Christmas

Something has to be done, when the weeks leading up to Christmas are rain-sodden, perturbed and creaky with tiredness, and when the office Secret Santa holds sway every day for two weeks and vast amounts of chocolate and kneffe sandwiches are consumed for breakfast every morning to stave off the boredom. Something has to be done, and we do our best. We go to the German Orient Institute and drink mulled wine in a graceful courtyard with a many-sided fountain next to the library, all golden light and inlaid wood and fraying cloth-bound volumes. We go to Franco-German Jazz at the American University of Beirut chapel, where a thin man in a poppy-printed shirt introduces a small fat one in a grey t-shirt whose glorious beatboxing has people jiggling in their pews by the organ, and to classical Koranic music sung in a Maronite church with Mamluk mouldings in Gemmayzeh. Here an old man in robes, his face lined like the pages of a book, spins chants that when you close your eyes to the kitsch and the chandeliers makes you think instead of tents in the desert and Mohammed at dawn, communing with his god in the quiet. We go to the Old Souk in Kaslik for the food and wine festival, and do our dégustation in honey-coloured halls, beneath multicoloured lamps, and on the terrace overlooking Jounieh bay, while a man who glories in the career title of pizza acrobat spins his dough in ever-widening circles and the crowd goes oooh. But we come home early, because tomorrow is Saturday and we must sleep before work, and our feet drag. Something has to be done.

And so, we do it. The Sunday before Christmas we haul ourselves up at the crack of dawn and head for the Bekaa valley. The way to Syria, the way to the Roman temples, the way to the fertile lands and vineyards, the way to mountains and mists and snow and the breath of the new.

So many stories pave the road to the Bekaa, and here we are taking a tour bus to the vineyards. But it is the season, and in the spirit of Lebanon, to forget the trails of blood and war and ideology and to go pleasure-seeking instead. In the early white-cloud hours we are scarves and hats and arms around each others’ shoulders – and when we look back north towards Mount Lebanon our hearts lift at last with winter and adventure, for it is vast and unearthly icing-sugar white, the first snow of the year.

Up bare and stony hills the bus climbs, past as much ugliness and emptiness borne of destruction and poverty as we have seen before. Past half-built apartment blocks with child-sized pink mosquito nets set up bravely and significantly next to nonexistent walls, past bridges still under construction after Israeli bombing in 2006, with signs next to them that read, with jaw-dropping insouciance, Bridge reconstruction project: From the American people, for Lebanon’s progress. Past mangy dogs scavenging at the roadside, and a seasonal rash of men dressed as Santa selling bags of pink candyfloss outside barely-identifiable grocery shacks.

Edging round mountain corners above lumps of rock and frozen streams, the valley creeps into view. The hillsides are just as bare, deforested, but dignified – not scattered with ugly buildings but merely with grudging grey stones and occasional dark fuzzes of hard-bitten trees. The line of sky beneath the clouds and above the mountains is yellow and grey; the vast flat floor of the valley is rumpled at the edges by great ribs of rock and earth, driving plow-shaped into the land. Beyond them the hills rise higher and higher, shrugging into themselves in the cold, lavender and steel blue and greenish grey, blanketed in the distance with early snows. Mist is pulled along the valley floor like a ghostly scarf, that settles only uncertainly and barely warms the bony limbs it drapes.

On the flat between the ribs, with its dark clumps of trees and grey fields and heartbreaking plastic tents cobbled together by Syrian migrants, we are soon full of Arab bread with labneh or kariche and honey. We reel from vineyard to vineyard – Ksara, Kefraya, Kouroum, Clos de St Thomas – and our heads are full of Roman passageways and shining steel stills and signs that read dégustation or fermentation in stencilled white letters on black boards, halls full of stopped-up barrels stained pink and smelling of honey and oak. Piles of corks, winter-stubby vines in neat lines between dark firs with the snow far away in the blue, the sky changing above the mountains every hour, and always, always the wine, honey or pepper or summer fruits or who really cares, when you are warm and tired and settling down to a late lunch at the last cave, sitting à l’Arabe on bright low seats with a few full bottles and piles of cheese and bread and sausage tasting of anis.

In eight hours, we have visited four vineyards. Our lungs are full of fresh Bekaa air and our mouths with sweet scents. Something had to be done, and we did it well. As we slumber back to Beyrouth, the skies over the hills welcome us in pink and grey, sunlit patterns of cloud and mist and the dark silhouettes of trees standing lonely by the roadside. Soon, it will be Christmas.

Christmas Eve, and the mildly inebriated day spent watching Tom & Jerry in the office in protest at the 3pm end time (because you have Saturday off) and the macabre office “party” with self-congratulatory management speeches, lorded over by the obese eight-year-old heir apparent to the company, is quickly and thankfully forgotten. For now, we will come from Zouk, from Hamra, from Sodeco, from Dahiye, to Bourj Hammoud for a night among the lamps and the spices and the sweetness in the dark.

Fatima and I walk from Dora, along my favourite streets. They are as obstreperous as ever in the lamplight, except that everyone is wearing Santa cowboy hats. We turn off the main road and walk through hazes of nargileh smoke, the steam from roasting chickens, the scent drifting from herbs hanging in armfuls above magical mounds of polished fruit and vegetables. A battered estate car stands idle, full from roof to window, from boot to front seat with enormous white pumpkins. The sweet shops spill out on to the road, cardboard boxes full of coated peanuts, walnuts, dried fruits, things in toffee, sweets in twists of paper and sweets in boxes, scoops shoved in at the ready for filling greedy paper bags.

Onno brings out the best in everyone. Hummus haar, we say, and zeitoun haar, and tabbouleh haar the Armenian way, because khalas with the mild Lebanese everyday. Red wine, we say, and we talk about Lebanon and Iraqi refugees and our dreams and mop up oil with Arab bread, until the others fall in the door. Cherry kebabs, we say, and batatas al toom. Sausages with cloves, soujouk in yoghurt, fattouch, chicken livers. Sparrows, I insist, not without trepidation. Ruba catches on – frogs, she says, and announces a CDBB party – Cute Dead Baby Birds. The tiny once-feathery corpses disappear, bones and skulls and all, juicy mouthfuls soaked in wine-rich sauce. The frogs have no power to unnerve beneath their herbs and juices, and the small creatures make a happy communion in our bellies.

Under a self-consciously cheese-like horizontal half moon, we find our way to red wine and almaza in Gemmayzeh. We are tired, still, but tomorrow will dawn bright and sunny and there will be nothing but pyjamas and lazy dozes and thoughtless yawns in front of The Snowman and Father Christmas and Brideshead Revisited. We laugh until our throats are sore in the smoky bar, and as we waver home in the dark, we know that we will sleep dreamlessly, and well.

Zico House

When do you first start to notice the domestic workers in Lebanon? In Zouk, you can’t escape the Syrian migrant labourers who squat by the roadside day in and day out, waiting seemingly without hope or foundation for a truck to pull up and offer them casual employment. They inspire sympathy and revulsion in equal measure as they loiter filthy and miserable in the dust, leering and hissing every time you walk past on your way to the Charcutier or the autostrade. But they are Arabs, and men, and their trials are of a different order, though certainly they are regarded with disdain by the Lebanese. Elsewhere, the streets of Lebanon are anyway overflowing with such a motley ethnic mix that at first the faces of Filipinos, of Ethiopians, of Sudanese, of Mozambicans, of Indians and Pakistanis and Nepalis do not stand out from the rest with any particular significance. Bourj Hammoud on a Sunday is a parrot-bright conglomeration of colourful outfits and different trilling accents, everyone laughing and talking and going to church and eating along boisterous roads hung about with cheap goods and strings of sausages. Passing through on one’s way into Beyrouth, one might casually believe in some harmonious coexistence of communities within Lebanon’s fractured whole. But soon enough the everyday seeps in, insidiously. Perhaps you first notice it when you see those pantomimic maid's uniforms you saw on sale in the supermarket and thought were hilarious being worn by Indian ladies fielding troupes of Lebanese children, or when you see families out to extravagant lunches sitting with an African girl to one side of their table, without a menu, or when you suddenly catch yourself assuming that a Lebanese man and a Filipino woman together must be involved in some distressing transaction. Perhaps it is when Ellie, the ray-of-sunshine Filipino lady who cleans our offices and apartments with backbreaking enthusiasm, talks about her son. She has not seen him since she came to Lebanon thirteen years ago, during which time she has not had a single day off. Perhaps, it is when you are forced to conclude that Ellie is one of the luckier ones.

