This Is Running for Your Life

by Michelle Orange

  * * *

  Say the name to someone of my generation and their eyes still widen: Beirut means bad. Lebanon’s war dominated the world stage during the 1980s—along with Iran-Iraq and the Russians in Afghanistan—as Vietnam, Cambodia, and North Korea had in previous decades. I recall Beirut most vividly; it’s the center of a country and its tragedy. It was a name I knew at eight years old, scanning the cover of Time on our kitchen table—probably hoping for the painted glare of Prince or Madonna—and finding yet more images of Beirut’s carnage and rubble, its seemingly endless issue of grief, ruin, dust-etched tears.

  Beirut meant “the Paris of the Middle East” back in its midcentury heyday, back when my twenty-four-year-old father was offered a teaching position at the city’s American University in 1966. It was a young man’s gambit—a few years to burn on a kind of French playground—but he turned it down, opting for a stint in Rochester, New York. A year or so into that move a letter arrived informing him of a change in his draft status, and it was so long Rochester. By the late 1960s resident aliens and teachers—previously protected by a shifting set of conditions—were being conscripted to fight in Vietnam. A few years after returning to Canada my father accepted a professorship in the London of southwestern Ontario—the thriving, many-treed, oppressively well-adjusted town where I was eventually born and raised.

  Founded in 1866 as the Syrian Protestant College by an American missionary named Daniel Bliss, the American University flourished in the first half of the twentieth century, then had a fairly steady decline throughout the second. Walking along the street named for Bliss on the AUB campus, I wondered what the twenty-first century might have in store for Lebanon’s jewel of higher education. Many of the graduate programs shut down during the civil war, and today a Lebanese student with the means to attend university will most likely enroll abroad. Even the staunchest foreign students eventually evacuated in 2006; relatively few have opted to return. The bombings and high-profile assassinations rose in number and severity across 2007—a Christian legislator was killed in September and an army general in December; Hezbollah was blamed in both cases—and the election for a new president has been delayed eleven times since Émile Lahoud left office in November. The entire country seems suspended with dread, wondering if the next shot fired or explosion detonated in Beirut’s streets will be the one that sends Lebanon tumbling. The twelfth attempt at a presidential election was scheduled for January 12, 2008, several days after my arrival in the capital. In retrospect, it would have been a good thing to know.

  * * *

  Beirut is not a walking city. Neither is it a driving city, nor particularly a public-transportation city. When I ask the meticulously coiffed hotel concierge for the best way to get to the famously rebuilt downtown area, also the site of the National Parliament, she tells me to walk along the shore for a while. “Eventually…,” she advised, “you’ll want to turn right.” A pause followed and our eyes met over the glossy front desktop, each of us awaiting very different things. “Ask someone on the street,” she added finally, above the peals of a suspiciously well-timed phone call. “You can’t get lost.”

  Indeed, I could. The problem with getting lost in Beirut is that looking lost is tantamount to looking suspicious. Few people are in the streets, fewer still who are alone; within seconds of setting out I knew that neither strolling nor stopping were viable options in a walking tour of the city. The idea, securitywise, is to slow down the cars—with zigzagging barricades that prevent vehicles from tossing a bomb and zooming away—and speed up the people. Private guards patrol the front of nearly every building, and the Lebanese army is out in force on most corners. There is only hustling with your head down, grateful for the cover of the January chill.

  When I finally found the downtown—a peanut-butter-colored, art deco suburb built up around crumbling mosques and churches—only soldiers roamed the area. A maze of barricades and riotous spirals of razor wire made accessing a building that seemed mere steps away a triumph of will and logistics. Turning down a new block meant another search of your bag and your person by another young man with a long, elegantly snouted automatic rifle strapped across his back. The high-fashion shops lining the radial streets off Nijmeh Square are shuttered on a given afternoon. A mean wind was whipping in off the Mediterranean; over an hour I saw fewer than a dozen civilians. I wound up on a wide, wildly trafficked avenue, where I was finally granted a full vantage of the imperious Al-Amin Mosque. Hariri was building the Al-Amin at the time of his death; he’s buried there now, along with his seven bodyguards. The mosque appears blown from blue and gold glass, as though it were set down among a ragged sandbox city and could as easily topple or be taken away. I pulled out my camera to take a picture and felt the nearby soldiers resettling their focus. It was my first, fuzzy twinge of what became a full-blown case of paranoia.

