I went to Beirut in June 2010 because my father was dying.
This sentence, palpably illogical—my father was not dying in Beirut—is nonetheless true.
When my father was in the hospital in 2008, after nearly dying from a perforated ulcer, then from MRSA, a super-bug, the doctors said to him, categorically, “You drink, you die.” We all heard them. We talked about it. And for almost two years, he did not drink, and he didn’t die.
And then, early in 2010, in remission from a cancer diagnosed a year before that, he started drinking again. I don’t know whether he died because he drank; or whether he drank because he was sure he was going to die; or because he was afraid to die and wanted to forget about it; or because he just wanted, by then, to die. After all, my mother, who had Lewy body dementia, was slipping quietly away. It is strange to understand that all of these can be true at once. Suffice it to say: he drank; he died.
In late April 2010, my father had a stroke. They realized, once he was in the hospital, that after a respite of ten months his esophageal cancer was back in force. His throat was fully dammed: there was not even room in his gullet for his spit to slip down to his stomach. The oncologist, a bluff fellow of the old school, eminently clubbable, who prided himself on his frankness and resembled British generals in black-and-white war films, with his bow tie and his tidy white mustache—confided, oddly jauntily, in the hallway outside my father’s room some days later, “Within six to eight weeks he’ll be in trouble.”
In between the oncologist’s first prognosis in the corridor of the hospital and my father’s last breath, there was a Bergsonian eternity, moment upon moment upon moment of Being. My father was always intolerant of small talk and banality: he very much wanted time to mean. In this sense, those last three months were very much his time. But inevitably, too, there was stupid time, interspersed between the significant time—time that wouldn’t necessarily, in ordinary circumstances, have been considered stupid, but which, in the context of death, became strangely preposterous. Watching television of course becomes impossible in a crisis. But even the matter of living my own life became largely absurd to me: teaching classes, participating in panel discussions, attending readings—ridiculous. Perhaps ironically, the daily household tasks, when rarely I was at home with my family, seemed immensely precious: making breakfast, folding the children’s clothes, the small connections to the ordinary, a place where we wanted the children at all costs to remain.
Some months before, I had committed to going to teach in Beirut for a fortnight in the second half of June. When the oncologist first gave my father six to eight weeks, it was the beginning of May. Six weeks would coincide almost exactly with my departure for Beirut; eight weeks with my return. I didn’t know what to do, whether to cancel the trip straightaway. Two years before, when my father was so ill, I had canceled everything, stopped my life altogether. Afterward, I came closer to jumping off a bridge than ever before. This time, with this knowledge, it didn’t seem a good idea simply to withdraw.
“Just wait and see,” said my husband, my sister, the doctors. “Just wait and see.”
For some weeks, my father seemed still to be getting better. He had physical rehab sessions and his walking improved. He ate well (they had put in a stent, a wire mesh, as I understood it, not unlike one you might use in gardening, to keep his esophagus open), although he complained of the soft food: pureed meat in gravy, mashed potatoes, pureed carrot. We brought him little things he liked to eat and could manage: chocolate truffles, olives, caviar.
He was on enormous doses of painkillers, and when they were not working well he complained of great pain. But in the time after they kicked in and before he slept, or after he slept, he was utterly himself. We talked about things we could never have discussed before—whether he believed in God and believed in an afterlife; whether he was afraid to die; whether he was happy with his life. We pushed his wheelchair around the lovely gardens of the nursing home, pausing by the stone Buddha, counting rabbits, keeping track of the blooming and wilting of flowers, watching the planes fly overhead. We kept an eye out for the jeweled hummingbirds that hovered over the roses and lilies; we monitored the slow disintegration of the fairy village my children had built out of sticks and leaves in a flower bed one drizzling Saturday. My mother spoke in an awed whisper of the horse-riders who passed at dusk at the edge of the field: it seemed, as crazed hallucinations go, most wonderful.
But as the weeks went by, and my time to leave approached, my father was clearly suffering more. By the end of May, they had stopped his rehabilitation. The stretches when he was awake and not in pain grew shorter; the pain, when it was present, grew more intense. One of the nurses explained that it was as if a digger were scooping away at his insides: an internal excavation. My mother, unable to articulate her terror, grew intensely anxious, a wraith flitting through the corridors of the nursing home whenever I was not there, or my sister was not there, always looking for us, for someone, driving my father crazy. So much fear.
