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.
______________________________
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.
__________________________
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.
[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.
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