Life, with the nervous exception of my shaky status as a “test case,” began to take on a pleasant, anisette-flavored aroma of gentle living. On weekends, the ski slopes beckoned invitingly, and so did the beaches, where we would turn loose the children and watch them dig in the sands for Roman coins. The kiddies were getting a superb education at the British Community School, and had picked up a few words in Arabic and a few wondrous friends, chief among them Mohammed abd el Wahid el Boren, an Egyptian boy of six, and Master Nigel Doman, a St. Trinians type. In a word, we were comfortable. We were acclimated. We were even saying, “Bukra!” At last, I was no longer a “foreigner.” I’d found a home.
You couldn’t get me near a night club any more, but along with swimming, skiing and sightseeing, there was certainly enough on the Beirut social calendar to while away the Middle East days and nights.
There were the movies, for instance. Beirut boasted about a dozen colossal theatres in its downtown section, and to attend one of them was an experience.
Standing in line at the box office was always a nervous, shouting business because in Lebanon, lines were about as sacred as cows to a bull, and the last to arrive would invariably attempt to be the first served. Lebanese and Americans alike, we would all shout at the newcomers, but these imperturbable worthies would merely turn and smile triumphantly at us as they picked up their tickets and walked in. There were also numerous little box office dramas concerning the distinction between an adult and a child, and it reminded me of my mother’s constant fare battles with New York bus drivers. “My God, he’s only five years old!” my mother would scream at the infuriated but helpless drivers, as I stood gangling over them, for I was a rather tall youth even at the age of eleven. The only difference between my mother’s bus scenes and those in front of Beirut’s theatre box offices was that the movie patrons rarely won out, whereas my mother never lost.
Bottom pinching also added a rather novel spice to the scenes outside Beirut’s theatres. Lebanese men probably never heard of the word “goose,” but they knew how to execute one well enough and had a marvelous “Who, me?” face to go with it. They usually picked on American blondes, for amongst a dark-skinned people, blonde women were an irresistible temptation. Fortunately, Peggy was a brunette.
Inside the theatres, the seats were arranged in widely spaced rows so that candy, popcorn, ice cream and pop vendors could pass among the patrons in the midst of a performance, and that didn’t seem to bother the Lebanese, because they talked out loud right through most of the picture anyway.
As for the films, they were mostly American, and hugely popular. There was no dubbing in of voices, but Arabic and French subtitles were flashed, and these were sometimes about as close to the spoken line as Casey Stengel to Karl Marx. Once, during a western, an actor who might have been Ward Bond stepped up to a Dodge City saloon keeper and growled: “Whiskey, straight, before I flatten you!” The French subtitle read: “Un Dubonnet, si’l vous plait!”
When the subtitles weren’t grabbing us, the loud comments of the Lebanese filled the breach. In Love Is a Many Splendored Thing, there was a scene in which Bill Holden telephoned Jennifer Jones, said nothing more than an emotionally charged, “Goodnight,” and then hung up. It was supposed to be very subtly romantic, but the unbelieving and disgusted comment of a Lebanese man sitting behind us was “fifteen piastres!” this being the cost of a local phone call in Beirut.
Now and then Peggy and I would go to a strictly Arab movie, and even though they lacked subtitles, they were even more fascinating than a psychiatrist’s dream. They had everything. Do you hear me? Everything! In a single film, the plot would include robbery, murder, a love triangle, incest, the betrayal of state secrets, fratricide, patricide, a religious message, spies, a success story, belly dancers and a war. The only thing missing was Dr. Gillepsie, and if they’d had him, believe me, they would have used him!
ii
Our biggest, and most worrisome, Beirut social go-around involved the endless cycles of cocktail parties at which we were nightly required to commit martinicide. There were over three thousand Americans in Beirut, and their primary preoccupation seemed to be stuffing each other with Gibson onions and hors d’oeuvres. You were considered anti-social and boorish if you didn’t attend these blasts, and after staggering through about two hundred of them, Peggy and I now had moral justification for throwing one of our own. It was a rather nervous affair from start to finish.
