AT THE SQUARE

By Arie Amaya-Akkermans For G. Maalouf and E. Magdi

I "Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible" -Hannah Arendt The war had ended but it was still summer. It was such a different morning, prosperous, defiant, even opulent with happiness. The fifty something kilometers along Damascus Road were very tense, fraught with disbelief. There was still a stench of burnt asphalt and tar, almost invisible after Bhamdoun, when you passed the ruins of the abandoned synagogue; it was like a signpost from elsewhere. The arrival into the womb of the valley was painless, but somehow suffocating. I stood by myself in front of the statue, to let all the difficult air sink in, and then like a miracle, the noise and the moisture stopped. You could hear the waters at the Berdawni breathe in slow agitation and Pierroti's "Our Lady" staring from high above, into the naked river. "Vin et la Posie" was the name of Attar Samih's statue to Bacchus, mysteriously placed at the entrance of the city whose name is derived from the word "displace", in the language of the country. And that is exactly what I thought:

How displaced are Bacchus' figurines, all alone and drunk in this valley. I tried to imagine the tunes that the Greek lyre, standing half idle by the side, had played in other ages of the world, in other years, less prosperous. The air thickened itself out and resembled the water of the fountain, "There's so much life here", I thought. How much I wanted to take over the square, to dance there under moonlight, to surround the entire uneven slope of the hill and flush the air with paint. But I guess no one had ever conquered Zahle, not even Attar Samih, and not even the Syrians. In 1981, the Syrians tried to take over the city and besieged it for over a hundred days, and set up roadblocks around the entire valley, to block the access to and from the entire city, that after all, connected the distant planets of Beirut and Damascus. After trying to control the Hill of Jeha, in the valley surrounding it, and failing at it at the hand of the poorly armed Lebanese forces, the Syrians shelled the population of Zahle for sixteen days and sixteen nights. Bachir Gemayel, wrote to the besieged and tired fighters stationed in Zahle: "Because the road is still open for a few hours only... if you leave, you will save your lives and the fall of the city will be certain and this will be the end of our resistance... if you stay, you will find yourselves without ammunition, without medicine, without bread and maybe without water; your task will be to coordinate the internal resistance and defend the identity of the Lebanese Bekaa and the identity of Lebanon, and by that you will give a meaning to our six year war". And then some more. Besieged, the city was never defeated, neither was Samih's "Vin et la Posie", standing there, almost

naked, and holding modern history in contempt, with a certain naive glee of arrogance. But I didn't want to defeat it, to ransack it, like others had done. I wanted to know each and every corner of the valley, every flower, every brick, and every shade of light and darkness. How I had loved you then! As if you were a child, or a beautiful woman, or the son of a God. It just occurred to me that this couldn't be the task of one man alone. Saint Augustine writes: "For we call 'world' not only this fabric which God made, heaven and earth, but the inhabitants of the world are also called 'the world'... Especially all lovers of the world are called the world." It seemed to me as if the entire planet, and the whole collection of miracles to be found in the valley, aren't sufficiently enough to have a world. Worlds appear only in between men. And I felt a little sad, standing there, by myself, sharing in all the miracles, and without a world, a world to realize them, to transform them. So fragile everything seemed then, like a desert, so improbable, and the waters so loud, wanting to embrace the ocean, so far away from here, crossing the burnt roads and the bombed out buildings, from underneath, running away, from the streams and rivulets that stood up to the tanks, wanting also to forget. I guess I heard the river travelling in the direction opposite mine, and I still stood by the statue, unmovable, and so ready to travel.

II I came into the world under the sign of Saturn -- the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays. Walter Benjamin I was down the valley, in a place that almost meets the entire beauty of the world; it was a small plateau like no other, bursting into itself like a volcano, carpeted with flowers so purple that they resemble ponds of wine growing heavenwards, only interrupted by the trenches made decades ago at the hand of both villains and heroes, and the endless curiosity of the clouds. It was a field of lavender, like no other, growing spectacular legs, and running after you with the pace of a gazelle, confusing the tiny hairy leaves with grapes and berries. So godless it all appeared to me, half accidental and half abandoned. And infinitely solitary. Why would such a place exist if it cannot be contemplated? And why would it ever be contemplated by one man alone? I imagined the festivals from other times, the gifts of the world, and how one god after another, tried to claim this place as their own, failing each and every time; oh the valley... Rejecting peace but also war. So much life, and so much death, together, at once, in the same valley, under the sign of Saturn. And for so long, I hadn't thought about the statue and the valley, about the purple lavender and the fields and the rivers, perhaps trying to circumvent the obvious difficulty of having seen it alone. Not even God was watching then, for it was probably market day and he was collecting the tithes at a souk. Oh, how you love the world, I thought, especially from the position of beauty that immediately assumes an infinite

distance from it as a pre-condition for participation in it. Once a friend had vaguely reminded me of the statue, and in gratitude I wrote him a long letter that then I sent to a foreign country, and sat across the void of a certain light, awaiting the response, or at least, even a postcard. And I somehow grew old from waiting, older than god himself... Thinking about this "problem" of the love of man, the love of the world, the love of God. Why is it that we must love God? Is it because of certainty or because of fear? Why is this world transient and passing? Why does it have to die, like us? Is the world not like a miracle too? I remembered a certain philosopher, from younger days, reading on a bench in Hamra, and something at this church, somewhere up the hill: "Would it not be better to love the world in cupiditas and be at home? Why should we make a desert out of this world? The justification for this extraordinary enterprise can only lie in a deep dissatisfaction with what the world can give its lovers. Love that desires a worldly object, be it a thing or a person, is constantly frustrated in its very quest for happiness." Why should it be a bad thing, though, I asked. Why all these guarantees and insurance policies with God? I suppose that the only cure to the irreparable damage of the cycle of life and the slaughterhouses of history is nothing of the eternal or immortal kind. Human bonds are like that, fragile, tense, haunted, and invincible only in the sense that they are nothing but temporary. The world will outlive us always, the human community, of the lovers, of both God and the world. So will the valley, since Canaanite gods and Roman emperors occupied it, and then died.

