Beirut 2020

by Charif Majdalani

  For the last few days, the mornings have been especially difficult, from the moment I open my eyes and remember the immeasurable waste—of the city, the lost lives, and our futures. Nayla told me that she had woken up last night in the middle of the night wondering why she had a heavy weight on her chest, and wondering what had changed that she could no longer remember, and what more could have been added to the destruction of half the city, the economic crisis, and Covid-19. She had gone back to sleep in hope of not remembering it. In the morning she was relieved to hear that there was nothing more, nothing new.

  During the day, my morale improves a little, notably at the sight of all those young people who rose like a single man to take on the task of erasing the signs of the nightmare and to help rebuild, given the inaction of the criminal government, whose members, even the most anonymous ones, are loathed and chased away as soon as they dare appear on the ground among the ruins. Also at the sight of the mobilization of civil society supported by an enormous international effort, and the solidarity of the entire population working together, having decided not to bend—or if the violence of the blows they received forced them to bend, not to break.

  The Gemmayzeh and Mar Mikhaël districts, those most damaged by the explosions, were inhabited for over a century by the merchant aristocracy up in the hillsides and by a migrant population from the mountains and Armenian refugees on the plain below. Up until the beginning of the 2000s, Gemmayzeh and Mar Mikhaël were made up of little streets lined with artisanal and mechanical workshops, and all kinds of retail businesses. In the first years of the twenty-first century, in keeping with a worldwide trend, this neighborhood was transformed by the arrival of architects’ offices, stylists’ and painters’ studios, and art galleries that were some of the most important in the Middle East. Among the preserved traditional heritage buildings, large-scale architectural projects were developed that showcased Lebanon’s contemporary creativity. This activity then spread to the industrial wastelands and warehouse districts around the port, which were also taken over by Lebanese designers, artists, and galleries. The two districts all at once became centers of the nocturnal life that was emblematic of all the creative energy of Beirut.

  This is what was irremediably destroyed by the explosion of August 4: the creativity and vitality of a people incarnated in its artists and designers, and their tireless, sometimes desperate desire to continue to exist, to ensure that their country exists through art, beauty, intelligence, and with a spirit that was all their own. They’d had to fight hard for that, as we all did, against the negative and morbid rationale of political power, its lethal corruption, and its arrogant ignorance. Only to see all their efforts, and those of so many others in all ways of life, flattened in a few seconds.

  Today for the first time I have settled back down in the place where I usually work, here on the terrace, exactly where I was sitting a few seconds before the explosion, nine days ago, when I had just finished what has become chapter 50 of this book and jotted down the first few words of the next chapter. I had not come back to this table when I started writing again, not because of any kind of superstition, but because it has been very hot. Except that today, I need to tie up the broken thread of time again.

  Nayla told me that she, on the contrary, was not going to start the account of her self-therapy again. There are other imperatives. She makes all her time available for urgent consultations, on top of her existing patients with whom she is now working on this recent trauma. The new requests are so numerous that she is overwhelmed with work, and she tells me that what she hears all day long is terrible. The hopelessness and exhaustion are boundless, but so is the anger.

  On August 8, an absolutely massive crowd fills the vast expanse of Martyrs’ Square and its surrounding streets again. Two hours before the appointed time, hundreds of thousands of protestors are already on-site to express their hatred for the whole political class. Very soon as well, the security forces, with dubious reinforcements under the authority of the speaker of Parliament, start to sow disorder by throwing tear gas grenades and shooting rubber bullets. It becomes more and more difficult to work out what the police are trying to protect from the crowd. They are blocking the protestors’ access to the front of the ruined offices of the An Nahar daily newspaper and to the carcass of the Le Gray Hotel. The city center they are blocking off is completely in ruins, there’s not a single store or office left standing, the Parliament itself is ripped to shreds. And the whole government that it represents is nothing more than a broken cadaver.

  On August 10, the government falls. This is the second one to collapse under the blows of protest and insurrection, without significantly affecting the mafia establishment that installed it, then let it go.

  During the protest, one of my wife’s former patients threw herself into her arms. She is a young activist, highly committed to the fight against the ruling class. Nayla told me she had come back from Britain to open up a patisserie shop and a line of fine food products, but the economic crisis had hit her hard and she had often thought about going abroad again. Then the explosion destroyed her premises. After we left, she no doubt stayed late on the front lines with the more pugnacious protestors, facing off against the security forces and the thugs that support them. Perched on a friend’s shoulders, in the midst of the tear gas, the bullets, the flames, with a mask on her face and a scarf over her eyes, as she told Nayla the next day, she was shouting at the police officers covered in body armor like Michelin men: “We will not leave this country, we will stay here, we will be happy here again, we will laugh again, and if the bastards that you are protecting do not stand down, then we will go drink and dance on their graves.”

