“But I find myself devastated,” my friend will tell me, her eyes focused and growing full over our gin and tonics. “Just that idea, that life can be imperfect and … over.”
After two weeks, her daughters at her side much of the time, Rita will receive what the nurses allege to be the lowest morphine dosage they’ve ever used to treat a terminal cancer patient. This is the last stage, when we begin to talk about a dying person’s pain with authority. In recent years I have wondered about the nature of depression, specifically Rita’s depression, turning it about as a biochemical event, then as part of her biography, her response to the world and her role in it, an expression of some intimate and mysterious grief. But is there, for once, more comfort in the meaningless option? Certainly there is comfort in morphine, a drug, at last, of consequence. When I hear it named I know that she will die, and in the opiated coma that will carry most of us away.
As the days pass, I will be told that this is the most peaceful time in Rita’s life. Her Melville apartment will swiftly be emptied and her furniture off-loaded to charity; even her wrinkles fall away. Some days she will eat, some she won’t. Another pattern will form and we’ll start to settle into it, despite everything.
And then, on a Saturday afternoon in early June, Rita Boyle dies on the ninth floor of the Queen Elizabeth II hospital in Halifax, Nova Scotia. I will be in the act of writing this essay when it happens, her letters and ticket stubs spread across my desk, my digital recorder cued to the twenty minutes of her audible breathing. My mother will leave the message as I am finishing for the day. I will pass the several hours I wait to return her call immobile at my desk, watching the longhand words around me transfigure, the false ink on the screen a blurred and hopeless rival. Had I lied to her when I said I would tell her story? Does even trying amount to a sort of lie? Perhaps all I can offer is the setting down of a space, one whose highest aim is that you might roam, however elusively, within its borders.
Soon after Rita’s letters stopped in 2006, I was paid to watch and respond to a film for the first time. Two months later I was voted into a critics’ group and could gorge myself in hermetic studio screening rooms. This, I was told frequently, was the dream. This was progress. In the last five years, on the rare occasion when I venture out to a theater, the ticket stub bypasses the groaning stash, slipping instead into the large manila envelope where I keep the rest of my tax receipts.
Later that evening, when I return her call, my mom, ruminant and a little tipsy at the resort hotel where she has reunited with Frank after a long stay in Halifax, will tell me about the last time she saw her mother. Their days together had grown full: the lower the tide, the safer the passage onto the island. A smile was still too much to ask, however, which is probably why my mother tried it as a command. I will feel my ribs fuse together as this story begins and think of Rita’s laugh, which was more of a private chuckle. My mother will describe how, when other persuasions failed—it had been so long; just one smile—she offered to help, using a fingertip to push the corner of her mother’s mouth up over her gums. She will recall the way Rita strained to hold the expression on her own, how she almost got there.
* * *
My time on Deadman’s Island has drawn past what patience allowed. My mother and Frank grow smaller, trudging inland along the shore, tiny yet familiar figures beneath their flapping hair and coats. Still bent over the plaque when they step onto the mainland, I turn to leave at the sound of a wind-strangled call. Surely, I think, stopping for a last look at the humble crest of sod, its beard of striplings, and the shattered light of the water beyond them, I will not see this place again.
Beirut Rising
In my opinion, Lebanon is the scene of a historic test that will determine the future of humanity.
—President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran, July 25, 2006
Beirut’s hopelessness relies upon its resilience. There are those who praise the courage of its people, their valor amid despair, but it is this very capacity for survival, for eternal renewal, that is Beirut’s tragedy. If the city were allowed to die—if its airport closed forever, if its imports and exports were frozen, its currency destroyed, if its people gave up—then its war could end.
—Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation
A joke went around Beirut during the summer of 2006, as the taunting and touchbacks between Israel and Lebanon finally set off the spark of war, involving a notoriously swish section of the city called Achrafieh, a neighborhood whose idle doyennes are known for their opulent dress and fondness for face-lifts. When Israeli general Dan Halutz, freestyling over an escalating duel of war drums, threatened to “turn Lebanon’s clock back twenty years,” so the joke goes, it was the best news the women of Achrafieh had heard in decades. Tack on a few more and we’ll talk.
