This Is Running for Your Life (17 page)

On stepping outside the building I was marked by a group of men idling around a taxi stand. The tallest one led the charge, his hand outstretched for my suitcase. The first practical bit of advice one gets about traveling to Beirut is not to pay more than twenty thousand lira (about $14 U.S.) for the ride from the airport, and to settle up front. I and the huddle of disgruntled drivers that formed around me were making a time-lapsed orbit toward Tall Guy's cab when he answered my calls for a number: thirty-five. I shook my head and reached in to cover his grip on my suitcase. Tall Guy whirled around in disgust, tossing his head and snorting like a pro.

I was preparing for the second act when a small, sharp-eyed dude in a red bomber jacket made a lunge for my suitcase and carved an expert little doughnut with its wheels. Suddenly a soldier was in the mix, roughing Red Bomber Jacket away; hot-faced arguments ensued, everywhere scorn and smoky breath. When it seemed I would not extract a ride—or myself—from the scrimmage, a sleepy type on the perimeter stepped in to mutter, “Twenty dollars,” real low. I nodded and he swung my bag away from the curbside vehicles, back into the building. Inside we boarded an escalator and blazed a circuitous path in silence. At length I was handed off to a second man, who led me out onto an upper ramp, where a single, unmarked Hyundai was waiting with a driver already inside.

Two weeks after this scene played out, Beirut's taxidrivers staged another in a series of strikes over rising fuel prices in Lebanon, a one-day protest that sparked rioting in the streets. Lebanese soldiers began firing on the protesters, leaving seven dead and more wounded. Electricity shortages and rising food prices have been particularly acute in south Beirut and the southern region of Lebanon, large sections of which are controlled by Hezbollah. The Shia and Christian opposition, backed by Syria and Iran, have accused the American-backed government of punishing southern Beirut with the blackouts that have grown common in Shia villages in the south and the eastern Bekáa Valley. With no president, parliament, or functioning cabinet to address these concerns or even officially meet the accusations, violent protests and road blockades—a clear path to attention—grow more frequent.

Beirut's airport is blissfully central; fifteen minutes after the cloak-and-driver routine on the arrivals deck I was contemplating the metal detector at the entrance of the Palm Beach Hotel, an elegant, proud, exceptionally creepy facility whose “luxe,” seafoam-green parlor broke my heart on first sight, and every day after that. The decorating scheme appears to have involved Zsa Zsa Gabor's swallowing a flatbed full of crown moldings, chasing it with the contents of a dolphin tank, and then vomiting all over the lounge. About one hundred feet out the front door and off to the right is the site where Hariri was blown to pieces by two thousand pounds of TNT. The sign marking the area is in Arabic, and for the first couple of days I assumed the gutted buildings and ragged streetscape were a more anonymous addition to the city's general disarticulation.

*   *   *

Say the name to someone of my generation and their eyes still widen: Beirut means bad. Lebanon's war dominated the world stage during the 1980s—along with Iran-Iraq and the Russians in Afghanistan—as Vietnam, Cambodia, and North Korea had in previous decades. I recall Beirut most vividly; it's the center of a country and its tragedy. It was a name I knew at eight years old, scanning the cover of
Time
on our kitchen table—probably hoping for the painted glare of Prince or Madonna—and finding yet more images of Beirut's carnage and rubble, its seemingly endless issue of grief, ruin, dust-etched tears.

Beirut meant “the Paris of the Middle East” back in its midcentury heyday, back when my twenty-four-year-old father was offered a teaching position at the city's American University in 1966. It was a young man's gambit—a few years to burn on a kind of French playground—but he turned it down, opting for a stint in Rochester, New York. A year or so into that move a letter arrived informing him of a change in his draft status, and it was so long Rochester. By the late 1960s resident aliens and teachers—previously protected by a shifting set of conditions—were being conscripted to fight in Vietnam. A few years after returning to Canada my father accepted a professorship in the London of southwestern Ontario—the thriving, many-treed, oppressively well-adjusted town where I was eventually born and raised.

Founded in 1866 as the Syrian Protestant College by an American missionary named Daniel Bliss, the American University flourished in the first half of the twentieth century, then had a fairly steady decline throughout the second. Walking along the street named for Bliss on the AUB campus, I wondered what the twenty-first century might have in store for Lebanon's jewel of higher education. Many of the graduate programs shut down during the civil war, and today a Lebanese student with the means to attend university will most likely enroll abroad. Even the staunchest foreign students eventually evacuated in 2006; relatively few have opted to return. The bombings and high-profile assassinations rose in number and severity across 2007—a Christian legislator was killed in September and an army general in December; Hezbollah was blamed in both cases—and the election for a new president has been delayed eleven times since Émile Lahoud left office in November. The entire country seems suspended with dread, wondering if the next shot fired or explosion detonated in Beirut's streets will be the one that sends Lebanon tumbling. The twelfth attempt at a presidential election was scheduled for January 12, 2008, several days after my arrival in the capital. In retrospect, it would have been a good thing to know.

*   *   *

Beirut is not a walking city. Neither is it a driving city, nor particularly a public-transportation city. When I ask the meticulously coiffed hotel concierge for the best way to get to the famously rebuilt downtown area, also the site of the National Parliament, she tells me to walk along the shore for a while. “Eventually…,” she advised, “you'll want to turn right.” A pause followed and our eyes met over the glossy front desktop, each of us awaiting very different things. “Ask someone on the street,” she added finally, above the peals of a suspiciously well-timed phone call. “You can't get lost.”

Indeed, I could. The problem with getting lost in Beirut is that looking lost is tantamount to looking suspicious. Few people are in the streets, fewer still who are alone; within seconds of setting out I knew that neither strolling nor stopping were viable options in a walking tour of the city. The idea, securitywise, is to slow down the cars—with zigzagging barricades that prevent vehicles from tossing a bomb and zooming away—and speed up the people. Private guards patrol the front of nearly every building, and the Lebanese army is out in force on most corners. There is only hustling with your head down, grateful for the cover of the January chill.

When I finally found the downtown—a peanut-butter-colored, art deco suburb built up around crumbling mosques and churches—only soldiers roamed the area. A maze of barricades and riotous spirals of razor wire made accessing a building that seemed mere steps away a triumph of will and logistics. Turning down a new block meant another search of your bag and your person by another young man with a long, elegantly snouted automatic rifle strapped across his back. The high-fashion shops lining the radial streets off Nijmeh Square are shuttered on a given afternoon. A mean wind was whipping in off the Mediterranean; over an hour I saw fewer than a dozen civilians. I wound up on a wide, wildly trafficked avenue, where I was finally granted a full vantage of the imperious Al-Amin Mosque. Hariri was building the Al-Amin at the time of his death; he's buried there now, along with his seven bodyguards. The mosque appears blown from blue and gold glass, as though it were set down among a ragged sandbox city and could as easily topple or be taken away. I pulled out my camera to take a picture and felt the nearby soldiers resettling their focus. It was my first, fuzzy twinge of what became a full-blown case of paranoia.

Nowhere is Beirut's resilience more apparent than in its reconstructed city center
, read a tourist guide I picked up later that afternoon.
In 1990, Downtown was in shambles, a deserted no-man's-land, a ghost town.
I had stopped at the Virgin Megastore—found on all tourist maps of Beirut—because it was adjacent to Martyrs' Square, the memorial I had hopelessly been stalking, fended off by an intimidating show of barricades and wire. The Virgin Megastore, a four-floor behemoth, was open despite all appearances. I know there are four floors because I traveled—in escalator slo-mo—to each one, trying to find someone who would take my ten dollars for
Lebanon 2006: Official General Tourism Guide
.

After that I ate a pound of almonds, tore my pants on an errant coil of wire, and declared Round One for Beirut. I had been searching throughout the afternoon for an outlet adapter for my computer, continuing a saga begun the night before, when a timorous young woman made five separate trips to my room, each time bearing a new contraption that fit neither my machine nor the hotel's outlets. The power was sort of fluid anyway, coming and going throughout the day. That morning I had been using the hotel's desktop when the whole place went dark. I hadn't yet moved past the page where the last guest, a built young man of indeterminate ethnicity, left off:
iCasualties.org
, a real-time database of coalition forces killed in the Iraq and Afghan wars.

Adapt, adapter, adaptive; I was sure I had packed the fucking thing. I made one last try, ducking into a tiny cell-phone shack on the way home. The skinny teenager manning the gadgets was just about to tell me he was sorry when I saw exactly what I needed sitting between his phone and his lighter on a shelf behind the counter. “That?” He tossed it to me. “You can have that, I don't even know what it is.”

*   *   *

The young sir at the front desk gave me the usual directions: “Go this way, then go that way, then ask somebody—you can't get lost.” He was just a kid, all soft and facially unsorted and yet so assured. “Let's assume I'm lost
right now
,” I wanted to reply. “What would you say then?” After a night spent vomiting fattoush and hummus, I was on my way to meet Felicia—a stranger, a friend of a friend—at a café in Jamia. She had suggested a taxi but I wanted to walk.

The Prague Café is on the AUB campus, close to Hamra Street, where I was relieved to find a healthy stream of civilian life. On this Friday afternoon the place was filthy with smoke and great-looking people. A small chalkboard hanging behind the bar appeared freshly erased and reinscribed:
When a woman has a nervous breakdown, she goes shopping. When a man has a nervous breakdown, he invades a country.

Felicia's friend Rafael was the first person in Beirut to accuse me of being a spy. “People are going to think you're a spy,” he said as we arranged our knees and elbows around a low-slung coffee table. “Are you not a spy?”

I told them I had come to Beirut to research a short story; to his credit, Rafael didn't blink. I tried not to seem too desperate for the company, and Felicia—home visiting from Dubai, where she reluctantly took a reporting position a few months previously—attempted to ignore her BlackBerry's violent seizures between our cups. Journalism jobs are hard to come by in Beirut; the city tends to attract the best. Like most of her friends, she's gunning for Cairo. Rafael works for an environmental group and mentioned being recently escorted away from the U.S. embassy, where he had gone to take pictures of the waterbirds—unheard of in the city—drawn in by the large pools that collected in front of the building after a heavy rain. He only got off a few snaps before the guards closed in.

The presidential election was scheduled for the next day, and I may as well have fired a starter pistol into the café's smoke-stained ceiling when I asked if it would actually happen. I was thrown clear of the ensuing debate, with its unfamiliar names, dates, and technicalities, regaining purchase only when Rafael equated Lebanon's political détente with the other dark force currently occupying his life: a punishing divorce. What he had realized, he said, was that the nature of the split with his wife and the nature of Lebanon's disintegration shared certain patterns. The breakdown in communication, the antipathy born of long-term alienation, the petty marshaling of protocol—it was all there.

“Ultimately, it's all about power,” he said, his eyes rounding with epiphany, or caffeine. “It's not about who's right or what's best or some deep belief. You lose sight of all that, and it becomes about who has more control, who comes out on top—who did what years and years ago and who has to pay.” Felicia and I sipped and fiddled at our drinks as Rafael slumped back into his leather armchair:
“Power.”

It's hard to talk about anything else when you're breaking up. Try, and be amazed at the tunneling your brain does to get back where it wants to be. Everyone in Beirut talks politics, all the time. It's like history's longest breakup between the world's most promising couple, argued by the Middle East's greediest lawyers, and contingent on the custody of several million traumatized children, who will grow into needy adults with trust issues and a tendency to freak out other countries in bed.

Gathering himself from his chair and another of divorce's palpable aftershocks, Rafael wrapped up with the two things I needed to know for my stay in Beirut: “Everyone thinks everyone is a spy. And they might as well line the whole city with razor wire.”

*   *   *

Hezbollah emerged in 1982, a pet militia of the Ayatollah Khomeini. They trained under Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard to fight the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon, which had left between twelve and nineteen thousand Lebanese dead, many of them Shiites. Led by Beirut-born secretary-general Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah since 1992, Hezbollah—the only militia not forced to disarm after the end of Lebanon's civil war—is cited as a terrorist organization by both Canada and the United States, whereas most of Europe and the Arab world recognizes them as a legitimate resistance movement. Prior to September 11, 2001, Hezbollah was responsible for the deaths of more American citizens than any other Islamic group, most notoriously the 1983 truck bombing that killed 241 marines in their West Beirut barracks, out by the airport. Court documents called it “the largest nonnuclear explosion that had ever been detonated on the face of the Earth.” And yet in 2005 the United States showed signs of capitulating to the United Nations' attempts to smooth Hezbollah's way into mainstream Lebanese politics—a sign, some say, that the United States is currently too depleted by its involvements in Iraq and Afghanistan to risk toying with the puppets of Syria and Iran. With over one hundred million dollars in annual funding from Iran and flourishing black-market and intelligence resources, Hezbollah has ballooned into the world's premier terror network; even Al Qaeda looks to them for training and advice. They are, after all, considered the leading experts in the kidnap and torture of foreigners—particularly Americans—for political advantage.