9

The End of Something

ESTRAGON:	I can’t go on like this.
VLADIMIR:	That’s what you think.
ESTRAGON:	If we parted? That might be better for us.
VLADIMIR:	We’ll hang ourselves tomorrow. (Pause.)Unless Godot comes.
ESTRAGON:	And if he comes?
VLADIMIR:	We’ll be saved.
		—Samuel Beckett, WAITING FOR GODOT

A man in a brown suit killed himself in the parking lot outside our front door one morning in November 1983, about a month after the Marine headquarters was blown up. Dave Zucchino’s little girl Adrien was the first to spot him from their balcony, which was just below ours. Adrien was pointing at him through the balcony railings when her mother came along and noticed the corpse. Some of the other neighbors said afterward that the man in the brown suit had been wandering around our parking lot for a while, drinking from a can of poison marked with a skull and crossbones. In his other hand he was holding a plastic bag. As he keeled over and went into convulsions, the neighbors watched from afar. Eventually, someone called the police. When Beirut’s finest arrived about forty minutes later, the man’s eyeballs had rolled up into his head and his body was already cold. The police always preferred it that way: fewer witnesses to interview, less paperwork. When the police opened the plastic bag the man was carrying, they found it stuffed with hundreds and hundreds of Lebanese pounds. After a brief discussion, they took the money and left the man. A little while later they returned with the coroner. He was supposed to take a picture of the corpse, but his camera kept jamming. Finally, one of the neighbors mercifully threw a pink sheet over the man in the brown suit, and a while later an ambulance carted him away.

Mike the barber, whose shop was around the corner and who dispensed free philosophy with his crewcuts, told me later that this was the third person to kill himself in my parking lot overlooking the sea. When I asked him why, he just shrugged and said, “They like the view.”

This gruesome and absurd doorstep suicide symbolized for me the mood of Beirut at the end of 1983 and in early 1984—a mood of dashed hopes and utter desperation. The Marines had come to Beirut to project strength, presence, security, and calm, while the Lebanese resolved their differences and rebuilt their nation. But all these plans were made a mockery by the smiling suicidal driver who slammed his truck into the Marine compound and by the intercommunal war that began to rage out of control in the Shouf. After all the Lebanese had been through, after all the hopes they had pinned on America, it was devastating for them to discover that their fling with radicalism wasn’t over, after all. The beards and jeans and the untamed tribal passions had not disappeared; they had only been in hibernation, waiting for the American season to pass.

No one had to tell the Lebanese that the American season was over; they could feel it in their bones. Around this time, I went to see my favorite political analyst in Beirut, Riyad Hijal, for a reading on the situation. Hijal never studied political science; in fact, he never studied much of anything. He sold window glass, and in Beirut he was the next best thing to a Gallup Poll. When his business was good, it meant that the Lebanese were optimistic, replacing their bomb-shattered windows with new ones. When his business was bad, it meant that no one had any confidence in the political situation and they were covering their broken windows with plastic wrap better suited for sandwiches—and a lot cheaper than glass. I found Hijal sitting amid stacks of unsold windows. The suicide attacks on the Americans were the turning point, he said. Business had gone downhill fast since then. Only a fool would invest in glass in Beirut now.

“We have not sold a window in weeks,” Hijal moaned. “In fact, do you really want to know how bad it is? It is so bad that all the windows in my own apartment are shot out and I am not even replacing the glass. It’s true. It’s the fourth time my windows have been broken and this time we just put up plastic nylon instead. We’re getting rockets every day. How can I put up glass anymore?”

How indeed? As the mushroom clouds from the Marine bombing and the Shouf fighting spread over Beirut in early 1984, I began to wonder whether the whole city wasn’t finally going to suffer the same agonizing death as the man in the brown suit.

But why should anyone care about the death of the city?

Because Beirut was never just a city. It was an idea—an idea that meant something not only to the Lebanese but to the entire Arab world. While today just the word “Beirut” evokes images of hell on earth, for years Beirut represented—maybe dishonestly—something quite different, something almost gentle: the idea of coexistence and the spirit of tolerance, the idea that diverse religious communities—Shiites, Sunnis, Christians, and Druse—could live together, and even thrive, in one city and one country without having to abandon altogether their individual identities.

The spirit of Beirut is what was known as the Levantine spirit. The word “Levantine” derives from the Old French word levant, which literally meant “rising.” The Levant, where the sun rose, was the geographical name given to all those countries bordering the eastern Mediterranean. The Levantine political idea, which grew naturally among the communities of the eastern Mediterranean, was an original way of dealing with diverse tribal, village, and sectarian identities, and it inspired the Beirutis and ultimately the Lebanese to believe that they could build a modern Arab republic, melding together seventeen different Christian, Muslim, and Druse sects. The Levantine idea posited the notion that if men cannot break with their tribal pasts, they can at least learn to check them at the door of the cities in which they live. That was Beirut at its best—a “plural society in which communities, still different on the level of inherited religious loyalties and family ties, co-existed within a common framework,” in the words of my Oxford professor, the Lebanese historian Albert Hourani.

This Levantine spirit developed gradually in Beirut after the Industrial Revolution, as the burgeoning Lebanese silk trade and the invention of the steamboat combined to bring men and women of America and Western Europe in large numbers to the Levant. These settlers from the West were Catholic and Protestant missionaries, diplomats, and merchants, Jewish traders, travelers and physicians; and they brought with them Western commerce, manners, and ideas and, most of all, a certain genteel, open, tolerant attitude toward life and toward other cultures. Their mores and manners were gradually imitated by elite elements of the local native populations, who made a highly intelligent blend of these Western ideas with their own indigenous Arabic, Greek, and Turkish cultures, which had their own traditions of tolerance. “To be a Levantine,” wrote Hourani, “is to live in two worlds or more at once, without belonging to either.”

In Beirut, the embodiment of the Levantine idea was the city center. The Levantine spirit of coexistence was both produced in, and reproduced by, the covered markets and stone-arched alleyways, the red-roofed houses and craft workshops, the arabesque Ottoman fountains and bookstalls of old downtown Beirut, woven around Riyad el-Solh Square. In the Beirut city center seven thousand shops once stood shoulder to shoulder, with the Maronite cobbler next to the Druse butcher and the Greek Orthodox money changer next to the Sunni coffee seller and the Shiite grocer next to the Armenian jeweler. The Beirut city center was like a huge urban Mixmaster that took the various Lebanese communities from their mountains and villages and attempted to homogenize them into one cosmopolitan nation.

“When I was a little boy, I discovered Lebanese society there, the different accents and cultures and forms of dress,” remarked Salim Nasr, a Lebanese sociologist. “It was where the country met the rest of the world and the different components of the country met each other.”

With the destruction of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, the Levantine idea was gradually choked to death in Smyrna, Basra, Salonika, Alexandria, and Aleppo, by Greek, Turkish, and Arab nationalists who had no patience for, or interest in, heterogeneous cultures and the spirit of tolerance of a bygone era. But in Beirut the idea lived on—primarily among the elite Christian and Muslim classes. These Lebanese Christians and Muslims intermarried, interacted, became business partners, and produced new ideas together, and they were the ones who really made Beirut a cosmopolitan Manhattan of the Arab world—a refuge for the politically radical and a springboard for the Arab avant-garde. Effete Arab politicians ousted by coups d’état came there to write their memoirs, and aspiring Arab artists and poets came there to make it on the Arab Broadway.

Beirut was the ideal hothouse for this Levantine spirit to survive, because the near-perfect balance of power between Muslim and Christian sects made it impossible for any one group or nationalist ideology to impose itself and smother the diverse mix of cultures necessary for a Levantine society. Moreover, there was a powerful economic base for the Levantine idea in Beirut. Because it was a city which had no real natural resources other than the cunning of its multilingual inhabitants and their ability to make money serving as a bridge between Europe and the Arab world, Beirutis had to learn to come together peacefully in the city center and to cooperate with one another in order to play the profitable role of middlemen between the Arab East and the Christian West. That role was further enhanced by Beirut’s banking secrecy, casinos, and wild, salacious nightlife, which made it an attractive oasis for an Arab world that had yet to discover London and Marbella. Every region of the globe needs one city where the rules don’t apply, where sin is the norm, and where money can buy anything or anyone. Asia had Hong Kong, Europe had Monaco, and the Middle East had Beirut.

The first round of the Lebanese civil war that broke out in April 1975 and lasted until the end of 1978 wounded Beirut, but not mortally. These early years of the Lebanese civil war primarily involved Lebanese Maronite Phalangists in East Beirut versus Palestinians and later Syrians in West Beirut, supported by a few small Lebanese Muslim militias. The extent of actual Lebanese-versus-Lebanese fighting was relatively limited. Nevertheless, the street fighting that did occur in these years was extensive enough to break the Beirut Mixmaster in half. The main confrontation line, the so-called Green Line, that separated the combatants in East Beirut from the combatants in West Beirut ran right through the Beirut city center, turning it into a ghost town of gutted buildings. The symbol of Beirut’s unity became the symbol of its disunity. Despite this separation, though, national institutions, government ministries, the Central Bank, the national airlines, and even the American University of Beirut continued to function to some degree, and the multicultural flavor of Beirut continued to live on in pockets on both the eastern and western sides of the Green Line. During periods of calm, many Lebanese Christians crossed from East Beirut to work in West Beirut and many Lebanese Muslims felt free to do the same in the other direction. The country was partitioned more physically than psychologically, and many Lebanese sincerely believed that their state would one day be put back together more or less as it had been—as soon as all the “outside agitators” were removed.

The definitive dismemberment of both Beirut and Lebanon came in early 1984, and it wasn’t “outside agitators” wielding the butcher knife; the Lebanese themselves would carve up their own country and their own flag with their own hands.

The event which set this national suicide in motion was the culmination of the war for control of the Shouf. The Phalangist offensive against the Druse in the Shouf was a naked power play, and the longer it went on, the more it brought out the Druse’s deep-seated tribal feelings of solidarity and self-preservation. The Druse—Maronite fighting became a war without prisoners or restraints. During the Shouf fighting, I once came across a Druse militiaman who was wearing the distinctive pea-green uniform of a Phalangist militiaman, whom the Druse had just killed that morning. He had made off with the Phalangist’s khakis and polished black high-top Gucci boots like an Indian with a scalp. When I asked this Druse how he had come by those duds, he smiled the thin smile of a cat that had just swallowed a parakeet.

Indeed, the only kind of military battle the two sides seemed to know was the massacre. They not only attacked each other’s villages, they torched them black as coal before they left. A senior Israeli officer in the area once told me about his attempts to negotiate prisoner exchanges between the Druse and the Phalangists when they took each other’s civilians hostage.

“One day the Druse kidnapped a bunch of Christians, so the Phalangists went out and kidnapped eighty Druse. We immediately tried to mediate,” said the Israeli officer. “Dr. Samir Geagea, the Christian commander in the Shouf, was in my office and he had a list of the eighty Druse his men had kidnapped. While we were negotiating the telephone rang. It was a call from one of Geagea’s men saying that the Druse had killed fourteen of their Christian hostages. Geagea just shook his head and said, ‘If they killed fourteen, I have to kill at least twenty of theirs.’ Then, right in front of me, I mean right in front of me, he took out a pencil and started crossing off names on his list of Druse prisoners. These were the ones to be killed. There was no emotion. He was like a businessman doing some accounting.”

The war in the Shouf unleashed a virus of intercommunal tension that floated down from the mountain to infect first Beirut and then the rest of Lebanon. As the battle for the Shouf intensified in early 1984, Gemayel’s Christian-led Lebanese army attacked Shiites in West Beirut to prevent them from aiding the Druse in the mountains; the Shiites in turn attacked Christians wherever they could find them, and then took control from the Lebanese army of as many Beirut neighborhoods as they could. When the Sunni Muslims saw the Druse and Shiites swallowing all the turf in West Beirut, they sent their militiamen into the streets to preserve a corner of their own, leading to shoot-outs with the Shiites and Druse. Before anyone knew it, Beirut was in the grip of a war of all against all. Suddenly the outsiders—the Israelis, the Syrians, and the Palestinians—were on the sidelines, and it was just Lebanese going at Lebanese. Every Lebanese became aware of himself and his neighbors. Everyone knew that no matter what his political views, he could be killed just for the religion on his identity card, so safety meant drawing even closer to one’s own sect or seeking shelter in one’s own religious canton.

Nadine Camel-Toueg, a young Christian Lebanese journalist who was living in West Beirut at the time, summed up the mood of the city as the Shouf war reached fever pitch. “Every community had to go to its own corner,” she said. “You could not be a Muslim pro-Christian or a Christian pro-Shiite anymore. There was no room for subtleties. I was working as part of a team of Muslim and Christian journalists in West Beirut, and most of us frankly were pro-Arab, pro-Palestinian. But when the Shouf war came, all of a sudden everyone revealed his true colors, as though they had been at the bottom of people all along and were just covered up. We had a Christian guy who was against the Phalangists, but all of a sudden he was with them. And all of a sudden another guy started being a Shiite. Who are you? A Shiite? Then join your clan. Who are you? A Christian? Then join your clan. There was no place to stand anymore. The Lebanese government couldn’t even hold a Cabinet meeting, because there was no neutral space where everyone could agree to meet.”

The fighting in the Shouf and Beirut climaxed on February 6, 1984, when all the pent-up anger in West Beirut against Amin Gemayel finally came to a head. The day before, all the Muslim members of Gemayel’s Cabinet quit under pressure from their supporters, after a week in which the Lebanese army, having been prevented by Shiite and Druse militiamen from moving reinforcements to West Beirut, began indiscriminately shelling apartment houses in the Shiite neighborhoods. On the evening of February 5, Amin Gemayel belatedly reached out to his Muslim and Christian opponents and called for reconciliation talks and the formation of a national unity Cabinet representing all political factions. It was too little too late. What I remember most about Gemayel’s televised peace overture was that it was scheduled for the time slot immediately after the weekly showing of Dallas, which was as popular in Beirut as it was in America. Because Gemayel’s speech kept being delayed, Lebanese Television kept showing the sameDallas segment over and over again for four hours. I was waiting for the speech at the Reuters news bureau, and after we had seen Dallas for the fourth time, one of the Reuters Lebanese reporters opined that it was the best possible preparation for Gemayel’s remarks: “It is very appropriate that Dallas is being shown now. It is just like the Lebanese problem. Everyone is against everyone else, and it all keeps going around and around in circles without anyone ever winning or anything being accomplished.”

