Beirut 2020

by Charif Majdalani

  The peg of the Lebanese pound, and therefore the entire economy, to the US dollar and the dollarization of the economy that followed meant that for decades you could buy and sell in either one currency or the other, since the exchange rate between the two remained stable. But now, the many different exchange rates make daily life completely surreal. Schools, insurance, medications, gasoline, and even restaurants have stayed at the official, extremely low exchange rates from before the economic crisis. Everything else is at variable rates so that when you go into a store, you don’t ask the price of the products for sale anymore, only the exchange rate at which they are offered. It is all so absurd that, now I come to think about it, I realize that I paid the price of a bottle of tequila for our house insurance, but that the purchase of a new computer monitor for my daughter is setting me back more than the yearly school fees for both her and her brother.

  We had dinner on the terrace, with Nadine, Paula, and Camille. The last time we had a meal here together was almost a year ago, on the evening before the start of the revolution of October 17, which we expected would herald the end of the ruling political class. We often remember that evening, when we shared our skepticism about whether there would be a popular reaction to the imminent wreck. A few days earlier, huge wildfires in the mountains were blazing out of control, because the new Canadair water bombers the government had acquired the previous year had not been able to take off. After some stammering and absurd justifications, it transpired that the entire maintenance budget for these planes had vanished into thin air. No one responsible was held to account for this, but a week later, for a different and much more futile reason, the popular insurrection had started. That’s not likely to happen now, although some of us here this evening think the embers are still smoldering under the ashes. A breeze wafts past from time to time, a crescent moon finer than a scimitar’s blade seems to be resting in the branches of the araucaria tree just across from us, which I found out a few years ago from Pierre Michon is called a monkey puzzle tree, because its prickly branches make it difficult to climb. I reported this information to Jean Rolin, when we were sitting there late one evening with Christophe Boltanski and my wife. It was during the 2006 war, Rolin was in Beirut for Le Nouvel Observateur and his book on stray dogs, and Boltanski for Libération. A few hundred meters away were the borders of the southern suburbs and Hezbollah districts, which were plunged in total darkness, and made the illuminated terrace where we were sitting up late into the night seem like the last inhabited place on Earth before the fall of darkness and silence.

  Tonight there is no war or destruction, but the lack of electricity conveys the same impression of profound gloom. And yet a singular streetlight is still burning inexplicably on the sidewalk below, casting splashes of purple, pink, red, and mauve from a huge bougainvillea into the darkness. The generators are thrumming away in the depths of the night, beneath the bursts of our voices in conversation. A beneficent gust of wind floats by, and then the voluptuous scent of the gardenias rises.

  As I was coming home from dropping off Camille, who’d come on foot, I saw a demonstration at the end of the avenue that leads to the Ring Bridge. It’s one of the meeting points for protestors. There weren’t many of them, but it sometimes happens that some surge of anger suddenly brings thousands of people out onto the streets again after nightfall. The roads are blocked off, dumpsters are set alight. We were there last time, two weeks ago, my wife and I, just like every other time. It was a spontaneous gathering, which later spread to other parts of the country, and I was surprised once again, in the middle of the crowd with its flags and megaphones, to find the corncob and coffee seller with his miniature tinseled stall set up on the front of his motorbike. A few months earlier, when the huge nighttime protests ended in skirmishes with the police and the reserve troops of the speaker of Parliament, that salesman had stayed amongst it all, moving along with the charges of the riot police and the retreats of the demonstrators. And he wasn’t the only one doing this. There was also a water seller, a pugnacious little boy who stood his ground even as the tear gas was raining down and the young people were running away with balaclavas completely covering their eyes and noses. When they regrouped to advance once more, the little boy sprang up again in the midst of the white smoke, the shouting, and gunshots, as if he were at a fun fair, or like an improbable little djinn, loaded down with his packs of small bottles and proclaiming throughout the general chaos, the artificial fog, and the battle atmosphere: “Cold water! Cold water! Who wants to buy some cold water?”

  This morning at around eleven, on the square in front of the National Museum, there’s a traffic jam caused by a gigantic crane parked there. It lifts up an ancient stele from the platform of an enormous truck, then sets it down in front of the museum doors, then lifts it up again, rotating it slowly and setting it down again next to another stele and a sarcophagus that have been displayed there for years as part of the urban decor. I don’t know whether the National Museum is open or whether any museums have been allowed to reopen after lockdown. But I imagine they must be strangely deserted. The collections are sleeping in the silence of a necropolis, without a single visitor—all the objects, the evidence, the relics that have served to illustrate the national narrative, to develop the ideological basis for the country whose founding fathers could never have guessed that exactly one hundred years later that same narrative would become the expression of the most bitter and shameful failure.

  I don’t know whether the museums are open, but in other places there is nothing happening. The art galleries are no longer holding exhibitions, or very rarely, there are no music festivals, there will be no more book fairs, the publishers aren’t publishing anything anymore. Nizar Hariri, who is the head of a sociology research program at my university, told me a few days ago that the Ministry of Education had opened a tender for printing the schoolbooks for next year’s curriculum. It’s usually a contract that printing presses fight over, because it guarantees the sale of at least a hundred thousand books. But this year, not one of them even put in a bid. They have no confidence in the ministry’s promises of payment. There will be no schoolbooks next year. Or this year’s will have to be reused.

  Most of the founding fathers of modern Lebanon were poets, writers, lawyers. But they were also shrewd businessmen, fastidious bankers, readers of Victor Hugo and José-Maria de Heredia, but also of Commerce du Levant, the venerable and still informative economic magazine that was founded in their era. According to this week’s issue of Commerce du Levant, more than two thousand businesses closed their doors this last month, two hundred pharmacies, as well as the famous international brands that are leaving the country for good, such as Adidas and Coca-Cola. The Carnegie Center, for its part, estimates that more than a thousand businesses have folded in the tourism sector alone, putting more than thirty thousand families into penury. The French Foreign Ministry estimates on the basis of independent studies that there have been four hundred thousand total layoffs so far, a figure which represents one-twelfth of the total population.

  I first thought that the sudden disappearance of all those anti-mosquito coils you burn to get rid of insects was linked to the general shortages in the supermarkets. Then Nayla made me realize that it probably had more to do with the fact that it was impossible for many households to use the usual devices that you plug into a power socket, since there is hardly ever any electricity at all in many neighborhoods, especially at night. So we’re back to using the good old burning coils, which have now disappeared from the market because of high demand—collateral damage of the economic crisis, but also of the Covid-19 pandemic. For I am firmly convinced that the worldwide slump in industrial activity and the lower pollution levels that allowed nature to reboot during the three months of lockdown all over the world have given a new unexpected vigor to plants and insects.

  And so now we are suddenly defenseless against the bugs. A few days ago we were having dinner with Gilbert Hage and his
wife at their place, and Gilbert, who is always easygoing and good-natured, with the girth of Winston Churchill and a chewed cigar permanently hanging from his lips, disappeared for a moment inside the house, then came back into the garden where we were having our meal, holding one of those coils which he lit up with the end of his Partagás. I told him this was a strange thing to do. He retorted, with his usual offbeat and unpredictable humor, that these coils were now so exclusive that you couldn’t possibly do them justice with a simple matchstick. I then told them how the smell of these strange green products, whose smoke rises slowly into the air like incense, had been part of my childhood, especially during my summers in the mountains. Everyone around the table seemed to have the same memory. Then I recalled reading in Gabriel García Márquez that in the West Indies they used to burn dried cowpats to get rid of mosquitoes. Gilbert said that the burning green coils were in fact made out of compressed cow dung, with an artificial fragrance. The economic crisis in Lebanon, I said to myself, has led to the not-so-fortuitous encounter, at the home of a great photographer, of Churchill and a coil of compressed cow dung.

  For the thirty years of the second republic, one of the most coveted contracts was for trash collection, and even more so for the management of public dumpsites. Obviously the tender involved endless manipulations, nontransparent transactions, and clientelistic maneuvers. The dumpsites were finally awarded to someone close to the Hariri family—who has since become a billionaire, along with the rest of his entourage—who respected almost none of the terms of his contract, notably regarding the sorting and treatment of the waste material. The landfills turned into huge mountains of trash, cliffs of filth collapsing into the sea at several points along the coastline, with a smell that throughout the years has often spread all over the towns and the whole seacoast like the malevolent spirit of a power that is rotten to its core, while we go about our business, work, study, shop, or have parties on the rooftops and in the trendy nightclubs, some of which claim a certain cachet from being located right up next to these cursed mountains. All the alternative plans for burying the waste or building incinerators were abandoned because of conflicts of interest. Some people say this was no bad thing, because incinerators or burial projects would just have led to the theft of more millions of dollars, the construction of inoperable factories, or even greater calamities for the environment. In 2015 a popular uprising took the ruling political class to task for the first time, because of what was called the trash crisis. Those in power got away with it through covert repression, by infiltrating the protestors and ecological groups or those fighting corruption, and reduced the movement to silence. Everything went back to normal, the stink prevailed, but that didn’t matter since the garbage was still earning millions of dollars.

  A few years ago, a literary journal asked me to write a dystopia set in Lebanon or the Arab world. I came up with a story of widescale real estate speculation in Beirut, of which there has been so much in the last few years, of ultramodern skyscrapers and business centers built by the mafias connected to those in power on land reclaimed by compressing and dumping millions of tons of trash into the sea. A shadowy business world, covered in gold leaf and knee-deep in garbage.

  We had dinner at Pierre and Nada’s last night. There were twelve of us, which was probably too many for social distancing, but miraculously, the subject of the economic crisis didn’t come up once throughout the whole evening, as if a benevolent genie were floating above us or we were graced with the presence at our table of the Homeric gods, those creatures who influence events with crude but effective stratagems, rendering the words of an Achaean leader inaudible during a banquet, or a Trojan fighter invisible in the midst of battle. We thus kept the country’s collapse and our own anxieties at a distance, for the space of one evening. When the topic came up of the trash that hasn’t been collected for a few days now, the gods of Olympus did their work and a former secondhand bookseller changed the subject by telling the story of how he sometimes bought huge stocks of books, hundreds and hundreds of volumes, some of which had no value whatsoever and he put into the closest dumpsters in his neighborhood, only to find them again a few days later, offered for sale by rag-and-bone traders who had picked them out. He then decided to dispose of those useless acquisitions in more distant garbage dumps, in other neighborhoods, but the books came back, inescapably, as if by sorcery, or like a practical joke played on him by some laughing god.

