Ah.

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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.

Shu hayda?

Arabic classes? Naturally. Documentary film festivals, Arab Feminist conferences? Of course. Impromptu Oriental orchestras, Byzantine cloth dolls, Asian films subtitled in French, installations and exhibitions in bombed-out Modernist cinemas, book festivals, German talks on Ottoman governance? Yes to all.

No one can say that I am not trying. And in the thick evening air, as the minibuses boy race up the autostrade and service drivers play puppets with your homebound fortunes in a series of clicks and jerks of the head, you lean gratefully into the side of your rescuing vehicle and let Fairuz or Nancy Ajram, jazz classics remixed in Arabic, forgotten nineties hits or dabke music wash over you, and let your dreams and others' dance their technicolour footsteps across the inside lids of your tired, tired eyes.

Jeita with the Iraqis

There is a saying in Iraq: Execute first, discuss later. Under Saddam Hussein, group meetings and debates were viewed as likely crucibles of dissent and as such “discouraged”. Independent thought was muffled and persecuted, and the skill of anticipation dwindled (also true, apparently, of Americans in the White House). Expecting quick and easy democratisation, the post-invasion coalition foundered not only on its own callous stupidity, but also on a complete lack of anticipation of the effects of decades of totalitarian rule on the national and bureaucratic mentality. But the post-war Iraqi government, and the country’s funding of Lebanese militias, is not the concern of Librarie du Liban. And, as so often in Lebanon, it is not the grand themes and conflicts themselves that make their presence known, but their faint reverberations, the most venial realities of policies or alliances, the ugliest, most shadowy political choices. Or, in this case, the simple yet intractable gulf (no pun intended) between Western and Iraqi approaches to group work. In such riveting scenarios must an LDL editor seek the rough surfaces for purchase on the slippery incline of understanding.

And so they came, to Lebanon for teacher training. Twenty-six Education Ministry officials, the men with moustaches and cigarettes and ugly suits and false praying scars,* the women in heavy hijab and resourceful eyes, in possession of a world where you cannot shake the hand of man who is not your relation. One of our staff did not realise this and proffered his hand confidently – flustered, the lady dropped folds of her voluminous headscarf over her hand and shook that way to avoid both contact and social embarrassment. “Loose,” muttered her male colleagues, referring to her morals. We spend so much of our time as distant agents of these strictures – spotting illustrations where the women are in the company of men or wearing too much make-up under their abayas – yet to interact with the reality is a shock, even when the regime is a comparatively liberal one.

Saturday of their arrival, Lena and I are roped into taking them round the local feature, the incorrectly described Grotto at Jeita. The tour bus wends its way down the side of the valley in the beastly midday heat, we discuss the security situation in Iraq, they take innumerable photos. Posters everywhere declare Jeita’s claim to be one of the “New Seven Wonders of the World – cast your vote online at – ”. We take the creaking cable car up to the entrance to the caves, sweat seeming to weld us to the plastic seats. It is a constant source of wonder how women in such climates manage in black hijab and heavy modesty. Do the enveloping materials somehow negate the heat and they walk around in cool darkness? When I cloaked up for the mosques in Trablous, I failed to find any such Oriental magic in the itchy cotton and hair sticking to my neck. Our Iraqi ministry ladies are formally modest – ornate headscarves that reach below the waist, turtlenecks, boxy suit jackets and long skirts in thick acrylic material. I am wearing a short-sleeved shirt rather than a vest top as a concession to their preferences, and find even that unpleasant. At one point, I start talking to one lady as she puffs along. She immediately beams up at me, thanking God for the opportunity of being here, and takes my arm. Every inch of her underarm is soaked in sweat that comes through several thick layers. So much for the liberating veil. Time was, in the desert, women and men dressed in robes for practicalities. Now it seems as if cloth that was meant to protect, constrains and induces physical and social challenges. It is also partly a choice in the context of newly conservative Iraq – a symbolic expression of difference in the face of the Allied presence.

***

This exchange takes place more than once: Are you married? No, not yet. Ah, so young!

HANG on. This is what counts? And I respond with the implicit acceptance that this desirable state will one day take place? And the only reason I'm not married is my supposed youth? There are so many things wrong with this that I have to go and have a little sit down. A supervisor from Baghdad tells me that on the evidence of films my country must be morally rotten, but that I am clearly a nice modest girl who knows how to conduct herself. Even if I were not there in a professional capacity, I would not know how to disillusion her. What would they think, really, if they knew that I smoked narghile and drank to excess and lived alone and was happily areligious and loved sex and did not think of marriage and reproduction as the blessed summit of my potential achievements? How could they possibly imagine that I live otherwise? Yet I smile a sickly smile and allow them, it feels, some sort of unappealing victory.

I do not judge them for their choices. But why do I feel it necessary to conceal mine?

***

Into the caves, then – cooler, with stale clammy air. Do you remember your GCSE geography? Stalactites and stalagmites, the drip drip drip of mineral deposits, pillars climbing up and reaching down towards each other over the millennia. Yet drip, drip, drip, and the river far below barely explain the glistening modelled fungi, the efflorescent cauliflowers, the ripples and waves frozen in icing sugar stone, the absurd phalluses sprouting from the cave floors, the deep vastness of the cavern, liberally festooned with natural figurines and barely tamed by the concrete walkway. Rumour has it that a boat sailed upstream for ten hours and found no hint of the source – this place should be haunted by fabulous beasts and treacherous legends, not by perspiring tourists and an online voting campaign. The river in the lower cave, lit from below, is an icy turquoise channel of Stygian eeriness. We trundle up it in the ferry boat, trailing our hands thankfully in the water. Lena – tiny, almond-eyed, child-limbed – is thoroughly disenchanted with tour guide duties. I shake off thoughts of Alex and concentrate on the towering rocks, the dim light, the expansive pink and white tableaux built from grain upon microscopic grain, the extraordinary and incomprehensible passage of time.

***

Inexplicably, the last track from the lower cave out to the car park is lined with cages of depressed wildlife. I make overtures to a porcupine, without much success.

***

Five long days, then, of wildly different world views facing each other over a battleground of primary and secondary education. Our department’s presence is required for show, although we don’t do much; James takes notes in Russian and Elvish, I construct crosswords, Jihane plans her wedding. We drink coffee, hoard the free croissants with zaatar or jebneh (thyme; cheese) and watch the trainers flounder.

Imagine: A generation or two after colonialism, many schoolteachers have never interacted with a native speaker. They often learned, as do their students, under impossible practical conditions, without study aids or books or desks, gleaning what language they can from what their teachers were able to glean under similar conditions. Being a teacher is a good job. Their students will try their best to repeat the pattern. And on such ground lies the dreams of businesses, of escape, of a better life. Hardworking fifteen-year-olds in my school in Tanzania spoke better English than their teachers, who were supposed to teach all parts of the curriculum – maths, science, theology, life skills – in English. You start to resent your own language and the absurd indignities it forces people into. The situation is complex, heartbreaking, and inescapable.

You can, of course, speak a language well but still be defeated by the culture in which it was brewed. Back in Zouk, the problem is not merely one of English, though that challenge is ever-present. The English the Iraqis will teach is of the “cat sat on the mat” variety, but the concepts and challenges they face in this training is the vital stuff of curriculum change and bureaucratic procedure, classroom methodology and language theories. Why on earth should they have to be trained in their second language, and by people who are not Arabs, let alone Iraqis? I cannot imagine a coven of French teachers in the UK being asked to do this.

Opinions in this conference room are held and repeated notwithstanding any training and discussion. I do not think this is a particularly Arab failing. But who is to say that what the trainers is attempting is appropriate? Visiting trainer Steve asks for suggestions and ideas in the audience-focused tradition. They balk. “Mr. Steve. Please tell us what we should do.” They quibble each point before the task. They do not see why they should imagine things other than they are in order to find a solution. Being given the space for discussion, they do not respond as they are supposed to and get stuck on whether a lemon is a fruit or a vegetable. “We are not concerned with theories, please. Tell us the solution, scientifically speaking.” Steve wipes his forehead. “I asked you to ask me questions, and a lot of you gave me statements,” he sums up. How, he mutters to me, can they understand complicated concepts but be defeated by a simple paper-based exercise? The longer I spend in the conference room, the more the task before the Iraqis and their trainers seems aptly represented by Jeita – vast, incredible, unfathomable.

***

They either do not understand, or choose not to understand, my questions about how the war has affected their work in Iraq. The men look blank, and the sudden tightness around one woman's eyes shuts me up and we start talking about her children again – “six mistakes!” she crows, happily. They are prepared, however, to talk about life under Saddam. One teacher in particular has never been out of Iraq before – he misses his wife, his children, his home, he was terrified by the plane journey. He is bewildered by talking to a foreigner for the first time. For ten years, he was paid fifteen dollars a year and worked in a pharmacy after school to make ends meet – these journeys, and the decision to live honestly, to work this hard for the sake of educating the next generation, are shaming.

Friday, James and I are in the studio and are not around to wave them off. What did they take back to Iraq with them? Was it worth their while, and ours? This is something we are unlikely ever to know. We go back to our desks, back to em dashes and crossing out cartoons showing dogs or girls’ knees, and they go back to Baghdad, to Basra, to Tikrit, and to a reality of classrooms and day-to-day teaching that cannot be expressed in sayings, or even in words. Perhaps just knowing this is something, and being reminded of how little the symbols of difference matter. It is the daily grind, the formation of ideas, the stuff of life itself that can leave you lost for words, and for solutions.

***

*The Qu’ran holds a special place for those who foreheads display the wear and tear of devotion. Yet, a lady from Baghdad told me, she prays five times a day with her head on a stone in the Shi’ite manner (you can also buy extra-rough praying mats), and her forehead is unmarked. Those with grey scars actively create them with stone or soot; their visible marks of holiness are a lie. She also told me that several of her cousins were executed by the Ba'ath party, and as a result she lost her job for eight years. To “keep the flame of English alive”, she talked to herself in English for all those years, keeping her husband and children, with three dictionaries on hand to check herself thoroughly for mistakes.