Baghdad without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia

by Tony Horwitz

  In what passes for “quiet” times in Beirut, the ferry carries six hundred or more passengers to Lebanon on each daily trip. These days, most of the traffic was going the other way; there were fifty people headed to Beirut and nine hundred booked to come out. Fifteen thousand Christians had already fled the shelling, and Larnaca’s cafés were crowded with Lebanese waiting for things to “cool down.”

  “You know, ‘cool down,’ like a nuclear reactor—from radioactive to just boiling hot,” said the man behind me in the passport line. “These Lebanese are crazy fuckers.”

  The man extended a sweaty palm and said, “I’m Khatchig Ohannessian.” Then he lowered his voice, as if making contact with the one other sane inmate in a madhouse. “I’m American like you, not Lebanese.”

  Ohannessian was a Beirut-born shopkeeper who had lived in Detroit for thirteen years. He was returning now to sell off two buildings his family still owned in Lebanon. He didn’t plan to stick around long. “I’ll bribe a few people to get the paperwork done, then get the first boat out,” he said, showing me the single small bag he carried as luggage. “This isn’t exactly a holiday weekend.”

  At the start of the civil war, a man had offered Ohannessian’s family $750,000 for the property. Now he thought they’d be lucky to get a third that sum. “But if I wait any longer,” he said, “there won’t be anything left to sell except bricks and scrap metal.”

  Most of the other passengers were Beirutis working abroad, headed home now to evacuate their families. Unable to phone Lebanon, the men were desperate for news. My short-wave radio, propped on the ferry’s open deck, quickly made me the most popular passenger on board.

  “Do you mind?” asked a young man named Marwan, picking up the radio as soon as the BBC broadcast finished.

  “Please. Go ahead.”

  He twiddled the dial and picked up, in rapid succession, French Radio, Greek Radio and the Arabic service of Voice of Israel. Then Marwan tuned in Voice of Lebanon, which was judged least reliable of the news services. “It belongs to only one faction, so you get just a piece of the story,” he explained. In divided Lebanon, even information was balkanized.

  From what I could gather, it was a quiet day in Beirut. “Just sporadic shelling,” Marwan said. When the news broadcasts resumed half an hour later, the prognosis changed, like an update in the weather forecast. Sporadic shelling, becoming heavy at times. An hour out of Larnaca, it was raining cats and dogs and ten Lebanese were already dead.

  Marwan hit off the radio and lay flat on the deck, unbuttoning his shirt. “I might as well do some tanning now, because I won’t get any sun in the bomb shelter,” he said.

  I lay beside him and we chatted as the ferry steamed out across the azure Mediterranean. Marwan was twenty-four and had been studying architectural engineering in West Germany for two years. “Architecture and engineering—these are two things Lebanon will need a great deal if the war ever ends,” he said. This was to be his spring break from school. “Sun and sea for eight hours—then shelling for ten days.”

  Marwan, like many of the others on board, seemed more European than Middle Eastern. Blue-eyed, with mouse-colored hair, he wore designer jeans and hand-tooled leather boots. He shifted easily from Arabic to French when talking with his fellow passengers, occasionally tossing in a word or two of English. The only Arab thing about him was the string of coral worry beads that he clacked together during the radio reports from Beirut.

  “You must understand,” he said, “we are Christian Lebanese. Except for the language, I feel nothing in common with Arabs.” He closed his eyes, massaging the worry beads. “Of course, some of my best friends are Muslims.”

  Lebanese I’d met elsewhere in the Middle East were always saying this sort of thing. Beirut, it is a beautiful city—except for the shell craters and shattered buildings. Muslims and Christians and Druze, we can live together in peace—except that we’ve been killing each other for centuries.

  Still, it was hard to resist the Lebanese. There was a lingering whiff of the ancient Phoenicians about them: adventurous and enterprising, mixing easily with East and West. On the plane from Cairo to Cyprus, the woman sitting beside me had introduced herself as Jacqueline Tufenkjiam Davies. I was struck by her name and asked what country she came from.

