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.