Because of course, things do not stop merely at outward expressions of a social attitude, one where a permanent shadow in one's wake of a downtrodden scullion is a sign of wealth to be admired as opposed to one of reactionary unpleasantness, and where the daily experience of an African or Asian* in Lebanon is one where people look askance, leer, throw verbal abuse, or ban certain races from their businesses (especially swimming pools) unless they are there as employees. Instead, dehumanization of others and of what are perceived to be lowly professions has led to a situation of such widespread human rights abuse that governments around the world are forbidding their citizens to leave for work in Lebanon. But, seduced by false promises of well-paid work in tourism, they come anyway by back routes and, lost to their embassies, join the ranks of workers whose passports are confiscated as standard practice, who are denied time off or phone calls home or their pathetic wages, who try and flee their abusive employers but are returned to the same family, who are beaten and raped and killed and driven to suicide. They become trapped in a country where the system is a legal, political and moral loophole that allows all this to carry on barely challenged and which – whether or not the vast majority of citizens treat their domestic workers with a decent amount of consideration, and whether or not there are a few glowing examples to the contrary – sustains a culture where a death or suicide – often it is not clear which – among the domestic working class a week is a cause for, at most, a shrug of the shoulders and an offhand haram.^**

Perhaps it is the clarity of outrage that belongs to a foreigner who is equally blind at home, but the sickly daily reality of racism and snobbery appalls. So when some exemplary ex-pats organised a gathering at artists' commune-cum-cafeteria Zico House to discuss what is what, it only made sense to go along. A big battered house in a prime location in Beyrouth, this place drags me back in seconds to the SOAS bar – in fact at least one person is there from my year. There is the same smoke-thick air and stained furniture and bad murals and insistent feeling that you are not and never will be cool or interesting enough to fit in here, coupled with a sneaking suspicion that dreadlocks and weed are not an automatic passport to visionary sociopolitical insights. The music is world, the food from the countries of the domestic workers, but apart from the speakers and perhaps one and a half full-time Lebanese, the entire audience of eighty or so is ex-pats or overseas-educated Lebanese who have come back to recoil in horror at some of the customs of their homeland.

Still, through smoke and local beer, voices have a chance to speak and to be heard. A Nepali voluntary support worker explains that for countries without their own embassies (Nepal, Bangladesh, Madagascar), honorary consulate positions are filled by indifferent Lebanese, leaving those who do manage to navigate their way to official help thwarted yet again. An Ethiopian deacon talks about the suicides of four of her countrywomen in October. They came indirectly and illegally to Lebanon through Yemen, Qatar, Syria, and their deaths went uninvestigated – the Lebanese state takes no responsibility. She can barely speak of a woman whose skull was broken by her employers when she damaged their TV. A Sri Lankan prison visitor tells of those who are kept jailed long after the one-month standard sentence for visa violation, and who have no legal or financial recourse, no family or connections that can help. Her English is hard to follow but she passionately repeats one phrase – insisting that everyone has a right to the personal life of a human being. This is what gets to her most, and it is the core of the problem; how to change legislation on behalf of people who some Lebanese consider less than human, and when the country’s labour laws exclude workers in the home – 90% of which are foreign. Children’s books exist for Lebanon that attempt to de-alienate other cultures, but the school system cannot even agree on the history of its own country for long enough to produce an up-to-date history textbook, let alone implement radical social awareness programmes, even if they wanted to. As such, the next generation are growing up according to the example of their parents, treating others as they have learned to treat their own nannies and servants ­– as those without the right to the personal life of a human being.

***

Beyond the far more important calls to action, and problems like lack of funds and manpower for a centralized legal and social effort on behalf of the domestic workers, what I take away from Zico House is another piece slotted into place in a more general feeling of growing dismay. It is the end of the year, no doubt, and times are grey and dispiriting and exhausted. But I have been trained, like most of the other nice social science minds at the meeting, to look everywhere for expressions of control. And perhaps for the first time I am consciously feeling what it is like for other people to consider you powerless, and seeing daily and overtly how people with power choose to express it. For many, it is in their curt words to their servants as they load up shopping bags into range rovers. For me, it is in the way that LDL keeps everyone on tenterhooks until the eleventh hour waiting to hear whether public holidays will in fact be granted to the company staff, and every day, several times a day, in the way that men believe that because I have the temerity to walk around Lebanon without a male escort they have the right to drive alongside me with their windows rolled down and fix me with lecherous stares. These are inconsequential things, of course, in the context of the problems faced by the domestic workers, and even more so in the context of other political and social problems faced by Lebanon, but I am starting to see it all as part of a whole – if you have status and power in Lebanon, then everyone else must be made to dance grotesquely to your tune.

***

Feeling like this, the temptation is to stay home until the blues pass. It is seductive, safe in the strong ship, whose wide windows are nightly now smudged and sloshed with bucketfuls of dubious rainwater and whose industrial panorama is dramatised by sheet lighting as a matter of course. Here there are glorious hours alone, music and warmth and the smoke rising from mosquito coils smelling of summer houses in the woods, and there is me alone in the light, reading or writing or grappling fairly unsuccessfully with Arabic. Outside the air is an unidentifiable winter industrial soup of food manufacturing smells, there are no drains or pavements, and at least three kerb-crawlers are guaranteed between here and the nearest bus stop or source of cornflakes.

But the mood will pass, and people will continue to meet and talk about what is what, and I will go too, and for now this is what matters – that people care enough to start something, and that there are people who feel the same way, and that on the same night as the Zico House meeting there are concerts and dinners and adventures to be had, and that there are always Lebanese to meet that remind you of the good in people. The New Year will bring fresh eyes and fresh heart, and many more months of exploring, and of education.

***

*There are exceptions to this rule. Arum and her Korean friends find that when obviously well-turned-out they are taken for Japanese, which apparently exempts them from the general attitude. The rest of the time people address her as Filipina and she has far too good an idea of what it is like to live on this dark side Lebanon’s attitude to race. There are no such distinctions for Africans – a well-off or nicely-dressed Ethiopian or Sudanese will invite only speculation about how they have illegally come by their good fortune.

**A multipurpose term originating from a word meaning “forbidden by the Koran” – in Lebanon it means, rather, “poor you”, or “shame”.

Watching films in Beyrouth

It’s a thin month, December, with the bike chained up round the back and the belt tightened right in close. It's cold, at last, and the country is no match for the increasingly frequent and astonishingly heavy rains, having apparently constructed its roads with a mind above drains. Within minutes of the start of each storm, the streets are two inches deep in furious torrents and the news full of houses swept away in the Bekaa. Thin, also, on tolerance – even as Zouk blushes fluorescent under the seasonal frosting of tinsel and fairy lights, the markers of prejudice casually thrown about the place become suffocating rather than interesting, and the Lebanese Forces tea towels on sale in the supermarket far less funny. I feel prompted by some unhelpful demon to suggest that the office Christmas charity collection be sent to Palestinian families in the refugee camps of Sabra and Chatila, unleashing a sickening, hysterical torrent of bigotry*. I know that they have their reasons, but retain an unconscionable tendency to try and remember the reasons of others as well.

It's a thin month, with the bike chained up and no money for a licence, but speaking of tracks further afield, soon, where green grows and the air is clear and the landscapes of religion and history become more manageable with distance.

There is time, then, with poverty and disaffection, for the things that should have come earlier. Evenings trundling up and down the pool of the local hotel, evenings reading, evenings scribbling illegible ramblings on multicoloured papers that metamorphose, caterpillar-like, into a satisfying butterfly flourish of envelopes with red-and-blue airmail wings. Does my letter-writing style speak somehow of my character – incoherent, mercurial, unreadable, lost in the post? Evenings ditching dear Jeanne d'Arc for the less splendiferously named but far more effective (and dangerously delightful) Michel, who takes you through Beyrouth on the back of his bike and up and up marble stairs to a lean-to bedsit in a roof garden in Achrafieh. Basil plants grow round and about, palms arch below, a rug is spread out for smoking narghile on and elegant windows in the air beside are golden-lit from within. He teaches me Arabic in French and by the end of the evening I feel properly Lebanese, my head a fractured mess of three different languages, incapable of expressing myself properly in any of them.

It's time, too, to seek out the spaces that are warm with the colours of art and of curiosity. For even if in Zouk narrow-minded attitudes are immovable and creativity limited to an eight-foot dancing Santa in the supermarket, elsewhere people are talking and thinking and writing and taking photos and campaigning and making films about it all. Happily for one always disposed to watching obscure and miserable accounts of man's inhumanity to man, Beyrouth's artistic scene and violent past has attracted enough similar souls to sustain a fantastical parade of art house films from the miserable to the magical and everything in between.

So, to the Metropolitan Sofil, where the festivals are held – European or Documentary or Animated – for LL3,000** a throw. Here, the farmer in the One Man Village documentary talks lovingly to his cows and refuses to speak about family deaths in the war. He has a photograph of his parents on the wall of his house – “but they were never actually photographed together. This was a picture of my father with his cow, and we took a picture of my mother and placed her where the cow used to be. But it is still good, no?”. Here, Fly by Rosinante is a truly mad but largely hilarious film about a travelling Romanian opera troupe and Zelary is beautiful Czechoslovakian hills and the vileness of men and the impossibility of war and time. Here the arrogant, insensitive American pontifications of Car Bomb make me even more susceptible to the sensibilities of Sa'at Sa'at and Mother, Lebanon and Me, two beautiful films about war and sadness and old age and diseased minds and history that send me back to Zouk fuzzy with ideas and with melancholy. To the Empire Sodeco, whose names in lights and red velvet armchairs would grace any screen in 1950s Hollywood, were Julie & Julia is colour and fun and food and the breath of Paris and of home, and the dark eyes of the heroine in Melodrama Habibi glow with all the intelligent bemusement of a thirty-five-year-old single woman in Lebanon, while her boss's chauffeur's embonpoint steals every scene it appears in. To the ArtLounge, in a dark warehouse full of pink lamps off La Rue d'Armenie, where on Sunday nights people come to drink beer, curled into a collection of podlike armchairs or squatting on leather pouffes, and to watch free cycles of cinema from Persia, from Hong Kong, from Bollywood. Here Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham cuts from a Mumbai palace to the hero and heroine inexplicably writhing in see-through clothes in front of the Pyramids, and the people in their armchairs fall about in exultation.

