As we corkscrewed down towards the coastal plain the temperature rose and a thick fug of pollution hovered among the ruined buildings like a pall of gunsmoke. Here and there rose a scattering of kitsch new neo-Baroque villas with red roofs and marble balustrades: the product, presumably, of looting, arms or drug-trade money, for precious few legitimate fortunes have been made in this country during the last two decades. But as we drove deeper and deeper into the shattered city, such signs of prosperity became rarer: we headed on, faster now, on a potholed freeway, hotter and hotter, fuggier and fuggier, more polluted, more wrecked.
Yet for all this destruction, in some places the shrapnel marks were strangely beautiful, like a Kandinsky abstract: a perfect peppering of dots and dashes. It was a tribute to the arms dealers' art: a hail of metal perfectly distributed across a plaster canvas. Even the hideous ruins of the sixties blocks had a strange fascination. Some appeared as if newly built; only the puncture-mark of a massive shellhole through the lateral wall of an apartment indicated what had happened to its interior and its occupants. Others were utterly wrecked: a single wall remained like a gravestone to mark the whereabouts of an entire tower block; at a distance, an oblique exclamation of concrete and a tangle of metal rods - the building's top storey - would remain where it had landed in the aftermath of the blast or the collapse. Strangest of all were those blocks where the collapsed concrete stories were now folded down on top of each other, like a pile of neatly pressed shirts that had been left hanging off the edge of an ironing board, thick layers of tons of pre-stressed concrete curved over the edge of a hundred-foot drop like soft folds of fine cotton.
Despite the mess, astonishingly, the great majority of the wrecked apartments were still inhabited. In some whose walls were so eroded by shrapnel that they resembled pieces of chronically worm-eaten wood, I would notice washing hanging out to dry or perhaps a shadowy figure taking the air on a half-collapsed balcony. As twilight fell over the ruined city, pale and ghostly lights began to come on in one after another of the apparently abandoned blocks. The ruins, it seemed, were vertical shanty-towns, makeshift billets for impoverished Shia labourers or homeless Palestinians, all rushing to fill the vacuum left by the rehoused rich. Most had patched up their flats with pieces of corrugated iron or slashes of black plastic sheeting; but many others, perhaps the newest arrivals, had not. As we drove past, I found I could look into the illuminated interiors of these people's flats, for they were missing walls or had such huge shellholes that entire suites of rooms were opened up for public inspection like some sort of outsized Advent calender. In one flat I saw a man getting dressed, nonchalantly pulling on his jeans. It was an unremarkable, everyday scene, except that the wall of his apartment had entirely disappeared, so that he was framed by the black concrete superstructure around him, lit up like a cinema screen in a dark auditorium.
As we drove on, past the Green Line which for ten years marked the battlefront between Muslim West Beirut and the Christian East, we left the very worst destruction behind us. But the vision got stranger still. For roughly twenty-five years between 1950 and 1975 - the darkest period in Lebanese architectural history -Beirut's developers laboured to convert an Ottoman jewel of rare beauty into the most hideous high-rise city in the entire Mediterranean. Then for the fifteen years after that, from 1975 to 1990, the Lebanese - with a little help from their friends and neighbours - did their best to tear it all down again, using an impromptu mixture of suction bombs, phosphorus shells, rocket-propelled grenades and Israeli napalm. Yet somehow neither the uncommon ugliness of the post-war development nor the spectacular pockmarked legacy of the bloodbath that succeeded it were quite as surprising as the almost surreal lines of glass-fronted and spotlit couture shops that have recently reopened amid the craters, and which now line the bombed-out boulevards of Hamra, their windows full of the latest creations by the fashion houses of Milan and Paris.
The tanks and checkpoints, the shrapnel-marked ruins and collapsing, shell-smashed skyscrapers - all these things, featured in a hundred television documentaries, were expected, and seemed somehow obvious from the first moment of arrival. The real revelations on the final stage of the journey into Beirut - particularly after two months in the rural hinterland of eastern Turkey and northern Syria - were the glitzy American limousines queuing at the lights, and the new ice-cream parlours that have sprung up by the gun emplacements.
This?
I thought, after a twenty-year civil war:
This?
Armageddon I expected; but Armani I did not.
Then, quite suddenly, we were through the city and on the seafront, and everything was all right again, as if the war had never happened and the city had never been besieged and destroyed. The houses on the corniche seemed for some reason relatively untouched by the bombardments, and the silhouettes of the seafront palm trees stood undamaged against the darkening sky. There were girls in shorts and boys in jeans and semi-circles of old men on stools sucking hookahs. Dusk was falling now and many people were promenading, taking the air before it grew dark: chic women with Hermes shoulderbags strutted through the traffic, mobile phones held to their ears; little boys in baseball caps raced their bikes along the pavements; couples strolled hand in hand, or dropped into the seaside cafes.
I told my driver to pull in by a newsstand where copies of European newspapers and magazines were on sale. On the top rack, amid the latest issue of American
Vogue,
the London
Tatler
and a French edition of
Hello!,
a line of
Cosmopolitans
were on sale, one emblazoned with the banner headline: ARE YOU GETTING ENOUGH?
I got back into the car and we drove to the Hotel Cavalier in Muslim West Beirut. There I checked into a room and spent the next few hours in the bar recovering from the journey with the help of several glasses of cold Stella Artois and one of the most optimistic documents I have ever read. Its title:
Lebanon: The Promised Land of Tourism.
At nine that night I was still sitting in an alcove of the smoky hotel bar reading
Lebanon: The Promised Land of Tourism.
It really was the most remarkable publication. 'Lebanon is the ideal country,' it maintained, 'for those who desire to enjoy their holiday surrounded by a gay nature, between kind and hospitable people and in the solemn scenery of mountains or on the shores of the blue Mediterranean. It is also an ideal country for those who want to pass their holidays in picturesque cities, staying in touristic localities where feasts and manifestations of all kinds are held.'
It was these manifestations that worried me. What sort of manifestations? Massacres? Gang rape? The mass exhumation of corpses? Undaunted, the anonymous writer of
Lebanon: The Promised Land of Tourism
continued in the same vein: 'Among the countries that are proposed to the choice of the modern tourist, Lebanon, better than any other, allows one to make, apart from the first properly said voyage, a second voyage, equally touching and even richer in spiritual treasures - "a voyage in time". Actually, nobody by visiting Lebanon has the chance of feeling lonely! The hospitality of Lebanon has already become proverbial the world over
...'
Too right, I thought, as Brian Keenan and John McCarthy had discovered. And after all, who could possibly feel lonely when chained to Terry Waite, with the additional diversion of a truckload of grimly bearded Hezbollah for company?
'For,' continued the brochure, 'when the Lebanese utters the famous phrase
"ahlan wa sahlan"
("welcome") he squeezes it from his heart and uses his tongue only as a tool for expressing it. No wonder the fame of that worldwide saying that Lebanon is the Home of Goodwill! When you leave this Promised Land you will be carrying a gift that no one shall contest, which no custom officer will dare to charge you for
...'
What was coming next, I wondered? What was this unique duty-free item that it was possible to smuggle through the Lebanese customs? A crate of raw opium? A trunkful of powdered heroin? A ton of Semtex? None of these, apparently:
'. . . that gift, that will lie in the depth of your heart, is a feeling of all pervading gratitude and majesty, a deep rooted human feeling which only great civilisations can offer to their guests.'
I was still wading through great drifts of this slush when I looked up and to my surprise saw across the bar a friend whom I had met and very much liked on a previous assignment in the West Bank. Juan Carlos Gumucio is a huge, Bolivian-born journalist, formerly with Associated Press and
The Times,
now representing
El Pais.
Juan Carlos (or J.C., as he is known) is a heavily built, densely bearded giant with a great mop of wiry hair and a barrel for a belly. He has enormous hands, a loud laugh, and is utterly fearless: apart from Robert Fisk, he was the only Western journalist who dared to stay in Beirut to cover the dramas of the hostage crisis rather than fleeing before the Hezbollah kid-nap-gangs. He has survived, so he believes, partly because no one thinks of the Bolivians as an enemy, partly because no one believes the Bolivian government would be able to afford a ransom, and partly because with his swarthy appearance and thick mat of facial hair he is visually indistinguishable from a Hezbollah commander.
Juan Carlos had flown in from Amman an hour before, and rather than going to his room he had made straight for the bar where he was already demolishing a string of double vodkas and tearing into an outsized
shwarma.
He bought me a drink and after we had exchanged gossip about mutual friends in London and Jerusalem, I showed him
Lebanon: The Promised Land of Tourism,
through which he flicked with a growing smile.
'The Lebanese!' he chuckled through a mouthful of kebab. 'They're worse than the Greeks!'
While he read, I asked him what it was like living on in Beirut when all the other journalists had either fled or been taken hostage. 'Weren't you constantly terrified you would get kidnapped?' I asked, thinking of how shaken I had been by Beirut in peacetime. 'Imagine spending seven years in a basement, chained to a radiator.'
'I've been married three times,' replied J.C. without looking up from the brochure. 'It's not so different.' Suddenly he became animated: 'Willy! Look at this!'
He pointed to the back of the brochure. There, hidden away in the final pages, was a series of great double-spreads advertising nightclubs, 'massage parlours' and escort agencies. Busty Russian blondes wielded whips and fiddled with suspender belts; thick-lipped and slim-waisted Filipinas did their best to reveal charms only partially masked by the skimpiest of bikinis.
'The new Lebanon!' he said. 'There hasn't been anything like this here since 1971!
Habibi' -
he was talking to the barman now
- 'Habibi!
Get me a phone this minute!'
While the barman went off to find the mobile, J.C. turned to me. 'How this country has changed!' he said. 'When I first came here twenty years ago all anyone knew about Bolivia was that it was the country of Che Guevara. Now all they know is that it is the only other country in the world that makes quite so much money through narcotics.'
The phone arrived and J.C. dialled the number emblazoned below a picture of five smiling brunettes in matching pink leotards. After only three attempts he got through (quite a stroke of luck in a country whose telephone network was fairly recently so bombed-out that it became totally inoperable).
'Hello?' said J.C. 'Hello? Who is that? OK,
habibi,
listen. This is Juan Carlos speaking. I'm a big oil magnate from Texas and I want to know if you can provide me with - how to put it? - an escort service. No, I'm not coming anywhere: you send her to me. No: I'm not going to wait
...'