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.