Brownies and Kalashnikovs Page 16
Among the myriad rules and regulations made to keep the boarding school’s reputation as one of stellar propriety, was the rule that we could only leave the school premises with a chaperone designated by our parents. One very long and boring Sunday, a group of us who had no one to take them out started exploring the school building. A girl had given us an inside tip that there was a music room on the top floor of the villa which she had been allowed to enter to hone her piano skills. We climbed hesitantly up the steep narrow staircase that led to the attic and opened the door to a darkened classroom which seemed to be frozen in a time warp of students past and present. The piano was there, as old as the school itself. There were yellowed pictures of Beirut and of BESG many decades back, hanging crookedly on the wall around a calendar dating 1933. A mixture of dusty musical instrument cases, old cardigans, and straw hats lay in aged silence on equally aged school desks and chairs. What caught our attention and made us brave through this uncomfortable, eerie room was the rooftop terrace just beyond its closed shutters. We pushed in concert against the stiff rusty doors and tumbled out into the bright sunlight with only the unlimited clear sky above us. Without any ado, we immediately made a beeline to gaze down on the street below our dormitory to finally match the faces to the nameless voices that continued to give us such entertainment.
We adopted this terrace as our secret hideout, spending long hours sunbathing and sticking pins into makeshift voodoo dolls of our headmistress, interspersed with writing maudlin poetry filled with teenage angst. Often, our conversations would turn to politics. The boarders were a combination of nationalities from countries surrounding Lebanon, daughters of professionals, rulers and government officials from Iraq, Turkey, Iran, Jordan, Palestine, Syria, Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia (other than me and including three daughters of the late King Sa’ud), Sudan, and Lebanon. Fahda, King Sa’ud’s daughter from his Syrian wife who lived in Beirut, with two of her sisters, Madawi and Sheikha, had decided to join our boarding school that year to have a taste of normal life. Fahda, the eldest, was the most arresting. She reflected the beauty and grace of the Saudi women of Central Arabia with her tall broad shouldered physique, large dark luminous eyes, generous forehead, aquiline nose, full lips and a smile that lit up her face. Fahda carried a decidedly royal aura that was made all the more poignant as it was juxtaposed with her heartfelt desire for normalcy in her relationships with people and notions of dialogue between leader and nation that were not mainstream Al Sa’ud fare. We hit it off well as we were both curious about each other, coming as we did from backgrounds that did not cross one another’s path in Saudi Arabia.
In any given discussion on that terrace, there would be at least three sides to the same issue as each of the girls argued in favor of her country’s take on whatever political dilemma was dominating the news, and discussions invariably centered on the issue of Palestine. We argued at length whether all Jews were the enemy or only the Zionists. Our discussions would time and again focus on the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), which was espousing a militant course of action for the return of Palestine by Palestinians. I learned much from my half Palestinian friend, Amber. Amber’s youthful rebellion, sense of fun and mischief, loud laughter and devil-may-care approach to the world had her sent into solitary punishment almost as often me. She didn’t care too much about studying, preferring dancing, singing, and boys far more. On her serious side, Amber’s dreams of becoming a writer and her love for Palestine stemmed from her love for Jerusalem and for her extended family there. Her grandparents were Christian Palestinians whose ancestry went back generations upon generations in a town that seemed to be a haven of peace and harmony amongst its residents. In Amber’s and other pre1967 Arabs’ take on the world, their fight for Palestine was against the Zionists, never against the Arab Jews who had been until then firmly woven into the fabric of the Levantine society culturally and historically.
The Levantine multi-religious character of Beirut was markedly demonstrated on our weekly Sunday walks through the city. Due to the strictly enforced policy controlling our weekend outings, Amber, Lisa, the twins Maria and Helena, Hana Azzouni (a giggly Palestinian-Saudi who would eventually become my sister-in-law), Khairiyeh Rehaimi, (who was as serious as Hana wasn’t) and I were the ‘usuals’ left hanging around the school grounds as none of us particularly got along with our parentally-appointed guardians. A kindly spinster teacher of Christian Assyrian descent who lived next door to the school would invite our motley crew to have tea at her house and then take in a movie at one of the brand new, lavishly furnished theatres in Hamra, the high street of Beirut. We looked forward to our walks with Miss Ashooh and loved sitting in her immaculate little living room eating small cakes and sipping tea, doing our best to fight back waves of nostalgia for the living rooms of our homes.
