|
|
|||||
|
|
|
||||
|
|
|
|
|
||
|
|
|
 |
|||
|
|
|
|
|
||
|
|
|
||||
|
|
|
||||
|
|
|||||
|
|
|
||||
BY APRIL, THE COMMUNAL thrill that came with the first uprisings had lapsed into a quiet uncertainty. With nothing to latch on to, the international minglers at this short-lived middle school dance of ideas went back to their usual places along the wall. It was harder to squint now and see the Gulf afresh, to straddle that edge of paradise and purgatory. Isolation returned, and I was more aware of it.
The news shrieked of Syria, and I had vacation days. It was time to see what was really happening. My childhood friend Danny was studying Arabic in Damascus. “It could get dangerous in damascus in the next couple weeks . . . so its really your call,” he wrote. “That said I’ll probably be here and itd be awesome if you came.” That was enough encouragement for the thing I already wanted to be stupid enough to do.
FROM: DAD <G•••••••@SWARTHMORE.EDU>
SUBJECT: WHEN DO YOU LEAVE?
THU AT 6:02 AM / 5:02 PM
Not going to Syria, right?
------------
FROM: ME <A•••••••••••••••••@•••••.COM>
RE: WHEN DO YOU LEAVE?
THU AT 6:07 AM
Yeah i prob wont go there
------------
FROM: DAD <G•••••••@SWARTHMORE.EDU>
RE: RE: WHEN DO YOU LEAVE?
THU AT 6:10 AM
PLease take out the “prob.”
ON TUESDAY, THE UNITED STATES began to evacuate “nonessential” staff from its embassy in Damascus and told all other Americans to leave. On Wednesday, I bought a $175 Air Arabia ticket out of Sharjah, the conservative emirate two-ish hours to the north. The flight was to Beirut—I didn’t want the flight to get canceled, and fares were good, and I could take the easy taxis from there up and down the hill to Syria.
A week later, I spoke to my parents from the 3 A.M. bus leaving Abu Dhabi for the Sharjah airport. “Do you hear the birds?” they asked. It was springtime in the Pennsylvania suburbs. In the Gulf summer, the only natural sounds were traffic and elevators dinging. “Do you hear the air-conditioning?” I said.
It was two days before Mother’s Day, and as a small gift I did not tell my mother where I was going. To my parents, I was traveling only to chic, seaside Beirut. Beirut was not so distantly the poster child for sectarian civil war, but then came intermittent wars with Israel, brief ones, and the last of those had ended five years before. For the sake of their blood pressure and sleep, it was the last time I told them I’d bought a ticket anywhere.
FROM: DAD <g•••••••@SWARTHMORE.EDU>
RE: RE: WHEN DO YOU LEAVE?
THURS AT 6:59 AM
Would you please email to confirm that you’re not going to Syria?
IT WAS MORNING WHEN I landed in Beirut, the town many have named the “Paris of the Middle East”—a comparison I find fitting not because of the friendly mercis or the presence of crêpes and Hermès bags, but because it is a city that survived war and hardly faded in the Middle East as an image of romance and posh class. Slate streets are the city’s bones and sandy-colored buildings its Parisian skin, marked with the scars of bullet holes and half-collapsed edifices. And twenty-million-dollar condos looking out on the Mediterranean. And the army.
Down the street by the synagogue-in-repairs, a soldier questioned me for taking pictures.
“Hea kaniisa, sah?” It’s a church, right? I asked.
A little raise of the eyebrow and a smile. “Hua kaniis yehudi.” It’s a Jewish synagogue.
Old and new, and old and ruined and new, and destroyed and old and refurbished, and new and under construction. Beirut’s one face is like a cubist painting, recognizable patterns (outdoor cafés, the waterfront boulevard, shelled and charred hotels) elicit memories of larger spaces (Paris, Santa Monica, the smoke and gunfire in Bahraini squares). I leapfrogged in and out of the millennia, walking from the shops of the new souk (Dolce & Gabbana, Massimo Dutti, Quiksilver) to the ruins of Roman baths.
I felt very small as I passed the ancient tubs, symbols of how titanically vast the Empire stretched, of how far some travelers must have come. And when they came, it must have meant something just to make landfall.
My traveling was more me-centric than it ever had been: a stream of consciousness road trip around Lebanon in a rented Ibiza hatchback. I didn’t know what I was trying to see (north first), I wasn’t sure exactly how long I would stay, and no one called either of my two phones. They combined to tell nothing but the time, and even that was twelve minutes apart.
At a café, a waiter affirmed the beauty of the north. Then: “You are alone?”
“Mhmm.”
“But if you go alone . . . you’re not happy.”
Danny might have joined, but he was stuck in Syria for fear of getting stranded if he left. Alone, with total freedom again, I was slipped of my moorings. I kept driving to quell my fidgets with novelty.
I sped up the coastal highway to Jeita, famous for its capacious grottos, one of twenty-eight finalists for the “New Seven Wonders of the World.” I drove up through the ruins of Byblos, named Jbeil in Lebanon, where school tour groups swarmed a castle occupied by Ottomans and Greeks and the Crusaders and the French that looks out onto Roman ruins and a rich, blue Mediterranean cove. I spun around in circles at a roundabout in traffic-plagued Tripoli, then the road turned east and upward and didn’t come down until the end of the road six-thousand feet higher in a crop of cedars, where snow and ice blocked any further passage.
THE ROAD THAT CONTINUED EAST would have come down into Baalbek, a majority Shia city where even more Romans left ruins. After all my racing, I was only two hours away from Beirut, and I retraced the drive counterclockwise from the small country’s 12 to 3.
I was sick of the traffic and of looking at maps, and I was leaning further and further toward driving to a beach in the south, sticking my head in the sand, and hiring the first shared taxi out of the country in the morning.
It was either that or find another route to Baalbek, if only because the road had stopped me before. I pulled into a gas station in the Furn al-Shebak neighborhood.
In Beirut, they balked at the mention of Baalbek. “They’ll put your car on blocks,” said a camouflaged young soldier in the Lebanese Air Force at the opposite pump. This was what he offered instead of directions, joking with the manager at the station. “They’ll leave him with nothing but the steering wheel!”
Again and again, I heard this from both Sunnis and Christians in Lebanon (whose population is divided in nearly even thirds) about this other part of Lebanon: Don’t go to Baalbek. You’ll get robbed at gunpoint by Shias.
The cadet, who looked about my age, told me not to go east to Baalbek, but not to go south either. Stay here. Go south tomorrow, he told me, and I’ll go with you: fish for lunch, jet skis, the beach. His name was Marwan, and he was from the south.
But if I didn’t go somewhere, I was midafternoon stuck with fuck all to do. I couldn’t quite get that across in Arabic.
“Do you know people in Lebanon?” Marwan and the pump manager asked. No. “What are you trying to see?” Nothing. Anything, something different. “Where are you staying?” Nowhere. They looked at me as if I were a talking goat. I truly had no good reasons to do anything at all—no sights to see, no people to meet, and an unfaltering confidence that my rental insurance would cover robberies.
“Meet me outside Melek al-Tawwous at 8:30,” Marwan repeated, putting his number in my phone. With the air force in charge, I could take the passenger seat and throw my baggage in the back.
And still: the empty time in between. I pushed the soldier once more for directions to Baalbek, and promised I’d only go half as far, only to Zahle, as if I were talking to my parents. “Okay,” he said. “Go right. And then straight all the way.”
And so I drove straight, yelling names of upcoming towns out the window for the endorsements of lolling shopkeepers. Soon, billboards on the road sprang up with the faces of Shia clerics and I drove until I knew I was in Baalbek, and I turned off the radio and smelled horses.