And still I clung to the prospect of Beirut. I was to teach at the American University there, a trip organized by the International Writing Program at Iowa in conjunction with the American University of Beirut (AUB), and with assistance from the State Department. It was the pilot program for a possible regular summer teaching course: only two of us were going, a poet and myself, a fiction writer. In those weeks, as I waited for the details of the trip, I had in my mind the State Department–sponsored visit I’d made to Istanbul several years before—a week of classes and meetings with writers and university professors and students, a trip that offered me the promise of Turkish culture like a glorious flower unfolding, mysterious and immense and amazing. The teeming enormity that is Istanbul and the intensity of my encounters had imparted to that visit a particular aura of necessity. It had seemed important to go to Istanbul; it had seemed important for me to go to Istanbul; it had seemed important for me to go at that time to Istanbul.
Needless to say, Istanbul was also bound up with my father. Istanbul was the first city my father had consciously fallen in love with, as a boy of ten, arriving at its mouth by boat with his family in the middle of the Second World War. My grandfather, who was sentimental, described it as a coup de foudre for his child. My father, who was, if not less sentimental, considerably more reserved, conceded that he had wanted from the first to go back there.
My grandfather was a consular attaché in the French Navy, at that point under orders from Vichy, and so my young father and his younger sister were boarded outside the city at the residence of the Sisters of Our Lady of Sion in Therapia (now Tarabya), where they spent the forty days that their parents remained in Istanbul. My grandparents, briefly childless, inhabited a furnished flat overlooking the Bosporus and engaged in minor derring-do, befriending sub rosa the English envoy to Turkey, a man named Ellerington, who would resurface later in the war in Algiers when they were finally all officially on the same side. My father and aunt were photographed, meanwhile, tiny and lost in the overgrown gardens of the pensionnat in Therapia, where few children remained because it was summertime.
Over those weeks, my father and aunt learned to swim in the Bosporus. The children were tied under the armpits by ropes and dropped into the water by a near-nun (it would seem that the Sisters of Sion were complicatedly nunnish but not fully nuns) in a near-habit who then paraded up and down the jetty holding on to this lead. In this way the children, ostensibly undrownable, swam several lengths without being drawn out into the strait by the swift current to perish at sea. I am not sure whether the swimming mistress held the rope of one child at a time, or of several children at once, like a dog-walker in Central Park.
More than half a century later, my father remembered the beauty of the light on the Bosporus, the precise yet glaucous outlines of the buildings in Sultanahmet in the early day. He had held that beauty in his mind’s eye, in palimpsest—the overlaid and changing memory of all his visits to the city. He returned to Istanbul as a teenager, for a summer, as soon as he was able to travel alone, and had his wallet and passport stolen before ever he arrived at the port—a vanishing which seemed somehow symbolic: to be searching, in the maze of a city, for something essential and irretrievable, for some impossible belonging.
Much later, he learned Turkish and embarked upon a Ph.D. at Harvard on Turkish political parties. He and my mother passed through Istanbul on their way to Ankara, where they lived for six months in the late 1950s in order for him to pursue his research. She, not yet thirty, fresh from Toronto, whose limited travel experience had been entirely in Western Europe, wrote home detailed and emotional letters to her parents, describing what it was like for a young Canadian woman in Ankara in 1959: her indignation when she witnessed a bus driver deliberately running over a dog; the thrill of collecting shards of ancient pottery at a friend’s archaeological dig; her alternating frustration and amusement at the daily struggles to communicate with the housekeeper. She approved of the food, although not as much as my father, who would all his life love this cuisine best of any. He, meanwhile, filled a briefcase with notes in his spiky scrawl, in French and English and Turkish, a briefcase that moldered for many years in the basement of my parents’ house in Canada and which, after his death, we finally threw away.
My father abandoned the Ph.D.—my mother did not ultimately care for life in Ankara; and besides, my father felt that if they wanted to have children, he would need to earn what he called a “proper” living. Instead, as a businessman, he amassed, over fifty years, a scholar’s collection of books on Byzantium, the Ottoman Empire, the Armenians, the Turks, the Middle East more broadly. Upon his death he left behind hundreds of volumes, although how many of them he had read I cannot say. He left, that is to say, substantial traces of the life unlived, of the internal life, which as we all know is both hard to discern and the only one that matters.
