The Wet and the Dry

by Lawrence Osborne

  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.

  “Yes,” he said fondly. “How glamorous Communism seemed in those days. How inevitable.”

  “Did Khrushchev,” I asked, “send any rare vodka over?”

  “I can’t recall. He may have.”

  I walked out into the gardens and looked at the tombs with their stone garlands and putti and I saw the snowlines of the Shuf through the cypresses. I was still vibrating from the wine and the arak, and I could not hold my senses still. The landscape seen through arak, I thought. Luminous and reposed and near. Distilled, you might say. Clarified and intensified to the point of serene madness.

  The Ally Pally

  In Abu Dhabi, I awoke late in the afternoon in the Fairmont Bab al Bahr. I was in the same clothes that I had been wearing for weeks in Beirut, and with a headache so severe that I had to lie there for some time and try to remember where I had been the night before. It is curious to wake up fully clothed, and my clothes were wet. I was in a suit with cufflinks attached, a tie askew, slip-ons with no socks. I was dressed, in other words, for a late-night party of moderate but not quite serious elegance. There was a bowl of fruit by the bed with a banana and a star anise and, next to them, a tray of handmade chocolates. Nothing had been touched.

  I sat in my room on the eighth floor of the Bab al Bahr as the sun was declining. A thin moon had appeared over the waterway that separated the hotel’s artificial beach from the cranes and silos on the far side. There, in a fluctuating light, stood the world’s eighth-biggest mosque, eighty-two Mogul-inspired Bianco marble domes clustered together and framed by virtually every window in the largely glass-covered Fairmont. The Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque can accommodate forty thousand worshippers and houses the world’s largest carpet as well as the world’s largest Swarovski chandelier. Being the Emirates, this quality of being the largest and tallest and grandest is important.

  One is supposed to know these things and to app
ly them in one’s mind to the buildings themselves as one looks at them. Even from the futuristic lobby of the Fairmont, where the architecture is opulently immanent, the metal and glass columns changing color every few seconds, the boldness of the mosque was arresting as it was seen through the back windows. The piety of the Emirates’ capital is often underrated. Even in that lobby, surrounded by partying princes and Western girls in Pucci skirts, the fact that I was no longer in a city of wine and sea was obvious. The desert and its faith had replaced it.

  The Fairmont bar was called Chameleon. Two guys shook the mixers like Mexican rattles, and by midnight le tout Abu Dhabi was at its counter shouting for things mostly made with vodka and various fruit juices. The drinking was intense, and it was an Arab crowd, if not necessarily an Emirati one. The bar glittered with Absolut and Grey Goose and Bong and Cape North and Stoli elit.

  The most humbling thing about drinking is the instantaneous erosion of recent memory. As the mind reassembles itself after a poisoning, it is full of questions, but it finds no answers. The hangover burned on. I couldn’t remember how I had ended up.

  I gazed down at an artificial beach, at a long pool surrounded by sun beds and dark blue towels. I had been at the opening of this very bar the night before, but I had been carried home by the staff—carried or hustled or encouraged, I couldn’t say—and laid to rest in my executive suite bed like a pensioner who has collapsed at a bus stop. A hangover is, moreover, a complex thing. It is slow, meditative; it inclines us to introspection and clarity. The aftereffect of a mild envenoming is cleansing mentally. It enables one to seize one’s mind anew, to build it up again and regain some kind of eccentric courage.

  When I was a child, I remember being puzzled by the hangovers of adults, which I had many opportunities to observe close up. My parents staggered about silently, holding on to things to steady themselves, and their speech was unusually gentle. They seemed ghostlike in this state, and I preferred them that way. They had slowed down, and it made them seem like robots, or at least they reminded me that the human body is a machine after all and that it can be impaired easily.

  Watching them, I could not help but be aware that if this was the effect of their drug of choice, this same drug could well end up being mine. Furthermore, it was curious that in a middle-class England that preached so much about the virtues of being sober, and therefore industrious, the adults who sustained this culture and bore such responsibility for it should spend so much time lumbering about completely stoned.

  The telephone rang by the bath later that night. I was almost asleep, dreaming sadly about these matters, as we all do when the house of our parents has been destroyed and scattered to the winds, and I had trouble making words connect. It was long distance, which inevitably meant America. Chirpy tones, anxiety, and somebody wanting something.

  “Hi, it’s Jen from the Faster Beast! Are you having breakfast? I wanted to catch you—”

  “Before I got up?”

  “If only. By the way, you are up early. That’s not like you. How’s the sun?”

  “Shining.”

  “They told me there’s a really cool view of the mosque. It’s an awesome hotel, isn’t it? Did you go to the opening of Chameleon last night? It would be great if you could file it by tonight your time. Or even this afternoon. Or even earlier.”

  “Why not right now?”

  “Could you? The editor wants to know what new cocktail trends are making waves in the Arab world. You know, cool bartenders, exciting new trends—ah—new formulas for the Arab Revolution, and that sort of thing. Like, where are the kids going for their sundowners after they’ve been protesting all day?”

  “Liz, I have to go. There’s a large lizard in my bath.”

  “Jen. It’s Jen.”