After finishing our tea, we would stroll to Hamra Street passing through the historic old quarter of Beirut. First came the Jewish quarter, Wadi Abu Jmeel, marked by its Synagogue built in the refined, proportionate architecture of the Ottoman era and its adjoining school, a compact red-tiled two-storied affair with yellow stone walls and red wooden shutters. It was known simply as ‘the Jewish School’ and catered to students of all denominations. The Jewish neighborhood was one like any other with its narrow streets, small grocery stores, artisan shops and modest but charming three- and four-story buildings dating back to the Ottoman and French colonial eras; it was also home to Assyrians, Kurds, Orthodox Christians and Sunni Beirutis. Wadi Abu Jmeel opened onto a major thoroughfare leading to the center of Beirut, where a mix of houses of worship dotted its wide sidewalks. A short distance down from the synagogue was the Greek Orthodox Church covered in giant slabs of polished white stone and stained-glass windows. Crowned by a towering succession of eye-catching terracotta-tiled domes of varying gradations, the church spread its impressive beauty over an entire block. In stark contrast, a few buildings away, the Catholic Church stood tall, narrow and somber in its unadorned yellow limestone walls, small wrought-iron clad windows, and pointed gothic-style arched façade. Not to be outshone by its neighbors, the Maronite church stood aloofly apart from the rest of the churches across the thoroughfare, boasting a seamless Romanesque arch of stone that framed giant wooden doors which dwarfed the modern office buildings from the 1950s next door. Surrounding the Maronite church in casual array were ancient Mamluk-era mosques with their perfect spherical domes and graceful muezzin spires that defined the skyline of downtown Beirut.
As we ambled through Wadi Abu Jmeel on any given Sunday, a medley of religious calls for prayer would fill the air as they echoed from one muezzin spire to the next and from each church’s bells as they chimed and clanged festively up and down the musical scale. The faithful would stream into their respective houses of worship, while the less faithful tended to their mundane Sunday activities. Such cohabitation was nothing remarkable in the everyday lives of the Levantines. My mother’s best friend was a Jewish Syrian named Anna who lived next door in the heart of Damascus. I grew up listening to my mother’s stories of her escapades with Anna and how she would offer to help with small tasks for Anna’s family on the Sabbath Day. These stories always ended with how my mother’s family hid Anna and her family from the Vichy French during their occupation of Syria in 1940. In those days, the Levantines judged one another by how one abided by their time-honored norms of decency and decorum, and not by what religion one was.
This code of honor was highlighted one morning in BESG. Every morning before classes began we would troop out to the Chapel on the school grounds to hear a short prayer from the principal, a large German-American evangelist, Miss Else Farr. She wasn’t the most scintillating of speakers nor were the girls the keenest of listeners but it was all taken in stride by the mixed student body as just another routine of BESG school life … until one Monday morning when Miss Farr learned another side of the Arab psyche that she had never factored in during her long stay in Lebanon. That Monday morning, Miss Farr
walked up to the pulpit and as usual asked the students to rise for song. “I am going to give you a surprise today,” she told us over the microphone. The girls giggled in anticipation of this unusual change of routine. Miss Farr opened her mouth (quite a substantial one) wide and a song celebrating the birthday of her dog, Tina, began to warble forth. A sudden deathly silence gripped the entire student body as feelings of deep insult hit the girls simultaneously. There are red lines in Arab dignity as Miss Farr learned that unhappy Monday morning. Observing rituals of religions not their own was no problem, but singing to dogs was.