  Looking at the thousands of photos taken at the port and posted on social media and news agency Web sites, I realized how the colossal grain silos had been an emblem of Beirut for me ever since I was a child and without my even acknowledging it—much more so than the Pigeon Rocks or Martyrs’ Square—but also an emblem of Lebanon as a whole in my eyes, almost more so than the columns of the Temple of Jupiter at Baalbek. I had started taking an interest in that strange dinosaur when I was just a kid, after reading a series in a Tintin magazine—which I have just astonishingly remembered was called The Petrified City and was set in a town that was struck by an incomprehensible attack which only the visitors to a silo survived. Later in life, I had used the fascinating grain silos at the port as the setting of a story that I never published or even finished. Hangar number 12 was at the foot of these silos. On August 4, their powerful concrete mass stopped the explosion from radiating farther west and destroying the rest of Beirut even more violently. In shielding the explosion with their enormous compact mass, they partially collapsed, and their sides crumbled down, disemboweled. But the remains, partly destroyed, are still standing, like a wounded beast or a cliff face eroded by ten thousand years of wind and waves, in the middle of the docks.

  We walked over to the olive trees again, he and I, and then to the mulberry trees. This was another plot of land, the dry grass came up to our knees. Nayla and the children stayed at the boundary line, afraid of meeting some reptile or other. The heat was strong, despite a breeze that flowed through the dry wheat and made it rattle like an old wooden noisemaker. When we reached the ancient mulberry tree with its trunk twisted like hands begging for forgiveness, I stopped. I told the fellow that, with all the grass and despite his explanations, I couldn’t make out the topography of the plot. He was beginning to annoy me. I told him his prices were too high for me, and he started up again with his grocer’s prattle about high prices, cash, square meters. Nayla finally joined us, with Saria. Then at last Nadim decided to throw himself into the high grass as if he were diving into water. For a few days now, our children haven’t stopped asking us to get out of Beirut. Saria in particular feels suffocated and incomprehensibly sad. Both of them feel very out of place whenever they are in the countryside, and no matter how hard I try to initiate them into it
s ways by telling them stories of my childhood days in the wilds of the high mountains, they always stay impervious to it all. But today, they seem happy, as if the idea of being able to escape the city was reassuring to them. They have been confronted, for the first time and in quite an abrupt manner, with the violence of history. They only knew about it through our old stories, but then it brutally appeared in their own familiar universe, which they had thought was protected. The owner barely inquired about what we had gone through. I was the one who asked him whether he had family in Beirut. A daughter, whose house was slightly damaged, he replied distractedly. We were quiet, suddenly, and the immemorial silence settled in for a few moments. The summits around us were gleaming and looking away, indifferent to our pains, as they have been for millennia. This is what I’ve never been able to make my children understand about my fascination with these landscapes that I’ve carried since childhood: the mountains’ silence, this immense peace, as if they were the last witnesses of what must have been the planet’s eternal stasis before time and history burst in, and before the disorder, ruin, and entropy that human beings have unceasingly wreaked, ever since they started to writhe upon the Earth.

  When I found out that the little street where Sarah lives was severely damaged, I remembered an old friend of my mother’s whom I hadn’t heard from for years. She had always lived on this street, although I didn’t know whether she was still living there, at her advanced age. The landline on which I tried to call her was obviously out of order, and I no longer had the numbers of any of her daughters. I went over there yesterday afternoon. The building was badly hit, there are no more windows, the elevator shaft is gaping open, all the doors have been ripped off, the handrail in the stairwell has come adrift, on each of the landings you can see inside the homes and through to the street on the other side, and as you go up the floors, you can see the port and the sky at last. But at every level, everything has been cleared out, tidied up, put away. Whatever could be saved was set aside, the rest was in a heap ready to be taken away, thanks to the teams of young volunteers.

  There were lots of people on the floor where my mother’s old friend lived. A team of volunteer architects working for an NGO was surveying the damage to the walls, the ceilings, the facade. Maya, one of the daughters of the owner, was there too. She reassured me about her mother, who doesn’t stay at the apartment much anymore, because she can no longer walk, and lives with another one of her children. She showed me around the apartment, where after the cleanup there were still a few pieces of old furniture, including an immovable sideboard, an intact chandelier hanging in an empty room, and a couch in the middle of the living room, turned toward the gaping facade. She opened the sideboard, in which there was a complete set of crystal glasses, undamaged.

