The Road to Baalbek

‘At eleven o’clock, our eyes fell upon the walls and columns of Baalbec, a noble ruin whose history is a sealed book. It has stood there for thousands of years, the wonder and admiration of travellers; but who built it, or when it was built, are questions that may never be answered. One thing is very sure, though. Such grandeur of design, and such grace of execution, as one sees in the temples of Baalbec, have not been equalled or even approached in any work of men’s hands that has been built within twenty centuries past… A race of gods or of giants must have inhabited Baalbec many a century ago.’

-Mark Twain

Cola is less of a ‘bus station’ than a roadside transportation market where a jumble of passenger vans convene along a stretch of sidewalk at one of south Beirut’s major intersections. After the international airport, it is Lebanon’s second biggest transport hub. But this is a very small country – scarcely larger than Delaware – and from the sidewalk hub of Cola you can go most anywhere east or south of Beirut for less than $5. Before the Syrian civil war, you went to Cola to get a shared taxi to Damascus for the evening. With the right papers, you still can. 

A bustling intersection, Cola lies in the shadows of the one highway connecting Beirut to the south of the country. Beneath the highway overpass is an army garrison with two tanks nestled behind an elaborate maze of sandbags and barbed wire. Facing outward, their guns are passively manned by men at best in their mid-20s, though no one seems to pay them any mind. Lebanon has a beguiling mix of checkpoints and garrisons that crop up in the most unexpected places; but like stray cats, festering green dumpsters and gutted Ottoman villas, they have become such a crucial part of the urban environment that no one notices them any longer.

We wait for the van to fill to capacity before departing, which it does after several minutes. There is a magical, organic efficiency to a great deal of how people travel outside much of the ‘developed’ world. Whether your destination is 50 or 500 miles away, it usually suffices to show up at the bus terminal whenever you please and within the time it takes to have a coffee and a cigarette, there’s a vehicle heading to your destination for the cost of a sandwich or two. No planning, booking, reserving or waiting involved: it’s a dogged, emancipatory efficiency I wonder why we don't imitate.

Minutes after leaving Cola we start to ascend the Lebanon Mountains, the first of two formidable back-to-back ranges that lie between us and Assad, Al-Nusra, and ISIS. In Beirut it had been a balmy spring morning, around 75 degrees, but each minute we mount, a new chill sets in. The height of early spring, one moment the fields are awash in yellow daffodils, the next a thin layer of snow. From sea level we ascend more than 5,000 feet in the first 20 miles alone. A panorama five minutes ago bathed in light is now shrouded in dark, foreboding shades of gray.

We reach our first checkpoint after passing a road-sign reading: “Syrian border: 20 miles” (in French and Arabic, not English), more or less the distance from Prospect Park to the South Bronx. A man in a black ski mask, a red North Face parka and a slick black shotgun slung around his shoulder is inspecting each car. I cannot explain why but I secretly want to be him. Like most of those who man Lebanese checkpoints, his powers of inference must be strong, because he’s checking neither ID’s nor asking any questions. Cars come slowly to a crawl, the driver’s window goes down, and both motorist and soldier give each other a cursory, understated glance. As if to say: “Not to worry – not this time.” But who does get flagged at these checkpoints? The 30 cars ahead of us all passed without a single one coming to a complete stop. 

Once past the road-block, we round the bend and are met with a dramatic panorama: a vast, green fertile plain of arable land parceled out in perfectly fitting puzzle-pieces and dotted with modest dwellings. Enter the Bekaa Valley, Lebanon's breadbasket and cornucopia, this mountainous mini-state's very own Garden of Eden. At 1000 meters (3,280ft), it has the country's most propitious agricultural climate and grows the bulk of its fruit, vegetables and spices, not to mention hosting more than a dozen world-class wineries and the Middle East's biggest production base of cannabis, hash and opium outside Turkey. Just behind it to the east lies the anti-Lebanon mountain range, many of whose peaks are already on the Syrian side of the border (seen above). Looking down and you’d never guess a politicidal war was being waged 10 miles away; from here the valley’s a paragon of natural perfection, the Goya Promised Land, a veritable Lebanese Shangri-La.

