Brownies and Kalashnikovs Page 27
“Freedom’s door can only be knocked on by the hand that is covered with the blood of sacrifice.”
There were many unsung heroes, young men not affiliated to any political party who turned into suicide bombers and hit-and-run attackers against the occupiers of their city and were pivotal in driving the Israelis out of Sidon if only to contain their losses. Once the occupation was ended, Sidonian informers received their death sentences from fellow Sidonians ‘who never forget,’ as Adnan had once described them to me.
***
After Abu Bashar’s death, the Khayyats went into a long stretch of personal sadness in addition to the strains of occupation. Adnan’s older brother Hassan, a quiet man with a wry sense of humor and a heart of gold, died in a car accident along the desert highway between Dubai and Abu Dhabi, just eight months after Abu Bashar passed away. He left behind a vivacious, pretty young widow, Mona, barely thirty years old with two spirited daughters, Nadine (twelve) and Zeina (ten), and a much-feted baby son, Bashar, who had not yet turned two. Under the guidance of the most bereaved of us all, Im Bashar, we rallied around Mona and her children in a fiercely protective and loving circle. Sadness was everywhere for the Lebanese whether it was personal or not.
13
War and Dreams
Two years after the Israeli invasion of 1982, promises of peace were made and the fighting suddenly stopped. Despite the continued presence of the multinational forces, Israeli occupation of Sidon and the south, Beirut divided into East and West and sporadic clashes amongst the heavily-armed militias, the news going around was that war was over. The local warlords had drawn clear lines of demarcation throughout Lebanon, we were told, and from now on negotiations would be carried out on paper only.
We chose to believe the hype and with stars in our eyes, gave the go ahead for construction to begin of our dream home in Doha, a hilly suburb south of Beirut, a nature reserve where peacocks and deer ran free. My brother-in-law had already bought a beautiful house there in 1976 from an American couple who had chosen this spot to pursue their art and photography. It had been a very difficult decision for the couple to sell their home, but they were old and had seen enough of the civil war to read the end of Lebanon as they knew it, at least within their lifetime. We had visited my brother-in-law frequently in his new home and had found it a peaceful, neutral spot in contrast to the chaos of the divided capital. Our architect promised us that we could move into our dream home in no longer than six months time and we chose to take his word for it. On September 18, 1984, we bade farewell to staid, predictable Abu Dhabi, where tomorrow was pretty much the same as yesterday and took the plunge back into Lebanon.
When it comes to love and country, reason flies out the door. Now I can only look back and wonder, “What were we thinking?” We weren’t thinking actually, we were dreaming. Never mind that they were dreams made of gossamer fluff, we jumped in anyway with our trademark determination to make our dreams happen.
From Day One in our rented villa across the street from the construction site of our new home, it became crystal clear that the Israeli invasion had put an end to Doha’s ‘raison d’etre.’ All that remained of Doha were large, empty ransacked villas. My brother-in-law’s family and ours were the only homes where children played, music blared, and calls could be heard for meal times. Our children and my brother-in-law’s merged into one extended family, eating, playing, arguing, and studying together, the one bright spot of promise in the dismal war torn suburb. Overgrown vines and thorn bushes had reclaimed the once landscaped gardens; wild dogs howled all night and a bevy of abandoned housecats quickly zoned in on our house as a steady source of food. Outside of our two homes, Doha was a ghost-town, empty of its original inhabitants. It was now under the watchful eye of its new inhabitants, displaced southern Lebanese families who looked after the dream homes that had died before they had a chance to live.
Our temporary home was an accurate reflection of the events of the war. The two-story villa was designed in the shape of a Swiss chalet as a weekend retreat for an artistically inclined Maronite Lebanese architect. The entire Mediterranean flora was present in his garden where he entertained, Lebanese style, with al fresco mezza spreads under a towering jacaranda tree. Tangles of jasmine clambered along the open terrace’s walls and rows of lavender, roses and gardenias encircled the terrace’s railings. A boisterous bright red bougainvillea covered the length of the wrought-iron fence that encircled the villa. In addition to jasmine, roses and gardenias, there were orange and tangerine trees, evergreens, and a wondrous camellia that took center stage in the front garden. Within the cool interior of the house, the entrée had been left to soar to the roof with an open floor plan that combined spacious seating areas that surrounded a circular sunken fountain and a cozy handcrafted kitchen with a seated bar that lead to the terrace and a secluded back garden. Vines of ivy on the outer stone walls were invited indoors through small portlets lined up along the two-story high walls near the ceiling to frame pieces of the sky. Spiders were left to weave their cobwebs unharmed because they added to the oneness with nature that the owner wanted his summer retreat to reflect. A half-floor with a fireplace flanked by two built-in oak bookshelves overlooked the ground floor. There in his aerie, the original owner read and surveyed his garden and the Mediterranean coastline through wall-to-wall French windows in winter and from the wide curved balcony that the French windows opened onto in fair weather. Under the half-floor, facing the kitchen on the ground floor, was a circular sunk-in seating arrangement covered with Persian carpets, soft silk floor cushions and a brick fireplace for fondue nights.
Alas, in 1975, just three years after he had moved into his dream house, the civil war crashed into his little heaven when he became the targeted religion in this particular area. He panicked, sold the house and all of its belongings overnight for a song and fled to the Christiandominated area of Lebanon.
Its new owner, a stolid Sunni Muslim from Beirut, altered the house into a formal area with blanket disregard of what the original space was designed to express. He sealed off the front open terrace that had served as the main entrance and turned it instead into a formal living room that no one could sit in as the poor workmanship allowed in blasts of cold air during winter. A second formal receiving area replaced the open seating area where the fountain had gurgled and ivy had wound its way through small portlets near the high ceiling. The portlets were sealed shut, the spiders and their webs zapped and a faux fireplace of two truncated ornate plaster columns topped by a slab of black marble for a mantelpiece was installed against the soaring two-story high wall. Flanking the useless fireplace, reduced to midget size where it stood, were two sets of highly uncomfortable Louis XVI sofa knock-offs. A circular piece of wood covered the sunken fountain in the center of the salon so no one would fall in during the blackouts. The former poetic space now exuded all the charm of a vacuous government ministry. Standing between the two receiving areas was a life-size plaster Venus di Milo that looked on morosely at the cacophony of interior design around it.
Soon after he moved in, the new owner became so terrified of the war reaching him in Doha, that he sold the villa to a Palestinian entrepreneur based in Saudi Arabia and returned to his penthouse in Beirut. In a twist of Shakespearean tragedy, an incendiary mortar shell landed on his penthouse during a militia battle for turf, and he died from a heart attack.
The villa’s new Palestinian owner was not interested in living in his new purchase and the house remained boarded-up and forsaken until Israeli foot soldiers occupied it en route to invading Beirut on June 6, 1982. Pleased with its strategic position overlooking the city, airport and Palestinian camps, the 91st Division’s Task Force Commander, Major General Adam found Doha the ideal spot for reconnaissance in the siege of Beirut. He gave orders to requisition villas and hunker down until the rest of the invading troops, who were stuck in the infamous mother-ofall-traffic-jams of tanks and bulldozers along the Israeli-Lebanese border, caught up. The P
alestinian’s villa was turned over to a troop of foot soldiers. Apparently it was a longer wait than the young men occupying our villa expected, judging from the graffiti we came upon, scrawled in Hebrew on each and every wall expressing boredom and intense homesickness.
Major General Adam’s decision to wait in Doha was a fatal one to him. It was there that he would become Israel’s highest-ranking officer ever to die in combat. Playing a major role in his demise was my brother-in-law’s female German shepherd, Bonny. Adam had liked my brother-in-law’s house and its sweeping view over the southern coastal road and the Palestinian camps surrounding the airport. He decided to make it his headquarters. As he stepped out of his jeep to inspect the estate, Bonny barreled towards him and sank her fangs into his thigh. His soldiers killed her on the spot. The bad karma generated by the attack soured the Major General’s enthusiasm for my brother-inlaw’s villa and he decided to look elsewhere. But not before he allowed his soldiers free range to ransack the house, empty it of everything valuable and smear their excrement on the beds and sofas in salute.
Adam’s next choice was the Zantout villa, which seemed far better than my brother-in-law’s. It was brand new and not yet lived in by its owners, with an even greater vantage point over Beirut and the southern coastal highway leading to the capital. But what Adam was not aware of was that it had also been chosen for the same reasons by three Palestinian commandos on a reconnaissance mission to monitor the movements of the Israeli army. Caught by surprise, the commandos managed to slip undetected into the basement while Adam and his officers moved in, six in total. As soon as the Palestinian fighters realized exactly who was sharing the villa with them, they made their move that very same night, a moonless night. Under cover of the darkness, they crept noiselessly out of the basement towards the unsuspecting Israeli officers as they sat on the balcony laughing and drinking while they played a game of cards. The commandos attacked in a barrage of machine gun fire that killed all six, including Major General Adam, and retreated unscathed back to the basement where they braced for the expected reprisal. In spite of the IDF’s superior firepower, the young Palestinian fighters kept on shooting until they ran out of ammunition and were finished off cornered in the basement. Our gardener, Abu Ali, an old man from Ramieh, a village on the southern border of Lebanon, was then the terrified concierge of the villa next door who was marched out and ordered to bury them. The bodies remained in their shallow grave for three weeks before their families were allowed to reclaim their sons.
***
Soon after we moved into our temporary quarters, it became clear to us that our architect’s promise of moving in within six months was laughable and frivolous. Although the Lebanese warlords and their militias were no longer under any visible hands of tutelage, they had bitten into the lucrative fruits of warmongering and were coveting one another’s territories. The battles for control over Lebanon and its trade routes that included West Beirut, the port areas, the southern coastal road, the inland routes that went through the mountains and the airport were raging once more. The Shiite Syrian-backed Amal militia in control of most of the south and the southern suburbs of Beirut began to push for total control over West Beirut. To accomplish that, it needed first to neutralize the Druze who were in control of West Beirut and the southern coastline and to subdue the Palestinians who were showing similar signs of hegemony over West Beirut. Amal’s encroachment on the Druze militia’s turf in West Beirut triggered a new alliance between the Druze and the Palestinians against Amal, creating a vile tangle for power amongst former comrades-in-arms against the Israeli enemy.
We had unwittingly brought our children to witness the ugliest chapter of Lebanon’s war.
Stubbornly, we continued the construction of our new house regardless of its progress in fits and starts … naturally, more fits than starts. The laborer’s movements depended upon the confessional color of the winning side in the street battles that erupted without warning in lawless Beirut. Our labor force was composed of Palestinians, Syrians, Kurds, Armenians, and Lebanese Sunnis, Shiites, Druzes, and Orthodox Christians. This wide range meant there was always someone who couldn’t reach work because his confession’s number was up at flash checkpoints. The absent worker would hold up the rest because as per Murphy’s Law, his job would need to be completed first before the rest could do theirs (electrician before plasterer, plasterer before painter, etc.) We paid protection money for our truckloads of building material to a round robin shuffle of militia members from each warring faction of the civil war that took control at some point in time over the checkpoint at the fork of the road on the southern coastal highway that lead to Doha. Electricity was erratic and the telephone system was a joke. We used a car telephone in our home to connect to a group of bribed telephone operators for any contact with the outside world. Our children moved within a narrow shuttle between Doha, their school near the airport and their grandmother’s house in Sidon. They knew nothing else of Lebanon. Beirut was their school, Sidon was their Grandmother’s home, and Doha was their home. Their cousins were their friends. For the longest time in her early childhood, the words ‘cousin’ and ‘friend’ were one and the same for Munira. Our toddling twin daughters were even more homebound. Too young for school, their sole contact with the real world through trips to the park or to the supermarket or of meeting people outside their family, happened only during our visits to Europe.
***
Early one morning, a few months before the Israelis retreated from Sidon, a very old woman appeared at my door. “Please, please,” she begged me, “Please help me find my sons. I am Palestinian and I have not seen my sons since 1982 when the Israelis invaded. I have been searching for them for the past two years. Allah is merciful to me; He has not taken my sons. I have been told that they are still alive and are moving from one location to the next. They are good boys, I know who I have raised and they have never carried a weapon in their lives. Please can you lead me to them? I have been told that they are working as plasterers in Doha, and your house is the only one going up here. No one would talk to me at the site. You are a mother; you will understand.” With tears streaming down both of our faces, we silently made our way to the construction site where I knew that two very quiet and diligent young Palestinian men had been working as plasterers and sleeping on the site for the past two weeks. And they were her sons. Sobs of relief escaped from her as they dropped what they were doing and ran to their mother, first kissing her hands before embracing her. She came to see them every day laden with food and clothing, content to sit silently on a stool in their company while they worked. Not a word passed between us as the less everyone knew, the safer it was for all. When the two men finished their consigned work, they and their mother parted ways once more as they melted into the backdrop of the pointless Lebanese civil war.
My first lesson in how to deal with our new lifestyle took place very soon after our arrival in Beirut. We were invited to dinner by friends of ours who were celebrating their wedding anniversary in Beirut. The situation was troubling that day and deep rumblings of mortar fire could be heard intermittently in the distance. I was not yet the battle-seasoned Beiruti that most were after ten years of civil war and the sound of a cap gun made me jump, so it was with some trepidation that I accepted to venture out that evening. We walked into a festive room filled with laughter, song, and dance to live music from a troupe of musicians and singers. In the midst of the festivities, a gun battle broke out two streets away between Amal and Hezbollah, an opposing Shi’a militia that had risen out of the ashes of Sharon’s ‘Peace for Galilee’ invasion. Hezbollah rattled Amal with its superior organization, militancy and professionalism and its unwavering focus strictly on the Israeli occupiers of the south and their Lebanese lackeys rather than warmongering for material benefits like the rest. Amal felt its power base threatened and decided to stem the flow of Shi’a young men attracted to Hezbollah by killing them. The staccato of machine gun fire with the occasional crash of
the RPG (rocket propelled grenade) mortars drowned out the melodious voice of the singers and guests now and then but the party continued in its gaiety without missing a beat. It was only I who could not withstand the travesty of the situation without mentioning it and asked out loud, “What’s going on?”
“They’re shooting at one another down the road. We’re not within their target range,” the lady next to me answered smilingly as she patted my leg comfortingly then dived back into clapping and singing for the men and woman who were dancing.
The party carried on into the early hours and so did the shooting. Both stopped within minutes of one another, the militia picking up their dead and wounded and the partygoers their coats and hats, and all went home to rest before continuing the same absurd lifestyle for 15 more years.
Too many innocents would die in this inane war for no reason other than being in the way of a bullet. Weaponry meant for distances of kilometers were used against targets only meters away. Sick of fearing death every minute of their daily routines, the desperate Beirutis eventually developed homegrown early-warning-systems for predicting flash battles after studying the activity around them very closely and uncovering certain constants common to all. In many fortunate instances, rumors did actually pinpoint the location of the battles-to-be, ‘Fi ‘alqa’ (they’re going to tangle) and people stayed home.
The Lebanese universally recognized that the ‘ alqas were never spur-of-the-moment clashes. Rather, they were intricately choreographed confrontations for turf control and victory depended solely on the surprise factor. The script invariably went as follows: