Pumpkinflowers (17 page)

54

I
N THE NORTHERN
part of Mount Lebanon, near the town best known as the birthplace of Khalil Gibran, I encountered eight people my age walking along the Qadisha River. One of them, in a baseball hat and track pants, stopped to ask if I was Lebanese. This was in English, so I suppose he already knew the answer. His said his name was George, and he was from one of the towns nearby. They were going down to the river to have a picnic and play some music, he said; another member of the group carried a guitar. Would I come?

We made our way down to a small clearing by the riverbank and settled down in a circle. One or two of them were lawyers, a few were university students, one was a nurse, and one, in flared jeans and a shirt that reached her midriff, was a teacher. They offered me a plastic cup of orange soda and a goat cheese sandwich. I liked them, all of them, at once. On leave from the army, when I still lived on the kibbutz on Mount Gilboa, I used to go with some of the kibbutz kids down to a spring in the valley with a guitar and a watermelon pilfered from the dining hall, and we would lounge around in the late afternoon enjoying the fact that we had nowhere else to be. It was the same sort of thing.

They wanted to know where was I staying, and when I said the name of the town—Bsharee—they hooted. Why would I stay there when the neighboring town of Ehden was superior in every way? This, I gathered, was where they were from.

“Ehden is more beautiful,” said Emilio, a lawyer with slick hair. “And more modern,” said George. “The people are nicer,” said Shadi, whose curly black hair and glasses gave him the appearance of an eastern European intellectual of the 1930s. I read later that there had been bad blood between the two Christian towns since the civil war. The warlord family from Bsharee was allied with Israel and the rival family from Ehden with the Syrians, and one night in 1978 men from Bsharee went down the road to Ehden with guns, and among the dozens they killed was a son of the rival family, the Franjiehs, as well as his wife and daughter, who was three. One of the girls with us was a Franjieh. I pleaded ignorance and promised to stay there next time.

Three members of the group—the guitarist, his fiancée, and the teacher—were Muslims, George said, not from the Christian villages of the hill country but from the coastal city of Tripoli. “Our fathers fought each other,” he said. “Everyone thought they were defending something.” He shrugged. “To us it is not important.”

“My brother married a Christian girl,” said the guitarist. “We're breaking down the wall.”

“Like Pink Floyd,” said Shadi.

As a student of the Middle East, George asked, did I agree that Israel had engineered the American plan to invade Iraq so that the Palestinians could be transferred there?

I hadn't heard this interpretation before, but the sentiment was becoming familiar. I had many similar conversations in those weeks, and worse, and had already noticed the availability of the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
and related literature in the better bookstores in Beirut. If I harbored an idea that in Lebanon I might meet some who were prepared to join me in a Middle Eastern version of the Christmas truce, when German and British soldiers left their trenches to meet each other for a game of soccer in no-man's land, or that I might at least detect a hint that such a thing was possible, it was not to be. I didn't find no-man's land.

The guitarist strummed a few chords and they sang a song everyone knew by Lebanon's beloved Fairuz. When the tempo picked up, Shadi hoisted me by the arm and led me in a clumsy but enthusiastic
dabka
, after which we sat down to applause and laughter. Then the guitarist's fiancée, who hadn't said much, began to sing and everyone fell silent. She wore a blue shirt and pink eye shadow, her voice was thin, her delivery mournful and unadorned. It was “The Story of Love,” by Oum Kalthoum, the greatest Arab chanteuse of all.

Emilio leaned back next to me and observed her. “All of our songs are stories of love,” he said. I have often thought of those eight and wondered where they are now.

55

A
ND FINALLY TO
the south.

It felt wrong to reach south Lebanon just by driving south in Lebanon—for us south Lebanon was a different universe with different rules, accessible to members of certain combat units through gates in our northern border. My last trip had been in a convoy of armored trucks. This time I was in a minivan taxi, Arabic pop on the radio, the sea a blue expanse out the window to my right.

The taxi was staffed by two men, one the driver, the other a barker with tattooed arms and a sun hat whose job was to draw customers and make change. As we barreled down the coastal road from Beirut in the sunshine the barker hung out the door shouting “Sidon, Tyre!” with glee at the people we passed. He seemed to be doing this mainly for his own entertainment, as the van was full. A child sat on her mother's lap and chewed the seat in front of her. The roadside villages grew more ragged as we drove, the women's dress more conservative, the yellow flags more numerous as we approached Hezbollah's territory in the former security zone. At the entrance to the city of Tyre we were greeted by the guerrilla group's patron saint, the ayatollah Khomeini, glaring from a poster next to a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise, which was full. Tyre was to be the base for my exploration of the south.

When the minivan stopped the barker pointed me toward a swarm of yellow cabs, one of which dropped me a few minutes later at a pension in the city's Christian Quarter. After I paid, the driver told me to be careful. Why, I asked. He motioned with his hand toward Israel and grinned.

