Border excursion
Even when they take our passports away, it still seems like a joke. Number, number, one of them says in English, and we hold up our hands helplessly. What number? we ask.
They type something into Google Translate, and show us the result: Where is your permit number?
Permit? we repeat, foolishly.It's when they gesture for us to get out of the vehicle that we first start to worry. I try desperately to remember some of my Arabic, but it is all gone, squandered somewhere between Aden and Berlin, and now they are making it very clear that we need to get out and follow them.
"You stay inside," S says. "Try calling her."
I scroll frantically through my phone contacts, looking for Rose, the owner of an olive oil business in the small southern town of Deir Mimas, who we have driven an hour inland to visit and who is, according to our navigation app, now only 6 minutes away from us.
S is gone for a long time. "Rose," I say, when she picks up, "we are at a checkpoint and they are asking about permits."
"I thought you said you were staying in the area," she says.
"We are," I say. I stare at the red-and-white painted concrete barriers all around
the car ("sponsored by BMA Paints" reads a small legend, cheerfully). "We're staying in Saida. In the area, meaning Saida. Close enough to drive."
"You don't have a permit?" Rose asks.
"We didn't know we needed one," I say, feeling even more foolish.
*
From the moment we had first driven our hired car out of Beirut Airport, we had encountered checkpoints manned by the Lebanese Army. Whether blocking three lanes on the city highways or straddling narrow mountain roads, they had all looked alike, with their reinforced lookouts and precast concrete barriers and red and white painted stripes. One had even been in the middle of a roundabout.
No one had ever asked for our passports.
After a long wait, Stefan re-emerges. Rose speaks to the guards while I hold out my phone, and I can tell just from the tone of their voices what the outcome will be.
"If I had a little bit more notice," Rose says. "I could get you on the list. But it is Sunday, and late, and the commander is not answering his phone."
"That's alright," I tell her. We get back in the car. "I guess we're very close to the border," I say, to S.
"But we've been near the border lots of times before."
"The Israeli border," I say.
He squints at the far hills, but there is nothing to see. As we leave, the youngest guard comes out to say goodbye. "Germany?" he says.
"Germany," S confirms. "Berlin."
"Me go to Berlin too," the guard says, hopefully, and he keeps looking after us as we drive away. We buy three mangoes at a roadside stall with the handful of Arabic words that seem to be all I can recall.
*
I had first tasted Rose's oil in a kitchen in Berlin, more than a year before. It was so good that we had looked her up when we had arrived in Beirut. Sure, she had said over Whatsapp - the only form of communication any business in Lebanon seems to use - you are welcome.
We had been trying, in the weeks before, to find other oils to taste. The groves were everywhere - all over the terraced mountainsides, planted close along the twisted roads. Our host in one small village had given us an amphora filled from his family's trees. "Everyone in Lebanon makes their own oil," he said.
The next morning, we were eating fresh manakeesh at a cafe in that same village when a man came in with his friends and casually put his automatic weapon on the table.
*
Everywhere we have gone we have seen German cars, most from the 80s or 70s or 60s. There are Daimlers and Cadillacs and Chevrolets, too, but mostly there are Mercedes-Benzs. Mercedes-Benz Beetles and Mercedes-Benz roadsters and Mercedes-Benz coupés and Mercedes-Benz twin-cab trucks. Panel-beaten and rust-eaten; bald-tired and with one window sticking. On every road and in every small village.
In the Qadisha valley there is a rusted 1970s Mercedes-Benz fire-engine standing at the roadside, which at first we take to be a wreck. But there is a pipe attached to its belly to pump in water.
On the highway entrance to Tripolis, S pulls over on the shoulder to photograph a row of flat-nosed Mercedes-Benz trucks for sale.
"This is unbelieveable," he says. "These are fifty - sixty! - years old. They are museum-pieces. But here they're still running."
Not all of them are ruins. There is polished and waxed bodywork, glistening chrome. When we stop at a family-owned workshop to repair a small piece of our rental car's undercarriage, the owner become excited on hearing where S is from and pulls out his phone to show us photographs of an original 1952 split-paned VW Beetle.
"I am restoring it," he tells us. "Hard to find the original parts. But better that way."
At the home of the Joumblatts in Moukhtara, there is - among the astrolabes and tall plane trees and freshwater canal running through the fine marble - a dusty 8-cylinder Mercedes Benz 770 standing behind a display window. A small notice reads: The same model used by Adolf Hitler.
I blink. "Does that say...?"
"A disturbing amount of people salute when they find out I'm German," S says. "You know," he adds, when I look blank, and sketches out the Heil Hitler.
"No," I say. "What. Really?"
*
This is the part where I have to tell you that we visited the Hezbollah museum. S was curious; I suppose I was too. We paid our $2 at the gate and a friendly guide explained the layout to us in perfect English.
There was a black-and-white propaganda reel with triumphal music on loop. There was a set of buckled Israeli tanks and missiles with placards naming the dates and numbers killed. There were Israeli Defence Forces helmets displayed on sticks.
"I can't take this," I say. But we don't say anything to the friendly guide. We do not say anything to the families there with their children, pacing the bunker tunnels and buying keychains at the gift-store. We nod and smile and leave without a single uncomfortable question, because none of this was directed at us, and I think about that now still.
*
A day later, we return to the checkpoint and the bored soldiers, and this time, we make it through. The road beyond looks no different. There is a petrol station; a small roadside cafe with plastic chairs. The village of Deir Mimas itself is unremarkable.
Rose is in a hurry when we finally locate her. She shows us through the small settling room, each tank labelled with a farmer's name, then the filtration process she applies to remove all the remaining sediment. She tells us about the 800- year old olive trees that ring the village, some of them even older. "We call them milennials," she says. "There has been oil made here since before history."
When we ask to buy a bottle, she makes a face. "It's too early in the season," she explains. "We are sold out since March."
"No oil?" we ask.
"No oil," she says.
We look at her in disbelief.
On the way out, we stop at the village's communal oil mill, which we had passed on the way in. The men there encourage us to look at all the parts, as we nod knowledgeably, trying to guess at the processes, only a handful of shared English and Arabic words between us.
"From where?" asks the foreman, pointing at S.
"Germany," S says.
"German!" the man cries, with delight, and we flinch, expecting the worst. "Very good, German!" But he spreads his arms wide and begins to gesture to each part of the milling machinery in turn. "German! German! German!"
We leave with a 1-litre plastic water-bottle filled with oil, our palms greasy, the men waving us merrily away.
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