I BOUGHT A SIX-DOLLAR KEFFIYEH from a grizzled trader outside the two millennia-old Temple of Jupiter. He lit a cigarette and brought me into his shop for coffee. “I drink forty cups a day,” he said. “And five packs of these.” He tapped the cigarettes. “It’s good for the stomach.” A woman turned away from the dubbed Turkish drama on TV to wrap the scarf around my head.
From eight thousand miles away my parents asked me not to leave Beirut, and my government had warned me not to go there at all; now it was compatriots and next door neighbors who misdrew the off-limits boundary.
Fine. So the place wasn’t as bad as people said it was. But Life Going On did not mean people were sound and happy. It was a generalization to call the place safe after an afternoon and evening, and I wasn’t traipsing around shouting insults at the clerics. Still, aside from the ATM that swallowed my debit card, Baalbek was unthreatening. No instant catastrophe, no cars nicked.
I was never really afraid of this town in the first place. The local whispers were old-school sectarianism or ignorance, and there were scads of well-informed people who could have told me so and saved me the trip. I set out to prove that the world wasn’t as scary as we imagined it, but discovering just that, I was bored and restless. Do I want war or paradise?
I was hungry to get at something that really felt risky, that would count as real engagement. One last gulp of paradise on the Mediterranean coast, I thought, and then I’d go get my goose bumps in Syria.
I PICKED UP MARWAN outside the breakfast place just as we planned. “Let me drive,” he said.
The day started so right. We shortcut through side streets and raced onto the highway, stopping to pick up two pirated CDs of Lebanese pop from a shack by the road. By the end of the day we’d listen to the good one about forty times and the bad one sixty-five. We learned little about each other: he fixed planes for the air force, I wandered around countries. “You have a good heart,” Marwan would say to me, because I seemed willing to travel alone or with new friends. I tried to live up to his assessments by trusting in his plans for fun à la libanaise.
We had unbelievable hummus and fava beans and Pepsi in his town—Ghazieh—and he ran into his house to change out of his army uniform. “When I come back I will be a real person.” He came back in a sleeveless muscle shirt with his hair gelled. We were going to the beach. “Do you have any cologne?” he asked. Tolerance, I told myself.
We stopped by the water in Saiida for tea and argileh—as the Levant called the tobacco-vaping water pipe because that’s what the Persians called the coconuts (nargile) that might have made the first bases; or shisha, as the Egyptians called it because that’s what the Turks called the glass bases they all have now; or hookah, as my parents knew it, because that’s what they were calling it in India when the Brits came and exported words to English like spices to the kitchen. Marwan was delighted that I smoked argileh, too. And while I’d never bought or bummed cigarettes in my life, in the Middle East I let water-cooled tobacco smoke into my code of health conduct without even a dieter’s bad conscience.
Marwan paid, as he had for lunch. It was cheap, but it sent a message: He might have been riding my car, but I was the guest. “Money comes and goes,” he said. “Friends are the most important.”
In the baffling traffic on the small streets around Lebanese International University, we circled for ages to pick up Marwan’s girlfriend who was not his girlfriend. He got quieter and quieter. I brainstormed an idea for a screenplay based entirely around Lebanese traffic patterns.
“She loves me but I do not love her,” he said. A girl in a tight white headscarf got into the car. She would never talk to me.
Finally we were there, in the town with three sides to the sea. Broad beaches swept along the Mediterranean—warm sand, cold water, and nearly deserted in the summer preseason. It was the American dream: a private beach. Still Marwan circled. Around the same roundabout, past the same ocean.
“What are you looking for?” I asked Marwan when my trust faltered. No answer.
Marwan fell silent when he had no plan and no answers. Even though I couldn’t have been happier with the sun and sea as we found it, he wouldn’t believe me. There was no argileh, no umbrellas by the water, no crowds.
My fists clenched, unclenched, grasping at time lost forever. I was unsettled when I was alone, and now I was trapped by their presence: Where could I tell anyone to go?
