Coming of Age in the Middle East by Trevor Mostyn

Author:Trevor Mostyn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zamadur International Ltd
Published: 2014-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

8 A noisy night in Beirut

I had first known Beirut in its plump days before the civil war, and as a poor student was repelled by its brash wealth. I next visited it nine years later in 1977 when the forces of darkness had become a self-perpetuating cycle of horror. Only then, and I say it with shame, did I look at the city with fascination and empathy. Damnation seemed to have broken its fragile surface of slick satisfaction.

Had the Lebanese come into their own amid the blasted buildings, the bodies dragged behind ‘voitures verolées’ (‘bullet-poxed cars’), the traffic jam on the airport road while the car ahead was having its passengers kidnapped and dragged off to a repulsive death? Yeats could have written for Lebanon: ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.’

In April 1977, shortly after the short-lived ceasefire which was mistaken for peace after a year of internecine savagery, I put Beirut down on my itinerary for a visit as Macmillan Publishers’ Middle East Manager and no director questioned it.

At the airport I was astonished by the efficiency and friendliness of officials who barely glanced at my baggage. The taxi driver immediately tried to cheat me, a cosy reminder of Lebanon before the war. I had misunderstood that his £20 charge was danger money. So absorbed was he in haggling for his bloated fee that my attempts to discuss the ‘events’, or get him to comment on the massive security force checkpoints, or identify the shattered buildings, were to no avail. But the devastation was partial and when I reached the elegant, efficient Bristol Hotel in Al-Hamra I relaxed into the assumption that, as usual, the whole affair had been exaggerated by the press.

I paid the taxi £10 and entered the hotel where a phalanx of porters greeted me with genuine pleasure. ‘No need to book a room, sir,’ gushed the reservations clerk. The porter refused a tip. The only stipulation was that everything had to be paid in cash. No cards or travellers’ cheques: hard cash and everyone was happy. The credit card companies had long ago crossed Lebanon off the map. My first visitor was the German Ambassador, a friend of a friend in London, who had been running a one-man show for one and a half years. ‘I have no staff so have to don a hundred hats,’ he told me jovially. ‘I am everyone from Ambassador to tea-boy.’ The French Embassy was, by comparison, top-heavy. Everybody seemed to have stayed put throughout the war. They had not cut back on a single staff member although two gendarmes had been killed. Two years later the French Ambassador was murdered.

When the German Ambassador had left I telephoned one of my closest childhood friends, Charles-Henri d’Aragon, who was now Second Secretary in the French Embassy. He had recently arrived in advance of his wife and was delighted t:o hear from me. ‘I’ll come round immediately. Just wait there.’

Within fifteen minutes he had arrived.

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