This Is Running for Your Life

by Michelle Orange

  Instead I began that Saturday the way I would the next several mornings: calling a tour company to see if they had attracted the single other customer needed to merit their running a day trip into the countryside. I was still the only taker. A few floors up, in the hotel’s hushed dining bay overlooking the sea, the continental breakfast spread had been reduced to coffee, a few squares of poreless bread, and a fruit salad spotted with black olives. I plucked one up with a pair of small, serrated tongs, then dropped it through a salutary puff of fruit flies.

  I decided to walk over to Gouraud Street and sip away a few hours in Le Rouge Café. It was the weekend rush; chattering couples and families filled every table of the small front room. A bar at the back opens onto a galley kitchen, and English literary quotes are stenciled onto the walls in various fonts and sizes. From Günter Grass: The job of the citizen is to keep his mouth open. Oh really, Günter?

  I was close enough to the three old-timers beside me, merry chain-smokers who received staff members throughout the meal with copious kisses and handshakes, to feel a part of their fun. In fact I sat through an entire service without catching my waiter’s eye. After a further half hour spent wondering if I had managed to offend, something about the polite sweep of his gaze across the empty chair opposite me every time he passed suggested it had not occurred to him that I would be dining alone. When I told him just that, he popped up straight with a mortified look, quickly slipping me a second Diet Pepsi as consolation.

  This is where the Parisian influence ends: one does not eat alone in Beirut. It’s seen as a rather sad, confusing thing to do. To be alone signals misfortune or just misjudgment—in any case a kind of defeat. I had asked Felicia if Beirut had any movie theaters, and she told me they were all on hiatus; people were too afraid to go out at night. But today the mood is almost jubilant, defiantly so. When the restaurant falls to darkness and the kitchen’s whirring cuts out with a kind of needle drop, the waiters don’t break their step and no head turns. Eventually the owner, a hale and gracious gentleman named Hamil, stopped by my table to wonder if I had any quotes to add to the wall. I had been pretending to write in my notebook to keep from collecting looks from my fellow diners that could as easily have passed between us at the funeral of my firstborn son. I couldn’t think of a quote for Hamil, or at least I didn’t tell him what came to mind: Oh really, Günter?

  * * *

  After lunch I walked south into Ras El Nabaa, where I had Lebanon’s National Museum to myself on a Saturday afternoon. One guard was on duty, and we played a lethargic game of cat and mouse as I lingered over two floors of mosaics, Bronze Age baubles, and Roman sarcophagi. Every thirty feet or so I heard the jingle of the guard’s keys a respectful distance behind, as he rose to limp toward an adjacent corner and continue his surveillance. This kind of thing would usually make me laugh, but it was one of those days when I can’t understand how anyone makes it down the street with all of the shit they have inside them. So it just made me want to cry.

  * * *

  We were leaving Beirut, circling into the valley beneath the nasty gap in the middle of the Mdairej Bridge. “We’re about to get a terrific view of what accurate munitions can do,” said the Irishman sitting directly in front of me. From the low angle of our detour, the damage to the Middle East’s tallest bridge was even more spectacular. The Palestinian woman beside me began taking pictures, centering the long blank space in her digital monitor. The Israelis had bombed the bridge in 2006, taking out a two-hundred-foot support beam and crippling Beirut’s supply traffic.

  After a week of early-morning calls, there had finally been enough people for a trip to Anjar and Baalbek to go forward, and so four of us were in the back of a minivan: Peter, the Irishman, and his wife, Margaret; Nisrine, the Palestinian; and me—along with our Lebanese guide, Raaida, and Bilalo, who was huge, bashful, and drove like the blazes.

  Nisrine had not been to Lebanon since she was three years old. She felt the odds that her sponsor—the producers of a documentary she was working on—would secure a visa were almost nil, so the trip was sudden and a considerable surprise. Now she was cramming her schedule with sights like Godard’s bande à part racing through the Louvre. The Irish couple had toured Damascus the previous day and enjoyed the city very much. “Maybe I could borrow your passport,” Nisrine said, with what would become her trademark, edgy deadpan, “and see it for myself.” Over fortysome years she had traveled the world, but never entered the countries bordering her own. Nisrine seemed surprised and a little pained by the green of the mountain vegetation bordering the Bekáa Valley; she had almost forgotten how Palestine used to look. When we hit a patch of scrubby, desert bush she muttered about this being more like it. Earlier she had turned to me, by way of introduction, and asked if I was interested in seeing the Jeita caves with her the next day. “If there are two people,” she said, eyebrows all but waggling, “they have to take us.” I liked Nisrine immediately. I would go; I wouldn’t let her down. She kept asking throughout the day, just to be sure.

  Raaida was wide-mouthed and willowy. Wrapped in sunglasses and two wool sweaters, she chatted about our itinerary while the rest of us exchanged dippy comments about the weather, the food, the countries of our birth. Late into his sixties and all but retired, Peter was in Beirut consulting. He had spent a career as an electrical engineer building power plants around the world; his accent seemed diluted by equal parts travel and time. “You’ve come to fix our power!” Raaida exclaimed, twisting in her front seat to face us. Peter chuckled. “God himself couldn’t fix the power here.”

  President Bush was in the region, but he wasn’t coming to Lebanon. He had been photographed goofing off with Saudi sheikhs and exchanging backslaps with Israeli emissaries. These images, Nisrine said, confirmed Bush’s unseriousness about the Palestinian cause. President Clinton—now he almost got there. There might be peace today, she said, had it not been for that chubby tramp and her big, red lips. Here Margaret chimed in from behind her massive sunglasses for the first time that morning. It was unclear if her approving murmur was meant to affirm the tragic subversion of the Clinton administration’s agenda for peace in the Middle East or the notorious sluttery of young American women.

  Less than fifteen kilometers from the Syrian border in the east of Lebanon, Baalbek is the birthplace of Hezbollah. The first members began training there in 1979, and today it is considered the group’s strategic headquarters. The ruins at Baalbek are devastating. The site encompasses the largest Roman temples ever built and evidence of a settlement dating back to the Bronze Age. Excavation in the area—like all excavation in the archaeologically larded Lebanese countryside—halted with the civil war and has not resumed. Tourism, once a lifeblood industry, is increasingly untenable. There were no guards, no barriers, and no other visitors. We drifted through the heady sprawl of this minicivilization, picking and wobbling and jumping back at the treacherous drop that divides the temples of Jupiter and Bacchus. The noon call to prayer began to sound throughout not just the city but the valley, the loudest and most plaintive I had heard. It wended through the towering pillars below, in no rush to reach our ears.

  On the way back to the van we were beset by four or five grizzled, older men hawking gum, scarves, and green-and-yellow Party of God commemorative gear. They tugged at our elbows and shook Chiclets under our noses, surrounding us in an impressive formation. When it became clear that they were going to follow us the several blocks back to the van, a mixture of embarrassment and a more complicated tension overtook the group.

  “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 America
ns 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.

&
nbsp; 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.