How right he was. The next morning, in a last desperate attempt to assert his authority, Gemayel’s Lebanese army ordered an immediate curfew in West Beirut; anyone on the streets an hour later would be shot on sight. The Druse and Amal militias ignored the curfew and met the army in the streets for one final shoot-out. There was a real panic as people raced to get home from their offices. I saw cars speeding backward, crashing into each other, mothers scooping up their children from sidewalks, and people cramming into supermarkets and grabbing armfuls of anything they could eat. I ran to get Ann from the newspaper office where she was. I just took her by the arm, announced, “This is the real thing,” and pulled her out the door, while her colleagues watched dumbstruck. We managed to get to the Commodore Hotel just before the fighting, which began in the suburbs with a distant rumble, hit the center of the city with the roar of a tidal wave. I wrote my story that night hiding in my bathroom at the Commodore, with my mattress propped against me for extra protection from flying glass.

That night we slept with some two hundred other people in the hotel’s basement disco, not knowing that outside in the streets Druse, Shiite, and Sunni soldiers were deserting the Lebanese army in droves and joining their respective militias to drive the remnants of Gemayel’s army out of West Beirut for good: their answer to his peace overture. In the Shouf, the Druse finished off the Phalangists once and for all, often dragging their bodies behind cars for good measure. Without the Israelis and the Lebanese army to protect them, the Phalangists proved to be the tin soldiers everyone believed they were. The Lebanese government and army the Marines had come to rebuild were reduced to a shambles; the “center” they came to buttress was no more. Even President Reagan could figure that out, and he lost little time in ordering the leathernecks home.

On February 26, 1984, the day the Marines completed their pullout from Lebanon, chief operations officer Lieutenant Colonel Ernest Van Huss and his commander, Colonel Pat Faulkner, decided that they would have a formal ceremony to turn their Beirut Airport complex of bunkers and gun positions back over to whatever was left of the Lebanese army. The Marines and the Lebanese army had shared a joint command post at Beirut Airport. On the wall there the Marines’ American flag was hanging crossed with a Lebanese flag. Being Marines, they didn’t just want to take the flag down; they wanted to have an official ceremony to strike their colors. The Marine commanders had planned to take the flag back to America and present it to the widow of the last Marine to die in Lebanon.

As Lieutenant Colonel Van Huss said later, “We had no intention of leaving our flag there to be abused or ignored or whatever. That to us represented U.S. authority and we had no intention of leaving the Stars and Stripes there to become a souvenir for some unauthorized representative of the government of Lebanon.”

The problem was that the Lebanese army commanders could not get to the airport, because they had been thrown out of West Beirut. So at 8:15 a.m. a Muslim Lebanese army captain who happened to be hanging around the airport and a few other stragglers were rounded up to attend the ceremony. The Marines told me they did not know who half of them were or whether they were loyal to the government or some Muslim militia chieftain. To ensure that some official Lebanese was on hand, though, the Marines had Colonel Fahim Qortabawi, the Lebanese army officer responsible for liaison with the Americans, flown in from East Beirut by helicopter.

Colonel Faulkner delivered a few brief remarks thanking the Lebanese for their cooperation, and then he requested that he and his men be allowed to “strike our colors,” which were hanging on a flagstick on the wall, crossed with a red, white, and green Lebanese flag. The Marine officers reached up, carefully took the Stars and Stripes off the flagstick, and began to fold it with great dignity into a precise triangle, according to United States military regulations.

“We did it all with the dignity the U.S. flag deserves,” Colonel Van Huss told me proudly. “The Lebanese army officers were watching us very carefully, and well, I guess they were a bit overwhelmed by what we were doing.”

Just as the American officers finished folding their flag, Colonel Qortabawi reached up, grabbed the Lebanese flag from the wall, folded it in no apparent pattern, and handed it to Colonel Faulkner. “Please,” he said. “You might as well take our flag, too.”

Looking chagrined, Colonel Qortabawi, who was a Maronite, then turned to Colonel Van Huss and said. “You are leaving?”

“Yes, we are really leaving,” answered the Marine officer. “Our eastern positions have already been vacated. We’re in fallback positions now … and we’re in the final throes of the embarkation. Yes, Colonel Qortabawi, we are really leaving.”

Qortabawi, with downcast eyes, then got to the point. “I have no way home,” he told his Marine hosts. “To go home I have to go through Muslim checkpoints. [Maybe] you can get me to the Ministry of Defense by helo ride?”

“Yes, we can do that,” Van Huss recalled telling the hapless Lebanese army officer. “So Colonel Qortabawi left with us. We gave him a helo ride to the Ministry of Defense. He linked back up to [the Lebanese army command] and it was all very final and over.”

Many Lebanese were either too young to remember or too poor to have ever tasted the cosmopolitan life of the Beirut city center, so they never mourned its passing. But for those members of the Christian and Muslim bourgeoisie who really exploited the beautiful side of Beirut, life will never be quite the same again without it. True, they had never paid much attention to the Shiite, Palestinian, and even Christian underclasses upon whose backs Beirut’s joie de vivre rested, and they believed in the fantasy of Lebanese democracy much more than they ever should have, but they were my friends and I happened to be a witness when their world was murdered.

Long after the civil war began, many of these true Beirutis kept the addresses of their offices in the ravaged city center on their stationery as symbols of solidarity with the past and hope for the future. As the years went by, some of them emigrated, unable to tolerate a Beirut in which Christians and Muslims were being forced to live in separate, isolated ghettos. But many of them stayed, and today they form a whole new class of Beirut refugees. They are existential refugees, homeless souls, internal exiles. They are still sitting in their old apartments with bucolic paintings of the Lebanese countryside decorating the walls, in their favorite chairs and with their favorite slippers—but they are no longer at home and never will be again. They did not leave Beirut, Beirut left them.

My favorite member of this breed was Nabil Tabbara, an architect and professor of architecture at the American University, and a man quick with a smile that always set his whole face aglow. Like many of his generation, Tabbara, whose uncle was Saeb Salam, grew up being taken by his father on trips through the Beirut city center. The smell of the bazaar there, its spices and breads, its colors and sounds, and, most of all, the warmth of people mixing together, would always be part of his identity and his sense of Beirut as home. At the height of the civil war in 1976, it appeared that the graceful stone archways and marketplaces of the old city center were going to be destroyed forever. To keep a personal archive for himself of the Beirut he cherished, Tabbara took a leave from his architectural job and decided in the middle of the civil war that he would try to sketch and photograph what remained of the city center before it vanished.

“I didn’t know what would be left of the old Beirut,” Tabbara explained when I asked him what motivated this personal adventure, “and I always remembered the people of Warsaw who broke into their municipal archives after the Nazis invaded and hid all the plans and drawings of the Warsaw city center, which they used to rebuild it later.”

Armed only with his Nikon camera, pencil, and sketchpads, Tabbara spent a month obtaining passes from all the different Muslim and Christian militias fighting along the Green Line, in order to freely enter the battle zone. Then he headed off to capture the last remnants of his youth.

“I would go down to the Phoenicia Hotel every morning, park my car, and then walk to the Green Line,” he recalled. “At first the gunmen would say, ‘Look at this fool sitting on the rubble sketching with the rockets and bullets going by.’ They thought I was absolutely crazy. But after a while they really got into what I was doing. Some days they would lay down a barrage of machine-gun fire to cover me, so I could run across a dangerous street, or they would break into a building so I could get a particular view from the roof.”

