Stigmata la guerre

First published in 2003 in Oman Today

The Lebanese are a beautiful race, but I wish they would leave their noses alone. Much of Dubai's Lebanese population considers "getting the nose done" mandatory and recommends clinics with the nonchalance of sharing hairdressers. Commanding Arab nasal fleets are reduced to rows of identical, insipid stubs, each creating a perfect, perfectly forgettable face.

The Lebanese girl next to me has left her nose alone and she is unforgettably beautiful. A group of us are sitting in a chic Italian part-loft-part-lounge awaiting the arrival of our pasta lunches. The girl is talking about Beirut – oh, did I mention we were in Beirut? – and I can hear the pride ring in every sentence. It gets especially resonant when she sums up Beirut's standard travel-brochure body copy: "In Beirut you can ski in the mountains and half-an-hour later be down on the beach sunbathing in your swimsuit."

Ambivalent energy
A day later I was in those mountains, not skiing down, but driving up the Chouf Mountain in the then-new Mini Cooper. BMW had chosen Beirut for the Middle East launch of this ultra-chic automobile for reasons I found murky until I absorbed a bit of Beirut's energy.

As I raced past little towns with pretty churches, terraced mountainsides and views of springs and lush valleys, I kept asking myself, "Slow down for the scenery or speed up for the next curve?" I realised later, this is a question Beirut seems to ask of itself many times each day – with every crane hoist and every dressed-to-kill outing on the town. There is, on its streets and in its nightlife, the curious tug-of-war energy of the rider who has just got back on the horse that threw her. The determination of her forward motion is relentless, but watchers can tell she is still shaken and hurting. Over a decade after the last battle, the good times are enjoyed with such fervour you get the impression they still feel hard won.

The cranes of Beirut are working overtime trying to forget the past, but it is not easy when the reminders of old brutality are everywhere. The blasted concrete-and-plaster hulks of Beirut's memory are fearsome. Building walls display bullet holes by the thousand, and there's something unforgiving – even terrifying – about mossy 10-year-old bullet holes. Then suddenly, hope shines through. Five storeys up an impossible building (a structure that looks as if I could sneeze to non-existence) is a defiant show of life: a line of clothes hung out to dry.

Walking through Beirut's pretty central district, I come across another modern-day ruin, but this time of a once-beautiful house. I lift my camera, but the policeman I've just passed calls out and waves a stern 'no'.

"No photographs?" I ask in appalling Arabic.

He points at the ruined house and shakes his head. I point questioningly at the striking new mosque adjoining and he smiles and gives me a thumbs up. Lifting the camera and pressing the shutter release, I join in the celebration of Beirut's present and the suppression of its past.

Many wounds
That evening I meet Shafeek, the Beirut journalist in his twenties with a pronounced stutter and a distracted, almost disturbed, manner. Our group walks from bar to restaurant in the fashionable Hamra area, alive with pretty young people making a night of it. I fall in step with Shafeek and we begin a conversation. He tells me he has lived in Beirut all his life and describes how he used to be driven to school with shells flying overhead in a deadly game of call-and-answer between the mountain hideouts and the city below. Shafeek's stutter disappears when he describes the sudden onset of his affliction: he was six years old, he'd lost many friends to explosions, and one day a shell crashed into the ground right next to him. Though it failed to explode, its damage was done. The wounds of war are many.

The next day, I was in a tour van and delighted to be among the snow-capped peaks that had been the bounds of Beirut, and seemingly, imagination. It was my guide who slapped me with reality. We were 1,500m up in the mountains, about to head down into the Bekaa Valley when she pointed at snowy Mount Hermon in the not-so-distant distance and said, "Just beyond that is Golan – occupied by Israel". A shiver frizzed up and down my spine simply at being within mentioning distance of a region I've heard in the news for so many years.

Down in the Bekaa valley we visited the site of Lebanon's 'Taj Mahal' photograph – except that this country's iconic, must-photograph monument is the group of six 20m-high columns of the temple of Jupiter, set – luckily for us – against a sky of exceptional cut, clarity and colour. The scale and power of the ruins at Baalbek is ironic. I'd just left a city that was busy building, not because it wanted to, but because it had to. I was now at a Roman site whose foundations were built using stones the size of buses, simply because they could be. An awful lot of time and coerced, unpaid labour indulged that little excess.

Wild contrast
Further along the valley in Anjar, I enjoyed what was to me, the wildly contrasting sight of ancient ruins set against snowy mountains. And a little later that morning, we stopped at one of Lebanon's famous wineries – Chateau Ksara. Sipping on a selection at the tasting session, I barely know a bouquet from a bunch of flowers, but can still tell that Lebanon makes some excellent wine. But Lebanon is, in actuality, the land of milk. The name 'Lebanon' is derived from the Arabic word 'laban' meaning milk – an etymological tribute to the snowy mountains that dominate this tiny land.

But over 50 per cent of Lebanon's people live outside of their beautiful country. Most of the expatriates I've met in Dubai cling tightly to the memory of the mountains, knowing that little else of their past lives remains unchanged. However, Beirut's war on the bad memories is in full force and it is fighting hard to regain its former title: 'The Paris of the Middle East'. In frenetic rebuilding and relocating, it is uncomfortably easy to lose the essence. The mandatory Lebanese nose job should not, must not, become a metaphor for deep cultural loss. GR

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