The Crossway

by Guy Stagg

  Archimandrite Jack Khalil was tall and lean, and he moved with the delicate grace of a mantis. After leading vespers in the monastery church, he stood by the door, bowing his head as people filed outside.

  The bishop had recently returned from Syria. When I asked about the trip, he began listing churches lying empty in Aleppo and Homs, in Hama and Mahardah. ‘The Christians do not want to choose sides. But both sides – the government, the rebels – tell them that if you are not my ally, then you are my enemy. So they have no choice. They have to leave.’

  Once the service was over, I walked a lap of the courtyard with Fr Paul. It was evening now and the walls had turned a chilly blue. ‘The bishop has to keep out of the fighting,’ my host explained. ‘In the Middle East people assume a religious leader speaks for his whole congregation. If he criticizes one side, the other – it’s not safe.’ As Fr Paul spoke, a group of men entered the yard, climbed the staircase and hurried into the cells surrounding mine. ‘But he lets seven Syrian Christians hide in his monastery, so maybe you can guess which side he supports.’

  When I returned to my cell, one of the men was waiting for me. He asked if I would keep watch while he smoked, because cigarettes were forbidden in the monastery. Then we sat above the gatehouse, my companion cupping his cigarette while I stared into the dusk. Downstairs I heard clanging as Fr Paul locked the gates, but otherwise we were alone.

  The smoker’s name was Ibrahim. He was about my age, but his face was drained, his shoulders stooped, and a band of elastic showed through the worn collar of his T-shirt. As he smoked he explained that the other Syrians at Balamand had fled the country rather than fight for Assad. Dodging the draft meant they could not return home, so instead they lived here in secret, working for local businesses during the day and slipping back into the monastery each evening. Meanwhile their families remained in Syria, waiting out the war – though Ibrahim feared the fighting would last until there was nothing left of his country.

  Was that the reason he came here?

  He shook his head. In 2011, at the start of the revolution, Ibrahim was finishing national service. This made it dangerous for him to take part in the protests, so instead he helped them organize online. At one demonstration his brother was shot in the leg, and later that day the mukhabarat, the secret police, raided his family home. The injured brother hid on the roof, but Ibrahim was arrested. Then he was held without charge until his parents paid for his release. ‘I was not tortured, no. I was taken to a room, my eyes tied, my hands tied, hanging by my arms. Sometimes I hear bullets loaded into a gun. Sometimes I feel a man standing behind me, breathing on my neck. I wait and wait, never knowing when it will end, never knowing if I will die.’

  He began telling me about the Christians he knew who had left the country, and the Muslims who had turned against the government, and the many victims of the mukhabarat. One friend was beaten on the soles of his feet until he could no longer walk. Another friend’s wife was raped by a squad of secret police, the husband forced to watch. Both men ended up joining the rebels.

  ‘The worst part is not the pain. The worst part is the humiliation. That is why there cannot be peace. That is why Assad will fight to the death. He knows it is too late to forgive.’

  Night had fallen. Ibrahim pinched out his cigarette and eased the stub into the pocket of his jeans. I wanted to offer some comfort, or tell him some hopeful story, but there was nothing I could say. I could only watch him brush the tobacco from his palms and blow the ash from his fingers. Then he said goodnight and returned to his cell.

  I left Balamand next morning and hiked back to Tripoli. It was Friday 23 August. Yesterday I had passed roadside checkpoints made from oil drums – striped red and white, strung with barbed wire – but none of them were manned. Like the dingy alleyways of the Old City or the cramped corridors of the souk, they had a forgotten, leftover feel. Today soldiers stood at the checkpoints, police patrolled the streets, and armoured cars were parked on the pavement – brutish vehicles painted muddy shades of brown.

  I roamed round in the dense sunshine, looking to buy a map. Eventually I found one in a bookshop near Al-Tell Square. The owner spoke to me in nervous French, repeating the words, s’il vous plaît, s’il vous plaît.

  An Ottoman clock tower stood in the corner of the square, five storeys of stacked stone with a tiled pyramid at its peak. Opposite the clock tower was a disused building from the colonial period. Dust fogged the marble floors and the windows were foxed with dirt. A coffee stall squatted in the entrance hall, among mismatched tables and chairs – wrought metal, striped cane and red plastic with Coca-Cola branding.

