The Wet and the Dry (2 page)

I had paid no heed to the images of Osama bin Laden or the long cool stares from the boys in white. I asked the question crudely but innocently. As soon as I had uttered it, I was conscious of the mistake, the potentially fatal faux pas. It was too late, of course, to back up or even run. So I had to weather the little storm that was bound to come down upon me. The boys, however, surprised me. They expressed no outrage or even annoyance at the question. Instead, they did something surprising. They invited me to a café to have a coffee and “discuss” the matter. They might be able to make me see why my question was, if not absurd (given my uncleanness), then at least unnecessary if one took the longer view.

Did I not see, they argued once we were at the café, the disasters that alcohol visited upon the Western world? It was a plague, sickness of the soul. But their reasons for agreeing with the Koran’s prohibition of alcohol were not merely rigid or rote; they were, I found, quite nimbly considered. The terrible thing about drink, they said gravely, agreeing with one another, was
that it took one out of one’s normal consciousness. It therefore falsified every human relationship, every moment of consciousness. It falsified one’s relationship to God as well. One day, they mused, the government would close down all the bars, and the capital would be beautiful again. It would be purified. “But still,” I suggested, “you’d like to go there before it is purified? That would be normal.”

These reedy boys in their white gear shifted on the balls of their feet, and suddenly we were all staring sheepishly at the ground, where a water bug waddled between the cigarette butts and the bottle tops. Who could speak of desires in a café flooded with the light of neon rods, in hearing of the mosque loudspeakers?

Our conversation broke off right there at the critical point, but I remembered it clearly as I was drinking that night in Milan and watching the Arab families with their bottles of Perrier. I was wet while they were dry, and with those boys it had been the same. I particularly remembered that phrase “a sickness of the soul,” because the more I thought it, the more I was unable to disagree with it, though nor could I agree with it.

The two states of wetness and dryness: one balances between them. Perhaps every drinker dreams of his own prohibition, and every Muslim or Christian teetotaler dreams of a drink at the end of the rainbow. One cannot say. Certainly all things are dialectical, I thought as I went walking around Solo, hoping in some dark way that I might eventually stumble across that most delightful phenomenon, a Muslim alcoholic. (I had a soft spot not just for Muslim alcoholics but for the very idea of them. A Muslim alcoholic gives me hope that the human race can be saved.)

I went through a night market where various animals were being cut up, past cafés where men sat without women, slouched at tables of soft drinks and cans of prepared tea called Tea Pot. There was an out-of-joint, off-putting delicacy about the men. They stirred glasses of litchi juice and ate off oval plastic plates with one hand, their eyes turned on the unclean foreigner. One quickly feels paranoid.

The non-Muslim among Muslims is placed inside a unique mood. There is something pure about it, something desirable, and at the same time it grates. Was it, at this moment in Solo, the knowledge that every person there was sober and always would be?

Six hundred thousand people, I kept thinking, and not a single bar. It seemed like a recipe for madness. This was where Abu Bakar Bashir ran his Al-Mukmin boardinghouse, or
pesantren
, a spiritual home of the three men executed for the Bali bombings in 2008. It was the center for Jemaah Islamiyah, Indonesia’s Islamic terror network. One of those men, Imam Samudra, gave an interview to CNN just before his execution by firing squad, during which he explained in broken English that he had learned to make bombs on the Internet and that he had been correct to massacre drinkers in bars because of the deaths incurred by “commander Bush.” Another of them, Amrozi, said in the same interview that the pictures of the charred bodies produced no emotion in him whatsoever. They were, he said, “Kafirs, non-Muslims.” Solo was his city, and I supposed he must have known these streets well.

The unease I felt as I went farther and farther into the night markets was also the discomfort of being dry for days on end,
and I remembered it well as I sat at the Milan Town House drinking my gin and tonic and other things and listening to the crowds at the tables below, the beautiful noise of drinkers massed together under a single roof. It is only when you are surrounded by teetotalers that you realize how indebted you are to the chemistries of alcohol.

The waiter came over and asked me for the umpteenth time how I liked my gin and tonic (I had decided to waltz on with Madame Geneva), and I sank into that dim music of ice cubes and that smell of frozen grass as he mixed the drink for me. Forty euros for a gin and tonic: it seemed a little stiff, and is there a
good
gin and tonic that is thirty euros better than a bad one? I swirled the ice and tipped the glass to see the oily emulsion on the liquid’s surface. So much better than a Bellini or a dreaded
sgroppino
, that Venetian mix of sorbet and vodka that all the bars in Milan seemed to have that summer. The noble “g and t” is truly a
cocktail di meditazione
. A product of India and the Raj, of the British and tropical heat and its diseases (the quinine in tonic was used to treat malaria), this simple drink is the only one I can consume quickly, the only one in which the ice does not intrude and numb.

I was now so becalmed that I could not really stand up, and I contemplated—as if from afar—the possibility of an evening spent entirely seated. The Arab matriarch glanced over at me, and I could see what she was thinking. To my surprise, however, she suddenly raised her glass of water and smiled. She seemed
to know that I was not quite finished yet, or even finished at all, because one can never be finished entirely. One drinks from birth to death, unthinking. I raised my gin and tonic, therefore, and said, “Inshallah.” Blasphemy, certainly, but her husband didn’t hear.

A Glass of Arak in Beirut

                                  
At Le Bristol, as soon as I am
alone and the lights have come up, I order a vodka martini shaken and chilled with a canned olive speared on a stick—being shaken, in the Bond manner, the drink is actually less alcoholic in its effects because more of the ice passes into the concoction. I am resolutely solitary at the hotel bar at ten past six, and the international riffraff have not yet descended upon its stools. It is
l’heure du cocktail
, and I am content. The birds are still loud on Marie Curie and nearby Al Hussein, and as yet there are no hookers strolling the carpets. I have been drinking all afternoon in my room, but after a nap and a cold bath, I have subdued the outward effects, and my hand is not shaking at all. I am alone, I think to myself, on my little lake of slightly gelatinous vodka. I am alone, and no one can touch me. I am
haraam
.
^*

I like the Bristol, which lies so close to the Druze cemetery of Beirut; I occasionally wander there if no one has picked me up or a conversation has not dragged me down. The Druze drink alcohol, and no disrespect is possible. I also like the hour of ten past six. When I touch the rim of the night’s first glass at six ten, I feel like Alexander the Great, who speared his insolent friend Cleitus during a drinking party.

The Bristol’s bar is half hidden in that anxious lobby where men in dubious suits eat honeyed cakes all day long. It is an exercise in discretion. The businessmen who sit here late at night do so with tact, because not all of them are Christians. In Lebanon, which is still 40 percent Christian, alcohol is legal and enjoyed widely. I sit at the end of the bar, and my second vodka martini comes down to me on its paper serviette, with the olive bobbing on the side. Salty like cold seawater at the bottom of an oyster, the drink strikes you as sinister and cool and satisfying to the nerves, because it takes a certain nerve to drink it. Out in the street, beyond the revolving glass doors, a soldier stands with an automatic weapon staring at nothing. It is truly time for a distillate. Beer and wine are for friends, but distillations are for the drinker who is alone. I sit here watching the clock, and the barman watches me in turn, and it seems we are both waiting for something to happen.

At dusk the first addicts drift into the lobby: ill-knotted ties and self-conscious Italian shoes who grow focused under the chandeliers as they head for the bar. Soon there is that syrupy commotion of the bar stirring to life as light fades out of the outer
world. Subtle intoxications take over. I look over the bottles of Gordon’s and Black Label and Suntory and Royal Stag, the brand names ever prevalent in the East, and then at the tongs idling in an ice bucket and the Picard ashtrays and the barman’s geometric black tie. How universal in its format the bar has become. It is like a church whose outposts are governed by a few handy principles. The stool, the mirror, the glasses hanging above by their stems, the beer mats and the wallpapers that have been chosen from suppliers to morticians. Everywhere in the world these shrines have emerged, bringing blighted happiness even to the inland towns of Papua, and everywhere they exist the cult of intoxication advertises itself with jukebox music and screens filled with faraway football games and the bottled, fancy edibles all derived from the Arab alchemists and chemists who eight hundred years ago gave us
al-kohl
—a sublimation of the mineral stibnite designed to form antimony sulfide, a fine powder that was then used as an antiseptic and as an eyeliner. Was it the fineness of powdered kohl that suggested the fineness of distilled alcohol, as some lexicographers claim? Or was it the way the “spirit” of stibnite was sublimated into that powder? Either way, in these dens we spend much of our time forgetting what we are. I light a cigarette and wonder if it is still allowed—even here in Beirut—and then I melt like a raindrop into the vodka martini itself. Vodka and smoke go well together, they seem to have been conjured out of the same essence.

The Arabs drinking next to me ask me the usual questions to which the solitary traveler is routinely subjected. I say I am taking a few months off to travel and wander, drinking my way
across the Islamic world to see whether I can dry myself out, cure myself of a bout of alcoholic excess. It is a personal crisis, a private curiosity. It might end up being a few years.

“Très bien,”
they nod, with a kind of resigned disgust.

But what is the point of that?

I say I am curious to see how nondrinkers live. Perhaps they have something to teach me.

“Vous êtes donc un alcoolique?”

“En quelque sorte,”
I say. “It’s my nature.”

Well, they say, you can get a drink in most Islamic countries. Not, of course, in Saudi Arabia. But the psychological context is going to be very different. I say that it is precisely this context that interests me. For someone who has spent his whole life submerged in alcohol, the change of context will be illuminating.

“Illuminating?” they say.

The subject is quietly dropped. It is difficult to say if they are Sunnis or Maronites or Druze, and it is even possible that they might be Shia. They think I am a fool and a fraud, or just a drinker, and they are right. Yet there is something about vodka, I think as they chatter away; there is something about vodka that makes me indifferent and supreme.

I walk down Rome when it is quiet, past Michel Chiha and on down toward the sea, which can feel like an open brightness behind the walls of houses with their weedy trees and balconies sprouting with houseplants. Omar Daouk, and then a shortcut down through Dabbous. The knot of streets behind the Radisson,
where I come for a fresh watermelon juice and a pipe when the booze has wrung me out and I need a breather. There is another hotel here in Ain el Mreisseh that I sometime stay in, the musty Bay View, where one can eat hard-boiled eggs and
labneh
in the morning looking out over the sea.