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Mar Mitr

And in the morning, with the clumsy fingerprints of yesterday's storms still soaking into the windowsill, there is a moment of quiet to pause in, outside the heavy wooden door with its French and Lebanese flags, before tipping down the stone stairs and through the metal front gate. On the other side of the street is a forgotten shell of a building, its stone balustrades rotting away and terraces cluttered with pre-war rubbish. Neighbouring balconies suggest geraniums, and inquisitive green tendrils test the air. The ugly corporate facade of the supermarket at the end of the road is undermined by the minute open-backed van painted in primary blues and yellows that stands by its delivery entrance, disgorging trays of oranges and guarded by a grubby old man with a wizened beard and dubious keffiyeh.

And before you climb onto the number 2 bus, before you hand over your noisome green lira notes, before the bus driver lights his cigarette and blows it all over the baby in the front seat to the tune of Fayrouz, before you clatter along Gemmayzeh and turn left at the vast Pop Art poster of Bashir Gemayel, and long before you trudge up the hill to the wearisome office that is no longer your home, you know that this is right. Even as you walk towards the front gate, the street beckons with an old lady in a zebra-skin hat and patent leather boots, and outside the manoushé shop next door a bleary old man is wearing grey pyjamas over his pendulous belly and cackling corpulently over his morning zaatar. You can look back at the house you came from, at its terracotta pink exterior and questionable art deco mouldings, and remember passing it all unknowing, many months ago. Along the road to Dora there is light over the sea and on the mountains, men already bent over oily engines in Armenian repair shops, grandfathers in peaked felt caps wandering amiably and inconsequentially past the determined commuter traffic, and a pair of indescribably filthy old women lugging sacks of scrap metal in early morning incomprehension and heartbreak.

***

The day before, Valerie gives me tea and keys in the kitchen, and we make a rental contract on the back of an envelope. Mina sits on a third chair and rests her chin on the kitchen table in a doomed effort to appear human, blue eyes faintly crossed. You live here alone? I ask her, la belle Parisienne. Oui, she replies, je suis solitaire. I nod. Moi aussi. We understand each other.

So the pink house on Mar Mitr has another solitaire, with not much money but a room of her own, and who in the mornings pads past the red theatre curtains and the plants dark against the early sunlight, and out into the day.

And then ...

We are going to see the apartment, he announces at the end of class. I have become more resigned to Zouk recently, or at least appeased by the money that I save, and faintly regret my grumblings that have led to this unplanned late-night excursion. But in French I must needs be even less intelligent and diplomatic than other times, simply because I cannot keep up or spontaneously express myself with delicacy, if at all. So we drive through Beyrouth in the dark, leaving faint nervous smudges of social awkwardness in our wake.

So because I do not have the presence of mind to say no, I find that the building is old and beautiful, the domain of enormous plants and graceful iron railings. The landlady is an exceptional French beauty, a filmmaker, with a malleable Siamese cat who answers infrequently to the name Mina. Her apartment is high ceilings, dark walls and Byzantine furniture. Up dappled flights of stairs, she pauses on a verdant terrace and opens a door to a tiny theatre, polished floors and red velvet curtain and fading posters, where she encourages the youth of Beyrouth to express themselves on weekday afternoons. Tiny costumes hang from railings, and plastic cutlasses lie on a sideboard. Beyond this is bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, all mine for the asking, and the whispering hum of the city insistent outside. We go back down and are entertained by an inedible effort at a Lebanese cake, and I try to keep my wits about me in French after three hours of Arabic and eight of proofreading. I feel far removed, yet aware that this is a rare chance.

A sleepless night and nervous morning later, I manage to remind myself why I came to Lebanon, and that I enjoy challenges and beauty and independence. Still, it feels like Zouk had almost tamed me, and there is a feeling akin to that experienced before a scary party where you are afraid you won't have anything to say.

I will be much poorer. I will have to learn to commute again, in a land without trains, after indulgent months of tipping out of bed and into work with pillow-creases still disheveling my cheeks. But the world will look different, and Beyrouth will be my home. This is how it goes, it seems, and the next page turns.

The Test

Kamil calls me on Thursday afternoon, without ceremony. Ellen, it is better that you do the test tomorrow morning. He has booked it for you, and they are making things much harder very soon. My bike is hors de combat with a dead battery, I have to do an interview and submit the article the same evening, and I am due in the recording studio at 10am. But, Kamil … . This is Lebanon. I will go, having only desperately Googled instructions for automatic scooters at 1am.

In a state of sleep-deprived nerves, then, I enter the now-familiar state of ignorant, passive foreigner, being led from room to grey, stained room of government buildings by kindly, sweaty men who grin and offer me Nescafé, and discuss me in Arabic while shuffling and stamping tottering piles of carbon copies. Pierre is my wasta for this round, a little bent man with a greasy forelock and banker’s pink-striped shirt. He has a screaming argument with someone in the corridor outside his office, while I sit inside and look out of the grimy window at a truncated section of the car park. To make his final point, he strides over to a metal door, carbon copies in hand, opens it and throws them inside, to where I just glimpse a room of tables and shelves so jammed and piled with blue, green and pink papers as to resemble a bloated pile of innards, ready to vomit everything out into the corridor at any moment. He returns, switches his computer off and says curtly in Arabic It is all fine. You will only have to sign.

More rooms, more chairs, more men. I am ferried to and fro by hands in the small of my back as I am explained and bargained over. Eventually, in a room full of computers set up for the theory test, I stand and wait my turn. Thirty people enter, seat themselves, and fiddle disinterestedly with their belongings. Only a couple of people make any move to click their screens, and men move to and fro between the desks. Ten minutes later, they rise en masse and are hustled out to the cars – 3a siyyara! 3a siyyara!* When my turn comes, I study the first screen, which has the option to choose Arabic, English or French. A man appears at my shoulder and clicks for Arabic, then does the test for me – 30/30 in 15 seconds. Khalas, done, yalla, let’s go.

In the arena of the practical test, I sit on a bench and watch people drive cars for ten metres, stop, reverse five, then get out and sign their successful pass sheet. My latest escort, Boutros, takes me straight to the signing booth and presents me to its guardian. There is some problem. Pierre must be called. I wait and listen for the tone of the sign-off, which is a now-familiar musical riff of success – OK, tayeb, yalla. Eh, tayeb. OK, yallabye. Notes change hands, bored officials wave you on. Boutros has been briefed, and drives me all the way to Mansourieh on the boss’s orders. Are you married? He asks. How long will you stay in Lebanon? You should get a Lebanese boyfriend, then you would learn Arabic very quickly.

Despite my nerves, none of this surprises me in the slightest. As far as Lebanon is concerned, and once I have paid the wasta at my end, I am ready to drive. The whole licence and registration process will cost me about five hundred pounds.