  When the topic of Covid-19 came up, with the possibility of a new lockdown that would finish the job of ruining the country once and for all, the Olympian gods reacted just as effectively, and Pierre, without changing the subject, transported it elsewhere, telling us with a straight face how he knew who Patient Zero was, the guy who had carried it out of China, and that he had almost met him. It was a colleague of his who was working in Bergamo. The guy had traveled to Singapore, where he had had meetings with Chinese industrialists from Wuhan. When he got home to Italy, he had met with his company representatives from Mexico, Madrid, and Paris, whom he must have infected, and then they flew home and had more meetings. He had done the same in Bergamo—including spreading the virus to people who the next day would attend the notorious Atalanta-Valencia match—which is now considered the epicenter of the pandemic in Europe.

  He was then supposed to fly to Dubai, where he had a meeting planned with Pierre, who was there at the time. But he had felt flu symptoms and canceled his trip at the last minute, greatly disappointing Pierre, who had thought him rather fickle and fragile to cancel a business trip just because of a little fever. If the meeting had taken place, it would have been Pierre who brought the virus into Lebanon, and not that pilgrim woman from Tehran.

  For a few days now, the new Covid-19 case numbers have been rising steeply, and there are rumors that there will be a new lockdown. It’s like a bowling game for all the businesses and retail, where the ball is thrown again and again with ghastly regularity until everything left standing is eliminated. Any business or retail store that managed to pull through the first period of the economic crisis, capital control, and the collapse of the markets, had to suffer another shock: enforced isolation and the complete shutdown of both internal and external trade. Those who came out of it unharmed are now fearing the new lockdown, which would be like the final assault, the coup de grâce.

  The spontaneous protest movements are not subsiding. They are made up of shock troops of young, tirelessly mobilized activists, who are occupying the ministries and the public service offices, settling in with their masks and their slogans, demanding to meet the ministers or the department heads, essentially to insist they quit their positions because they are not discharging their duties honorably. The police responsible for security in public places are apathetic and leave the protestors to it, observing them, sympathizing sometimes. But the ministers and senior public servants are never even there, or abscond early, or scuttle away through the service exits.

  This morning I was coming out of the office of a friend of mine who had offered to make her errand runner available for some of our administrative formalities around the purchase of the land in the mountains, when I saw a woman sitting on a large threadbare couch, in the shade of a dumpster, sorting parsley—parsley which, in contrast to the worn couch and the grubby dumpster, looked fresh and almost poignantly green. She was wearing a black dress, her head also in a black veil that covered her mouth. A Nawar, surely, one of those mysterious people some consider to be the Asian cousins of the Roma. Maybe she had tattoos on her arms, gold teeth, and piercing eyes, I couldn’t tell. She was very busy with her bunches of parsley, enjoying the faded and tattered old couch while she had the chance, before a junk dealer would find it and chase her away to claim it. Nawar women are generally fortune-tellers, and many of their people are also beggars. But it’s a fact that for a few years now they have been supplanted in the streets by a vast deployment of a new contingent. At every intersection, women, little boys, and old men have developed a
whole economy of the outstretched palm. According to a study published in 2015 by Unicef, the ILO, and various NGOs, the overwhelming majority of these newcomers—who are even more numerous and just part of the urban landscape now—are of Syrian origin, driven away from their homes by war and violence. Children in rags as young as eight or nine, teenage boys, fourteen-year-old girls with babies in their arms, old women too—a whole insistent world, prowling, banging on car windows, simpering, pleading, or walking past full of contempt for your indifference. Many of them are born here, in abandoned building sites or squatters’ rooms or on the street, and are therefore completely stateless, abandoned unto themselves, the fruit of broken relationships, displaced families, or shotgun marriages. Many of them are apparently also victims of exploitative mafia groups.

  One evening a year ago, a little girl who was already a mother, holding her baby in her arms as she might have held a doll if she had been born under other skies, planted herself in front of my wife’s car window, at a traffic light, on Bechara el-Khoury Avenue. My wife always keeps a few cookies and candies in reserve for this kind of situation, and bread too if possible. But the young beggar didn’t want them, she asked her to get hold of some diapers for her instead. Taken aback at first, Nayla, who had Saria in the car with her, hesitated, then finally went to a pharmacy nearby. She found the beggar again thirty minutes later, delivered her order to her and took the opportunity to try to ask her where she was from. The little mother muttered something incomprehensible, then pointedly turned away without showing any gratitude or giving a satisfactory answer. But by then she had been joined and set upon by other girls just like her, all carrying infants and coveting her diapers.