'And it works?'
'I have seen it with my own eyes,' said Sister Tecla. 'One Muslim woman from Jordan had been waiting for a baby for twenty-five years. She was beyond the normal age of childbearing, but someone told her about the Virgin of Seidnaya. She came here and spent two nights in front of the icon. She was so desperate she ate the wicks of nearly twenty lamps.'
'What happened?'
'She came back the following year,' said Sister Tecla, 'with triplets.'
The nun led me up the south aisle of the church, and down a corridor into the chapel which sheltered the icons. At the doorway she removed her shoes and indicated that I should do likewise. I placed them with my rucksack, beside the great mountain of footwear already deposited in the antechamber and Sister Tecla led me into the muffled sanctuary. It was darker even than the church, with no windows to admit the faint light of the moon and stars which had cast a silvery light over the high altar during vespers. Here only the twinkling of a hundred lamps lit the interior, allowing us to avoid tripping over a pair of Muslims prostrated on their prayer carpets near the entrance.
'And you have no objection to so many Muslims coming here and praying in your church?' I whispered.
'We are all children of God,' said Sister Tecla. 'The All Holy One brings us all together.'
She kissed an icon of the warrior saints Sergius and Bacchus, then turned back to face me. 'Sometimes the Muslims promise to christen a child born through the Mother of God's intervention. This happens less frequently than it used to, but of course we like it when it does. Others make their children Muslims, but when they are old enough they bring them here to help us in some way, perhaps with cleaning the church or in the kitchens.'
The shrine of the icon was thick with the low murmur of prayer and chanting; those pilgrims who were talking to each other did so in hushed voices. Behind me a Syrian paratrooper in full khaki fatigues entered the shrine, having first deposited his heavy boots by the entrance. He advanced towards the icons on his knees, crossing himself all the while and murmuring prayers to the Virgin. Here, you felt instinctively, rather than in the church, was the centre of the convent's devotion.
In the lamplight, smoke-blackened icons were everywhere, some of them very fine. There was a Beheading of John the Baptist, from which pious pilgrims had scratched out the face of the executioner; there were several of the Panaghia, including one in which the Madonna was shown with thin, almond-shaped eyes as if she was a Persian princess; there was a fine image of the Dormition, the composition of which, intriguingly enough, seemed to be derived from the Ascension in the Rabula Gospels. But the most famous of the images of Our Lady of Seidnaya, the sacred icon supposed to have been painted by St Luke, was invisible, so cluttered was it with knotted silk ribbons, scribbled petitions and silver plaques representing the parts of the bodies of the pilgrims which had been healed through the Virgin's prayers.
As Sister Tecla led the way from the shrine she said, 'Come: I will take you to the guest rooms. You must eat before you go to bed.' Up to that point neither of us had broached the subject of where I was to spend the night.
In the guest rooms I was shown to a divan, while a servant took my rucksack to my cell. Sister Tecla poured me a small cup of bitter Arab coffee from a thermos flask, then sent the servant to the kitchens for some food. It arrived a few minutes later, brought by a young novice: a plate of thin soup and some feta cheese accompanied by flat pitta bread. Sister Tecla sat opposite me as I ate, and I asked her about an unexpected photograph which was framed on the wall beside my table.
'These are our Syrian cosmonauts,' she said, pointing to a picture of three men in space suits clutching their helmets under their arms rather as stage ghosts hold their heads. 'They spent a month together on the Soviet space station Mir.'
'But why is the picture here?' I asked.
'It was given to us by the cosmonauts after they returned to Syria.'
'They came here?'
'Of course. All three are Muslims, but they visited Seidnaya before they went, to pray for good luck. As soon as they had returned safely they came here again.'
'To tell the nuns about their adventures?'
'No, no,' said Sister Tecla, looking at me as one might at a rather dim ten-year-old. 'They came to thank the Virgin and give us presents: this picture and a sheep.'
'A sheep?'
'A sheep.'
'As
...
as a pet?'
'No, no,' said Sister Tecla, frowning again. 'The cosmonauts came here to cut the sheep's throat, of course.' She gave me another withering look. 'It was a sacrifice to the Virgin,' she said, 'to thank her for their safe return from outer space.'
IV
Hotel Cavalier, Beirut, Lebanon,
23
September
1994
After a fortnight of glorious indolence staying with friends in a diplomatic suburb of Damascus, I was woken this morning by the sound of Bing, their Filipino manservant, blow-drying my now spotlessly clean rucksack.
Slowly the daunting prospect of the day ahead began to take shape: leaving the soft beds, the cool blue swimming pool and my hospitable hosts - all for the uncertainties of the Lebanon, a country which for the last two decades has been virtually a synonym for anarchy.
To an earlier generation, Lebanon brought to mind images of skiing amid the cedars and sunbathing on the lido at Byblos, followed by flighty evenings in the casinos of Jounieh. But for those of us who grew up during the eighties, Beirut is of course associated with a rather different set of images: grainy front-page pictures of the massed Palestinian corpses at Sabra and Chatila; Don McCullin's photographs of the fire-blackened ruins of the lunatic asylum the Israelis bombarded with phosphorus; television pictures of the hostages; the impacting shells of the bloody militia wars - the PLO versus the Phalange, the Phalange versus Amal, Amal versus Hezbollah, Hezbollah versus the PLO. None of these made one in a particular hurry to rush to see the country for oneself.
For two weeks this diary has lain unwritten, unread, under a pile of freshly washed and immaculately ironed clothes. Since I last opened it in Seidnaya, the days have been filled neither with writing nor research; instead I have spent an unscheduled fortnight on the carousel of Syria's diplomatic whirl: a
soiree
at the Greek Ambassador's (dancing until 2.30 in the morning); a vast dinner with an Armenian entrepreneur; trips in the Land-Rover to an old ruin or a new restaurant; swimming; lunch in a palace in the old city; drinks with a Damascene aesthete amid his collection of icons. After the tensions of Turkey and the Spartan eccentricities of Seidnaya and the Baron it was a welcome - in fact an almost unbelievably wonderful - change. The only real irritation in the entire period was the incessant noise of building in the apartment above that of my hosts, where a
mukhabarat
general was about to move in and where the builders were busy installing marble floors, mirrored ceilings and pink bathtubs with gilt taps the shape of flying swans - apparently the sort of kitsch accessories that make secret policemen feel at home.
But now I was ready to move on, and the more I heard about Lebanon the more fascinated I became by the prospect of that strange country. Over drinks, people would tell the most bizarre stories about the war and its aftermath: the time the victorious Palestinian militias exhumed the Christian dead from the cemetery at Damour, scattering a couple of hundred cadavers and skeletons around the streets, all of them still dressed in the frock-coats and Sunday suits in which they were buried a century earlier; stories of Beirut's cockerels, that appeared to be suffering from a form of post-traumatic stress syndrome (they start crowing at midnight, only to fall silent at dawn); the renowned Lebanese vineyard of Chateau Musar, that only lost one vintage during the entire war - in 1984, when the front line between the Christian and Muslim militias ran between the vines and the winery.
Most of all, however, I was becoming fascinated by the Maron-ites. They sounded very different from any of the other Christian communities I have so far come across on my journey. Although they do not appear in
The Spiritual Meadow,
the Maronites started off as a cult around a Byzantine hermit who was a nearcontemporary of John Moschos. Indeed St Maron's ascetic tendencies were so extreme that he earned a place in Theodoret's compendium of eremitical eccentricity,
The History of the Monks of Syria.
In this, their first appearance in history, the Maronites started as they meant to continue: on St Maron's death a 'bitter war' broke out among his followers and their neighbours over the saint's body: 'one of the adjacent [Maronite] villages that was well populated came out in a mass, drove off the others and seized this thrice-desired treasure'.
Later, the Maronites' somewhat eccentric theology came to be deemed heretical by the official Byzantine Church. The details of this are wonderfully Byzantine: Monothelitism, the particular brand of Christology then favoured by the Maronites, had originally been promoted by the Emperor Heraclius as a compromise definition of the person of Christ which would be acceptable to both Orthodox and Monophysites and so unite the divided Empire; inevitably, however, it was rejected by both parties, leaving the unfortunate Maronites, the only community to accept the definition, to be branded as heretics and persecuted accordingly. This was largely due to the influence of John Moschos's travelling companion Sophronius, who in his old age became a rigorously Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, and set himself up as the most bitter opponent of Monothelitism.
To escape further Byzantine harassment, the Maronites were gradually forced to emigrate from their low-lying Syrian heartlands into the impenetrable fastness of Mount Lebanon. There, amid the cliffs and narrow passes, they were able to defend themselves against all their enemies, both Christian and Muslim, until centuries later, at the time of the Crusades, they came into communion with Rome and managed to form an alliance with the Franks. It was an alliance that very loosely, in one form or another, was to continue up to the twentieth century: in 1920, out of the Syrian territories they inherited from the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War, the French created a 'State of Greater Lebanon' specifically for the Maronites and at the Maronites' explicit request.
In return the Maronites attempted - and indeed still attempt
- to be more French than the French. The Maronite upper classes speak French as their first language and usually refuse to speak Arabic except to servants and tradesmen. Most of them have French Christian names. They send their children to Paris for as much of their education as they can afford. Moreover they adamantly deny their Syrian roots, and in the course of this century have invented an almost entirely mythical Phoenician (i.e. semi-European) origin for themselves, while visualising Lebanon as a sort of Near Eastern outpost of France, a country which they still refer to as 'the nourishing mother'.
Most commentators have tended to attribute the balance of responsibility for the outbreak of the civil war to the Maronites' intransigence, their unapologetic Christian supremacism, their contempt for their Muslim neighbours, and their point-blank refusal to share Lebanon with the landless Palestinian refugees ejected from their homes at the creation of Israel in 1948.
Under the terms of the 1943 Lebanese National Pact, supreme power - in the form of the Presidency - was placed in the hands of the Maronites as a reflection of the Christians' numerical superiority. But by the 1970s the Maronites were no longer the largest single religious group in Lebanon, being outnumbered by both Sunni and Shia Muslim communities. Despite this, the Maronites adamantly refused to discuss any reform that would share power more equably between the different groupings. Instead, they began to arm themselves and to prepare for war.
When the civil war finally broke out, the Maronites were ready. Modelling themselves on the Crusaders, they went into battle with crosses sewn onto their uniforms and icons of the Virgin glued to their rifle butts. Their militias were given neo-medieval names like the Knights of the Virgin, the Youth of St Maron and the Wood of the Cross. Yet for all these chivalrous titles, the Maronite militias were responsible for more than their fair share of the war's worst atrocities: the notorious massacres at Sabra and Chat-ila, where at least six hundred (and perhaps as many as two thousand) Palestinian civilians were butchered, was the work of the Maronites' Phalange militia, albeit under Israeli supervision.
The Maronite clergy did little to restrain their flock. Expatriate
Maronite priests such as the parish priest of Our Lady of Mount Lebanon, Beverly Hills, exhorted their congregations to donate money to arm the militias, while the Maronites' enemies accused even the supposedly cloistered Maronite monks of involving themselves in arms dealing. Referring to the large sums said to have been raised by the monks for the war effort, the Druze leader Kemal Jumblatt observed that 'the tonsured heads of Lebanese monks give off a golden halo.'
Certainly, as in Byzantine times, the monks involved themselves closely in politics, tending to support the more extreme ultra-nationalist Maronite militias. Most popular of all in the monasteries were the sinister Guardians of the Cedars, whose symbol was a sword-cum-cross amid flames, and whose particular speciality was cutting the ears off their dead Muslim opponents, then displaying them as trophies. The monastic support given to this group continued, despite the Guardians holding a press conference to applaud the Sabra and Chatila massacres and adopting the macabre slogan 'It is the duty of every Lebanese to kill at least one Palestinian.' The monks were, however, prepared to give their support to other suitably extreme figures: on one occasion Fr. Boulos Naaman, the Superior of the Maronite Order of Monks, went so far as to compare one of the most vicious and bloodthirsty Phalangist leaders, Bashir Gemayel, to 'Christ, with complete understanding of his Christian mission'.
The civil war left between 100,000 and 150,000 dead, and no one came out of it well; but the Maronites certainly emerged with their reputation for ruthlessness, brutality and political incompetence enormously enhanced. They also came out of it fatally weakened. By the final stage of the war, which set Christian against Christian, a third of a million Maronites - over a quarter of the entire Christian community in Lebanon - had fled the Middle East for good, joining the haemorrhage of Christians leaving virtually every country of the region.
After lamenting the demise of a succession of Christian communities in the Middle East which failed adequately to defend themselves, it may seem perverse to criticise the only one that has taken serious action in an attempt to hold its own; but even the other Eastern Christians seem to regard the Maronites as something of an embarrassment in their determination to cling on to their privileges whatever the cost. They certainly sounded very different from the defeated and depressed Armenians and Syriacs I had met in Turkey, or the timid, discreet and low-key Christians of Syria.
If nothing else, I told myself, Lebanon was certainly going to be a change.
By ten o'clock Bing had ironed my jacket and arranged the taxi that was to take me over the mountains to Beirut. I ate a last cooked breakfast (when will I next smell bacon and eggs?) and had just finished packing when the windows shook and, with a noise like a revving chainsaw, the Beirut taxi drove up outside the front gate. It was a souped-up American Thunderbird, the size of a small tank, with chrome fenders and a sunshade jutting out above the windscreen. It was driven by a Lebanese spiv in Ray-Bans and a leather jacket. I embraced my anxious hosts, then, with another roar, we were off.
Ten minutes took us out of Damascus, and soon the Thunder-bird was burning into the scrub beyond. A further forty minutes and we were heading up into the foothills of Mount Lebanon. A convoy of T-72 tanks crunched down the highway in the opposite direction; President Asad waved goodbye from a hoarding. The road wound steeply upwards, corkscrewing through pine trees and slopes of gorse, and suddenly we were there: the Syrian frontier post - a rambling collection of concrete huts huddled among the pines - lay a little above us at the summit of the mountain.
The border formalities on the Syrian side were surprisingly quick and efficient, easier indeed than it used to be to pass from one European country to another. The guards collected our passports from the car, like waiters in a drive-in McDonald's, then brought them back again a minute later, stamped with their exit visas. We drove on through a no-man's land, past the skeletons of three burnt-out cars - although, rather disappointingly after all I had read about the war, these looked as if they had crashed rather than suffered the strafing of Israeli F-16s. To our right rose a slope of conifers from which wafted the acrid scent of pine resin. We turned a corner and there, amid the trees, recently rebuilt, lay the Lebanese frontier post. Outside it flapped the Lebanese tricolour, overlaid with the Cedar of Lebanon.
Entering Lebanon was rather more problematic than leaving Syria. Six mustachioed beefcakes in camouflage jumpsuits kept us waiting for two hours in the cold while a busload of Libyans begged and pleaded to be let in. The border hut was a grim, seedy bunker, the guards were bored, and none of the Libyans had visas. But eventually, after much twiddling of thumbs, the Libyans gave up and got forlornly back into their bus. Our passports were stamped and the chief official wished us
'Bienvenu au Liban.'
The Thunderbird roared back into life, and at some speed we set off downhill into the green basin of the Bekaa Valley. From above, it seemed as beautiful and bucolic as the Valley of Kashmir: rivers, water meadows, green fields, long lines of poplars and beech avenues all turning yellow in the early autumn cold. It looked the picture of pastoral innocence; nothing about the Bekaa indicated it to be the seedbed of one of the world's largest opium harvests and home to some of the Middle East's most formidable drug barons.
As we twisted down the mountain slope, however, the impression of a gentle pastoral oasis quickly disappeared. Rubbish -cartons, old tyres, cans, crisp packets, binliners - lay like a carpet across the ground, as if there had been no refuse collections for twenty years. Disused carrier bags caught in the barbed wire and furred the hedgerows with white polythene. Wrecked buildings dotted the roadside, neither repaired nor demolished since the end of the war three years earlier. The power lines had everywhere been hijacked by pirate operators, and from every pylon a cat's-cradle of wires tangled their way through a hundred illegal connections to the houses lining the roadside.
One of the root causes of the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war is often said to have been the weakness of the country's central government and its inability to control an overheated economy of unregulated libertarian capitalism: no one paid taxes, therefore there was no government spending, therefore no public services were provided. To all intents and purposes there was no state, and everything, for better or worse, was left to the initiative of the individual. In this respect nothing has changed; indeed it looks as if any semblance of central government control has now broken down completely.
One aspect of this is the role still played in Lebanon by the Syrians. Although we had left Syria ten miles behind us, Syrian troops in clumsy, ill-fitting khaki uniforms - very different from the chic designer camouflage of the Lebanese army - still manned checkpoints at intervals along the road. Syrian
mukhabarat
Range-Rovers, their windows blacked out with friezes of Asad posters, stood parked beside pillboxes painted the colours of the Syrian flag. On the concrete crash-barriers beside these Syrian pockets, the otherwise ubiquitous posters of the Lebanese Prime Minister, Rafiq Hariri - all jowls and double chins like some corpulent Italian waiter - were replaced by the Asad family iconography familiar from Syria: Asad in his paratrooper's fatigues, Asad the general with his peaked cap, Asad the statesman in international pinstripe, Asad's dead son Basil in his trademark reflector shades.
Sometimes the hagiography became more whimsical: on one Syrian pillbox, Asad and Basil were transformed into the idiom of Haight Ashbury flower children, their scowling faces hanging from the stalks of bright, naively-painted sunflowers. At other times the iconography of the different power-brokers in Lebanon was strangely intermingled, so that pin-ups of Asad, Basil, Hariri and a brace of turbaned Iranian mullahs (popular among the Shia of the Bekaa) would all appear together on a single crash-barrier, sometimes in the unlikely company of a leggy Lebanese
chanteuse
or some sequined Egyptian movie starlet.
Perhaps strangest of all were the unlikely lines of hoardings that rose above the forbidding ruins lining the highway: a smiling Claudia Schiffer stretched out leopard-like in Salvatore Ferragamo next to a yellow sandstone French colonial villa so riddled with great round shrapnel-holes it resembled an outsized slice of
Emmental; the Marlboro cowboy with his ten-gallon hat and herd of steers beaming out over an apocalyptic wasteland of shattered tower blocks; a metal tube of Bodymist -
un beau corps sans effort
-
set against a carbon-black skeleton of twisted metal that had once been a filling station.
From the bottom of the Bekaa we crawled sluggishly up a narrow ridge, a single lane of traffic moving slowly behind a pair of massive Syrian tank-transporters until, at the top, we found ourselves looking down from an unexpected eminence, through a fug of smog, over the ruins of Beirut to the shattered mirror of the Mediterranean beyond. The Thunderbird's outsized bonnet swung over the hogsback of the ridge, and we were off: down we twisted, through a series of S-bends, under the ruins, past the posters:
Salvatore Ferragamo Pour Hiver
94; an Ottoman villa pockmarked with small-arms fire;
Valentino: En Exclusivite;
a Bible-black hearse parked outside a church;
Martini: Right Here, Right Now;
two decapitated palm trees;
Calvin by Calvin Klein;
a dead tank;
Cool Budweiser - On Tap;
a bombed-out hospital;
Lucky Strike;
a cluster of skyscrapers so pockmarked with shrapnel they looked like a mouthful of severely rotten teeth;
Versatile by Versace. . .
It was like a morality tale, spiralling downwards through one of the world's greatest monuments to human frailty, a huge vortex of greed and envy, resentment and intolerance, hatred and materialism, a five-mile-long slalom of shellholes and designer labels, heavy artillery and glossy boutiques. Like a modern updating of a Byzantine Apocalypse, it was the confusion that was most hell-like: Ayatollah Khomeini, hands raised in blessing, shared a billboard with a bottle of American after-shave; below, huge American cars -
Thunderbirds, Chevrolets, Corvettes - roared past building sites where monstrous machines, thickly carapaced like metal-clad cockroaches, moved earth, demolished ruins, dug holes. Occasionally there was an explosion and a small mushroom-cloud of dust as a doomed tower block crashed to the earth, nudged by one of the grunting metal beedes below.