This Is Running for Your Life (19 page)

“Well, I decided against the Hezbollah T-shirt,” Peter sighed, breaking our heavy silence as he strapped back into his seat. We all laughed, delivered by Peter's perfect delivery.

*   *   *

We six finally faced each other over lunch—platter after platter of traditional food served by the fireplace of a large, drafty family restaurant in Zahlé. The minor revelations of a shared meal eased the way into franker talk: Nisrine tolerates Americans and reveres the Japanese; Margaret doesn't drink and never has; Raaida is off carbs and was so tickled by Peter's use of the expression “a moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips” that she made him write it down (“It's really true,” she said, wiping her eyes); Bilalo smokes between courses; and I can eat my weight in baba ghanoush.

Raaida called to me from the far end of the table as the bitter candied fruit arrived for dessert, rhyming my name with
seashell
. “Bilalo has something he's been wanting to ask you,” she announced. I leaned over my plate to catch our driver's eye two seats down, but Bilalo had shrunk into the back of his chair like a kid refusing rice pudding. Raaida is a teaser, so his discomfort was her delight.

“He's curious about your name,” she went on. “Do you want to know why?” Bilalo had wondered if I was aware that Lebanon's opposition leader was a man by the name of Michel Aoun, and that Aoun's party color is orange. There is even, I would learn, an “Orange TV” channel, the premier network for Iranian jihadist propaganda. Bilalo finally looked down at me, blushing to the rafters. I assured him, a little flushed myself, that I was Orange in name only.

Raaida and Nisrine had been cordial, almost careful with one another throughout the morning, often lapsing into Arabic, but spoke more freely over lunch. Raaida is Greek Catholic—basically Greek Orthodox plus pope, she said—though the concept of “taking the pin,” which Margaret did at her confirmation at the age of twelve, felt bafflingly foreign. There was needling throughout the meal:
Just a sip! Come on, Margaret
. As though a lifetime's commitment might topple because a Lebanese tour guide thought it was the stupidest thing she ever heard. Margaret still wears the Pioneer pin, with its emblem of the sacred heart, and won't touch chocolate liqueurs or certain medications. At this point it's just stubbornness, Peter added reflexively, forking through a sour grape leaf between sips of beer. Nisrine's brother is making a film about Palestine's fledgling network of microbreweries. She mentions more than once that Christians make up less than 1.5 percent of Palestine's population.

“We built much of what is here,” Nisrine said, during a discussion of Lebanon's faltering infrastructure, and Raaida allowed it. Today Sri Lankans and Filipinos make up the country's sorely unregulated underclass, and Palestinians are official pariahs. After a few moments' deliberation, Nisrine put down her glass and declared that four days spent meeting and speaking with the people of Beirut had made it clear to her that the Palestinians were better off than the Lebanese. “In an occupied country there is a solution,” she said. “Get rid of the occupier, get rid of the problem. The people still have
hope
.” But in Lebanon, she went on, the problems are so treacherous and densely intertwined that there is no path out, or none that the people can see, and that is a far worse place to be.

This was more than Raaida could bear. Being pitied by a Palestinian was definitely not on the itinerary. Her eyes filled with tears and the fragile good humor that had borne us all through the day gave way.

“If you want to know the truth,” she said, looking around the table, “if I can speak openly—I am miserable.” She made a sharp, helpless gesture, as though momentarily waiving her professional veneer. “I am very depressed. My whole country is depressed. We are frightened. Everyone is trying to leave but there is nowhere to go—there are no jobs, no money. We don't know what will happen. For us this is a terrible time.”

Nisrine was the only one who spoke. “Yes,” she said, nodding. “Yes.”

*   *   *

During the ride back over the mountain we were buoyant again. Raaida told jokes circa the summer of '06, including the one about the vain women of Achrafieh, and another about a pneumatic Lebanese pop star named Haifa being traded for the Israeli port town of the same name. Peter told a story about his daughter's recent attempt to buy a house in Northern Ireland. Hers was the top bid, but the seller turned it down when he saw the spelling of her last name. Not Kelley but Kelly, as in Catholic. These things take time to resolve, was his point, if they ever do.

