipping out of bed and into work with pillow-creases still disheveling my cheeks. But the world will look different, and Beyrouth will be my home. This is how it goes, it seems, and the next page turns.

The Test

Kamil calls me on Thursday afternoon, without ceremony. Ellen, it is better that you do the test tomorrow morning. He has booked it for you, and they are making things much harder very soon. My bike is hors de combat with a dead battery, I have to do an interview and submit the article the same evening, and I am due in the recording studio at 10am. But, Kamil … . This is Lebanon. I will go, having only desperately Googled instructions for automatic scooters at 1am.

In a state of sleep-deprived nerves, then, I enter the now-familiar state of ignorant, passive foreigner, being led from room to grey, stained room of government buildings by kindly, sweaty men who grin and offer me Nescafé, and discuss me in Arabic while shuffling and stamping tottering piles of carbon copies. Pierre is my wasta for this round, a little bent man with a greasy forelock and banker’s pink-striped shirt. He has a screaming argument with someone in the corridor outside his office, while I sit inside and look out of the grimy window at a truncated section of the car park. To make his final point, he strides over to a metal door, carbon copies in hand, opens it and throws them inside, to where I just glimpse a room of tables and shelves so jammed and piled with blue, green and pink papers as to resemble a bloated pile of innards, ready to vomit everything out into the corridor at any moment. He returns, switches his computer off and says curtly in Arabic It is all fine. You will only have to sign.

More rooms, more chairs, more men. I am ferried to and fro by hands in the small of my back as I am explained and bargained over. Eventually, in a room full of computers set up for the theory test, I stand and wait my turn. Thirty people enter, seat themselves, and fiddle disinterestedly with their belongings. Only a couple of people make any move to click their screens, and men move to and fro between the desks. Ten minutes later, they rise en masse and are hustled out to the cars – 3a siyyara! 3a siyyara!* When my turn comes, I study the first screen, which has the option to choose Arabic, English or French. A man appears at my shoulder and clicks for Arabic, then does the test for me – 30/30 in 15 seconds. Khalas, done, yalla, let’s go.

In the arena of the practical test, I sit on a bench and watch people drive cars for ten metres, stop, reverse five, then get out and sign their successful pass sheet. My latest escort, Boutros, takes me straight to the signing booth and presents me to its guardian. There is some problem. Pierre must be called. I wait and listen for the tone of the sign-off, which is a now-familiar musical riff of success – OK, tayeb, yalla. Eh, tayeb. OK, yallabye. Notes change hands, bored officials wave you on. Boutros has been briefed, and drives me all the way to Mansourieh on the boss’s orders. Are you married? He asks. How long will you stay in Lebanon? You should get a Lebanese boyfriend, then you would learn Arabic very quickly.

Despite my nerves, none of this surprises me in the slightest. As far as Lebanon is concerned, and once I have paid the wasta at my end, I am ready to drive. The whole licence and registration process will cost me about five hundred pounds.

I am only half an hour late for the studio, where it turns out I have about two lines to record. I spend the rest of the afternoon watching Wes Anderson films on James’s laptop while our supervisor Nancy puts on makeup and discusses her new boyfriend, a Lebanese businessman working in Nigeria who she met on Facebook.

This is Lebanon. Happy driving.

Sahlab nights in Beyrouth

Arum did it at dinner the other night; she was showing us drawings from her diary, all written in Korean, but peppered with reminders in English – phrases like “positive mental attitude”. I'd always thought she was a philosophical sort of person, not given to unhealthy introspection – this is the girl, after all, who happily got herself from Istanbul to Tehran to Lebanon overland, alone. But suddenly there we were – three bright, interested girls who had spent our days in Hezbollah-controlled Roman ruins or at era-defining demonstrations, who had upped sticks from home for challenge and adventure, all too easily slipping into talk of what we lack, how we feel we are failing ourselves, and how we don't understand what we are doing wrong.

Who are we, the single girls of Beyrouth? We're not on our gap years any more, yet we've turned things upside down to be somewhere other than our homelands. We aren't here for money or for love, and yet we wouldn't mind either and aren't quite sure why they aren't easier to come by. We are presentable, well-qualified, engaged, and prepared to work like dogs for the right job. And there's the key – we will compromise on everything but watching our youth disappear down a hole of pointless paper-pushing and cultural stagnation. Or, anyway, that's what we're trying to avoid, but are strangely surprised to find that simply moving countries wasn’t enough.

