Holidays in Hell: In Which Our Intrepid Reporter Travels to the World's Worst Places and Asks, "What's Funny About This" (8 page)

"This is the trunk," says the driver.

"I am not a donkey," says the Syrian, pointing to the back of
the car. "Open the trunk!" So the driver does as he's told, exposing
the VW's engine. "Aha!" says the Syrian, "You have stolen a motor.
Furthermore, you have just done it because it's still running."

Another of Ahmed's stories-and he swears this one is trueis about a checkpoint on a hill where the Syrian soldier wanted to
inspect a car trunk. "I can't get out," said the driver, "I have no
emergency brake, and I must keep my foot on the brake pedal or
the car will roll away."

"Don't worry," said the Syrian, "I will sit in the car and hold
the brake pedal." So they changed places. "Now open the trunk,"
said the Syrian. The driver opened it. "All right," yelled the Syrian
from inside the car, "is there any contraband in there?"

What the Syrians are looking for in your trunk, by the way, is
Playboy magazines. Be sure to carry some.

We sat and smoked more cigarettes. Lebanon is not the place
to go if you're trying to give that up. Everyone over the age of six
chain-smokes. Long-term health effects are not, these days, a
major concern, and it's the worst sort of rudeness not to offer
cigarettes at every turn. George fell in love with Carmen, Antoine's
sister, a beauty of about fifteen. George could talk of nothing else
for the rest of the trip but getting married and becoming Maronite.
Maybe the feeling was mutual. Antoine took me aside later and
asked me if George was a Christian. I assured him most blond,
blue-eyed Americans over six feet tall are not Druse. He then
nicked me, instead of George, for the two hundred Lebanese
pounds it allegedly cost to get in the Gibran house.

We went on up into the mountains to the Cedars, one of only
three small groves of these trees left. Once the country was forested
with them, a hundred feet high at full growth and forty feet in
circumference. It was from these the tall masts of the Phoenician
galleys were made and the roof beams of Solomon's temple and so
forth. The trees in the Bsherri grove look like they need flea
collars, and the grounds are a mess.

We found a good hotel, the La Mairie, about ten miles west of
Bsherri in Ehdene. Ehdene is notable for the country's bestlooking martyr pictures. There are martyr pictures everywhere in
Lebanon. The Phalangists put up photographs of the ox-faced
Bashir Gemayel, who got elected president in '82 and blown to bits
within the month. The Shiites plaster walls with the face of some
dumpy Ayatollah who went MIA in Libya. The Druse have Kamal
Jumblatt, who looked dead even before the hitmen ventilated his limo. Ehdene, however, is the headquarters of the Giants militia,
led by the very photogenic Franjieh family. In 1978 the Phalangists
attacked the Franjieh home and killed a handsome son, his pretty
wife, and their little daughter too. If you have to look at pictures of
dead people all day, they might as well be cute.

From Ehden, with light traffic and no mood swings at the
checkpoints, it's only two hours back to Beirut.

The remaining great thing to see in Lebanon is Baalbek, site
of three immense Roman temples, among the largest in the ancient
world. Baalbek, however, is in the Bekaa Valley, where Israeli and
Syrian forces are faced off and where Israel has been making
periodic airstrikes on Syrian missile emplacements. Take sturdy
and practical clothing.

Baalbek itself is controlled by an extremely radical proKhomeini Shiite group called Islamic Amal. The leader of Islamic
Amal is Hussein Mussawi. He has close ties to Iran, and many
people believe he personally ordered the suicide attacks on the
American Embassy and the U. S. Marine base at Green Beach.

The Islamic Amal people are so far out there that they think
Syria is a puppet of international Zionism. When I first arrived in
Beirut, the Syrian army had Baalbek surrounded with tanks and
was shelling downtown.

I went to Baalbek with ABC's chief Beirut correspondent,
Charles Glass, and two drivers, one Syrian and one Lebanese
Shiite. (Glass was later kidnapped by radical Shiites, possibly this
same Islamic Amal; after two months in captivity, he made a
harrowing escape.) The ride over the crest of the Lebanese range is
breathtaking. The and reaches of the Anti-Lebanese mountains
rise in the distance. Below is the flat, green trough of the Bekaa,
where Syrian and Israeli lines are lost in verdant splendor. The thin
neck of the fertile crescent is spread out before you, cradle of the
civilization that has made air strikes possible. It's overwhelming.

