He slammed the phone down. 'Damn it! Fucking "Green-sleeves"! They've put me on hold.'
With the eye of a connoisseur, J.C. flicked through the pages of the brochure, finally settling on a pouting black girl lying back on a tigerskin, one long ebony leg raised in the air, the other placed so that her big toe rested on the tiger's outstretched tongue; below was the caption: 'I'm Pussy Cat and you're my Tiger. Come on big boy: make my day.'
Juan Carlos picked up the phone again. 'Right,' he said.
'That
looks like what we're after.'
After four or five attempts, he again got through.
'Hello? That's the manager? OK, listen here
habibi.
This is Juan Carlos. I'm a big diamond millionaire from Amsterdam. I've just had a long flight and need some
..
. attention. Can you provide me with some pretty female company tonight, please? Yes: Pussy Cat would do nicely. HOW MUCH? Is that dollars or Lebanese pounds? You must be joking. Look,
habibi,
inflation isn't that bad: I could fly in my girlfriend for less. I'll be back in touch. Thank you very much.'
He put the phone down and turned to me. 'Unbelievable. I can't believe what's happened while I've been away. And to think I was planning on leaving this country
...'
Beirut,
28
September
It took a while to track down the two men who, I felt, would be best able to make some sense for me of the complexities of Lebanon. Both were the authors of exceptional books on the recent conflict. One was a historian, Kemal Salibi of the American University of Beirut, author of
A House of Many Mansions,
a brilliant debunking of the myths in Lebanese history which had led to and exacerbated the conflict. The other was the great award-winning foreign correspondent Robert Fisk of the
Independent,
author of
Pity the Nation,
much the best account of the 1982 Israeli invasion yet published.
Professor Salibi was easily accessible, but Fisk proved a more difficult man to pin down. He has always tended to keep aloof from his journalistic colleagues, and even Juan Carlos, who appears frequently in
Pity the Nation,
had not seen him for months and did not have an up-to-date number for him. He could give me no better lead than suggesting I try ringing the
Independent
foreign desk. Amazingly, the
Independent
also had no address for him, apparently part of the elaborate security precautions Fisk practises which have so far saved him from assassination or kidnapping. The paper did, however, have the number of a satellite phone in New York which, they said, would somehow beam through to Fisk in Beirut.
So it was that I finally got hold of Fisk - who turned out to be living less than half a mile from my hotel - via tens of thousands of miles of cables to New York then back again to Beirut bounced off some satellite. By this route I offered to take him out to lunch. He accepted, suggesting an Italian place in a Druze area near the seafront.
I had arranged to see Professor Salibi that same morning in his office at the American University, which lay only a short walk away from my hotel, and I walked over there after breakfast.
For an institution whose campus had been under siege for a year, whose main hall had been destroyed by a car bomb, whose acting president and librarian had both been kidnapped by Islamic Jihad, another of whose presidents had been killed and many of whose students had been maimed, murdered and wounded, the American University of Beirut looked remarkably like any other university the world over. The Pizza Hut at the gates was full of undergraduates lounging around, making eyes at each other and spooning mountains of ice-cream into each other's mouths. Noticeboards in the porter's lodge advertised student raves alongside the rather more staid option of a forthcoming piano recital. Undergraduates, late for lectures, ran across lawns that had recently supported batteries of anti-aircraft guns. Lecturers, books in hand, walked along the cinder paths chatting to pretty female students whose fathers and brothers had, only months earlier, no doubt been blazing away at each other in the alleys outside.
Salibi had just finished teaching a small class of history students when
I
walked into his rooms; a sketch map of the Middle East was still chalked up on the blackboard above his seat. We shook hands and
I
said how surprised
I
was to see the university looking so normal after all it had gone through in the war. The Professor smiled. 'Thankfully we are a very forgetful culture,' he said, pulling out a chair and indicating that
I
should sit. 'Those who committed the worst crimes and atrocities have long been forgiven. Few people in Lebanon can afford to bear grudges for too long. Who remembers Sabra and Chatila? At the time it was terrible: who could ever forgive mass murder like that? But twelve years later even the unfortunate Palestinians have probably forgotten and forgiven.'
I
asked the Professor how the war had affected him personally.
'I
was driven out of the city altogether,' he replied with a smile.
'By the shelling?'
'No, no.
I
survived the bombardment.
I
was driven out by a death threat from the Hezbollah. I had to go to Amman. That's where
I
put together
A House of Many Mansions.
It
was written from memory, without a single reference book. You see, I lost all my books in the bombardment.' 'Your house was destroyed?'
"We suffered twenty-six direct hits. I was in the basement at the time. It was a lovely old Ottoman house, built by my greatgrandfather: very beautiful. But by the time it was finished the house was uninhabitable.'
The Professor offered me coffee, and as he fussed around with the kettle he talked quite calmly about the destruction of everything he had owned, as if describing some minor inconvenience: a blown fuse, or a broken lightbulb.
'We heard the shelling start and I said it would be a rough night. So we all began to move into the basement, taking all our things with us. Then the three windows above where the children were playing collapsed inwards: glass flew everywhere, but somehow no one was hurt. We ran downstairs after that, with a bottle of whisky and a candle.
'Whenever a shell fell the candle would be blown out. It was very frightening: so frightening that I thought I couldn't go on. After a while you begin to feel sure that the next shell will get you, that you can't possibly survive. You just hope it won't be too painful. Then oblivion sets in. There's a mechanism in the human mind which obliterates terrible memories. I sometimes wonder now whether it really happened.'
'It can't have left you with very warm feelings towards the Palestinians.'
'It wasn't the Palestinians who shelled us,' said the Professor. 'It was the Maronites, the Phalange. Like many Christians who found themselves on the wrong side of the Green Line, I carried on living in Muslim West Beirut where I always had lived. I was unharmed until Amin Gemayel turned his guns on us and began randomly shelling West Beirut. I never approved of the Phalange. They were intolerable. They considered that Lebanese of Christian origin should have rights which Lebanese of non-Christian origin did not have. In a sense it was a racist doctrine. Luckily their policies ended in the failure they richly deserved.'
'So you think the Christians lost the war?'
'There is a widespread feeling that they did. The Phalange wanted one of two things: either to have political control over the whole of Lebanon, or to retreat to the north and partition the country so that they could at least have control over a Christian enclave. They lost both those battles. They couldn't retain unconditional control over the whole country, nor could they create a canton all to themselves. On the other hand they emerged from the war with their share of power virtually undiminished, and in one way came out unequivocally the winners.'
'What do you mean?'
'Before the war the whole idea of Lebanon was in question. It was adamantly rejected by almost everyone except the Maronites, who were believed to have cooked up the idea in collusion with the French. But the war changed all that. There is now hardly a single person in this country who does not have a strong sense of Lebanese identity. They might be Lebanese with Hezbollah sympathies, or Lebanese who want to cooperate with Syria, or Lebanese who think that to cooperate with Syria is anathema. But they have no doubt of their Lebanese identity. So in a way you could say that the Christians won their point.'
'And yet despite this,' I said, 'the Christians are apparently still emigrating from here
en masse.'
'True. But the reason they are leaving is no longer because they are threatened, or because their country is going to disappear. It is because - how to put it? - they are weary. There is a feeling of
fin de race
amongst Christians all over the Middle East, a feeling that fourteen centuries of having all the time to be smart, to be ahead of the others, is long enough. The Arab Christians tend to be intelligent, well qualified, highly educated people. Now they just want to go somewhere else, make some money and relax. I can understand it. There is discrimination - sometimes very subtle - against them in almost all Middle Eastern countries. Sometimes when I am with Arab scholars there will be sly digs against Arabs who are not Muslims, doubts about how Arab they are, how patriotic they may be.'
'And do you think it really matters if the Christians do leave?'
'It is a very serious matter,' said Salibi. 'Each time a Christian goes, no other Christian comes to fill his place, and that is a very bad thing for the Arab world. It is the Christian Arabs who keep the Arab world "Arab" rather than "Muslim". It is the Christian Arabs who show that Arabs and Muslims are two different things, that not all Muslims are Arabs and not all Arabs are Muslims. You see, many Muslims regard Arab history as having little meaning by itself, outside the context of Islam. In that sense we are the Arab world's guarantee of secularism.'
Salibi leant forward on his desk. 'Since the nineteenth century the Christian Arabs have played a vital role in defining a secular Arab cultural identity. It is no coincidence that most of the founders of secular Arab nationalism were Christians: Michel Aflaq, who founded the Ba'ath Party; George Antonius, who wrote
The Arab Awakening.
If the Christian Arabs continue to emigrate, the Arabs will be in a much more difficult position to defend the Arab world against Islamism.'
'But isn't that battle already being lost?'