Dina hates her job, should be earning twice as much as she is, and has started reading self-help books. I hate mine when I can be bothered, and suffer great debilitating waves of inadequacy and stress. Arum came from Syria reeling from an overdose of Arab culture only to find it lacking in Lebanon, apart from attitudes to her race, and is having to leave and deal with the return to her family's expectations of her in South Korea. By no means exceptional problems – life, just in another place. And we didn't expect things to be easy, in fact we came here to make them more difficult – but we find ourselves seeking solace in the very smallest achievements, and wondering why people assume we're fine all the time, that we're strong. Because it isn't how we see ourselves, and it isn't how we feel. More often than not we are to be found huddled round mugs of sahlab* prior to bed at 10pm rather than out experiencing the Hoxton crowd in the Middle East, a scene we despise and slightly envy at the same time.

So we go on, wondering if this is all there is and if we ask too much to want things to be better, if it's us or Lebanon or life. For now it is worth it, if only because we are of the peculiar persuasion that has to travel – but like everyone, we do wonder.

* A hot milky drink in roughly the same family as Horlicks.

February 14

Valentine's day in Beyrouth. Red balloons mushroom poisonously from the door of every florist's, and furry red teddy bears cluster in malevolent heart-clasping covens on the lintels of novelty shops. But there is strong competition for billboard dominance across the country, even against the brisk Valentine's trade in perfume and holidays, in this land with its unbridled adoration for kitsch and romance. Whirled about with the colours of Lebanon, the smiling monobrowed face of assassinated ex-President Rafik Hariri, shown in memorial black and white, gazes down at the land he tried to lead from thousands of giant posters across the country. Whatever his manifest faults, he sought to make Lebanon prosper, and believed in making a stand for its independence against Syria, an enterprise that probably led directly to his death by a thousand kilos of TNT on 14 February 2005. Outrage at the killing was the straw that broke the camel's back of Lebanon's post-war tolerance of an outside regime for the sake of peace. The Cedar Revolution grew out of this outrage, with hundreds of thousands gathering on the streets in an unprecedented show of Middle Eastern people power to demand the end of Syrian dominance, the departure of its mukhabarat spy networks, and the establishment of an international tribunal to investigate the murder of Hariri. The movement today is represented by the March 14 coalition in government.* Pro-Syrian supporters marched as well (today the March 8 coalition, largely defined by its orientation around Hezbollah), but in the end Lebanon got its sovereignty, at least on the surface, and without the use of military force, that its state could anyway never have marshalled against far more powerful Syria and its allies.

In the weeks leading up to the fifth anniversary of the assassination, Hariri's legacy has been fully Lebanized. The tribunal is pathetically stalled, Hariri Junior (now Prime Minister, though without much glory) has just got back from a fence-building trip to Damascus, and instead of a people's movement the party-sponsored billboards advertise the time and place of the gathering with corporate efficiency. Electronic advertisement screens in Martyr's Square layer the business entrepreneur Hariri's face with advertisements for imported luxury goods with a truly Lebanese flair for following an idea to its extremes: Bennetton, YSL, Hariri. H&M, La Senza, Hariri. The Revolution.

As well as Hariri on his own, there are also thousands of posters in the same colours of six “martyred” politicians, who have all in death lent their support to the visions of their successors. There is something terribly comical about the ranks of besuited self-importance and patrician expressions – look how many of our leaders we have killed! This means something that we can be proud of, that we should support! In the evenings after dark, you can walk the flyover joining Achrafieh with Hamra and look down on the Centre Ville, all in darkness but for Hariri's mosque and his face floodlit at ten different prime vantage points across several miles, glowing with incomprehensible significance, clean points of light that stand out from the shadowy city. Somehow, it doesn't feel real.