  “Lebanon,” she said, then added with a laugh, “which means I’m from all over the place.” The child of Armenian traders, she was born in Iran, schooled in Syria and married to an Englishman in Lebanon. She spoke Armenian, Arabic, Farsi, French, English, Greek and German. And she was trying to move back to West Beirut, which she’d fled when Muslim gunmen occupied her house while she was away on vacation.

  “Beirut is the only place I feel at home,” she said. “Every other city seems, you know, so parochial.”

  The ferry I was riding was Beirut in miniature, a cosmopolitan stew with at least one person thrown in from every corner of the Lebanese diaspora. Even the boat, a hundred-yard-long cruiser called the Baroness M, was a mutt of Mediterranean extraction. It was Greek-owned, Cypriot-flagged and Lebanese-run. And it looked more like a chartered pleasure craft than a ship sailing grimly across the Styx. The wide deck had canvas chairs and a “tropical shower” for sunbathers to cool off in under the hot sun. In the cabin below, there was a bandstand, a well-stocked bar and a casino with one-armed bandits, roulette wheels and blackjack tables bolted to the floor so passengers could gamble on stormy nights. Appropriately, the Greek captain’s name was Dionysos.

  Escaping the sun, I settled in at the bar beside a muscular man in blue jeans and a tight white T-shirt. He was named Imad. “Usually, it is like Love Boat,” he said of the ferry ride. “All singing, all dancing, all gambling. Lebanese, they know how to have good times.”

  Imad looked like a bouncer, which wasn’t far off the mark. He worked as a security officer for the Lebanese Forces, a Christian militia that controlled the port at Jounieh, just north of the city. Beirut was carved up, gangland-style, among competing Christian, Muslim and Druze militia, and the ports represented the most lucrative turf. “Guns, drugs, stolen cars—all such things must travel by sea,” Imad said, calmly listing the pillars of the Lebanese economy. He smiled and drained his beer. “The Lebanese, they know how to make good moneys.”

  The Lebanese Forces also skimmed profits from gambling, and the casino opened as soon as the ferry pulled out of Larnaca. I found the casino manager sipping beer behind a wall of chips at the roulette table. He bet half on black and half on the number 13.

  “It is my lucky number,” he explained. “On March thirteenth, shells hit every building in the neighborhood except mine.” The wheel spun and the small metal ball stopped at 00. He shrugged and bought another hundred dollars’ worth of chips. “If you may die tomorrow, why not live it up now?”

  Actually, the violence in Beirut wasn’t great for business. Usually the boat departed Cyprus after dark and passengers partied until dawn. But because of the shelling, the ferry now left in the morning so that passengers could shuttle ashore under cover of darkness. “Everyone thinks too much about what waits for them at the other end,” the manager said. He was the only gambler. He gave me three free goes at the slot machine in the hope that clanging tokens would lure a few more customers into the casino. No one came. “Business will be better on the boat ride out,” he said.

  * * *

  I wandered back on deck in time for the midday news broadcast. It was more of the same. “The Arab League has called for a cease-fire,” Marwan translated, clacking his worry beads. “The Syrians have launched more bombs.” One shell had hit a power station, knocking out what little was left of Beirut’s electricity supply. There hadn’t been water for days.

  “We are returning to the Stone Age,” said a man named Hani, who was heading home to Beirut after several days’ respite in Cyprus. He drew a crumpled photograph from his wallet and passed it around, the way a proud father might display baby pictures
. The snapshot showed the charred remains of Hani’s Mercedes, with its windows and doors blown out. A shell had hit the car only moments after Hani climbed from the driver’s seat. “I am replacing it,” he said, “with a tank.”

  The others laughed. Hani’s photo was a cue for black-humored one-upmanship. One man boasted that he’d survived the civil war by always renting the third floor of tall apartment blocks. In his first residence, a car bomb had taken out the lower few floors, and in his second, an incoming missile had wiped out the floors above. He’d just moved into a new place and taken the third floor again. “It is always best to be in the middle,” he said. “That way your neighbors are like armor.”

  Another man told of visiting a neighbor’s house and retreating into the basement when shelling suddenly broke out. After three hours underground, a full bladder finally forced the neighbor upstairs. “He was redoing the cellar and didn’t want to pee all over the floor,” the man explained. A moment later, a shell hit the house and killed the neighbor in his bathroom. “He didn’t even get a last good piss,” the man said, shaking his head with a macabre chuckle.

  Listening to the stories, I couldn’t understand why these urbane, well-traveled men were headed back for more. Couldn’t they settle in Cyprus or Paris or New York?

  The man who had been blasted out of two apartments shook his head. “Home is home,” he said, “even if it is nothing but sticks and stones.”

  Marwan nodded, adding, “There will be a cease-fire soon. You will see.” I thought of the sweaty-palmed shopkeeper from Detroit; crazy fuckers, these Lebanese.

  Later in the day, we gathered again to listen to the radio and to hear a story that evoked no laughter. One of the men had just met his neighbor at the bar. The neighbor was returning from Kuwait to evacuate his wife and two kids. The man had to tell him that all three had been killed by a shell that hit their street two days before. “I didn’t have the heart,” the man said, “to tell him that there was not very much left to bury.”

  Ten miles off Beirut, the captain pulled up to wait until dark. I went back to the deck and stood against the rail with Marwan, gazing out at Lebanon. At sunset, the mountains rushing down to meet the sea looked peaceful, a bit like the Côte d’Azur. In more tranquil times—1835—an American missionary named W. M. Thomas wrote of the same approach: “As our steamer came bravely into harbour at early dawn, the scenery was beautiful, and even sublime . . . . You will travel far ere you find a prospect of equal variety, beauty, and magnificence.”

  As dusk became dark, a few faint thuds resounded from the hills, illuminating the sky with brief bursts of flame, like matches being struck in the distance. Then the thuds became a constant drone and the sky exploded in color. From ten miles out, the shelling had the benign beauty of a fireworks display; I found myself sighing as each rocket and shell streaked through the night. Look at the oranges! The pinks! The display was carefully choreographed, dancing from right to left to right again, with the occasional light flaring straight out across the water and fizzling into the sea a few miles from where we stood.

  Marwan leaned across the rail and described the scene with the eerie expertise bred of an adolescence under fire. The thuds from the left were Christian guns. The rapid-fire bursts on the right were the multibarreled rocket launchers of Shiite gunmen in West Beirut. The shells falling in the water were Syrian mortars, positioned on the hills above the city and aimed at us. “It is just a reminder that they know we are here,” he said.

  The shelling subsided and the captain ordered everyone into the cabin. He was blacking out the ship and shifting position so the Muslim gunners couldn’t follow the small boats’ path as they wound out from shore to meet us. Below, the casino was still empty but a three-piece band played loudly and the passengers sang along, swigging beer and whiskey. I asked Marwan to translate the lyrics. “‘Fill me up, Lebanon,’ this sort of thing,” he said, slapping his thighs with the rhythm. A couple got up and gyrated between the tables, shaking their hips and pointing fingers in the air in a lewd parody of Arab dancing. The man was too drunk and quickly slumped back in his seat. But the woman climbed onto the stage, hiked up her blouse and undulated her bare, ample belly. The audience hooted and splashed down more beer. This wasn’t how I’d imagined things would be a few miles off the coast of Lebanon.

  At midnight we crept back up on the deck. A full moon perched just above the mountains, casting a brilliant beam across the water. Even so, we didn’t spot the first boats, their engines muffled and lights extinguished, until they pulled alongside the ferry. The lead craft was a Lebanese Forces gunboat, and just behind trailed two wooden fishing trawlers. All three were crammed to the gunwales, mostly with women and children. We climbed down into the belly of the ferry to watch them come aboard. The first to appear was a young woman. She took two steps and fainted, from relief or exhaustion, it was hard to tell which. The others looked just as bedraggled. Most had been waiting at the dock in Jounieh for three days, with no cover from incoming shells. There were hundreds more still huddled in Jounieh, hoping to shuttle out.

  The passengers from Cyprus lined up to board the boat for the ride to shore. “You see how brave the Lebanese are,” Marwan said. He was grinding his worry beads. The man beside him lit a Marlboro with the butt of one he’d just finished. I spotted the Detroit shopkeeper near the front, jaw clenched, bag held tightly to his chest. His un-holiday weekend was about to begin in earnest.

  Marwan took out a scrap of paper and scribbled his address. “If ever you are in Lebanon,” he said, “my home is your home.” He laughed. “And my bomb shelter is your bomb shelter.” It was one of those uncomfortable journalistic moments I had experienced many times before. After fourteen hours together, we’d become buddies. Now, having milked Marwan for all the quotes I needed, I was headed back to safety and he was headed into hell.

  As we neared the front of the line, he grasped my forearm and asked, “Why not you ride into shore with us and then ride back out? It would be good for you just to touch the soil of my country.”

  It would also be good for my story. If I went in, I could get a much better view of the evacuation—and I could justify a Beirut dateline. Marwan’s grip gave me a sudden jolt of peer pressure as well. I felt as I once had as a fourteen-year-old, poised on a lakeside cliff with everyone else jumping in.

  We reached the front of the line. Militiamen reached out and half-dragged the last passengers onto the bobbing gunboat. In a moment they’d disappear. I called to the captain and asked him how the ride from shore had gone.

  “Fine,” he said. “The sea is calm tonight.”

  “No. I mean the shelling.”

  He shrugged. “We are here, no?”

  Marwan leaped onto the bow of the gunboat. A militiaman unlashed the rope and engines kicked into gear. Marwan reached out his hand. I took it and hopped on board as the gunboat pulled away from the ferry.

  Fifty or so people had already crammed into the gunboat’s small cabin. We crouched with four other men in the only available space, the narrow bow just in front of the captain’s bridge. The boat was so overloaded that we barely seemed to move.

  “Moo, moo,” went the passenger beside me. He was a middle-aged man named Ali who wore a University of Texas sweatshirt. “In Texas I learned all about cattle,” he said, laughing and mooing again. I was wedged tight between Marwan and Ali and buffered from the night wind. The sky was completely black, the sea air soothing. These people lived with danger and knew its contours. If they were unafraid, why shouldn’t I be as well? After twenty minutes or so I drifted into a shallow sleep.

  The next thing I knew, Marwan was counting aloud and pointing at geysers shooting up from the sea. “One, two, three, four . . .” Whoosh. “One, two, three, four . . .” Whoooooosh. The first shell landed a hundred yards off; the second only fifty. Somewhere in the night a Syrian gunner was shifting his sights, just so. He unleashed another round. “One, two, thr
ee, four . . .”

  Marwan threw me flat against the deck. Facedown, I couldn’t see where the shell came in, but it was close enough to tumble the boat in its wake. Inside the cabin, children began screaming. Marwan clutched his belly. “Never you get used to the bombs,” he moaned.

  The guns thudded again in the distance. This time we counted in unison. “One, two, three, four . . .” The shell splashed into the water somewhere just to the left, and a fine sea spray sprinkled the back of my neck.

  The six of us now lay in an untidy heap on the bow, as if scrambling for a fumble. There was a loud clacking sound, which I took to be Marwan’s worry beads. Then I realized it was my teeth.

  “I’m freezing cold,” I muttered, barely able to get the words out between chattering molars.

  “Bullshit,” whispered Ali. His University of Texas shirt was drenched with sweat. “You’re scared shitless.”

  Marwan laughed. I laughed. My teeth went clack-clack-clack. My arms and legs jerked wildly. I felt like a ventriloquist’s dummy. “Where else in the world,” Marwan said, “do you get a welcoming committee like this?”

  We laughed again. The cannons boomed, twice in succession. We groaned and huddled closer together. The first shell splashed to the right and we skittered on all fours, crablike, to the left, almost hanging into the water. The captain banged the windshield of the bridge, motioning us back to the center; the weight shift evidently made it difficult for him to steer. He looked little more distressed than when he’d told me back at the ferry that “the sea is very calm tonight.”

  Whooooosh. The second shell plunged into the sea just ahead of us, and the pilot swung the wheel. My arms and legs flapped in near-convulsions. Can fear bring on an epileptic fit?

  The guns thudded. On the fifth beat, water splashed fifty yards off. The guns thudded and the next shell landed a hundred yards off. A moment later, the plumes of water were too far away to be visible in the dim four-in-the-morning moonlight.