Perhaps the only thing as impressive as Lebanon's wildly variegated topography across very short distances is the political-sectarian diversity that accentuates them. Within minutes of leaving the mostly Sunni working class areas around Cola (whose streets are often plastered with the sleazy octogenarian mugs of Saudi royals) for the more prosperous hills, you're immediately met with political Maronism. One moment there are billboards for Samir Geagea, the egg-bald Maronite Christian warlord who was Lebanon’s only political-military leader to be imprisoned for his role during the civil war (1975-1990) and who’s currently gunning for the presidency.

A block later is a bakery with a massive poster of Dany Chamoun, the British-educated civil engineering son of President Camille Chamoun (1952-1958) who was assassinated with his (German-born) wife and children in 1990. Chamoun had led the (Maronite) Tigers Militia in the early years of the civil war, until the more dominant Maronite militia, the (Phalangist) Kataeb, liquidated it in 1980.  He had also been a close advisor to (Maronite Christian) General Michel Aoun, today Geagea's bitterest rival in the struggle to dominate the country’s increasingly small and fractious Christian community for control of Lebanon’s presidency, a post that only Maronite Christians can accede to.

Further into the mountains beyond Beirut's hilly, well-heeled southeastern suburbs, one passes through a series of villages draped in posters for the Future Movement (FM), the predominantly Sunni political party founded by former PM Rafik Hariri, arguably the most cross-confessionally respected leader this country’s ever had. After his assassination by some probable combination of Syria/Hezbollah in 2005, the FM's leadership - like much of Rafik's fortune - was handed over to his woefully poorly whiskered son, Saad. A billionaire Saudi citizen and sore loser, he's been more or less wallowing away in Paris ever since being ousted from Lebanon's premiership in 2011. 

Over the first mountain range and into the Bekaa Valley, we find ourselves in completely new political territory. The first visible signs of political orientation are of Amal, a Shia militia-cum-political party whose principle patron has historically been the Syrian regime (whereas the H-team has always looked to Iran). More secular than Hezbollah, it has been losing ground in the Shia community to the latter for decades – but can at least still claim the country's Speaker of Parliament, the Sierra Leone-born Nabih Berri.

Amal is Hezbollah's older, louder, prouder, scrappier, better shit-talking second-string quarterback: with a growing beer-gut and a part-time gig at the mall, it's not the star it once was – but if public displays of thuggery are anything to go by, it’s still a force to be reckoned with. Indeed, the first several miles into the valley are dominated almost exclusively by Amal insignia and the banner of their favorite son, the Iranian-born and Qom-educated cleric and philosopher, Musa al-Sadr.[1]

The deeper you go into the valley, the less orthodox the political forces that make their presence felt. First is the upscale antique furniture dealer plastered with the swastika-like flags of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP), the pan-Syrian political movement founded by a Sorbonne-educated Greek Orthodox intellectual in the 1930s that militates for a 'greater Syria' spanning all of Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Palestine and parts of Turkey. Accused by its detractors of being fascist – not in the least for its nail-pulling-pinball-machine-looking flag – the SSNP has been one of the Syrian regime’s closest allies within Lebanon since the late 1970s. A secular ally of Amal and Hezbollah within the pro-Syrian March 8^th movement, hundreds of its men and women are said to be fighting in Syria as we speak.

A few minutes later we pass through a small but bustling Palestinian camp that’s clearly under the control of another Syria-backed splinter group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC).[2] Opposed to negotiating with Israel, they have been at loggerheads with Arafat, the PLO and Fatah, the faction controlling the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank, since the late 1960s. Nonetheless, they’ve maintained a strong presence in many of Lebanon’s most desperate Palestinian camps.

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The valley itself is a thing of extraordinary beauty. The day is sunny and brisk, the air sweet and cold. As we plunge deeper down its narrow country lanes, cigarettes lit, windows down and sliding doors ajar, an endless stream of vineyards and rich red fields of recently ploughed soil roll past. The sky’s a stunningly honest shade of blue – the kind you only see when falling-in-fatuated or skipping school in early April. Little white puff-the-magic-creamball kingdoms of dancing clouds hover over each mountain range to the left and right, a bittersweet reminder that however much he’s forsaken the rest of the region, the Good Lord above still loves the Bekaa.

