The Wet and the Dry (5 page)

As I walked up the main flagged road, I sensed that the columns on either side were actually Byzantine, looted from
another site perhaps, and at the ancient city’s main crossroads huge Roman columns rose out of classical pediments scored with Greek graffiti. It is the language of power, too, but expressed in porphyry.

The Umayyad elegance stands side by side with this more powerful and more ancient form, uneasy, envious, and imitative but reaching out for a definition of its own. I sympathize with those newly arrived Arabs of the seventh century, a desert people obsessed with water wandering into a land of vines where the peasants still cried “Dionysus!” at harvest time. When the
inglizi
got lost, however, in the dark mazes of the past, the armed guards came to look for him with torches. They called “Hey, Tommy!” into the abandoned bathhouses and mosque, alarmed that the Syrians might suspect that he was up to no good, whereas in reality the suspicion was merely that he was drunk and good for nothing, not even for finding his way home.

Lunch with Walid Jumblatt

                                  
Beirut for me is like Naples, a
place that tears up the stable personality of the visitor. The crime and lassitude, the beauty, the intense melodrama of the street, the melancholy sea; the bars where life seems to stop and then begin again and then stop again. Bars in a city that is half Muslim are like brothels in a city that is Catholic, and the Beirut bar has an innocent intensity all its own. Though come to think of it, Catholic cities are excellent places to find brothels.

One night I might favor Grey Goose in Ashrafieh, and another night the rooftop bar of the Albergo Hotel on Abdel Wahab El Inglizi, that French Mandate street of shutters and cloistered gardens and multimillion-dollar condos and long strolls after dinner. The Albergo, in fact, is one of the bars I have written down in my Black Book of Bars in case, in an inebriated fit, I forget its address. A tall hotel in Belle Epoque style, it has an ironwork elevator, a beautiful and secretive bar on the ground floor, and another one on the roof laid out under shades and
with views over the city’s lights. One can even drink on the floor below, inside the restaurant, where gin and tonics are served at sofas so deep that the drinker disappears into them like stones sinking into quicksand. But there are so many bars in this febrile city; in Gemmayze you can spend entire nights wandering through them, unable to count them or hold them to account. I have not even mentioned the Couqley in its alleyway, where I came with Michael to eat oysters with Entre Deux Mers and steaks
saignants
with bottles of Hochar red, a restaurant where one can drink all afternoon and into the evening and then into the small hours in the same way that you would smoke a pipe all the way down over the course of a day. And there are bars I have forgotten, name-wise, though I remember their dedication—touching and sincere—to a single prewar cocktail. One night at a bar opening by the fashion designer Johnny Farah in the port, Farah served us a Trinity, a kind of dinosaur dry martini that was reputed to be the distant origin of the more famous concoction. It’s a perfect three-way split between sweet and dry vermouth and gin, but here it was complemented by intense Beirut lemon zest and drops of orange bitters. Rich and clear, with an acidic sweetness, it has none of the formidably “grown-up” sourness of the dry martini, yet it’s not sickly. In Christian Beirut, its name no doubt has its own “feel.”

Beirut is the only city where the bar and muezzin cannot dominate each other. From Abdel Wahab, Furn El Hayek runs gently downhill toward Saints Coeurs, past Ottoman houses with their balconies and high arches intact, the gardens dark with hundred-foot trees. Near the bottom, on St. Joseph University
Street, stands Time Out, which may be the oldest continuously running bar in Beirut. It is built into three floors of a house that was once a
table d’hôte
in the late nineteenth century and is now like an English country home with a basement of white stone vaults. Here is that perfect bar: a worn-in room with, at its center, a great wall of bottles in niches, and around it armchairs and oils and shaded lamps and, leaning on said bar, the white-haired and bearded Jacques Tabet, who during the civil war was known cryptically as Beirut Number Three. Tabet is Beirut’s most cantankerous and generous bar owner, and his creation is very like himself: interconnected rooms like salons in a private house, an unlit garden terrace, corners where men can smoke cigars without occidental disapproval. A bar for adults, in other words, and not for screaming children. In New York it would have been closed down long ago for this very reason.

During the war the bar was hit numerous times by RPGs and small-arms fire. “Small ordnance,” as Tabet says, “because the people shooting at us were right next door.” Survival is part of its charm. “I hate being sober,” he continues, pouring me seven or eight red ports. “It’s a state that irritates me, as I am sure it irritates you. If I had been sober all these years, I would not have survived.” And downstairs in the basement of this house, which used to belong to Tabet’s great-grandparents, one finds Beirut’s most famous bartender, Johnny Khouris. To Khouris one must come when one needs a proper dry martini in Beirut. No one else’s will do. And so nights can pass under the chipped stone vaults that look as if they are made of chalk, among the house cats and the men who have that distant war still in their
faces and in their gestures. Is alcohol, I wonder as I sit there, a substance that separates the consciousness from its true self and therefore from others? If that is true, then we spend our entire lives in a state of subtle falsity. But is alcohol the creator of the mask, or the thing that strips it away?

There are moments, as I sit at a bar in some forlorn neighborhood, whether it be here in Beirut or elsewhere, alone usually and distanced from the human race as if by a stone wall, when I can hear something trickling deep inside my core, like a sound of dirty water moving through a wood, and it seems to me that I am living in slow motion. The fingers close around the glass in slow motion; the ice cubes shift in slow motion; the images in the mirrors around me are frozen. I have entered a sedentary state of suspended animation, my mouth moving and words coming out, but having nothing to do with me. I am a puppet, but the subtlety and charm of puppets should never be underestimated.