Outside of that one experience, the Chapel was a place of refuge for me. It was the most beautiful building on the premises. Set in the midst of an exquisitely-kept garden filled with fragrant gardenias and roses, it was an oasis of loveliness and tranquility. The chapel was the one spot where I could sit quietly with myself and read after taking permission from the sisters in charge. I often went there to rest my mind whenever I felt overwhelmed by my new confusing surroundings. A co-boarder, a Jordanian of Circassian origin, Aida Mufti, joined me one afternoon. Emboldened by one another’s presence, we decided to put down our books and explore the stage beyond the pews and the pulpit. As we lifted the heavy velvet curtains on the stage, we discovered a hidden revolving door. Timidly, we pushed it and it flew open exposing the busy street outside of the school grounds. Cars whizzed past and pedestrians of all shapes and sizes walked up and down the sidewalk. We had just uncovered the door the priest used to enter the chapel on Sunday mornings!
It took no longer than a second for us to realize that we were experiencing a golden opportunity of unsupervised liberty and unfettered freedom. “I’ve heard of this up-to-the-minute café called ‘Automatique’ that makes a new kind of coffee called cappuccino. It’s just down the street, let’s go!” Aida shouted happily above the din of the traffic. The coffee shop in question was at the end of the sloping street down from our school in the exact center of Beirut, an airy expansive restaurant enclosed in floor to ceiling glass windows, where everyone sitting at the tables could see and be seen, a favorite Lebanese activity. Espresso and cappuccino machines had just hit town and they were the latest coffee drink of the season. The café of the moment, the ‘Automatique,’ was abuzz with the ultra chic business and social world of Beirut. Sliding breathlessly behind a table in a prime position next to the glass window, we gave our order with what élan we could muster to an openly amused waiter as he took in our school uniforms and obvious youth. Turning towards the glass façade, we stared enthralled at the teeming sidewalks beyond, the hustle and bustle of a dynamic city. Our cappuccinos arrived, generous frothy affairs sprinkled with chocolate and cinnamon. My first taste of cappuccino will remain forever entwined in my memory with my first taste of freedom in Beirut at its finest hour.
The Beirut I was seeing that day in 1965 was the Beirut my generation will always hold in our nostalgic hearts. At the crossroads to Europe, Asia and Africa, Lebanon was the glamorous money processor for Arabia’s oil fields. Three billion dollars per year in revenue poured into its coffers from the oil industry of the Arabian hinterland. Arabs and non-Arabs from everywhere flocked in droves to Lebanon’s cool green mountains and fun-filled nightclubs, arriving at the pride of the Middle East, Beirut’s state-of-the-art airport and its spanking new Middle East Airlines 707s. Although very few Lebanese could afford to travel, they visited the airport anyway. Beirut International Airport became the place to take one’s children on a Sunday outing. Everyone young and old got their thrills from watching airplanes take off and land as they stood in excited anticipation on a spacious curved balcony that overlooked the tarmac built expressly for that purpose. There was a top-notch restaurant for the fancier crowd and for those less affluent the ice cream was well worth the trip. It was called ‘Merry’ cream, the brand name of the machine that squeezed out fat tantalizing swirls of chocolate and vanilla ice cream. No visitor to Beirut at that point in time (or Lebanese for that matter) looking up to see the happy, waving crowds upon arrival at Beirut airport, could conceive that ‘things were not always as they seemed’ in Lebanon, to paraphrase the Cheshire cat of Alice in Wonderland, as those in power were still able to keep the discontented carefully invisible.
Coup d’Etats, War, and Snow
Despite the major flaws in its constitution and a lack of transparency in its economy, Lebanon seemed to have all the outward signs of being an icon of stability compared with its fellow Middle Eastern neighbors, who were also emerging from centuries of colonialism. Egypt’s, Iraq’s, and Libya’s people overthrew their kings and colonizers in popular moves for self-determination and the Cold War superpowers installed dictators in the vacated positions with a job description that included throwing the leaders of such promising popular movements in their rapidly growing dungeons to rot. As the British Empire breathed its final death rattle, its former colonies in the Arabian Gulf were quartered into sparsely populated sheikhdoms and kingdoms while Syria went into a series of coups that seemed to have no end.
I experienced these Syrian coups ad nauseum during the summers I spent with my grandparents in Damascus. A coup d’état could occur once a summer, sometimes twice. A collective groan of frustration would rise across Damascus and from us in my grandfather’s house when the all too familiar military jingle accompanied by a self-important voice interrupted regular radio programs to announce a coup d’état. The new leader would pop up on the television screen promising eternal stability and to fight against the Zionists to the end and a curfew would be slapped on us for three days (the time needed to mop up what remained from the previous President). To pass the time under curfew, we would play-act ‘coup d’état’ and march in housebound demonstrations lead by Uncle Hisham who was in his mid-teens and had issues with his mother, my grandmother. She would come in from the garden to find placards denouncing her as we marched in circles repeating Uncle Hisham’s chants for whatever grievance he needed resolved. ‘Faltaskut Yisr Hammoud ” (Down with Yisr Hammoud) and our response was “Taskut! Taskut! Taskut!” (Down! Down! Down!). That aside, what really annoyed us during those coups d’état was the lack of television or radio, as these would be reserved for the numerically arranged military announcements about the progress of the coup and what was expected from the population (100 percent support for the coup leaders). Bursts of gunfire would follow very near to our home that was in the neighborhood of the much moved into and out of presidential palace. This included Hafez al Asad’s coup d’état against Salah Jedid in 1970, the year my grandfather died. It was scarier than the rest because one of my uncles was pinned down in the crossfire. Fortunately it was over quickly and my uncle came home safely. After that coup the fun stopped both in my grandparents’ house that lost much in Asad’s policy of land appropriation in favor of his minority Alawite group, and Syria in general after his deadly clampdown on the majority Sunni Muslims.
Lebanon appeared to be immune to the contagion of dictatorships that was eating up the newly emerging Arab nation-states. Lebanon was the poster boy of capitalism in the Middle East with its bank secrecy laws, flexible bankers, multilingual western-oriented entrepreneurs, elected parliament and a judiciary based on the Napoleonic code of law. Back then in the 1960s, no one was afraid of war or gave it any sobering thought. The Lebanese felt invincible. Their freedom of thought was nonexistent in the Arab countries stretching from the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf. That politics was discussed so openly was in complete contrast to what I had become accustomed to in Saudi Arabia, primarily within the confines of the American community. No one ever discussed anything in Dhahran when in a group situation outside of sports, the weather, Vietnam, and the current price of crude oil.
As refreshing as its liberalism, was the Lebanese sense of fashion. Less than a month after arriving at BESG, I carefully relegated my sneakers and collared shirts to the back corner of my cupboard, and replaced them with mod op-art mini dresses and clunky ‘pilgrim’ shoes. In spite of my strug
gle to be accepted by the Lebanese, when asked to choose between the insular and apolitical Saudi Arab world and the spirited, avant garde Lebanese one, I found myself choosing Lebanon, hands down.
In my junior year in BESG, my sister joined me briefly but quickly decided it was too foreign for her and moved to England to continue her studies under the close supervision of Uncle Adnan, there for his PhD in agriculture. During our stay together in Beirut, we visited our relatives in Damascus often. One November weekend, in spite of the heavy clouds and inclement weather, Fatin and I decided we had to visit our grandparents if only to get some distance from our boarding school. The taxi station was a five minute walk from our school and we had become regular patrons. We were met with a lot of fanfare at the door of the Alamein taxi office and much discussion went into choosing comfortable seats that had us protectively ensconced away from possible physical contact with any males sharing our taxi.
Our driver that November day was an old man, Abu Maher, who wore a tarbush that swung vigorously to and fro when he talked and he was a very talkative old man. As we climbed higher up the mountains that divided us from Syria, the air around us became perceptibly colder and the heavy grey clouds that accompanied us from Beirut became discernibly thicker and lower in the sky. Nodding to the rhythm of our driver’s story, I gazed sleepily out of the car window at what looked like small confetti swirling around us. My eyes popped open, all sleep rubbed out. Could it be? Was it? Was it SNOW? YES! It was SNOW! My sister squeaked as though afraid her voice would stop the snowflakes. “Fadia, it’s snowing!” We became transfixed in saucer-eyed wonder, our noses glued to the window pane of the car oblivious to its freezing temperature. Our driver’s tassel whirled, “You’ve never seen snow?” he asked in surprise.