Moona, wishing to make her contribution to the effort, arrived in the afternoon with an armful of daisies for decoration. “I pick them near my house,” she said. She sure picked them, all right. That night Peggy floated them atop the wading pool, and the sudden fusion of water to their doubtful chemistry somehow jangled up their latent smells, and it became evident that Moona had neglected to tell us that her house was perilously close to a cow pasture. It certainly didn’t take a book to convince our guests that they shouldn’t eat those daisies, for while you were safe upwind, it was a pretty risky business if you were standing down near the kitchen area.
“Don’t go near the water,” Peggy would say to the new guests as they arrived, and I suppose that some of them misunderstood and silently suffered rather than go to the bathroom. I don’t know. As I say, it was a rather mixed-up night.
Ali, whom I had hired for the occasion and who was novelly attired in my best white dinner jacket and his own gray sneakers, was mixing the drinks in the kitchen, and it soon became apparent that he had an inborn distrust of tap water. People were reeling around the balcony conversing in seven languages, and Peggy and I rushed around all night pulling swaying drunks back from the railing, which was perilously low.
“Judas priest, put some water in the highballs!” I finally shouted at Ali in the kitchen, and one of the tipsy guests overheard me and spread the word that I was instructing Ali to “water down the drinks.” “Cheap screw,” I heard someone saying, “the best Scotch is only two bucks at the commissary.” I wanted to defend myself, but decided it would only make matters worse.
Pouring his own generous contribution into the evening’s cup of hilarity was an Arab ethnics professor from the American University who was standing in the living room expounding a rare racial theory, the general drift of which was that the Irish were descendants of the Arabs! I knew there were a lot of Arabs descended from Irishmen, what with the Crusaders once nosing around the area and all, but this was a switcheroo that had me standing on my head, a trick that I have when I come across the unusual.
“The Phoenicians were seafaring men,” the professor was saying, his audience clustered about him like ignorant grapes on an erudite stem, “and we know that they penetrated as far as the British Isles. And do you know,” he declared, “that there is a village in Northern Ireland where the inhabitants speak a dialect of Gaelic not so much different from the old Phoenician tongue!”
“You kiddin’, professor?” said a ruddy faced, malmsey-nosed listener named Connolly.
“Kid? Kid!” squealed the professor, getting a little excited now. “Look you—there are words in Gaelic that are identical to Phoenician. Take the simple sentence—‘Fein karia entu?’ This is Gaelic for ‘What country do you come from.’ Do you know what it means in Phoenician?”
“Up the rebels!” ventured a wag sitting within earshot.
“Please!” said the professor sternly. “It is not to joke. In Phoenician it means the same as in Gaelic. Yes!”
“You gabby little camel chaser, you tellin’ me I’m really an A-rab?” snorted the inebriated Connolly, raising his voice.
“Arab? Hah! You are probably a Greek!” shouted the professor, and it was at this point, I believe, that Connolly lunged at him, but leaping quickly upright again, I pushed in and separated them. I didn’t have much time to waste there, though, and I soon left them and rushed out to the balcony to pull a few more drunks away from the railing, and then quickly barreled into the kitchen to supervise Ali’s pouring of the drinks. In the kitch
en I met Peg. “Pretty hairy party, isn’t it?” she said numbly.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Think I ought to haul out the binoculars?”
“I guess,” she nodded. “Otherwise somebody’s liable to get killed.”
I got the binoculars. They were one of the chief diversions of a portion of the American colony in Beirut and were the standard equipment of many party hosts, who were expected to pass them out to their guests.
The Lebanese have a strange feeling about the world outside their apartment windows, the feeling being that this world doesn’t exist, which is an opinion they are welcome to although I have always felt that it was pretty fuzzy thinking on their part. Anyway, their windows are always open and their shades are never down, affording the power-binoculared Americans in Beirut a pretty rare insight into Arab customs.
I passed out binoculars to those who wanted them, and then delivered the customary orientation spiel: “The sixth floor (I was speaking of the building across the way from us) is fairly dull and there’s not much doing there except an occasional game of Boardless Monopoly and a dirty old man clipping his toenails in a nightshirt.” I urged my guests, however, to scrutinize the third floor which was peopled by a Saudi Arabian and his four young wives. They were quite a study. By day the girls would sunbathe in Bikinis, and they didn’t give a Continental State Bank who saw it. But at night, when they left the building for none knows whither, they would be heavily robed and veiled in strict Moslem tradition.