Even to City Mall, to ABC and the rest, where you can disappear among neutral decorations and designer shops for a popcorn-fuelled ninety minutes of Johnny Depp and his ilk shooting each other glamorously and forget that you are in Lebanon. To all of these, to sit in the dark and see the people around laughing and nodding as you do, and to emerge into the night feeling restored by trips to different worlds.

And afterwards, in the quiet dark, walking between buildings grubbily beautiful or buildings with the beauty bombed out of them, even the clicks and hisses that seem to come constantly from arrogantly loitering men grate less, and the fuck-off finger you direct at the ever-present kerb-crawlers lacks the proper outrage. It seems, then, that there are always worlds outside Zouk, and outside Lebanon, and that those worlds are good.

But in the dislocation between the celluloid and the everyday, I realise for the first time that I miss the company of the very few people in this world who I like without reservation. And for no particular reason I remember, yet again and by no means less so for being in Lebanon, how far and insurmountable the distance is between who you want to be, and who you are.

* The vast majority of people in this area are more or less evangelical supporters of the Lebanese Forces, a phalangist Christian militia (reinvented as a political party after the war) responsible for the massacre and rape of somewhere between 300 and 3,500 Palestinian men, women and children in Sabra and Chatila after the agreed evacuation of PLO forces from Lebanon in 1982 – an incoherent but deadly revenge for the assassination of president-elect Bashir Gemayel.

** About £1.50

Independence Day

And sometimes, there is no time to turn to a distant citadel. With a phone call here and there and a little time, impatiently waited out, it suddenly seems as if Lebanon is on your side. Then, you hear the impossible words the Editor loved your article and you have more commissions and are organising phone interviews while hiding in the bogs during overtime at work. Then, on the way to Arabic class, you spy a very second-hand Kawasaki Estrella 250 outside a mechanic’s shop in Dora. It speaks of a few more months’ poverty and possible unpleasant death, but also of freedom and madness and the open road.

And so it happens that on the Saturday of Independence Day weekend you are being driven into Beyrouth by Bernard from the design department, whose tattoos and swagger suggest that he is a man with whom a motorcycle salesman will not trifle. The roads are lined with flags, fluttering from lampposts and from bridges and from bunting strung across alleyways. They declare in cloth and ink the strength of the nation after independence from France in 1943, declare the worth of the country’s leaders and the value of all those dead men. Such a strong clean flag, Lebanon’s – red for the blood spilled in war, white for peace and for the snow-capped mountains that gave the country its name, and the dark green of the strong, faithful cedar tree. But it would not be Lebanon if the story ended there, and if the declarations were not dissipated by cynicism and venality. Behind and below and beside those flags are posters and graffiti-ed logos of the real Lebanon, the Lebanon that everyone knows only too well. It is a fractured state, squabbled over by political parties defined by their religious confession, known by their acts of violence and greed and by the names of their leaders, who dominate the stories of war since before the time of occupation – Chamoun, Aoun, Franjieh, Jumblatt, Gea’gea. Hariri II, now heading the supposed governing coalition, is a brand new dynasty in comparison, but shows no sign of combating the old ways. Indeed, he has overseen the latest resurgence of influence from Syria, whose military and mukhabarat spy networks were largely driven out during 2005's independence intifada, inspired by the murder of Hariri I. The flag flies for an idea that is empty, and that no one pretends to believe.

Through fluttering flags, then, drives Bernard. “You are not afraid to ride the motorbike?” he asks. Obviously not. “How about guns?” He pulls his out of the glove compartment and I produce the required high-pitched reaction. No one cares about Independence Day, he assures me, except for the day off from work that comes with it. “How long will you stay in Lebanon?” he asks. “When will you leave – before the war, or after the war?” He is certain that spring 2010 will bring Israeli bombs. I wouldn’t know what to think, except that I have read the same thing in the press, based on reports from the French. The flags around us dance in mockery – there is not a patch of Hezbollah yellow to be seen in this part of Lebanon, but they are the real power and peril, whatever you think of their politics. As Iran ferments, all eyes are on the regime’s proxies in Lebanon, more powerful than the Lebanese state as they are. The suspicion is that Israel will not much longer stand for the militia’s presence against empty Lebanese government talk of making them comply with the 2005 UN resolution ordering them to disarm.

Is this talk the frenetic ticking of a jammed clock, or the sinister progress of a countdown? Stuck in traffic in Dora, deafening horns and men driving bikes hung about with handbag-shaped kaak sesame bread or pushing carts between the cars loaded with bright goldfish swimming in their glass globes, people living their lives, war seems impossible – but Lebanon has already known it, known it well, and is philosophical about knowing it again.

***

Bike deposit paid, independence-themed party partied, two girls meet up in Downtown on Sunday to observe the military parade sardonically through their red wine hangovers. 11am in Martyr’s Square, they were told – but the streets are dead and blocked by soldiers, who make you turn back without bothering to explain what is going on or how you might otherwise reach your destination. Soviet-era tanks and trucks roar off in the opposite direction, and after five different conspiratorial brush-offs a soldier deigns to explain – though not without later contradictory evidence – that the parade ran from 6am to 10.30 in another part of town. Whatever Independence Day is meant for, it is not for the people to celebrate, nor for anyone to believe in the happy unity of the nation or in its military power, which is far outstripped by that of privately-funded militias.

And so it happens, that Independence Sunday in Beyrouth, that two girls with Lebanon in their hearts and minds find that Dunkin Donuts is the only coffee house open. So they take it with cream and sugar and glazed pastries, and they sit outside in the late November sun in the middle of the Orientalist-fronted business project that is Downtown, and they laugh it off and they talk about boys. Somehow, it seems appropriate.

***

Later that week, yet another service driver unintentionally underscores the depressing outlook. “You like Lebanon?” he asks. Yes, there is a lot of variety – Trablous, Beyrouth, Sour ... “Tchah! Trablous, no good. Beyrouth, no good. Jounieh, Kaslik, anywhere Christians live, good. Trablous, West Beyrouth – fuck them.”

It is horrible, and I am pathetic. “You are Christian?” he asks, and I barely bother to review my options before lying yes. Who am I to judge his – Lebanon's – entrenched bigotry, when I cannot even stand up for secularism against Claude the taxi driver? And Claude at least has decades of war on his side. In parliament today, there is empty talk of combating political sectarianism. While the Claudes of this world still breathe and vote and fight with all their belligerent simplicity, the old ways will persist, one way or another.

Onno

Bourj Hammoud is where the Armenian community clusters, skilfull hands and dark smiles and knowing eyes. In 1915, the Turks killed and raped and drove them out of their homeland and across Europe, where hundreds of thousands died as they walked, their bodies left to rot by the roadside. Their past unacknowledged still today in Turkey, they cannot forgive and forget why they came to the Lebanon that is now their home. The shops are cheap but mostly found by luck and insider knowledge, and people’s Arabic is often broken. Domestic workers from the Philippines, from India, from Ethiopia migrate here on their rare days off for the cheap goods and maybe the solidarity of exile, and on a good day the air smells of basterma and soujouk* and cinnamon and fresh bread baking. Like so much of Beyrouth, the beauty is thickly veiled behind the dirt-grey buildings battered by bullets and by years, with their shawls of tattered, air-stained striped balcony curtains and sprawling guts of shop fronts – bright plastic, fake labels, tinfoil and gas lamps, posters protesting the Armenian president’s recent accord with Turkey and suspicious-looking hole-in-the-wall sandwich shops.

Onno is a tiny restaurant to one side of a vile underpass beneath one of Beyrouth’s favourite gargantuan flyovers. James’s sense of direction fails us and we walk in misdirected circles for nearly an hour before a youth on a moped, scorpion tattooed on his neck, takes pity and buzzes on ahead to show us the way. The proprietors seem none too pleased to see us and our guide turns out to be a well-known local troublemaker. Still smarting from our reception, we shuffle upstairs to a beige room hung with framed black and white postcards of Old Beyrouth, where a table of fat men with extravagant moustaches heaves with glorious outbursts of gurgling smoke-thick laughter.

