A Sunday in Beyrouth (NSFW)

“Take the bus to Dowra,” they said, “take the second road across the roundabout, and you can walk straight into Beyrouth in forty minutes.”

Sounds like a plan, non? An easy start for a girl trying out her first steps alone in Lebanon, wanting to test the water, to see what there is to see, to see how this works.

Well, this is how it works. Crossing the slick of green slime that is the Beyrouth river, where drinks cans fly instead of birds, along Avenue de l’Armenie, steps sound close in my right ear and a voice begins, a voice I have heard in countries across the world. “Hey, where you going? Speak English, Français?”

I have never been good at this. I have friends who will talk to everyone who comes up to them, be constantly open and friendly, but my immediate reaction is to turn away. I have accepted that I will never be anything but shy and socially awkward, in a way that translates into brusqueness rather than gratitude for contact. I make friends slowly. Today, I had never felt more justified.

Ten minutes later down the road, a moped pulls in to my right. Unremarkable, were it not for the face, the chequered shirt, those which came with the earlier voice, that drove it. Worse, the hand at work below the waist, the fixed stare and the mocking gasps and the “Oh my God, my God” that came with it.

Forget it, forget it. In twenty-six years of sauntering and be damned, I've been lucky not to have had much worse. I don’t flinch and I walk straight on. And then – and this has to be bad luck – the garage entrance to my left, right next to the street, is suddenly host to naked hairy legs and buttocks, their owner facing the wall and his hand – at work? Urinating? It didn’t matter, because he glanced back and the same refrain began, the same exaggerated movement and high-pitched commentary, like he couldn’t believe his luck. What the hell is this place?

But that had to be it, right? Until the earlier shirt, with the same hand to flies, the same voice starts up again on the street and I realise that I am being kerb-crawled. Belated self-preservation kicks in, and I choose a left-hand turn of steep steps leading up into what I guess is Achrafiyeh, a leafy climb where the houses have signs in Armenian script and an old lady and I exchange smiles and lifted eyebrows in commentary on the heat.


On the way home, my skin smelled of Beyrouth streets. This is not a nice smell, people. It’s a smell of sweat and of fumes, of putrid rubbish, of buildings so riddled with bullet holes as to look like perforated paper snowflakes standing next door to designer shops, of incessant car horns demanding your attention, of ex-pats drinking in expensive bars that would not be out of place in Leicester Square, of getting lost and frustrated, or knowing you would be frustrated if every feeling weren’t flattened to nothing by heat and sweat, and of being strangely disinclined now to ask for directions from the loitering male masses.

But it’s also a smell that remembers how a single jasmine flower fell to the pavement in front of me, where no jasmine bush grew or overhung. It remembers the sheer surreal impossible reality of standing on the green Astroturf in front of Rafiq Hariri’s tomb, while people around me cupped their hands and prayed. It remembers walking the Green Line that I've been reading about for months. It remembers how the cool stone of sculptures from Sidon and Tyre and Baalbek soothed me in minutes when I eventually found their home, and how they spoke of a Lebanon that is still waiting to be found, that could be a friend.

Just maybe when I have acquired a crucifix, an ostentatious wedding band, a mobile phone with the police on speed dial and the Arabic for “Leave me alone, you sick fuck.”