Yet the signs of war and social breakdown still surround us. The first is the shop selling shishas exclusively molded in the shape of life-size AK-47s. The second are the ubiquitous junkyards. One moment a fleet of eight black armored Mercedes flies through a checkpoint ahead of us without slowing down; the next moment, we’re traveling past 100-meter junkyards of smashed-in, bombed out cars on both sides of the road, often stacked 4 and 5 upon each other.[3] Sporadically located, these apocalyptic scrapyards are scattered throughout the better part of the road between Chtaure, at the valley’s entrance, and Baalbek, our destination. Thirty seconds later we pass an old fleet of abandoned city buses left to rust in an overgrown field. On the left is an old rusted train car on an abandoned, moss-covered patch of track, inoperative since the civil war, and lingering in what looks to be someone’s front yard.

The deeper the minivan flies northward through the valley, the more pronounced the presence of Hezbollah. After leaving Zahle, the valley’s largely Greek Orthodox provincial capital, the lone north-south road is soon billeted with giant 25-foot cutouts of various Iranian and Lebanese imams and ayatollahs, roughly the equivalent of Shiite archbishops and popes, to put it crudely. Out there on the horizon, in the road’s median for every traveler to see, looms a giant black-and-white waving cutout of Ayatollah Khomeini, spiritual leader of the 1979 Iranian Revolution and spirited arch-foe of the Great Satan.

Though you wouldn’t know it from taking a cursory drive, the valley’s also home to one of the region’s largest human catastrophes. Since the start of the Syrian civil war – if either of those adjectives can be said to still apply to the conflict – more than 400,000 Syrians, often arriving with but the clothes on their back, have taken up residence in the Bekaa, a valley of roughly 750 square miles: an area smaller than Cook County, IL. The fortunate ones are festering in UNHCR camps, makeshift tents in which they faced a particularly brutal winter of massive snowstorms, sleet, rain and ice.

Off in the distance, sequestered between vineyards, fertile fields and tidy villages, are rows of miserable off-white hovels, each emitting a thin stream of dirty black smoke from numerous make-shift fires (often burning tires). The minivan screeches to a halt and, as I gather my thermos and Tupperware to make room for the corpulent older woman getting in, I make eye contact with two small, smiling children peering out from behind a window facing the street. Their hair is a buoyant, deep, dark red, their eyes bright and green, their faces dirty.

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There’s another checkpoint as you approach the entrance to Baalbek. Again, soldiers in their early 20s sit smoking in silence behind piles of sandbags flanked by 4ft red, green and white oil barrels painted the colors of the Lebanese flag and presumably filled with cement. Arching over the actual checkpoint is a newly constructed, hollowed-out, ersatz roman colonnade, a sad reminder of former architectural triumphs. Not to be dismayed, for little do we know, the single greatest structure these eyes have laid sight on is just around the corner. 

Descriptions of the ancient city of Baalbek must be reserved for more competent writers. To put into words the wonders of the temples of Jupiter, Venus and Bacchus is harder than describing the ecstasy of opening a fresh pack of jelly bellies or the joy of walking barefoot in the vacant lot after a mid-summer’s afternoon thunderstorm, the wet viscous mud squiggling through your toes like giant earthworms coming up for air. Before the beauty of Baalbek one can only remain silent, or giggle, or put on garrulous airs. Anything but actually do it justice.  

Once inside, you have the entire city to yourself. Sure, there are a few French[4] girls snapping selfies in the distance and a lone Lebanese family, but otherwise the ancient grounds are yours and yours alone. Immediately to the east is the anti-Lebanon mountain range, snow-capped and looming like a giant white tortoise. To the west, a vast yellow and green carpet of trees, grass and flowers as fresh as a new pair of patent leather Jordans. Behind them, the Lebanon Mountains, a soft but jagged streak of snow-white sheets that blanket the balconies of heaven’s slums. But before you can kiss the earth in gratitude, a shot rings out in the distance.