And so in this sense it had been a pilgrimage for him, my trip to Istanbul, a trip he was then still well enough to applaud and appreciate. It was my own trip, too, of course—the thrill of the invitation, the excitement of setting one foot in Europe and another in Asia, the little glasses of steaming tea served on the ferries from one side of the strait to another, the view of the passing boats from my hotel room, the joy of wandering the mosques and Topkapi Palace alone on my day off, of negotiating the subway system with my three words of Turkish, of slipping into the plush seats at the cinema alongside a wonderfully cantankerous old American acquaintance from Boston and his deferential Turkish student, to see, of all strange things, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis—no, it was my own trip, too. But its ultimate raison d’être was my father.
So, too, with Beirut. My father, before ever he saw Istanbul, was a child in Beirut. Beirut was his Eden. My grandfather was first posted there as naval attaché to the French Consulate in 1936, before the war. My father was just five years old; my aunt three. They lived in a villa on an ascendance at what was then the edge of town and is now indiscernibly incorporated into the city, a place that has not only vanished but the very notion of which has vanished. It was my grandparents’ first moment of relative prosperity: until then, they had been frankly poor, and only in Beirut did they have the luxury of a housekeeper. There, too, they bought their first furniture, which they would take with them to their next posting, only to have it evaporate a few years later, mid-war, when the ship carrying it belatedly back to Algeria was torpedoed in the Mediterranean.
From Beirut, in 1939, they were dispatched to Salonica (now Thessaloniki). There, they heard word of the French defeat and the armistice. My grandfather—who spent a decade of his retirement writing a fifteen-hundred-page handwritten memoir of his life for his granddaughters, for my sister and myself—records the shame and horror of this development; but he was also a follower of rules and of order, and so rather than rebel, he followed the command that then emanated from Vichy, taking him back to Beirut in 1940, and then on to Istanbul in 1941.
Their Beirut of before the war is recorded in family photographs as a time of outings and parties: the children are captured in elaborate fancy-dress (my father as a court page, in red velveteen bloomers with white and gold brocade, complete with feathered toque; my aunt as a tiny princess, in layers of frothy skirts) among others similarly attired, all staring dumbly off into the corners of the frame, as photographed children are wont to do. The grown-ups are pictured smiling in the streets or at the St. Georges Hotel on the waterfront. Their letters talk of the ease and beauty of it all, the fragrant flowers in the garden, and the warmth of the local welcome. There was food enough for everyone. At the weekends, there were outings to the mountains; throughout, an abundance of fresh oranges and sweet cakes and coffee. And always, the sunshine and their beloved Mediterranean extending outside to the horizon.
The return to Beirut in 1940 was much darker. Food, while plentiful in comparison to other places, was considerably more difficult to procure than it had been. The children suffered from headaches and earaches and colds. Housekeepers were in short supply, as was money to pay for them. My father, now nine and stoical, lived with his family in an apartment on the Rue Achrafieh, at the summit of the hill in what is still today the Christian district. There was then a French air base across the road. The children attended the French elementary school only a few blocks away on the corner of the Rue de Damas—the Road to Damascus—where now there stands a large modern tower containing offices, luxury apartments, and shops.
My father and aunt did not know that times were worse: they knew only that they had returned to their beloved Beirut. All through the rest of the war that was their childhood (by the time it was over my father was almost fourteen, and no longer, strictly speaking, a child), after they were back in Algiers, keeping a chicken in a muck of straw on their tiny balcony for its eggs, until the afternoon it took alarm at the children’s antics and fluttered dizzily down to the courtyard only to be slaughtered by a neighbor for supper; or queueing endlessly for rations to find that the meat—or the rice, or the butter—had run out; or hiding in the air raid shelters overnight in the unsettled stretch when school was canceled for weeks, and my grandmother, in hope of salvaging the year, dragged my father around to tutor after tutor—including, for Latin, an aged monk in grimy attire crammed with his parents into a small and filthy flat on the outskirts of town, with an entire flock of pigeons in cages on the porch; or being shipped out to ancient aunts in the countryside in the hope that there they would have calm and food—throughout all that time, the children spoke of Beirut as the answer. My father wrote more than once in his looped still-childish hand to his father, far away—first in Toulon, then in Dakar, then in Casablanca—that he wished they were back in Beirut. Beirut, where, for the children at least, everything had been good.
