Cobra in the Bath

by Miles Morland

  Even the Beirut stock market had come out from the hiding it had been in during the dark years, and was starting to function again, albeit on a small scale. I also knew the Lebanese were among the most resourceful and entrepreneurial people on earth. It would not be long before they were dancing till dawn once more. I decided to go and find out what was happening before everyone else did. Maybe Blakeney Management should be investing there before everyone else discovered it.

  My first inkling that things might not be quite back to normal was at the airport. While waiting in a ramshackle shed for our baggage, people actually talked to each other. ‘What brings you to Beirut?’ ‘Oh, just checking it out.’ ‘Well, you’ll find things are different now. Eighteen months ago it was bad. Even the airport didn’t work.’

  Outside the airport all was midnight dark. I had failed to arrange for a car to pick me up as I assumed it would be easy to grab a cab. There were four beaten-up cars on the taxi rank. A villainous man with a Saddam moustache grabbed my bag and pushed me into the one at the end of the queue. ‘What your name?’ ‘Er, Morland. Bristol Hotel, please.’ Nod of apparent understanding. Why does he want to know my name? I asked myself as the door was slammed and locked from the outside and we drove off into the darkness.

  We clunked down the unlit and potholed road. There were no street lights, no traffic lights. The road appeared to be half of what had once been the airport motorway. After about two miles the driver braked violently, U-turned and accelerated into a maze of narrow streets. All dark. There were chinks of light from behind steel garage doors. The car slowed, accelerated, turned into an even smaller street, and all I could think of was the three Beirut hostages who had recently been released. I wondered as we bumped down another dark potholed street if I would be as stoical as they had been after three years chained to a radiator.

  I did not know my way around Beirut but was sure that the airport lay to the south of the city, which meant that we must be driving in through south Beirut, the most impoverished part and the heartland of Hezbollah. The taxi slowed. The driver was looking hard in the darkness for an address. To me the houses looked identical, pockmarked, steel-shuttered, unlit. Oh, God. I could see no happy outcome to this. Should I open the door – we were moving at no more than 15 mph – throw myself into the street and make a run for it? But where to? I would be easily caught. And hadn’t he locked the door? Should I try and cosh the driver with my Psion Organiser? And then what?

  The car stopped. The driver looked round at me as if sizing me up. He muttered something guttural in Arabic and stepped out. I tried my door. Yes, it was locked. The time must have been 1.30 a.m. The street was utterly dark and deserted. The driver went up to one steel-shuttered door, which had a crack of light showing around it. He banged on the shutter. After about a minute and another bang the door was opened a crack. Inside was another Saddam-moustached figure. The two had a hurried conference. The driver had his back to me but I saw him accept an object from the other man although I could not see what it was. There was some movement. It looked as if the driver was counting out money and handing it to the man. There was a hurried conversation; the steel door clanged shut again, and the driver slid the object inside his jacket.

  I was looking at myself with a sense of detachment and curiosity now. The driver had obviously picked up a gun and I was about to be taken into captivity. How was I going to behave? Was I going to be brave? Resourceful? Resigned? The last seemed most likely.

  The driver opened his door and slid into the front seat. He spat out of the window, reached inside his jacket where he had concealed the gun and turned to face me.

  ‘Mister?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said in as manly a voice as I could muster.

  ‘Mister.’ He withdrew the object from inside his jacket and thrust it towards me. ‘Cigarette?’

  A packet of Marlboro Red was pointing straight at me.

  ‘Thank you. Please. Oh yes. Yes, please.’

  Never have I been so grateful for a cigarette.

  We drove on through the black Hezbollah heartland, both of us smoking, and twenty minutes later we pulled up outside another dark, pockmarked building with a moustached ruffian outside it, who managed to open my door despite it being apparently locked.

  ‘Monsieur, welcome to the Bristol Hotel.’

  The Bristol was the best surviving hotel in central Beirut. Well, not quite central Beirut. There were no functioning hotels in central Beirut. The Bristol was in a Christian suburb. It was the first hotel I had been to since Romania in 1990 where the entire reception area was lit by one bulb.