At the foot of the descent is the large Christian town of Zahle,
a Phalange outpost surrounded by Moslems. The Syrians shell this
sometimes, too. Zahle has a good hotel, the Kafiri, and an arcade
of outdoor restaurants built along a stream in the Wadi Arayesh, or
"Valley of Vines."

The road north to Baalbek runs up the middle of the Bekaa.
Marijuana fields stretch for miles on either side. This is the source
of Lebanon's renowned hashish. Don't try to export any yourself,
however. The airport customs officials won't search you when you
arrive, but they're very thorough when you leave. Taking hashish
out of the country without payoffs is one of the few crimes they still
prosecute in Lebanon.

Bedouins from the Syrian desert camp beside the hemp fields.
They're not very romantic up close. Their tents are made from old
grain sacks, and everything around them stinks of goat.

The ruins of the Roman temples at the Baalbek are, words fail
me, big. The amount of mashed thumbs and noses full of stone dust
that went into chiseling these is too awesome to contemplate. The
largest, the Temple of Jupiter, is 310 feet long, 175 feet wide, and
was originally enclosed by fifty-four Corinthian pillars, each sixtysix feet high and seven and a half feet thick. Only six are left
standing now. The temple complex was three centuries in building
and never finished. The Christian Emperor Theodosius ordered the
work stopped in hope of suppressing paganism and bringing a halt
to a very lively-sounding cult of temple prostitution.

Once again we found a lonely tour gide who took us around,
spouting names and numbers and pointing out things that are extra
odd or large.

The ruins are policed by the Syrians, who are doing a better
job than the Israelis at Tyre. The captain in charge came up and
introduced himself. His English consisted of "Hello." "Hello," he
said and shook hands. "Hello," he said and waved goodbye.

Outside the ruins, Baalbek is a tense and spooky place. All
the Christians, Sunnis and Druse have fled. Giant posters of
Khomeini are hanging everywhere. There are few women on the
streets, and they are carefully scarved and dressed down to the
feet. The men gave us hard looks and fingered their weapons. The
streets were dirty and grim. Syrian soldiers stayed bunched together. The tanks are still dug in around the city. You cannot get a
drink or listen to Western music or dance or gamble, and you'd
better not whistle the "Star Spangled Banner."

The tour guide led us directly from the temples to a souvenir
store. There was something about risking my life to visit a pest hole full of armed lunatics and then going shopping that appealed to me.
The store looked like it hadn't been visited since the Crusades,
except all the ancient artifacts were new, made this month and
buried in the yard fora week.

The nonsense you hear about bargaining in the Orient is, like
most nonsense about the Orient, perfectly true. I had not been in
the shop three seconds before the owner was quoting prices that
would do justice to a Pentagon parts supplier and flopping greasy,
ill-made rugs in every direction-like somebody house-training a
puppy with the Sunday New York Times. There's a charming banter
that goes with all this. I mean, I suppose there is. Some of the
verbal flourishes of the Levant are lost in a minimal English
vocabulary. "Good, huh? Real good, huh? Good rug! Very good!"

"He has a cousin in St. Louis," added the tour guide, helpfully.

It seemed I had to hold up both ends in this legendary duel of
wit in the Bazaar. "Tell him," I said to the guide, "his goods are of
the greatest magnificence and pleasure flows into my eyes at their
splendor. Yes, and I am astonished at the justice of his prices. And
yet I must abase myself into the dust at the humbleness of my
means. I, a poor traveler, come many miles over great distances . . ." And so forth. Out came bogus Egyptian dog-head
statues, phony Roman coins, counterfeit Phoenician do-dads, and
more and worse and bigger rugs. After an hour and a half I felt I
had to pay for my fun. I settled on a small bronze "Babylonian" cow
with some decidedly un-Babylonian rasp marks on the casting. I
bargained the shopkeeper down from $200 to $30. Good work if the
cow hadn't been worth $0.

Charles Glass has spent years in the Middle East and was
completely bored by this, however. He said we should go meet
Hussein Mussawi.

Our Shiite driver was sent to negotiate. After the customary
amount of temporizing and dawdle, Hussein consented to see us.
We were taken to a shabby and partly destroyed section of town,
where we were surrounded by nervous young gunmen. Though
whether they were nervous about us or nervous that they might get
a sudden invite to make like a human Fourth of July, I don't know.
We were marched into a tiny and dirty office and told to sit down. We waited. Then we were marched to a larger office furnished
Arab-style with couches around the sides of the room. Khomeini
pictures abounded. We were served tea, and Charles and I, though
not our Moslem drivers, were very thoroughly searched. Charles's
tape recorder was taken apart with special care. Our guards were
pleasant, but small talk did not seem the order of the day. We
waited some more. Finally, another group of armed young men
came and took us through a warren of narrow filthy alleys to a
modest and well-protected house. We were put into a small study
lined with Arabic books and decorated with more pictures of
Khomeini. There were two young men who spoke English waiting
for us. They asked in an affable way what was going on with U. S.
foreign policy. "After all," said one, "this part of the world has a
Moslem majority. Is your government crazy or what?"

Half an hour later Hussein came in and shook hands with
everyone. He's a thin man of middle size, about forty-five. He was
dressed in a sort of semi-military leisure suit and was very calm
and dignified in his bearing but had, I swear it, a twinkle in his
eye.

Hussein ordered a gunman to bring us coffee and cigarettes.
The young man who spoke English less well acted as translator.
"Were you responsible for the bombing of the Marine base?" asked
Charles. I nearly lit my nose instead of the Marlboro. Hussein
answered with equanimity, pointing out that any number of people,
including the American Democratic Party, stood to benefit from the
attack on the Marines.

"How long will this peace last in Lebanon?" asked Charles.

"This is not peace."

"When will there be peace?"

"When there is Islamic justice everywhere," came the answer.

"Everywhere?" asked Charles. "Will there be a place for Christians and
Jews under Islamic justice?"

"Islam allows a place for everyone," said Hussein. The translator paused
and added on his own, "Except, you know, Zionists and imperialists and
other types."

"The Zionists will have to be driven out?"

"Yes."

"That may take a long time," said Charles.

Hussein fixed him with a smile. "Long for you. Short for us."

Hussein expounded upon the destiny of Islam and a believing
man's place therein. The translator got himself tangled up with
"Allah's great wishes ... I mean, large would-be's ... That
is..."

"The will of God," I suggested.

Hussein turned to me and spoke in English. "Do you understand Arabic?"

"No," I said, "I just recognized the concept."

He said something to the translator, who said to me, "He
wants to know if you believe in God."

I didn't think I should quibble. "Of course," I said. Hussein
nodded. There was intensity in his look and no little human
concern. He continued on subjects theological.

"To get back down to earth for a moment ..." said Charles.

Hussein laughed. "Oh," said the translator, "all this is very
much down to earth."

Charles continued to ask questions. I continued to ponder
Hussein. He was practically the first Lebanese I'd met who didn't
tell me he had a cousin in Oklahoma City. Although, as it turns
out, his brother is a petroleum engineer who used to work in
Dallas.

Charles asked Hussein about Johnathan Wright, the missing
Reuters correspondent. "I hadn't heard about this," was the reply.
"Also he wasn't headed this way."

Hussein told Charles he should study the Koran.

At length we took our leave. As we were being escorted back
to our car I noticed a woman on a nearby roof wearing a chador and
hanging out lacy black lingerie on the clothes line.

Less than a week after our visit, the U.S. embassy annex in
East Beirut got blown up. I hope it wasn't anything we said.

The hotel at Baalbek is the Palmyra, built in the 1870s. It's a
massive Ottoman structure furnished with antique carpets and heavy mahogany Victorian furniture. The leather-bound guest register bears the signatures of Louis Napoleon, the Due D'Orleans,
the Empress of Abyssinia and Kaiser Wilhelm II. There's an air of
twilight and deliquescence to the place. Only the owner and a
couple old servants are left. No room had been occupied for
months, and only an occasional Syrian military officer comes to
dinner.

Charles and I sat alone that night in the vast dining room.
Pilgrims were still returning from Mecca, and celebratory gunshots
sounded outside. "Happy fire" it's called. The electricity guttered
in the bulbs and cast the long tables and tall ceiling into gloom.
The forces of darkness and barbarism seemed to gather around. It
was as though we were the last two white men in Asia. We sat up
past midnight drinking the bottle of Arak a grizzled waiter had
smuggled to us, talking politics and literature and citing apt
quotations: