AN EARLY AFTERNOON IN BEIRUT BY TIM LLEWELLYN
AN EARLY AFTERNOON IN BEIRUT BY TIM LLEWELLYN
In late 1979, Ras Beirut remained the home of many foreign diplomats, journalists, academics, bankers and businessmen. The glitzier edges of Beirut and Lebanese life had been distressed by four years of civil war, but these foreigners hung on. So did the Lebanese, most of whom had little choice.
The street where I lived was on the edge of a hill, in an area called Sakkiyat al-Jinzieh. I and some other foreigners were housed in a six-storey apartment block facing west towards the Mediterranean Ocean, across the roof of the Carlton Hotel. If I looked directly south I could often see the Israeli air force bombing the Palestinian refugee camps in the southern suburbs of Beirut, about a mile and a half away.
A closer reminder of the Palestinian presence was just below our block, nearer the sea, an elegant French-colonial-era villa that had been the residence of a junior Turkish diplomat, in happier times. It was now occupied, “lived in”, by a group of Fateh guerrillas and their families. These people were endearing and hospitable. The wives daily invited their foreign neighbour-ladies in for tea and mahmoul, while their Fateh men kept an eye on who came and went in the Rue al-Watan al-Watiniyeh (Arab Unity Street). It was the nearest thing we had in those days in West Beirut to a community police force.
One Saturday, at about midday, as I stood on my balcony looking at the ocean, I heard shrieks from the apartment next to me, along the way. One of the foreign ladies had obviously had enough. She was packing her bags.
As fast as she filled her bags, preparing for her departure not just from Beirut but from her consular official’s life, and her being a German, who liked to do things in order, the husband would empty her suitcase over the balcony. Neatly folded items of underwear opened out like miniature parachutes and fluttered into the wasteland that separated Fateh’s villa from our block. For a while, this scene unfolded: shouts and screams from the sixth floor, a suitcase emptied (you could see the red-faced man off-loading it over his verandah), knickers, bras, skirts, blouses. I thought of a few lines of Tennyson:
A land of streams! some, like a downward smoke,
Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn, did go;
There would be a slight pause as these items rested where they lay. The lady in question was taking the lift to the ground floor. She would come out, past the puzzled and slightly scared concierge, Hossein, who had been aroused by the noise from his camp bed in his closet, march to the zone, scoop up her clothes and carry them to her apartment, where the procedure would recommence.
As I watched, I noticed that the Fateh men, with their Kalashnikovs and in their fatigues, had started to take position. They were not being menacing or aggressive but they were…well, there. Their wives, sisters, daughters and mothers watched from behind their windows, in the villa. After all, this angry and demeaned foreign lady had been a guest in their house and it was their duty, as watchdogs of our street, to see that order was maintained.
Finally, as can happen in these cases, the consular official and his wife became exhausted. The cascade of lingerie ceased, the shouting stopped, the Fateh platoon went back inside the villa and their women brewed more tea, nursed their children and made something nice for supper.
Peace was restored, insofar as in Ras Beirut peace is ever restored.
Later that evening, the Fateh captain, or Capitan as we called him, knocked on my door and asked if he could come in. He sat on my sofa, offered me a Marlboro, lit his and mine with a stem from a book of matches that said “Coral Beach Hotel”, and apologised for his men’s intervention during the early afternoon ructions.
He said to me, in English, “You see Mr Tim, when the lady started to throw her underwear we noticed that the refugees from the South were starting to move up the hill and we thought there might be looting. So we were trying to protect her, and her belongings. We do not wish this street to have a bad name. But after some time I had to withdraw my men. I am sorry.”
“Why did you withdraw them?”
“Because the ajnabi threw a radio, and it came down very near the head of one of my most experienced fighters. I could hear his wife screaming from behind the window. ‘What if the majnouni will throw the television?’”
Tim Llewellyn joined the Board of the Arab-British Centre in 2004. Click here to read more about him.