What would Dorothy Parker do?

So that was that, and this is how it is – to be left the losing player in a mug’s game. To know that you did what you did because of something in him that is rare, and that he is also as flawed as anyone else, and that he is gone. The end was stamped across the beginning, and there is no one to talk to, and no excuses. No answers, and barely any satisfactory questions.

Inevitably, a girl starts to wonder how much more of this there will be – of yes, buts and if onlys and things are nots. Whether in fact this is her choice, or if it is all she is capable of, or worth. Perhaps it will be her turn one day, or perhaps she does not wish it, or know how.

These are not things I wish to ponder, yet here we are. I am responsible for my choices. The tears will dry, and I will get up and go to work and have done. When did we get so tough, and so stupid?

I shall go and read Dorothy Parker in the bath.

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Roumania.

Autumn

The talk in England is of puddles, and gumboots, and leaves gold orange gold and blackberries in the hedgerows. Farming Today chunters comfortably along at Lebanese breakfast time, mulling over E. Coli, milk prices and bumper crops of oysters. Not the closing of a year, but a more subtle season of renewal than spring, with its gambolling lambs and expansive daffodils. By September, you know what is what. For twenty or so of my years, this has been the month of new terms; exercise books, name tapes, hockey sticks, Chipie agendas from Carrefour, a small step up the inky ladder of education. You can look ahead through mists of pencil sharpenings to knitted scarves and a chill in the air, or back through who knows what permutations of the year to when you looked on it with fresh eyes.

The talk in Lebanon is of Eid al-Fitr, and ministerial resignations, and Katyusha rockets fired into Israel. Hariri junior comes and goes, the Special Tribunal chess piece is bartered back and forth, Syria and Iran loom over the news with their customary intransigence. In Zouk, you can now walk to the market or take a bus without feeling the sweat course down you in ticklish runnels. Around sunset, the day now no longer feels exhausted, but cooler and freshly shadowed. You can smell the evening, where before there was nothing but pollution and dust and wanting to lie under the air con with no more movement than the languid antennae strokes of a poisoned cockroach.

Has it really been nearly two months? Both nothing, and something. Lost thesis days, days learning the peculiar frustrations of work, days making plans and not always achieving them. Some days that sang with light and colour, some that left you exhausted and miserable. Ridiculous days spent on an affair that has done no one any favours. In less than a week he will back among those puddles and gumboots and in the arms of a better woman than I, and I will be able to start again, again. There is nothing to do but bide one’s time for days when one makes progress.

And so it goes, the uneasy mounting of impression on impression. We are nowhere near even a vague idea of how this might eventually shake out. Not the close of a year, then, and the new beginning now receding, but days requiring patience, and some grit. We are both waiting, Lebanon and I. Still, but not for long - or perhaps forever.

Trablous (Tripoli)

Go to Trablous. Ignore your Maronite friends who mutter about extremism and poor Muslim hygiene, pack wine and water and modest clothing and hop skip hop two hours north up the coast. One minibus is crowned with a cargo of white ostrich plume dusters, another has a white poodle leaning out of the window, curly face turned hopefully into the wind. This is the way to Lebanon’s second city. It is a stone’s throw from Syria and a world away, as if the checkpoints with their red and white barriers and indolent gun-swinging soldiers and painted cedar tree flags looking like they were applied to the empty oil drums by a drunk five-year-old were somehow guardians of a parallel world, the one you thought you were going to meet before you met Beyrouth. Snoozing northwards, they felt the office and the Saturday morning in the studio recording stilted dialogues for early learners drop away under the tyres. With a flourish, the traveller’s wind whipped and buffeted their smiles up to broad – the wind that brings the smile that belongs to the moment you go further than you ever have before up this road, or that.

