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.