“Let me put it this way: he advises them.”
“So what do the politicians say? What stance do the parties take?”
“None of them will speak out. They all just hem and haw as usual. Hezbollah is absolutely against civil marriage. Nasrallah’s authority depends on religion for its legitimacy, so Hezbollah would never agree to a change in the law.”
“And the other parties?”
“Very unlikely.”
“But … I mean, how many religious groups are there here? Seventeen?”
“Eighteen.”
“Eighteen. So why can’t people see this as an opportunity? Allowing interfaith marriages would be a huge leap forwards. Imagine a Lebanon where a child could have one grandmother who’s Sunni, the other Maronite, one grandfather Shia and the other Druze?”
“I see what you’re getting at …”
“How could a child like that ever hate anyone because of their religion? Wouldn’t a law permitting interfaith marriage have the power to bring all the factions together at last? Unite them into a nation? It would be revolutionary, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Nabil. “Revolutionary.” It sounded wistful, the way he said it. “But that’s exactly what the politicians are afraid of. That’s why they’re so fiercely resistant. Politics and religion are one and the same thing here. Every single religious leader is terrified of your vision of peace. As long as the land remains divided, people will keep listening to them …”
We drove the rest of the way in silence. When the lights of Beirut began to appear on the horizon, Nabil phoned his brother to say he’d be by to pick up his children shortly. I could hear them making a racket in the background.
“So, Samir, what hotel should I take you to? Back to the Best Western?”
“Is there a Carlton Hotel in Raouche? Near Pigeon Rocks?”
“A Carlton Hotel? Hmm. I think there used to be, but it’s gone now, as far as I know.”
“Are you sure?”
“No. Well, pretty sure. Was it quite old?”
“Yes. I’d say it was built in the sixties, maybe even a bit earlier.”
“Then I’m certain it’s gone now.”
“Why?”
“Because all the hotels on the Corniche and around the marina are modern skyscrapers now. Lots of glass. I’ll show them to you tomorrow. Developers and investors have been flocking to Beirut since the war ended. Most of them come from the Gulf States: Saudis, Qataris, and so on. They see Beirut as a project. The world’s biggest urban renewal project. They’ve bought up huge swathes of the city. The few buildings left standing after the war were torn down because they were old. Why do you ask?”
It was the hotel Father worked in. I read about it in his diary. “Just curious,” I said. “It would be nice to see Pigeon Rocks.”
I turn off the air conditioning and put down the business card. SINAN AZIZ, RHINO NIGHT CLUB. The clock says half past twelve. I resist the urge to get dressed and take a taxi there, just show up and start asking about him. I consider phoning the number. It’s a nightclub, so there’s probably a better chance of someone picking up now than during the day tomorrow. On the other hand, if Father doesn’t want to be found, it wouldn’t be smart to announce that I’m here in the city. Sinan Aziz might warn him.
I crawl under the duvet. I’ll be too warm later, but until then I’ll leave the air conditioning off and the window closed. The TV next door is silent now, but a tap is running; I hear the water swooshing on the other side of the wall. I pick the business card up again and place it on the other pillow. As I’m falling asleep, I think of Grandmother and her painful realisation that her son is not coming back. Not if he can help it.
This time I’d set the alarm: nine o’clock. Get up, shower. Breakfast room on the first floor. Crumpled newspapers on a table by the door. Smiling waiters. A European-style breakfast buffet: toast, wholegrain bread, jam, plates of cheese and salami, tomatoes, cucumbers, boiled eggs, fried eggs, scrambled eggs, milk, orange juice (though not freshly squeezed). The guests are in suits, laptops and tablets open, coffee cups and cutlery clinking. To my surprise, I slept through the night.
When I leave the hotel at ten, I can hardly believe my eyes. Nabil is leaning against his car, which is gleaming in the morning sun; he’s just washed it. He gives a broad grin and spreads his arms wide.
“Ten o’clock, as arranged.”
I feel like patting him on the head.
“I’m impressed.”
“Like I said, I know all the shortcuts. Nabil is always on time.”