Zoukian expressions of apathy (I would NEVER go! Why would I? Why do you waste your time with politics? People just go there to have a day out. You can watch it on TV!) are not surprising, but more thoughtful responses can be found elsewhere. A friends who happens to be a Sunni Muslim reacts with horror to the idea that she might go. I don't believe in what they're doing, and I wouldn't want to increase the numbers. Brought up in Manchester, she hates the idea that people expect her to be a March 14 supporter simply because Hariri was a Sunni. After a Time Out interview, a gentle book club member shakes his head at cars full of pre-anniversary Future Movement supporters roaring past, blue flags with white stars fluttering from their windows (Rafik Hariri's party). You talk about a people's movement, but this is something united for a common goal – in Lebanon, it can never be. For a while maybe you have the idea of it, but in the end, people here have strong religious beliefs, and they will return to them. The strength of these beliefs is apparent in the reactions of yet others to news of the demonstration, even when they too marched in 2005. Oh, are they still doing that? It's all the right-wing Christians now.

The day before the demonstration, I walk through Martyr's Square. Podiums and loudspeakers and security, and tottering ranks of innumerable white chairs. This is a political rally, not an independence movement. Hariri's tomb is buzzing with important-looking figures and has a whole new layer of flower-ringed portraits of ever more preposterous size and impossibly saccharine colour schemes. For some reason, there is also a contingent of Armenian scouts with trombones and neckerchiefs and flags marked 1887. I walk away full of familiar half-comprehension; this is the untidy jigsaw of the landscape of Beyrouth, and I too am part of it, pale and diffident and confused but trying to understand, without much conviction that understanding is worthy or achievable.

So perhaps the Hariri phenomenon was something different, and perhaps it ended up a lot the same in the end, in its absorption into all Lebanon's other problems. But it was Hariri who occupied my MSc thesis, and it is through the prism of those months of reading that I learned to look at Lebanon. So on February 14, post-revolutionary lack of ardour notwithstanding, I shake off my Sunday morning hangover and emerge into the uncomfortable sunshine to roads in Zouk heaving with Lebanese Forces** cavalcades. The roads ululate with the tune the party's supporters hammer out on their car horns – perhaps I have been reading too much Fisk, but when I hear it all I can think of is bigotry and murder, and my skin crawls. As the bus take me towards town, the autostrade is lined with picnicking families hung about with LF flags. Everything is jammed and closed from Dora onwards, so I walk to Beyrouth down the main road, rather than my usual route through Bourj Hammoud. The sandwich-sellers are here from Trablous in the Muslim North, bearded men with metal carts where they grill sesame flatbreads with halloum under striped umbrellas. The roads are quiet with hundreds of people walking, and I am left in comparative peace, almost the only foreigner I see. What there are many of, however, are young Phalangists. The Kataeb party (“Phalange” in Arabic) is a prominent member of the March 14 alliance, and their leader Amine Gemayel will speak at the rally today. He is the brother of assassinated Bashir Gemayel, whose killing in 1982 triggered the Sabra & Chatila massacres in Beyrouth’s Palestinian camps. Old Pierre Gemayel, their father, based his party's vision on admiration for Hitler’s brownshirts as observed during the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. This was only an aesthetic preference, they argue today. Their Wikipedia page states that they were only Nazis when absolutely necessary. As I walk past people my age carrying flags with the triangular Kataeb cedar logo, I realise how little understand these movements, and how little it will ever be in my power to. I am not a flag-carrier, or a strong believer, and the young Phalangists just make me feel ill and tired.

I enter Martyr’s square by the entrance next to the Kataeb headquarters, hung with a thirty-foot photo of the latest Gemayel to meet an unpleasant end – Pierre Amine in 2006. The square is heaving, and people wander to and fro or sit about in the sun smoking narghile, babies on their knees. Phones cut out and it takes me nearly an hour to locate Dina. People are sitting on top of traffic lights, on billboards, swinging from tall wire fences. Voices roar from the loudspeakers and I catch the predictable words – Syria, Lebanon, Lebanon is Arab, Lebanon is one, Hariri, Hariri, Hariri. Translations I read later don’t add much. I can see the big names via the screens as they speak – Amine Gemayel, Fouad Siniora, Saad Hariri, Samir Gea’Gea – the bread and butter of my understanding, but I can’t locate their figures beyond the crowds.