I am only half an hour late for the studio, where it turns out I have about two lines to record. I spend the rest of the afternoon watching Wes Anderson films on James’s laptop while our supervisor Nancy puts on makeup and discusses her new boyfriend, a Lebanese businessman working in Nigeria who she met on Facebook.

This is Lebanon. Happy driving.

Sahlab nights in Beyrouth

Arum did it at dinner the other night; she was showing us drawings from her diary, all written in Korean, but peppered with reminders in English – phrases like “positive mental attitude”. I'd always thought she was a philosophical sort of person, not given to unhealthy introspection – this is the girl, after all, who happily got herself from Istanbul to Tehran to Lebanon overland, alone. But suddenly there we were – three bright, interested girls who had spent our days in Hezbollah-controlled Roman ruins or at era-defining demonstrations, who had upped sticks from home for challenge and adventure, all too easily slipping into talk of what we lack, how we feel we are failing ourselves, and how we don't understand what we are doing wrong.

Who are we, the single girls of Beyrouth? We're not on our gap years any more, yet we've turned things upside down to be somewhere other than our homelands. We aren't here for money or for love, and yet we wouldn't mind either and aren't quite sure why they aren't easier to come by. We are presentable, well-qualified, engaged, and prepared to work like dogs for the right job. And there's the key – we will compromise on everything but watching our youth disappear down a hole of pointless paper-pushing and cultural stagnation. Or, anyway, that's what we're trying to avoid, but are strangely surprised to find that simply moving countries wasn’t enough.

Dina hates her job, should be earning twice as much as she is, and has started reading self-help books. I hate mine when I can be bothered, and suffer great debilitating waves of inadequacy and stress. Arum came from Syria reeling from an overdose of Arab culture only to find it lacking in Lebanon, apart from attitudes to her race, and is having to leave and deal with the return to her family's expectations of her in South Korea. By no means exceptional problems – life, just in another place. And we didn't expect things to be easy, in fact we came here to make them more difficult – but we find ourselves seeking solace in the very smallest achievements, and wondering why people assume we're fine all the time, that we're strong. Because it isn't how we see ourselves, and it isn't how we feel. More often than not we are to be found huddled round mugs of sahlab* prior to bed at 10pm rather than out experiencing the Hoxton crowd in the Middle East, a scene we despise and slightly envy at the same time.

So we go on, wondering if this is all there is and if we ask too much to want things to be better, if it's us or Lebanon or life. For now it is worth it, if only because we are of the peculiar persuasion that has to travel – but like everyone, we do wonder.

* A hot milky drink in roughly the same family as Horlicks.

February 14

Valentine's day in Beyrouth. Red balloons mushroom poisonously from the door of every florist's, and furry red teddy bears cluster in malevolent heart-clasping covens on the lintels of novelty shops. But there is strong competition for billboard dominance across the country, even against the brisk Valentine's trade in perfume and holidays, in this land with its unbridled adoration for kitsch and romance. Whirled about with the colours of Lebanon, the smiling monobrowed face of assassinated ex-President Rafik Hariri, shown in memorial black and white, gazes down at the land he tried to lead from thousands of giant posters across the country. Whatever his manifest faults, he sought to make Lebanon prosper, and believed in making a stand for its independence against Syria, an enterprise that probably led directly to his death by a thousand kilos of TNT on 14 February 2005. Outrage at the killing was the straw that broke the camel's back of Lebanon's post-war tolerance of an outside regime for the sake of peace. The Cedar Revolution grew out of this outrage, with hundreds of thousands gathering on the streets in an unprecedented show of Middle Eastern people power to demand the end of Syrian dominance, the departure of its mukhabarat spy networks, and the establishment of an international tribunal to investigate the murder of Hariri. The movement today is represented by the March 14 coalition in government.* Pro-Syrian supporters marched as well (today the March 8 coalition, largely defined by its orientation around Hezbollah), but in the end Lebanon got its sovereignty, at least on the surface, and without the use of military force, that its state could anyway never have marshalled against far more powerful Syria and its allies.

In the weeks leading up to the fifth anniversary of the assassination, Hariri's legacy has been fully Lebanized. The tribunal is pathetically stalled, Hariri Junior (now Prime Minister, though without much glory) has just got back from a fence-building trip to Damascus, and instead of a people's movement the party-sponsored billboards advertise the time and place of the gathering with corporate efficiency. Electronic advertisement screens in Martyr's Square layer the business entrepreneur Hariri's face with advertisements for imported luxury goods with a truly Lebanese flair for following an idea to its extremes: Bennetton, YSL, Hariri. H&M, La Senza, Hariri. The Revolution.

As well as Hariri on his own, there are also thousands of posters in the same colours of six “martyred” politicians, who have all in death lent their support to the visions of their successors. There is something terribly comical about the ranks of besuited self-importance and patrician expressions – look how many of our leaders we have killed! This means something that we can be proud of, that we should support! In the evenings after dark, you can walk the flyover joining Achrafieh with Hamra and look down on the Centre Ville, all in darkness but for Hariri's mosque and his face floodlit at ten different prime vantage points across several miles, glowing with incomprehensible significance, clean points of light that stand out from the shadowy city. Somehow, it doesn't feel real.

Zoukian expressions of apathy (I would NEVER go! Why would I? Why do you waste your time with politics? People just go there to have a day out. You can watch it on TV!) are not surprising, but more thoughtful responses can be found elsewhere. A friends who happens to be a Sunni Muslim reacts with horror to the idea that she might go. I don't believe in what they're doing, and I wouldn't want to increase the numbers. Brought up in Manchester, she hates the idea that people expect her to be a March 14 supporter simply because Hariri was a Sunni. After a Time Out interview, a gentle book club member shakes his head at cars full of pre-anniversary Future Movement supporters roaring past, blue flags with white stars fluttering from their windows (Rafik Hariri's party). You talk about a people's movement, but this is something united for a common goal – in Lebanon, it can never be. For a while maybe you have the idea of it, but in the end, people here have strong religious beliefs, and they will return to them. The strength of these beliefs is apparent in the reactions of yet others to news of the demonstration, even when they too marched in 2005. Oh, are they still doing that? It's all the right-wing Christians now.

The day before the demonstration, I walk through Martyr's Square. Podiums and loudspeakers and security, and tottering ranks of innumerable white chairs. This is a political rally, not an independence movement. Hariri's tomb is buzzing with important-looking figures and has a whole new layer of flower-ringed portraits of ever more preposterous size and impossibly saccharine colour schemes. For some reason, there is also a contingent of Armenian scouts with trombones and neckerchiefs and flags marked 1887. I walk away full of familiar half-comprehension; this is the untidy jigsaw of the landscape of Beyrouth, and I too am part of it, pale and diffident and confused but trying to understand, without much conviction that understanding is worthy or achievable.