The red wine is good and comes with small plates of chopped olives with heavy oil and walnuts, fine Arabic flatbread warm with cinnamon, something wonderful based on tomatoes, and stuffed vine leaves that drip olive oil down your arm. Then there is chopped fried liver that changes my mind about eating organs and hummus hamra, the chickpeas red with heavy spices that colour the whole world new. The fattouch salad is dressed with mythical pomegranate molasses that leaves you drenched in taste as if it would be a sin to eat anything after it. But the main event is still to come – soujouk pinched into pastry, chopped and fried and folded into a warm bowl of spiced yoghurt, and lamb cooked with cashew nuts in a thick, sweet, dark sauce of cherries. Soon Ian is telling filthy stories and our laughter is as well-fed and full of joie de vivre as our neighbours’.

We walk back to Dora past Armenian shops called Gargossian Uniforms and Missed Call, the borough vastly improved for being quiet and lamp-lit in the dark. The way is clear, the night is warm, the cherries are still sweet on our tongues.



* Types of heavenly, heavily spiced Armenian sausage.

The Citadel

Ten years ago, in a pastel-painted classroom behind heavy dark doors, half-interested sixteen-year-olds read verses aloud from creased Wordsworth Classics and waited for the lunch bell. They are there still, no doubt, in some form or other, though with different bands and shoe brands. It is surreal and slightly exasperating, perhaps, when that awkward A-level classroom and a fragment of something acquired in it surfaces again a decade later and a world away; has nothing more significant come to light in the years in between? But it is not literature's fault that I have not devoted more time to its wisdom since Dr Cornford's efforts to enthuse his lounging charges with the morbid delights of Thomas Hardy. No matter – the lines learned among strip lighting and plastic tables come back again, to a girl now wheeling a grey mare in circles between the sun and the clouds high above Beyrouth.

Down there they are dubious and askance; there nobody thinks as I
But mind-chains do not clank when one's next neighbour is the sky.

A new escape, up a mountain to Ain Saadé, as another week of coastal introversions draws to its thankful close. Down there overtime stretches out long when there aren't Arabic classes, books apparently written by illiterates weigh heavily on one's enthusiasm and self-respect, and most of the conversations in the office focus around the release of a new make-up catalogue. The circle of faces and places closes up easily, and apathy stalks the days. Even up here in the blue and the white, the instructor spends most of the hour on his mobile and I feel as inclined as ever to spend quality time with animals rather than people. But the wind is fresh with purpose and with play, clouting me about the ears and spurring the ringside trees to wave their branches towards the city spread out below, taking joy in the late-afternoon light that conjures up sparkles in the sea and sweetens Beyrouth in the distance into a cleanly pink-lit landscape of peaceful buildings.

I know only too well, though, that the streets so far below are cacophonous and either fetid or kept unnaturally clean by underpaid migrant workers. The old suqs were obliterated in the civil war, occupied by Hezbollah in 2007, and have now been reincarnated by assassinated former president Rafiq Hariri’s company Solidere as glistening international shopping malls. The day after the red carpet opening for the first branch of H&M in Lebanon I walked through the plate glass and slate-grey stone and felt enormous emptiness – absurd polished hummers thrummed by and disgorged six-inch-heeled, surgery-enhanced Beirutis who tottered down the red carpet that still lay in place, cavernous handbags poised to absorb more Prada and YSL. They were followed by a second wave of overall-wearing Pakistanis with brooms and dustpans, shuffling desperately to keep the temporary rug looking like new.

From these streets there eventually arose or was negotiated a new government of sorts, five months and innumerable concessions after the elections. Chez LDL, people who had never once expressed a political thought or shown any interest in their non-existent government since I arrived in July printed off the cabinet list and highlighted the Christians, simultaneously complaining that there weren't enough of them and making disparaging remarks about politicians in general. These are the fruits of 2005's independence intifada, of the promise of a new Lebanon; re-entrenched sectarianism and cynicism, the insidious influence of Syria and the rest, Hezbollah no closer to disarming. Political status quo and economic privatization combined with individual enrichment – they are not the only stories, but they are the ones that are everywhere talked about, and that are only too easy to see.

Back in Zouk and trying to gear up for clubbing, the escape doesn't seem like enough. From the mountain even Zouk looked beautiful at last, splayed out along the line of the coast. But each week you need to go further and higher to get a sense of something new, of something achieved, to believe that you came to Lebanon for reasons other than to work away your life by the light of your Macintosh.

***

So the next day, Arum and I sit in the late November sunshine on the Citadel above Trablous; the slanting gold of late afternoon at lunchtime, looking down on a very different city. Down there the suq is frenetic and mysterious and variegated and parrot-loud, the streets are about people and their every days, and Lebanon seems like a friend again. As we talk and look on, flaunting teams of brown and white pigeons swoop and dive to let the sunlight glance blindingly off their breasts as they turn together in inexplicable joy. Gunfire crackles between two high-rise apartment blocks – we can see the sparks of the bullets flying – and no one even turns their heads. Just last year the Lebanese army came out in force here to subdue an uprising in the Palestinian camp of Nahr al-Bared, just a few miles away. Parts of it razed to the ground, the Lebanese government are now refusing to re-build the refugees' temporary homes due to the discovery of Roman remains, which elsewhere in Lebanon are let to rot under rubbish or built over by entrepreneurs.

Mountain or Citadel, a pace removed from below lets you breathe deep and try to order things to your satisfaction. But down there, there is no such discipline to be found, and joy must be unearthed where you can.

***

And, as these things must be, the eventual re-reading of the poem shows how much you have forgotten, and how much you have learned. No simple call to an airy escape, but a heart as full of loss and diffident complexity as one could wish or recognise.

Down there I seem to be false to myself, my simple self that was,
And is not now, and I see him watching, wondering what crass cause
Can have merged him into such a strange continuator as this,
Who yet has something in common with himself, my chrysalis.

I cannot go to the great grey Plain; there's a figure against the moon,
Nobody sees it but I, and it makes my breast beat out of tune;
I cannot go to the tall-spired town, being barred by the forms now passed
For everybody but me, in whose long vision they stand there fast.

Bibliopolis

And suddenly, in Beyrouth, there was a moment of quiet. Not everywhere, for even after the apocalypse has levelled the earth to a pounded expanse of nothingness there will emerge from the dust over what was once Lebanon a horn-honking taxi driver, shedding a cockroach or two in his wake and arguing with the afterlife about where exactly it wants to be dropped off. But in a room in a house behind the Eglise St. Nicholas, down unexpected leafy lamp-lit alleyways, there was quiet. No matter that it took a traffic-jammed bus journey complete with inescapable expatriate Lebanese businessman expounding the benefits of a Kuwaiti lifestyle, a thieving service driver,* a misdirection in perfect English from a Filipino maid and a lift in a range rover from glamorous Good Samaritan Lebanese-Canadian students to get there. There was quiet – not the white-skies quiet of the mountains or the desolate peace of fear and curfew, but one thick with years and words. Not words shouted or even whispered, but words that are spun by prophets, by romantics, by philosophers into inky threads, their capricious weft and warp eventually coming to rest and encircling years upon centuries, becoming treasured, so that the spider-silk peaks and troughs of their dark tracks are rich with histories that have the scent, as we know, of leather and cloth and spiced paper, of dust motes and bay windows, of old men with spectacles and of the ages of learning.

Yielding to badgering, the good people at Time Out Beirut had risked sending me on a mission for their Literary Culture column – one possibly backward step for mankind, one small treasured pace for me. Inauspiciously, I was twenty minutes late in falling through the door of Bibliopolis, still seething in the service aftermath, but all was immediately well.

For in the quiet lives its caretaker, glowing with the strength of his refuge, as delightful and interesting as the gilded contents of his antique glass-fronted cabinets. Everything here – books, Ottoman saddles, plaster busts, Hindu screens, a charming yet mysterious display of old shoes moulded onto their wooden trees – seems to have sighed contentedly into its proper place, and so has he. The joy of Paris is his youth, like so many Lebanese who can afford to disdain their motherland (and its wars) for their education. Browsing the Seine-side stalls, he found then that Madame Bovary could be had leather-bound and two hundred years old for only five francs more than the latest paperback. Weekends, he worked as a driver for a French businessman with “a small castle” and disdained the family gatherings around the TV for the library. “You might like to read the magazines” said his generous if uncomprehending boss, and away into the stacks he went. An international business career and an early retirement later, he took Madame Bovary and the rest and started to collect.

The years in between and the journey back from Paris to Beyrouth passed well, and his ground-floor castle in Achrafieh is a place of treasures. He trades, yes, and restores and advises and values and dates, but most of all he talks, and brings alive with love. Here! A bustle, and a ferret. Out comes a thirteenth-century book of psalms , clasped in brass. Here! A sixteenth-century Qu’ran with liquid gold illumination, the work and script of three different calligraphers explained. Here! A solid tome with a suspicious-looking cotton-bound appendage. A bookmark with relic attached! I don’t open it!

We get on well. A magnifying glass is brought out, to show the details of hand-worked letters that barely catch the naked eye – their creators used to go blind in ten years. Then there are more rooms, more treasures; a third-Reich-stamped letter signed by Hitler is brought out for me to hold. A carpet rolled up by our feet is revealed as a thirty-pound hanging of gold and silver threads from the Prophet’s tomb in Medina. He shows me his research; the discovery of the French general who originally translated The Perfumed Garden, to be finally credited next year. A workshop, where he restores – and reads – manuscripts in English, French, Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, Russian and Chinese. In a cabinet, a silver-framed photo of him riding in a distinguished Parisian dressage competition – further cupboards are filled with saddles and martingales, and his “serial killer” bathroom – I didn’t quite catch why so named – is lined with long leather boots to make a pony girl weep.

“You seem to have lived the lives of about five different people,” I say. “Perhaps it is Voltaire” he replies, pointing to a particularly ugly plaster bust. “He comes and visits me here sometimes, perhaps he gives me the spirit.” I felt he had earned his whimsy.

Almost at the door, I ask about the shoe tree and its well-buffed population. “My life in shoes! Here,” – a pair of leather sandals – “I was a revolutionary Trotskyite in Paris. Here,” – two-tone lace ups – “The Pimp years! Here,” – gentlemanly brogues – “the bourgeoisie period – they are not friends with the sandals! Here,” – high-class slippers – “the academic”. And the petite, elegant leather boots standing to one side? “My wife – she does not stand with the others, because she has never understood a single thing!”

My dusty blue hi-tops felt embarrassed by their battered global-brand universal practicality, and owner’s comparative poverty of wealth and education. I left him there in the quiet, with the years, with Voltaire, and went to look for a minibus with a sense of honour.

***

I was glad he could not see me on Saturday, still wearing those hi-tops but with ancient ripped jodhpurs, muscles completely incapacitated after half an hour of trying to persuade a competition dressage-standard mare to change legs at the canter with her head and back in the correct arch required by my patient instructor. “We have an Olympic black stallion” she mused. “I am sure his owner would not mind you riding him”. My teenage self salivated; my office job self winced. It seems they do not do things by halves in Lebanese stables – we shall see whether I can keep up. But minor walking disability in the following days would anyway have been welcomed just for the journey to the “Country Farm” itself. From the rond-point at Jeita, a small part of the way up the mountain to Chabrouh, you walk left and feel again, with now-recognisable relief, the familiar hair-raising roads fall away and new hillsides and villages open up, not so far from Zouk, that smell of things other than pollution and contain things other than tower blocks. Here, as the road stretches on in the November twenty-seven degree heat and I hope I am not lost, aubergine plants with heavy black or yellow-striped globes under their leaves start to hang over the roadside from small plots of land, olive trees give silvery nods and round a corner spring-green umbrella pines lift up and down and across the valley all the way to Harissa in the distant blue. Stumbling downwards down a steep track, there are tepees of climbing bean plants, clusters of droopy-capped mushrooms apparently left over from Hallowe’en, and a black-clad old nun who was not so much walking as rolling from side to side, appearing to be busily picking her teeth with a plastic pointer.

Bandy-legged on my return journey, I was wondering whether to be despairing at the prospect of climbing the hill or fortified by the challenge. A car leaving the stables took the decision out of my hands; jaw-droppingly slender and beautiful Gaia and her father, whose reckless child-naming must have pleased the goddess, resting somewhere in fickle retirement – she chose to invest all the elegance of the earth in her sixteen-year-old Lebanese namesake.

***

Sunday in a Music Hall somewhere in Downtown, the seats are garden plastic under their faux-vintage red covers. Although we are underneath yet another brand new glass and metal Solidere business tower, the stage is ringed with vast black roses set amid twinkling golden fairy lights. What fits is that the local beer is ten times the usual price. The bar is groaning with outrageously beautiful Lebanese women and their forgettable-in-comparison male companions, all speaking French and gesticulating with the calculated panache designed to out-Paris the Parisians. There is one African woman I can see, clutching a Malian flag to her turquoise vitenge, though it is one of her countrywomen we have come to see – Rokia Traoré. The clientele is not so surprising, perhaps, given the average Middle Eastern taste for comically-airbrushed Arabic pop or staple fusha Arabic singers. Rokia’s popularity in France attracts the Francophilia of the Lebanese bourgeoisie, and her delicate fusion of Malian music with traditions which, like herself, were raised outside of her home country, is a diasporic sophistication that they can understand. But although no one mentions it (least of all Rokia), the vast majority of Lebanese encounter Africans only as downtrodden, racially and physically abused domestic servants, who are often banned from upmarket facilities or subject to open harassment unless they are with their employing family. Ethiopia has joined the Phillipines this year in banning its citizens from emigrating to Lebanon in the wake of a rash of suicides.

But Rokia puts all such thoughts to one side. She looks like a twelve-year-old boy, dressed in white with an asymmetrical tuft of afro. In the flesh her singing is huskier, deeper, more varied than what the studio records. She sings almost to herself, then channels Billie Holiday, then disco, then dances the way only Africans know how. She is lit by a kaleidoscope of coloured lights – as I doze in the taxi on the way home, they continue to glow in my head and she sings on, whispering, into the quiet.

***

*My experience and Arabic are now at the irritating point where I can recognise a swindle, demand explanation, then correctly and politely explain that I have not understood a word of the response. I am still British enough to confine myself to conceding the extra money with a bad-tempered flounce, rather than taking the advice of Lebanese friends to simply hand over the correct amount and run off.

Hallowe'en

The seasons turned, it seemed, two weeks ago, on an evening in Jbeil. Autumn does not come elegantly, here on the noisy dirty coast. The clapped-out minibus that took me to Jbeil was as much of a boneshaking sun-magnet as ever, to which I tripped down the hill from the office over the multiple spaghetti junction lanes and three different fascinating archaeological strata of filth and rubbish. There are no trees that like to drop their leaves in golden resignation at the coming cold; the scrubby grasses and bougainvillea stained black by the passing cars look much the same, and a t-shirt is as much as you need to wear, long in to the evening. You spot your drop-off point and waver to the front of the bus – “bade hōn” and point – and with more or less grace are deposited at the side of the motorway. Down breezeblock steps no town planner designed, under the bridge with its extravagant graffiti, dodge a few cars and waver down the edge of the town. In these roads there is quiet, there is scented air, there are families gathering on their patios under scraggly vines, and you suddenly notice that the sky is fresh in its palest evening golden pink. The heartless towers of apartment blocks fracture gently apart as you move downhill, into square houses of golden stone. One of them has a vivid blue mosque's dome to one side of its courtyard, toylike in size. Beneath it women, veiled or not, sit among fuchsia flowers and talk, while small doves smudged with rainbow colours stoop and drink from puddles, and fat bats chirp and cluck overhead on airy fairground pathways. On the way to the sea you walk alongside a banana grove, the joyful scent of dark earth and growing green rising from the giants’ bouquets of leaves, heavy-veined with the sun behind them, big enough to cover you from head to toe in a shroud both jungle-strong and velvet soft.

But the season has turned, because from the bitter sand of the beach you can see that the sun has already fled the darkening pink sky; it is a still turquoise twilight, now, the rocks in the bay suddenly dark beneath the field of ruins, uncaring of what fickle generation of humanity casts its fishing lines into the sea from beside their brooding mass. Halfway into my swim and twenty minutes from the shore, I am swimming in the dark – seeming close, a club at the water’s edge sends tinny strains of techno music into the air. When I make the beach, nervous-limbed, everything looks different and the season has done. Rats or cats rummage in the litter bins, silent men loiter past the fishing hour, and the buses seem to have changed their patterns – an impossible Arabic conversation in the dark is needed to set me straight and on the way home.

A new escape, then, is needed in the evenings, that I do not become moulded forever into the shape of my office chair. But the Lebanese, so rich in their sea coast, do not seem to care for pools for the masses; indoor water is a site for exclusive sybaritic relaxation, not tedious calorie-burning lengths. And anyway, for now I have four hours of Arabic a week to ingest with my ten hours of proofreading a day, and an exhausting hour to travel in each direction twice a week for the privilege.* By Friday night, with the worst day at the office still to go, I am sick with the need to sleep long and deep – but how, with only one day in the week that is yours to live the rest of this country, that you turned yourself inside out to become a part of?

Saturday, then, two weeks after the seasons have turned, and Hallowe’en is the word on the ex-pat street; the Lebanese have chosen the fourth of December for their All Hallows, so the masked children clustering around fast food restaurants are likely pale under their face paint and vampire teeth and pirate eye-patches. Despite this, the stuff of Lebanon itself seems to be getting into the spirit of the foreigners; scrubbed up nice for a journalist’s fundraising club night, I bump my way into town on the inevitable minibus through mists of rain that herald the thunderstorms that have been threatening for days. By the time I arrive for collection for dinner at the AUB† main gate the downpour has begun – I shelter under the elegant Oriental arch built by wealthy Americans and look in vain for the happy well-fed cats that have colonized the campus. Arum finds me, peeking from under a wonky lilac umbrella like a garden elf with a damp anemone hat, and we run through fat armfuls of raindrops, skipping from side to side to avoid the grand and delicate snails that have materialised to make their stately progress along to the rhythm of the rain. They crane their globed antennae into the gloom with dignified curiosity, oozing happily in the generous new rivers running indiscriminately over flowerbeds, paths and stairways. Across Lebanon, children will be running after them with buckets – they will be boiled in their shells for two hours and sold with tahini as a roadside snack. The democratising storm waters turn the carefully landscaped gardens and golden-lit, smooth-edged building lines of the American University Experience in Lebanon into an unpleasant sodden mess, the same as the rest of the city.

Dinner is just as dinner should be; Sunni, Shia, Palestinian, Syrian, Iranian, Lebanese, Korean, American, British and Finnish eating four different cuisines off their knees, and without boys the headscarves are off, both literally and figuratively. The storm outside tenses, stretches and shatters in its strength, and the sky is lit like daylight by fantastical lightning bolts thrown about as if by a madman let loose with a tin of phosphorescent paint. In the face of this, and caught up in the comfortable University Professor's apartment, the Hallowe’en party plans are soaked out like so many candles in the rain. Instead, Arum tells the story of a flasher at her girl’s high school in Korea: in their first year, the girls screamed and ran away; in their second, they gave ladylike gasps while peeking over the tops of their books; in the final year, they pointed and laughed, saying “Your thing is so small!” The offender turned out to be the local lawyer.

Doree, who without her hijab is chic and sexy, remembers how she felt during the stolen Iranian elections when her family had to restrain her younger brother from going out to protest; Reem, brought up in France, explains the rights of Palestinians in Syria. Still struggling to understand the petty domestic politics of Lebanon, I return again to Robert Fisk: “When The Times closed down for 11 months in 1979, I spent weeks reporting the Iranian revolution for Canadian radio. How could one compare one of the great developments of twentieth-century politics with Lebanon’s little wars?” What happens here must matter, there cannot be a hierarchy of conflict. But still the room is silent when Doree speaks, and no-one bothers to mention the still-absent Lebanese government. If you ask a Lebanese about it, they shrug their shoulders and say “And if it is formed, will it change anything?”.

I try to explain to them how little I think about my Britishness. Later, I remember that of course my experience as the bearer of a certain flag is barely challenged, and not in any way that causes me anything other than mild irritation. A service driver once accosted me as soon as I got into his car; “You are American!” No, British. “It does not matter! American, British, they are all the same when you say Hamburger!” That's like saying that the Syrians and the Lebanese are exactly the same. Uproarious laughter. Another day, coming back from the hypermarché with wine for the evening’s guests in my bag, I shared the taxi with four or five young guys, high as kites on whisky. I showed them my bottles and they cheered raucously. They asked what I was doing in Lebanon; I told them about the Librarie. Still confused, a stream of Arabic between them resolved itself into one glorious realisation that made them all fall about laughing. “Find yourself!” No, I wanted to say, I came here to lose myself. Because it is only then that you can try to forget what you cannot find, or do not wish to.

All Hallowe'en night and for days afterwards, the picture windows and sliding glass doors on two sides of my apartment's front room frame the winter-liberated power of the mountains and the sea. Their currents of warm and cold, wet and dry mix in terrible alchemy and breed furious sky-beasts with foaming manes and pounding hooves, whose tracks where they stamped up and down the coast are clear in the sea in daylight – broad stripes in shades of violently heaving brown in place of the summer's placid turquoise. The idea of the heavens rending has always seemed hyperbolic, until now, when the boom and crack of the storms are of unearthly proportions. If the legend of Nahr el Kalb is true then Lebanon is in grave danger, and the dog returning to his pedestal in the dark is a monstrous slavering hound, baying apocalyptic curses from a bottomless carmine maw into a night veiled in the heavy tears of billowing rainclouds.

I dream of snails and painted faces, and the sound of bombs.

***

A pleasure deep and long, to stay inside while the skies outside are pale and drenched and the sea bites ever closer to the coast. With a whole glorious rain day to hide away in, I stare hopelessly at the irregularities of the Present Tense in a language that was not made for phonetic transcription into the Western alphabet, but keep going out of love for my Arabic teacher, Jeanne D'arc (Jeanne D'arc!!). Repeating the words, they elide into the sound of hooves in the desert; inté btétékbé, hyé btéktob, ne7na mnektob, into btéktbo.‡ I bask in the time to read – perhaps I will one day finish Pity the Nation? Being reduced to the level of a child in terms of the Arabic language, and spending so much of my days trying to communicate with people who are often not much better in English and French, I love English and all than it can do with a new intensity. I draw fruit and vegetables to decorate my kitchen, lost in the paper skin on an onion, the grooves in a clove of garlic, the knots of a ginger root, the dark polish of a plum or the greenish tinge of a leafy local orange. Basal, toom, zanjabil, khawkha, laymooné.

The seasons have turned in Lebanon, and perhaps in me too – but it will take many more seasons to be sure.

***

*To Sin el Fil – “Elephant’s Tooth” – like Elephant and Castle, a fanciful name for a grotty borough.

† American University of Beirut

‡ Phonetic Arabic uses numbers to represent sounds that are missing from the Western alphabet – 7 is a heavily aspirated h. The verb is to write.

Ah.

So "follow" does not mean "receive post notifications by email". Who knew? Disproportionate sense of achievement followed installing the new option to your right - no spam or other offers of a dubious nature involved in subscribing, guaranteed. Real new post below.

Alligator waters

England, five months ago. The Tories have rubbished Labour in local elections, and a few weeks later the news will be full of Europe and Nick Griffin's face – oily, smug, twisted, and covered in egg. Elsewhere, another election is also taking place, one that represents what I am going to, not what I am thankfully leaving behind. If I hadn't had a ticket booked, would I have given more than passing concern to Lebanon's June elections? There was nothing like the media fanfare devoted to the elections in Iraq or Afghanistan. The Western investment was minimal, it was not as clearly “historic”, the threat of violence not as overt – anxious ambassadors hovered around their favoured candidates rather than parachuting in electoral commissions. Still, it was the first general election since Syrian withdrawal in 2005 (they had been maintained control since the Ta’ef agreement brought the civil war to its uncertain conclusion in 1991) and, as such, theoretically the first fully independent election held in Lebanon since the start of the civil war in 1975. The photo images were much the same as those of other Middle Eastern elections distilled into the Western press – queues (they're not very good at this yet), voting boxes (fraud?), inky thumbs (how different!), women in headscarves (conflict of conservatism and progress), people marching with banners (underlying tensions), grins and celebrations (the magic of democracy). In the run-up to my exams, I noted my ignorance and put it aside until July.

Five months later, then, and images have resolved themselves into stories, ignorance into more complicated ignorance. The winners of the election are yet to form a government, and seem unlikely to in the very near future. A service driver laughed when I asked what he thought of the delay and said “Nobody cares! We have no power. Iran, US, they play a game with us. If they form the cabinet, it makes no difference.” This unpleasant gridlock is yet another tableau in the extraordinary gallery of uncertainty, insecurity and vacuum that make up Lebanon's political track record. I read and I listen and I wonder. My Maronite children’s book enclave is not politically minded, though I can imagine it shaken to fury like an otherwise docile hive of bees. “I hate politics” is the most common refrain, reminding the eager Masters graduate to put her Fisk on the back burner and go along with life as it is lived, and to learn that living with war and nepotism and a fascinating array of dangerous neighbours can just as well induce passivity as engagement. There are plenty of political fireworks to be had – not to have involvement demanded of you is a refuge as well as a dangerous invitation to apathy. It is also a reminder to look around you with eyes that are able to hold things precious, away from the evidence of grinding venality and flashpoints of violence that are all too easily had, it seems, in all places and at all times.

What, then, of those elections? Ignorance, distillation, synopsis and error, but here it is.

To one side of Lebanon is the sea, and beyond it the promise of power and protection. The promise of the Vatican, of Paris, the call of a cooler civilization. To the other side, mountains and valleys and deserts wheel away under the sky to differently powerful neighbours and their visions. Both bring their ideologies, their demands, their conflicts. Both have their peoples, their enemies, their adherents within Lebanon. This is far more than just a political simplification, though it is that too. For centuries the mountain Maronites have sought protection from France, the Druze their own warlike strongholds, the Sunni and Shia on the plains the support of stronger states further East. In between flounder the persecuted Armenians, the Greek Orthodox, the vestigial Jews, and so on. Even those who hate politics and who are able to live reasonably safe from its demands live their lives defined by the particular strain of Lebanon that they grew up in. There are families in the North who speak and read French better than Arabic, and who do not consider themselves Arabs. There are villages in the Chouf whose gates are painted Hezbollah yellow and welcome the visitor in peace – flanked by pillars in the shape of Katyusha rockets. There is my boss, who has a private zoo, and there are 30,000 Palestinians still here fifty years later, without rights or land or a state. There are many Lebanons, their leaders equally self-serving, their comparatively liberal coexistence – or lack of it – across a patch of land half the size of Wales part of the magic and the madness that makes up a nation.