The beach at Tyre is superb, with broad white sands and clear waters. I spent the evening drinking local beer at a shack run by a man named Walid, who wore only a pair of cutoff jeans. He spent a few years studying architecture in France, he told me, before he tired of Europe and came home. He had everything he needed here, he said. He played pool with a friend under a bare lightbulb.

I was a twenty-minute drive up the coast from my parents' home in northern Israel—or would have been were there not an impassable border in between. I had traveled twelve thousand miles to get here. The salty air was the same. In the weak light the border was visible to the south, the same ridge visible from my parents' rooftop, ending in its promontory of white chalk extending into the sea. But now I was on the wrong side.

56

I
WALKED INTO
a grocery store to buy something to drink, and found two men sitting among shelves stocked with dry goods. They were surprised to see a tourist, because there was no good reason for any to come to this town. The proprietor stood up and greeted me. I was Canadian? That was very good. In fact he had cousins in Ottawa, did I know them? I bought a raspberry Popsicle. The second man seemed to have a job that is an important staple in many Middle Eastern businesses, that of the friend or relative who sits around your shop doing nothing. Welcome to Nabatieh, he pronounced, and I thanked him. He wanted to know if I had heard of someone named Hassan Kamel al-Sabbah, and looked disappointed when I said I had not.

Hassan Kamel al-Sabbah, the proprietor repeated. I shook my head.

From Nabatieh, he said. He invented—he searched for a word—the electricity.

The light, the second man said.

Back on the street a man passed me with a metal jug of coffee in one hand. In the other were glasses that he clinked together in an elaborate rhythm. He stared at me. Other people stared at me. I was pushing my luck.

I stopped at a bakery, and the owner took my elbow, led me to a table, and brought me a plate of sticky pastries. When I was done he undercharged me. Welcome to Nabatieh, he said as I left. Farther down the street I noticed a large sign on a traffic island, a portrait of a man in a traditional Arab headdress. He was not one of the usual Shiite clerics or teenage Hezbollah martyrs whose portraits were everywhere. The Arabic letters underneath the man's face read
HASSAN KAMEL AL-SABBAH
.

This al-Sabbah was, I later learned, an inventor who did important work for General Electric on circuitry and solar cells before he was killed in a car accident near Elizabethtown, New York, in 1935. He was a different kind of local hero, perhaps, for those so inclined.

To the east was a row of hills, the ones I was looking for. There were buildings in the way, so I walked until I had a clear field of vision and could make out an artificial protrusion on the ridge under an overcast sky. It was the Pumpkin. I was getting closer.

I wanted to find the places we saw from the outpost, the ones we all knew by heart: the villas, the Cal-Tex gas station, the al-Ghandour hospital, the Monastery of Saint Anthony. I began walking through the town in the direction of the hill. Soon what life there had been on the streets began to thin.

Now I was among shops cluttered with old car parts. I passed a vendor selling charcoal. Men gave me unfriendly looks from dilapidated storefronts, but no one stopped me. I passed a group of middle-aged men standing next to a row of parked taxis and saw that they were laughing. They were laughing at me. They stopped when I walked over, and each of them shook my hand. I was Canadian? Canada was good.

Journalist? one asked. Tourist, I said, and if they were surprised they didn't show it.

One of them took my camera and photographed me with the other drivers. My back was to the hill, and I could feel it behind me. I wondered what they would do if they knew. A driver with a bushy gray mustache asked me to help him move to Canada. I said that Canada was so cold and Lebanon so beautiful—why would he want to leave? He placed his hand on my shoulder and spoke as if he had prepared a statement. “Lebanon is the most precious gift of God, the most precious thing he gave us,” he said, and then waved his hand at the dismal street. “But here there is no way to change your life.” I wrote that down as soon as I found a quiet place to open my notebook, because I didn't want to forget exactly how he said it.

I was now being carried along by the magnetic pull of the outpost. There were no more sidewalks in this part of town, just garages and Hezbollah signs. The wall of one building was covered in portraits of martyrs from the war against us. I turned left into a neighborhood that spilled off the road and stretched toward the foot of our hill. There was nearly no one around, and I knew the farther I walked the flimsier my excuses for being here would become.

An old man was sitting on a chair outside a store, holding a cane and looking at me through thick glasses. Two little boys played on the ground next to him. What was I looking for, he asked in English. I told him I was a Canadian student and that I liked to see regular neighborhoods and not tourist sites.

Was I alone, he asked, and I said yes. He suggested that I be careful—it was dangerous to walk around alone. When he asked if I liked Nabatieh I said I did, though I didn't and wanted badly to leave. Could we once have thought, even in jest, that coming back here one day would be a happy reunion with a place we knew well? There seemed no happiness in this rough town, certainly none that would be available to me.

“Things are getting better here,” he said, “since they left.” He pointed to the protrusion on the hill. I asked him how it was when
they
were here, not saying “Israelis,” as if by pronouncing that word it might be clear to him who I was. He looked at me as if he pitied my ignorance. “Bad,” he said. “Very bad. But I wasn't here. I was in Gabon, in Africa.” I asked him if it was really dangerous to walk around. “It was a joke,” he said, but he didn't smile.

