There is magic in these streets. Beirut, insolent as a rebellious teenager, pouty lips and all; shrewd as the middle-aged men who try to sell ribbons of air; as broken as the gun-riddled life occupying it.
This holiday has been years in the making, arising partly out of heritage (the gift my Lebanese mother left in my blood), and partly out of curiosity to see the growth of a city occupied with annihilating itself for so long. But still, the rusty research I did before coming did little to prepare me for the stark contrast between the steel and glass shrines in the renovated areas and the derelict buildings often right across the street.
I remember the way my mother used to speak of this country, eyes downcast, trembling voice, as though the words threatened to choke her. She would speak of a time before war as though in a distant dream, as though the country had never witnessed demolition and spilled blood. When I first saw the destroyed buildings, a shiver shot down my spine. Hatred had done this. A crack on the inside fuelled by those on the outside. The human instinct is to inherit rage and drown in vengeance. An eye for an eye, as the saying goes. Years ago, when I first came across an interpretation of that barbaric notion, I produced a painting. A disturbing piece entitled ‘More Blindness’. Two androgynous young people with prominent, dark features stood apart, each holding a dripping, scratched eyeball and an empty eye socket. Their expressions were stricken.
There is a tiny part of me that wonders if coming here was the right thing to do. It’s not so much the timing, but rather the country itself. I always intended to visit this place as a way of securing an invisible link to my mother’s memory. Before her accident, we maintained a comfortable distance. She had never really forgiven me for the fall from grace that was my youth, and I didn’t seek redemption. We fell into a pattern of bi-monthly phone calls and occasional lunches. But at least we talked. Father continues to ignore me and considers my older brother his ‘only child’. He lives strictly by the glory of two things, the path of Christ and the stock market. Anything in between is secondary.
I tried writing when I was younger, but the words kept slipping away. I found myself chasing after vowels and dropping synonyms like uncomfortable clothes. But painting, expression through images and colours and brush strokes, formed something not only solid but also the opportunity to get a glimpse of myself on canvas. I feel like my soul is tucked away in the numerous tubes of paint that litter every place I inhabit.
I am severely tipsy by now. In the hotel room, the comforting warmth tingles through my body. I half-walk, half-stumble to the easel, the wine sloshing over slightly from the mouth of the glass. The blank canvas stares reproachfully at me, stemming a sense of urgency. This is it, the moment of adrenalin rush, when a million possibilities flash through my mind. Carefully, I set the glass down and locate a small knife on the table. My finger swiftly traces over the blade. The flesh rips obediently and I bring the finger to my tongue. The taste is metallic, thick and warm. Moving quickly, unable to see the marks in the dark, I smear my blood on the canvas, trying to project the image in my mind, alternating between my lifeline and the prepared palette. With no idea of what colours I am using or what shape is forming, I paint drunkenly, as if in a trance, enraptured by the slick sound of the moistened surface. My mind is saturated with images of run-down buildings, intricate jewellery, twinkling city lights. I feel my lips curl into a sardonic smile.
Something is wrong. Maybe it’s the alcohol along with the tricks my substance-bruised mind sometimes plays on me. The painting seems ethereal, a rushed mistake of the gods. There is no beauty in it. Dark, clashing colours form an aura around the borders and there is an angry sky below. The blood I used flames scarlet in a thick haze. I am always surprised at the art I create in the dark, but it seems almost beyond me. I laugh sharply at myself. The feeling fades as I continue staring. It’s beginning to look fine, despite all the crouching figures and, in the corner, an intricate upside-down cross. God is in the details. Or is it the devil? I suddenly feel weary. For some reason, Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Oval Portrait’ flashes into my mind. It’s the tale of a young woman, painted by her lover. He is transferring energy, lending her life to his canvas. Tiredness falls abruptly and, without bothering to change or switch off the light, I sink into a curled foetal position on the luxurious bed.
The next morning, I casually drop my head into my hands and massage my temples as I relax in the straight- backed chair at the Phoenicia café. Ah, hangovers!
To push out the pain in my throbbing skull, I begin to drift off into my thoughts, to recall episodes that haunt my mind.
I met Louis on a night after a rather questionable combination of dancing, drinking and acid. I stumbled onto him, in every sense of the word. We exchanged numbers and, eventually, worlds.
‘So what are you going to do with it all?’ He had asked me after an evening of conversation. An empty whiskey bottle was on the table, the glass catching the streetlights outside and splaying them on the wall.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked, blowing softly on my still-wet nail polish. ‘Do with what?’
‘With all this – your job, your life, your future. What do you want to do with it? Because if you don’t want to spend the rest of your life slaving away in a nice little office from nine to six, now is the time to make a move.’ He spoke casually, but there was something in the way his eyes caught mine. He cared so much that I couldn’t risk losing him. His dark hair was rumpled, his shirt slightly open. Platonic friendships! Do they ever really exist? Yet with Louis it was more, so much more. This wasn’t some drinking buddy or stand-in companion. He was going to be my saviour.
Everyone grows a little bit older, becomes slightly more bitter, but the bitterness is usually directed towards life, not faceless monsters. My loss was more personal than patriotic. No stars and stripes waved out of my apartment window. My tentative Arab heritage ended up being the source of a few catty remarks, but nothing more. We mourned our loss without succumbing to hatred, but it didn’t make the absence any easier. Irony lives. I left New York, travelled around for a while, living off monetary proof that I, too, had once existed in a smart business suit, thinking I was getting away from everything, putting distance between myself and it all, only to discover that somehow I had unwittingly packed it all and brought it with me.
And what was ‘it’ exactly? I don’t know. Perhaps it was the boredom, the restlessness, or the diminutive power of that city that I love as much as I hate the sudden fixation with painting. At the thought of painting, my fingers instinctively curve and I feel myself transported back to the here and now. I look down at them, at the various healing cuts on my fingertips, and my eyes turn away. I half raise my hand to ask for another glass of wine, just one more and then –
A crash sounds. No, not a crash, I realise after a bewildered second, louder, an immense barricade of reverberation so earsplitting that for an instant I think I am deaf. For a split second, the thunderous roar leaves everyone immobile. I’m frozen with fear, instantly transported back to another time and place.
My God! What have I done, throwing myself into this battlefield? I’m dreaming, too much wine again. I’ll wake up. But all those screams, it can’t be a dream, and the sky seems as if it’s falling. There’s glass everywhere, I’m bleeding, Jesus, it’s New York all over again, the panic, the fear, the smoke, only this is closer. Good God, am I going to die trapped in my own inability to move?
‘Yallah, Yallah! Miss, you need to get out. Big bomb, yes? Come on, there’s been an explosion. Please come.’ Something in the urgency of his tone shakes me out of my stationary state and my legs begin to move, in a sudden homage to being alive, alive despite the stench of burned flesh that fills my nostrils as I stagger outside. The tumbling sunlight, slightly blotted out by thick black smoke, seems to taunt the terrified people who are fleeing the inferno, as if to say, ‘Aha! You didn’t expect this, did you?’
The smell, that awful reek of rotting life, enters me and clings to my very pores, my inner cilia. I begin to shake uncontrollably. The faces in front of me blur, the high-pitched shouts and cries become muted, and for a muddled moment I am six years old again, spinning too quickly, as the earth and sky become distorted, actually feeling the earth whirling on its tilted axis. My knees buckle and I crumple to the floor just as blackness swallows me.
Sunlight filters through my eyelashes as I am thrust back into consciousness. Almost instantaneously, everything comes flashing back – the explosion, the screaming people, the broken glass littering the streets and the revolting smoke. I bite down on my lip to keep from shrieking frantically, only to feel a stinging pain. I press down slightly harder and taste blood.
For one awful second, I cannot think. It’s worse than when that thing went off, because then, at least, my mind was racing. But right now the only forming thought is the fact that I cannot keep grasp of a single coherent thought. Panic, bubbly in the back of my throat, begins to rise. In one second I’m going to lose control and join the wailing crowd with their hands outstretched towards the betraying sky.
For a bizarre second, I imagine my mother with them, begging the gods to take it back, to erase it all. Is this what she saw? The streaking smoke, the falling people? God’s children falling like rain? And she was so young. All at once, I feel a rush of sympathy for the terrified little girl my tall, thin mother with her severe hairstyle had once been. This is not New York City, but Beirut all over again.
Instinctively, an instinct I lost when I was fourteen, my hand rises to my forehead and I begin to trace a cross. I despise hypocrisy and look at me now, turning to religion in a moment of need. I know, deep down, that the gesture is more one of childhood comfort than anything else, but I am still irritated at myself.
The panic has subsided now. Strangely, I feel detached, dream-like, as though nothing can penetrate my bizarre realm. There is a woman, looking frazzled, with an almost pained smile, speaking to some people at the hotel entrance. Feeling as though I am moving through the sticky, tangled strands of an enormous spider’s web, I make my way over to her.
‘Please, everybody, calm down. Please, quiet down.’ It is as though this were all some twisted version of an unruly kindergarten class gone very, very wrong. I feel a pang of pity for this lady, probably just as terrified and clueless as everyone else, trying to be a pillar of unruffled calm. I imagine a massive canvas smeared with obscure blotches, and the Statue of Liberty rising from the centre, with tear-stained cheeks and thin lips. ‘I will catch your tears in a bejewelled chalice. Here, let me bleed for you.’