  Next morning I decided to go for a walk, sit at a pavement café, window-shop, choose between restaurants for lunch, snooze in a deckchair on the beach and see if I could find a few traces of the civil war. Would everything have been restored by now? Since the civil war had stopped the journalists had moved on to other trouble spots, and you read little about the Lebanon. I was curious as to what Beirut was like.

  After breakfast I asked the hotel for a map. They gave me a scrunched-up old yellow thing which appeared to predate the war. After giving it my usual mapaholic’s scrutiny, I marched up to the desk and said, ‘How far to the Etoile?’ On the map, L’Etoile, between l’avenue Gamelin and la rue Allenby, was clearly the centre of town. ‘Monsieur?’ ‘L’Etoile, you know, the centre of town.’ ‘Etoile?’ He shrugged. I could have been asking for directions to Xanadu. ‘You want tour? Beirut, Baalbek, Byblos? What you like?’ ‘Thanks. I’ll walk.’

  I tried following the map but it soon became obvious that it had little relevance to the reality of Beirut as it was now. I would have to follow my nose instead. I strode off. Downhill had to take me to the sea.

  I hit the corniche about a mile west of the St-Georges Hotel, venue for my ninth-birthday party in 1952. Everything looked normal. People were fishing off the rocks with long bendy rods; vendors were selling Arab flatbread shaped like purses; the sea and the coast were as blue and green as ever. I remembered the corniche from forty years ago. Apart from the fact it was now lined with smart new apartment blocks on the land side, the sea side had changed little from the days when Michael and I would swim there. I walked north. The next three hours left me with my mouth hanging open. Literally. The Allied soldiers who first went into Belsen must have felt the same sense of disbelief.

  The entire heart of the city, an area the size of Hyde Park, had been destroyed. Approaching it from the gleaming corniche, first you walked past buildings which were empty, then ones scarred by bullets, then ones which had been shelled, and finally you stood in rubble. The St-Georges was at the end of the Green Line, the frontier between Muslim and Christian in Beirut. It stood, but how? It had no windows, no doors, and concrete blocks with loopholes for guns on the ground floor. A soldier stood in front, and the street, Beirut’s Fifth Avenue, was a marsh of sand and mud.

  I walked on in horror. I remembered Bucharest a month after its revolution. A few buildings had bullet pocks and that was it. In central Beirut the buildings with bullet pocks were the lucky ones because they at least had walls. It was as if the people either side of a line drawn along Piccadilly, Knightsbridge and the Cromwell Road had spent sixteen years trying to annihilate each other. In the centre nothing remained but rubbish and broken masonry. A hundred yards back a few walls stood with their edges picked away like a rotting Stilton. I found the Etoile. In the midst of the desolation stood a giant metal statue of a heroic family. It was perforated with bullet holes, the man minus both arms, the woman with her head shot away, an apt metaphor for the civil war.

  There were the empty husks of churches and mosques. Hardly anything stood higher than a few feet off the ground. One of the few remaining buildings was a large shell-shaped edifice. I walked around it. It was a cinema whose walls had been destroyed. At the edges of the destruction still stood the remains of the grand hotels – the Hilton, the Phoenicia, the Holiday Inn – but the walls were more bullet hole than brick. The old souk are
a, once the shopping centre of the Middle East, was razed to the ground. Nothing stood. It was chained off, to be rebuilt at some unspecified date ‘as it was’. Knowing the Beirutis, in ten years the houses would spring up again, sleeker and more elegant than ever; the bullet holes would be stuccoed over, the streets repaved, the lifts reinstalled, while the only fighting would be between Bulgari and Valentino.

  It is trite but none the less true that one adapts quickly to even the most abnormal surroundings. When I left the hotel the next day and we skirted the downtown area on the way to lunch it was almost starting to look normal.

  Beirut traffic was alarming. After sixteen years of shooting and being shot at the Beirutis clearly did not regard NO LEFT TURN, ONE WAY STREET or NO PARKING signs as anything other than noise. There were no traffic lights and no street lights. Every car was a potential taxi. When you waved your hand the nearest five cars mounted the pavement and pinned you against the wall in an attempt to get your custom. Each trip turned into a mini-kidnap, particularly as none of the drivers spoke English or understood where you wanted to go.

  Away from the centre, life bopped along: streets, horses and shops all looked close to normal with maybe a stray bullet hole or taped-up window here and there. I had a long dinner in an exquisite French restaurant with Serge, a charming Romanian aristocrat connected to one of the French banks who had arranged some introductions for me in Beirut. Serge would have been at home in the Hamptons: he spoke every language, knew everyone and talked without pause. His family had lost their land in Romania; he had been brought up in Argentina, spent years at the Shah’s court in Iran, knew Baghdad well and was now a typical Beiruti.

  He told me about the social structure in Beirut and how it was adapting to the return of the Lebanese who had made their fortunes overseas during the sixteen years that the country was destroying itself. Those who had come home after making a pile in Brazil, Canada or France were at the centre of Beirut social life and invited everywhere. These were for the most part Christians or Sunnis. Those who had got rich in Nigeria and the Côte d’Ivoire often had more money and built bigger palaces but were shunned by the smart set. ‘Nobody mixes with them,’ said Serge. They were mainly Shi’a. Snobbery, like the cockroach, could survive the worst of wars.

  All through the night I had heard powerful jets screaming over the city at just above rooftop level.

  ‘Don’t they close the airport at night?’ I asked Serge.

  ‘Bien sûr.’ He laughed. ‘That was not Air France; it was the Israelis. They like to implement their Law of Moses: ten eyes for an eye, fifteen Palestinian lives for one Israeli. The flights serve no purpose. It is the Israeli way of farting in our face – to show us who is stronger.’

  ‘Why don’t you shoot them down?’

  ‘My dear man, what weapons do we have to shoot supersonic planes down with? Rifles? The Lebanese have been shooting at the bastards for ever. They’ve only got one in fifteen years.’

  24

  Blood in the New York Gutters

  I was booked to fly back to London from New York on 12 September 2001 but owing to the events of the previous day all flights had been cancelled and, several days later, there was still no news as to when the airports would reopen. So I called up Cunard and asked if they had a boat going back to England. Yes, they said, the QE2 was leaving for Southampton on 17 September from Boston, to which it had been diverted from New York.

  I caught a train to Boston and next day marched along the gangway into the QE2. The last time I had been on an ocean liner had been sixty-one years earlier, when the Circassia of the Anchor Line had taken Ma and me to Bombay in 1950 on our way to Iran.The five-day Atlantic crossing in brilliant September sunshine had a surreal quality to it. Everyone on the ship knew that 9/11, as it had yet to be called, had changed the world, but no one yet knew how. No one even knew who was responsible, but the name of Osama bin Laden was circulating before we reached England.

  I wrote what follows on the QE2 and have not changed it since because I realised that things would look very different in hindsight to the way they did at the time. I didn’t know what I was going to do with it but it felt good to write something.

  I was living and working on Wall Street in 1970 while the World Trade Center was being built. The Vietnam War was going on, Nixon was bombing Cambodia and New York was bankrupt. The act of construction at that time of the world’s tallest building by the world’s most bankrupt city was one of breathtaking effrontery. The sheer irresponsibility of the act caused great irritation to the rest of the country and great delight to New Yorkers.

  After Nixon bombed neutral Cambodia in May 1970, Wall Street became the focus for the outcry against the spread of the Vietnam War. A week earlier I had been in Washington demonstrating and getting gassed. Now when I went out from Kuhn, Loeb’s office at 40, Wall, for a lunchtime sandwich I saw that the demonstrators had come to Wall Street. Every morning teenagers in bell-bottoms and flowery shirts gathered in downtown New York to march up Broad Street to the junction of Broad and Wall. Here they established themselves on the steps of Federal Hall, the spot where George Washington had been sworn in as America’s first president. This was their rostrum.

  At midday the hundreds of construction workers who were building the World Trade Center, then two enormous holes in the ground some half a mile away, broke for lunch. Grabbing spanners and wrenches they barrelled their way down Broadway and charged left into Wall Street, a phalanx of bare-armed, beer-gutted, hard-hatted menace. Their president was bombing the geeks and the gooks in Asia to show them the American Way, to teach them the meaning of freedom. Someone had to root out the commie freaks who were standing on the steps of Federal Hall and talking treason.

  At ten past noon this wave of sweat and brawn broke on Wall Street. The sidewalks were crowded with workers like me taking their lunchtime breaks; the street itself was given over to the rampaging hard hats. The police stopped the traffic, kept the crowds back from the road, and then leaned back to watch the fun, thumbs tucked in gunbelts. The recapture of the Federal Hall steps was the first thing the hard hats wanted to do; a flying wedge of brawn, using wrenches as bludgeons, drove its way into the crowd of students. Some twenty steps lead up to the portico of the building; the speaker stood on the top step behind a microphone with the statue of America’s first president at his back.

  ‘Friends, we are here with a purpose. Don’t let these thugs—’

  Kerrrump. Hard hats cudgelled students to their knees and kicked them aside as they stormed the first ten steps.

  ‘Friends, hold firm. This is the kind of violence that is tearing our country—’

  Kerrangg. The microphone went spiralling into the air as the hard hats recaptured the top step.

  This happened every day for almost a week. Every day blood ran red in the gutters. Students were kicked in the face as they lay on the ground. Two ham-forearmed men, standing no more than six feet from me, held a frail teenage girl by the arms while a third beer-gutted hard hat punched her in the breasts and face. An elderly partner of Lehman Brothers standing right in front of me on the edge of the sidewalk raised his fingers in a V-shaped peace sign in solidarity with the kids. He was struck on the crown by a wrench and fell to the ground with blood gushing from his head. Meanwhile the crowd on the sidewalk chanted and bayed. ‘Kill the commie faggots . . . Pinko scumbags . . . Fuck the red mayor.’ (Mayor John Lindsay, from the liberal, Rockefeller, wing of the Republican Party, a decent man who was overwhelmed by the impossibility of governing 1970 New York, was widely regarded by the hard hats as being a pinko.) While the violence stormed, the police swapped quips with people in the crowd and loosed off a kick or two themselves whenever a kid rolled within range.

  The first demonstration was on Monday. On Tuesday and Wednesday some of the kids took refuge a couple of hundred yards away inside Trinity Church. The hard hats barrelled in there as well, dragged the kids out of the church, held them down and beat them on the gravestones
of America’s founding fathers. The pattern repeated itself on Thursday.

  And then on Friday something extraordinary happened. Led by students from Harvard Law School, busloads of graduate students from the leading East Coast business and law schools came to demonstrate. They wore grey suits, waistcoats, button-down shirts and striped ties. They assembled at the foot of Broad Street and began the half-mile march to Federal Hall. They marched in silence. The crowd who had gathered to cheer the noon-time carnage shuffled their feet as the students marched past, with their well-polished shoes and neatly trimmed hair. The steps were mounted and the speeches began. At ten past noon the hard hats came rampaging round the corner into Wall Street, wrenches a-wave, to be faced with the sight of a Harvard law professor delivering a carefully argued indictment against Nixon to an audience of be-suited graduates. The hard hats paused and then came to an untidy halt. Where were the commie freaks? After five minutes of muttering and sporadic shouts of ‘Hey, fuck you, shitheads’ they dissolved into the crowd of lunchtime workers. They were seen no more on Wall Street.

  By the time the Twin Towers were finished, Nixon had resigned in disgrace to be replaced by Gerry Ford. Far from standing for American unity and strength, the World Trade Center was seen by the 95 per cent of the country that did not live in New York as a symbol of that city’s overweening arrogance. In the words, now legend, of the Daily News headline when bankrupt New York rattled its begging bowl under Washington’s nose and was told to look elsewhere for funds: FORD TO NEW YORK: DROP DEAD.