After three months of work, Tabbara took all his sketches and photographs, as well as the street signs of famous avenues which he made off with when he could, and put them away for safekeeping. In late 1976, the civil war died down, and many even thought that the government would soon rebuild the city center almost as it was. It didn’t happen, but for eight years Tabbara’s sketches, pictures, and street signs sat in a drawer. After the Israeli invasion, as I noted, the Lebanese government actually began to rebuild the city center, and once again it seemed as if the Green Line was going to be erased. But then came the Shouf war, and it was a hope that was erased for good.

Shortly after the Lebanese army collapsed in February 1984, I came to see Tabbara at his West Beirut apartment across from the Sanaiyeh Gardens. We sat in his living room and ate a tableful of Lebanese salads prepared by his maid and talked about his past finally going up in flames a few miles down the road.

“I felt like I was contemplating something very near to me that was dying,” moaned Tabbara. “These were the roots of my generation, and I felt that I was losing my roots for good.”

Under such circumstances men do funny things. In order to hold on to a fragment of his past, Tabbara painted. He took out the eight-year-old sketches and photographs from the bottom of his drawer and, using them as his guide, painted a series of watercolors of the streets and shops of the old Beirut city center as he remembered them. Even though some of the paintings showed crumbled buildings, they were brightly colored and exuded palpable warmth and serenity.

“They express my own joy,” said Tabbara, slowly unveiling one picture after the other, “because the atmosphere was the most important thing in my recollection. The variety of one shop next to the other brought a sense of life and togetherness. Now people just belong to their sectarian neighborhoods. Do you call this belonging? This is ghettoism.”

At one point during the conversation, Tabbara’s young daughters scampered into the room. They had no idea, he sighed, what these paintings were about or what they could possibly mean to him. They called them “Daddy’s crazy hobby.” His friends, though, the people Tabbara grew up with, all wanted to buy a picture, any picture, and some offered to pay any price. There was a certain desperation in their appeals—grownups begging for a crumb of memory. So it is with men who know that no matter where they go and no matter how long they live they will never feel at home again.

Lebanese were forever asking me whether I had visited Beirut before the civil war began.

“No,” I would say, “I never had the pleasure.” Then they would get a faraway look, and a mist of reminiscence would fog their eyes, and they would wax eloquent about how “life was so beautiful then—Lebanon really was the Switzerland of the Middle East.” It certainly looked that way on the postcards: snowcapped mountains towering over Beirut, a bank on every corner, and a parliament with all the trappings of a European-style democracy. But how could a city go from being a vision of heaven to a vision of hell practically overnight? Because it was too good to be true, because Beirut in its heyday was a city with a false bottom.

My first glimpse of Beirut’s real bottom came at the Commodore Hotel bar on February 7, 1984—the day after the Druse and Shiite Amal militias had seized control of West Beirut from the Lebanese army. Groups of Shiite militiamen belonging to the radical new pro-Iranian organization, Hizbullah, “Party of God,” had gone on a rampage that morning, ransacking heathen bars and whorehouses just off West Beirut’s Hamra Street. Some they set ablaze, others they smashed apart with crowbars.

I was enjoying a “quiet” lunch in the Commodore restaurant that day when I heard a ruckus coming from the lobby. I turned around and saw a tall, heavyset Shiite militiaman with a black beard, a wild look in his eyes, and an M-16 in his hands, heading for the bar. It was clear he wasn’t going for a drink. Anticipating such a visit, Yunis, the bartender, had hidden all the liquor bottles under the counter and had replaced them with cans of Pepsi-Cola and Perrier, which he had carefully stacked into a tall, rather absurd-looking pyramid. The militiaman wasn’t fooled. He stalked behind the bar, shoved Yunis aside, and began smashing every liquor bottle and glass with his rifle butt. He didn’t miss a single one. When he was done, he stalked out of the lobby, leaving behind a small lake of liquor on the floor and a stunned crowd of journalists frozen to their chairs.

The scene was terrifying on many levels. The relentless manner in which that gunman smashed bottle after bottle with the butt of his rifle left me with the uneasy feeling that he could easily have done the same to any human heads which might have stood in his way. He had Truth with a capital T, he was from the Party of God, and nothing could stop him. But what was no less unsettling to me, and I think many members of the Commodore staff who watched this scene with lips grimly pursed and arms folded across their chests, was that this man was our neighbor. He was not an invader from Syria or Israel. He was a Lebanese, probably a Beiruti. He had been living for years in the same city with us, maybe even in the same neighborhood, and we really never knew he was there—our fault not his. It was as though with his rifle butt he not only smashed the Commodore bar but also right through Beirut’s false bottom. Suddenly what remained of the genteel Levantine spirit of Nabil Tabbara’s drawings was torn aside, only to reveal a pool of tribal wrath that had been building in intensity for decades beneath the surface among all those Beirutis who were never really part of the Beirut game, or, if they were part of it, played it with a mask on.

This turbulent pool was made up largely of Lebanese Shiites. The Shiites of Lebanon were the country’s perpetual underclass, a rural people who for centuries seemed to silently accept their role as Lebanon’s beasts of burden. But the Palestinian—Israeli fighting in south Lebanon in the seventies and eighties drove thousands of these Shiites from their native villages in the south to shantytowns on the outskirts of Beirut, where their neighborhoods were aptly dubbed the “Belt of Misery.” They lived at the gates of Beirut, but the city never really admitted them—not socially, not politically, and not economically. By the early 1980s, the Shiites of Lebanon were the largest single religious community in the country, making up close to half the total population, but they were represented in the government by corrupt feudal lords and were looked down on by the Sunni aristocracy as much as by the Maronites.

By 1984 the Shiites of Lebanon were tired of waiting for the city’s gates to open. The Israeli invasion and the Shouf war had shown them how weak the Lebanese state was and the Iranian Islamic revolution had shown them the power which Shiites could exert in the world. Emboldened by the distant whistle of a pied piper named Khomeini, the Shiites of Lebanon decided that their days of violation and silence were over. It was time for a cleansing, time for a people who had always been denied to claim Beirut for themselves. And so they did. West Beirut has been dominated by the Shiites ever since.

The Shiite who broke up the Commodore bar, though, was not only taking revenge on the symbol of something he had been denied but also on the symbol of something he probably never really comprehended. What Nabil Tabbara and his friends did not understand was that the Levantine spirit which infused them—the most modern, secularized, urbanized classes in Lebanese society—had not penetrated many of their other countrymen—not just the Shiites from villages in south Lebanon, but all of those Lebanese Muslims and Christians living in the hinterlands, beyond the city limits, where the spirit of their ancestors continued to rule the day. They called themselves Beirutis or Lebanese, but these identities were just uniforms that many of them wore to work in the city center. These people mimicked the genteel Levantine language when they walked the streets of Beirut, but at home they spoke a different vernacular. At moments of intercommunal tension, such as the Shouf war, they were always ready to answer the call of the tribe. For them Lebanon was never the Switzerland of the Middle East. It was always the Tower of Babel.