Beached in the hideous traffic of rush-hour Beirut, we all lost steam and were silent. Cars surrounded us two and three deep on either side. Beyond them, the curious profile of the city: for every structure that is newly built or merely intact, there is a stooped shadow building at its side, kneeling in its own ruin. Raaida leapt from the car with barely a goodbye, following a complicated acceptance of some money from Peter and Margaret, who departed soon after with polite good wishes. I was next.

Down by the corniche Nisrine shuddered as we drove across Beirut's latest ground zero. It was not goodbye, she said, extracting one more promise about the next day's trip to Jeita. I awoke early the next morning and called the company from my bed to confirm. They told me Nisrine had called even earlier, to cancel.

*   *   *

Beirut's boardwalk is as pretty as any on the Mediterranean, and I was determined to make the most of it. I moved along slowly, stopping every few feet to lean against the railing and look out across the sea. It is a rare stretch of the city where lingering is permitted, and one can behave and even begin to feel more or less like a tourist. German warships sit in the middle distance, patrolling the waters for the Israelis. These things take time.

The men don't bother unescorted women in Beirut, when they bother with them at all. I wasn't concerned when a young man wearing jeans with a complicated wash and embellished pockets drew up alongside me at the railing, then slid a ways down. I turned to the mountains, slipping into a paranoiac reverie and rehearsing for the fifty-third time what I would tell the American agent at passport control when he asked me what I was doing alone in Beirut in the middle of January. Before I left, a friend had put a terrible reentry scenario in my head involving German shepherds, tax returns, and a porn sweep of my laptop. I went over the straight story and then I considered the truth, amassing as it was out there over the water. I thought of telling the officer, as he looked over my visa—my life—that Beirut doesn't give a shit about either of us, or what we think. It didn't care when I came, it didn't care when I left, and I respected that. I'd tell him that it's gorgeous and battered and tired and awful, that the mountains are exquisite, the sea as lush and blue as any you'll ever know, that the sky is silky and bright, that the fishermen casting rods, smoking hookahs, and casually wizzing on the rocks below are charming and picturesque—even the warships look sort of beautiful, carving dread into the horizon—and that none of it means a thing. I'd tell him that Beirut did not let me down.

Eventually I turned back to the boardwalk, where the young man in the ornate jeans had attracted a small crowd. He was standing against the railing with his back to the sea. His chin was tucked in sharp and both hands were shoved deep into his pockets. Four soldiers in red berets were flanking him, two to a side. The shortest, strongest-looking one was questioning him with what seemed like tenderness; they were probably the same age, could have been brothers. He put his hand on the young man's cheek, then pushed up under his chin. The young man refused to look at him. The soldier spread his hands over the young man's temples, tilting his forehead back with his thumbs. Again the young man resisted, keeping his eyes closed and his mouth pursed. I thought maybe he had tried to jump. But how had I missed it? After about half an hour the crowd dispersed, the soldiers went back to wherever they came from, and the young man stood alone again, his back to the sea, his fists in his pockets, and his eyes squeezed shut.

That afternoon I headed toward Al Hikmat to visit the Sursock collection of Islamic art, maybe walk home along the port. It had taken several tries to get the museum's eccentric hours straight. I didn't hear the explosion, but within moments it was clear it had happened. There was an uptake in the streets, an intensified version of things I had seen before: groups of seven or eight narrow-eyed toughs emerging from nowhere, bumping and pushing down the sidewalk; unmarked Hyundai vans filled with kerchiefed men leaning hard into the corners, jumping in and out at stoplights.

I walked back over to Charles Helou Avenue, where army trucks were amassing and dispersing. Ambulance peals were sounding, but I couldn't tell from where. A handful of local security guards had gathered on the corner and were pointing out over the coast. I moved in closer and followed their gestures: a bloom of smoke was rising off to the right, to the north, where a U.S. embassy car was burning in the street. The bomb had been detonated a breath too soon; the car's passenger and driver were injured but alive. The three people who happened to be passing by, however, were dead. A soldier from a nearby checkpoint came to join the men and eventually turned to me. After a scan through my bag, he told me to clear out, that it wasn't safe.