When I meet another drinker at the bar, it is like two puppets bowing to each other and then fencing. But usually, as I say, I am alone, and it is this quality of aloneness that is most special. The solitude of the bar is so absolute, so gutting that you wonder why Edward Hopper didn’t paint it more often. It is a place where social leprosy is normal; Islam, whose traditional cities are communitarian and domestic, sees no need for such isolation at the altar of Johnnie Walker. But there are sects within Islam, like the Druze, where alcohol is permitted—what of them?

•  •  •

I had lunch one of those days of Beirut spring with the Druze warlord Walid Jumblatt in the Shuf Mountains. I remembered Jumblatt from my school days during the Lebanese civil war of the 1970s, with his ruthless militia, his love of motorbikes, and his leather jackets. He was a legendary figure, a chilling figure. A killer, an ethnic cleanser, a man whose own father had been assassinated by the Syrians; but at the same time a man of the world, a sophisticate, a playboy familiar with Antibes and BMW bikes.

The idea of meeting him in the flesh thirty-five years on was startling. It was on a press visit offered by Saad Hariri, prime-minister-to-be at that moment, and leader of the March 14th reform movement. It was going to be a lunch full of bonhomie and political sympathy, with Jumblatt frail in his corduroys, the aristocratic grandson of the great pan-Arabist Prince Shakib Arslan, his famous bald pate ringed with white hair: a deceptive, soft-spoken mignon who knew how to charm.

In his dining room decorated with scabbarded swords and bucklers, the questions put to Jumblatt were about Hezbollah and Syria, his future relations with them. He is the leader of the PSP Socialist party, and he is expected to hold positions of interest to American scribes. He listened and talked, holding forth. The conversation was enjoyable. The windows were open, and we could smell the snow. On the table was a bottle of Château Kefraya, the wine that Jumblatt invests in. As I was seated next to him, he politely poured me a glass. The politics died down, and he seemed genuinely curious to hear what a drinker would think of his production. Jumblatt has owned the winery since the late 1980s, and for some fifteen years now his wine has been
one of the most popular in Lebanon. It’s a thick, juicy Americanized wine, more or less revolting, and I said it was wonderful—it didn’t seem wise to brandish conflictual tasting notes with a vigneron warlord. The warlord and winemaker seemed like two incompatible personalities converged by fate into a single human frame that might barely be able to hold them together.

“Good,” he said. “I’ll send a magnum to your hotel room.”

My heart sank. My goose was cooked because however bad it was, I knew that, once locked in my room, I would drink the whole thing in an afternoon. Walid himself did not drink, however. I asked him how it was that the Druze, who are Muslims of a sort, do so.

“It’s because we do not follow sharia. We pray three times a day and not five. When we say ‘jihad,’ we mean something very different from war against outsiders. A war against oneself.”

The Druze are mysterious to others. The writer Benjamin of Tudela described them in 1165 as “mountain people, monotheists, who believe in the eternity of the soul and in reincarnation.” They are derived from a sect of Ismaili Shiites who founded the sect in Cairo under the Shia Fatimids. Al-Darzi, the preacher for whom they are named, was Persian. They advocated the abolition of slavery and a more mystical, depoliticized Islam that borrowed much from Greek and Persian traditions. Estranged even from other Shiites, they are denounced outright by Sunnis. They drink, but they are forbidden to eat watercress.

I wanted to ask him not about Israel or Hezbollah but about Al-Hakim, the mad imam and ruler of the Fatimids from 996 to 1021, who the early Druze of Cairo thought was an incarnation
of God. I wanted to ask him if any scholar knows what Al-Hakim’s policy on alcohol was. But the question seemed oddly impertinent, and I knew full well that almost no one can unravel the mystical threads of the Ismaili.

So I asked him instead about his vineyards in the Bekaa Valley.

“The Bekaa is dominated by Hezbollah now. And I am sure one day they will cut the water to the vineyards. Well, I say they might do it, not that they will. They can’t make Lebanon dry, but they can make it drier.”

He watched me drink with a shrewd looseness, his head slightly tilted, and asked me again if I thought Kefraya was a wine that could do well in America. It was, to me, a wine crafted with precisely that in mind. “Good, good,” he said.

When the meal was over, we moved to arak. He was pleased that we liked Château Kefraya and his own arak, and that we seemed to understand that his country was made of shifting sands, and that one day he might condemn the teetotalers in black on the far side of the hills and the next year join forces with them to survive.

“And you,” he said, “you seem to like your wine. How do you find our arak?”

“It’s like ouzo, only better.”

“The Greeks took it from us, not the other way around. Arak is the soul of Lebanon. Another one?”

I was already a little slow.

“I am half Irish,” I said. “It’s best not to get me drinking at two o’clock in the afternoon. The genes.”

I felt the slight panic even now as my hand was curled around a tiny glass of arak, and the old man’s eyes were on that hand as well. It was as if this shrewd observer of human nature had suddenly detected the flaw in my person, which was not even a very well-disguised flaw. The arak gave off a slightly juicy fragrance, and its clarity made it seem innocuous.

After lunch we toured the grounds. Jumblatt’s castle is landscaped with cypresses and rosebushes and the Roman sarcophagi that he likes to collect. A greyhound loped silently alongside as we were shown the grounds. He took us into his designer library, filled with his father’s Soviet memorabilia. The Jumblatts were Soviet allies during the civil war, and Brezhnev sent Walid’s father, Kamal, this life-size oil of Marshal Zhukov astride a white horse, as well as some lovely military pistols that are now displayed on Walid’s desk. A splendid library with a fine collection of
La Nouvelle Revue Française
.