Ten lost minutes in Trablous and James turned and said “It’s like a balm for the soul”. He was right. It was everywhere, in the cluttered multicoloured streets and the low-rise buildings and the carts of fruit on every corner. Most of all, it was in the smiles and the old men getting up to walk you to the next corner to show you the way and the ahlan wa sahlan and the marhaba and the choukran where “welcome” and “bonjour” and “merci” will do further south, in the openness that held nothing but the gift of helping strangers and the joy of showing the city. This was new, yet remembered, from travels past and dreamed of – the days of being filled up to overflowing by scents and sounds and colours and a people wonderfully different from those you left behind. This was why we came.

In Trablous, everything has a pattern. No more cosmic than anywhere else, but where it matters – at the edges of roofs, in curlicued window bars, along the tops of walls, cushions on stools, around the corners of things, over and under and where they aren’t intended – piles of fruit, fifty upended ceramic toilet bowls on a stall top pink and blue against the sky, embroidered robes and faces scarred and lined. Bolts of cloth, swathes of sheepskin, fish in a tank with a guardian cat beneath, glistening sheep heads on a platter. Nargileh pipes, robes, towering columns of bars of soap, bread on boards and barbed wire by tanks. And, always, the baklawa, miraculous trays of honey-soaked pastry sliced and stacked like a gourmand’s fantasy Lego set. Here, they are the best in Lebanon, but buy them and squirrel them away for later, here in the month of Ramadan.

There was a marvellous hotel, its name painted neatly onto a metal door in a hand that knew no English. It had pink cement between the bricks and rooms up twisty staircases, with baklawa and croissants with halloum for breakfast, and a toothless old man who took out a rogue cockroach with his broom, cackling. That evening, they walked to the Corniche down a long avenue that used to be lined with orange trees but where cement blocks and McDonald’s had sprouted in their place. Every few metres a man with a cart was busily juicing carrots and oranges for fast-breaking drinks, leaving the pavements heaped with orange debris and wrung-out shells, and the air sweet and juicy. Clouds of pigeons wheeled overhead, brown and white between the buildings. Patches of cement on the pavement had the Star of David scrawled over them so that passers-by might walk across and insult them with the soles of their shoes.

Along the long wide Corniche they went in search of dinner, with Dutch bicycles whirring past by the palms and boats rocking gently in untidy lines. Nearly sunset in Ramadan and a huge glistening white iftar tent is there on the dock, filled with families and friends and anyone else, gathered for a charitable hand with their fast-breaking. A sweaty moustachioed sailor on a bike descended and marched them in in front of a hundred curious pairs of eyes. They were hustled to places by the long tables, awkward yet delighted, and metal trays were slid in front of them – dates, bread, almond cake, warmly spiced pilau with chicken and peanuts and almonds, an apple, water, sweet and salty labneh. Small children were sent over by their parents to giggle and to say “Welcome to Lebanon!” from behind shy fingers.

She listened to the sailor tell her about his boat trips to Greece atop of two hundred tons of mixed cargo. He checked his watch every minute and wiped sweat out of his eyebrows, as a black-toothed old man opposite stared at his tray with furious longing and a Syrian taxi driver recognised James from his first day in Aleppo. It made as much sense as anything else. Seven o’clock came without ceremony and the iftar was tied up quickly and simply, with bottles of salty yoghurt drink to take with you. They walked away down the Corniche under an impossible vast orange moon, rats scurrying by and the scent of boiling corn on the wind, everywhere stalls in bright white generated light. The sailor went back to his boat to drink beer, taking and leaving his Islam in true Lebanese style. They told this story to their guide the next day, and he grinned and nodded. “In Lebanon, people worship God, and they also worship the Devil”.

Over drinks at a café, George Michael buzzes in from a neighbouring table’s mobile ring tone. “I ain’t never gonna fast again,” muses Alex. “Hungry boy don’t like religion”. They think it is hil-a-ri-ous.

Back in the old town, blue and white washing on lines forms patchworks between walls and windows. Their taxi driver silently motions them towards his boot and draws out three apples apiece – a Ramadan gift. Ahlan wa sahlan and ahlan fik takes them to a circle of plastic chairs in a pool of lamplight – narghile, strong sweet tea, Bedouin coffee from a silver pot hawked around by a small boy, Syrian soap operas on a TV – ahlan. Sit and join us in the yellow light and we will treat you, and smile and nod, because that is our way. Ahlan.

What a piece of work is Trablous! Sunday brought Ali, who bustled up to them around a corner, grinning, with a photocopy of his name in an old Lonely Planet guide in one had and a plastic bag of modesty robes in the other. Let me show you the city, it will be my pleasure. I will take you along humming souq streets to clean white halls, to dreamlike mosques with stone fountains and men dozing over the Qu’ran on carpeted floors, their foreheads worn with praying. There will be achingly beautiful black and white Mamluk stones by luscious glass and metal chandeliers, ancient courtyards behind niqab shops, mosques that were churches and then mosques again, truncated Roman columns whose foundations are many floors below, conquest after conquest each raising the level of the surface with their own architectural vision. I will take you to the citadel, vast and stony and still home to soldiers and tanks, and leave you there, happy to have taken a detour along my morning to show you what I love.

Later, they wandered through and round and about to the courtyards and workshops where they make the soap. The Soap. You can smell it on the air from outside the walls, jasmine and cedar and olive oil and bathtime suds floating past the chimmering canary cages. Soap in squares, in balls, in flowers, in teddy bears, soap modelled into the Qu’ran and, inevitably, into a portrait of Rafik Hariri. Soap in blocks of bright colours and in every other possible combination, in baskets and suitcases and towers and boxes and moulded into giant rosaries hanging from low ceilings in dark shops. In one of them, a woman grabs your arm and rubs in a sample of her wares. “Apples and milk,” she says. “You will smell of it for two days.” In a quiet, shadowy eyrie, dim light and faded paint, a man has been carving soap his whole life. Knife held surely against apron, shavings piling up around him, moustache as marvellous as surely his family founder’s was in 1808. His shy daughters pour oil and turn handles in demonstration. It is all peaceful and scented and calm and good.

One more thing, before you load up with baklawa and memories and a ridiculous but wonderful old silver fob watch for your trophy case. On the corner of the souq, ask a man at an orange juice stand and he will show you to a shop that barely even merits the name; men with snowy beards and snowier robes sitting around by a few stacks of crisps and orange shoeboxes. They nod to the tourists, for they have seen this before. Through a door at the back and down a corridor strewn with bags of lettuce, there is an echoing, damp, peeling, abandoned, impossible domed mystery of Roman baths. The huge, endless rooms are empty and decrepit, but the domes of the ceilings are wonderfully studded with small points of coloured glass that bring light in, pink, green, blue, yellow, that dances in spotlights on musty walls and mouldy floors. It is quiet, and cool, and wondering.

On the way home, there was still time to stop at Jbeil for a swim. My skin smelled of apples and milk and salt, and of a life being lived.

Jbeil (Byblos)

The day smelled of sun cream, and of adventure. The candy-striped smokestacks belched black smoke in celebration as I flip-flopped to the autostrade past the Societé Italien-Libanais pour les Savons et Détérgents, getting stuck to the juice running from the charcuterie bins that was cooking gently on the tarmac, trickled over with delighted ants.

A minibus is always on hand to take you away from these Zouk delights. They rattle and pounce through the traffic, hand permanently on horn, hounding down potential passengers and nearly running them over. When one screeches to a stop, curious eyes ask the question, “What is a silly white girl doing getting the bus out here?” What indeed, but even if I spoke Arabic I might not be able to explain. And so it’s wedge yourself up against a militiaman, speed and sway and elbow out of the window as the wind rushes through and blows your hair into crazy shapes. And it’s hot, God it’s hot. It’s banana groves and the driver with one wrist barely on the wheel as he counts money and smokes and drives, and men asleep at the roadside under umbrellas next to their stacks of fish or wooden carts of melons and figs. It’s gorges and mountains and icons of the Virgin Mary swinging and mile after mile of tower blocks stacked up the hillside like a blind man’s dominoes, the line of the coast and bewildering Arabic arguments, Miss Lebanon Emigrant, Super Night Clubs with their Russian girls, guns on hips and Fayrouz and the open road and Roadster Diner, there goes my heart.

So take your time in Jbeil, when you stagger off the bus and across the roads into the town. Take your time, and the town will take it with you, for inventing cursive script to make your trade go more quickly and flooding the world with the alphabet is not the work of an afternoon. Wander through the souq, past the jelly sandals and the achingly kitsch portraits of saints and soldiers and Hariri, past fat men asleep in chairs and children running errands. Past the grandfather bent over bits of an engine whose face could have looked on the Arab conquest in AD 636, it is so old and strangely coloured, and his eyes so red and tired. Take your time, and sit in the shade in the harbour and watch the world, which doesn’t really go by so much as snooze its way sluggishly along.

Watch the boats strung with flags slumbering on the water, and the fishes swimming in it. Watch the sun blistering the paint and red-and-white wooden rudders and empty seats by tangled nets and wicker fishing baskets. Watch the tourists come and go to Pepe’s famous fish restaurant, rucksacks and water and cameras, and ponder the strangeness of this little harbour, pleasant and quiet as it is. Look up at the tumbledown tower – a Crusading tower that watches over the remains of the works its masters conquered – and down, into the turquoise water, and see the ancient quays sleeping there. From the restaurants opposite you can look across the water and wonder who sat there over time, and if they pondered who would sail through the opening of the harbour that day – Egyptians, Amorites, Turks, Greeks, Phoenicians? What would they bring, this time? New languages, new religions, new buildings? New evictions, new burnings of statues, new empires. The ebb and flow of trade was the motor of all these things, which took the place from scratchy, shabby fishing village to worldwide trading port and back again.

Wander around the corner, and the ancient city walls are just as ancient city walls should be, stony and imposing and brushed with the fronds of palms heavy with netted-up dates. But the sea – the sea is blue green blue and a perfect semicircle of beach, pink striped pebbles like gobstoppers, and I will come here to swim and walk whenever I can. For this is just half an hour up the coast from Zouk, and your regular constitutional can take in ten different conquests and the birth of a written language, swimming over the debris of nations. Inside the walls, the streets of houses with their sunny stone and cobbles made of pebbles laid in patterns are just as streets and houses should be. The churches and gardens are even more so, hung as they are with lemons, with jasmine, with glorious swathes of pinkest bougainvillea and with heavy pomegranates. Somewhere, a chorus of tiny voices is singing the numbers in French. The air smells, finally, of flowers and warm stone and olive trees and peace. Somewhere, a fish is grilling.

Circle round and about a little, and on a promontory above the harbour lies another impossible, bizarre palimpsest of peoples and the extravaganza of remains they leave behind them. Because this is Lebanon, you wander unguided and unrestrained across the years, picking paths worn in and around every possible corner, coke cans in Phoenician graves and enormous lizards scuttling where earthquakes revealed underground tunnels. Sarcophagi and obelisks, flowers and palms and a few brave upright columns on a hillside still lining the dream of a worshipful avenue, where yews now grow. Carvings of bulls, foundations of houses from eight different centuries, Isis weeping in a hollow, a toy amphitheatre with Bacchus tiled into the floor and round and round and on and on for acres until you wind up exhausted at the Frankish fort, climb up and look down upon it all, wondering.

Eight thousand years of history, ‘discovered’ by Ernest Renan in 1860. Ah, Monsieur Renan. We met in the quietness of the stacks of a library in grey London. Here you are again on the shores of the Mediterranean, wielding your Orientalist pen. Very well. Let us walk, and talk a little, hot and tired as I am, and you so short and fat and in ghostly mourning for your sister Henriette, who died of a fever at your home in Amchit up the coast. Let us lean on the warm stone of a Roman pillar, still crowned with its ornate architrave, and ponder how this can be.

Ernest wrote epic books on grand themes, and spent some time thinking about memory, which is not surprising considering he spent so much time digging it up. In the Jbeil ruins, a little metal railway meanders through and around Chalcolithic walls and Egyptian tombs and Amorite temples. It is dusty and rusted now, overgrown with vines and scrubby grasses, its metal cart tipped over years ago and lying half-concealed beneath glossy creepers, collapsed or abandoned or bomb-scared in the middle of a run, its cargo of soil filled with treasures or with worms. Ernest would have stood here and directed operations, brush in hand, overwhelmed by the amphorae, the bones from burial jars, the carvings and sculptures that sifted up in such generous and extraordinary numbers. “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?” he wondered.

“Or l’essence d’une nation est que tous les individus aient beaucoup de choses en commun, est aussi que tous aient oublié bien des choses”. There is, indeed, so much here both forgotten and remembered, by accident or by design. And what of these nations, that have ebbed and flowed like so many watery pools through the seasons, their populations evolving, migrating or perishing? They have not died, but their elements both treasured and neglected have become the property of their successors, who add their own brand of manipulation to the mixture. Lebanese history schoolbooks stop in 1946. After the civil war, new books were planned, but the committee factions could not agree on the correct way the nation’s youth should be taught to remember the events of their country’s past, starting with that Arab coming (invasion? occupation? rape?) in 636, let alone those around the war that they had just lived through.

The ancients themselves knew a thing or two about memory:

As early as 4000 BC, an Egyptian god was endowed with the responsibility for controlling memory, as was the Greek goddess Mnemosyne, one of Zeus’s wives and the mother of the Muses. Memory was placed in the hands of deities because it was thought to defy logical analysis.

They can hardly have envisioned how their grand designs would come to rest. But here they are, looking out over a Maronite sea while tourists sit in the replica amphitheatre and hold hands and behave irritatingly, historians try to remember their festivals and gods for them, and Lebanese Christians adopt their achievements as their own to explain their superiority over their Muslim brothers and sisters. Imagining it in another eight thousand years’ time is as impossible as the present reality.

My guidebook tells me what is what, but it doesn’t explain anything. It doesn’t explain how this came to be, or why, or whether Ernest Renan wore a thobe or a straw hat with a jaunty brim, or if he shared a nargileh with his workers at the end of the day.

But in Jbeil, you can imagine it how you would wish it to have been. Take your time. Have a seat on a stone from one of those eight thousand years and watch the world. Look at the sea, and listen, and smell the salt at last.

The dog days are over, the dog days are done.

The thing is done. Half-baked, perhaps, and at considerable cost, but done enough nonetheless. And another, larger chapter is also finally closed, one that has come back to haunt me while I have been squirreled away in paper-strewn corners of my apartment.

May I make better choices, one day. May the treacherous grasping fingers of LSE or MSc never again desecrate my academic interest, enjoyment, confidence, and may I never again watch a year that I had meant to treasure slip away down a muddy gutter of small but significant failures. May I never again allow unpleasant personalities to play merry hell with my time, or my heart.

Oh, but there was good, there were treasures, there was love of places and of people. But sometimes, you have to admit you did a bad job. That is all.


But now, it is time to remember that I am in Lebanon. There are Arabic classes to book. I have people to harass for freelance writing gigs, to ring the changes. The weekends are free for getting lost in the Levant. I can say "yes", "no", “hello, my name is”, “thank you”, “stop here, please”, “piss off” and “you’re a donkey”. I am told the temperature is soon to drop a fraction. I can tilt my chin at a taxi in the local manner, to indicate “no, move along”, and touch my fingertips together to signal “wait”. I am liable to lapse into broken Kiswahili under pressure.

I still have not eaten falafel.

All right then, Lebanon. The dog days are over, and I’m shaking myself awake. Let’s see what you’ve got.