The day the Marines left Beirut, I went down to Green Beach, their landing zone, to watch the last Marine contingent ride out to their mother ships in amphibious armored personnel carriers. The Marines had worked out a deal ahead of time with the Shiite Amal militia in which Amal promised to protect the Marine perimeter as they pulled out from their base at Beirut Airport, in return for the Marines letting Amal take over their abandoned bunkers, gun positions, and the Green Beach docks. When I arrived at Green Beach, I noticed an Amal militiaman at the gate reporting to his commanders on the Marines’ progress via walkie-talkie. A second after the last Marine amphibious vehicle stuck its nose into the Mediterranean whitecaps and headed out to sea, this Amal militiaman shouted into his radio that the Marines were gone. A second after that, a jeep with a machine gun mounted on the back came careening into Green Beach. A wild-eyed Shiite youth, his curly locks flying in the sea breeze, was holding fast to the machine gun for dear life. After the jeep sank to a halt in the white sand, all the reporters present ran over to the vehicle and stuck their microphones into the face of the driver. What did the inheritors of the earth have to say for themselves? Specifically, I asked the driver, what was his reaction to the Marines’ departure.

He was just a boy. He looked at me quizzically, then squinted his eyes, scrunched up his nose, and said with a grin, “I don’t speak English.”

After the Marines evacuated Beirut, the Lebanese knew that there would be no one from the outside to save them and no more “outside agitators” to blame for their troubles. Nothing was more depressing for Beirutis. It was one thing to suffer and have it be front-page news in The New York Times; it was another to suffer and be a two-paragraph item on page 28C, next to a story about a bus falling off a bridge in Calcutta. Samia, the secretary to the publisher of the An-Nahar newspaper, said to me shortly after the Marines pulled up stakes, “You know how when you listen to the news and the story about the Iran–Iraq war comes on and that’s when you turn the radio off? That’s how the world is treating the Lebanese. There is only one thing worse than being shelled, and that is being shelled and turning on the BBC the next morning and not hearing it reported on the news.”

But it wasn’t Samia and her friends I felt most sorry for. They had lived a myth and paid the price. Their children were different. They only knew the price. I would periodically get a group of Beirut high-school and college students together to talk about their lives. Shortly before I left Beirut, I convened such a discussion group at the American University. As we got started, I asked each one of the students to give his or her name and age. Before anyone could respond, though, one girl, Rima Koleilat, a twenty-five-year-old sociology graduate student, whispered softly to herself, “We are all one hundred years old.”

It must have seemed that way to the lost generation of Lebanese youth—those kids who were nine and ten when the civil war began. They were just really waking up to the world, starting to read newspapers, understand a little politics, and dream of what they wanted to be when the civil war descended in 1975 and destroyed their adolescence before they knew it was gone. One day they were kids, the next day they were adults. Chronological age meant nothing in Beirut. “Normal” for Lebanese youths meant studying for finals with the rock radio channel turned up louder than the shelling. “Normal” for them meant virtually never going out at night. “Normal” for them meant having at least three close friends and one relative who had died a violent death. Few of them could distinguish between Chuck Berry and Little Richard, or early Beatles and late Beatles, but by their fifteenth birthdays practically all of them could distinguish between a Katyusha rocket and a 155-mm mortar just by listening to the sound of the incoming whistle. While their parents knew a different life and would never really feel at home again without it, their kids had never known anything else and would never really feel whole because of it.

Over dinner one evening, Nada Sehnaoui, an aspiring young Lebanese filmmaker, captured the essence of that emptiness for me when she turned a conversation about her parents into a fairy tale of whimsy about herself. “Most of us feel we’ve just missed it,” said Sehnaoui in a flat, emotionless voice. “My mother had a wonderful time in the fifties and sixties. She’s always saying, ‘Oh, you don’t know what you missed.’ I guess we were just born in the wrong place at the wrong time. I would have liked to have been Italian, I think. Or maybe Egyptian. No, Italy would have been lovely. Anywhere, really. Anywhere but this place, this time.”

This lost generation of Lebanese not only missed out on their adolescence; they also missed out on having a country. For them, most of Lebanon was a foreign country—just a picture on an old calendar in the attic or a faded postcard in the drawer—nothing they ever experienced, smelled, or touched. The Syrian and Israeli occupations, coupled with the partition of Lebanon into sectarian cantons, had made some parts of the country off limits to virtually every Lebanese religious community. Hassan Tannir, a Muslim student at Beirut University College, whom I met when he was a Red Cross volunteer, remarked that were he not a rescue worker he never would have had any idea what Christian East Beirut or its chic port, Juniyah, looked like.

“My younger brother,” said Tannir, “is always asking me what is behind the Green Line, what Juniyah looks like, what the autostrada to the north looks like. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know our house in the mountains. He has never climbed a tree in his life.”

Indeed, the youngest children, those under the age of ten who didn’t even have a distant memory of more normal times, were the most scarred of all. It is frightening to imagine what sort of adults they will make. For instance, a thunderstorm will probably never be the same again for Ramsi Khalaf, who was two years old when I left Beirut in 1984. When shelling in his neighborhood used to get very heavy, Ramsi’s parents, Samir and Rosanne, used to calm his nerves by telling him that the flashes and booms rocking their apartment were only a thunderstorm. After a while, though, Ramsi began to realize that something was amiss. When the shelling became very intense one evening, he looked up at his father and asked, “Daddy, is it raining without water again?” Sofia Saadeh, a Lebanese academic, told me she came home from school one afternoon and found her ten-year-old son and four-year-old son were playing “Beirut” in the apartment. They had set up cardboard checkpoints between all the rooms and insisted that their mother show them her identity card before they would allow her to pass from room to room.

How did the lost generation get lost in the first place? I was up in the Shouf one day in February 1984, shortly after the Druse had completed their takeover of the region from the Phalangists, and I had a conversation with a father there which made it all clear. The man was a fifty-four-year-old Druse merchant named Nabih. He was standing outside his shop in the village of Qabr Chamoun with his fifteen-year-old son, Ramsi. The shop had been ravaged by weeks of Phalangist artillery and machine-gun barrages. All the windows had been blown out and parts of the ceiling were dangling ganglia of wires and steel rods. Nabih described for me in great detail what he called the “savagery” of the Phalangists and the devastation they had wrought in trying to take over the town. Then he proudly rested a hand on the shoulder of his son and said, “See this boy? He was in the fight, too.”

Ramsi then picked up the story, with an aloof air and a matter-of-fact tone: “I was in school, but I quit and came here because they were killing our people. If we don’t fight they will kill us all.”

Nabih beamed with pride at his son’s answer. Fathers in Lebanon do that. A few weeks later I repeated the story over lunch to Richard Day, the American University psychologist. I was asking Richard what kind of psychological revolution would be required to bring peace to Lebanon. Richard, part of whose job was to counsel Lebanese students whose minds had been warped by the war, just threw the question right back in my face. “When will there be peace in Lebanon?” he asked in a voice larded with cynicism. “When the Lebanese start to love their children more than they hate each other.”