When former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri was killed in February 2005 and the Lebanese rose up in protest against their Syrian occupiers, they did not do it as one nation. The dividing lines were not dead under Syrian control, to reassert themselves after its retreat. They were the encompassing warp and weft of the story, that shaped the war, the Syrian departure, and that are the form, still, of politics in the aftermath. The dates of the anti-Syrian, pro-independence, pro-Western protection 2005 protests have given their name to the March 14 coalition running in the 2009 elections, led by Hariri's son Saad. The pro-Syrian forces also marched, their vision one of Lebanon as part of the larger Arab project. They are largely marshalled by Hezbollah, with their strong support from Iran, and they are the March 8 coalition today.

In between independence and elections, the 2006 war against Israel was a military and psychological success for Hezbollah, but also brought domestic accusations that they inflicted a traumatic and unnecessary conflict on Lebanon, and the long-term mistrust of their Iranian supporters who did not benefit directly from a war which revealed the extent of their military empowerment of Hezbollah, something they would have preferred to keep quiet until such a time as they had more to gain from its implementation. Hezbollah today remains militarily far stronger than any other force in Lebanon, including the national army, and have a strong support base in the South and other areas (not just Shia) where they provide excellent social services and development work that the government cannot, and as such broadening their appeal beyond mere ideology.

The 2009 election was, then, an expression of complex local, regional and international interests, as ever in Lebanon. When March 14 achieved a substantial victory this June, sighs of relief were drawn in the West. But, what five months of negotiations and resignations and re-appointments and side-switching have amply pointed out is that elections are neither the beginning nor the end of the story, but only the most public stage – a burlesque of democracy, a distracting puppet show, a figleaf woven from smoke and mirrors – in a game of power that depends far more on the balance of external interests than on the wishes of the Lebanese people, insofar as they can be considered a cohesive people at all, with the chance to make decisions that will please and profit more than one group at a time. The labyrinthine complexity of Lebanese voting is not as important as the months of candidate list-fixing that preceded the election days, and the extraordinary sums that were lavished on supporters both domestic and diasporic. Whole planes’-worth of tickets were bought out by March 14 to get their numbers up through Lebanese citizens from France and elsewhere. Added to this, record-breakingly creative and ubiquitous domestic advertising made this the most expensive election in history, relative to Lebanon's size. But, the real business still began after the election. March 14's winning margin denied the opposition veto power in parliament, and so the dance began.

Five months later and the Lebanon’s “consensus democracy” (as opposed to a democracy which implies actual winners and losers according to the choices of the population at the polls) has made a gruesome dummy of the idea of the people’s choice, even more than the pre-election manoeuvring. A cabinet formula has been proposed of 15-10-5, with the greatest number of bloc seats going to March 14, the next to March 8, and the remainder to smaller parties. But if March 8 can swing their allies into enough seats, they will have de facto veto power. The latest dramas centre around Christian minister Michel Aoun, the former Lebanese army commander and opposition leader who was sent into exile when he attempted a “war of liberation” against the Syrian regime. In the fifth month of parliamentary negotiations, already compromised by his insistence that his son-in-law Gebran Bassil get to keep the valuable telecommunications portfolio,* he added another heavy gobbett of greed to the mix, demanding a sixth portfolio to add to the five he had already been assigned. Why not just sling him out, refuse the ridiculous pantomime? Because in order to maintain a strong presence in his post-exile Lebanon, Aoun chameleoned into the good books of Hezbollah, and as such has powerful friends. Walid Jumblatt, leader of the Druze and scion of their greatest family, known as “The Windmill” for his astonishing ability to whirl with the direction of the political wind, ran with March 14 but defected after the election and thus remains an unknown quantity. Which way will he vote over crucial issues in Parliament, who can count on his support? These are the lines of greed and power that Saad Hariri must tread as he attempts to form his cabinet, and his CV largely made up of managing one of his Dad's soap factories in Saudi Arabia.

Thus, the many Lebanons shoulder up against each other with equal bull-headedness, and the people over the sea and those across the deserts weigh up their options with more or less concern for the peoples whose lives their goals sweep into tragedy. Every week in Lebanon there is an incident – rockets into Israel, sectarian stabbing, Hezbollah detection of Israeli spy devices – that sets the media shuddering and humming and nervous chatters running from house to house. No-one forgets the smallness of the events that proved to be the forerunners of the civil war; today's spasms of fear are challenges to the national attempt to forget that the ingredients have not so much changed as shifted, that Lebanon is always only a few bad decisions away from war, that no one group controls this decision-making ability, and that the strongest parties in the mix are external.

What is certain, for now, is that nothing exists in Lebanese politics that cannot be manipulated, reneged upon, acquired, or u-turned around. The shadowy bulk of moody alligators slumber everywhere underneath the choppy waters of peace, barely bothering to conceal themselves. What is, perhaps, depressingly certain is that the new government, if it is formed and if it can keep the peace, has already lost its chance, if there ever was one, to work from a platform of democratic majority and domestic trust. Even further from reach recedes a strong sense of nationhood and independence in the face of Lebanon's ravenous neighbours and a nervous, skeptical (Western) international community who have Iran baying in their ears and whose eyes look very much askance at Hezbollah as an agent of Iranian interests.

A real peace in Lebanon – the millions of tourists, economic flourishes, hedonistic parties, all speak of its possibility. But the daily headlines, the soldiers with their AK-47s who you know have no power compared to externally-armed militias, the dull, aching reality of history, politics and region all speak otherwise. Iran, Syria, Iraq, Israel – everything that happens there is reported here with a terrible urgency. The UN meets to discuss Hezbollah and perspectives swing and turn in your head as you try to rationalise Ban Ki-moon's seemingly banal statements with what they might really mean here in local headlines and military action and the lives of your friends, who simply hate politics and want it to leave them alone. They have had enough bridges bombed already. For now, no-one seems to want a war, but there are never any guarantees. Especially not here.

***

The Gulag Archipelago, which sits neglected and accusing on the side of my bath, has a line on the back cover attributing to its author a place in illuminating the "consciousness of an age". What do Nasrallah, Aoun, Hariri, Griffin and Cameron have to do with the consciousness of ours? A warning, perhaps, that at this point in time the alligator powers have far more interesting and meaningful things to say, and methods and objectives that neither harmonise with, nor wish to, those of less fiery regimes. I watch and I listen and I read, I wait for my work visa that is dependent on the formation of the new government, and I wonder.

* Telecommunications being, naturally, coterminous with “control over spy networks”.

Ehmej

Sometimes, your day waiting for your Damascus visa down to the line crunches your left eye into a ball of scintillating light; half an hour before you are supposed to leave, it is all called off. But, that is a story for another day. Instead of biblical lands and teacher training, the weekend will bring bowling balls and mountain fields of cabbages.

So, sleep away an afternoon in the restful dark, and emerge – vision restored – to a Lebanese birthday party. Go to an American-style entertainment emporium where people eat burgers under neon strips while smoking narghile, and bowl in front of an ice-blue-lit bar to an Ibiza soundtrack next to girls skittering across the lanes in six-inch heels. Glamorous women stalk by, shadowed by their domestic servants. The Lebanese way is unedited; the American dream in downtown Dbaye. Blinking and shaking your head will not make it all fall into place, so have your tequila shots and dance on down towards the pins, for tomorrow will be different again.


An invitation, then, to lunch in Ehmej, from one of the Arab feminists. So welcoming, women, when they get together under a banner that reminds them that they are friends. Their smiles appreciate each other for what they have achieved, headscarves or crow's feet, stiletto heels or shadowed eyes. I see it, and I a girl who has never learned to like her own kind.

Go to Jbeil, she said. Turn right and wait for the bus by the King of the Chicken Sandwich shop, and at the top of the mountain there will be a twelve-foot Saint’s face carved into the stone. What better instructions? Then up she swung, all straw hat and battered Merc and black eyeliner and blue eyes, her story one of marriage in Old Lebanon and nostalgic peace in the new, and she a London girl who slipped away in a convertible MG and into an old Lebanese family from the mountains.

And so to lunch, through slanting mountainsides rippled with silvery leaf-lines and dusty roads past ancient churches. To a cool stone house in a garden of vines, the domes of Shia mosques drowsing below and a crucifix hung high above on a ridge against the sky, the veranda with its views of stone terraces and dreamy grey blue silhouettes of mountains slumbering against each other further and further towards the sea or who knows where.

Around the table are husbands and wives, professors whose words are on every page of my thesis, neighbours and the Fifth Emir of Beiteddine. I must still address him as Emir, although his father sold his lands in the Bekaa during the war and now, old and stooped but still regal, he sells air conditioning out of a suburb of Beyrouth and has a constant tearstream running from his left eye. This is Old Lebanon, the Lebanon of the mountains, ceux qui ont une différent mentalité. By this, of course, they mean that they are cultured, elevated, French-educated, barely Arab. The steamy delights of Beyrouth are a weekend entertainment, the South another world. This is an ideal (and inescapable political reality) that divides Lebanese people yet again. But there is no one to dissemble, here, so for now to lunch.

A lunch, then, that envelops you into its embrace and drenches you with the addiction that is Lebanon. Tiny soft figs from the garden that morning on a platter of their own dark leaves, white green and velvety purple; a glass of home-made arak that clears the palate with a clear liquorice wash. Rich orange soup with slivers of root ginger still swimming happily in a pumpkin pond, and then the mezze. Tabbouleh with the correctly green base and only a sprinkling of white bulgur, scooped up with a lettuce leaf or home-made flat Arabic bread if you prefer. I am not sure about this at all – a traditional replacement for forks, I am tired of its ubiquitous flavour and ability to fill up parts of you that would prefer to be full of mezze. Maybe in leaner times, but for now I put it aside in favour of the herby meat shaped into rough sausages, and my favourite kibbeh, the national dish of Lebanon (I have certainly never called it ‘kibble’ by mistake). The word refers to the bulgur content and kibbeh comes in moulded shapes and fried or as raw meat that is served spread out on a platter. Both were here today. Balls of ground pumpkin with an outer heart of spinach and an inner one of pine nuts, smoothed into a crumb jacket and deep fried. And the meat paste (goat, with herbs), that you drizzle with olive oil and that is creamy and delicious. The stone table on the veranda is also a worn, carved slab where they used to pound the meat for this kibbeh, those long-dead Lebanese matriarchs with strong arms. To go with the meat, loubia bi zeit, flat green beans with tomato and cumin sweet like the sun on the vegetable garden. The Emir had brought a platter of pale pink roast beef scattered with leaves of basil, and a sauce of his own – zaatar, herbes de Provençe, moutarde. On and on and round and round the plates went, and in the distance there were circles of grilled aubergine, hummus with pine nuts, juicy chickpeas, raw liver that I was forbidden from touching on behalf of my delicate English constitution. Olives, too, from their own olive trees, but I was perfectly full, or so I thought. Tiny glasses of home-made red wine led to the figs again, more magical again in the intermission. Add to them now tiny, intense cabernet sauvignon grapes from the vines outside, small apples still with their twigs and leaves, and you have had an acceptable break. For here comes the kneffe, impossible yet unavoidable, a buttery circle of soft crumbs that are just the covering of the sweet cheese inside; forget your innumerable weight warnings from tiny Lebanese girls and do your best. It is normally drizzled with sugar water, but we are not in everyday realms in Ehmej. They have their own hives, and allow the bees to die each year so that they do not have to treat them with chemicals. The soup plate circling the table contains two huge chunks of comb resting fatly in a dark pool of their own liquid treasure. Naptime beckons, but still more – impossibly thick Arabic ice cream – almond, vanilla, chocolate, the earthy coffee that I am trying to learn to like, baklawa that, finally, I just couldn’t touch.

But still room for trilingual conversation. My French passes much better muster here than in Paris, so all is well and I can appreciate the talk of Solidere, of Hariri, of Iraq, of the failure of democracy in the Middle East, of Then, before the war, of people’s loves and lives. Patrician smiles are smiled, eyebrows beetle, uncertain married women hover and certain single ones harangue. Everyone is immensely kind and interesting, and we sit on the terrace with ancient leather books on herbal properties, French scrabble, talk of corruption and deforestation and How It Was Before.

So much that is beautiful and rich and good, then, and so much that is lost and mourned. The old stone heart of the house, white-painted arches and wooden doors, is half underground and full of brewing wine and wicker baskets sheltering fermenting arak. The land around is striped with lines of cabbages, olive trees, vines, aubergines, pumpkin patches and apricot bushes. Amongst them, on a grassy burial mound, the bones of the ancestors layering comfortably into the carrots, sits the toylike square family church, with room for a congregation of ten at most. The whole is bordered by the road above, beyond which lines of tree and rock mount higher and higher towards the sky, and below by boulder outcrops and harsh vegetation that fall away down stone terraces to a dry stream and climb up the other side to the endless shrug and groan and reach of the hillsides. In the golden light and the quiet, here is a place to come to rest, or to ponder the Lebanon that I will never know, the dream that haunts these people, and how the vastness has not its peace yet – artillery practice echoes around the skyline.


More than all of this, perhaps, for a heart that has known no war and no loss out of the ordinary, it is a place that brings back Montaigne; Je veux que la morte me trouve en plantant mes choux, mais nonchalant d’elle, et encore plus de mon jardin imparfait. Imperfect, naturally, but a place to choose be, and to be enthralled. This is such a place, and such a life, though it resonates with more sadness than most. May such stillness remain possible, and may I come to know something of what these people are joyous to live - love, and a quiet place.


Much later, I descended towards the heaving coastline, the autostrade and McDonalds signs and a traffic jam, with something of an inner sigh. Perhaps I will stay down there, and grub my way along, and soon enough I will have an ever-present tear and a life defined by How It Should Have Been. Perhaps not. I shall not forget Ehmej, though, and other good places, and How It Is Possible To Be. For now, this shall be enough.

Sargon

Degaul (Degaul! Whose son is, perhaps inevitably, named Charles. He takes his father's first name as his second, in the Lebanese tradition) drives us away from Zouk and down and up and around to an oddly serene sun-bathed warehouse in a tree-ringed yard somewhere in Beyrouth. A sombre giant, Degaul, whose jowls, heavy-lidded grey eyes and graphite curls put one in mind of a whisky-swilling cinematic hero of the underworld rather than patient photocopier-cum-chauffeur confined to the spiritless corridors of LDL. His roars and gestures at incompetent drivers are the stuff of ancient battle cries, filling the car to bursting, suddenly turning it into a fragile toy that ill-contains his size and wrath. He never complains, but has a distant stoicism that makes you wonder what he wished for, once. I cannot ask, and he cannot tell, until one of us learns more than a few words in the other's language.

Slumped stickily on plastic seats, then, we wait as long past the appointed time as it takes for our company's version of wasta* to materialise, heralded by an overgrown boy child's fanfare of motorbike vroom vroom vroom. And then into the barely-office, metal desks and concrete walls and old men sleeping around piles of out-of-date interior decoration magazines, stalks a veritable vision, with all the self-importance of one entering Saatchi in New York.

There is no one word to sum up Sargon, unless it be a choice expletive. What would his namesake, the legendary Mesopotamian king who founded the now-lost kingdom of Akkad, make of him? The Beyrouth 2009 version, though tall and broad, has all the regal grace and poise of a coat hangar bent and crammed into an empty wineskin. His edges – collars, cuffs, belt, keyring, wallet – are gilded with the metal of his true passion, Harley Davidson. “Better than sex,” he informs me. “My girlfriends complain that I prefer riding Harleys to making love to them.” Yet his clothes are ugly and awkward over his incipient paunch, his shoes the plastic lace-ups of a nerdy child who still buys the same Clark's versions in adulthood that his mother did for his schooling, his conversation eye-wateringly dull. The whole is crowned with sepia Ray-Bans and tragicomically unsubtle hair plugs in a thick straight line across his forehead, combed back in a plastic, stalely-perfumed, mincing insult to James Dean. His age is hard to determine, but must be in the region of fifty. I once saw him without his tinted aviators and wearing endearingly grandfatherish spectacles. His pale eyes seemed suddenly vulnerable, until he opened his mouth.

He is, by his own account, highly educated, indispensably well-connected, a hard-bodied Lebanese style icon and irresistible to women. I was unwise enough to allow him to fool me into a day out in his company – he promised me “the ride of a lifetime” on the back of one of his bikes to the famous Cedars with the Lebanese Harley Davidson chapter. I was prepared to overlook his over-familiar touches of arm or leg to emphasise a point for this promise. After postponing for a week, he turned up in a car (admittedly, a burgundy '77 Mercedes) and drove me to a mountainside restaurant where he solemnly informed me that Oscar Wilde was, he thought, a homosexual. He then preceded to sing “Love me Tender” in an uncertain baritone while I concentrated furiously on my glass of arak. A short ride in Beyrouth on the back of his Harley was not enough to convince me to try this again, particularly as he made me wear his leather jacket and pose for photos by the bike while he muttered “Oh my god, beautiful”.

So, this is the guardian of my passport and future acquisition of appropriate visas. Excruciating days are spent in the grey green yellow corridors of various state buildings, as uniformed army members with cushy desk jobs lounge around and Sargon struts and preens. His much-vaunted connections have failed to get previous editors work permits within the twelve months of their contracts. Hezbollah is blamed, idiots at the ministry, anything but this man at whom officials laugh and who will never reveal the secret workings of his plans to the hapless Brit whose passport he is conjuring with. LDL wishes to send me to Damascus today – on Thursday we made the journey to Sargon's lair and I took some grim enjoyment in watching him fail to swing an exit visa for me via the back door. The trip has been planned for weeks, and Sargon is supposed to descend in a cloud of Harley glory at 12 with my stamped passport, for departure at 2.

I have not cancelled my alternative plans.

* Roughly, “who you know”. Wasta smooth transactions of all kinds through their power and connections, from traffic fines to visas to conscript placements to political offices. This is how it has always been done, and explains a lot about the Arab conception of rules and regulations – they are for those who are not important enough to be able to avoid them. It seems apt that LDL's principal channel of such power is through such a man as Sargon; awkward, incompetent, delusions of grandeur.