And that is how I found thee, friend from other ages, less violent and less godly, and there you were, wrapped entirely in a field of lavender, on a regular week day, so far away from the entrance of the city. I was suddenly reminded how badly I wanted to go there and how I loved every corner of it, every hue in the air, every color of the water; entirely unafraid of the risk of disappointment or unhappiness. It was so clear, everything, that day, like a bright summer morning, like the day when I first saw the statue; all the colors returned to the palette, like a thick rain falling over the sores of a volcano. I remembered all what I had seen, as if with somebody else. It was so pure, almost laughable. Where had we been lost all these centuries? I heard at last all the laughter, all the weeping, all the screaming... All what the Berdawni had wanted to tell me, that day, after the last war. I cheered the moment, it was a discovery, a miracle, the beginning of a world. It didn't resolve any of our wars, but it made it all look probable, possible and invincible. Maybe we'll conquer the valley after all, if only to dance at the square. III "Death = being completely inside one's head. Life = the world."- Susan Sontag "Are you hungry?" She asked me when we returned from the valley, and we sat at Le Cigale, on the street named after Charles Malik, whom I so fervently admired once, wrongly so. I stared into the transparent shelves, loaded with heavy trays

of what seemed all postcards from another time - croissants, eclairs, beignets, mille-feuilles, tartes, brioches, madeleines, palmiers, and exuberant chocolate cakes. My eyes had fallen in love, and I inspected each and every detail inside the little paper holders; my disgust however was ineluctible, and the porous flavor of sweet seemed absurdly unnatural and just too comforting. I didn't want any of that. But I watched her, and I think she wasn't so interested in eating the cake, as much as in drawing the inner wombs and layers with that carbon pen. I still remember her like that: The day when she arrived from Egypt, with this very large suitcase, I was surprised to find out she had brought nothing in it but that carbon pen. Not even a sketchbook, because she used to tear off large cuts from her skin and draw upon them. "This is Lebanon", I told her that day, and pointed to a garbage bin that had a semi-naked woman on it, her body half littered or half plastered with yellow stickers imported from the Kingdom of God, and crossed with printed riffles. So different it was then in Achrafieh, after the particularly long journey, and I was so starved, so consumed by daytime insomnia - the only cure to daydreaming; I spent the whole time tilting my head back, trying to catch another glimpse of the lavender field, and I somehow entertained the idea that it was the last time I was to see him, and the entire Bekaa. There was a foreboding chaos in my mind, and it didn't have to do with having lost the friend found out of the scandalous force of other centuries but rather with reckless impatience, with not tolerating one single moment of silence. St. Augustine came to mind again: "None will doubt that the only causes of fear are either loss of what we love and have gained, or failure to gain what we love and have hoped for."

The German professor explained it to me once: "The trouble with human happiness is that it is constantly beset by fear. It is not the lack of possessing but the safety of possession that is at stake". And that is why St. Augustine loathed both the lovers of man and the lovers of the world, those living out of craving rather than grace. But isn't the love of God just as intimately unhappy? I wondered. It was like that little drawing of Mouna that I had seen once at her studio: The party at the skirts of Beirut with the two women sipping champagne and the gunman hiding in the bushes, finished five years before the war. Somebody told me once a story that Mouna drew it after a conversation with a foreign diplomat, who couldn't quite believe that the Lebanese were going on about their parties and soirees while the ticking bomb of the war was already in full motion. That is how I felt about the journey from the square, as if I were not to see it again, as if it had been the last dance before I were forgotten. Engraved in my own book. Why did I feel always this enormous anxiety? Why did I always fear that I was going to lose their presence if their epiphany didn't materialize at my compass? Perhaps the present had something to do with it. Whoever was born during the war knew full well that we had lost the right to both the past and the future, and that our temporary truce could end any day now. We could be alive only for the day, only for the hour, everything is to be had, to be consumed, to be exhausted, here and now. There's no time for promises. There's no time for faith. There's no time for time. Eman always knew this, and though she never asked, I knew that she could see what I was looking for every time I tilted my head backwards, and suddenly her carbon pen bled purple blotches, as a reminder

of what at the square had been a promise, from which I had excluded myself in the tireless anxiety of fear of loss. There we were, in the middle of Achrafieh, trying to find my way back from the valley. So squalid it all seemed, without the statue, without the promise: It was now Sassine Square. IV "How can one be glad about the world except if one takes one's refuge in it?" -Kafka How easily recognizable had been the tall and slender American woman, with that long mane of dark hair and a shock of white at the temple. "But I couldnt again be just a witness: that is, meet and visit, tremble with fear, feel brave, feel depressed, have heartbreaking conversations, grow ever more indignant, lose weight. If I went back, it would be to pitch in and do something," she said at first. Eman and I wondered then what we had lost in this city; was this pornography of war or something like that? Why return here? I told Susan about my friend from other times, from other centuries, back at the square, his silence... She stood impassive and defiant, as if with certain cruelty, and didn't utter a word. Nothing that could comfort or relieve. Simply staring. She quickly changed the topic and continued speaking: People ask me if Sarajevo ever seemed to me unreal while I was there. The truth is, since Ive started going to Sarajevo this winter I plan to return to direct the Cherry Orchard with Nada as Madame Ranevsky and Velibor as Lopakhin it seems the most real place in the world.