  Nowhere is Beirut’s resilience more apparent than in its reconstructed city center, read a tourist guide I picked up later that afternoon. In 1990, Downtown was in shambles, a deserted no-man’s-land, a ghost town. I had stopped at the Virgin Megastore—found on all tourist maps of Beirut—because it was adjacent to Martyrs’ Square, the memorial I had hopelessly been stalking, fended off by an intimidating show of barricades and wire. The Virgin Megastore, a four-floor behemoth, was open despite all appearances. I know there are four floors because I traveled—in escalator slo-mo—to each one, trying to find someone who would take my ten dollars for Lebanon 2006: Official General Tourism Guide.

  After that I ate a pound of almonds, tore my pants on an errant coil of wire, and declared Round One for Beirut. I had been searching throughout the afternoon for an outlet adapter for my computer, continuing a saga begun the night before, when a timorous young woman made five separate trips to my room, each time bearing a new contraption that fit neither my machine nor the hotel’s outlets. The power was sort of fluid anyway, coming and going throughout the day. That morning I had been using the hotel’s desktop when the whole place went dark. I hadn’t yet moved past the page where the last guest, a built young man of indeterminate ethnicity, left off: iCasualties.org, a real-time database of coalition forces killed in the Iraq and Afghan wars.

  Adapt, adapter, adaptive; I was sure I had packed the fucking thing. I made one last try, ducking into a tiny cell-phone shack on the way home. The skinny teenager manning the gadgets was just about to tell me he was sorry when I saw exactly what I needed sitting between his phone and his lighter on a shelf behind the counter. “That?” He tossed it to me. “You can have that, I don’t even know what it is.”

  * * *

  The young sir at the front desk gave me the usual directions: “Go this way, then go that way, then ask somebody—you can’t get lost.” He was just a kid, all soft and facially unsorted and yet so assured. “Let’s assume I’m lost right now,” I wanted to reply. “What would you say then?” After a night spent vomiting fattoush and hummus, I was on my way to meet Felicia—a stranger, a friend of a friend—at a café in Jamia. She had suggested a taxi but I wanted to walk.

  The Prague Café is on the AUB campus, close to Hamra Street, where I was relieved to find a healthy stream of civilian life. On this Friday afternoon the place was filthy with smoke and great-looking people. A small chalkboard hanging behind the bar appeared freshly erased and reinscribed: When a woman has a nervous breakdown, she goes shopping. When a man has a nervous breakdown, he invades a country.

  Felicia’s friend Rafael was the first person in Beirut to accuse me of being a spy. “People are going to think you’re a spy,” he said as we arranged our knees and elbows around a low-slung coffee table. “Are you not a spy?”

  I told them I had come to Beirut to research a short story; to his credit, Rafael didn’t blink. I tried not to seem too desperate for the company, and Felicia—home visiting from Dubai, where she reluctantly took a reporting position a few months previously—attempted to ignore her BlackBerry’s violent seizures between our cups. Journalism jobs
are hard to come by in Beirut; the city tends to attract the best. Like most of her friends, she’s gunning for Cairo. Rafael works for an environmental group and mentioned being recently escorted away from the U.S. embassy, where he had gone to take pictures of the waterbirds—unheard of in the city—drawn in by the large pools that collected in front of the building after a heavy rain. He only got off a few snaps before the guards closed in.

  The presidential election was scheduled for the next day, and I may as well have fired a starter pistol into the café’s smoke-stained ceiling when I asked if it would actually happen. I was thrown clear of the ensuing debate, with its unfamiliar names, dates, and technicalities, regaining purchase only when Rafael equated Lebanon’s political détente with the other dark force currently occupying his life: a punishing divorce. What he had realized, he said, was that the nature of the split with his wife and the nature of Lebanon’s disintegration shared certain patterns. The breakdown in communication, the antipathy born of long-term alienation, the petty marshaling of protocol—it was all there.

