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.