None of the complications of war featured in my father’s Beirut—or if they did, they did so only decades later, in retrospect. My father’s Beirut was his happy home, the place he could first clearly remember, where life was comfortable and Mummy and Daddy were happy and school was exciting and everything seemed to lie ahead, and to be possible. The city’s perfection was always a myth, but a myth so perfectly imprinted that when, before I left for my own trip there, I sat next to him in the nursing home and asked him to draw a map of the city as he remembered it, he shifted in his wheelchair and closed his eyes for a moment, and then, having moved the pen back and forth above the page a few times in a hovering motion, drew a perfect outline of the city’s coast and penned in the port, and the St. Georges, and the American University in Ras Beirut, and the Pigeon Rocks offshore, and the Rue de Damas heading inland and uphill—all exactly as they are in life, although, since leaving in 1941, he’d only been back in Beirut for forty-eight hours some thirty years later, just before the civil war, a stopover born of a somewhat garbled matter of lost luggage on the way back from Hong Kong. When I showed the map to my Lebanese architect friend, he marveled at its accuracy.
And then, too, my father put down in the same black ink and of course with the same certainty the souk where they shopped for food, and Tanios, the central department store to which his mother used to take him, and the air base across the road from his apartment building, all of these things gone now, or transformed beyond recognition, and certainly beyond caring, in a city which has suffered and survived so much in the intervening decades.
Yet for as long as he lived they existed, absolutely, in all their vividness, in my father’s memory, and he could indicate them for me on a scrap of lined yellow paper and so insist upon their continued reality, their absolute importance, perfectly preserved in every detail—you do know, don’t you, that in the moment in which he closed his eyes before he drew his map, he knew the quality of the light, the shadows cast by the buildings in the road, the clattering of the cars passing, and the mingling smells in the street of cooking fat and gasoline and dirt, and the ruts in the pavement beneath the thin soles of his shoes, and the fine layer of dust upon those shoes, and the weight of the department store door and the texture of its handle as it swung open, and the warmth, too, of his mother’s hand, cold now for almost thirty years—in the precious box of his childhood mind for seven decades and finally, finally taken out unblemished, at the last, for me.
And now he is dead and these memories have dissolved into the ether and all that remains is the yellow slip of paper folded and already worn in the pocket of my diary, a mere desiccation, a sign stripped of its significance. Everybody thinks this, I know, but I think it now with great confusion: How can it be that all that is in us dies with us? How can it be that those memories, that Beirut—which had existed seventy years in its locked corner of his mind, but not the less real or immediate for that—have now simply ceased to be? I cannot understand it. That we cannot know something unless we are told it: this seems to me the greatest weakness of any supposed divine plan, the primary reason to doubt.
On the afternoon when he drew his map, I asked my father whether he would like me not to go. “All you have to do is say you’d like me to stay,” I said. “And I will stay. I can cancel it.” I had in my head that the trip was important, somehow important for my father and in order that I might bring him some gift—not an actual gift, of course, but an emotional gift—and that this would make his parting easier. I was aware even as I had this idea in my head that it was a silly, novelistic idea and not a true thing; but then, too, on some level, even when he was so sick, I really wanted to go. I had also been with them, my parents, almost all the time for six weeks, and it was hard; and he was in pain and often sour-tempered and she was growing increasingly anxious and I wasn’t sure that I could do this indefinitely, this nursing thing.
My father may have read my mind. He closed his eyes again—the kind of closing that may have been thinking or may have been necessary to ride out a wave of pain, this latter a type of eye-closing I know only from childbirth—and then he said, “No. I think—I think it’s . . . important that you go.”
And so I went.
What did I want from Beirut? Did I think I would encounter my father there, a child of six, or nine, walking purposefully through the streets in short trousers and long socks with a lock of dark hair falling over his right eye? Surely not, although . . . Did I think I would unearth a Francophone enclave for whom my father’s distant childhood would also evoke something, whatever it might be, and prompt at least a ruminative conversation about the city of that period? Perhaps. And did I think I might walk on the same pavement and stand before his old apartment building and take a photograph to carry back with me to put upon his table in the nursing home in Rye Brook, New York, thereby returning to him both some scrap of his past life and some trace of its present continuation? Naïvely, yes. He was so certain in his mind that it all existed still somewhere that he almost made me believe. It was as if I believed I would be traveling not only across space but across time, into the very distant but perfectly preserved place he had laid out in his little map.
And at the same time: Did I envisage a trip like my visit to Istanbul, in which the city was opened to me in its various marvels, past and present, and its various atrocities, too, by the generosity of my influential and devoted hosts? Yes, that certainly. I certainly imagined that I would be introduced to writers, professors, journalists, and politicians, would be conducted through refugee camps and have explained to me by passionate interlocutors the history of the Naqba as it has affected Lebanon; and then the history of the civil war; and the history since the civil war; and so on. Only by imagining such a grand tour could I justify leaving him; without that, it was an abandonment.