So perhaps the Hariri phenomenon was something different, and perhaps it ended up a lot the same in the end, in its absorption into all Lebanon's other problems. But it was Hariri who occupied my MSc thesis, and it is through the prism of those months of reading that I learned to look at Lebanon. So on February 14, post-revolutionary lack of ardour notwithstanding, I shake off my Sunday morning hangover and emerge into the uncomfortable sunshine to roads in Zouk heaving with Lebanese Forces** cavalcades. The roads ululate with the tune the party's supporters hammer out on their car horns – perhaps I have been reading too much Fisk, but when I hear it all I can think of is bigotry and murder, and my skin crawls. As the bus take me towards town, the autostrade is lined with picnicking families hung about with LF flags. Everything is jammed and closed from Dora onwards, so I walk to Beyrouth down the main road, rather than my usual route through Bourj Hammoud. The sandwich-sellers are here from Trablous in the Muslim North, bearded men with metal carts where they grill sesame flatbreads with halloum under striped umbrellas. The roads are quiet with hundreds of people walking, and I am left in comparative peace, almost the only foreigner I see. What there are many of, however, are young Phalangists. The Kataeb party (“Phalange” in Arabic) is a prominent member of the March 14 alliance, and their leader Amine Gemayel will speak at the rally today. He is the brother of assassinated Bashir Gemayel, whose killing in 1982 triggered the Sabra & Chatila massacres in Beyrouth’s Palestinian camps. Old Pierre Gemayel, their father, based his party's vision on admiration for Hitler’s brownshirts as observed during the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. This was only an aesthetic preference, they argue today. Their Wikipedia page states that they were only Nazis when absolutely necessary. As I walk past people my age carrying flags with the triangular Kataeb cedar logo, I realise how little understand these movements, and how little it will ever be in my power to. I am not a flag-carrier, or a strong believer, and the young Phalangists just make me feel ill and tired.

I enter Martyr’s square by the entrance next to the Kataeb headquarters, hung with a thirty-foot photo of the latest Gemayel to meet an unpleasant end – Pierre Amine in 2006. The square is heaving, and people wander to and fro or sit about in the sun smoking narghile, babies on their knees. Phones cut out and it takes me nearly an hour to locate Dina. People are sitting on top of traffic lights, on billboards, swinging from tall wire fences. Voices roar from the loudspeakers and I catch the predictable words – Syria, Lebanon, Lebanon is Arab, Lebanon is one, Hariri, Hariri, Hariri. Translations I read later don’t add much. I can see the big names via the screens as they speak – Amine Gemayel, Fouad Siniora, Saad Hariri, Samir Gea’Gea – the bread and butter of my understanding, but I can’t locate their figures beyond the crowds.

Dina and I take it all in for a while. A good 80% of the several thousand people in the square seem to be there as Lebanese Forces or Kataeb supporters, while the rest carry Future Movement or Lebanese national flags. Five years after the event and with March 14 at least superficially in power, the total absence of a March 8 presence shows how cruelly and fundamentally Lebanon is still divided. Each movement becomes a cariacature of itself, and while the leaders grit their teeth and shake hands for the time being, the motley barely-ex-militias that make up the coalitions harden and recruit and continue as they ever have, defining themselves by their religion as they choose, and as the state still divides and classifies them.

We stupidly try and cross the square at its busiest point, and get hemmed in by people cramming against the VIP area barriers. It is unpleasantly hot, and I suddenly realise that Dina and I have been encircled by a group of men, who stare straight ahead and close shoulders while their hands grasp at us. I turn and shout and they look all innocent. Desperate elbows and aggressive pushing are required to let us walk away, and I do not have the words or the presence of mind to express my disgust – and anyway, to whom? The male Lebanese security guards? We should have known better.

Edging through the crowds, I look up and see airy flocks of helium balloons in the Lebanese colours, floating away on the wind. Through a clearer patch of square, a fat young man in military fatigues runs, grasping the pole of a vast Lebanese Forces flag that has been altered for the preferences of his sub-faction – it is black, with a skull incorporated into the design. It ripples dramatically in his wake, and he seems aware of the arresting image he makes.

Later, we go to Hamra for coffee and computers and then dinner, in a world away where American students talk about how they saw the rally on TV. In the days after, the media that I can follow is indifferent in its assessment of the day, and all the published photos seem to have caught only pockets of demonstrators waving or wearing straightforward Lebanese flags and carrying posters of Hariri. I saw only unpleasant far-right parties and a message of independence broken and distorted – but then, I was not there in 2005. Why are people not more afraid for Lebanon – am I still too new, or are they jaded and comforted by the recent comparative peace? Is my perspective skewed because of the area where I live and the patterns I think I see? Or are Beyrouthian journalists equally compromised by their cosmopolitan lifestyles in easygoing Hamra? Perhaps I am reading too much into things, or perhaps they are neglecting internal conflicts while the external threats lie temporarily low. I still don’t know enough, it’s too big, too complicated, though also nothing to the import of other countries in the Middle East. Where do you start, when do you give up, and how can we ever speak of these things with any confidence?

* The original Cedar Revolution protests took place a month after Hariri's death; February 14 as a memorial day and associated independence movement came in 2006. March 14 is made up of assorted parties, mainly Christian and Sunni Muslim, but predictably the membership and rhetoric chops and changes according to the regional and domestic situation.

** A right-wing, largely Maronite Christian party, whose headquarters are just up the road from Librarie du Liban. Like most groups in Lebanon, they have a deeply unpleasant civil war history, and the leaders from that era still hold the positions of power. Their flag is a cedar tree in a circle in the Lebanese colours, and their cross a simple double outline with sharp points.

Laqlouq

Such a small country, Lebanon, and so troubled, and perhaps understandably tending to conspiracy theories. Given the popularity of these theories, it is mildly surprising that the people have not attributed the travails of their ski industry this season to anything more sinister than unfortunate weather patterns. On other topics, the current favourite circling the office is the idea that the sorry passenger plane which fell into the sea in flames last month was the victim of a renegade Shi’ite faction, who apparently have nothing better to do with their time than aim at Boeings full of Ethiopians in the middle of a thunderstorm. Cautious and sensitively phrased skepticism (Bollocks!) is met with a generous effort to enlighten the innocent foreigner. Eh bas anjad ya Ellen, if it was just one side saying it then maybe it would not be true, but everyone is saying it, really, from every side. Perhaps the newly discovered black box will settle the question. In the meantime, photos of grinning schoolchildren throwing flowers insincerely into the Mediterranean proliferate on the Internet; vivid orange gerberas against dark waves and cold sands. A cartoon is censored from the press that shows a Lebanese lady telling her friend how news of the crash reduced her maid to tears:

Why should she care, if she’s Filipina?

It turns out I was taken in – she’s not Filipina after all, but Ethiopian!

The horror! What will you do, get rid of her?

No, don’t worry, I just lowered her salary from a Filipina to an Ethiopian one.