  “I’ll file tonight, Jen. Thanks for getting me on the executive floor, by the way.”

  “Oh, no problem.”

  The irritation in the distant voice could hardly control itself.

  “So what did you drink?” she asked testily.

  “A thing called the Arabian Night.”

  “Cool. Was it a girl drink? Was it postgender?”

  “It was vermouth, Worcestershire sauce, vodka, sugar, crab-apple juice, lime, Angostura bitters, seltzer water, lemonade, champagne, a twist of grapefruit, and Coke.”

  “Oh.”

  “I drank it with the sundown. It made me violent.”

  “Did you go to a protest?”

  I went downstairs at noon and sat in the buffet restaurant on the ground floor, which is quite an Abu Dhabi social scene. It is one of those buffets learned from the great hotels of the East. Multiethnic, sophisticated, generous in scope and quality. A manifestation of the new middle-class culture that girdles the world and that enjoys its lunches with little reference to any specific Western origin. The women were veiled but wore mall jewelry of the highest order. Their hands were heavily tattooed in the desert way, but the shoes were Forzieri. The men sat together in groups outside, their children darting among them, in an ambience of wealth and relaxation. A self-conscious participation in modern family hedonism.

  The cuisines of the buffet were Gulf Arab, Lebanese, Japanese, Egyptian, Italian, and Indian, with a few dabs of English—baked beans and link sausages and squares of fat-drenched toast. There were counters of tropical fruits; juice bars that liquefied kiwis and mangoes on the spot. Dessert isles with dozens of handmade mousse fondants and îles flottantes and strawberry kulfi. One could discreetly order a glass of wine, but as one did so, there would be a subtle inspection by the server, an instantaneous assessment of one’s background religion.

  If you were Muslim, you would be declined, I imagine. If you were Jewish, you would be thrown out, and if you were Christian, you would be allowed a drink. I am not saying this is the hotel’s policy, of course. Tall green cocktails indeed made the rounds, but what was in them? In any case, I ordered a Diet Coke to mix up my gourmet fuul and behind my sunglasses tried to eat and Coke my way out of the lingering brain fog, as I call my hangovers. The mists within began to part. I got up, finally, and walked through the glass doors out into the suffocating sunshine, my balance only slightly akilter, my ears ringing. I walked past the pool, where the chubby white girls lay sweating in oil like things slowly simmering in pan fat.

  There were two breakwaters of piled stones and an artificial beach between them, and across the water the cranes shone in a pall of dust. I stood on a breakwater and watched the Coast Guard launches trawl by. The day was already way past ninety degrees, and the sky was beginning to haze. All the controlled, anal emptiness of Abu Dhabi was concentrated in this single view dominated by the world’s biggest mosque. I had suddenly forgotten, in some sense, who I was as I waved to the Coast Guard, and why I was. I should have remembered, but someone remembered for me, because as I dropped onto the beach and walked along it, a man from the deck chairs rose, dusted himself down, and came toward me. He raised his hand, called “John!” in an English voice, and came down onto the sand. He was, oddly, dressed for a business meeting, though he had been sunning himself by the pool with a jungle hat. I stopped. He came plodding down, saying “Oi, John!”

  He was unknown, but he seemed to know me. In that light we both looked like ghosts, almost transparent, and I knew at once what was up; I had met this loser in the bar last night and had no recollection of him, but he had easily recognized me. John, that was me. I must have called myself “John” all evening. But who was John?

  “Oi, John, I knew it was you. I see you’re up and about.”

  “I’m sorry—”

  “James. From the bar.”

  “Yeah, James.”

  “John, good to see you. I thought you were dead.”

  Laughter.

  “No, just out cold for the morning.”

  “My wife said you should have been dead. Eleven mai tais. Blimey. We both thought you was dead.”

  “Was it eleven?”

  “More than that, cock. Yo
u’re a right fish.”

  “Am I?”

  “Dead right you are, mate. You passed out.”

  “I did? Where?”

  “In the pool. Don’t you remember passing out in the pool?”

  A playful arm-punch and a wink. The hideous dyed hair glistened in the sun, and the oyster eyes contracted.

  “Wait,” I said. “I don’t remember anything about a pool.”

  “Come on, mate. You remember the pool. That was the funniest thing I saw all year.”

  I was now sweating copiously, and we were walking.

  “The pool? What did I do in the pool?”

  “You don’t remember doing the jackknife?”

  “The jackknife?”

  “Yeah, you did a jackknife into the pool. The missus said it was the funniest thing she’s seen all year.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, mate. You’re kidding. We all pissed ourselves.”

  Who are you? I wanted to ask.

  “So I did a jackknife?” I said.

  “Yeah, it was a good one. You didn’t come up for five minutes.”

  Underwater, then. A memory of drowning bubbles, panic, and now it was coming back in little pieces. The wobbling diving plank, the sudden elevation toward the stars.

  “Yeah,” I muttered. “I always do a jackknife on rum.”

  “I believe it.”

  He seemed very pleased with me.

  “Are you coming to the Ally Pally tonight?” he asked. “All the lads will be there. After your jackknife, I would say you have honorary admission to the Ally Pally.”

  “What is the Ally Pally?”