Shots fired: part II

In the streets below everything was calm. Two well-dressed older women were trying to find the entrance to the exhibition at the Pink House. We pointed them to the front door and made our way back to the main road. Traffic was mild, but not eerily so. Little old men were still plied to the sidewalks, sipping their coffee and killing time. Oh but to read their minds! The florist was still open, the Syrian kids still trying to shine your mingy brown salt-stained shoes. Men grilling kebabs over a small open-air grill in the street. Damn you people! Is no one the least bit taken aback?

The sporadic gunfire had completely subsided; no one to bear witness save us. Were we losing our grip?

I ask Tall Will if he wants to take the rowdy way back from Hamra, passing through the bustling working class Shia neighborhoods of Bachoura and Basta, where militia posters, Iranian flags, Christ-like portraits of the martyred grandson of Muhammad, Hussein ibn Ali, the St Peter of Shiites (to make a truly meaningful analogy), and images of 20-year old gun-toting martyrs hang from every wall. (One cabby from the area told us that 40 men from the neighborhood had already died fighting in Syria – more than twice the number of people from Manhattan who died fighting in Iraq in an entire decade. Anyone who says Lebanon is not at war hasn’t been to Bachoura or Basta, much less the southern suburbs from which Hezbollah draws much of its cannon fodder for the Syrian campaign.[1]) Perennially down for the cause, Tall Will agrees to take the alternative route.

Hide your Minolta! For in 15 minutes we’ll have long foregone the leafy confines of Hamra – the city’s cultural hub and home to its finest cafés, bookstores and hotel bars – for a far more interesting part of town. Granted, the quasi-fascist flags of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP) still dot Hamra’s high street at certain key junctions, but its old commie dives – another once venerable local force – have mostly been converted into Costa or Caribou. These days the zealous flavor lies elsewhere.

Ten blocks east of Hamra and a stone’s throw south of downtown, Bachoura and Basta are a world unto their own. Like many of what used to be the finest urban American communities, these two neighborhoods are hemmed in by recently built freeways and cross-cutting boulevards to the north and the east – Lebanese developers as keen to repeat the mistakes of mid-century urban planners in the 1990s as the Chinese are today. Despite this, each neighborhood has its own distinct charm. There are still dozens of antique shops, a leafy cemetery and several impressive mosques, not to mention the many stunning if derelict old, bullet-ridden Mandate-era buildings being left to rot. Though friendly, welcoming and two minutes’ walk from downtown, these are not prosperous areas. What they lack in scrills they more than make up for in public displays of thuggery.  

We pass the army checkpoint – replete with tanks and sandbags – that flanks the western edge of Bachoura. Shooting from the hip, a friendly soldier approaches to make sure I delete the only halfway decent shot I’d gotten of the barracks. Whatever the army’s (wretched) reputation toward perceived enemies of the state – among them a great many innocent civilians – the actual boots on the ground are almost uniformly friendly and good-natured. Of course, the ones doing the blindfolding are probably not the ones manning routine urban checkpoints, but the contrast is jarring. For many Lebanese (read: poor and marginalized Sunni), the army is often perceived as the greatest threat. For many others (read: poor Christians), it’s the only thing between them and their firstborn becoming Janissaries in the next Caliphate. Poor Shias, for their part, already became Syrian Janissaries several years ago. 

I want Will to appreciate the ill-nasty thug mish that abounds in Basta, but I cannot remember which street to turn down. We take a back alley heading north toward downtown; is my favorite intersection just around the bend? We hook a right and stumble upon the freeway before turning back. We’re weary of giving the impression that we’re lingering, overstaying our welcome. Scooters bop and weave between us, the driver holding the wheel in one hand while juggling a shisha full of flaming coals in the other: this I shall do for a living in the next life. Car doors hang wide open, their radios blasting a heated oration. Damn me for not knowing a lick of Arabic. Then again, on this occasion one needn’t understand a word: if told to, you’d have drunken the juice of whoever was giving the fiery speech.

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I desperately want to find the point where Basta ends and Monot, an upscale Christian neighborhood full of English pubs and French bistros, begins. These two neighborhoods, decades and destinies apart, are divided by one measly fucking boulevard. It’s the Delmar Divide on the finest rock Ollie North ever scrounged together. As we snake toward Monot, rapid gunfire erupts again, only this time much closer.

Tat! Tat! Tat! Tat! Tat! The shots are more frequent and getting louder. Will suggests make like a fetus and head out in a cab. “Trust me, bud, we’re getting close. We have to reach this junction where the two neighborhoods meet: it’s super-duper interesting. Like, you know, the con-trast, I swear you’ll love it.” We round another corner and inch our way further east, or so I’d like to think. The shots are getting closer. Will turns a lighter shade of pale. “Come on, buddy, we should leave.” But the locals are still unfazed! The shots ring louder as we meander to Antique Row, yet people are still milling about. Why aren’t they losing it? By now my buddy’s turning light purple, and even my stomach’s starting to wobble. Come on, little sense of direction of mine, it’s got to be just around the corner.

Pap! Pap! Pap! Pap! Pap! Suddenly the streets are empty. Shots ring out from every direction: single-fire, semi- and automatic, each in seismic spats of fury. Are we in the middle of a turf war? Where are the snipers? Will they still shoot us if we soil ourselves beforehand? I’m happy to take one for the team. Alas, Will had been right along. We turn around and scurry the fuck out of there, anxious not to draw attention to ourselves. Like nada goddamn thing. When you stumble upon a stray pit, sprinting will not do (your correspondent knows). Our only hope was the rapid glide-walk, the one where you scuttle as quickly as possible without both feet ever simultaneously leaving the ground.

Back on Antique Row, bowels on the verge of bubbling over, I make out the downtown Hariri mosque in the distance. If ever you wish to be reacquainted with Haribo, Thou Shalt Scurry Down that Hill. We make a byline for the highway underpass that divides Basta from the city center and start running down the hill. Tall Will still wants to get in a cab. Out of the question! At this point we’re dripping with a fear so thick that any two-bit huckster cabbie could smell it. The kind of fear that seizes you when you’re flipped by a violent wave, have smashed your head against the seafloor and are choking on saltwater and supplicating subconsciously for forgiveness. That will not do. He’ll smell us and turn us in. Bring us to party headquarters. Whisk us right back to the front. The only way to survive is to speed-walk down the hill as if nothing whatsoever had happened.  

Bullets are still flying but no one seems to care. We pass a police station where chubby officers in berets and full-body camouflage are milling about smoking ciggs and sexting with underage paramours. Not one half of two shits were being given that the civil war had re-erupted. We dash under the overpass and make for downtown. It’s sundown and bureaucrats and bankers are making for the parking lot, solemn as one expects them to be after a full week on the grind. Various gates, roadblocks and barriers have been erected to keep some cars from entering and others from exiting the parking lot. Soldiers – or simply cops in camouflage – are manning the exit points. They are many, yet no one pays the slightest mind to the gunfire exploding in the neighborhoods only two blocks south.

We reach the safety of Saifi Village, a ritzy but virtually vacant downtown gated community. I can my boogie neighborhood bakery a few blocks in the distance: never have I been happier to see an establishment in my life. It looks safe and warm and protected from the world. Tall Will and I are trembling with fear and excitement, the jumble of orgasmic nerves that erupt when you think you’ve tricked the devil. To Carthage! Atlantis! Persepolis! We’d earned a debilitating disease’s worth of tallboys.

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Back home, we check the newspapers to see what we’ve just “witnessed.” New York Times: nothing. Guardian: nothing. Wall Street wanking Journal: nada hot damn thing. Were Will and I losing our minds? Had Jerusalem Syndrome gone astray? Finally we have the sense to check the Beirut Daily Star. But of course. Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s fiery leader, had been giving a publicly televised 90-minute speech to address the significance of recent skirmishes along the Israeli border that threatened to drag the country back into war with its Jewish neighbor. Israel this, Israel that: we’ll bring it if we have to, nyungka. The shots fired that afternoon? Celebratory.

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[1] In a previous post, I foolishly referred to these neighborhoods as being Hezbollah-controlled. They are not. Instead, a competing Shia militia-cum-party called Amal – still beholden to Hezbollah – holds sway.

Shots fired: part I

We set out for a stroll one pleasant Friday morning to give Tall Will the lay of the land. Meandering the motley of Roman ruins, army checkpoints, crassly upscale but empty retail outlets and stark new high-rises that are conspiring for the heart of Beirut, we finally emerged upon Zaitounay Bay, a posh new marina sequestered between the St. Georges Hotel to the west and a lovely new boardwalk being laid over a landfill to the east. 

The view from the seaside, both manmade and not, is a jarring but beautiful jumble of layers. In the foreground, several dozen yachts are flanked by hundreds of smaller speedboats, none of which ever stir from their winter’s slumber. Immediately behind them, an untamed brigade of glass and steel shoot into the air. The towers closest to the marina are or will be finished; several of those a block or two further inland have been abandoned ever since the civil war – most notably the infamous Holliday Inn – site of the “Battle of the Hotels” in the autumn of 1975. Looking north, a sleepy coast speckled with thousands of little white dwellings floats as gently toward Syria as a lamb to the slaughter. Just behind this first layer of densely inhabited hills that roll up from the sea is a dramatic range of snow-capped peaks. On a clear day, it is offensively beautiful.

Plastered across the St. Georges Hotel is a giant 100-foot banner reading “Stop Solidere,” the namesake of the development company that owns and manages virtually all of downtown Beirut. One of few property owners with sufficient funds at the end of the civil war, the owner of the St. Georges narrowly avoided expropriation at the hands of the autocratic development group, Solidere, that seized virtually all of downtown Beirut for “redevelopment” in the 1990s. At the risk of boring the reader, I will leave the story of this corporate fiefdom’s historic takeover of an entire city center to a more articulate writer than myself. 

Once the foremost playground for the global leisure class that flocked to Beirut in the 1950s and 1960s, the St. Georges has been inoperative as a recreational facility since the beginning of the civil war (1975) (though it did house Syrian troops until 1996). Built under the French mandate in 1932, it originally served, in its current owners’ words, as a meeting ground for “French officers and local society.” Only in Lebanon do many still take extreme pride in having been colonized – by the French, of all people. During its heyday in the 1960s, its website boasts, its pool “flaunted the best displays of bikinis and brown limbs in the Middle East” – a byline a little harder to promote in today’s regional political climate. Tragically – or according to some, ironically – the founder of Solidere, billionaire and former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, the man who for years prevented the re-opening of the hotel, was blown to bits in a car bomb as his motorcade careened past the St. Georges exactly a decade ago. Across the street and directly facing the unmistakable “Stop Solidere” sign is a larger than life-size monument of the late Prime Minister, a jarring reminder of the unfinished war he waged against the older patrons of the city.  

Once past Zaitounay Bay, we arrive at the Corniche, the city’s finest seafront promenade and the pride of West Beirut. Contrary to downtown, the Corniche has something for everyone and all walks of life: tri-generational family strolls; little old men with nothing but time and tobacco on their hands, casting their metal rods into the sea; emaciated middle-aged divers coming up to examine their findings; young couples and ancient companions; new lovers and old quarrelers; weight-conscious, kale-munching expats darting past in spandex; southeast Asian house-slaves walking their masters’ mutts; bristly, underemployed creepsters no longer pretending not to stare. Though noticeably more Muslim than other prosperous parts of Beirut, the Corniche is the only part of the city where everyone is truly welcome, regardless of class, creed or religious confession (the latter not to be confused).

Several blocks down, the American University of Beirut springs from the earth as if a stairway to Heliopolis. The gates of its seaside entrance are virtually on the sea, and if you can make it past security without a student ID (read: white skin and/or a conspicuous sense of entitlement), you’ve no more need to don the robe, sprout the prepubescent beard, go to confessional, tithe or take up arms for or against the Islamic State. Entering AUB’s campus, you’ve arrived at the end of the line, paradise on earth, the city upon the hill built of cocaine and gooey-butter cake. It is the campus to end all campuses, a beacon of light, learning and very studious leisure: the crown jewel of American missionary undertakings. In the annals of Protestant achievements, the conversion of 9 million Koreans to Presbyterianism pales in comparison.

Since this was before I’d whiskeyed my way into a job, I was there to put up flyers for private history lessons. Scrills having long since left my pocket, it was time to swallow my pride and start looking for work, however desperate the approach. I printed out twenty flyers advertising my credentials and half-heartedly began posting them to light-posts and telephone booths at the entrance to campus. Furtively, I applied the tape to each flyer from the confines of the telephone booth before dashing out to post them as quickly as possible, terrified I’d bump into someone I knew (Didn’t you tell me you were a journalist? Coordinating the Committee to End All War? A documentary filmmaker? Cultural attaché at the Welsh embassy?)

Nevertheless, I had to press on. “Weary of playing fifa with your stupid pimply friends? Passionate about unlocking the mysteries of the past? Eager to understand how Hitler escaped to Argentina? Top-notch lessons with Anglish-speaking native of eastern Missouri.” (If I’ve learned one thing over the years, it’s that most everyone outside of Europe and North America is stark raving mad about the Fuhrer. The evidence is overwhelming, not just in Lebanon). I even upped the Garamond to font size 18, which, of course, not a soul can make out from more than 7ft away. Alas, there have been no inquiries: such was our brief foray into the Levantine hustle.

Next we set off in search of the Pink House. A beautiful crumbling ruin overlooking the sea, it is the last of its kind in West Beirut, a monument to a bygone swagger that, until Joe and I make our fortune selling Vietnamese egg-white coffees on the northside, may never again hold sway. Its foundations built sometime in the 18^th century, the second and third floors of this imploding palace were added in 1888. In the 20^th century it became a cultural hub of sorts, rented out to one artistic clan alone from in the early 1960s until last year.

Sometime last summer, an affably blond English painter and longtime resident of Lebanon was strolling along the sea when the lonely old mansion caught his eye. With a good-faithed confidence that only foreigners seem to enjoy in this country, he went up to the door and knocked. Fayza El Khazen, the last of a storied clan to inhabit the pink ruin, opened the door and immediately took a liking to him. Little did the Englishman know, the developer who’d recently purchased the house had just served Fayza an eviction notice: the end of an era, albeit a long-since neglected one, was nigh. He asked if he could come do several portraits of the house as she moved out, and Fayza gladly acceded. Shortly thereafter he moved in. If his current exhibition generates enough publicity, the developer may find himself forced to rehabilitate the house rather than demolish it.

The main floor was sadly majestic, but I was geeking to get upstairs.  Tall Will was out in the yard taking pictures when I meandered the imploding staircase wrought with broken glass and miscellaneous trash toward the top of the old palace. Oddly, you could only access the second and third floors from an outside staircase – as if some feat of engineering had been concocted to accommodate a vicious divorce or a familiar falling out. Alas, the second floor was bolted shut, but the staircase continued. By the time I got to the roof, a series of dark, impending clouds had begun to form in the west. The sky turned a deep dark pinkish-grey, the hue that hung over Hanoi on the eve of Rolling Thunder.

Pap! Pap! Pap! Were these firecrackers on a Friday afternoon? Pap! Pap! Pap! Pap! Pap! To virgin ears, it was impossible to tell. Whatever their source, it wasn’t that far away. For all its infamy, it’s a compact city. The Palestinian camps are barely a ten-minute drive; the hinterland of Hizbollah-controlled Dahiye scarcely any more. Single shots rang out first, followed by spurts of automatic gunfire. After a minute or so, they slowed and then stopped. Apart from the hum of traffic, a perfect quiet resumed. I was alone on the roof and could see at least ten blocks south, yet there were no were outward signs of unrest. Had I imagined it? There were no horns, no sirens, no ambulances. No shrieking mothers. No flailing arms. Why was everything so perfectly calm? Hadn’t they heard? Red light, green light: trucks, cars, vans and cabs came and went as though nothing had happened. Joggers – those careless fucking joggers – were still shuffling up and down the seafront sidewalk as though nothing was amiss.

Tall Will came up to the roof a moment later, we exchanged a nervous hello. For whatever reason, we didn’t address the elephant choking on formaldehyde in the corner of the room. After a minute or so, Pap! Pap! Pap! This time even longer, closer, louder and more immediate. “Did you hear it earlier?” Of course he had. On the roof of this battered pink palace, the wind began to stir. “Should we get over there and see what’s cracking?” I asked rhetorically, giddy but secretly terrified at the thought. Only hours earlier, along the Corniche, we’d been musing about becoming war correspondents in the next life… The rubble! The beards! The stolen crates of vodka! Grozny, I love you, but you’re bringing me down. Only after hearing the gunfire, so violently close yet so terribly far, did we begin to disabuse ourselves of any such notion. “Come on buddy, this could be our chance!” I mused in bad faith. “We’ve both got our cameras.”