But anyway, for now, the snow is here, even if a couple of months late. Long tired of the effusions of snowbound Brits that blend so rapidly into sour and then hysterical complaints, I am falling over myself to head as far as possible into the mountains and to taste at last the fresh winter air. The troops are marshaled, the expedition booked, the warm bed left at an ungodly Sunday morning hour. Now is the time to turn your eyes back on Lebanon from its peaks, while the whiteness lends a miraculous beauty to the ravaged hills, and distance generously distils the coast from calcified ridges of smoke and concrete into nothing more the gentle curve of a hand through the sand at the water’s edge; a momentary cupping of the blue and infinitesimal moulding of the shore.

Such a small country, Lebanon, and so troubled, from the maps always seeming to be shouldered into the sea by its neighbours. Beyond the hazy rim of its sea coast the land is all earth and rock flung up into tense peaks and valleys, that only calm themselves when they collapse into the plains of Damascus. The country is permanently ridged like the back of a snarling dog, a terrier holding clumsy bloodhounds at bay. And so, this Sunday, from the Valley of the Dog (or Wolf), we rise along the spines of the hills, fold on bare and unbeautiful fold, until the hasty squares of houses that have destroyed the beauty they set out to exploit* are sensibly covered with several feet of glorious white, and our breath plumes in the air. In Laqlouq, with disappointingly Early Learning Centre-esque snowshoes^§ in jaunty bright plastics strapped to our feet, the blinding light and flawless whiteness beckon us irresistibly into the hills.

And this is the way to be, surely, when trudging along the edges of frozen lakes and up the ridges and along the sides of things, all swoops and arches and rearing crests, gives way to the view back along the great sweeping bowl of the valley and to the haughty peaks beyond. Nothing has tracked here today but things with fur and whiskers, that have left hysterical lines of single-minded paw prints behind them. Sometimes they trail across great blank expanses towards the cliffs, as if Lebanon had a visiting population of suicidal lemmings, here to experience death in the snows.

How to speak of these days but with big, clumsy, obvious words, that say nothing and yet everything, because this is the simplest and most dramatic landscape, the mountain stage cloaked and cleaned into a temporary parallel world. It is very big, and very white, and very bright, beneath a Disney bluebird sky.

Here and there, a talon of rusty metal or curve of black plastic pipe like the hump of an ice-age serpent hints at the landscape beneath, reminding us that these hills have a more practical everyday reality. After all, we are walking through commercial man-made orchards, and this is Lebanon – if you can’t build on it, put a crucifix on it, so that not a single inch of this land shall be left untouched by the absurdity of men.

The trudging changes its tune as the trail we create on the sparkling surface turns downhill, and we shuffle and slide with a little more brio along the flank of the valley, edging along icy falling water and guarded by brittle ranks of icicles suspended from the stepped and crumbling slopes. If you fall behind the group for a while and still the squeaking of your shoes against the snow, you can find the silence that seems impossible anywhere else in Lebanon. Pause for a moment and let the wind carry you away a little, over a slumbering shoulder of the beast of the hill, to where nothing mutters or stirs but the beating of your own heart. This could be the frozen land of an oriental Snow Queen, vain and terrible. But as in all good stories, the hardy juniper trees show dark and strong even far away above, the wild roses are heavy with dark red hips and shy with nudging buds, and the black skeleton orchards of apple and pear sleep in tidy lines on the valley floor that promise fruitfulness and colour, come a different season.

The descent from Laqlouq is as it ever is from the worlds away that Lebanon stores for you, stores it does not do to forget. The air thickens with pollution, the lights grow more garish, concrete noses the snow away like a blind and ugly beast snouting through the hills. Tomorrow looms. Days afterwards, climbing another unbearable stretch of dust-fogged tarmac in Mansourieh, I glimpse pale cyclamens clustering together in teardrops of faintest lilac beneath a clawed-away hunk of cliff, banked about with empty water bottles and otherwise unidentifiable litter. For a moment, distant voices seem to chime through the ponderous white noise of the cars, singing of a lost world, innumerable lost years, and of a thousand lost mountainsides that are never cloaked with snow, that are never allowed to forget, even for a short season.

* Thubron again. (I am obsessed. He is particularly amusing on the topic of monks with beards.)

^§ They still call them raquettes, but I had been imagining something rather more rustic in wood and leather, so the disappointment was probably just as well.

Batroun

What to do, on a late January Sunday when you wake up and the skies are all light and gold and sunshine glancing off the surface of the water? Unwritten letters, unlearnt vocabulary, plans unplanned can gather dust, today. Step out, instead, into the palm of the sun's hand, and smell the sea on the wind. Today the coast beckons from under its concrete casing and promises to remember its sorcery for you, if only for today.

And in Batroun, today, just beyond the first checkpoint on your way North and where in summer the streets would crawl with day trippers and the souq's vendors, there are closed shutters and surprised glances at the presence of a couple of unseasonal foreigners. So we can take our time, unhurriedly, to clamber around abandoned foursquare Ottoman mansions, still beautiful under their abandonment. The trees in their gardens are heavy with bitter tangerines and oranges, and the sun warms the dark leaves with glowing points of light and the scent of forgotten dreams, forgotten days. In the old town, we can stand and inhale the first briny fingers of the sea's breath, mixed with the meat and mint and spices that families are grilling outdoors on their verandas, under impossibly idyllic arches grown about with tiny blooms as if the Ottomans had scattered jewels across the city as well as stones. We can bask in the uneven walls and blistered wooden shutters, in stairways built on the outsides of houses, in the plants growing generously out from between the bricks, in dozing cats and tiny bell towers, in a world away.

Around and along and down the steps to the sea, to where the rock of the coast, as harsh and pockmarked as history itself, has yielded to thousands of years and untold myriads of waves to form a bold bite of sea wall that the Phoenicians only needed to refine to form their harbour. Here, today, the sun is blinding behind the black mass and we meander happily around turquoise pools and sit up on the wall, where the waves break in incandescent efflorescences of foam. These are long, quiet hours, hours to be a wind-whipped shadow passing along the rocks while the light scintillates with the sea and clouds billow past unconcernedly.

Later, on the way to find pastries with lahme and zaatar, a carving on a wall reminds you of what Lebanon can be, and you can never really be at peace, even in Batroun.

In the days after there will be work and wondering, wondering why you are always fighting. There will be a sudden fear of loss that you had not foreseen, because somehow you have remained blindly your father's child, despite everything. But today, with your visa in your pocket and time enough on your hands, today is a day to be grateful, to be surprised, to dance on the wall by the sea and to be lifted by the wind.

The Jews of Beyrouth

These are the hills of Adonis,* and his valley runs inland just a few kilometres north from the bays where Zouk and its neighbours have hunkered down in prejudice and concrete, silting up in banks of billboards and high-rises where the blood-red anenomes used to flower. Long before the Greeks or even the Phoenicians raised his story to the status of classical legend, people here lived with the spirit of the beautiful boy who returned in spring from the dark lands, bringing warmth and colour. His name was Tammuz, which today is the Arabic name for July. Today, looking out on the endless rain and learning the season's bone-aching cold, watching videos of rescue workers staring gloomily into the icy sea for the remains of the Ethiopian Airlines flight, you can see why they yearned for him so deeply. But with the hills so far away and the days so grey, it is easy to feel, as one author did, that the day-to-day grind and savage advance of history constitute a denial of the resurrection that once obsessed this land.**

On these grey days, rainy days, days of waiting, the best thing to do seems to be to go to the Armenian quarter and buy a vast white umbrella adorned with black polka dots, and then to don a black coat and navy wellington boots and set forth in search of the Beyrouth that can only be found by sarha – by wandering at will. These are days for discovering the borough of Getawi, with its carved stairways and balusters mounting up and up the hills towards the sky. Here there are pale walls grown about with bright flowers, trees heavy with oranges, and quiet verandas open to the day. At the base of the hill where the stairs begin, the Armenians have spread out from Bourj Hammoud and the walls are scrawled with a date in rough and angry paint – 1887. The new generations are well schooled in keeping alive the pain of over a hundred years ago, when they were driven here by the Turks. But a fat old woman in a headscarf resting on a corner smiles at me, and gurgles ahla, habibte with real warmth. What disconcerts more than all the rest is that, as a visitor from Zouk, I find myself thrown by the naturalness of this welcome and cannot remember the response (ahlan fik). I suddenly have the feeling that I am in another Lebanon altogether, one that still hovers beyond my reach.

These, then, are lonely days, days for tracing out a lost community, Lebanon's eighteenth sect. The Jews have lived on these lands as long as anyone, and were – are – quite as Lebanese as any Maronite, Sunni, Orthodox, Shia or Druze. They were as integral part of the country as it is possible to be here, and Lebanon is the only Arab country where the Jewish community increased in size after 1948. Attempts by Zionists to attract funds and recruits were met with closed doors. 25,000 Jews lived here around this time, and they looked at Israel with as much trepidation as the rest of their countrymen.

But history does not always allow such choices to be sustained. Even after the first spark of Lebanese civil war in 1958 the Jewish community held strong, but from 1975 onwards they started to trickle away, though rarely to Israel and rather, like true Lebanese, to America and to France. After 1982 they could barely stay. Eleven Lebanese Jewish officials were kidnapped and murdered after the Israeli invasion, and as the resistance movements grew the stories of persecution of Jews rang out wearily in their familiarity; businesses failing, children kept at home, publications shut down, murders, threats, fear. Today, the Jews are but a rumour and a shadow. Maybe one hundred, maybe sixty, and one red-haired old lady, often sought out by journalists, still clinging on defiantly and accompanied by innumerable cats in the remains of her house in what used to be known as Wadi Yehud – the Valley of the Jews – in central Beyrouth, which is now scheduled for destruction and incorporation into the developers’ postwar dream of the capital.

Outside of Beyrouth, a boarded-up synagogue in Deir al-Qamar, a rubbished cemetery in Saida, and the vicious border just a few hundred miles south are all that is left. But one Saturday, in the rain, I can walk up the busy road that leads to the French Embassy, Sécurité Générale and the National Museum, and pause outside the abandoned Beth Elamen cemetery, still untouched and perhaps respected. During the civil war, this road was the Green Line that divided Christian East and Muslim West Beyrouth, where for fifteen years nothing but bullets flew between the burgeoning greenery that sprang up on a road both feared and fearful. Three cemeteries lie in a row on the right hand side, behind a high wall that shields them from the passing cars. The iron rails in the stone gateway at the entrance to the Jewish graves are chained and locked beneath carved Hebrew words that are distorted by bullet holes. I peer through them and upwards, over worn steps slicked with rain, past grilles in the wall shaped into the Star of David, to the distant marble squares beyond. The view stops here – these gates will not be opened. But around me lie a hundred small wastelands and building sites in between the hotels and apartment blocks – surely this can't be the only way in? So I wander along the blind graveyard wall, trying to find a different way around. Passing plaques that announce the resting places of French soldiers from the first world war and then Lebanese Chritians, I find a narrow alleyway that leads behind the wall. Why not?

But there is no way around – instead, a dark, wet collection of shacks, silent and deserted in the rain, are huddled beyond the walls and out of sight of the busy road. It is suddenly, eerily quiet, and the daylight hushed and shadowed. I can hear the rain pattering on unnervingly flourishing leaves that lean out of empty windows and blossom in doorways. I edge further in, as the shacks are clearly in use, but no-one stirs. Unidentifiable fruit casings hang from a washing line like dead moles on a farmer’s fence, and half-open doorways hint at lives that belie the suspicion that this is a haunt of refugees; an all-too-familiar Gemayel^§ poster decorates one wall, a spray-painted cross another. These are the hearts and minds of East Beyrouth, raw and desolate and living in extreme poverty. I back out to the main road, unnerved.

Back, then, along the road, and I scramble up along the graveyard wall at the other end. A narrow gap has been left between it and the adjacent shopping mall, that is filled with builders' rubble. I am, probably, quite mad. But still, when I fall out into a car park at the top of the passage, I can see the graves over a lower wall, tumbled across the wasteland beyond. I follow the wall up and around to where it becomes a different clump of buildings, then barbed wire, then another wasteland. I clamber through this, trying to push the words unexploded ordnance out of my head. Twenty years since the end of the civil war, and grasses tall and small trees retain their claim here behind the graveyards, twisted and bent over in supplication to who knows what. And then, I am at the top of the far wall of the graveyard, looking down into a sea of broken and blackened marble. Preparing to slither down, I find a conveniently placed metal ladder propped just where it is needed. Is it too much to imagine the last Jews of Lebanon climbing back to their dead, out of reach of prying eyes?

I wander the stones, feeling inappropriate under my jaunty umbrella. What strikes me most of all is not the quiet and beautiful graves that lie shattered and pockmarked and overgrown, but the blank eyes of the apartment blocks that crowd around and about the walls. Their daily view is of the cemetery – who are they that watch the abandoned graves in their midst, and what do they think? If I am seen here, would it matter?

The rain clears as the sun goes in, and as the call of the muezzins swells up and around from mosques across the city, I am standing alone in a ruined Jewish graveyard watching the sun set behind the headstones. It is time to climb back up the wall and to find somewhere warm, somewhere dry, somewhere with light and talk. It will be among people who do not look on these graves and wonder, but who look south with loathing, and whose stories are not of broken marble and rusting ladders but of tanks and massacres and land. All these things are real, and you can touch them, as I ran my hands along the Hebrew carved into the tombstones. The stories are far from done.

The next day, there is another building to go and see, another day of walking through the rain. Past the anaemic city centre reconstruction, along streets so new that they do not yet have houses, through districts so damaged and with such obliterating architectural plans imposed on them that they will remain nothing but builder's boards and heaps of earth for some time to come. In the middle of all this stands one building that has been preserved from the wholesale leveling of history. Built in 1925, the Maghen Abraham synagogue is large and square and simple, now freshly painted an elegant grey blue. But its Torah scrolls were sent abroad in 1976, and though at one point it was guarded by the Phalangists,^{^} members of the PLO stood outside it in 1982 and so it was bombed by its own Israeli sons and daughters. For years, like so much of the rest of the city, it lay in overgrown ruins while its community blew away like ashes on the wind. But with the Hariri years came investment and grand words of preservation, so now it is cluttered with scaffolding and cement mixers. I already know that I cannot take photos of the outside (such is the culture of suspicion and control), but it seems deserted anyway. The windows are empty spaces for the rain to wash through, and inside it is an empty, airy grey room leading to the altar at the far end, in front of which the clothes of the builders are strung drying from the scaffolding. I wander around slightly nervously, as I can hear the humming and the busy paintbrush of a worker far above me in the rafters. Anyway, there is little here to love; like the rest of Solidere's constructions projects, all character seems to be being sandpapered away so that everything is unnaturally harmonious, a larger than life doll's house to suit all tastes, and none. I slip out again, but am caught in the act of stowing my camera and get shouted at in harsh Syrian Arabic until I stop and explain myself. I feign ignorance and even less language ability than I possess and eventually they give up, but it leaves a bad taste in the mouth, and in the heart.

Afterwards, I walk to Hamra for an exhibition of photos of an abandoned railway station in Trablous. It used to be the final stopping point of the Orient Express but now, like the rest of the country's defunct train and tram networks, lies neglected and damaged. Everywhere wreckage, everywhere loss, everywhere anger and confusion. But on the way home, as the rain thickens into thunder and lightning and the water running along the street swells about my ankles, I pass a comically capacious bus stop (since the concept of waiting in an assigned place has no application whatsoever in the daily life of Beyrouth) under which shelters a stooped old man clutching handfuls of early narcissi. Their scent is so strong and sweet that it infuses swathes of the rain with perfume as it hurls itself along the road and I turn back, unable to resist. He conjures smiles from the depths of his beard and overcharges me with delighted charm.

The scent of the flowers fills the apartment for a week. The scent of spring, the scent of renewal, the scent of hope that will not be extinguished, as long as flowers still bloom somewhere. It cannot be otherwise.

* Plagiarism (highly recommended – the book, not the practice).

** ibid.

^§ The Gemayels are the founding family of the Phalangist party in Lebanon, today the Lebanese Forces (see next note).

^The Lebanese Phalange – amongst whose contemporary adherents I am unlucky enough to live – was, as its name suggests, created out of the admiration of the founder for the Hitler's approach to life. The alliance between the Phalange and Lebanon's Jews, and with Israel, is yet another headache-inducing twist of history.

Home

And, after six months and four days, I make my first phone call to the homeland. Even ten seconds of Ollie squeaking "Hardy Hardy Hardy!" (damn you, lying international calling card) is enough to keep me smiling for the rest of the weekend. I don't miss you yet, home, but I know you're there, and I haven't forgotten what you're worth.

Three houses in Beyrouth

Even more than other cities, with their tidy houses and grand buildings strong and settled, Beyrouth lives and breaths through its walls. Bullet holes, bomb holes, scaffolding against the light and the sky. Sometimes, memory and loss play unregarded in the rubble while the green grows over steadily and the detritus of passers-by silts up, and sometimes just next door a luckier neighbour will be building up new visions in glass and steel. Boarded-up spaces fail to hide the gaping tears in entire districts – the fronts of buildings with nothing behind them, rooms with no ceilings, the rain soaking through empty windows, huge apartment blocks in fashionable quarters glowering and mouldering unattended. Elsewhere, mobile concrete barriers jar against the polished new city centre, and there are huge, solid, rapidly-reconstructed governmental walls whose concrete oozes corruption and ineptitude. Elsewhere again, there are the fragile walls of the refugee camps, permanently impermanent, that constantly leak pain and danger. But the city's walls are not just absences – eyes quickly become trained to scan for graffiti and posters that plug online or official information gaps – what's going on, who owns this area, what's showing, what's the trend? Graffiti-ed logos, flags or posters mark out the sectarian preferences of an area's residents, and boards lining Hamra, walls in Gemmayzeh and a hundred other places have grown peeling, blistered skins of posters and fliers that slough off incompletely from week to week, building up the heavy paper scars of a city constantly in motion.

Built over layer upon layer of fleeting populace and empire, Beyrouth today continues in the tradition of subjugation and assimilation. The buildings themselves, the shape of the city, is in bewildering and constant migration and metamorphosis, its necessity and strength; nothing is guaranteed, and maps and pictures are almost instantaneously inaccurate. Since the war, when blocks of sky appeared or disappeared on the whim of a bomb, the cocoon of time suspended has broken open and liberated a thousand avaricious butterflies of architectural visions. The city's bookshops are full of sepia postcards of the tourist sights from the 1920s to the 1950s – stand in Martyr's Square today with one of these in your hand and a still from a 1994 film, Lebanon: Bits and Pieces in your head. Only the Martyr's memorial is a constant, and the square's slight slope. The tramway, the bus station, any recognisable buildings, the luxuriant palm trees of the nostalgia postcard are long gone. On the right, now, is a Virgin Megastore and a Dunkin' Donuts, and ahead the vast, unnaturally undamaged beauty of Rafiq Hariri's mosque, so new and so significant. The tomb of the mosque's assassinated founder lies along its flank, a white-tented complex that, like the rest of the square, insults and goads in its temporary ugliness, all clattered about with the ubiquitous metal crowd control barriers manned by indolent uniformed figures. A rough-and-ready car park and a charmless exhibition hall with the air of a giant Portaloo dominate the rest of the plaza's several hundred square metres. Towards the bottom of the square and the port are the last boarded-off remains that recall the film still of postwar destruction. Then, the square was burned and blackened and blasted, sectarian gunfire and Israeli and Syrian bombs leaving nothing but ragged empty craters of buildings and some hard-worn residents determined to stand their ground no matter what. Now, some stumps of buildings are disappearing under a grassy layer of neglect as they await attention from the developers.

Walk to the memorial. The revolutionary figures, put in place to mark independence from France in 1943, are still stretching out their metal arms. They remained immobile beneath fifteen years' worth of bullets, which have left them punctured and scarred in the middle of a concrete skate park.

Three houses, then, and three small, random corners of the never-ending architectural drama of Beyrouth. Why not?

