Beirut Diaries - Michele

After the Turkish breakfast on the morning after New Year’s Eve, Murad, Nicholas and I headed back to Saifi. We all wanted more breakfast. The cafeteria looked less dirty since the time we left. A cocktail of freshly brewed coffee, cigarette smoke and floor cleaning detergent filled the air. The sun pierced through the gaps in the trees. It poured onto the yellow lime rock and robbed it off its color.

   

The cafeteria was empty but welcoming. Breakfast was ready. We all ordered omelets and found a spot in the sun. Nicholas unfolded a pocket size map of the city and we discussed what to do, where to go, what to eat and so on. The plans came forth and competed like a pack of hounds chasing a racecourse rubber bunny. Nicholas who had been in Beirut for some time felt responsible to weigh in on every decision we took.

We were all fairly loud and in bright night suits. In the middle of escalating deliberation, and at a time when we least expected, a girl walked up and said, ‘I think you guys need help.’

The abrupt intrusion was pleasant: maybe because the girl spoke with a lovely smile or because Murad and I were happy to get our first real taste of undivided female attention or because she was cute or it could be all of these things together.

Anyway, before she walked up and engaged us, Murad and I had never seen so much hair on anybody’s head before. Her curls really did have a life of their own.

‘Yes, we’re quite aimless,’ I dragged back a chair and asked her to join us. The cute girl rushed to her table to fetch her bag. She was brimming with insights and in that moment we were all captives to her esoteric pointers on Beirut.

 

‘I heard you guys talk about Achrafieh – you must go see Rue Monot – it’s a street. During the civil war it had two sides. Bars served alcohol on one. The other practiced prohibition. The sides were divided by a string of shrubs. 

...even after the war, when the plants were uprooted, the division lived in the minds of people. For some, it still does.’

‘You’re so much better than lonely planet,’ I said.

Although I could let her talk about Beirut for hours in that moment I felt the need to provoke her; interrupt the spell she began to cast on us with her words.

‘There are places I would never go to…’ unaffected by the prod, she continued on her own tangent and spoke about how seventeen distinct ethnicities divided Beirut into a number of mini-states.

 

A discussion on alcohol Murad could listen to. The moment she switched to socio-political issues, Murad felt like his precious vacation bubble was going to pop.

 

Murad had to hijack the conversation, 

‘Excuse my ignorance, but are you a guardian angel of some sort?’

She laughed, stuck her hand out and said, ‘Michele’.

‘I live in Jounieh, but I come from a small town two hours south of here’.

Murad and I found Michele refreshing and forthcoming. In our puny world, especially in Pakistan, girls like to play hide and seek, dodge overtures and sustain interest through elusive behavior. They like to share everything in bits; prolong the chase; just like a test player paces himself for a long innings.

Maybe we take more time to thaw as a people; maybe most of us are unsure of who we really are and don’t want to expose ourselves. Whatever the case, it’s always fun to meet people who dare to live beyond barriers of propriety and unnecessary reserve.

Awe struck with Michele’s positive disposition, we could not foresee the impending disappointment ahead of us.

After Michele’s introduction, the gents at the table followed suit. 

‘Murad, from Pakistan, first time in Beirut’  

‘Nicholas. I’ve been here two months. I’m English. And I do know some things about Beirut’.

‘I’m Khizr’

‘What?’ Michele squinted.

‘Khizr’

‘Hisser?’

‘No, Khizr’

‘Hizzher?’

‘Khi-zer, K, H, I, Z, R, Khey-Zar,’ I enunciated, slowly, and separately, each letter, with syllable stress, 

like a foreign language teacher. 

‘Khaaa, khaaa’

‘Sounds like phlegm. I think I’m going to choke on your name,’ Michele made her opening joke and cracked herself up.

‘That’s the idea! You should have been dead by now!’ was my opening rebut and the banter continued for a while.

Michele finally stuck her tongue out and squinted.

‘But if you choose to live, you can call me just K, OK?

‘OK…K, OK!’ Michele and I laughed. Murad and Nicholas didn’t.

‘I have some friends visiting from Spain. We’re going to Byblos, the oldest inhabited city of the world – one of three actually – you should come,’ Michele twirled her hair and added new curls to the infinite perms already buoyant on her head like a frenzy.

‘I’m going to Tripoli today,’ Nicholas sounded hasty.

‘I hate Tripoli. You can’t even drink there. Those people are different,’ said Michele.

‘That’s why I carry my own booze,’ Nicholas retorted in his thick British accent. 

‘So K, OK, do you have a local number?’ Michele turned to me and disengaged Nicholas.

‘No. But you can reach me on 00923344416660. Pakistan. Works.’

‘Are you sure?’ Michele punched the numbers in her phone as I reiterated slowly. She put my name down as ‘kokkkk’.

‘Yes. Call me. I’m going to shower. See you soon.’

‘Can I get your number?’ Nicholas spoke cautiously with his phone in his hand.

‘You want my number? What are you implying Nicholas? Acting all fast with me huh?’ Michele laughed.

Nicholas turned red in the face and changed the subject.

After I showered and returned to the cafeteria, I found Michele with her Spanish friends and Nicholas was nowhere in sight.

Much to our collective disdain, Michele’s friends – Sergio and Manuela – were two bright chaps from Madrid – not the beautiful women Murad and I had envisioned. On our way to Byblos, Murad wore his dark glasses and observed Lebanese life from the bus window. I sold the Northern Areas of Pakistan to the Spaniards.

Michele had met Manuela in Madrid on a vacation and that’s where they hooked up. Sergio was the hanger that accompanied Manuela and avidly followed him as he cultivated his love interest. Murad and I were just odd Pakistanis – a race our new friends knew nothing about.

As we approached Byblos, a steady down pour began. It was a blessed spanner of sorts. Had we continued on public transport we would have been drenched by the time we reached Byblos. So Michele called her friend Lilian who lived in Byblos and asked her to collect us from a major shopping mall right off the main highway.

Lilian parked her mini Pajero and took her mini self out of it. Her light brown hair was rolled up and stitched with pins at the back of her head. Tweed jacket on jeans. Her skin was like golden brown olive oil. She had a delicate frame, soft features, everything quite slender and two incredible eyes with tones of both green and grey.

In short, Lillian was a woman of remarkable looks but unremarkable remarks. While we waited for her at the shopping mall, we shared foul language in Spanish, Arabic and Urdu. It was a tri-national ‘circle of trust’. In Spanish, Bosta meant a pile of rotten shit with flies hovering over it. Bhen-chod meant sister fucker in Urdu. Michele taught us an abuse in Arabic but we were advised against using it in our little tri-national togetherness anthem and the word soon evaporated.

When Lilian arrived, we fetched snacks and umbrellas from the shopping mall and left for Byblos. We all sang the absurd tri-national togetherness anthem without Lilian who didn’t utter much beyond politenesses every now and then. At one point when the singing got loud and obnoxious, she managed a strained smile. She looked into the rearview mirror from time to time, but every time it was just a glimpse and it was impossible to catch her eye.

En route to Byblos we were stuck in traffic on a down slope at one point. Behind us, at close distance was a massive snow clad peak and ahead of us, again at close distance, was light blue water, palm trees and mustard sand. To have such diverse vistas at opposite ends of the same peninsula felt surreal. Later in the trip I read on the Beirut Timeout Website, ‘5 reasons to go to Beirut’.

It said, ‘one of two cities in the world where you can swim and ski the same day’ and it added that March was the best time of the year to do this.

When we drove into the oldest inhabited city of the world it really was the stuff of dreams. The lime rock lighthouse, the vast open wooden bay, the erosive powers of nature on display, cutting through rock and wood alike, building character through snail pace time. Everything was just so damn charming; it was impossible not to fall in love with the place and its overwhelming antique emotion. 

The beach invited us to talk and walk through history. We saw a two thousand year old restaurant called Pepe Abid. Many modern day celebrities occupied wall space inside the restaurant. Pepe Abid served only fish – the best you can find in Lebanon. We didn’t get a chance to eat there; we only nibbled on Michele’s stories of the restaurant and our real appetite was abandoned because the entourage was not hungry yet.   

By the time we finished our walk on the beach, Lilian had shared her entire professional and personal life story with me. She had experience in designing and advertising and was practicing freelance. She knew about Sammy Moujaes. I told her I could help her reach him and she acquiesced to the idea but didn’t look keen. Then she explained how she finds working for brands restrictive because of all the guidelines, rules, standardized communications and so on.

While we walked out of Byblos towards a modern town of Lebanon in search of a good restaurant, Murad perpetually smiled at me. I felt like I stood under a bright yellow spot light. Murad thought Lillian and I were falling in love. We walked side by side for the longest time, just like a pair of domesticated pigeons. But unremarkable remarks hardly ever do anything to anyone and Lilian to me was just as lifeless as a cardboard mannequin.

I felt like my stomach – empty. But Murad didn’t see that.

Our group equation was a mix of lone and not so lone pigeons. Manuela walked with Michele. Sergio had his camera. And Murad carried in his head a cloud of wishful optimism until Mariella, the half Arab, half Lebanese bombshell walked into the scene and destroyed Murad’s ability to walk in a straight line.

Mariella was another friend of Michele’s who joined us for lunch. Mariella ordered a salad, especially designed for picture perfect Lebanese ladies.

Mariella too had remarkable looks – high cheek bones, tall, shiny thick black locks, pouty lips, a perfectly symmetrical nose, single tone skin, a mole strategically placed at the tip of her left cheek, designer goods head to tow, lip gloss, mascara, perfectly manicured nails, glistening teeth, an hour glass figure accentuated through clothes, strategically draped over her curves and a static smile that guarded changing emotion.

The first thing Murad half thought, half muttered when he saw her was, ‘she’s not real’. And then he touched his own face to see if he was numb or stuck in an ephemeral dream.

Mariella moved with effortless grace, wove her words in a web of conventional truths and generalizations and enjoyed the company of equally good-looking people. Since we were short, chubby, and unfashionable and we made little effort to enhance our aesthetic appeal, we enjoyed Mariella’s stunning looks from a ‘safe’ distance. The tribulations associated with natural selection and evolution had never been so evident on the trip thus far. 

Sadly, Michele turned out to be an anomaly. Until we met others, to us Michele was the definition of a Lebanese woman. And even though people were generally friendly, nobody else was half as forthcoming. Another generalization went out of the window.

And worse, Murad’s dreams to see Lilian’s babies with me shattered when Lilian’s husband, David, appeared out of nowhere to join us for lunch. David talked about his boring job as a banker and told us he wants to move with his wife to Canada because the quality of life in Beirut was not good and things were far too unpredictable. I could hear another fantasy bubble going ‘pop’ in Murad’s head.

By the end of their meal, Lilian and David were having a strained conversation about the right time to move to Canada and the difference of opinion made their faces look longer.

This was yet another opportunity for me to sell the magic of the northern areas of Pakistan and I did exactly that! 

‘The second highest plateau in the world – Deosai – happens to be in the northern areas of Pakistan! The word Deosai means ‘landing zone of the giants’ – that’s because flat land at 14,000 feet is no good to anybody else. At the end of June, the entire plane is awash with multicolored flowers. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. You guys have to come’.

‘…Sure, David and I will make a plan and visit you sometime next year and then we can all go to the Northern Areas’.

Lilian and David looked at each other. Lilian didn’t mean a word of what she said.