I was, on my father’s account but also simply for itself, passionately interested in Beirut. I wanted so much from it. Beirut, meanwhile, proved to be dispassionately uninterested in me. Our pilot program, it transpired, in spite of the fancy names attached to it, was merely that: a pilot program at the American University (a beautiful campus by the sea, and as close to a private American college as can be found outside the United States) for a two-week summer class in creative writing for undergraduates. My lovely and immensely patient poet colleague and I were furnished with a windowless classroom, a milling contingent of bright and, for the most part, motivated students (all of them impressively Anglophone and many unnervingly Americanized), a fluorescent hum, an ugly carpet. Like so many Rapunzels, we were then locked in for three hours each morning for two weeks. The curriculum was up to us. But for a few young women in hijabs, we might have been in Allegheny or Eugene.
As for my father’s history, nobody cared. Why should they? The image of my father as a child—a colonial child, so long ago—did not capture their attention even for a second. I bored my poet colleague with my insistence on my mission; and I bored my architect friend. Our hostess, raised largely in the U.S., nodded vaguely when I asked her about it; her husband, raised in Beirut and barely younger than my father, shrugged and turned away. The night they invited us to supper, I plagued their other dinner guests, including a Belgian woman of about my own age who was compiling for the office of tourism a walking tour of the old sights of Beirut. She, at least, promised to look at old maps: Rue Achrafieh? It should be locatable.
In the meantime, I tried to inquire about that time; but everybody—including our hostess’s husband—was too young to remember. Somehow, this had not occurred to me before I went: that if my father, at seventy-nine, was dying, so, too, was his generation, the people who might remember the time before Before. Besides, there had been too much pain since then; and I found that they did not want to talk about that, either. The people I met were happy to discuss the rebuilding of the downtown, and how they felt about it—too Disney, or just right? Was the influence of Solidere good or bad? What about the choice to restore certain examples of colonial architecture rather than those in the Ottoman style? And in moments of greater intimacy, what did they really think about Rafic Hariri, and his reconstruction plan, and his assassination? The residents, both young and old, were keen to show off the lively downtown, and to suggest beautiful hotel bars or stylish restaurants where we might spend an evening.
This was the strangeness of Beirut: it was to me like a city in a dream, a city wiped clean. With its lovely prospect overlooking the sea, its youthful and worldly population, its expensive shops and perfectly rebuilt arcades and plazas, its surface resembles very closely someone’s ideal of Beirut. Unless you poke around for a while on foot, you will not see much evidence, beyond the relentless construction, of the total destruction of their civil war—with the notable exceptions of the hulk of the Hilton Hotel, a punctured and hollowed concrete misery purposefully retained as a reminder; and the smaller, squatter ruin of the St. Georges on the waterfront, maintained in its decrepitude by the owner who, I was told, despised Hariri and his tidy beautification of the downtown. While I was there, a new Four Seasons opened by the water, a shiny white tower with its balconies turned to the sea, outside of which pooled glossy black limousines. Repeatedly I saw these limousines—often SUVs with Saudi or Abu Dhabi plates—pull up suddenly and eject their passengers, smooth young men on cell phones, with white kaffiyehs, holding the hems of their pristine white djellabas above the dirt as they dashed into Dunkin’ Donuts or Burger King for a snack.
When I observed to my architect friend how few Western tourists I glimpsed in Beirut, he laughed. “Nobody here cares about Western tourists,” he said. “You come for a week, two at the most, on a tight budget. You buy nothing, and you go away again. We want tourists from the Gulf, or from elsewhere in the Middle East. We want people who will buy a villa or take a floor or two in a luxury hotel, stay for months, spend millions. That’s what keeps the city booming.”
Moreover, he added, “Beirut has always been the party center for the Middle East. You can find anything here—sex, drugs, gambling, all of it. Last year there was a Middle East bear convention in town—big, hairy gay guys from all over the Arab world.”
The new Beirut is a fantasy city, the place where dreams come true. Its own history—and there is so much history there, in a place where ruins are revealed at almost every construction site: not just recent ruins, but Roman ruins, or Phoenician ruins—becomes no less unreal than its present. For obvious reasons, nobody from there wants to talk about the past, nor even, as long as things remain quiet, about the present—the students at the American University are asked to refrain from discussing politics—and nobody who is not from there really wants to know. Instead, you can marvel at the reconstruction, superficially lament the political instability just below the surface, and sip your cocktail while admiring the spectacular views.