Having been left by the world to sort out their own feuds, Lebanon’s Muslim and Christian warlords convened a peace conference in Lausanne, Switzerland, under Syrian sponsorship, in March 1984. Because there was no neutral space left at home where they could all agree to meet, they had to go to an entirely different country. The various factions, along with President Gemayel, gathered together at the elegant Beau Rivage Hotel, on the banks of Lake Geneva. Lebanese militia leaders, trailing bodyguards in ill-fitting suits with huge bulges in their jackets, waited in line to pass through the metal detector in the hotel lobby behind wealthy European dowagers trailing diamond-collared poodles. The Swiss had surrounded the hotel with barbed wire and sandbags crowned by machine-gun nests and had covered the windows of the conference hall with 20-foot-high steel plates. I could never figure out if all this armor was intended to keep intruders out or the Lebanese in.

The surreal atmosphere was compounded by the fact that Vogue magazine had months earlier scheduled a fashion shoot at the Beau Rivage, and by chance it coincided with the Lebanese conference. The enterprising Vogue photographer knew a good thing when he saw one and got two Swiss soldiers guarding the lobby to handcuff one of his models, who was dressed in the latest Paris designer fashions. While the Lebanese warlords argued inside the conference hall, outside the Swiss guards dragged a stunning redhead through the lobby as she “struggled” to escape their grasp. As the Vogue photographer frantically snapped pictures, all the time coaxing the model with “Great, great, wonderful, look at me, look at the camera,” the news photographers started taking pictures of the two of them. In the background, a crowd of print reporters shouted with delight at the two Swiss soldiers, “Hit her again, hit her again.”

It was easily the highpoint of the conference, which got off to a bad start when Druse warlord Walid Jumblat insisted on placing a Druse flag, as opposed to a Lebanese flag, in front of his seat. Things went downhill from there. Walid spent most of his time in his suite giving an interview to Playboy. Every time a negotiating session began he would announce to his bodyguards, “Okay, it’s showtime, let’s go.” After nine days of fruitless negotiations, interrupted only by banquets of smoked salmon and lobster bisque, the peace conference collapsed as the pigheaded Lebanese politicians refused to make any compromises with one another. Back in Beirut, the newspapers openly mocked the militia chieftains by showing pictures of them stuffing their faces with Chateaubriand next to pictures of Lebanese children mutilated in the latest street fighting.

Following the fiasco at Lausanne, everyone rushed back to Beirut for what would turn out to be yet another phase of the Lebanese civil war. The defeat of the Lebanese army by the Shiites and Druse and the failed Lausanne conference forced Amin Gemayel to recognize that he could not rule Lebanon by himself. So, under pressure from the Syrians, he invited the other militia leaders to join him in the Cabinet, headed by Rashid Karami, which was formed on April 30, 1984. Shiite Amal militia leader Nabih Berri became Minister of Justice and Hydroelectricity; Walid Jumblat became Minister of Transport, Tourism, and Public Works; Maronite chieftain Camille Chamoun became Minister of Finance and Housing; Phalangist militia founder Pierre Gemayel became Minister of Posts and Health; and Shiite leader Adel Osseiran was named Minister of Defense, a perfect post for a man who was seriously ill with Parkinson’s Disease. Now every militia not only had a piece of the country’s turf, it had a piece of the army and a piece of the government to boot. The wolves were finally in charge of the henhouse. For the time being, there was nothing left to fight for between them.

Yet the fighting along the Green Line between East and West Beirut went on—only sporadically at times, but it went on. At first no one, including myself, could understand why. When I asked my neighbor Dr. Munir Shamma’a, a physician at the American University of Beirut Hospital, he just threw up his hands and said, “This is not a war, this is an earthquake. You can’t learn anything from an earthquake. When you have an earthquake, people just die. That’s what it’s like here. There are no obvious reasons for the fighting anymore. It just happens. Come rain or shine, sea or mountains; it just happens, like an earthquake.”

My assistant Ihsan Hijazi described what it felt like to be on vacation abroad and to come back home to a city caught in the grip of such a war: “You feel as if you are coming into a room where you know that inside everyone is fighting with everyone else and no one knows why. At the door of this room you have Syrians and Israelis each passing out weapons to all the people going inside, saying, ‘Here, take this, it’s sharper, it kills better.’ Once you are inside, you start fighting like everyone else. The only way to survive in this room is to find a corner and put your back up against the wall.”

Around this time, I was walking to Ihsan’s office after a day of heavy mortar exchanges between East and West Beirut had wrought havoc with his neighborhood. The curb was lined with cars that had been set ablaze by shellfire. The owner of one of the burned-out cars must have come out after the barrage and found that his automobile had been turned into a twisted, charred wreck, unfit even for a junkyard. On the mangled carcass of his car he scribbled out an Arabic note and hung it from a jagged piece of glass where his front windshield once stood. It read:

What have we done to deserve this?
We are human beings.
Somebody please help us end this war.

But, as always, there was a logic to this earthquake. The logic was that Lebanon no longer was caught in the grip of a single civil war. It was caught in the grip of three simultaneous civil wars, which no one could keep straight—including the combatants.

The first and largest of these wars was the one that began in 1975 and culminated in the Shouf in 1984: the civil war over who should control the Lebanese government, which was fought out between the Christian and Muslim militias. It was this confrontation which had broken Beirut and Lebanon in half. The second civil war began in the late 1970s within the two halves of the country. It involved Muslims fighting against Muslims and Christians fighting Christians to decide which Muslims and which Christians would control their respective halves of Lebanon. In this second civil war one could find Druse fighting Shiites for control of a particular West Beirut street on Monday, and Shiites fighting Sunnis for control of a neighboring street on Tuesday. Across the Green Line in East Beirut the same sort of confrontation was going on between the Christian Phalangist militia and the Christian-led Lebanese army, as well as a host of smaller Christian factions.

The third civil war was a silent civil war, the one that always intrigued me the most. It began in the early 1980s and engendered as many passions as the first two, for it pitted all the Christian and Muslim militiamen who benefited from Lebanon’s chaos on one side and all the Lebanese civilians who suffered from that chaos on the other.

During the first decade of Lebanon’s civil war, the various Christian and Muslim militias became not only private armies representing the interests of different religious communities but also vehicles for the social and economic advancement of members of the Lebanese underclasses. The longer the civil war continued, the more the members of this underclass were able to take over Lebanese society from the traditional aristocracy, capitalists, and industrialists. Small-time crooks like Muslim militia leader Ibrahim Koleilat, frustrated middle-class lawyers like Shiite militia leader Nabih Berri, government schoolteachers like Shiite extremist Hussein Musawi, and medical students like Phalangist boss Samir Geagea (who became known as “Dr. Samir” only after his appointment as a Phalangist militia chief retroactively made him a medical school graduate) became big men around town overnight. The civil war provided them with a route to the top that would otherwise not have been available to them. Suddenly one didn’t need a degree in business administration, economics, or even good family connections to “make it.” One didn’t need to speak French or have graduated from the American University of Beirut. One didn’t need to be efficient or inefficient, an importer or an exporter. All that mattered was that one was connected to a militia.

This class of nouveau thieves, militia merchants, and gangsters hiding machine guns under political manifestos formed what my Lebanese banker friend Elias Saba liked to describe as “the war society,” and although they were constantly fighting each other, the Christian and Muslim members of this war society understood intuitively that for all their political differences they shared a common interest in making sure the Lebanese government, army, and police never came back to life. Members of the war society even had their own “official” car—the Mercedes sedan, usually silver in color and always bristling with so many radio-phone antennae that it looked as though it needed a haircut.

The militia merchants—through their illegal private ports and highway checkpoints—made money by using their military power to control the sources of distribution for any number of goods and services, from hashish to state-subsidized gasoline. Saba explained how the system worked on a micro-scale: “My bank has a small branch in my home village of Kura, in north Lebanon. The local branch of the National Syrian Socialist Party is the dominant militia in the area. They came to me one day and demanded the right to approve whom I would appoint as the bank manager. Then they asked how many employees I would have. I said fifteen. They said, ‘Fine, we will appoint five of them.’ Then they added that they would also expect a monthly ‘insurance’ payment to make sure that nothing unpleasant happened to the bank. It is the same story with gasoline. Gasoline is sold by the state at what is supposed to be a controlled price. It comes from terminals in East Beirut. As soon as the trucks come into West Beirut, they are met by militiamen. The militiamen will buy the whole truck, for, say, one million pounds. The driver sells it to them and gives the government its share. Then the militiamen take the gasoline around town and sell it for triple the government price.”

I knew of a contractor in East Beirut who wanted to build a multistory luxury apartment house near the sea, but the Lebanese government would give him approval for only four stories. He paid one million pounds to the Phalangist militia and they got him permission to build a fifth story. A short while later President Amin Gemayel’s father, Pierre, died, and Amin decided he wanted to build a statue to him in his home village of Bikfaya. The contractor paid a man from Bikfaya one million more pounds toward the statue of Amin’s father and then got permission to build a sixth story. Given the number of militia merchants in East Beirut, he probably could have gotten permission to build a skyscraper if he had had the money.

Show me someone involved in the distribution of goods and services in Lebanon today and I will show you a militiaman, the brother of a militiaman, the cousin of a militiaman, or the friend of a militiaman.

Parallel to the development of a war society in Lebanon, though, came the development of a peace society, which united both Christian and Muslim noncombatants. What happened was that the takeover by the militias of the Lebanese Cabinet and economy brought Lebanon, for the first time, to the brink of collapse. The Lebanese pound went from about 5 to the dollar when I left Beirut to 500 to the dollar just three years later. The economy became a sniper no one could escape, whether he was a Christian or a Muslim, a resident of East Beirut or of West Beirut.

The yearning for the return of a government that could prevent total economic ruin cut right across Christian and Muslim lines. So, too, did the visceral hatred for the war society. This mood was best captured in the spring of 1984, when the Beirut Daily Star sent a photographer and reporter into the streets of the city to ask random pedestrians, “What would you do if you were running the country?” Four of the eight people quoted said that they would murder all the country’s politicians. Amal Tawil, a student, age thirty, put it most explicitly, saying, “If I were President I would execute all political leaders without exception and throw their bodies into the sea.”

It was such attitudes that formed the glue that held Lebanon’s peace society intact, and emboldened them to dare to challenge the war society in an open confrontation. It was an uneven battle from the start, however, because the peace society was armed only with outrage and moral suasion in a country where even a peace movement needs a militia to protect it.

I happened to be on hand when the peace society declared war in the balmy spring of 1984. As the ritualistic fighting along the Green Line continued for no apparent reason, the civilians, those anonymous people who had nothing to do with politics or militias, the real people behind Beirut’s sterile casualty figures, finally screamed, “Enough.” The ducks in the shooting gallery said they simply would not take it any longer. If the Marines could not save them, and their own politicians could not save them, then they would try to save themselves. They called their revolt a “peace movement.” It was really a right-to-life movement for Lebanese adults, the first of many.

It all started in the living room of a twenty-nine-year-old kindergarten teacher in West Beirut named Iman Khalife, on the afternoon of April 10, 1984—three days before the ninth anniversary of the original civil war. “I was sitting at home evaluating some Arabic children’s books for the library,” Khalife told me during an interview in her office. “There was terrible shelling outside. I had this yellow pad in my hand, and I said, ‘I want to write something for all the silent people sitting in their homes.’”

Khalife then wrote a kind of stream-of-consciousness poem suggesting a peace march. She read it to a journalist friend, who told her that if she would get fifty signatures on it, he would distribute it to all the local newspapers. Within a few days most Beirut papers ran the Arabic poem on their front pages. It began like this:

Nine years have elapsed of this war,
and we have been watching all the solutions disappear,
resigned in our shelters … eating … drinking … sleeping.
Has not the time come to ask ourselves, Where to?
Until when?
Are we going to allow the tenth year to do us in?
Are we afraid? What is left to be afraid of?
Let us all go out and give our voices to the other silent voices
so they become a resounding scream.
Let us walk out of our silence and scream in one voice,
No to the war. No to the tenth year.

Drawing on a network of friends in East and West Beirut, Khalife, who always refused to tell me her own religion, set May 6, 1984, for her peace march. Organizing committees were formed on both sides of town to spread the word. They even had posters and little stickers made that said YES TO LIFE, NO TO WAR. Iman’s plan was for people in East Beirut and West Beirut to meet on the Green Line at the Beirut National Museum crossing point, the only road open at the time, and then to engage in some sort of spontaneous embrace.

“Maybe if we get really excited,” she said with a mischievous gleam in her eyes, “we will tear down all the barricades. People told me, ‘We will die if we march.’ I said, ‘Okay, let’s die. Every day when we go to work or out to buy things we are risking our lives. So why not risk them while at least saying something?’” When I asked her if she had sought permission to march from the police or the militias, she snapped, “Do you think people need a permit to revolt?”

No, but they do need guns. Even before May 6 rolled around, rival militiamen from all over West Beirut joined hands in ripping down the YES TO LIFE, NO TO WAR posters, which they knew were directed at them. Then, on the night of May 5, the militiamen in East and West Beirut, as if by agreement, began pounding each other with mortars and artillery across the Green Line, in one of the worst bouts of shelling since the civil war began. Twenty-two people living near the Green Line were killed and another 132 wounded in only a few hours—all to snuff out a peace march. Khalife and her friends decided that they had to call off the demonstration lest the militiamen slaughter even more civilians. The shelling stopped minutes after the cancellation of the march was announced on the radio. When Nawaf Salam, an American University lecturer and one of the organizers, called to tell me the news, he added wryly, “One of our main aims was achieved. As soon as we called off the march, all of the militias stopped fighting and Beirut enjoyed one of its quietest nights in months.”

Khalife was so bitter she would not even talk to me. “People know how I feel,” she said, and hung up the phone. The next morning Salam and six other organizers decided they had to do something, so they drove down to the Green Line near the museum crossing. I tagged along for the ride. First, they removed the 6-foot-high white marble plaque—engraved in Arabic with the words YES TO LIFE, NO TO WAR—which they had planted on a mound of dirt and had planned to unveil that morning. The scene was like a funeral. While one of the women in the group wept into a tissue, Salam and Dr. Najib Abu Haidar lifted the marble slab and put it very gently in the trunk of a car, as though it were a victim who had just been gunned down in the cross fire. Before leaving, they observed a few moments of silence, for their plaque and for themselves and for Beirut, and then read a statement into the wind. It said: “The Sixth of May committee has decided to remove the marble plaque today as a protest against the circumstances that led to the cancellation of this march.”

Just as they finished reading, two sloppily dressed Lebanese army soldiers, who apparently had not heard that the march was called off, came trudging up the empty, shell-scarred street, carrying above their heads a placard with a pink carnation taped to the front. Written in English with a black pen, the sign said: PIECE NOW.

