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.