Dina and I take it all in for a while. A good 80% of the several thousand people in the square seem to be there as Lebanese Forces or Kataeb supporters, while the rest carry Future Movement or Lebanese national flags. Five years after the event and with March 14 at least superficially in power, the total absence of a March 8 presence shows how cruelly and fundamentally Lebanon is still divided. Each movement becomes a cariacature of itself, and while the leaders grit their teeth and shake hands for the time being, the motley barely-ex-militias that make up the coalitions harden and recruit and continue as they ever have, defining themselves by their religion as they choose, and as the state still divides and classifies them.

We stupidly try and cross the square at its busiest point, and get hemmed in by people cramming against the VIP area barriers. It is unpleasantly hot, and I suddenly realise that Dina and I have been encircled by a group of men, who stare straight ahead and close shoulders while their hands grasp at us. I turn and shout and they look all innocent. Desperate elbows and aggressive pushing are required to let us walk away, and I do not have the words or the presence of mind to express my disgust – and anyway, to whom? The male Lebanese security guards? We should have known better.

Edging through the crowds, I look up and see airy flocks of helium balloons in the Lebanese colours, floating away on the wind. Through a clearer patch of square, a fat young man in military fatigues runs, grasping the pole of a vast Lebanese Forces flag that has been altered for the preferences of his sub-faction – it is black, with a skull incorporated into the design. It ripples dramatically in his wake, and he seems aware of the arresting image he makes.

Later, we go to Hamra for coffee and computers and then dinner, in a world away where American students talk about how they saw the rally on TV. In the days after, the media that I can follow is indifferent in its assessment of the day, and all the published photos seem to have caught only pockets of demonstrators waving or wearing straightforward Lebanese flags and carrying posters of Hariri. I saw only unpleasant far-right parties and a message of independence broken and distorted – but then, I was not there in 2005. Why are people not more afraid for Lebanon – am I still too new, or are they jaded and comforted by the recent comparative peace? Is my perspective skewed because of the area where I live and the patterns I think I see? Or are Beyrouthian journalists equally compromised by their cosmopolitan lifestyles in easygoing Hamra? Perhaps I am reading too much into things, or perhaps they are neglecting internal conflicts while the external threats lie temporarily low. I still don’t know enough, it’s too big, too complicated, though also nothing to the import of other countries in the Middle East. Where do you start, when do you give up, and how can we ever speak of these things with any confidence?

* The original Cedar Revolution protests took place a month after Hariri's death; February 14 as a memorial day and associated independence movement came in 2006. March 14 is made up of assorted parties, mainly Christian and Sunni Muslim, but predictably the membership and rhetoric chops and changes according to the regional and domestic situation.

** A right-wing, largely Maronite Christian party, whose headquarters are just up the road from Librarie du Liban. Like most groups in Lebanon, they have a deeply unpleasant civil war history, and the leaders from that era still hold the positions of power. Their flag is a cedar tree in a circle in the Lebanese colours, and their cross a simple double outline with sharp points.

Laqlouq

Such a small country, Lebanon, and so troubled, and perhaps understandably tending to conspiracy theories. Given the popularity of these theories, it is mildly surprising that the people have not attributed the travails of their ski industry this season to anything more sinister than unfortunate weather patterns. On other topics, the current favourite circling the office is the idea that the sorry passenger plane which fell into the sea in flames last month was the victim of a renegade Shi’ite faction, who apparently have nothing better to do with their time than aim at Boeings full of Ethiopians in the middle of a thunderstorm. Cautious and sensitively phrased skepticism (Bollocks!) is met with a generous effort to enlighten the innocent foreigner. Eh bas anjad ya Ellen, if it was just one side saying it then maybe it would not be true, but everyone is saying it, really, from every side. Perhaps the newly discovered black box will settle the question. In the meantime, photos of grinning schoolchildren throwing flowers insincerely into the Mediterranean proliferate on the Internet; vivid orange gerberas against dark waves and cold sands. A cartoon is censored from the press that shows a Lebanese lady telling her friend how news of the crash reduced her maid to tears:

Why should she care, if she’s Filipina?

It turns out I was taken in – she’s not Filipina after all, but Ethiopian!

The horror! What will you do, get rid of her?

No, don’t worry, I just lowered her salary from a Filipina to an Ethiopian one.