Emans curiosity about Sarajevo tempted her into an obvious question, Werent you afraid to go? and with serenity she answered: Anyone who isnt afraid is crazy. And we were afraid too. We thought about Mohammed, that Syrian man about whom we had heard, who had been an English literature student in Idlib, whose apartment and entire collection of books had been set on fire, by the same army that planted landmines all over the Bekaa and that probably would keep the lavender fields for me as a fragment of a futile and yet vivid imagination, even if my friend were to return after all. And inside the besieged city, hes offering Syrians a glimmer of hope, directing Becketts Waiting for Godot like Susan had done back in 1993, during the Siege of Sarajevo. She told us: Culture, serious culture from anywhere, is an expression of human dignity which is what people in Sarajevo feel they have lost, even when they know themselves to be brave, or stoical or angry. For they also know themselves to be terminally weak: waiting, hoping, not wanting to hope, knowing that they arent going to be saved. You know, were waiting for Godot, said the Syrian to a journalist amidst laughter, when asked about his play. And how can Godot be about hope, Eman and I thought. How can waiting be about hope? And after all, I was myself waiting, and she was waiting with me, armed with nothing but a carbon pen. And Susan told us about the Godot that the Syrians were waiting for: Until the Bosnian genocide, one might have thought this was indeed the conviction of many of the best reporters there, like Roy Guttmann of Newsday and John Burns of the New York Times that if the story could be gotten out, the world would do something. The coverage of the genocide in Bosnia ended that illusion. Then it was night,

and I thought about a sad Joyce in Trieste, close to Verona and to Rome, where Ingeborg Bachmann had ended her life when she fell asleep in the middle of smoking a cigarette and set her apartment on fire, disproving Mary McCarthys thesis from her first novel, that no one would commit suicide in the middle of smoking a cigarette. Eman read that night to me from a book of philosophy that had not been burnt yet: We are mortals, you and I. There is only my dying and your dying and nothing beyond. You will die and there is nothing beyond. I shall slowly disappear until my heart stops its soft padding against the lining of my chest. Until then, the drive to speak continues, incessantly. Until then, we carry on. After that there is nothing.Susan listened carefully, and imagined Mohammed, the Syrian, fantasized with his opening night of Waiting for God and was reminded of her own: And I think it was the end of that performance on Wednesday, August 18th at 2:00 PM during the long tragic silence of the Vladimirs and Estragons which follows the messengers announcement that Mr. Godot isnt coming today, but will surely come tomorrow, that my eyes began to sting with tears. Velibor was crying too. No one in the audience made a sound. The only sounds were those coming from outside the theater: a UN APC thundering down the street and the crack of sniper fire. After Susan left, to take a plane to another country after seeing Beirut with us only for a few hours, we took to Damascus Road, to wait for Adam, maybe he isnt coming today, but maybe hes coming tomorrow, like Godot. I told Eman, It seems to me as if all wars everywhere look the same. She kept silent, we kept watch over the wait, and

across us the silence and a poster that read: See you in Beirut, whatever happens. [Passages from Susan Sontag, taken from "Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo", in "Where the Stress Falls", Picador, 2001. Passage from Simon Critchley, taken from "Very Little... Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy and Literature", Routledge, 2004.] V "But why do we loiter? The journey should be pursued. Now let us see whether we are in a sound condition, for that is the first step." -St. Augustine, "Soliloquies" He drove down from Al Mina, and we could have spent the whole night going in circles around Al Maarad; I loved the modern buildings, so unblemished, and admired the vulgar geometric shapes, with splattered colors from the lights, in sharp contrast from the rest of the city, bathed in a shabby ochre that resembles a glowing gold sprayed with grey, with the colors and gestures of a dying oak. The radio blasted away with that song from the basement; I saw it announced once in a half-torn poster in Beirut, as I was heading with Eman toward Damascus Road. I daydreamed - even though it was night - that he would about-turn in Al Mina again and from there head down to Riad El Solh, to the very end, so that I could see the statue of Abdul Hamid Karami. I had seen it once in a postcard that a distant relative had sent in 1969. I also knew that the statue had been bombed with dynamite in

1976 but that still didn't quench my curiosity. The statue stood impassive at the center of a square of the same name, and the cars, like ballet figurines, tiptoed around it. I had spent years leafing through the books at the library, trying to trace down the name of the artist, but to no avail. The novel of Bergsson, forgotten on page 115, under a stairway, came to me: "How could he have loved the woman if, in his mind, she is only a photograph? How can a picture be more real to the memory than the actual, living person?" I also knew that the name of the square had been changed, by the Tawhid, and that there was now a sculpture of the word "Allah". Perhaps Ismail had been right, it was God who had blown the statue at the square and replaced it with a sign. As I had all these thoughts in my mind, the old Peugeot drove into Bassel El Asad and Tripoli was being left behind. There had been no conversations since we left and the music kept blasting away; we spoke only with a timid smile that began in the corner of the mouth and rose through the pupils with a thick halo reflected at the height of the eye lids. It filled the entire space and as I gasped for air, the coastal highway opened its arms to us. Al Qalamoun, it was, the old mosque. I preferred the churches, St. George, St. Catherine and the Monastery of St. John; at that point Tripoli was nowhere to be seen, and you could no longer hear its sounds, nor the riffle neither the fear. I was reminded then of St. Jerome's commentary on the Testament of John: "The blessed John the Evangelist, who remained in Ephesus to an advanced age and could scarcely be carried to church with the help of his disciples, could no longer put many coherent words together. At each