Rat! Tat! Tat! Tat! Tat! Another firefight’s begun. Off in the distance a string of automatic gunfire pierces the late March mountain air; the shots are getting closer by the second. I run to take cover under the columns of the temple of Bacchus, eerily aware that the lone security guard doesn’t seem to be paying the commotion any mind. A mortar explodes over the lone colonnade that remains of the temple of Jupiter, leaving behind a small black billow of smoke that soon dissipates in the sky just above (yes, I have a very underwhelming picture to prove it). 

It’s a strange and terrifying cacophony of sounds, a surreal sensation – seized beneath a ubiquitous ring of explosions and automatic gunfire from the confines of an empty, ancient city where not a soul can now be found. But suddenly, after two or three minutes, silence, then normality – the hum of old cabs creeping up the hill; the call of the mosque; the song and dance of distant birds.

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I stroll into town to have a look around. It is quaint and peaceful, the sun is out, the streets are lined with beautiful old beat-up Mercedes, the makeshift plastic tabletop cafés are crammed with contented old conversationalists. At the town’s junction, a giant fading billboard of Bashar al-Assad in camo and sunglasses, standing next to the affably lisped and bearded Hassan Nasrallah, general security of Hezbollah. I pop into an antique store to see what the gunfire was all about. “Looking for postcards? Hezbollah t-shirts?”

The shopkeeper is friendly, in his late-20s and fluent in French. I ask about the battle that just took place. “Don’t be silly – that was a celebration, my friend! People always fire their guns in celebration.” What happened? “A man died. A good man.” Who was he? How did he pass? “He was a family man, the father of many. A good man.” Yes, err, of course, but who was he? And how did he go? “He was… a good man, you know, a family man. A loving husband, neighbor and father. In Lebanon, people fire their guns no matter the occasion! A birth, a marriage, a death. When a dog or cat or cow is born – we fire our guns!”    

Several blocks away I stop in another antique shop. An elderly man is watching a church service on television. The shop is dusty and sparse, the shelves scattered with batteries and old religious relics. There are several beautiful faded prints of Baalbek, old postcards blown up and framed on the wall. “How much is this one?” The old man hesitates. “Ahh… that… hmm,” he hesitates. “Afraid I only have one of those.” And this one? “Ah, that one! I love this one.” He points to an old handsome Ottoman mansion in the picture. “The Palmyra Hotel! Finest place in the country. You know, it’s just around the corner. The Emperor of Germany stayed there.” He grins with the rustic nostalgia of an old maid. “Wilhelm himself came to Baalbek and stayed at the Palmyra.” So it’s not for sale? “Afraid I only have one of those…”

I board a minivan down at the entrance to the ruins and sit in the far back. From the other side of the world, a valley, a mountain range, a different realm: we depart for $5 back to Beirut. Several miles later, we pick up a soldier. He’s pimply and baby-faced, no more than 19. He sits in the back with me. I glance in his direction as he pulls out a pack of cigarettes, Winstons. He offers me one; the bus is packed with women and children, but I feel the obligation to accept. He grins and offers me a light. I dig through my bag and offer him an Oreo; he kindly declines.

A few minutes later we reach a checkpoint and have to pull over. An older soldier opens the door and starts collecting ID cards. All I have is a Missouri driver’s license. The adolescent soldier and I are still smoking our cigarettes, heads halfway out the window in the back of the van. The older one looks at my ID and scoffs: where’s your passport? The younger one, my companion, looks back, nods his head and winks at the officer. As if to say, “Don’t worry ‘bout it. Tard-re's with me.” 

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[1] Of a moderate and ecumenical mind, Sadr arrived in Lebanon in 1960 from Iran to lead the Shia community of Sour (Tyre). He is chiefly remembered for being a tireless advocate of the country's disenfranchised Shias, particularly in the south. Revered for having eschewed the sectarianism that first led to, then exacerbated, the Lebanese civil war, he mysteriously disappeared after flying from Beirut and Libya in 1978. While some say Qaddafi had him killed over a theological disagreement (the cleric accused of being too pedantic within the walls of the presidential palace), others say that Yasser Arafat, whose PLO was then at odds with Shias in southern Lebanon, asked his old friend Brother Leader for a little favor, and the latter obliged. The Martin Luther King Jr. of Lebanon’s Shias, his death remains unsolved to this day.