While in Lebanon, I made the pilgrimage to Baalbek, to the Roman ruins of what was Heliopolis, Rome’s capital in the Middle East. The city is located in the Bekaa Valley, about a hundred kilometers east of Beirut over the mountains, deep in Hezbollah territory. Baalbek features some of the best-preserved Roman architecture in the world. The scale of the site and the perfection of the Temple of Dionysius in particular defy description. But perhaps what was most extraordinary of all was our sense that the ruins were ours.
For at least the first hour, my poet colleague and I were all but alone. A guide or two hovered at the entrance, smoking cigarettes and kicking dust, hoping for a job. But we were able to amble among the giant pilasters and plinths, up and down the fractured steps, under the arches, and among the walls, in total silence, the sky enormous above us and the mountains, framed by the ruined arches, snow-tipped at the horizon. We slipped into history without any human interruption whatsoever. At one point we perched upon a carved boulder in the shade of a massive stone wall, and, like children, ate our snack brought from home, of soggy butter biscuits and slightly salty lukewarm water. I think I even swung my feet. Looking around at the empty permanence of all these discarded stones, blocks for giants tumbled as far as the eye could see, I experienced a moment of genuine wonder: it was as if we’d discovered the ruins ourselves, as if, since the gods had abandoned their playground, no one else had seen it.
And yet, of course, this fantasy was rife with irony. Why were there, even later in that long morning, so few visitors wandering the temples at Baalbek? Could it be because for so many years, until recently indeed, it was a physically dangerous place for tourists to venture, and they did so at their peril? The ruins lie deep in Hezbollah-controlled territory, a fact brought home along the route by exuberant Hezbollah posters and statues, and chiefly by the immense murals at the site’s entrance, one of them depicting Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, wielding a rocket launcher beside photographs of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Ben Gurion Airport under crosshairs.
The effect was of simultaneous kitsch and horror. And then there was the inevitable strange realization that this, too, was just life, no more nor less, and that for the guide awaiting his customers or for the crooked-toothed woman selling pita with za’atar in the street outside, the mural of Nasrallah was no stranger than, to me, a billboard advertising McDonald’s on the Massachusetts Turnpike.
Unexpectedly, this very experience of dislocation—to be a benign tourist floating along the surface above a subterranean political nightmare—was perhaps the closest that I came on this strange Lebanese journey to homage to my father, and to an inadvertent reliving of my youth. There was a reason why my long drift through Baalbek felt so known, from the stones against the big empty sky to the painfully eager salesboys outside the few trinket-shop-cum-cafés on the periphery, and the disagreeable huckster with his scraggly, fly-infested camel, offering rides: these familiars were the extras of my childhood.
Throughout the 1970s, our curious and surely not oblivious father carted his wife and small children to vacation not at beachside resorts but in impending global hot spots, usually before the shit had officially hit the fan: I remember my mother painfully yanking my hair into braids in a Lima hotel room before dawn, before we set out to catch an early plane to Quito, and shouting at my father, “This is not my idea of a holiday!” Among other junkets, we visited Ethiopia in 1971 (we stopped also in Kenya, but the projected Ugandan portion of that trip sadly had to be canceled due to some trouble with a dictator), Guatemala in 1973 (my sister and I wondered aloud why we were the only tourists around), Sri Lanka in 1975, and so on. These are not journeys one would undertake lightly now, when we have a fuller awareness of “dark tourism” and its complexities: but I see it, in my family, as my father’s compulsive reenactment of and attempt to resolve his own childhood traumas.
My memories of these childhood travels are, in one regard at least, not unlike my father’s childhood memories of Beirut: blissful to me, they represent an isolate gem of privileged innocence in the midst of unacknowledged oncoming darkness. Whether that gem was a falsehood or a strange little truth I cannot quite say. But I can see why he would have wanted, however unconsciously, to re-create that strange and precious state. It was, in his youth, the happiest state; to be protected and only faintly aware, in the middle of someone else’s horror. Surely this is not a false question: Is the quiet banality of a place less real than its incipient evil? Isn’t life, most strangely, and even in evil, always made more real by its banalities?
What do I remember about Ethiopia? Not unrest or famine. Not global Cold War politics played out on an African stage—although my parents would for years tell the story of the TASS reporter who dandled me on his knee on a bus upcountry. No, I, who was five and half years old, remember our propeller plane spitting fire from its engine (“Look, Mummy, there are flames out the window!”), landing in a field on the way to Lalibela, and a squealing gaggle of children in rags running up, begging smilingly for pencils and touching my sister’s blond hair.