Shortly before I left Beirut in June 1984, I decided that I wanted to see what remained of the Beirut National Museum, which was located right on the Green Line. The aged director, Emir Maurice Chehab, was only too happy to give me a tour I shall never forget.

Soon after the Lebanese civil war began, and the museum was engulfed in cross fire, the most precious pieces were spirited away and hidden, but the big statues, bas-reliefs, and stelae in the main halls were impossible to move. So Chehab had wooden frames built around each piece and then filled those frames with poured concrete, leaving each priceless object encased in a foot of protective cement that would repel any bullet or shell. When the war ended they could be chiseled out. This made for a rather unusual display, because when you entered the Gallery of Ramses on the ground floor, what you saw were huge square pillars of cement reaching up from the floor to various heights. But Chehab, who had been the director of the museum for ages and knew every piece by heart, gave me a tour anyway. He would point to a 15-foot-high, 5-foot-wide block of cement and say, “Now, here we have a spectacular Egyptian statue found at Byblos.” Then he would walk a few paces and point to another identical block of cement and say in a voice brimming with enthusiasm, “And here is one of the best preserved stelae of early Phoenician writing.” For emphasis he would pat the pillar of cement. After about an hour of this I started to believe I could actually see the objects he was describing.

Whenever I think of Lebanon today, I am reminded of that tour. I still feel that there is a core of the original Levantine spirit left in the place, if only it could be chiseled out from under the layers of scar tissue built up over so many years of civil war.

In September 1988, Amin Gemayel’s term as President expired, but the Muslim and Christian parliamentarians were unable to agree on a successor. A Maronite Lebanese army general, Michel Aoun, was appointed by Gemayel as a caretaker chief of state until elections could be held. The Muslims, however, refused to recognize Aoun’s authority and have appointed the Prime Minister, Selim al-Hoss, as their acting chief executive. As of this writing, there is a Lebanese government in West Beirut and a Lebanese government in East Beirut. Despite this split, those radical Christian or Muslim groups which are calling for formal partition have found little support. Each side has insisted on keeping up the façade of Lebanese statehood and legality and maintaining the option of reunification. Even today, the ideal political future for most Lebanese still seems to be a new, reformed version of the old unified Lebanon.

Even the vast majority of Shiites in Lebanon just want to be Maronites—not religiously, but socially, politically, educationally, and materially. Now that they have inherited Lebanon’s ruins, most Shiites seem to long for some of its old content. Now that they have earned an equitable slice of the pie, they want there to be a pan again.

Nadine Camel-Toueg, the young Christian journalist from West Beirut, told me in 1987 that for years her apartment building had had a Christian doorman named George, but during the Shouf fighting George had fled to East Beirut and was replaced by Hassan, a devout Shiite from a village in south Lebanon. One morning while Nadine was sitting in her living room, Hassan the Shiite concierge came up and knocked on her door.

“He was standing there holding a piece of paper,” recalled Nadine. “He said to me, ‘Could you please fill out this application for me.’ I said, ‘Yeah, sure.’ So I read it and it was an application for a very posh school—the College Protestant. He tells me his daughter is living in the Ivory Coast and there are no good French schools there, so with the money she is making she wants to put her kids in a good French school in Beirut. Then he tells me, ‘You know, if we were living in south Lebanon there is great French school there—even better than all these in Beirut—they don’t even allow the kids to speak Arabic during recreation.’ The guy is a Shiite, he has ‘There is no God but Allah’ written in Arabic all over his door, but he wants to send his kids to a French school where they don’t allow them to speak Arabic. That tells you something.”

What has been happening in Lebanon since 1975 is not just a tribal civil war, argued Lebanese historian Kemal Salibi. “You can also call it a competition to acquire civilization. What the Shiites were saying to the Christians and the other Muslims is ‘We want to be like you. We may be doing it in a clumsy way, because we don’t know how to express ourselves, but we want to be part of the game.’ My family are Christians. In 1866 they were goatherders in the mountains. They had feuds and were constantly killing each other and fighting other tribes. Then they came to Beirut and after three generations they stopped being like this. We thought the same of the Sunnis—that they were boors, but now they are bourgeois … so who can say what the future will bring?”

Shortly before finishing this book, I had a reunion in London with my closest Lebanese friend, a quintessential Lebanese optimist, Nawaf Salam. Salam, a Sunni Muslim academic and a member of the elite Salam clan which once ruled West Beirut before the rise of the Shiites, explained to me the facts of life back in West Beirut, which he staunchly refused to leave, let alone give up on.

“All the myths are gone now,” said Salam, “but maybe that is the beginning of wisdom. That is what keeps people like me going. We now know that the democracy we had was not a democracy at all but a sectarian balance of power. Liberty was not real liberty, but a kind of organized anarchy, and the diversity of press was largely a cacophony of voices subsidized by the Arab world. But even with everything having fallen apart a certain open society still exists. A united Lebanon is still the first choice of the Maronites, not a separate state, and a united Lebanon is still the first choice of the Shiites, not an Islamic republic. With no water, no electricity, and no police, we still enjoy a certain quality of life that you cannot find in any other country in the Arab world. There are still more books published today in Beirut than anywhere else in the Arab world. There is still more of a free press today in Beirut than anywhere else in the Arab world. Even today I will take the American University of Beirut over Amman University. I will takeAn-Naharnewspaper over [the Syrian daily] Al-Baath. Even with everything destroyed, the idea of Beirut is still there. The challenge now is to rebuild it on real foundations, not phony ones.”

It is said that some men are born to times they cannot change. As I listened to Salam across the dinner table, I wondered if that would be his fate: a good man born in a bad neighborhood, an optimistic soul born to a bad time he simply could not change. But the more I listened to his enthusiasm and optimism, the more I thought I had better hold off on writing Lebanon’s obituary.

Just after I saw Salam in London, I came across an Associated Press article in the Jerusalem Post about life in Beirut in the late 1980s. The article explained that since the Syrian army had returned to West Beirut in 1987 to help provide some law and order for the Muslim half of town, the Shiite fundamentalist gunmen were being driven underground and a small measure of the good life was being restored. New bars and restaurants were opening on the ruins of the old.

“To be sure,” the article said, “car bombs still explode in busy thoroughfares … killing or wounding passersby in Lebanon’s eternal cycle of violence. Few days pass without shell blasts and gunfire jolting both sides of Beirut, as rival militias shoot it out … . Telephones work haphazardly and letters from abroad can take months to be delivered … . Yet newspapers are filled with advertisements for stylish clothes, Parisian perfumes, and nightclub floor shows. Billboards for sexy lingerie line the Hamra and Mazraa thoroughfares.”

As I read that article, it suddenly hit me that hope in Lebanon is not a flower, it’s a weed. Give it just the slightest ray of sunshine, and the tiniest drop of water, and it will shoot right up and multiply between the cracks in Beirut’s rubble. The Lebanon of old is gone now; it cannot be rebuilt as it was, any more than an egg can be sewn back together. But can there be nothing like it again? Here, I am more hopeful. Some essence of the old Lebanon still remains beneath the rubble and ruins. Who knows? One day it may yet reappear in a new form. That is why I insist that I saw the end of something, but maybe not everything—not as long as people like Nawaf Salam are around, not as long as a peace society continues to exist beneath the war society to push up the weeds.