  One of the architects recognized me and said that he was sure I would have a few things to say about all this. We chatted, with his colleagues too. One of them said he had seen one of those agents that everyone is talking about who discreetly go through neighborhoods making despicable offers to the impoverished inhabitants, on behalf of promoters and speculators, to buy up their destroyed homes. Another one told me how, two days after the explosion, a caterer had sent his deliverymen to collect the plates in which he had supplied food to his customers in the last days before the catastrophe, clearly concerned only that his soup tureens and sauce boats had been blasted away with the rest of the city. As we were talking, I had sat down with Maya on the couch, in front of the gaping facade, looking out into the open space as if we were sitting on a balcony above the sea and the ruins of the port, which you couldn’t quite see from inside.

  At one point, one of the architects came and offered me a piece of chocolate, from one of those mass-produced bars that have a cream filling with chemical fruit flavors and colors, and you wonder how they can still be available for sale, given how long it’s been since they can no longer compete with other products that are similar but less bad. It was all that was left from the candy display of a little grocer on the street, who was now working from the sidewalk while waiting for his store to be usable again. I don’t know if the young architect, who was apologizing for having nothing else to offer us, noticed how touched and satisfied I was, but those chocolate bars are the ones we used to have when we were children, in the mountains. They were the only ones available at the time in the isolated villages, and as I bit into the thin outside layer covering the artificial cream, I knew it would happen, and it did: I fleetingly saw my childhood summers, the gleaming solitary mountains, my cousins and their friends, the bicycle races, the picnics under the walnut trees, the cold water from the spring, the endless games of Risk, and the cool fog that gradually lifts in the afternoon.

  Covid-19 took the opportunity of our being distracted with other things to come back with a vengeance. The case numbers are rising again, and a new lockdown, which no one had talked about for a while, is now imminent. Our money is still being held hostage by the banks, we’re starting to wonder whether it even exists anymore, we barter and do business with checks or credit cards, or with bundles of national currency that have little value anymore. Inflation, which had been rising slowly, stealthily, in the previous months, has now exploded in our face. This makes things very complicated for those who are rebuilding or restoring their houses at their own cost, as well as for the countless organizations that are helping those worst off to do so, thanks to international support. The enemy is legion, and at its head is the oligarchy in power, with its interests, its accounts, and its fearsome survival instinct. It hasn’t changed its modus operandi one iota since the disaster, it is still ransacking the moribund public coffers and is in no hurry to form a new government. We are under siege, but from the inside. The government is trying to overthrow the people.

  As if in response, this morning, on a few badly damaged facades in the Mar Mikhaël district where I was passing with Saria, red and white banners have been hung up: NOUS NE PARTIRONS PAS, NOUS RECONSTRUIRONS—WE WILL NEVER LEAVE, WE WILL REBUILD—

  I’m writing these lines while sitting on the terrace. It’s very hot but a breeze has risen up and is blowing without conviction. In its gusts an empty drink can is rolling down the quiet street, bouncing along with a joyful clatter, sometimes soft, sometimes loud, like the little tinkling bells on a poor herd of mountain goats, and then it disappears, blown away.

  I don’t know why, but I remember what Ronald Moussa told me three weeks ago—in other words in another era, before the explosion. He was having dinner with his wife, on the waterfront at Amchit. They were sitting at the very end of the jetty, directly above the water. He had put a cigar down on the table, which the wind had discreetly started rolling away, gently playing at pushing it to the edge of the table, where it finally tipped off, just as Ronald, in a leap almost like a survival reflex, as if his life depended on it, and at the risk of tipping over into the water himself, as he later told me and laughed, caught it and prevented it from ending up in the sea.

  Our lives, like that drink can and that cigar, thrown to the winds…

  Charif Majdalani was born in Lebanon in 1960 and is one of the most important figures in Lebanese literature today. After living in France for thirteen years, he returned to Lebanon in 1993 and now teaches French literature at the Université Saint-Joseph in Beirut. His novel Moving the Palace (New Vessel Press, 2017) won the 2008 François Mauriac Prize from the Académie Française as well as the Prix Tropiques. Beirut 2020: Diary of the Collapse won the Prix Spécial du Jury du Prix Femina in 2020.

  Ruth Diver holds a PhD in French and comparative literature from the University of Paris 8 and the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She won Asymptote’s 2016 Close Approximations fiction prize for her translation of extracts of Maraudes by Sophie Pujas, and her translation of The Little Girl on the Ice Floe by Adélaïde Bon was short-listed for the TA First Translation Prize. Since then she has translated The Revolt by Clara Dupont-Monod, A Respectable Occupation by Julia Kerninon, and Arc
adia by Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam.