Sylvia's Journal

Our first outing was by taxi, driven by Eli Adam who used to be a salesman but has been driving a taxi the last 11 years. That he was a salesman is obvious; he likes to talk. Since Axel also likes to talk he got to ride shotgun. I tucked myself way in the back of the family van and looked sideways rather than to the front. Beirut traffic is scary, hence the taxi. Renting a car was only a brief fantasy until we experienced being in traffic on our first day here.

We are hiring Eli for most of the week to take us places. We speak a mixture of French and English with him, in true Lebanese fashion. Yesterday he took us to Byblos , or Jbeil, the place where we are told the alphabet was born.

We had another fantasy lunch, overlooking Byblos’s tiny harbor, eating fried fish, and drinking the wonderful house wine at Pepe Abed’s. The remaining open spots on the table were occupied by the small plates with the famous Lebanese mezze that have become Tessa’s staple.

The restaurant was one we knew from way back. Pepe has died in the meantime and now his son Roger runs the place. The street leading to the restaurant is named after his famous dad.

The restaurant is decorated with photos of Pepe with famous personalities who have come here over the decades; it included a whole series of posed photos with various Eastern European beauty queens. Brigitte Bardo is prominently featured in the famous people gallery amidst sundry local and not so local politicians and world leaders.

After lunch we hired a guide to show us around the excavations of some 17 different archaeological sites, built on top of each other over thousands of years. Everyone was deeply awed walking amidst so much history. The guide then wrote our names in Arabic, in Phoenician and backwards in English.

Eli dropped us off at the kids’ apartment (our progeny as they are referred to by Alistair) where everyone flopped on the beds. Being a full time tourist is tiresome. Eventually we pulled ourselves up and walked around their neighborhood to check out what was for dinner.

We ended up in a street full of bars, still empty at 7 PM. Clearly our eating habits are out of sync with the Lebanese, who enter restaurants just about when we are done. The waiters happily served us beer and wine when they found out we came from a dry place, and asked as, like everyone else does, why the hell do you live in Afghanistan?

I had gotten up early to write about my dreams but got sidetracked by a computer that did not work. It still doesn’t and it took me awhile to adjust to that new reality and get myself settled in front of Axel’s.

The dreams were probably inspired by Ahmed Rachid’s book Descent into Chaos. I have arrived at the place where reading has become stressful – the incompetencies and unenlightened self-interests, pure greed and stupidity have added up to the current reality I live in – can there be more descent, one wonders. Yes, there are another 150 pages to go and the book ends before I moved to Kabul – the bottom is not in sight for the reader, and for me, I wonder, are we at the bottom yet or is there more stupidity to come? Obama can only undo so much.

Yesterday Axel and I took a service (a more or less fixed route and fixed fare taxi) to Achrafiye where the kids are lodged. We brought them croissants and some basic food supplies and then set out on our two hour walk across town, to the tip of Ras Beirut where Alistair and Birgit were sitting in the sun by the water, reading the time away till lunch.

We walked to the part of Beirut that was a nomansland when we lived here. Now it is dominated by an enormous mosque built by the slain leader Hariri, with next to it a large arrangements of white plastic tents with countless portraits of the hero and a few of his slain bodyguards.

The new city that has sprung up over the rubble and debris of many civilizations, destroyed by the same forces that are at work in Afghanistan. It produced something vanilla that could be South Boston or any other city in the world. Fancy but lifeless.

We were all drawn down to the water and the Corniche and ended up walking the entire length of it, my third visit in as many days, but now during daytime, on a holiday. Everyone else was there too.

The reward for our long walk was the lunch I had fantasized about since we left Beirut and that can only be had here: overlooking the water, a mezze, cool white Lebanese wine, and fresh fish that came straight out of the water. I could have done without the small glass of arak and the pieces of halwa dipped in molasses or tahini.

We ate for hours and then swam in the saltwater pool. By the time we got home, at around 6 PM I was still full and so tired from this day of walking and vacationing that I tumbled right into bed for an 11 hour sleep.

For a short time there are no construction sounds, generators, people partying loudly or the revving of motors that are too big for their cars but not big enough for the men that drive them. There is only the sound of thousands of birds, the sparrows and doves that inhabit this city, their chirping drowned out the rest of the time.

Yesterday morning I was a medical tourist for a few hours to have an MRI done of my right shoulder at the American University Hospital. MRIs are not easily available in Kabul. I hoped to find out if something had gone very wrong last October that would explain the continuous shoulder problems.

Alistair accompanied me by foot to the hospital. After he had made sure that everything was going according to plan he left me in the hospital’s radiology department and joined Axel and Birgit for a visit to the organic farmers market across town.

After a couple of hours I left the hospital and realized that I could go anywhere I wanted, sit down on a terrace, window shop, or buy an ice cream, anything. I called Axel to find out whether I should join him at the farmers’ market but they had already returned to the apartment. I had no intention to go back to an indoor place when I could be free and footloose in the city. And so Axel walked down to join me. We went on another trip down memory lane.

We found the place where Axel lived when he first got to Beirut, the cockroach-infested apartment above the Socrate restaurant. We walked and we walked until I had blisters on my feet, ending our visit to Ras Beirut in a tiny café at the edge of the water, just below the Corniche. We watched men fish while we drank our small cups of Turkish coffee, qahwe wasat.

At 4 PM we retrieved the girls and Jim from the airport and deposited them at their cozy little apartment in an old building in Achrafiyeh, the place that we hardly ever visited when we lived here because it was Christian and you had to cross the dangerous Green Line, a no man’s land filled with the debris of war, to get there. It was another world from the West Beirut we lived in, even though it was just a 15 minute ride away.

Now that we are complete we can get on with our vacation. We have some sketchy plans that include day trips to Byblos, to the Beqaa valley and Baalbeck and a dinner at the restaurant of one of my young colleagues in Boston. We have hired a driver and van to take us to all these places as driving ourselves would undo the effects of a vacation.

But first we are going to relax all day at the Sports Club by the ocean to anchor this vacation. After today we will get busy again.

Axel sat by the window as the plane descended into Beirut airport. He became very quiet. Later he explained that flashbacks were exploding in his head. I had no such emotional entry in Beirut as everything had so completely changed that I could have been landing in any new city.

The last time we were at this airport was 32 years ago, me to fly in from Amsterdam and Axel to pick up his mother who had escaped just in time ahead of the famous blizzard of 1978 that obliterated what would now have been our small beach house at Lobster Cove.

Alistair stood waiting for us at the airport. I met him first at our house in Rue Nigeria, 33 years ago, when he and his friend Peter were expulsed from what was then still North Yemen. We have all remained friends all these years.

The road to the city used to be long and surrounded by Palestinian refugee camps. I gather they are still there but large buildings have gone up everywhere and so they are no longer in sight.

I kept wondering how a city, so destroyed and bereft from its intelligentsia, stocked with men with guns could have so transformed. Is there hope for Afghanistan? Can Kabul join the modern world, ever? Not with those millions of dollars leaving Kabul every week, thought Alistair.

We drove to Alistair and Birgit’s apartment near the only (tiny) park in Beirut. I suppose that if you are draped along the Mediterranean Sea you don’t need parks.

I had forgotten how French Beirut is even though very few of the old French apartment buildings with their louvered shutters, wrought iron gates, balconies and window bars remain. Most are being torn down and replaced by soulless hi-rises that have no personality to speak of but where rents can be quadrupled.

After a lovely dinner, preceded by cocktails and accompanied by Lebanese wine, we left Alistair with the dishes. Birgit, Axel and I walked down to the Corniche, the place where all of Beirut and surrounding areas comes to enjoy a kind of freedom that is so total alien to us now: thinly clad young women run down to the cornice, along the up and down alleys, in the dark, alone.

Heavily wrapped up women, young and old, stroll with their men from the most western part of the Corniche into downtown.

Young men sit in their fancy cars, doors wide open, treating us to music that may or may not be to everyone’s choice. One mullah type was trying to pick up girls with recitations from the Koran. There were audiences for just anything, whatever works.

Men and women hold hands, men and men, or women and women. Young girls and boys check their phone messages, roller blade, jog, do bike tricks or smoke the hubbly-bubbly. A few diehards continued to fish in the dark, off the rocks where we used to swim.

We walked all the way from Ain Mreisseh to Rue Nigeria where we used to live. I occupied with my ex the 3rd floor, while Axel, Alistair and Peter were on the 2nd floor. It was a beautiful old building with terraces on each side, the biggest looking out over the Mediterranean. Each apartment covered the entirely floor with three large bedrooms, an immense living room, and a large kitchen with marble countertops.

The building was owned by the Khalidy family. The youngest daughter, Ilham (which means inspiration) got a bit testy with us as tensions all around us began to rise and real estate became valuable again. Their testiness was problematic as they also had guns. After we left things got unpleasant and Alistair and Peter left. Eventually the building got sold and torn down and the guys left Lebanon. Many years later Alistair came back to Beirut with his new bride to live where we are lodging now.

I recognized little along our walk on the Corniche. Even Rue Nigeria was
hopelessly altered, not for the better I think – what is it with architects who build new hi-rises in old cities?

I suppose when architecture moves from art to commerce that’s what happens. One day whole cities will wake up and say ‘what have we done?’ All they have left is the pictures and the paintings of these olden days. I made an etching of our house, something I had forgotten; but it hangs on Alistair’s wall as a reminder of both good and bad old days.