assembly, he used to say no more than this: 'Little children, love one another!' Eventually, the disciples and brethren who were present grew tired of always hearing the same thing, and said: 'Master, why do you keep on saying this?' He replied with a sentiment worthy of John: 'Because it is a precept of the Lord, and it is sufficient if this alone is done." There was not a soul in the sight, until the prophet Isaiah spoke: "Against all the cedars of Lebanon, lofty and lifted up; and against all the oaks of Bashan." Back at the theater in Tripoli, it was the year 1885, the first theater in the Middle East. The vendor woman, an old Alawite, told us that once they had rolled the red carpet all the way from the harbor to the theater for Oum Kalthoum to perform at the glorious Ottoman building. There was nothing but rubble to be seen now, and the sound of diggers and hammers. The Ingea Theater was no more. Now I recalled, it was Rabih Mrou who had asked Catherine Deneuve in that film, "You wanted to see, I also want to see but I can't seem to. Do you see that?" And the truth is that neither of us would see anything, but diggers, hammers and rubble. It wasn't only the theater, but the city and the whole country, there was nothing to see but rubble. At some point I wanted to ask him if maybe the whole world was made of rubble now. As we drove away, he told me: "You know, we, the Lebanese and the Jews, we are perhaps the first peoples to have advanced from the idea of nationalism." I nodded and woke up from the still quiet of the highway and heard at last the delicate voice. "Do you see that?" He asked me. "The constellations on the sky stood steeply on their heads, all the stars had made an about-turn, but the moon, buried under the featherbed of

clouds which were lit by its unseen presence, seemed still to have before her an endless journey and, absorbed in her complicated heavenly procedures, did not think of dawn." Does the sky look the same everywhere? I didn't ask that question, if only because my vague knowledge of science provided the answer. "Do you remember when I first saw you?" I asked him. And he was thinking the same thing I was thinking. "I shall never forget that luminous journey on that brightest of winter nights. The colored map of the heavens expanded into an immense dome, on which there loomed fantastic lands, oceans and seas, marked with the lines of stellar currents and eddies, with the brilliant steaks of heavenly geography." He didn't answer my question and insisted on driving into the village that suddenly carved itself out before the entrance of Batroun. We couldn't get lost because in order to get lost, you have to know where you're getting lost from. At the entrance, we had to leave the car and our countenances too, in order to be transformed into aimless legs. We were not sad to let go of our possessions, for St. Augustine had taught: "Two things here on earth are essential: health and a friend. They are the two things most to be prayed for. Woe to the person who despises them. Health and friendship are natural gifts. God has made human beings for living -hence health, and for not living alone -hence the search for friendship." We took one of those cabbies that looked like tricycles in the miniature city and tried to make up our minds. "But who would entrust oneself on such a night to the whims of an unpredictable cabby? Amid the click of the axles, amid the thud of the box and the roof, I could not agree with him on my destination. He nodded indulgently

at everything I said and sang to himself. We drove in a circle around the city." "Is this you, George?" I exclaimed, and for the first time I recognized my friend. [Passages taken from Bruno Schulz, "Cinnamon Shops", in "The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories", Penguin, 2008]

VI "Never seek friendship... Never permit oneself to dream of friendship... Friendship is a miracle!" -Simone Weil There was an abandoned rock quarry at both edges of the hill south of Nahr el-Jaouze in a valley that once wrapped around in greenery the castle of Saladin's sons, and it was rumored that after "the events"(*), the rock quarries had been banned, but like ants - or cockroaches - the workers continued to plunder the weather-sculptured rocks laboriously at night. A highway from Tripoli to Beirut had been built on its contours, in between the years of the saga of the Ayyubid princes of the Koura and Tripoli and "the events", so the workers were easily spotted by the drivers and had to leave one early morning in a hurry, leaving behind bulldozer tracks and toppled rocks. The now barren hill, with its little fort and a surviving tree, looked upwards: "For that country submits utterly to heaven, holds heaven over itself in vaulted colors, variform, intricate with cloisters, triforia, stained-glass roses, windows opening onto eternity. Year after year that country grows up into the sky,

merges with the dawn redness, turns angelic in the reflected light of the greater atmosphere." So different from the Castle of St. Gilles, so small, I thought. An expert on castles of the crusaders had told us that when a fortress was besieged, the defenders didn't throw boiling oil but sand which would get inside the armor of the attackers and begin to burn, until they were in far too much pain to fight. "Had we known this, probably we could have won all of our wars!" is what I told George. I had wanted to climb up the polished stairway, but I remembered then we were aimless legs. "You are different, and for me that means irreplaceable". I tried to look around in order to detect where his voice had come from, but it was an ocean of aimless legs, and we looked the same, with our summer hats and elegant foulards. "How did he recognize me?" That's all I could muster. One man - or his leg - fretted about the destruction of the valley, now half covered with rubble again, even the Roman bridge. I mistook him for my friend. "Today those remote dreams come back, and not without reason. The possibility suggests itself that no dreams, however absurd or senseless, are wasted in the universe." "You're courageous. I, -like lots of others and unlike you- do not have the courage to write, and probably will never have." The castle had been thought to be the crusaders', and the French, mistook it for Turkish or Mamluk. Only in 1956, Emir Izzat al-Ayyubi, while studying at St. Joseph in Beirut, revealed the mystery of the virtually unknown Zahrite branch of the Ayyubids. Courageous? I was so afraid to leave, so afraid that everything would turn to rubble, that he would suddenly disappear, like the names of Saladin's sons, carved in stone,