  I sat at one of the tables and unfolded the map. My plan was to start walking in Al-Qoubaiyat, a town two hours’ hike from the Syrian border, and spend three weeks travelling south along Lebanon’s mountain spine. However, Al-Qoubaiyat was fifty kilometres from Tripoli and I was unsure how to reach it.

  A pair of men played backgammon at the table behind mine, slapping wooden counters onto a wooden board. At another table a man wearing rings on every finger joked with one of the waiters. I could hear music murmuring from the radio, while from the streets came snatched conversations and coughing cars. And from far off came a noise I could not name, like a low thunderclap or distant firework. Like the crust of the earth had cracked.

  The backgammon stopped. The laughter too. The conversation went quiet as the waiters stared into the square. I tried to guess what was happening from the faces around me, but found no answer in the startled eyes, the jutting jaws, the gulping motion at each throat.

  The second noise was closer, a deep beat followed by a smothered echo. It was the sound of concrete walls coming apart. This time there was no doubt: a bomb, two bombs, detonating somewhere in the city.

  The waiters shut the windows and the backgammon players tidied their game. Everyone was standing now, so I folded my map and shouldered my rucksack, but midway to the door I remembered that I had nowhere to go. When the man with too many rings asked the name of my hotel, I struggled to answer. He told me to cross the square, find a taxi, and stay seated until Beirut. ‘You will not be safe in Tripoli,’ he warned, taking my arm in his glinting fingers and walking me out into the bright tumult of the city.

  Leaving the cafe, I passed a cluster of women wearing loose clothes and coloured headscarves, some carrying bags of food, others holding the hands of children, rushing in a dozen directions, as groups of men jogged into the traffic, a few darting between the cars that were jammed in place, their horns blaring, their drivers shouting, hundreds of vehicles jostling onto the road south, one or two even mounting the pavement to get away, causing engines to grind and breaks to scream, these noises growing louder until they were drowned by the sound of sirens, coming first from police motorbikes, and then from ambulances and armoured jeeps, racing through the square on the road north, their lights bouncing blue and red off the buildings, while on the pavements below, every cafe and shop was shutting up for the day, clearing their stalls and locking their doors, meaning that by the time I had crossed the square and reached the Ottoman clock tower it was obvious that I would find nowhere to shelter in the city, obvious that I must get out as soon as possible, not south in the direction of Beirut but north towards Al-Qoubaiyat, Al-Qoubaiyat, Al-Qoubaiyat, a name I had to repeat to the crowds mobbing the minibuses, even though none of them was going north because that was the direction of the first explosion – or so I was told by a young man who spoke to me with stifled impatience, marching between the buses and asking each driver if they were heading to Al-Qoubaiyat, and then chewing his lips as one after another they told him no, no chance, not today, until at last he found a bus driving two thirds of the way and insisted I get on board, despite the fact that its twelve seats were packed with eighteen passengers and its footwell filled with luggage, because sure enough there was space for me on the edge of the footwell, one arm hugging my rucksack, the other arm clinging to the doorframe, my body half hanging fro
m the door as the driver turned onto the road north and accelerated along an avenue of office blocks, while a procession of cars came in the opposite direction, most of them ageing Mercedes with faded coats of terracotta and cream – the same colour as the low-rise flats and high-rise hotels bordering the street, as well as the garages with gaping signs and the shops with smashed windows, glass glittering on their displays of furniture and clothes – the first evidence that we were nearing the blast zone, but soon joined by four-wheel drives with cracked black bodywork and shattered black windscreens, and by sheets of smoke drifting between the traffic, the air becoming bitter, the sirens howling louder, the stench of asphalt rising from the road, yet dead silence inside the minibus as people peered into the streets, hoping for a view of the bombsite and seeing nothing but smoke, nothing but a wall of smoke rising towards the sky, until our driver realized that the road north was impassable – barricaded by ambulances and blast wreckage – and the bus began turning, meaning I had to grip my bag again, grip the doorframe again, and glimpsed for a moment the scene of the attack, or rather glimpsed several stray pieces of pavement and a car with fire pouring from its windows, as well as three survivors standing by the roadside: a man whose T-shirt was torn from his chest, a woman whose arms were black up to the elbows, and another man whose face was damaged, no face at all but a mask of blood, blood wet in his hair and leaking from his nose, blood shining on his forehead and spilling from his mouth, blood clotting his eyes and eating his cheeks and no skin no skull no body but blood – and then we pushed back onto the road, this time speeding south, past shops with smashed windows and garages with gaping signs, past low-rise flats and high-rise hotels, the smell of burning fainter, the sound of sirens waning, our minibus turning onto a tree-lined street and climbing into a hillside suburb, where the terrified silence gave way to stuttered conversations as the passengers tried to phone home, their voices nervous at first, but the words flowing out between sobs and sighs when a friend or family member answered, so that, by the time we had reached the ring road above Tripoli and were heading north again, our minibus was breathless with relief, some of the passengers gossiping, others gabbling, a few reciting elated monologues, and one or two asking me questions, wanting to know where I was from, where I was going, how long I had been in the country, and laughing when I answered yesterday, I came here yesterday, just twenty-four hours in Tripoli. ‘Ah!’ they said. ‘My God!’ they said. ‘Welcome, welcome to Lebanon.’