But anyway, for now, the snow is here, even if a couple of months late. Long tired of the effusions of snowbound Brits that blend so rapidly into sour and then hysterical complaints, I am falling over myself to head as far as possible into the mountains and to taste at last the fresh winter air. The troops are marshaled, the expedition booked, the warm bed left at an ungodly Sunday morning hour. Now is the time to turn your eyes back on Lebanon from its peaks, while the whiteness lends a miraculous beauty to the ravaged hills, and distance generously distils the coast from calcified ridges of smoke and concrete into nothing more the gentle curve of a hand through the sand at the water’s edge; a momentary cupping of the blue and infinitesimal moulding of the shore.

Such a small country, Lebanon, and so troubled, from the maps always seeming to be shouldered into the sea by its neighbours. Beyond the hazy rim of its sea coast the land is all earth and rock flung up into tense peaks and valleys, that only calm themselves when they collapse into the plains of Damascus. The country is permanently ridged like the back of a snarling dog, a terrier holding clumsy bloodhounds at bay. And so, this Sunday, from the Valley of the Dog (or Wolf), we rise along the spines of the hills, fold on bare and unbeautiful fold, until the hasty squares of houses that have destroyed the beauty they set out to exploit* are sensibly covered with several feet of glorious white, and our breath plumes in the air. In Laqlouq, with disappointingly Early Learning Centre-esque snowshoes^§ in jaunty bright plastics strapped to our feet, the blinding light and flawless whiteness beckon us irresistibly into the hills.

And this is the way to be, surely, when trudging along the edges of frozen lakes and up the ridges and along the sides of things, all swoops and arches and rearing crests, gives way to the view back along the great sweeping bowl of the valley and to the haughty peaks beyond. Nothing has tracked here today but things with fur and whiskers, that have left hysterical lines of single-minded paw prints behind them. Sometimes they trail across great blank expanses towards the cliffs, as if Lebanon had a visiting population of suicidal lemmings, here to experience death in the snows.

How to speak of these days but with big, clumsy, obvious words, that say nothing and yet everything, because this is the simplest and most dramatic landscape, the mountain stage cloaked and cleaned into a temporary parallel world. It is very big, and very white, and very bright, beneath a Disney bluebird sky.

Here and there, a talon of rusty metal or curve of black plastic pipe like the hump of an ice-age serpent hints at the landscape beneath, reminding us that these hills have a more practical everyday reality. After all, we are walking through commercial man-made orchards, and this is Lebanon – if you can’t build on it, put a crucifix on it, so that not a single inch of this land shall be left untouched by the absurdity of men.

The trudging changes its tune as the trail we create on the sparkling surface turns downhill, and we shuffle and slide with a little more brio along the flank of the valley, edging along icy falling water and guarded by brittle ranks of icicles suspended from the stepped and crumbling slopes. If you fall behind the group for a while and still the squeaking of your shoes against the snow, you can find the silence that seems impossible anywhere else in Lebanon. Pause for a moment and let the wind carry you away a little, over a slumbering shoulder of the beast of the hill, to where nothing mutters or stirs but the beating of your own heart. This could be the frozen land of an oriental Snow Queen, vain and terrible. But as in all good stories, the hardy juniper trees show dark and strong even far away above, the wild roses are heavy with dark red hips and shy with nudging buds, and the black skeleton orchards of apple and pear sleep in tidy lines on the valley floor that promise fruitfulness and colour, come a different season.

The descent from Laqlouq is as it ever is from the worlds away that Lebanon stores for you, stores it does not do to forget. The air thickens with pollution, the lights grow more garish, concrete noses the snow away like a blind and ugly beast snouting through the hills. Tomorrow looms. Days afterwards, climbing another unbearable stretch of dust-fogged tarmac in Mansourieh, I glimpse pale cyclamens clustering together in teardrops of faintest lilac beneath a clawed-away hunk of cliff, banked about with empty water bottles and otherwise unidentifiable litter. For a moment, distant voices seem to chime through the ponderous white noise of the cars, singing of a lost world, innumerable lost years, and of a thousand lost mountainsides that are never cloaked with snow, that are never allowed to forget, even for a short season.

* Thubron again. (I am obsessed. He is particularly amusing on the topic of monks with beards.)

^§ They still call them raquettes, but I had been imagining something rather more rustic in wood and leather, so the disappointment was probably just as well.