on the fortress walls. "And the kind of courage? The greatest kind of courage. The courage to be afraid. To have the two fears. First we have to have the courage to be afraid of being hurt. We have to not defend ourselves. The world has to be suffered. Only through suffering will we know certain faces of the world, certain events of life: the courage to tremble and sweat and cry is as necessary for Rembrandt as for Genet." We wanted to see the world - the impressive valley - from within Mousayliha, but as it happened with every fortress, there were no windows; the crusaders sat in a pitchdark. Autumn music played. How could a leg play music in a valley? "We resolved to become self-sufficient, create a new life principle, establish a new age, reconstitute the world -on a small space, to be sure, for ourselves alone, but after our own tastes and pleasures." The night began to invent maps of the city, mistaking the village for a stellar map, and was puzzled because Batroun - a few kilometers away - seemed so far for us, who couldn't walk. "To really paint the sea, you have to see it every day, at every hour and in the same place, to come to know the life in this location." Everything was so inviting. The rubble, the barren hill, the procession of Saladin's sons. I kept asking about the voice, the voice that had said all those things, until I found myself walking and was reminded of what the moon said to the night as she papered her windows: They can only walk in pairs. "We went for a walk all together along a steeply falling street, pervaded by the scent of violets; uncertain whether it was the magic of the night which lay like silver on the snow or whether it was the light of dawn..." "I would like to write like a painter. I would like to write like painting. The way I would like to live. Maybe the way I

manage to live, sometimes. Or rather: the way it is sometimes given to me to live, in the present absolute. In the happening of the instant. Just at the moment of the instant, in what unfurls it, I touch down then let myself slip into the depth of the instant itself... Monet, in 1890, is the one who said that: what I am looking for, instantaneousness... the same light spread throughout, the same light, the same light." Where are you going, George? I asked. "Nowhere in particular." He said. [Passages from Bruno Schulz taken from "Cinnamon Shops" & "The Republic of Dreams", in "The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories", Penguin, 2008. Passages from Hlne Cixous taken from "La dernier tableau ou le portrait de dieu", in "La Venue l'criture", U.G.E., 1977.] (*) "The events" or "Al-Hawadeth" is the popular term in Lebanon to refer to the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990). VII "These men marvel at the star" -from the Bayeux Tapestry, recording the brilliant apparition of Halley's Comet in 1066, during the days immediately following King Harold's coronation. First he was beatified by Pope Jean Paul II on May 10th 1998 and then canonized on May 17th 2004. The young priest, a European, explained and then turned to Eman, chattering about the secrets of the icon, contemplation in color, transfiguration, embodiment, and the mystery of

apocatastasis from the Acts of the Apostles: "Whom the heaven must receive until the times of restoration of all things, which God hath spoken by the mouth of all his holy prophets since the world began". The image is a memorial, read a line from St. John of Damascus, placed atop. What I imagined then: Will the Kingdom of God be restored? Everything will be like before? What was it like before? "What makes a genuine work of art and where is the secret of its perfection?" The young man asked her, in half ignorance, half arrogance. I stopped listening then and kept walking slowly and very close to the wall, almost embracing the calid stones with my limbs, staring into the half lit icons, maybe thinking that I would find him inside one of those woodcuts, like before. Why was the saint in the desert? Maybe it was a reference to Saint Anthony the Great, credited with having founded Qozhaya, and the leader of the Desert Fathers. I had also been told that nature is never depicted in the icons, and we wondered about this together. Perhaps it was a recent rendition, because the golden glow was so fresh and not yet dead. Looking out the vaulted window without glass, the Kadisha Valley, spread between the two villages of the poet, without arms; our destination seemed far. "In that room there was a bed made from green pine, resembling in everything her own bed in Naples. She was lulled into believing that she was home and that this was the end of the journey." It was her first drawing outdoors, and she was sorry that she couldn't paint without characters, because it was like a drawing a void. The valley however, was heavily populated, by the Forest of the Cedars of God, that was so admired by the Israelites, who brought the cedars to Jerusalem to build their temples.

"The Israelites haven't returned since then", complained one of the trees, standing there since the days of Solomon. Where else could I look for him? There are also the monasteries of Qannubin and Mar Sarkis, I thought. How could I have lost him? Lost him in this country? "Under the ruins of my house, I have lost Artemisia, my companion of three centuries, as she laid down in the quiet, breathing, put to sleep by me in one hundred pages of writing." The priests had said that contemplating the icons would lead man straight to God, through the saints, and that made me believe that should I find the icon, the same icon Eman had done of him, in one of these monasteries, I could come to him. The night seized us, and she could no longer distinguish between the contours of the hills; in the distance, the smoke. "People that at four in the morning flee in droves, aghast, at the sight of the homeland turning into rubble; staring twice, to come to realize the terrors of a night in which the German landmines, one after another, shook the womb of the earth." Some of the hermits lived in the vaulted caves, outside the forest, in Christian solitude; waiting. "It rains on the ruins over which I've already cried; on their contours the sounds had deadened their fright that after the first stroke of the shovel were now silenced forever. Artemisia's two graves, the real and the imaginary, are now the same, just inhaled dust." Can you see her, Eman? Can you see Artemisia? She tried so hard, but the light was too strong in the dark, and Artemisia never saw the light in the painting, only the perspective. "How could she not see the light?" Eman asked. And I didn't see it either. "Scorched a thousand times by the burns of the offense, a thousand times more does Artemisia fall back and catch her breath once again, to throw herself into the fire." Nothing in

the direction of Bsharri, nothing in the direction of Tourza. "Almost nothing exists for me in this tired and faded white of dawn on a day of August. I lay on the soil, over the gravel paths in the Boboli Gardens, still in a nightgown, as if in dream." Saint Hardini, do you have friends? "In Banti's account, what is central to Artemisia's life is not the rape; not the marriage with an obscure young man that her father imposed on her once the verdict was brought against the rapist; nor the four children (three of whom died) she bore her husband. It is her solitude, the inexorable result of her commitment to art." Eman, are you there? I don't think I can find him. George never told me the name of his village. [Passages from Anna Banti, taken from "Artemisia: Romanzo", Mondadori, 1953. Passages from Susan Sontag, taken from "A Double Destiny: On Anna Banti's Artemisia", London Review of Books, 2003] VIII "Well, no one has ever painted the landscape, man absent but entirely within the landscape"-Paul Czanne Pass-Partout. Yes, the frame. I had never seen the frame in this painting. When I first saw it, in the years before the war, it seemed to me as if the painting was nothing but a little drawing, in blue, set against faded cerulean cardboard. "A phoenix of a book, written out of the ashes of another book, the novel is a tribute to bitterness and to tenacity - that of the bereft girl of the early 1600's who will, against all odds,

become a renowned painter, that of a bereaved author who will write a novel that is surely more original than the one consumed in the fires of war. Loss had made the author free to enter the book, talking to herself and to Artemisia." Did you see the lake, Eman? No, I didn't see it myself. I think there were some young men in a boat. It's a difficult drawing I know, especially if you're focusing on the water, not wanting to see the faces; but if you don't want to draw the faces, you can begin by drawing the empty space around them. You can always imagine not that it is a void, but a still-life; remember the Flemish painters? It was Clara Peeters, I think. "But there was time; this was supposed to last a lifetime." Now the frame was almost bigger than the painting, so adorned, extravagant, baroque. "How do people paint from memory? And from the memory of others?" That is a legitimate question Eman; my problem with still-life is that it seems as if there, the world is already redeemed and I don't want that. "Injustice is a wine that intoxicates both the judge and the victim. I have known the taste of that wine." I really wanted to be at the lake. It is a lesson, Saint Augustine would say: "Who will hold the heart, and fix it so that it may stand still for a little while and catch for a moment the splendor of eternity which stands still forever, and compare this with temporal moments that never stand still, and see that it is comparable... but that all this while in the eternal, nothing passes but the whole is present." This is the problem with memory, that is so corruptible, because you have access to all of your experience simultaneously; there are no blocks, no fragments. "But if nothing stands still, how do you paint?" I think you need some trust Eman, you need to believe that his essence can be

touched, felt as carnal and the lines on the torso seen unsymmetrical, imperfect. "It is Artemisia who becomes a time traveler, a visitor, a phantom so real she can be measured even physically in the authors consciousness." Love is strange, Eman; it makes you at home by destroying the distance that the world demands for being an object, but yet it is the requirement to make oneself at home in it, with others as well. "It was a faceless love, without end or hope, enlightened, with fogs and snows, an immense river, boats with musicians and dances over the fresh grass". Things are very important to me, thingness, embodiment; but no matter how ensouled, objects do not love you back. "Then why do you want to find the icon? Had you wished it, you would know where to go, perhaps you wouldn't even need to go anywhere at all." Yes, Eman, you're right, nothing has changed. "We chase each other, Artemisia and I, and play to seize each other not without tricks, from the most material and obvious, to the most secretive. I abandon her after the war, during the first journey, from which I say, I may never come back. She pours ink on my paper from a vial and then we stare into each other." Perhaps. Perhaps he has come back. Perhaps a letter already arrived, all while we loitered about. You know, my whole life, I thought Gemayel was a hero, that he had saved us, that we had won. We all had been lied to. "We're all displaced people after all", George said. The rubble got into my shoes, all the way to Nottingham, and drowned from time to time at Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem, that takes its name from the 12th century Crusades to the Holy Land. According to the legend, knights who answered the call of Richard I to join the crusades stopped off there for a pint on the way to Jerusalem. We might have seen them, George,

at Mousayliha, sitting in the pitch-dark. I couldn't remember one single thing and the Englishmen kindly handed out to me old newspapers with pictures from the siege of Beirut, replete with questions. "To write about the past is to write something like fantastic fiction. It is the strangeness of the past, rendered with piercing concreteness, that gives the effect of realism." I had to imagine everything again. "Anna Banti did not want to lose her manuscript in the battle of Florence in early August 1944. No writer could welcome such a destiny." Do you remember, Eman, when we read Joyce? "But this is the point. You die for your country. Suppose. Not that I wish it for you. But I say: Let my country die for me. Up to the present it has done so. I didn't want it to die. Damn death. Long live life". "Non piangere. Don't cry. Who is talking? And where? It's the author, still in her nightgown (as in a dream, she writes), sitting on a gravel path in the Boboli Gardens -on the promontory on the south side of the Arno -sobbing, telling herself not to cry, and finally ceasing to cry, stunned by the even sharper realization of what was destroyed in the havoc of a few hours before." We've finally arrived, Eman. Beirut. George... How I had missed you, in the thousand years that passed; I'm so afraid, but I promise not to be afraid of that. [Passages from Anna Banti, taken from "Artemisia: Romanzo", Mondadori, 1953. Passages from Susan Sontag, taken from "A Double Destiny: On Anna Banti's Artemisia", London Review of Books, 2003]