I was torn by the need to preserve the new friendship—I still believed in my marrow that he was a good dude, as honest as people are made—and to open the pressure valve and roar until he understood I needed nothing but nothing and wanted only to relax, relax, RELAX!
When we were years older in spirit, we stopped in a beach parking lot. Only I moved.
“We’ll wait in the car,” Marwan said. I blinked. “We have some things to talk about,” he said, trying to tell me it was okay. But I couldn’t bear to have them sit like chauffeurs while I baked on the sand—I knew they didn’t understand that a person could sit on an empty beach for hours, and I felt far more alone than if I were by myself.
I opened my book and promptly fell asleep. They stood holding each other far, far away, in a blur of headscarf and hair gel. And when I woke up some number of minutes or hours later, the car, with my everything in it—keys, passport, shoes, phones—was gone. A flash of terror.
And then I saw the car parked slightly farther away than I had remembered it with the couple in the front seat. Marwan waved through the windshield.
The terror faded, but the vulnerability stuck.
Marwan deposited his habiba back at the university and we stared at the remaining hours of the day. “I don’t care what it is we do, just tell me why we’re doing it,” I said. He asked over and over where I wanted to go. “I’ve never been here ever,” I said.
We doubled back and stopped at a beach covered with trash. Plastic bottles and cartons stuck out of the sand, and receding waves uncovered buried car tires by the waterfront. But it was beautiful, and we ran into the water together to repair Lebanese–American relations. I opened a book. “What do you want to do?” he said.
We played palettes, the same simple beach tennis as Israel’s beloved matkot, but I kept thinking that everything he said and did was for my benefit, to force what he imagined was my fun into existence. He looked distressed, and I was distressed for having made him feel that way.
“Let’s go to the border,” I said, to no response. “Let’s go to the end of Lebanon.”
That would be cool, I thought—the contested border with Israel, no more than a few dozen kilometers away. Because we were already anxious, we should go somewhere where our anxiety would fit the vibe. The border wouldn’t require a peaceful state of mind.
He was afraid and confused—It’s just a border. He was also convinced that it was at least a four-hour drive. “I’ll drive,” I said.
We passed white United Nations tanks. A gunman leaned out of the manhole, yawning. A soldier waved us through a checkpoint. Before the border town Naqoura, the asphalt stopped and became white rocks as big as grapefruits, packed into a smooth, wavy surface. A guard signed halt at a more serious checkpoint. He ordered me out of the car and asked for our papers. Only Lebanese were allowed farther; all foreigners needed a permit from the authorities up north. If it wasn’t for Marwan and his army ID, I could have found myself in serious trouble: a lone male, foreign and with among the most Jewish of last names, headed for contested territory.
A little shiver: I was glad to have hit the as-far-as-you-can-go border. “So with just that permit, you can keep driving?”
The burly commanding officer handed me back my passport. “With a permit you can drive to China.”
MARWAN SLID INTO the driver’s seat with a look of infinite relief. It was curious what he found risky: at a mountaintop church, he was adamant we shouldn’t go in, or try the door. It was closed, he promised. (It wasn’t.) But on the way down he cracked beers open with his seat belt and took swigs between shouts out the window at friends who seemed to live everywhere. I took sunset pictures through the wires and old buildings.
And then minutes after dark, he steered us toward a hotel. Defeated from the day’s silent and not-so-silent quarreling, I let us drive toward a place a friend on the street had mentioned, away from the city, away from the lights, away from anything.
The Mina Beach Hotel was run down, colossal, and pink. Every window was dark, and the facade scowled at would-be guests like a deserted prison. Dirty was no problem, and scary can be fun, but a price five times what I had paid for a bed in the city—that felt wrong. Marwan had picked up a 100,000 lira note (seventy dollars) I’d left in the console and told me to wait. “Don’t pay him,” I said.
He got out. I found short refuge in the moment before he returned.
“Come on, get your stuff.”