***

Approaching Martyr's Square from Dora one average damp Saturday afternoon before Christmas, the serried ranks of poinsettias and scent from tubs of Norwegian pines outside the fancier flower shops reminded me of home. The walk takes you through Gemmayzeh, along a rue a caractère traditionnel – once a haunt of refugee Armenians, now that of disgruntled residents trying to avoid a fashionable influx of youthful drinkers and clubbers. In the daytime, looking down along its balconies and beveled rooftops, it is a quiet and pretty street with a view to the grand mosque at the end. The houses here have not yet been touched by the reformist visions of the developers in neighbouring Achrafiyeh or the Saifi quarter and so, being battered and slightly unkempt, are far more beautiful. By chance, this day, one of the peeling blue-painted wooden doors leading to an inner stairway stands open. I hesitate on the threshold, but the stairs are worn stone lined with pots of neglected geraniums, and they beckon inside irresistibly. So I slip through this inadvertent opening, to world behind the street that makes you pause in the silence and breathe quietly for long moments. Follow the stone banisters up and around, and you come to a dim corridor while the stairs wind on upwards to your left. There are no residents here to chase you out with a raised eyebrow or a broom. The corridor and the rooms beyond it are in a state of advanced decay, harmonising gently with the drifts of deliquescent leaves spread across floors and windowsills. Stone arches, their edges softened and pockmarked by water and wear and the years, open onto the remains of an inner garden. The shadows of paths and borders linger, but really it is a wreck beneath its central palm tree, and the only guardians are a pair of pigeons who stir and rustle in the leaves in a half-hearted burlesque of concern at the intruder.

The building is huge, and empty, and magical and sad. Take a seat on one of the neglected stairs and watch for a while, wondering how it came to be, and what will happen next, and how you can be a part of it.

***

A Sunday, another day, another year. The sun is out and Downtown is busier than I have ever see it. Despite the gun-swinging soldiers, morose or lascivious, that direct you around the barriers at every entrance to the central Place de l'Etoile and that are always a reminder of the eternally fragile security, families are out to enjoy themselves and it feels like there is a community here. Until now, this possibility had evaporated between Israeli bombs, Hezbollah sit-ins and the peculiarly soulless reconstruction project of the area, which left it a shiny Disneyland with designer shops but no galleries or theatres, Saudi tourists but no street vendors, Asian nannies following the families about but no women in the parliament building. But anyway, for now, there is a superficially functioning national unity government, and violence is confined to isolated incidents and the eternal rumours of war. This is as good as it has been for a long time.

One evening weeks before, in the dark, Fatima and I were lost on the hill behind the Grand Serail. In a pool of yellow light we came across an ornate gate with a well-kept garden tantalisingly visible beyond, here in the heart of Beyrouth where public space rarely includes more than six square feet of continuous greenery. A brass plaque on one pillar of the gate suggested opening times. So here we are, some Sunday later, getting happily lost among palms and fountains and nameless plants, among columns and stone figures. In the centre of the garden is a florid, iced cupcake of a mansion, the ward since 1911 of a talented if clearly deranged antiques collector.* Inside, you become instantly pale and wan against an explosion of of opulent Orientalist magnificence. Skimming across lozenge-patterned floors, you slide past endlessly intricate panelled and tiled walls that enclose tables with burgeoning loads of pink glass candlesticks and blood red wine glasses, cabinets overflowing with diamonds, walls of ancient books or hung with silver-filigreed shotguns, all glistening beneath windows and skylights of jewel-coloured glass. We imagine how it must have been when occupied, with the owner wandering past all this in pyjamas and carrying cups of tea. We wonder how it apparently escaped bombardment, and how the necklace worn by Elizabeth II at her wedding in 1947 ended up here in Beyrouth, in the same room as the world's most expensive diamond-encrusted bra. Beyrouth knows so many things, most of which you can never discover, but those that you do happen upon never fail to give pause.

***

Later that afternoon, we are lost again, this time below the Serail, where one's sense of direction is constantly thwarted by the military deciding that this or that street is too important for you to walk down. Unintentionally, then, we end up in what used to be known as Wadi Abu Jamil or Wadi Yehud,** but which in the aftermath of the Jewish exodus and wholescale destruction has become part of the ever-widening district simply known as Solidere, after Rafik Hariri's construction company. The company imposed shares on the area's landowners in lieu of cash compensation for their losses, and is now restoring the Israeli-bombed-out and congregation-less synagogue with self-important care whilst flanking it with glimmering skyscrapers. But we do not go into the synagogue today. Instead, our eyes stray to a gap in the wooden barriers that shield the perfect cobbled street from the surrounding wastelands. Through the gap, instead of your average building site, is a set of roughly excavated classical columns around a number of room spaces across a hundred square metres or so. With their uniform covering of orange-coloured earth and surrounded by the debris of earthworks, these distant remains look slightly unimpressive, despite their mysterious import. They must be stopping work now they have found the ruins, says Florence. Fatima and I raise eyebrows. Such niceties are unlikely to deter Solidere's vision, indeed many remains have been sealed up and built over already with little or no regard for conservation. Of course, the whole of Beyrouth is built on such foundations, and you cannot keep a whole city behind glass. But pause for a moment and look at the ancient house behind the boards. This may be the last time it is open to the air until another war, another recovery lays it bare again – in which case, you cannot wish it.

***

* The Robert Mouawad Private Museum

** The Valley of the Jews

On visas

Almost six months in – still nothing, still something. People keep saying that I am getting the most out of it, but it doesn't feel that way. Still so much to do, still so much left undone. If being constantly exhausted were a sign of living Lebanon to the full, then I would be satisfied. But what exhausts and corrodes is the six-day week of mediocrity and boredom, and the sense of powerlessness. I want to be here, I have no desire to come home. But however much I try to discipline myself, I cannot help but want it to be on different terms, and recently an awareness of the degree to which I am hamstrung by practicalities has crystallised alarmingly. I have a photocopy of my work permit, but have not seen my passport for over two months. Sargon and Sécurité Générale are supposedly locked in a battle of the Titans, but there is still no concrete progress. There will be no more English recruits under these circumstances, and I find myself the unlucky guinea pig of LDL's attempts to convince Hezbollah that my job would not be better suited to a Lebanese. Even if my passport complete with residence permit were to materialise, my living and working here would remain at the discretion of LDL. If I went to work for another company, my legal status would be a grey area until I had gone through the whole process again under the protection of my new employer. As it is, I cannot travel regionally or internationally, I cannot apply for my motorcycle licence, and I look for other jobs without much conviction. Unlike almost every other western woman I have met here, I am not married to a Lebanese, nor have any intention of being so. I start to wonder if a marriage of convenience is such a bad idea after all.

The faintest echo only, of course, of what such systems can do lives, and to entire peoples. I was arrogant enough to move countries and get a job according to some happy accidents of birth; I ask too much, perhaps, to wish for my work to be stimulating, to feel a sense of freedom and of choice. Do I ask too much to spend my days doing something that I find interesting, anywhere in the world? We cannot always simply remind ourselves of those who are worse off, or we would never strive to improve ourselves or our worlds, would never wonder if things could be better. If my papers never come through, what will I do? I do not think I can stay as things are. But how to start over, again, when I am not ready for England, and for now Lebanon is asking what I can hardly bear to give?

Olga

Between Luna Park and the Hôtel Mediterranée, in the dark, on the dusty car-strewn seafront, the ghostly white buildings with their dark windows and awkward palm trees seem to cast a silence over the traffic, which glides past beneath yellow lights. They loom, the buildings, and they glow, and for a moment they seem to wheel about your head, monstrous and weighty. Against the sky, so purplish dark, the ferris wheel in the park behind its chicken wire and peeling signs for popcorn and good times is a clanking metal thing that seems designed to increase the loneliness, rather than to invite cohorts of joyous holidaymakers. It is night, and January, and the hot dog stands are silent, and the sea is black.

Olga looks nothing like her photo; it must have been taken thirty years ago. I try to keep surprise off my face when the stout woman dressed in shriekingly bright, voluminous silks peers round the heavy door. Her eyes under the unnaturally red curls are perplexed and wary, her chin and cheeks collapsing softly into her collar, her lipstick uncertain vermilion. She talks constantly, passionately, while being somehow disconnected. I feel younger than I have in a long time, and even more gauche than usual, perhaps in sympathy.

I have been in the apartment – pale walls, dark wood, plants, graceful florals – before, through her film Maman, le Liban et Moi, which I loved so much that I ended up here with a notebook at the ready and a Friday deadline. So the painting of her mother and the photos and the furniture are strangely familiar, though rumpled slightly under accumulating drifts of the day-to-day that in the film a cheerful housemaid was still present to deal with. While Olga is in the kitchen making tea, I try and choose a chair to sit in, but they all look as if they have been inhabited for some time; the cushions of each are moulded into receive position, and each one is flanked by a small table overflowing with notebooks, papers, ashtrays, CDs and pill packets.

She comes back with the tea, dainty white cups and saucers that balance precariously on top of the debris, and talks. There's not much I can do about the director profile I'm supposed to be capturing; her sentences are too fast and disjointed to quote accurately. Somehow, she ends up talking – almost shouting – about Ataturk. Her Turkish mother gazes down at us from her canvas, feline-eyed, pale-shouldered, barely decent. Erdogan appears on the TV in the background and comes in for his share of abuse. Look at you! An Islamist, but you're wearing a cravat – you will never be able to change the constitution! I can't say much about the Armenians, but this was not like the Holocaust, I do not know if we can call it a genocide. Her phrases are wonderful and terrifying. I catch sight of myself in a mirror, looking scruffy and out of place. Where is Ataturk? Where is De Gaulle? These stupid little men we have in politics today – these supermarket managers. Who is this Putin, this Sarkozy, this Hariri? Men are always going off to war and doing the stupid things they do. They shoot each other in the mountains, and then they kiss and make up. This is how it has always been. I see no hope for Lebanon today. I would support Syria coming in and just controlling everything, for a secular state, but Lebanon will never be secular.

Beyrouth, Paris, Istanbul, Beyrouth again, but not out of choice. My mother and my country were both dying. I am not proud of much for myself, but I stayed with her until the end, as she wished. There is little comfort here for her now – Lebanon is a country of ghosts, and of sadness. For Olga, the ferris wheel does not turn, and the sea no longer enchants.

***

Later, another day, I watch her films again. So beautiful, so angry, so damaged. During the 2006 war, her mother sat curled into a wheelchair at unnatural angles, wrought into frail knots by age and depression. Her eyes watched the camera with the same worried dark wariness as her daughters’ now watch me. Olga has seen far, far more than I will ever see – but perhaps we are both wondering how much more Lebanon will ask of us, how strong we have to be, for how much longer, and how much it is ever in our power to avoid.

En passant

It's all so horribly true, and I'm so tired.

Pigeon Rocks

Warm, darkening evening wind rushes round the end of Hamra Street and picks us up, tumbles of flying hair and scarves in disarray, bowling us towards the headland. It smells of exhaust fumes and Turkish coffee, and sometimes fresh breaths of green from unplanned gardens growing in the spaces where buildings used to be, and only bullet-bitten edges remain. Street cats slip shyly over who knows what scenes of loss, rusting metal and twenty-year-old trees. I had forgotten about playful wind, and fresh green. The sky is dark and orange and pink, and you cannot smell the sea.

And now the Pigeon Rocks arching lumpily in the bay will always taste of jellab, sickly sweet and midnight purple, rosewater and charcoal, almonds floating round the straw, and sound like the castanet cups clinked together by the coffee sellers on Rue Raouché. And Hamra will always be dim lights and smoky bars, and the still warmth after the wind. Afterwards, there is pacing through the back streets of old Beyrouth in the soft grey early hours. These streets are where the schools cluster, closed up now and quiet in the dark, and where the buildings lean whose white paint is peeling around balconies carved out in curlicues, and that face each other over lamp-lit courtyards full of green. They are where dreams live, old dreams, that yet last on, into the daylight.

New Year

Out with the old, out with the old whispers through the hours, as they drizzle away to end a year already full of new starts, new starts seemingly no less fascinating or illusory each time.

At a restaurant in Jeita full of tackily black-clad Lebanese drinking vodka, taking photos of each other and not having conversations, I survey my last evening in 2009 much as I imagine an enthusiastic Lebanese student might do if, on travelling to England after reading Brideshead Revisited, they ended up at a party in a Wetherspoons in Leatherhead or Milton Keynes. Such emptiness is universal, if no less disturbing for being encountered abroad. But there is nothing to do for now but sport my shiny hat, and blow paper trumpets, and let fly party poppers and dance to Lebanese pop tunes, cheap whisky in hand. It is a timely enough reminder of how much there is left to do, and how badly wrong it can go.

***

On New Year’s Day, Callum calls me from Hiroshima. I am reading Palestinian Walks and watching the sun glow pink on the towers outside my window, wondering what it was all like before all the concrete, and whether the Palestinians in Lebanon find any hint in these hills of their lost lands, wondering what it is all worth in a world where these things can happen. Callum is tired of the school year and of the scene in downtown Hiroshima. There is an American teacher at his school who barely speaks Japanese, and whose local wife is not much better at English. We cannot understand the choices that some people make. France, he says. Geneva, Syria, Tokyo, Melbourne. Istanbul, I say. Iran, Yemen, Jordan, Israel, France. We understand each other.

Outside, the sunset deepens to an auspiciously extravagant evening display of cloudily-feathered technicolour, and the bats dip fatly up and down in the wind, as if they too overdid it the night before.

Out with the old, out with the old – we aren’t done yet, we aren’t tired, and we understand each other well enough, for now. Tomorrow, we begin again.