IX I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past." -Virginia Woolf Cherries. Blackberries. Blueberries. It's good to be back, you know, but it seems we are all Ghouraba(*) here now. How I loved La Cigale, at day time specially."...Here was the one place they could truly feel alive." Once I literally ran all the way from the library to get one of those tartalettes with glaz on the top. I wasn't particularly fond of sweets, or I am not; the taste is icy, somewhat piercing, but I loved the colors. Eman was here too, she loved the chocolate cakes, or rather, the textures inside them; it was a long time ago, that day when we met a certain famous writer. How long did it take us to get here? I can't recognize anything. "To be sure, the maze of old alleys that had perplexed Poujoulat still survived, leading Henriette Renan to remark in 1861: 'To know where one is in Beirut seems to me an impossible problem'". Did you read Maalouf's latest novel? I heard he came back too, in his dreams. "The novel begins with a phone call, that Adam answers, the main character in the story, and thus, it is also the writer's double." I think it's something about his best friend, who was dying somewhere nearby. "Locked up in a prison cell by the patriarchate, in Qannubin, Shidyaq succumbed to privations and mistreatment after a few years."

Reading an old newspaper, eh? It's good to pass the time; this is a rather long road."Eventually they found him... That is how it ends, or at least some hope so, the last act in this shame comedy that began one day in March 1985, when Michel Seurat was kidnapped, him and his colleague, the journalist Jean-Paul Kaufmann, along the road between the airport and downtown Beirut." You know Saad, it's strange, I hear the jolts, the crowds, the cars, tip-toeing, but it is as if there was no one here, not a single soul, except you and me. "In the heart of the old downtown -between Place des Martyrs, Place de l'Etoile, Rue Foch, Rue Allenby, and the Tawileh souq -the only pedestrians were stray dogs." What? The resistance? Ha. "We don't need any Zionist hostages; we're all the hostages in this country anyway". Yes, Saad, you're right, and anyway the Israelis bombed the synagogue and everything else in 1982, so we have nowhere to take the prisoners of war to in case they want to invoke their own superstitions. Bassita(**), Michel, bassita; you must be on the way home, if not there already. Tell your wife this was like the army, that you had no choice. I tell you what, Saad; these were the great names of Beirut, the great thinkers. Lupercus, Publius Egnatius Celer, Strato, Marcus Valerius Probus, Hermippus, Theodorus, Lucius Cavenus Taurus. The sages from the School of Laws. The rest of the names I can't remember. Who knows what happened here? Who is young enough to remember it? "After the tablets of Tel el-Amarna and the letters of Ugarit, centuries passed without any mention of Biruta in a written text [...] Two possible explanations have been advanced in this regard: either Biruta was destroyed in the course of the invasion by the Sea Peoples in the twelfth century, or it was annexed by a

neighboring city, perhaps Byblos or Sidon." It's not so important. Oh, yes, the novel, I was in the middle of telling you. Let's continue with that. "What is then the real reason for returning to this beloved country, whose name I'm afraid to mention?" You know, the other day, George asked Susan if he would ever get to see the Holy Land. I don't know. What do you think?"Unavoidably, being only one or two days distant from the places that saw the birth of Christianity, Beirut was a point of departure in its expansion and, if one considers the Holy Land in the broad sense, actually a part of this land." That I remember. Were you there too? The parties on the roof, belle poque, the empty streets, it was an ocean of sleepwalkers, one more beautiful than the other. Ah, that July. How to forget what it means to be saved? Isn't that what heaven feels like? "Military victories, the traditional reason for public celebrations, were no longer available to the empire; but there were more than a few occasions to hold parades and declare holidays, which made it possible in turn and in spite of all appearances to the contrary, to maintain an image of power and to indicate its extent." This was such a beautiful journey, you know. George, you mean? Oh he was busy, he couldn't come this time, maybe he will come tomorrow or the day after. No, no, he is not like Godot. He always comes, in fact, he didn't even have to come once, he had been there from the very beginning, it's just that I didn't know it. Would you like to come with us next time? "The novel ends in darkness, solely with the purpose of showing that 'the disappearance of the past is something one can find consolation for easily'; what is inconsolable is the disappearance of the future as well." No, Saad, it might take hours from here to the square, let's wait.

X "That he should die there was perhaps inevitable."Why don't they leave us alone now?" one of his young neighbors asked me before the cops towed Kassir's Alfa Romeo away and his followers spread a sea of candles across the road. "Why must they go on using this methodology of murder? We have to stop this. Are they trying to drive all the young people out of Lebanon?" Not longer after Kassir's killing, his colleague and editor at An-Nahar was atomized by a car bomb in eastern Beirut. There were twelve political murders at this time -a dozen in just three years, including that of Kassir. No arrests, of course. There never are in Beirut. Warm and gentle Beirut may be. But tough and cruel." What does it mean, Michel? What does it mean to regret when you had no choice? [Passages from Samir Kassir taken from "Beirut", University of California Press, 2011; "Michel Seurat, sans commentaires...", An-Nahar newspaper, July 24th, 1998. Passages from Amin Maalouf/Georgia Makhlouf taken from "Amin Maalouf: l'crivain et son double", L'Orient Littraire, August 2012] *Ghouraba: Lebanese expression to refer to Arab strangers, used pejoratively against Palestinian and Syrian workers. **Bassita: Lebanese expression: Don't worry; Take it easy; It's fine. "O ancient scent from far-off days, Again you intoxicate my senses! A merry swarm of idle thoughts Flits through the gentle breeze." -Albert Giraud, in Arnold Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21 It might take only half an hour I think. How long does it take from Avenue de Paris to Waygand? We're closer to neither. Damascus is near. Saad told me yesterday that he had seen Samir in his garden with the fountain. "Yesterday I visited him; he was smiling peacefully in his beautiful garden, maybe because he doesn't know what's going on". Do you know? Maybe you don't. I think it's better. Would you like to go for a stroll? "Not the years poured out like water, / Not a beautiful woman / Or anyone / Could make me forget / Distances / Beyond any distance." Why did it take you so long to come? I know, I know, I'm impatient. I'm sorry. "You have concealed your soul from me, / Loaves of bread on the table have dried; / Moss grows on them." You know how it was. The same sense of excitement and possibility; every morning again, going back and forth. I'm only travelling here; that is what I told people. You know, I was always afraid, afraid to leave. "Why were you scared yesterday under the rain? / Death told me. / But if I am your silent, older sister!" It's not that I didn't want to leave, who wouldn't? It was the uncertainty. Would I ever see you again, Beirut, George, Eman?

Loss is a wrong metaphor, you know. How can you lose what you never had? Pristine blue sky, almost perfect, irregular blotches of white, on the contours. Had you noticed the daylight? "'Why is your life in the dark', the light said, / 'But why, if you are not in the bottom of the well, / What you're lacking is love." / And I wept. / I wept inconsolable." Marie was in Damascus, looking for a house, for a house to buy. She didn't find one, though, because what she was looking for was not a house; she was looking for Michel. But Michel is not there. "I have already died, I no longer exist, / My soul has already fled / From this warm body." But you won't leave, right? Where would you like to go, after this? "It was a time / When the senses wanted to go to the limit / Beyond the laws of heaven." I know where I want to go. It's a bit far. "When I die - / God will unweave my life / Thread by thread, / And will cast my colors into the ocean, / Into the reef of the abyss. / They will be perhaps turned into a flower, into a butterfly / Of tender colors at night, of vivid colors at night." I hear the water. We must be nearer now. So glad you're here, at last, but there's nothing to see in this city. "How insignificant is the flame / Inside the mortal heart, / She said / And jumped / Into the bonfire / To rise to heaven in the fires of hell." I can be so cruel sometimes, but try not to judge me, I've been here for so long; I forgot many things while I was waiting. "I always wept / Because of my imprisonment / Between the walls of the house, / Between the walls of the street, / Between the walls of the city, / Between the walls / Of the hills." The world will not last; I think that's what the saints taught, but you? "My thoughts wondered / How you and those evil words / Could live in the same generation." How did you get here anyway? Did you take a

cab? My directions weren't particularly clear. Was the traffic too bad? "When I screamed / When I was confused / How did you find me? / Find me behind the seven walls / That I built around me?" I'm not exactly sure what was worse, the nightmare or daydreaming. No, you wouldn't like to know the things I was thinking."True friend / Primeval soul from remote days of Paradise / You brought beautiful perfumes / To the bottom of the well / For soothing my spirit." "Mafi 7ada 2a7la menak... mafi 7ada 2a7la menak...(*)" It's beautiful here, isn't it? It's OK. Nothing has changed much, except for a new music store, nearby. You'll see it. The people? Some left, yes. "Hate lies. Hate lies. Hate lies." Why don't you come more often, habibi? I love the simple words, you know, if I could say them more often, I wouldn't need to write; they're poetic already. I still have a map of the sky at night. It was very dark here in those days, the stars was the only thing we could see far in the distance and we were so curious then. What are you thinking of? "You know all the secrets / Now, tell me what to ask for in the last day." I saw Maiysa crying the other day, and I thought maybe you could tell me why. "Nor the reason for my life / Neither the reason of my death / Will I learn in this world." Are you still there? "I admired your glowing beauty / And detected signs of abandonment / In the petals / You were almost fading - / My little friend / We were both in need of so much compassion." Do you know what time is it, George? Let's go, they're already waiting. "Lucky is he who has no home; he sees it still in his dreams" Hannah Arendt

[Passages from Zelda Schneerson-Mishkovsky taken from "Shirei Zelda", Kibbutz HaMeuchad, 1974] (*) Lebanese: There is none as beautiful as you. ***The End*** In memory of Samir Kassir (1960-2005) and Michel Seurat (1947-1986), two victims of terror in a bloody international war that has claimed over 150,000 lives in Lebanon since 1975, and that to date has not ended. Acknowledgements: Jill Martin, Anouf Nematallah, Carole Helou-Keshishian, Eman Magdi, George Maalouf, Shaun Randol. June-August 2012.