I followed the dirt shoulder of the road into the neighborhood closest to the hill. A man passed me in a grimy yellow baseball hat with a Hezbollah logo, pushing a wheelbarrow. Now I was at the edge of the town. Beyond me was the dead zone leading to the beginning of the slope. Above me was the outpost, just a half mile away but inaccessible from down here in the valley; I knew it could be reached only from the eastern side of the ridge, on the old army access road, and getting there would be a separate trip. Now it was possible to imagine what it meant to have the horizontal slit of the lookout post peering down at you always like a malevolent eye.

I came to a two-story building surrounded by a low stone wall. A white sign was affixed to an electricity pole, and I am not sure why I was so surprised that it read dir mar antonius—the Monastery of Saint Anthony. Perhaps until then I was still not convinced that the line between my life and the life of this town could ever truly be crossed. One week during our second tour someone fired rockets at us every evening from behind this wall.

On the road ahead I saw a row of familiar villas, some of them no longer abandoned and others under construction. If I may try to explain what this felt like, imagine growing up with a painting of a forest on the wall of your room, a picture that you see every day and that is intimately familiar, and waking up one morning under the trees. I walked no farther and left the town as quickly as I could.

57

I
N THE MORNING
I set off from Tyre in a battered cab unencumbered by seat belts and headed inland into the old security zone. This was the most important part of the journey, and I felt something of what a mountain climber must feel leaving camp in unpredictable weather for an attempt at the summit.

I had considered engaging a tour guide to show me around southern Lebanon but abandoned the idea when I realized someone like that would be inclined to ask questions. Instead I hired a taxi driver named Ibrahim. We agreed on a price for two days of exploration. On the first I would visit only sites that a tourist would know from the Lebanon guidebooks and in this way gauge his level of suspicion. On the second, I would try to reach the hill. I could still think of no reason that anyone but an Israeli soldier would know where the Pumpkin was or want to go, and knew that the moment I directed him there would be the most fraught of the trip.

Under Ibrahim's dark mustache his front teeth were missing. On his dashboard was a photograph of a round toddler, his son. We didn't talk much, as he knew only a few English words and I was concealing my own minimal Arabic to avoid blurting out Hebrew by mistake, a fear that accompanied me throughout my time in Lebanon. The old cab's engine showed unexpected spirit, and Ibrahim wrenched the steering wheel to the left every time someone in front of us moved too slowly for his liking, passed in the opposite lane and then twisted the wheel rightward again to avoid oncoming traffic. He must have seen my expression—I was considering the irony of surviving south Lebanon as a soldier only to meet my end there on the grille of a cucumber truck—because he patted my leg and said, “No problem.”

At the main intersection of one dusty village I saw a wooden mock-up of the Dome of the Rock with a Hezbollah flag and the English words
JERUSALEM, WE ARE ON THE WAY
.

We drove along the border fence and drew abreast of a frontier post inside Israel. I recognized it as one named after a kind of orchid. Ibrahim slowed, pointed and said, “Israel,” pronouncing it
ees-ra-eel.
I assumed there were soldiers in a concrete lookout emplacement at that moment peering through binoculars at a yellow cab inside Lebanon that had slowed down, which it should not have done, making out a driver with a mustache and someone in the passenger's seat. I knew what the post looked like inside: a low ceiling, a horizontal opening facing Lebanon, an electric kettle, radio equipment with a few frequencies babbling, packages of processed cheese. Ibrahim pointed his index finger in the direction of the base, thumb up, mimed a gunshot, and then sped away.

We passed through Shiite towns bedecked with Hezbollah flags and posters of martyrs and leaders. After a while it seemed to me that Hezbollah's artists might have become bored painting the same Hassan Nasrallahs and Ayatollah Khomeinis, and I started noticing the same portraits but with backgrounds of airbrushed neon colors, the kind of style you might have seen on the side of a van in America in the 1970s. I saw one Nasrallah with a pop-art background of comic book dots and imagined a frustrated artist laboring in a basement covered in his own unsold paintings, churning out another portrait of the leader to cover rent.

When we stopped to buy gas the attendant was surprised to see a tourist. He pumped my hand and asked me how I liked Lebanon. I told him I loved it. Across the street was a Hezbollah flag and a mock battery of twenty rockets aimed at my family.

We stopped at the abandoned UN compound at Kana, where a sign read
THE NEW HOLOCAUST: 18 APRIL 1996.
Inside the base were signs of the impact of our munitions: shards of glass, blackened earth, shrapnel-pocked walls, twisted metal, and pulverized concrete. In one empty room were three little boys playing with pieces of junk. When a detachment of Israeli spotters became pinned down by a Hezbollah battery set up near the compound, our artillery fired to cover their retreat and hit the compound instead, killing more than a hundred ordinary people who thought they were safe inside. There were long marble sarcophagi and a few photographs, each with a name and date of birth. One smiling young man was born the same year I was, 1977.