What do I remember of Guatemala, when I was seven? The market ladies in their vivid ponchos and mannish hats, their eyes downcast and their wares laid out, most orderly, upon blankets, in the street running down from the pristine white church in Chichicastenango.
Of Sri Lanka when I was nine, I recall the murky green swimming pool at the Holiday Inn (we could not see the bottom, which disturbed my mother, but not sufficiently to forbid us from swimming in it) and the vastness of our glorious family room at the Galle Face Hotel, the biggest and most old-fashioned hotel room I’d ever seen, with its crisp linens, its dark wood, and its lazy ceiling fan. I remember my sister turning cartwheels along the green sward abutting the seafront, and being given a garnet ring by our parents for her birthday.
Any possibility of bloodshed and horror is excised from my memories of these places; or rather, more accurately my father gave us these places without horror. He gave them to us as sites of innocent joy.
This is an impossibility, of course. The very attempt is perverse, a denial of reality. But I can see now that this is what he attempted: we didn’t take off to Majorca or the Bahamas or Hawaii for our childhood holidays; and it now seems a wonder that we didn’t vacation in Belfast or Santiago. What it meant to him—atonement, escapism, folly—I cannot say, nor can I now ask. But when in Beirut I leaned over my dorm room balcony and saw a lone European mother walking her two small, fair daughters, in matching dresses, along the street, I held them in my mind until I spoke to my husband that night: “I saw my sister and me today,” I told him. Not my father as a child, but myself.
I cannot say what drove my father, but what his lessons taught me, I realize belatedly, is to be a novelist. To understand that most of what is you can only imagine, and can imagine only through the often contradictory traces of what you can see. To understand that always, at the heart of things—whatever the ideas and ideologies, the violations and violence, the strangenesses of culture—always at the heart are the ordinary people, and there is just life, being lived: tables and bread and toilets and scissors and cigarettes and kisses and illness and death; just life.
I’d been living in my American University dorm room for a week when my sister said on the telephone that my father was asking for me. I was on the balcony, speaking on the local cell phone that I’d acquired from a dusty little shop opposite the university, peering over the balustrade at the passersby. It was nighttime, but my street in Ras Beirut did not go quiet in the evenings. The World Cup was everywhere. Every possible screen was illuminated—the green of the soccer pitch glowed in apartments and outside cafés—and cars drove honking at all hours through the neighborhood.
Back at the nursing home, the days had a different rhythm. My aunt, terrified of flying, a lifelong smoker who suffered to go without nicotine for the duration of a transatlantic flight, had traveled from France to hold her older brother’s hand, in spite of the pain of her three half-healed ribs following a fall early in the spring. My sister had taken a leave of absence from her demanding corporate job in Paris to be in Connecticut for a month, and was conducting business over her BlackBerry from well before dawn until after noon each day, before heading over to the nursing home to stay with our parents until after supper. My mother would barely leave the room for fear that something might happen to my father, even though there were times when she did not exactly know who he was. (I rang once and, after speaking to her, asked her to pass me to him. “Your father isn’t here right now,” she said. “Are you alone?” “No . . .” “Is there a man in a wheelchair in the room?” “Yes.” “Let me speak to him, then.”)
Our immediate family is small; everyone was there but me. My sister said that my father was in pain for longer stretches each day—even though they’d added a new type of painkiller, these did not seem to help very much—but that there were still good moments. He knew this would not continue for long—he’d said to my aunt that what he feared was not death but the pain—and he wanted me to be with them, for us all to be together, before the pain was too much. Before he had to go into the land of morphine, and away.
Our trip to Baalbek took place over the weekend, when I already knew I would be leaving. On the Sunday morning, I went to a local swimming club, a collection of vivid pools by the seafront near the Luna Park, a place suggested by my architect friend. Not surprisingly, I found that I could not in good conscience lounge by the chemical-blue water and enjoy the hot sun and the children splashing. I was obsessively reading Rabih Alameddine’s novel The Hakawati, about Lebanon and a father’s death, about a young man traveling from America to Beirut to stand at his father’s bedside, and to try to defer his father’s death by telling all the stories in the world. Of course that was what I was reading: a book about my father, about my calling, about Beirut. But I couldn’t read it on the deck chair by the swimming pool by the sea near the Pigeon Rocks.