  “Ultimately, it’s all about power,” he said, his eyes rounding with epiphany, or caffeine. “It’s not about who’s right or what’s best or some deep belief. You lose sight of all that, and it becomes about who has more control, who comes out on top—who did what years and years ago and who has to pay.” Felicia and I sipped and fiddled at our drinks as Rafael slumped back into his leather armchair: “Power.”

  It’s hard to talk about anything else when you’re breaking up. Try, and be amazed at the tunneling your brain does to get back where it wants to be. Everyone in Beirut talks politics, all the time. It’s like history’s longest breakup between the world’s most promising couple, argued by the Middle East’s greediest lawyers, and contingent on the custody of several million traumatized children, who will grow into needy adults with trust issues and a tendency to freak out other countries in bed.

  Gathering himself from his chair and another of divorce’s palpable aftershocks, Rafael wrapped up with the two things I needed to know for my stay in Beirut: “Everyone thinks everyone is a spy. And they might as well line the whole city with razor wire.”

  * * *

  Hezbollah emerged in 1982, a pet militia of the Ayatollah Khomeini. They trained under Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard to fight the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon, which had left between twelve and nineteen thousand Lebanese dead, many of them Shiites. Led by Beirut-born secretary-general Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah since 1992, Hezbollah—the only militia not forced to disarm after the end of Lebanon’s civil war—is cited as a terrorist organization by both Canada and the United States, whereas most of Europe and the Arab world recognizes them as a legitimate resistance movement. Prior to September 11, 2001, Hezbollah was responsible for the deaths of more American citizens than any other Islamic group, most notoriously the 1983 truck bombing that killed 241 marines in their West Beirut barracks, out by the airport. Court documents called it “the largest nonnuclear explosion that had ever been detonated on the face of the Earth.” And yet in 2005 the United States showed signs of capitulating to the United Nations’ attempts to smooth Hezbollah’s way into mainstream Lebanese politics—a sign, some say, that the United States is currently too depleted by its involvements in Iraq and Afghanistan to risk toying with the puppets of Syria and Iran. With over one hundred million dollars in annual funding from Iran and flourishing black-market and intelligence resources, Hezbollah has ballooned into the world’s premier terror network; even Al Qaeda looks to them for training and advice. They are, after all, considered the leading experts in the kidnap and torture of foreigners—particularly Americans—for political advantage.

  Nasrallah picks his moments well. Having successfully ended the Israeli occupation of Lebanon in 2000, he won the support of 87 percent of the Lebanese population during the war he essentially started in 2006. Since then he has focused on building Hezbollah’s influence as a political party. They won 14 of Lebanon’s 128 parliamentary seats in 2005 and have forged opposition alliances with Amal—another Shia faction—and the largest Christian bloc in parliament, led by former military commander Michel Aoun. In a 1985 manifesto Hezbollah made its agenda plain: they sought to eject Western colonialism from the country, bring the Phalangists to justice for the atrocities committed during the civil war, eradicate the “Zionist entity” of Israel, and bring the Islamic revolution lockstepping through Lebanon.

  Nasrallah has lately stood down on that last item. His more immediate concern is acquiring veto power for Hezbollah in the cabinet, a provision that has thrown the government into chaos. Lebanon will come in at number eighteen on the Failed State Index for 2008, just two down from North Korea, two up from Yemen. Months have passed in the parliament without agreement on the makeup of a national unity government, each party cleaving to its demand for greater power. The cabinet is unwilling, in other words, to stay together for the kids. They won’t even share custody.

  * * *

  Felicia suggested a second drink at an old Beirut beach club, where we could sample some of the city’s ruined glory. The journey began with a common error in judgment—the decision to drive—and we spent the better part of an hour making excruciating, frame-by-frame progress down a few blocks in Felicia’s car. We had plenty of time for pedestrian-gazing on Hamra Street—mostly women of aggressive glamour, the head of every fourth or fifth one wrapped in a hijab. “You never used to see that,” Felicia said, nodding her big sunglasses toward the street. When it’s completely unavoidable, on assignment to Saudi Arabia, say, Felicia will wear a hijab. She’ll even take a little pleasure in picking one out, mitigating the annoyance with maximum cuteness. But the sight of them here at home made her wistful.