“You even washed the car.”
“Well, now that we’re official partners, I thought we’d better have a decent detective car.”
“We’re partners?”
“Yeah, like Holmes and Watson.”
“Doesn’t Philip Marlowe have a partner?”
“No, he’s a loner. But he gets more women than Holmes.”
“Oh well,” I say, adding in a low voice, “We can’t afford any distractions, buddy.”
I like joking around with him. Nabil’s good humour is infectious. He holds the passenger door open for me. As he makes his way round to his own side, he says, “Pigeon Rocks, you said you’d like to see them?”
“That’s right.”
“Let’s go there, then. I’ll show them to you. The address on the business card is to the north of here, and Pigeon Rocks are to the west, but it’s not much of a detour. It’s just gone ten, anyway. Let’s give them a chance to wake up first.”
“Good idea.”
“By the way,” he said, putting on his sunglasses and starting the engine, “I found out a few things about the Carlton.”
There’s a sheer drop between the land and the sea. It’s stunning. The azure sea sparkles, and small white-crested waves break against the craggy cliffs. Many metres below me, jet skis drone and little paddle boats make their way towards Pigeon Rocks, two massive outcrops covered in grey lichen, about fifty metres from the shore. I lean on the railings and close my eyes. The wind caresses my face. The noise of the city’s traffic seems miles away. I can’t help thinking of that day long ago. Father and me at the lake. Our nutshell-ships. His voice: May they sail for a thousand years! I know exactly what he’d say now: Picture it: Phoenician ships being loaded with cedarwood here before setting sail for Egypt. The most advanced civilisation in the world. I’ve been doing my best to blot out the fond memories these past few years. I wanted to be angry with him. But now I can’t stop them flooding back. I see a whole fleet of red-sailed wooden ships on the sea and I remember an entry in his diary:
I’m not supposed to be here. Fariz, who’s on cleaning duty up here today, gave me the key. The roof is out of bounds for us. Too dangerous with the snipers. But I checked with a few people, and they all said there haven’t been any militiamen around today. I love the view from up here. If you look east towards the city, you can barely see through the smoke billowing up from the streets. But if you look west, all you can see is the sea. You can forget about the explosions for a while. And if you look slightly to the right, you can see Pigeon Rocks, so resolute, I wish I was one of them.
I survey the hotels and the penthouses on the opposite side of the street. Their glass facades reflect the coast. My gaze drifts upwards, and I imagine Father on the roof of the Carlton, looking west. A burning city behind him and nothing but sea and limitless sky ahead.
“What did you find out about the Carlton, then?” I ask Nabil, who’s leaning on the railing beside me. He’s pushed his sunglasses back into his hair, and his chin is resting on his palms.
“Let’s take a wander,” he says.
The Corniche is teeming with people out for a stroll. Parents pushing buggies, lovers twisting into poses for seaside selfies, and street traders who’ve spread out their wares: knock-off Louis Vuitton handbags, recent Hollywood releases burn
t onto DVDs, Rolex watches, disposable cameras. The promenade is lined with palm trees. Old men sit on benches reading newspapers and shelling pistachios. A little boy wearing faded running shorts and a Messi football jersey runs barefoot across the hot asphalt, a bunch of roses in his arms.
“Syrian,” Nabil says. “A refugee.”
“How can you tell?”
“The Corniche is full of them. Especially in the streets where the bars and hotels are.” Nabil points to a trader flogging sunglasses to a couple. The man is trying on a pair; his girlfriend, unconvinced, shakes her head. “They’re all refugees. The boy is probably here on his own or else with his mother. The Syrian refugees are mostly women and children. Their husbands are either fighting Assad or dead, or they’ve fled to a country where it’s easier to find work. They send money back to their wives. The kids have to pull their weight too, if their families are to keep their heads above water.”
I’ve heard about it in the news. Lebanon, with a population of barely four million, has taken in more than a million refugees.
“They either stay in the old refugee camps, where a lot of Palestinians live—you know, on the outskirts of the city—or they find hovels in town with no running water, no electricity.”
