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.