Fall-out
I don't know when the empty sites first become noticeable. But every village and town we pass contains at least one half-finished shell of a building, sometimes two or three. Each has been arrested mid-build.
We walk out on poured-concrete slabs, admiring the panoramic views. Sometimes there is a sprinkle of glass; steel rods bristling from an unfinished surface; a stack of concrete breezeblocks by a staircase to nowhere. Mostly there is only the wind.
What happened? we wonder.
From up here, the Mediterranean has an incredible, reality-defying depth, taking up half of everything we can see. The sun is a wide sheen of beaten copper.
In the isolated splendour of Qanat Bakish, on our way to a rented house with an infinity pool overlooking uninhabited swathes of bare hilltops, we pass what looks like it was once a hotel. The facade is an infestation of bullet-holes, as if a strange silverfish colony has wormed its way through the concrete.
We
take bets; wonder which disaster was responsible for this. Too recent
for the civil war, too far from the border for the 2006 Summer War.
"Or just target practice?" S suggests.
Our Lebanese friend L shrugs. Who knows? So many possible answers.
*
This is the pattern: sophisticated wealth, and then husks.In yet another wine-farm in the Bekaa Valley, we sit on stylish furniture made from pallets, glasses in hand, with a view over the tidy acres of Merwah and Syrah and Cabernet Sauvignon, the Cedar forests rising beyond, and wonder how this could be the same country: sea and mountains, beach and snow, dust and forest, poor and extravagant both.
*
One afternoon, we take a taxi out to the point on the map that says Port Explosion Memorial, and find ourselves on the concreted side of a vast highway.
The "memorial" is a warp of rusted metal, separated from us by a retaining wall, and beyond it we can see the half-decayed storage silos, still arrested mid-fall. They stand in the part of the port that is sealed off to casual visitors, a warren of warehouses and naval stations and forklifts.
"What now?" I shout at S, over the sound of the passing cars.
"What?" he shouts back.
The noise of the traffic is furious and the sun's heat so physical a weight that I want to crouch down on the bare footpath and pant until someone - anyone - can shovel me into a cool dark car and bear me away. It's only because I do bend forward that I notice the tiny plaques: squares of tin set into the highway shoulder at about knee height.
Each is etched with a name and a photo. The details have been eroded by light and exhaust fumes, but they continue, these tiny memorials, all the way along that desolate, sun-blasted highway shoulder, name after name after name, until we can escape into the cool shadow of a multistory carpark.
*
Hezbollah owns that port, more than one person told me.
It's certainly true that the armed group generate funds through a complicated network of both legal and illegal trades. It's also true that Beirut Port - handed over to a "temporary" public commission in 1990, which is still running it more than thirty years later - has long been a convenient hub for arms smuggling and money laundering networks. An estimated $1 billion in customs fees vanish from the books each year. The ammonium nitrate that exploded in August 2020 was itself owned by an impenetrable web of shell companies, secretive off-shore accounts, mail-forwarding services, and sanctioned individuals.
Before the blast, the only cargo scanner at the port had been out of service for more than a year.
*
At the Sursock Museum, an art historian delighted to have an interested ear monopolises us for half an hour as she enumerates which aspects of the building's architecture she loves most, opening exquisite leather-tooled shutters to explain how there used to be a garden beyond, before it was removed to make room for yet more art.
In a section about the history of the museum itself, there is a set of CCTV footage. The screen shows ten, twenty, thirty seconds, more, of empty rooms caught at a peculiar angle, the bottom half of people's bodies visible as they walk into and out of the camera's reach. Then at 18:08 there is a judder; the rooms seem to ripple. The extraordinary speed of the blast makes it almost impossible to catch: windows shatter, furniture splits; followed by minutes and minutes of footage that unspool afterwards, the air so thick nothing is visible.
"It's not dust," the historian says. "I thought so too, the first time I saw it. It's glass."
I go back and watch it again. And again.
***
We walk a lot that evening. (A partial inventory of what is open at 10 o'clock on a Monday night in Beirut: four money-exchange-cum-mobile-phone stores, two men's hairdressers, a handbag shop, a nail salon, and the usual plethora of convenience stores and juice-bars and fried chicken outlets.)
The Sursock family were Greek Orthodox "industrialists", which means they were well-placed enough to buy and sell vast quantities of commodities: grain, silk, and - famously - property.
In the 1870s, among other acquisitions, they took the fertile Jezreel Valley (the Marj ibn Amir) from the Ottoman empire as security for a loan. The local Bedouins were dispossessed; tenant farmers paid rent to their new landlords. The Sursocks never lived there. In the 1920s, when the British subsumed this part of the fallen empire, the Sursocks sold the valley and other lands - more than 80,000 acres in all - the American Zion Commonwealth. Helpfully, the British rewrote the land laws, removing any right to remain for the Palestinian farmers living there. British police enforced the evictions.
On Armenian Street we stop in front of a petrol station whose enormous roof has slid to the ground at a jaunty angle. The corpses of two cars lie under one corner.
***
There are other kinds of fall-out, too, some not so immediately visible.
In Saidon, after sunset, the manager at a seaside restaurant introduces himself to us as we prepare to leave. He shows us the arched rooms, the meticulously preserved details from when the building was once a private mosque. "I am Palestinian," he explains when we ask him about himself. "Born in Lebanon, my father also born in Lebanon, my mother is Lebanese. But I am not allowed to be a citizen, cannot buy property, can not work in many jobs. When I go to university for interviews they will tell you, oh you, well you wait, you wait..."
Our host that night is a professor at the town's university, and we talk late into the night about the Palestinian camps in Saidon. They are not what one thinks of when one hears "camps", Ali explains, more like a series of multi-storey, ramshackle apartment buildings crammed tightly together. The people there are poor and cannot easily leave, despite having first arrived there in 1948, and so life there is like a ghetto anywhere. Two weeks before, a stray bullet from warring groups there closed down Sidon for weeks, so that we were in fact lucky (read: blissfully ignorant) to have arrived after that, Ali added. Not 30 minutes drive away, I had watched local women stripping down to bikinis and oiling themselves, but here there had been public arguments over women being on the beach without full coverings.
Ali has traveled, and never drank alcohol until he started doing business in Kyrgyzstan. He tells us of visiting Georgia and Bali and Spain, his views on Hezbollah, his journalist sister's banishment to the US for fear of being arrested if she returns - a fact he seems to take equably.
"What she writes is not really facts, it's opinions. You also have laws against that in Germany, right?"
No, we tell him, no, and he looks at us in surprise.
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