Today the Lebanese appear poised to turn back that clock all on their own. Eighteen months have passed since the final cease-fire with Israel was brokered in the Levant, and although the bombing stopped and the bodies were returned, Lebanon’s latest in a bullet-pocked history of violent conflicts left the country in limbo. That’s the optimistic take: many fear this latest war to be the beginning of a backward slide.
But then the country’s current spiritual, economic, and political crisis was already in progress when the Israeli tanks rolled in. Its most obvious source is the cataclysmic blast that killed the country’s former prime minister, Rafic Hariri, on Valentine’s Day 2005. Three years later, evidence of the explosion, which killed twenty-two others and gouged a fifteen-foot crater into the ground, still blights Beirut’s Mediterranean promenade. The stretch of the seaside corniche where Hariri’s assassination took place looks only recently repaved; the water mains still erupt regularly, dousing the decimated buildings on either side of the street with Beirut’s version of a fire hydrant’s jubilant summer spray. The site is one of the more spectacular markers in a city liberally engraved with its history of suffering.
That most useful breed of dreamer—the kind with resources—Hariri symbolized a hope for peace in Lebanon, the seat of his most extravagant dream yet. Having chosen the mountainous, coastal country of his birth as a pseudo-retirement destination in the mid-1980s—despite the minor buzzkill of a raging civil war—in the ensuing decades Hariri threw his sizable financial lot and professional acumen into restoring Lebanon. Derided for the ruthlessness that made him a billionaire and accused of seeking little more than glory—a political parvenu coasting on his fat bankroll and steamrolling charisma—Hariri was a Sunni Muslim, a nouveau Saudi who had left Lebanon to make it big in construction. His tenacity eventually earned him a loyal electoral base, however; he was elected prime minister twice, first in 1992 and again in 2000.
In 2004, Hariri resigned in protest over a Syrian power play to extend then-president Émile Lahoud’s term beyond its legal limit, a move that soured Hariri’s previously tolerant relations with Syria, Lebanon’s neighbor and occupier. At the time of his death it appears he was pushing, with the aggression that won the hearts of his people and assured his death, for the withdrawal of Syrian troops. Syria entered Lebanon in 1976, shortly after the onset of the civil war, which erupted in 1975 in the wake of a civilian shooting in Beirut’s Christian neighborhood of Ain al Rouamanah. Yet another in months of clashes between the Christian Maronite Phalangists, Palestinians, and Druze, Sunni, and Shia militias, the drive-by shooting killed two Christians and two others and led to the retaliatory slaughter of thirty Palestinians. Sixty eyes for eight, and suddenly it was war. In the dark cascade of violence that followed, Druze Socialist leader Kamal Jumblatt formed a ramshackle alliance with Yasser Arafat’s PLO, the Christians made frenemies with the Israelis, and Syria, doing its best big-brother impersonation, moved into Lebanon under the auspices of keeping the peace. The Syrian occupation lasted, on and off, for almost thirty years. They finally succumbed to global pressure and left in 2005—two and a half months after Hariri’s blood ran through Ain-Mreisse.
Though the effects of
the civil war can be seen on every corner and felt in every other face, citizens of Beirut rarely refer to it directly. Talk of war—if not politics—is scrupulously avoided or effaced with dry humor. The Achrafieh joke was one of several offered to me, during a 2008 trip to Lebanon’s capital, as a proud representative of the native mordant, melancholy wit—as Lebanese as the dishes of olives, parsley, and radishes that set their tables. “You have to laugh,” I was told, “or else…”
The ellipsis may in fact get closer than a hundred thousand words to capturing the terrible potentiality paralyzing Lebanon, which recently went six freighted months without a president and is sinking into the worst economic depression since the civil war. “As if they were the result of some natural calamity rather than a man-made catastrophe,” journalist Robert Fisk wrote, the Lebanese refer to the fifteen years of civil war as al-hawadess, or “the events.” The postwar attempt to rebuild the country’s infrastructure was ardent but somewhat cosmetic. Recovery has further been waylaid by the inexorable rise of the Shia faction who call themselves Hezbollah—“the party of God,” the former militia now recognized as a political party.
Hezbollah is the latest in the country’s long line of party crashers. Having filled its dance card with some of civilization’s greatest empires—Phoenician, Persian, Roman, Byzantine, Arab—Lebanon was under near-consistent Ottoman rule from the sixteenth century until 1920, when the French, one of the Allied countries divvying up the Middle East after World War I, assumed control. The French conceived of a “confessionalist” democracy for Lebanon, a system that attempted to represent the country’s major religious groups (eighteen are recognized) by population and mandated a Maronite Christian president, Sunni prime minister, Shia speaker of parliament, and Orthodox Christian deputy prime minister. This outrageously utopian conception of power sharing was confirmed by a National Pact when the Lebanese gained independence in 1943, and it actually worked fairly well, until it didn’t. Not everyone was happy with the pact, and the largest divide fell between the Muslims, who wanted closer Arab relations, and the Christians, who wanted to develop ties with the West. Beyond geopolitics there is simple geography: Lebanon, despite its French-drawn borders, will never be entirely self-contained and could only stave off the region’s veritable staph infection of national and sectarian conflict for so long. Until April 13, 1975, to be exact.
There has not been an official Lebanese census in over seventy-five years. The underlying fear is that the increase in the country’s Muslim (and particularly Shia) population and dwindling number of Christians will set a power shift in motion, essentially handing the country to Hezbollah. There is a pattern to the way Lebanon’s fissures blew into fault lines, and that pattern is repeating now. The process has consequences most of Beirut’s citizens—who refer to Hariri’s assassination as “the earthquake”—can’t bear to contemplate, much less name.
* * *
I met Carlo amid the jumble of the Amman airport in early January of 2008. I remembered him from the tortuous check-in line back in New York: short and compact, he was dressed for a trendy wine bar rather than a transatlantic flight. Carlo introduced himself a continent and several crushing cinematic offerings later, having noticed my cortisone spike when the ticket agent collected all of our passports and disappeared behind a red curtain with a magisterial flourish. An agent at JFK had nearly relieved me of my visa, plucking it out of my passport and tossing it onto a pile of scraps as though it were a receipt for Toblerone and duty-free tequila; I was as on my guard as a person filled with vegan plane food can be. One of the handful from our enormous flight transferring to Beirut, Carlo expressed an expatriate’s qualified pride to this first-time visitor: “Everything in Lebanon is beautiful—except the politics.”
We were following a strutting airline clerk through the brightly lit duty-free bazaar when Carlo inquired about my intentions. Was I not being guided or hosted or otherwise sponsored? Did I not speak Arabic? Initially I found the negative formulation of many of the questions one is asked in Lebanon charming; in this case, for instance, it seems to leave room for the affirmative option. It didn’t take long to imagine its darker applications: Did you not meet the man in question? Are you not involved in a major multinational conspiracy? Were you not traveling to the Middle East alone and for no apparent reason?
I had to admit, to Carlo’s complete lack of surprise, that I do not speak Arabic, though I can make do in French. More than fifty years after the end of France’s brief but penetrative mandate, the language still gilds Lebanese vernacular. Unluckily for me, most are loath to use it for more than “hello,” “goodbye,” and “thank you very much indeed.”
Carlo moved to New York when the war broke out in 2006; his wife couldn’t make this trip on account of being seven months pregnant. I asked him how often he returned to Beirut, and for the first time his friendly voice turned flat: “I don’t.” His dad was ill, he explained, and if he didn’t come home now …
I turned to look at him. We were seated in a long, narrow lounge crammed with baggage to the point of immobility. An entire day had passed without us, and it was night again. The young woman beside me had ended a phone call just before takeoff and wept pitifully into the window for most of the eleven-hour flight.
Carlo asked me a question that, though it became quite familiar, I was never able to answer to anyone’s satisfaction, including mine: “Why Beirut?” I told him I had come to explore, that I had a standing interest in the city and a couple of weeks free, which was true enough. His open face flickered, unsold. He asked where I was staying and I mentioned the hotel I’d picked because it looked clean and was close to the sea. Still skeptical, he had a final and ultimate question: “Is no one waiting for you?” I told him no, or rather yes; Carlo’s expression of confusion and dismay proved infectious. It’s not Beirut’s fault, I wanted to add. No one is waiting for me in general.
The arrivals deck at Rafic Hariri International Airport on a random Tuesday night has the caricatured charm of a Norman Rockwell frieze. Lebanese are stacked five and six deep against the barrier, dangling cheap bouquets and hot-pink teddy bears, scanning each new face with gleaming eyes. I kept my head down, remembering Carlo’s stricken look; he saw this moment coming. He blew past me at customs as I was puzzling over the entry form’s request for my father’s first name, like a password. Carlo had people waiting and was three checkpoints ahead of me when I lost sight of him for good.
The scene at the gate shouldn’t have surprised me. Though it’s smaller than Connecticut, with a population of fewer than four million, the scattering of the Lebanese across the globe is second only to the Jewish diaspora. Some estimate it at over fifteen million; almost three times as many Lebanese live in Brazil as in Lebanon. The civil and 2006 wars account for a significant portion of the outflux, but roaming is something of a national pastime. Leaving Lebanon may be the only pan-Lebanese tradition.
On stepping outside the building I was marked by a group of men idling around a taxi stand. The tallest one led the charge, his hand outstretched for my suitcase. The first practical bit of advice one gets about traveling to Beirut is not to pay more than twenty thousand lira (about $14 U.S.) for the ride from the airport, and to settle up front. I and the huddle of disgruntled drivers that formed around me were making a time-lapsed orbit toward Tall Guy’s cab when he answered my calls for a number: thirty-five. I shook my head and reached in to cover his grip on my suitcase. Tall Guy whirled around in disgust, tossing his head and snorting like a pro.
I was preparing for the second act when a small, sharp-eyed dude in a red bomber jacket made a lunge for my suitcase and carved an expert little doughnut with its wheels. Suddenly a soldier was in the mix, roughing Red Bomber Jacket away; hot-faced arguments ensued, everywhere scorn and smoky breath. When it seemed I would not extract a ride—or myself—from the scrimmage, a sleepy type on the perimeter stepped in to mutter, “Twenty dollars,” real low. I nodded and he swung my bag away from the curb
side vehicles, back into the building. Inside we boarded an escalator and blazed a circuitous path in silence. At length I was handed off to a second man, who led me out onto an upper ramp, where a single, unmarked Hyundai was waiting with a driver already inside.
Two weeks after this scene played out, Beirut’s taxidrivers staged another in a series of strikes over rising fuel prices in Lebanon, a one-day protest that sparked rioting in the streets. Lebanese soldiers began firing on the protesters, leaving seven dead and more wounded. Electricity shortages and rising food prices have been particularly acute in south Beirut and the southern region of Lebanon, large sections of which are controlled by Hezbollah. The Shia and Christian opposition, backed by Syria and Iran, have accused the American-backed government of punishing southern Beirut with the blackouts that have grown common in Shia villages in the south and the eastern Bekáa Valley. With no president, parliament, or functioning cabinet to address these concerns or even officially meet the accusations, violent protests and road blockades—a clear path to attention—grow more frequent.
Beirut’s airport is blissfully central; fifteen minutes after the cloak-and-driver routine on the arrivals deck I was contemplating the metal detector at the entrance of the Palm Beach Hotel, an elegant, proud, exceptionally creepy facility whose “luxe,” seafoam-green parlor broke my heart on first sight, and every day after that. The decorating scheme appears to have involved Zsa Zsa Gabor’s swallowing a flatbed full of crown moldings, chasing it with the contents of a dolphin tank, and then vomiting all over the lounge. About one hundred feet out the front door and off to the right is the site where Hariri was blown to pieces by two thousand pounds of TNT. The sign marking the area is in Arabic, and for the first couple of days I assumed the gutted buildings and ragged streetscape were a more anonymous addition to the city’s general disarticulation.
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