“Something interesting over here,” said one of the guests, a pimply young gentleman who worked for the Arabian-American Oil Company. He handed over the binoculars and I squinted at where he was pointing. I saw nothing but the old Arab in the nightshirt on the sixth floor, which wasn’t too unusual at all, except that he was training a pair of binoculars on us!
“See what happens when you educate the beggars?” growled the pimply young man. “Turn on you like snakes. Snakes, that’s all, snakes!” He was pretty well fried, and he turned away from the balcony and promptly fell into the wading pool, where he floundered wetly among the daisies, screaming “Snakes! Snakes!” at the top of his voice. With my naked eye, I could see the old man in the nightshirt jumping up and down on his balcony, and the men who usually played Boardless Monopoly soon joined him and were passing the binoculars back and forth. “Snakes!” roared the pimply young man, still thrashing and unwilling to get out of the pool. Through the kitchen window I noticed that Ali was back to “mixing” his waterless potions, and in the living room I could see Connolly lunging for the professor again, who had this time accused him of being an Abyssinian.
“Interesting party,” said Global Syndrome, joining me on the balcony. “Terrible for Arab-American relations, of course,” and he nodded toward Connolly and the professor. I crumpled in a quivering heap at his feet, as my newfound world of joy and understanding fell into a yawning, fiery pit, with the Ambassador, sporting horns, tail and a barbed tennis racket, waiting for me at the bottom of it! Oh for a bomb to come falling out of the skies, ending my misery and Global Syndrome with it!
I nearly got my wish.
23. “Don’t Bomb Me, I’m a People!”
IF THERE’S anything I hate, it’s an atom bomb in my lunch box. But that is a mere bomb fictional. What I hate even more is a bomb actual—and this is the kind that began blasting Beirut two days after my famous party. It postponed the Ambassador’s wrath and it was all on account of a ditch.
In October, 1956, the armies of Britain, France and Israel marched into Egypt to settle a property dispute involving a canal, thus fulfilling the prophecies of a late nineteenth century Brooklyn seer named Wisdom Tweed. I don’t know how they took the news in Brooklyn, but in Beirut it created more anxiety than Hart, Schaffner and Marx in a nudist colony. First came the swarm of American evacuees from Syria, Egypt, Israel and Jordan. Then came the rumblings in the streets and the mass pro-Nasser demonstrations by Lebanese Moslems. And then came the bombings. They came at night.
Peggy in her kerchief and I in my gold lamé underwear had just settled down for a long autumn nap when shabboom! A shattering blast ripped at our eardrums, and the building began to shake. “Little boy, have you been playing with the boiler again?” accused Peggy with round, wide eyes, and sensing that she was hysterical, I bit her elbow in an effort to restore her to her senses.
“Earthquake!” screamed Moona, suddenly appearing in the bedroom doorway, and “I dare you to tell me to go to the mountains!” I roared. Thoroughly cowed, she sulked off to comfort the children while I padded downstairs and into the street seeking Truth, Beauty and a few simple facts. But there was only one fact—the British Bank. It used to be a block from our apartment. It wasn’t any more. In its place was a gaping, smoking, freshly bombed ruin with a radiation belt in the back. And that was the beginning.
The Friendly Sons of Nasser League of Lebanon had begun a Suez invasion protest campaign, dropping off calling cards and homemade explosives made of nitro and petrified quince jelly at all stores, banks or buildings connected with either the French or British. These high-spirited raids were carried out by swarthy men in turtle neck sweaters who would roar up to their targets in a black roadster, heave out the explosives, and then head for the mountains where, ever since the earthquake, they were sure not to be followed. Their glorious leader was probably a wayward missionary, or at least a vegetarian, for their flaming missions were always carried out late at night and in some area devoid of population, giving the impression that they were careful to avoid taking a human life. They were a sort of Lebanese Lavendar Hill Mob.