That seemed to be my cue—permission, finally, to panic. Yet even for me, even after just a few days, the moment was not unexpected. When a city is wound this tight, the ambient strain of apprehension rivals any single vicious note plucked upon it, those brief vibrations absorbed by a further tightening of the strings. The soldier was used to telling people what to do, and I was clearly waiting to be told. In truth nothing felt that different from before.

*   *   *

Earlier, on the boardwalk, I had moved to leave the scene gathering around the frozen young man but found myself taking a seat on a nearby bench. The crowd was swelling with each passerby, until real commotion encircled his silence. No one tried to move him; everyone just wanted to talk. A wide-set, older woman in a thick wool coat dropped back from the soldiers and the scrum. She sat down beside me and let spill a few tears. One woman and then another stopped to console her, so that a satellite crowd soon amassed to mirror the larger one across the way. We looked on together, waiting for some kind of outcome, some progress. Every few minutes a commuter plane swung in low over the water, making its way into the city.

 

War and Well-Being, 21° 19'N., 157° 52'W.

I am wonderfully and fearfully made,

and such knowledge is too excellent for me.

—Psalm of David 139:14, 6

We are sick! We are sick!

We are sick, sick, sick!

Like we're sociologically sick!

—“Gee, Officer Krupke,”
West Side Story

1

The top reasons for visiting Hawaii have been broken down by its Department of Business, Economic Development, and Tourism in this order: Honeymoon; To Get Married; Pleasure/Vacation; Convention/Conference; Corporate Meeting; Incentive Trip; Other Business; Visiting Friends or Relatives; Government or Military Business; To Attend School; Sports Event; and Other, which leaves a one-inch line for elaboration. I handed back the form that all incoming island visitors are asked to fill out blank but aware of my first sensation of the place: it did not seem unusual that someone with a long history of near-complete lack of interest in Hawaii was on the brink of availing herself of more or less its full spectrum of attractions.

Visiting the fiftieth state a mere eight years into one's American education feels a little like skipping to the end of a story with only the wispiest grasp of the plot. Or at least it felt that way touching down in Honolulu, which is farther from my current home in New York City than any point in my native Canada. And yet, as I was careful to confirm, despite traveling five thousand miles west, the sudden ubiquity of sarongs, and a wicked case of jet lag, I had not committed the cellular sin of “roaming.” Whatever the future of territorial boundaries might be, one of the best ways for an American (or even a resident alien) to recover a sense of them at the beginning of the twenty-first century is to enjoy the outer limits of her satellite privileges. Welcome to paradise.

A couple of weeks before my flight to Honolulu, where I had traveled to attend the annual conference of the American Psychiatric Association, President Obama had crossed the East Room of the White House, looked into a camera, and announced that Osama bin Laden had been killed during a Navy SEAL raid on his compound in Pakistan. The news satisfied the craving for a clear victory that has only seemed to intensify in recent years. Positive military PR bursts have been especially scarce throughout the Iraq and Afghan wars, despite the efforts of a team devoted to generating them. Those efforts have not gone unnoticed by the APA, an embattled body about which more in a moment, though for now it may give you a sense of their predicament to learn that they recently recruited a public relations guru away from his perch at the Department of Defense.

Among the first such efforts was the military's assurance that DNA technology would be a part of these new campaigns, meaning every casualty would be properly identified and accounted for—no American left behind. In a parallel effort, national cemeteries were being combed for unmarked graves and remains exhumed for testing. Among the first of these was one of the four famously unknown men laid to rest in the most visited tomb in Virginia's Arlington National Cemetery.

The tradition that came to define the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier began in 1921, when a World War I veteran was flown to France to select an unknown from unknowns. The ceremony was initiated by the British several years earlier. Faced with four identical caskets taken from different French cemeteries, after a few moments' consideration the veteran signaled his choice with the placement of a bouquet of white roses. The selected casket was shipped to Arlington, and on Veterans Day of that year the monument housing the body was unveiled to the public. In 1956 the process was repeated: several unidentified bodies from World War II and the Korean War were exhumed from cemeteries around the world, and a veteran of each war was asked to select, according to an intuition known only to him, the body that would be placed in the Arlington tomb.