My insides collapsed, but I was still too baffled and dispirited to yell. He had taken money from me and donated it to a soulless hellhole that, we would discover soon, was home to the world’s thirstiest mosquitoes. He lived mere kilometers away. We had long since grown painfully tired of each other’s company—Why do you want to do this?—and still we jiggled the room’s door handle open. The beds were bare but for one thin sheet, a strange and unnecessary “kitchen” flaunted its one metal countertop and a fridge fringed by mildew and rust, and the ceiling dripped gently onto the floor.
Strangers were good, I told myself. Hospitality, curiosity, and kindness of heart—that’s what I’d find in the Middle East. Not assholes, no—who undermined my every effort. But the conflict was irrepressible now: the trust I knew I’d find was made to face the doubt I knew I felt.
And then a drop hit me from the ceiling and I burst. No more silent seething: riding the waves of a year’s anxiety, I erupted with the litany of every bad feeling I’d had all day, in a deluge of English when my Arabic burst under the pressure, with rapid-fire sentences I knew he couldn’t understand fully but that I still needed to speak.
“I know,” Marwan said to everything—to why he spent all the money I had left, to why he was content to sleep in the Lebanese Bates Motel. He was sitting slumped on the blanketless bed. “I thought you needed the rest.”
I drifted outside to the balcony, staring at nothing, lending my flesh to the night’s first mosquitoes. The sea was black, and I turned back inside. If only I could stop asking why, I’d escape with nothing but the memory of a weird day.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“You know, if any Lebanese yelled like that . . . I’d kick you.” He paused. “But you’re my friend, and I hate to see my friends unhappy.”
I was the asshole. For whatever reason, he had used my money because he thought deep down that that was what I wanted. He drove in circles until he found answers that worked for everyone. This was a man pure of heart and magnanimous in his intentions—I was the one who didn’t understand. He didn’t understand how to relax doing nothing on a beach, and I couldn’t convince myself that time spent getting to know someone good and different was dearer than anything else.
Or . . . was it all manipulation? A bored American to hang out with (how exotic!), who had a car and an open wallet. I wasn’t the asshole, maybe. No: I was. I really wasn’t. I definitely was.
For a moment, we both seemed at ease with each other’s foreign existence. I wandered into the open room next door to take a shower, bags of chips and tobacco strewn on the floor and countertops by those who had escaped in the morning. When I came back, Marwan was dressed and gelled.
“We need to go,” he said. “Right now.”
The police had seen him in the car with me, and they wanted to see me in the station for taking pictures (of the sunset) in town. The police chief had called Marwan personally.
Marwan told me to take all of my things.
I thought back to my questioning by the Beirut synagogue. He stared straight ahead at the empty dark road; I hid memory cards in pockets. I pictured movie chases, throwing the car in reverse, spitting up gravel and gunning it out of town. I planned how I’d flee as he led me into the station.
But that was never his intention. “Go to Beirut, go to Syria,” he said, pulling up short of what might have been a police station. And with that, he hopped out of the car forever.
No police had ever called, I realized. It was a melancholy relief: Marwan had found himself trapped with nothing left to give, or—and this struck me only years later—with someone too dense to see how much sex he wanted to have. I’d dismissed that thought before I’d ever had it. It still rings untrue, because Lebanese hair gel and friendship are not American hair gel and friendship. For so many reasons, though, a boy or girl never wants to believe a new friend’s attention is for just one thing.
With a clever but decidedly diplomatic move he took his leave. It was the first thing he did that I ever understood.
I sat in the passenger seat for a few minutes, blocking one lane onto a bridge. And then I slid over to the steering wheel and headed back slowly to surrender to the insects at the Mina Beach Hotel. I mummified every inch of my head and body in the six-dollar keffiyeh and the hotel blanket I swore I wouldn’t touch. By 4 A.M. the mosquitoes had me beaten and broken in the room haunted by Marwan’s disappointment, and I left for Beirut to sleep in the car by the bus station.
In the morning I returned the hatchback to Graziella at National Car Rental, and hailed a taxi for Damascus.