[2] An offshoot of the original, secular, Marxist-Leninist PFLP created by the Christian Palestinian George Habash in 1967. Deeming the PFLP too beholden to wealthy Palestinian intellectuals in exile and their petty Marxist theoretical concerns, the PFLP-GC soon broke from its parent in order to pursue strictly military, rather than political, objectives.

[3] Granted, it is also like this Beirut. Near my place of work are several bombed-out buildings overlooking a muddy field containing nothing but recent-model luxury cars. This being Beirut, next door is a body shop for totaled vehicles. An SUV is “parked” on the sidewalk, a large, bloody outward-facing intrusion in the windshield where the driver’s head collided with the glass.

[4] Quechua gear always gives their national identity away

Birth pangs of a golden dawn

We meet again, old friend, ye cold, bright, orange, and very early morning. A shame I only see you when I give up the devil juice or go to Turkey. 

It’s 5:32am and I’m lying on a small mattress in the middle of a gigantic corner room on the top of a sixth-floor walk-up. A typical, warn and beautiful old Beirut apartment building, each floor’s got 15-foot ceilings. Ascend them all in one go and you're far too winded to lay siege to the manor house atop the mountain, much less slay the master. But the building could not be better situated. We're at the end of Gemmayzeh (the West Village of the 1980s) and the beginning of Mar Mikhael (the East Village of the late 1990s). Just down the hill from the adorably modernist Saint Anthony Melkite Greek Catholic Church, our building's a half a block west from San Antonio di Padova, my personal favorite. We live directly above two delightful restaurants, neither of which I can afford yet both of which are kind enough to lend us water and electricity. The first is a charming little Italian bistro whose Lebano-African chefs chain-smoke in my stairwell and greet you with a cordial bonsoir. The second is an even swankier Armenian joint. Oh but to think of that sweet delicious forever distant first paycheck...

Three weeks ago, I proudly moved into apartment number three. Number one had to be abandoned when my Danish benefactor departed and the apartment's sorceress-proprietor returned from abducting thumbless orphans in Kerala under the guise of organizing theatre workshops. Number two, the nicest I've known in 29 years, had only been available for the month of February, so into the latest brokedown palace we stumbled in early March. Empty and abandoned for the past five years, it was well beyond uninhabitable as little as two months ago when my delightfully warm, cheerful, easy-going, bearded, ponytailed, Lucky-smoking, whiskey-sipping, Jack-of-all-trade Lebanese roommates copped a deal with the owner, gutted the place and slowly started chiseling it into a livable little oasis in their spare time. Our apartment is like Lebanon, and Lebanon like its most proliferate product: the battered old broken-down Mercedes slouched halfway over the sidewalk on every backstreet in Beirut - dirty, rusted, dented, paint-chipped and poky; tucked away in some bullet-riddled alleyway and left to die. Beneath the pockmarks, however, is something timeless, finely tuned and sublimely tasteful. Oh Lebanon, you 72-year old war-donkey that refuses to croak, no matter the number of slugs. 

Up on the top floor, the mornings are bright and cold. If you don’t go to bed with pants and at least a long-sleeve button-down, you’ll be up with the first sliver of light on the horizon, as I am now. This time of year, the sun comes and goes like a thief in the night. Between 5:52pm and 5:58pm, the richest late afternoon Avalara orange plunges without warning into an ominous ocean of purple. The mornings undergo a similar transmutation. In the absence of blinds - and if you don't abuse your chemical privileges the night before - you go from marauding the Donbass with Nestor Makhno one moment to picking the lent from your bellybutton the next. Pleasant dreams or not, there's no more glorious way to begin the day: a cold draft, a blinding sun and the raucous chime of church bells. 