Because of their apparent humaneness, no one actually feared the “Beirut Bombers,” but they certainly caused a lot of consternation in front of the British Community School the night after my party. I was out walking the llama, wondering when the fatal call from Lenora Borealis would come, when I came upon a watchman sitting in front of the school building. I stopped to chat with him, for he seemed uncommonly interested in my pet, and I was just about to let him pat Menlo’s head when a black roadster crammed with toughs came screeching suddenly around the corner. It slowed down in front of the school, and the watchman, who had an English mother and was named Leslie Farouk, leaped to his feet in a frenzy, screaming: “Don’t bomb me, I’m a people!” A turtle-necked smiler leaned out of the front window and asked us the time. Had he asked me for Big Ben, at that moment, I would have offered to get it for him, but he settled for the time, and in a moment the car vanished down the street.
“They do not bomb people,” said Mr. Farouk, staring at me ashen-faced, but actually I suspected that they didn’t want to hurt the llama. Mr. Farouk and I quarreled over this point, and we eventually left each other in a fit of pout. When a Lebanese gets some crazy idea into his head, you can’t talk him out of it.
ii
When it wasn’t bomb scares in the night it was demonstrations during the day. The leader of Beirut’s pro-Nasser element, a wild-eyed man who claimed to be receiving daily guidance from the ghost of Rudolph Valentino, would frequently petition the Government for the right to hold “peaceful demonstrations” in the main square. They were demonstrations, all right, but they were often about as peaceful as a Night on Bald Mountain, and there was lots of rock throwing and window smashing. Now and then a car turned over. Everyone agreed that they were interesting meetings.
One day, as Jeremiah Web and I were driving to work together, we turned a corner and suddenly found ourselves smack in the middle of a demonstration. “We’ve had it!” said Web quietly, for he was carrying with him a telecommunication from the American Embassy in Israel. Across the top of it in large black print were the words, TEL AVIV, enough to get us hung in any Arab country. Before I could put the VW in reverse, we were surrounded by shouting Arabs, and Web, his face the color of doom, ripped off the TEL AVIV portion of the document and, stuffing it into his mouth, began a courageous effort to swallow it. An Arab leaned his head into the car. “Wein rayeh—Where are you goin
g?” he said to me in Arabic, and I saw that there was hope. “We’re on our way to Damascus,” I replied, also in Arabic. But “Who is your friend?” prodded the Arab again. “He looks like an Englishman.”
“He’s not,” I said. “His father was Swedish and his mother was an Arab.” And then for good measure, I added, “He fought in the Palestine War.”
“Ah!” beamed my inquisitor, and with a farewell slap against the car’s fender, he waved us through. Web was still chewing on the telecom fragment, but we made it to the office without any further challenge. I didn’t tell him what I’d said to the man who had stopped us. It’s best to leave some things alone.
iii
It wasn’t until December that I got personally involved in the most incredible Middle Eastern demonstration since the auctioning of King Farouk’s pajamas. It got me deeper into the Suez Crisis than I had ever dreamed possible, and my dreams are no small matter.
It was late, and I was still at NERSC, checking some rush copy for a special Suez pamphlet. In the composing room, the Arab typesetters could come and go, talking of Mohammed and Michaelangelo, and I would hear fragments of their conversation quite clearly. It was not until I heard the Arabic words for “guns” and “killing” that I put down my blue pencil and began listening in earnest. The listening was good. But the news was bad.
A demonstration had been called for eight the following morning, and Farhat, as usual, had somehow gotten wind of some dark Communist doings in connection with it. “Many can die,” he was saying. And if his information was right, many could, for the Red plan, though crude and primitive, seemed to be one that involved bloodshed and a potentially telling propaganda blow against the United States. A parade would form in the main square, and the line of march would carry the demonstrators to the French, British and American Embassies. But the crowd was to be salted with a few guntoting Commies, and at the American Embassy, they were to incite the mob to riot, starting with rock hurling and ending in gunfire aimed at the Embassy’s Marine guards. At best, the Reds hoped to provoke the Marines into returning the fire, but at worst the day’s events would provide the Reds with an excuse to bray to the neutral nations of the world that the “imperialist Americans were unwanted and hated” in Lebanon, a relatively peaceful and stable Mideast nation. “Bad,” Farhat wound up his explanation. “Very bad.”
Which Way to Mecca, Jack? Page 19