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.
No comments:
Post a Comment