Beirut

ON MONDAY, the night before my friend Hassan and I are scheduled to leave Beirut, Hassan is unsure if he will leave. We have arranged for a taxi to Damascus but the roads are dangerous. “The Israelis bomb the road,” he says, “and then a bulldozer comes out and paves it over.” This is characteristic of the Lebanese: their resourcefulness, energy, and optimism to keep rebuilding; but the fact is that after a while, some things are truly broken.

We are sitting at Abu Elie, one of the few bars open Monday night. It’s a communist bar with photos papered over the walls. There’s Lenin and Kemal Jumblatt, the Lebanese Buddhist-Socialist-aristocrat-poet-warlord, whose ambition may have been responsible for the onset of the civil wars in 1975. (After his assassination, one in a string of political murders credited to the regime in Damascus, his son Walid–the current Druze leader–took over.) There are pictures of Fairouz, the famous Lebanese diva, through various stages of her career. A Red Army officer’s hat hangs from a hook in the wall on top of a rifle.