“And how do the Lebanese feel about them?”
“Well, there’s no such thing as the Lebanese. What about the Germans? Do they have a problem with refugees coming into their country?”
“Some do.”
Nabil looks at me.
“What’s the population of Germany?”
“Around eighty million.”
His eyes narrow, his forehead wrinkles.
“So, proportionally, you’d have to take in nineteen million refugees to match us.”
I nod.
“Good luck with that,” he says, and smiles. “But to go back to your question, some Lebanese people have a problem with the refugees, of course. Syrians have always been a sore point in Lebanon. The Syrian army left the country less than ten years ago, and now their civilians are coming over here. The Syrian military didn’t exactly endear itself to people here. Most Lebanese associate the Syrians with years of repression and tyranny. And don’t forget, there’s some evidence that Syria may have been behind Hariri’s assassination; we still haven’t got to the bottom of that. We all loved Hariri. The Lebanese government is split into two camps: the Sunnis and Christians in one, and Hezbollah, which is Shia, in the other. The Sunnis are supplying weapons and munitions to the opposition in Syria, while Hezbollah has joined forces with Assad to fight the very same opposition. The Lebanese civil war has basically shifted to Syria, you see? Now we’ve got all the people you see on the news, people lying on blankets in the camps and so on. But there are plenty of rich Syrians who fled here too, and they’re renting entire floors of hotels, and penthouses like those.” He points towards the buildings across the street. “There are loads of wealthy Syrians here, but they’re not included in the official refugee statistics. They’re different. They just feel like they’ve come home.”
“What do you mean, come home?”
“Lots of Syrians regard Lebanon as part of ‘Greater Syria.’ As far as they’re concerned, we never achieved independence. If you ask them, they’ll say, ‘We’ve just moved a little closer to the sea.’”
I study Nabil’s face as he speaks. He’s talking faster, eyes flashing, gesticulating wildly, his hands taking on a life of their own. He reminds me a little of Hakim: they’re both laid-back, even-tempered men who transform into fiery orators whenever talk turns to politics. In fact, Nabil is similar to most Lebanese people in that regard. No matter how many thousand kilometres lie between them and their homeland, they’ll have an opinion on what’s going on there. Whenever Nabil starts talking like this, I feel like a schoolboy who’s diligently studied for an exam only to find that it’s on an entirely different subject. I’ve tried to keep up to speed all these years. I’ve read and watched so much about the civil war, and about the developments since the war ended, but now I realise that I never learned how to see the bigger picture, how to connect the bits of information. I just noted the details without questioning them or really understanding their significance. I know facts, figures, dates. I gathered knowledge on Lebanon obsessively because I wanted to find out about my roots, about Father. But I never related that knowledge to today. What was it like for him when that bomb went off? When this or that happened in Lebanon, what was his reaction in Germany, his country of exile? Those were the only questions I ever asked.
I remember a common scene in our town: me standing in a crowd in front of the sports hall. Almost everyone from our street would be there, plenty of Germans and Kosovans too. We’d block the entrance so that the police couldn’t get into the hall. We did this whenever we got word that someone—or even an entire family—was going to be deported, very often to Hungary, as this was many refugees’ first port of call on their journey to Germany. We’d link arms and form a chain. It wouldn’t have been hard to break us up, but I think a lot of the officers were secretly impressed. Sometimes we were successful, sometimes we weren’t. But at least we felt that we’d tried.
I wonder how this small nation copes with the flood of refugees. I feel ashamed to be a citizen of a country where so many people demonise asylum seekers, a country where refugee shelters are going up in flames again.