  Hiking south from Al-Qoubaiyat, I met others who had been caught in the attack – one man whose car was destroyed, a second whose brother ended up in hospital – and from them I pieced together what happened that morning. Two bombs: the first outside Al-Taqwa Mosque in the north of Tripoli, the second outside Al-Salam Mosque in the east. Both were aimed at the crowds leaving Friday prayers, but both detonated while everyone was inside. All the same, forty-seven people were killed and maybe eight hundred injured. The worst bombing since the civil war. Nobody had claimed responsibility, but the mosques were associated with fierce Salafi preachers and the attack took place eight days after a car bomb in southern Beirut. So maybe it was revenge, the men said, shaking their heads with worry.

  Though I tried to fit together these accounts, I soon became overwhelmed. I could give no shape to the rush of sensations, nor any perspective to the vast movements of people. Instead, rising into the foothills of the Mt Lebanon Range, I was aware only of my helplessness before history.

  All weekend I climbed through the range, and on Monday afternoon I reached Sir El Danniyeh, a holiday town on the lower slopes of Lebanon’s highest peak, Qornet es Saouda. It was once a popular summer spot for Tripoli’s grander families, containing guesthouses, holiday homes and a pink mansion called the Hôtel Jazzar Raad. White balconies hung from the hotel facade, and harlequin tiles patterned the lobby. The windows were inlaid with tinted panes – red and green and gold – but otherwise the interior was dim.

  A man with an appalling smile stood by the door. When I entered, he launched into a lisping history of the hotel. I heard only a few phrases – ‘Alpine surroundings . . . Art Deco design . . . 1937, sir . . .’ – but guessed that he was the manager.

  A fountain shaped like a wedding cake sat in the centre of the terrace. Wooden trellises bordered each side, screening the valley below. My table looked down on the Abou Ali River as it cut a violent course towards Tripoli. The scenery was spectacular, but polluted too, with bin bags padding the roadside, drinks cans flashing in the gullies, and plastic wrappers clinging to the scrub. Tin-roofed houses cluttered the slopes, as well as a concrete mock-up of an Ottoman villa and a mosque with a neon-wrapped minaret.

  The manager brought coffee and asked about my walk. It seemed there were no other staff at the hotel, nor any guests, but minutes later he returned with a squat man in a boxy black shirt. The man’s name was Colonel Masor. The colonel just happened to be visiting the hotel and hoped to ask a few questions. He simply wanted to know my name, my age, my occupation, my nationality, how I entered Lebanon, who I had stayed with, every stage of my walk so far and each stop on the journey south.

  I unfolded my map and outlined the route. From Sir El Danniyeh I would track the western slopes of the Mt Lebanon Range for three hundred kilometres, before dropping into the Beqaa Valley and approaching the Israeli border. I listed the towns along the way – Ehden, Bcharre, Hammana, Jezzine – while the colonel noted them down. Then he marched off to make some phone calls.

  Once he was gone, the manager gave another ghastly smile.

  ‘Colonel Masor is from the secret police,’ he explained. ‘Like Scotland Yard. He wants to make you safe.’

  When the colonel returned he was grinning. Then laughter, handshakes, a second round of coffee, and an invitation to spend the night – which I immediately refused. I had seen enough of the Hôtel Jazzar Raad.

  The following morning I was questioned twice more – by a soldier at a checkpoint and by a pair of hikers using golf clubs as walking sticks. They hinted that there was no route over Mt Saouda, but the map showed a frail footpath circling the summit, so I pushed on, masking my doubts with a brisk determination. The road became a track, the track became a path, and soon I was scrambling up the rocky course of a riverbed.

  By midday I had topped two thousand metres and was balanced on the brim of the mountain. This area was under snow for much of the year, but in summer the snow melted to reveal waves of boulder and scree. There were no landmarks now, only a sky of relentless blue and a carpet of cloud at my feet. I followed a bearing and hoped for the best, edging round the summit for the next two hours, over a moonscape of split shale and loose maquis. At that height I could hear nothing but the heaving wind – my ears popping, my eyes watering, and my rucksack vibrating with each burst of air.

  Eventually I came to another track, this one dipping under the cloudline on the southern side of Saouda. Layers of stratus drew back to reveal a forest of cedar and oak, fanning over the slopes or sinking into the valleys.

  It was almost seven when I reached the road. To my right, a ring of hilltop villages formed a crown of slender belfries. Ahead I could make out the tiled roofs of Ehden – a muddle of convents and churches. Approaching the town, I heard bellchime tumble through the evening air and felt a sheltered sense of safety. This was the start of Qadisha, the Holy Valley, Lebanon’s Christian heartland.

  The presbytery in Ehden contained a crumpled priest with an angry expression. He complained that he could not help me – he was old, he was sick, there was nowhere to stay – but minutes later a younger priest turned up, dressed in a Lazio football strip. His name was Fr Joseph.

  ‘The most beautiful thing in life is choice,’ said Fr Joseph. ‘Will I go to heaven, or will I go to hell? Will I live in sin, or will I pray to God?’

  Today I had two choices. First: the guestroom upstairs or the apartment downstairs. Second: a meal in a restaurant or an invitation to a dinner party.

  I chose the latte
r both times.

  The dinner party was taking place on the far side of town. Fr Joseph led the way down a crowded street of cafes, their tables tied with orange lights. He greeted every person we passed, shouting and waving and poking his tongue between his teeth.

  We arrived at the flat after nine. The whole place was furnished with metal. There were aluminium-framed mirrors covering the walls and chrome-coated cupboards lining the kitchen. Copper lamps hung off the ceiling, and brass bowls shone from the table. Our host’s name was Rami, a childhood friend of Fr Joseph. He looked much older, however, with a shaved scalp and a pointed skull. Rami’s wife, Marie-Rose, had pink lips and bleached hair, and she greeted us with short, excited screams. Then she brought out plates of hummus and labne, tabbouleh and fatoush, stuffed aubergine, stuffed pastry and half a dozen salads. Three more guests waited at the table, with twice that number of vodka bottles piled in buckets of ice.

  Fr Joseph never touched the food, sitting at the head of the table and talking the whole time. Sometimes he sounded cheerful, sometimes exasperated. The other guests nodded along, crossing themselves and mouthing the words: Amen, Bravo, Amen, Bravo. Occasionally they repeated a sentence in English, but otherwise I had to guess Fr Joseph’s meaning. From what I could gather, the priest had recently been in trouble because he asked his congregation to pray for the victims of the Tripoli bombings. Another priest, more senior, warned him about taking sides, about appearing too political. ‘I was praying for peace,’ said Fr Joseph. ‘I was praying for all the victims of violence. Sunni and Shia, Muslim and Christian – God created every one of us. Why should I tell people not to pray?’

  The table nodded. ‘Amen,’ they said. ‘Bravo.’

  As the priest spoke, Rami slurred in my ear. First he tried to translate the speech; next he attempted a commentary. He mentioned the million Syrian refugees that had crushed Lebanon. He claimed the Muslim population was eating the Christian one. He said if I saw a church I should walk towards it, but if I saw a mosque I must fly away.