I experienced the spiritual equivalent of not knowing where to put your hands: I could not ignore what I knew was taking place without me. I could not fully be where I was; and even as I did not want to be in the King Street Nursing Home in Rye Brook, New York, I’d reached a point where I couldn’t be anywhere else. My father could not protect me from death any longer, not even by sending me away: the time had come for us to join together and meet Death at last, not (as for Alameddine) in Beirut but in, as it would happen, a residential hospice in Stamford, Connecticut.
Just before I left Beirut, my kindly hostess took me to find the Rue Achrafieh. Her younger Belgian friend had located it on an old map; and we could see, in fact, that all along it had been right there on the current map as well, its trajectory largely unchanged. That said, for a week I’d looked and hadn’t been able to find it—why not? it was not a small or remote street—and nor had anybody else. It was as if it had been hidden by sorcery and only belatedly revealed.
Rue Achrafieh was a road of apartment buildings, most of them new; of one or two small villas, bearing the smallpox pockmarks of the civil war; of an unobtrusive mosque on the side where the French air base must have been; and of large tracts of waste ground, hidden behind hoardings, from which sprouted saplings and giant bushes could be seen to wave their green, fronded arms. Much had been destroyed and subsequently razed. At one point, you could see through to the next street, where there stood—as in London after the Blitz—half a house, sheared down the middle like a doll’s house, revealing half a floor, and half a wall, and the flocked wallpaper at the back of the living room, and the tatters of curtains fluttering at the gaping windows. This although the war had been over for twenty years. Here, at last, just a few blocks off the tourist route, stood evidence of the time Before. Not, alas for my father, evidence of the time before Before: his era was too long gone for that. But at least, here, I could discern the city that might have arisen after his city.
My hostess approached a group of old men playing backgammon, perched in a circle on the ubiquitous white plastic chairs in a smaller vacant lot near the top of the street. Silver-haired, they were elegant in their dress shirts and pressed trousers, idling away the afternoon; but close inspection—and an inquiry in Arabic by my hostess—revealed that while old, they weren’t old enough. The eldest was perhaps in his early seventies, barely born in 1940. Their inspection of me was patient, neutral—looking me over from head to toe, accepting that I take a photograph of them, they weren’t hostile, but they weren’t interested, either. So much water under the bridge. They shook their heads, blew cigarette smoke out in satisfied whorls over the scrubby ground, and returned to their game: my search dismissed with the flick of a hand.
On Wednesday, I flew to Paris, and thence to New York. I arrived in time to celebrate my aunt’s birthday, a day after my father’s. I spent the next three days with my family; on the Thursday night, my husband and our children and my sister’s children arrived from Boston. That Saturday, we assembled tasty delicacies from the local traiteurs, and held a family picnic on the patio of the nursing home, my father in his wheelchair, all of us in the sunshine, the children shouting and playing tag and soccer and cartwheeling across the crispy midsummer lawn. We told jokes; we laughed. My father was happy, and for perhaps an hour was unaware of his pain.
Of course, when I gave them to him, he didn’t care about the posters of old Beirut, or even about the photographs of Rue Achrafieh (in a quick glance, nothing looked familiar, to him or to my aunt). He sampled only the tiniest crumb of his beloved halvah. By then, he’d traveled already too far along his road—as it were, to Damascus. But he was smiling, for all of us, over those few days, making us see only the beauty in this dangerous place, just as he had as a child been made to feel safe in danger, and had also made us, as children, feel safe. He showed us what was beautiful as though the danger did not exist, as though he might surmount the pain, as though we would be able to hold his hand always.
So began the end of the end of the end. One day soon thereafter, he insisted on getting up to sit by the window, for what would be the last time. “Why, Daddy?” I asked. “If it hurts, stay in bed.”
“Because I don’t want to miss—” He gestured at the wide world through the plate glass, “All this.”
But the pain, by then, was too great; and the call for relief too intense. He was transferred to the hospital the next day; and a day later to the hospice; and when next I saw him, he was asleep, in the blissful release, the terminal sleep, of morphine. He opened his eyes to smile and wave at the children—his particular fluttering of his stubby fingers, with his hand held up to his cheek. Later again, he opened his eyes to speak once more to his wife. He whispered, without opening his eyes, of my sister.
And on the last morning, as he slept so sweetly, as placid as a child at last, after a day of thrashing and fretting and rattling, I held tightly to his safe, warm hand—although it felt, as it always had, as though he held mine—and wished him Godspeed on his journey: not to my Beirut, but inshallah, perhaps to his, to the pellucid safety and hope of before Before, a place for which I have, in my diary, his neatly folded map, but to which I can never go.