Though Beirut usually has neither street names nor addresses, we live on Rue Pasteur, a beautiful, old, warn-out street that stretches from downtown to the edge of Mar Mikhael, once a working class Armenian neighborhood that's been inundated with hyper-fly book, brunch and booze establishments and the Perennially Well Dressed Drinking Class in the past few years. Rue Pasteur, for its part, is home to the city's most popular arabic-language institute, an enchanting, multi-layered concrete jungle-cum-garden gym that also houses a trendy hotel, a delicious, affordable joint serving Lebanese fare, a rooftop bar called Coop d'Etat and the city's most popular Anglophone pub quiz. Each Wednesday, roughly 100 alcoholic nerds from 20 nationalities turn out to determine which planets turn counterclockwise and whether glasnost or perestroika means "restructuring". It's a glorious affair. The MC, a quixotic little Lebanese man who tosses us the occasional hint, has a strong North American accent. When the questions don't involve planetary formations or chemical processes, they harken to world history and global (i.e. Western) pop culture. That's to say, there is no difference in the cultural knowledge needed to win a pub quiz in Beirut than there is in London, Berkeley or Cambridge. Hence this wonderful little country's greatest oddity: racist, short-sided and fiendishly tribal on the one hand, it's comically cultivated and cosmopolitan, on the other.   

Further east is Dawawine, a movie theatre-bookstore-library-café-rooftop-terrace-bar of truly thuggish proportions. For men, only finely crafted beards and shawl collars can show their face. For women, anything less fly than 8 is thrown into the streets, a dirty castaway Kulak with no future outside Our Favorite Five Letter Word. Here my buddy works the Friday night shift, selling craft beers and exchanging cinematic knowledge with whoever swings by that evening. By day he's a ____, by night a film director. "What kind of movies do you make?" I inquire the first time we meet. "Fucking depressing ones," answers one friend. "Films about the human condition," says another. Last week we shot a commercial in which I feature as corporate American stiff trying out a new financial app. This week he's off interviewing at one of Europe's premier graduate film schools. 

Just north of us is the sea, a sliver of which can be glimpsed not only from the balcony, but more importantly, from the bathroom. No, there's nothing quite like standing under a stream of cold air and hot water while you feast your eyes upon on that interminable sliver of dodger blue. 60 years ago, my roommates tell me, our building was on the sea. Now it's maybe 500 meters north of us, the result of decades of reclaiming land over a series of landfills. Immediately blocking our view is a high-rise whose windowless backend butts up against us. This needn't be a problem, however, as certain members of the apartment's Central Committee are fast at work attaching high-beam lights to its back wall in anticipation of estival festivities; and once we figure out how to work the projector against the concrete, there'll be no need for sea views apart from those accorded by the bathtub. Plus, this building blocks out much of the congested, coastal highway running just a block north, the last thing separating East Beirut from the industrial port that stretches up toward Karantina. 

Localese for "Quarantine," Karantina was first set aside as an area by the Ottomans in 1831 to house leprous European sailors as they entered Greater Syria. Later it became the sight of the infamous Karantina Massacre, when Phalangists killed up to 1,500 mostly Palestinian working-class Muslims in January of 1976 (I met one flamboyantly outspoken little man whose uncle partook in said massacre. Once, when given trouble at the Beirut airport for being brown and half-Colombian, he played the Fascist Uncle Card and was subsequently treated by security to a hero's toast). Today, Karantina is best known for the summertime stench of its slaughterhouse, the biggest in Beirut, its up-and-coming art galleries, and its preponderance of Civil War-chic night-clubs.

Pesky and pedantic history lessons aside, the morning's now fully upon us and it's time for me to stroll to work. On sunny days, it's a magical walk - a veritable 16-minute tour of much of the city's finest architectural heritage. Crumbling, abandoned, bullet-riddled and covered in graffiti: no closer to my innermost dreams than a Haribo factory minutes after the rapture. Of course, none of what I see along my walk will still be here in 15 years' time. However, as Kirby once said in reference to global warming, by then it will be our grandchildren's problem, and only if we bother to have any. And by the time that generation has come into being, from Beijing to Burundi they'll be too busy tweeting and tindering angry birds to worry about agricultural devastation or rising sea levels. Or perhaps they'll simply adapt. As Mr Rogers taught us, if you drop a fish in boiling water, he'll make like a Belgian jihadi and blow that pop-stand. But if you heat the water gently, and add a little salt.... 

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.