  Today the club where Felicia says all of fabulous Beirut would come to show off their new sun hats and sip brightly colored drinks looks like a shelled-out bunker. The seating area is a couple of green plastic tables and chairs scattered across a vast slab of concrete. Though it feels like taking a seat in a condemned public lot, discreet waitstaff appear before long. Our waiter regretted to inform us that there is no longer a working kitchen, so we ordered sodas and a bowl of the house’s salted soybeans. The wind was sharp off the water, sucking our hair and voices relentlessly back into the city.

  We didn’t stay long. The club seems resigned to accommodating gestures of patronage rather than actual patrons, fond visitors like Felicia who come to pay respect to what is essentially a tombstone. On the way out Felicia pointed to the spot where an anti-Syrian member of parliament had been killed by a car bomb in June of 2007. He died between the lighthouse rebuilt after a 2006 Israeli bombing at one end of the corniche and Hariri’s 2005 assassination site at the other end. The guided tour of Beirut’s latest misfortunes is nothing if not compact.

  Felicia was convinced that traces of mineral-hardened water in the previous night’s fattoush had done me in. Even natives aren’t immune to its devilry, she said. After a few months away, her homecoming might include a good puke as well. She dropped me off at the hotel, and I flopped out on the bed, assuming the sad, crampy little z I call “downward-facing tourist.” There was a party in Felicia’s honor later that evening and I was resolved to go.

  A few hours later four of us—me, Felicia, and a pair of her friends—were in a blue BMW and headed for Gemmayzeh, a Christian enclave known for the clubs you won’t find in its Muslim counterpart. Like many of the young Lebanese I met, Felicia is well-connected, geographically: she has already lived in more countries than many Americans will ever visit, including the United States, where her family waited out the civil war. Her stunning, raven-haired girlfriends were also raised primarily in the U.S. and could toggle between frankly accented American English and the rhythmic, glottal flow of Arabic.

  The empty streets clapped out our footsteps as we approached Kayan, a low-lit pub that serves bad music and big, strong drinks. We commandeered a corner and waited for Felicia’s guests, including a BBC News p
roducer, a former Daily Star reporter, an NGO worker, and Neill, a mysterious, British ladies’ man with a nonprofit day job none of them could quite fathom. Before his arrival it was speculated, by people I can only assume count him as a friend, that their Neill might be a spy.

  Within an hour the bar was packed with heads nodding in time—improbably, I felt—to Cornershop and Roxette. Two drinks in I was struggling to explain myself to Rob, the NGO worker from Florida. Rob was rangy and kind and made jokes about whether it was too early in the evening to send a booty text. Dipping in and ducking back in the birdish choreography of a first, loud conversation, he told me that even a year ago, even right after the war, he would have said the entire country had a 10 percent chance of spinning out of control on any given day. “Now,” he shouted, raising his eyebrows and working his palms like pistons to ensure I got the point above the music, “fifty-fifty.”

  A young Lebanese man with a blazing white bandage fitted across the bridge of his nose was seated at the bar. A punch-up seemed unlikely for such a slickly drawn boy; Rob said it was probably a nose job. Beirut has become the plastic-surgery capital of the region, a Middle Eastern counterpart to its similarly middle-class-less, expatriate satellite country, Brazil. Last year Lebanese banks began offering multithousand-dollar loans specifically for plastic surgery, and it is currently the investment of choice; bandages are worn like Hermès scarves. “It makes no sense!” I yelled over Rob’s shoulder, as Felicia bounced to the beat at the next table. It was Friday night and everyone was glad to be alive and in good company. And yet it makes perfect sense: in the face of astronomical disarray, perhaps the sanest impulse is to fix what you can.

  Felicia invited me to join the group on a ski trip the next day, and I had to confess that I have never been on skis in my life. “I’m a big fan of traction” is what I always say when the subject comes up, and I said it then.