The next few days are surreal. The country slides into a period of almost sinister mourning. I venture out into the city at night, when I feel too smothered by solitude, only to find barren streets and stores with obstinately locked doors. Everywhere I turn there loom enormous pictures of the former Prime Minister Hariri, looking purposefully into the distance. The city has turned eerie, its magic a warped and menacing Wonderland. I am taken to another hotel.
My strokes on the canvas are no longer caresses. They are desperate thrusts. I begin to close the heavy curtains carefully in the middle of day, forbidding slits of light to enter the room. In darkness, I paint outlines of the man they called Hariri, who I was told, had been assassinated minutes from his own handiwork; I paint flocks of weeping women clad in black; I paint bodies flying, limbs flailing, necks at an awful angle; I paint charred faces, eyes with pupils of smoke. I paint image after image of Louis, who has begun to creep back into my alcohol-induced days and nights, his eyes heavy with the promise of transience. I paint my mother, trying to stitch broken bodies back together with a terrifyingly large needle and thread, her fingers dripping with blood. I paint death, I paint grief. I paint loss and, what started as a depiction of the situation around me, turns into images of my grief and my loss. I have opened the stitches of a crevice for Louis to crawl through, and he does. My supply of canvas starts to run low and I begin to request paper, any heavy paper, from the receptionist downstairs. I avoid sobriety like the delusion I now know it to be.
I paint.
I paint.
My nightmares begin to litter the room. They feel like a sickness as they possess me. I am thrown back into my younger days of empty sex, of empty drugs, of cutting up line after line of cocaine, when a terrified part of my mind knows deep down that I’m not really doing the coke…it’s doing me, and with an almost malignant pleasure.
The country begins to shake me awake. Almost unwillingly at first, I learn more and more about the politics. It is not a pleasant series of events, but then, few countries have been born or established without drenching their soil with blood. But the difference here is that history is happening now, there are no textbook lessons. And somewhere inside my veins courses blood that is linked to this place.
The entire country is bristling, a nation that is suddenly wide-awake and furious. The stunned, controlled respect and grief that laced the city immediately following Hariri’s death seems to have exploded. I cannot demand entitlement to this pain. Scrawled writing appears on the sides of buildings, demanding (in no uncertain terms) that Syria get out. Groups of young men and women flock to the town centre near the grave of this political figure now transformed into a reluctant martyr; tents begin to pepper the area. At night, cars whiz by with flags flailing out, teenage boys stick their upper bodies perilously out of the vehicles as they yell random slogans in Arabic. Demonstrations and counter-demonstrations begin. Voices demand freedom and truth. I go to these demonstrations as an onlooker only: I cannot demand entitlement to this pain. Yet I understand it. I’ve seen it before. I have come here to be distracted and this country is as distracting as I could hope for.
Several days after the counter-demonstration I sit in the hotel lounge, sipping black coffee and inhaling my cigarette. Ciara, a photographer I met before the assassination, walks over.
‘Hey,’ she says, ‘Do you mind if I join you?’
‘Of course not. How are the pictures going?’ I know that, like me, she had made the decision to stay longer. For her photography, she said. I hadn’t asked if that was the only reason.
‘Actually, I was hoping to run into you. Would you like to see my work?’
‘Sure.’
The first photograph shows a crowd of people at the demonstration. The second picture captures an old lady silently grieving. In the next photo a young man, in a sea of demonstrators, is holding up a crucifix in one hand and a Quran in the other.
I don’t speak. I continue staring at the black-and-white depictions of life in front of me. I wonder what it must be like to see the world from behind a camera lens, to have that distance from everything awful and painful, yet still maintain the ability to capture it.
The last time I saw Louis, he gave me a sliver of hope.
The next day, a plane flew into a building. For the rest of the world, it was a 9/11 crisis, national tragedy. For me, Louis decided against a lunch break and was swallowed in the flames.
The demonstrations continue but my own thoughts are finally losing the edgy chaos. I wish I knew how I found this calm. It keeps me awake at night as I wonder, with unbelieving gratitude, what brought it on. My dreams are still vividly coated with images of my mother, of Louis, of the personifications of my mistakes, my losses. I wake up with my cheeks stiff with dried tears, but the smile I offer my mirrored reflection has lost its sarcastic resentment.
I decide it is time to leave.
The plane lazily lifts its nose and saunters to the skies. I swallow tears. I have got what I need. I can face what awaits me now. Below, the nightline of glimmering lights gently embraces the landscape and, like some intoxicatingly beautiful but dangerously poisonous flower, Lebanon winks at me and whispers goodbye.