For the last couple of days Tracey has been back at work and apart from doing a few small chores, like changing the Jordanian dinar and collecting the washing from the laundromat, I have one little except sleep, sit on the balcony and drink coffee in a nearby cafe while trying sort out various bits and pieces and write long overdue replies to emails. I have caught Tracey’s cold and sore throat - a sickness that is sweeping Beirut it seems. - and that is slowing me down. Much of the time I am tempted just to doze after having spent the night being woken by sneezing, sore throat and bad dreams. Today is Thursday and Tracey is not working tomorrow so until I return on Monday she is taking me to parts of Beirut I have not yet seen, and on Sunday an organised trip to Sidon and the Hezbollah Museum at Melita. I went to Sidon last year and it was one of my favourite Lebanese towns, so this time I may drop out of much of the tour and just enjoy hanging around the harbour until we move on.
Today is tomorrow, and his afternoon we browsed the antique shops of Hamra, a shabbier more muslim area of Beirut than fashionable street Gemayze, off which Tracey lives. As well as the junk and antique shops there were fruit stall, hardware shops with bright coloured buckets, bowls, brushes and cheap Chinese stuff for the poorer home. The junk shops, it was largely more junk than antique, showed me a strange diorama of Beirut history from the early 20th Century to today. There were dozens of huge gilt mirrors large enough to fill an entire wall f my house in Newcastle under Lyme, massive bucolic scenes in Dresden china with rosy cheeked shepherdess clutching fluffy white lambs to their milky bosoms. Mahogany cupboards and chests the size of small houses. Paintings of alpine scenery darkened by the smoke of a million cigarettes; portraits of moustachioed bemedeled and be tarbouched patriarchs. Then there was tat from later eras, 1950s lamps with once bright plastic shades, cocktail cabinets, triangular tables with spindly legs, adverts for Coca Cola and what must have been souvenirs bought back from around the world; African carvings, Chinese plaster figures, masks from the South Seas. Odd unclassifiable things too, like the knitted parrots with bent beaks that Tracey tried so hard to make me buy. The shop owners, surprisingly, put no such pressure on us. One even gave us a bottle of water and handful of sweets, that included a Kopiko the Indonesian coffee sweet the was my favourite in Jogja.
Out of all this detritus of Lebanon’s past it was the grandiloquence of the early years that impressed me.With a little paint and restoration you could easily fit out your themed bar or restaurant in any decade since the 1900s. What wealth there must have been. And how they knew to flaunt it! Yes, there is plenty of wealth here today too but looking in the super expensive shops of the new souk I see nothing of this extraordinary ostentation. The stuff is expensive, very expensive, but it seems almost …. tasteful in its understatement. rather a disappointment I like my rich to be vulgar, flamboyant and tasteless, in a Donald Trump sort of way. It makes me feel superior.
Walking around Hamra the following, a less posh and more obviously Arab part of Beirut I was mildly surprised to see that massive gilt sculptures and mirrors were still popular and that it was possible to buy a modern version of the knitted parrots.
Sunday morning my last day in Lebanon and we had breakfast in Tracey’s friend Julie’s apartment. Eggs and fried potatoes - which Julie likes to call eggiest and finger chippies from some past Middle Eastern experience when this was all that was on offer. - and croissants from Beirut’s original french bakery,Paul’s. All with fresh orange juice. After Julie’s we dropped into a very smart Strarbucks on the Corniche to use the toilets then
Tracey took me off to the Beirut Souk Al Ahad, the Sunday flea market. Piles of broken toys, chipped plates, dented electrical goods, that might or might not work -most likely not - rusting pans, tangles of cheap strings of beads, clocks with missing hands and piles and piles of shoes and clothes, where you most likely could pick up a flea or two. If that was your intention. Next to the flea market was a covered market that sold similar but knew things and few more up market ‘antique’ stalls. I was pleased and amused to see the wonderful unPC Fatty Man brand on sale. Something I had only seen in similar markets in Indonesia but now the brand has been to the more snappy Fatty Guy. An attempt to break into the American market perhaps.
I realise I have got things out of order and I should have described our visit to the Melita Hezbollah museum earlier, but I am not about writing factual travelogue but a kind of fictionalised account of events that I can later look back on and marvel as if they really happened.
So. Tracey treated me to a tour of Sidon and Melita as I had long been curious about the Hezbollah museum in its beautiful mountain setting. The tour was actually Melita and Sidon because when we arrived in Sidon the famous sea-castle was closed while a VIP came to view the progress of restoration work. The bus carrying our little tour group wriggled its way up into the hills through narrow winding roads, taking a longer route than usual as the short cut was closed for repairs. We finally arrived at Melita and the entrance reminded me of one of those mountaintop shrines I have visited in Georgia, Armenia and Lebanon, the buildings were clean and bright and the site well laid out with paths that led through carefully tended flower beds, and a good number of information boards to help you on the way. And the essential souvenir shop. All it lacked was a massive statue of a woman holding a grenade launcher. Our Mother of Terrorism. Instead of a statue in the centre there was something more interesting, a low wide pit, encircled with raised walkways. The pit which could have easily served as a giant tortoise enclosure in a first class zoo. But there no tortoises, only a tank with a knotted gun, the remains of a helicopter, weapons of all kinds and a thick scattering of Israeli helmets to top off the confection of warfare. Different parts had different names relating to tactics in the war against Israel. I can only remember two; the abyss and the spiderweb. The spiderweb actually contained a spiderweb made of rope. Our articulate and well informed Hezbollah guide explained that this was came from a remark that 'Israel is no stronger than a spider's web.' I was tempted to point out that relatively spider silk is one of the strongest substances known and scaled up like this would be almost impossible to break. I kept my mouth shut. As the guide explained this symbolic memorial was not really aimed at the faithful, or visiting tourists like us; it is meant to be seen from the air and is a message to Israel. In fact there were some messages in Hebrew among the twisted weaponry. I found that an interesting concept for a museum and this central abyss is certainly wonderfully designed and executed.
We saw a short and not very informative film about the war and walked a beautiful little woodland trail with dioramas of bunkers, field hospital and offices, with dummies representing the Hezbollah soldiers lurking in the bosky shade of the trees. It was a visit that leaves everyone with much to think about. Some things obvious like the nature of propaganda and war, the definition of terrorism, the role of religion in guerrilla warfare, and some things more subtle, the symbolic message in places like this and who that message is directed at.
Before leaving I used the marble hall of the toilets. All clean cool and marble a martyr waking up there could easily imagine he was in heaven.
Melita is extraordinary because it is run by a 'terrorist organisation' and it is well designed and efficient and even the toilets say a lot about the organisational powers of Hezbollah. And I guess that is another message visitors are meant to take away with them.