“Believe me, this crisis is unprecedented,” Nabil says after a pause to draw breath. “We’ve been coping with it up to now. How? By doing what the Lebanese do best: denying reality and rallying to help. But it’s all going to blow up in our faces sooner or later. I don’t mean collapse, I don’t mean fall apart. I mean it’s actually going to explode, the whole powder keg.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Well, there’s the political conflict, for one thing. But leaving that aside, the people who tolerate Syrian refugees in Lebanon will soon be outnumbered by those who want the Syrians out. And why? Because the Syrians aren’t given work permits. Many of them work illegally, getting paid far below the minimum wage. So employers are hiring Syrians, and Lebanese people are losing their jobs. Remember what I was saying yesterday about education? Hardly any of the refugee children go to school. They have no contact with Lebanese kids, so neither side will ever get over their prejudices.”
Nabil’s bleak vision jars with this sunny day, with the holiday atmosphere of the promenade.
“So it’ll be like years ago, when the PLO started flexing its muscles,” I say. This was history. I was back on familiar ground. The Palestinian presence in Lebanon since the late 1940s had contributed to the outbreak of the civil war in 1975. The refugee camps became a state within a state and were used as bases for PLO attacks on Israel, which turned the entire country into a target for Israeli retaliation.
“Yes,” says Nabil, nodding gravely. “The Palestinian camps are nearly as old as the Republic of Lebanon itself. The refugees lead their own lives there, their communities are very tight. But the Syrian refugees today … they’re a different kettle of fish.”
We continue along the promenade. The modern buildings on the other side of the street all face the sea. Spiral-shaped towers, polished facades, uniformed doormen hauling heavy suitcases out of limousines and onto shiny gold trolleys. All I see on our side of the street are relaxed faces, street traders, and fruit sellers. This is the Beirut tourists come to see. A beautiful day without a cloud in sight, not even far out above the sea. I’ve got used to the fact that Nabil has cast himself not only as my detective partner, but also as my tour guide. I guess it makes a welcome change from driving bankers to and from meetings, listening to them gabbling on their mobile phones. He’s having fun, but it’s hard for me to swallow the fact that I’m a tourist in my parents’ country.
“It used to be full of wooden huts here,” he says. “Sort of mini-kiosks. In the seventies, especially. Right along here, where w
e’re walking now. The tourists loved them, because they were directly across the street from the hotels, but everything was a fraction of the price they charged at the hotels.”
“Yeah, I’ve read about the huts. What happened to them?”
“I don’t know whether the hoteliers managed to get them banned or whether the traders just packed up and left once the tourists stopped coming.” Nabil stops and points to a building across the street. “Anyway, that’s where the Carlton used to be.”
The box-shaped building is around a dozen storeys high. It looks pretty new but lacks the showy architecture of many other buildings facing the promenade. A simple high-rise: grey concrete, identical balconies.
“There’s an apartment building there now. You wouldn’t think it to look at them, but the apartments cost a fortune because of the location.”
“What happened to the hotel?” I ask.
“It was pulled down. Pity. It was nothing to write home about architecturally, but it was a renowned hotel at the time. It was the place to go. That’s where the pool used to be.” Nabil points vaguely towards the forecourt. “It was on a slightly raised terrace, so you could lie by the water and look out to sea. People used to rent it for parties and weddings. I found a few facts and figures—want to hear them?”
“Sure.”
“A hundred and forty rooms, all with a sea view. Ten floors, five stars. A panoramic restaurant and an American bar with chesterfield sofas and imported whisky. The hotel closed down in 2002. There was talk of renovating it, but Jamil Ibrahim, a prestigious architecture firm here, bought the property and tore the building down in 2008. At first they wanted to build a new hotel: pure decadence, taps made of gold, that type of thing. Like in Dubai.”
“So what happened?”
“Someone must have decided it was a stupid idea and built apartments instead.”
I can picture it perfectly. The hotel with the Carlton sign glowing on the roof; golden lamplight at the reception desk; a huge multi-tiered chandelier in the foyer; a wide carpeted staircase; polite, friendly staff; waking to a view of the sea; a piano player in the restaurant; socialites in sunglasses chatting over cocktails by the pool. Father described it so vividly in his diary, I feel as if I’ve been there myself. So much happened here. Hakim and Father’s first meeting at a lavish wedding. The photo of Father in uniform standing beside the other man. So many other things happened here too …
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