Prancing Pitas

As night descended upon my flight past Damascus, a hazyhalo of bright tiny topazes blinked sleepily into the horizon and suddenly the Lebanese capital yawned into view, encrusted onto the promontory so characteristic of the entire coastline along the eastern Mediterranean.

I came to Beirut only on the understanding that Beirut beckoned me to come. I couldn’t live in the Middle East – even in Tel Aviv – and yet not know the other city a mere 200km to the north I’d always considered it’s twin. Both Beirut and Tel Aviv are more similar to each other than they can ever hope to be with other metro-poles within their own respective territories, pulsating with a discrete energy that simmers beneath the halfgloss and bursts at the seams when you truly know where to look, although Beirut’s physically prettier simply on account of the Lindt&Sprüngli backdrop. Beirut’s also architecturally more varied and interesting, a little like Palermo, bombed-out concrete hulks in-set alongside virgin rock dressed in a conflicting number of styles. But the gaping holes from the war are the ones that stay in your head.

The other reason I came to Beirut – aside from visiting friends – was to try and understand, imagine and digest how things happened the way they did between 1975-1990, particularly in 1982 when Bashir Gemayel’s ascension to power was brutally cut short and the Sabra and Chatila massacres took place shortly after. Right on the seafront Corniche, in the middle of a post-election turquoise-golden summer afternoon, my mind drifts off to Ari Pullman’s ‘Waltz with Bashir’ and my eyes suddenly see orange flares fired off into the night sky before spiraling downwards upon the benighted city even as 2D cartoon figures bearing IDF fatigues slowly and reluctantly drag ashore on their dinghies.

I didn’t venture into Sabra and Chatila nor through the thickly Shia neighbourhoods in the south of Beirut this time round, but a peeled-eye stroll along Rue de Damas, the wartime frontline between the Muslim west and the Christian East still reveals a small number of low-rise buildings riddled with multicalibre munition scars. In Ein Mreisse near the Marina, two buildings – one of them the then only-partially reconstructed Hotel St. Georges – bear physical testament to the blast that tore a larger-than-life hole along the seafront and reduced to faerydust more than 20 people in 2005, including then-PM Hariri. And standing stoic and almost unyieldingly behind these two is a third, much larger building – the long-retired Holiday Inn – with holes almost the size of small helicopters on its flanks.

A lot of the city’s night pulse has shifted to Gemmayzé in recent years from Achrafié and Monot in particular, although sporadic but near routine power cuts continue to counterpunctuate both rhythm and schmooze, even 3 years after the last time the Israelis bombed to bits some of the country’s main power stations. And despite themselves and their critics, the heavily facepeeled-and-botoxed areas around downtown/Nejmé, along Rue Foch/Majediyé and Saifi village, even that grudgingly Istan-bullish and outlandish mosque, deserve much more than a second glance.

One morning, we drive up to Zahlé and the Bekaa Valley via the Beirut-Damascus highway, a stretch of road so stressful despite the views and the fantasy of guillotining Lebanon into 2 perfect halves that I would’ve preferred we ribboned it through to the Bekaa from the north. But either way, you arrive at Zahlé after almost abruptly pouring into the immense concavity of the Bekaa. This sternly Greek Orthodox town with the thick accents and the giant rosary hanging down from the hilltop is nicknamed ‘3arous el Beqaa3 (Bride of the Bekaa) and must’ve been a lot prettier when younger because you could still make out the persimmon cheeks of a picturesque mountain resort town straddling both banks of the Bardawni river. Monique and Pascale’s entire family comes from Zahlé, and I continued to meet a considerable number of their cousins oncetwicethrice removed during the 24hrs I spent there and the nearby Ksara winery (the Moscatel (Muscat+Gewurztraminer) and the Cuvée de Printemps (Gamay+Tempranillo) are absolutely out of this world, certainly better than any other wine I’ve tasted from the region).

We leave Zahlé, driving up northwards through Baalbek and hooking back west through Qasr el Banat and Deir el Ahmar up up up towards the Cedars/Arz er Rabb and the slopes of Lebanon’s highest point, Qornet as-Sawda. In Deir al Ahmar, we bank a corner and nearly drive straight into a Christian funeral; cars all round the vicinity bear A4 photoprints of a pleasant-looking girl on their windows. Everyone is wearing black – ravenblack obsidianblack jetblack and even Maybellineblack. Apparently, the girl, only a sweet 17, drowned in a swimming pool a couple of days before and this at the start of a golden summer right after the calmest national elections since the end of the civil war.

The Bekaa valley melts into the horizon both in the north and south and is flanked, like the Hula valley in northern Israel (south of Kiryat Shmona), by two mountain ranges, the Mount Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon ranges, while the latter is flanked by the southern-most ridges of the same Mount Lebanon-Chouf range and the Golan Heights. So this is where the famous red hashish industries used to be and are still likely found. Hezbollah land.

The ascent from the Bekaa valley floor up to the Cedars near Qornet as-Sawda is the most mouth-gapingly beauu-tee-fool stretch of land you’ll probably ever see along the Eastern Mediterranean and this ridiculous claim goes sublime when you hit the summit overlooking the other side, the Qadisha valley and Bcharré. The eponymous Holy Valley/Wedi el 2annoubine of the Maronite hermits who came here to escape persecution in earlier centuries is studded with built-into-rockface monasteries and hideouts and slowly tapers downhilldownstream towards the west, towards the torrid Mediterranean lying prostrate towards the sunset. Maronite stronghold Bcharré in winter looks like a Christmas logcake under the thickest icing you’ve ever seen and even Khalil Gibran’s bronze bust, Resquiat In Pace, has by now all but closed its eyes because of the cold seeping straight into his bones each vin-ta.

It’s a bit hard to write about anything else in Lebanon after any description of the Bekaa and the Qadisha valley within the same prolix sentence. I’ll make it a point to describe the deep green and very Shia south the next time round.

I seem to be stalked by uncanny timing. In December, I returned to Tel Aviv one day after the Israel-Hamas truce expired and slightly over a week later, crossed the border into Jordan exactly one hour before Operation Cast Lead began in and then over Gaza. No premeditated link whatsoever. This time round, having countenanced enough unnecessary anxiety and uncertainty before and after the Lebanese parliamentary elections, I came, I saw and then exactly one day after I leave, trouble erupts in West Beirut between Nabih Berri’s Amal supporters and not a very Sad Hariri’s own partisans because of the latter’s nomination to the post of PM. Like his father, nearly 2 decades ago.

I dream of so many things. And I also dream of the day direct flights start plying between Tel Aviv and Beirut. Where do we begin?

Andie’s and my first trip together to Italy, planned for since late last year: 8+ days in Rome and the prettier bits of Campania, on the pretext of attending her longtime friend Francesca & Francesco’s wedding in Rome’s Club del Jazz. Could catch up a little with Angela & Martin at the Spanish Steps on the first evening before we made tracks to Naples on the morrow, Mozzarella di Bufala, Magherita@Da Michele’s and almost only seafood for a week straight. God I love the food and the sun in Campania. 3 days in jetset Capri with plenty of offcliff swimming and sapphire caves and Faraglioni and Anacapri and foodfoodfooooooood. 2 days in cliffhanger Positano along the Amalfi coast with more seafood and pebblebeach and plenty of bougainvilla. Quick stop on Sorrento on the way back along the Circumvesuviana to Napoli. And then back to Rome for the wedding.

An Arab male my age died in front of my eyes today and I couldn’t do anything to save him.

I was supervising a first-aid training module in an area with at least six Arab communities thrice removed from the nearest medical care provider when a man slices through the countryside and, mid-pant, tells us this guy from the community has been stabbed in a nearby town and requires medical attention. I don’t realize how bad his condition is until I arrive with a kit and my first-aid trained truck driver. He has been stabbed in three locations – in the left clavicle, in the left rib and the right tummy – and worse, his guts or something resembling his guts coated with fat are spilling out from the left rib wound near the heart and, eyes shuttered, he’s frothing and breathing like a cappuccino machine on a timer. In the meantime, his assailant has surrendered himself over to the police. There's no viable clinic and hospital in the vicinity.

Medi-vacking him 1hr back to al-Geneina on a 6x6 bumper truck ride would’ve killed him faster than a fourth stab wound. UNAMID isn’t forthcoming with helicopters because he’s a civilian and they’re procedurally constrained. After attempting to patch up bits and pieces of him that’d fallen out, there isn’t much else to do except sadly watch him pass away. And pass away he does, right in front of me.

With the most critical juncture now behind us, we do the only other thing we can: load the body on our truck and drive what practically becomes an entire funeral cortege back to the man’s damra about 7km away. In the interim, the first-aid course has of course been irreparably interrupted and the men’s club has now become part of the mourning procession. I sit there the next 3 hours sadly watching the community members – the man’s distraught father, the resolute Sheikh, the stern males, the gaudy women – wail, prepare the body for burial, sew up a white shroud, dig the grave, pray the Faatiha opening line of the Quran and then transpose the body into the spot marked ‘I’, a long two-tiered hole in the ground with the man lying on his side facing Mekka in the eternal east.

La ilaha ila allah La ilaha ila allah La ilaha ila allah La ilaha ila alllllllllah.

Witnessed two sendaways in almost two weeks, one in the Beqaa Valley in Lebanon and the second in Hashaba Gokar in West Darfur. Death likes to move about in low-lying places, perhaps because it's still thinking about the shortest route into the centre of the Earth.

Three weeks out in the hilly shrubland about 30km south of al-Geneina, 50,000 heads of mostly Arab-owned ovines-caprines bovines and camels reluctantly inoculated, a distribution of donkey/horse carts, another distribution of seeds-and-tools to mixed Masalit/Arab communities and a deepened and rehabilitated hand-dug well in a notoriously thirsty area. 3 weeks. But most flippantly remarkable of all was the fact that we made camp, of all places in the Sahelian semi-desert, in an amply buxom mango grove with fruit bursting in their skins, if hung a little too high up, simply because man shall not live by bread alone. And when we weren’t at work armchair supervising the campaign I was showing the boys how to play pingpong-without-the-table matkot on the wadi sand and going running with them and drifting off into deep slumber on most clear breezy nights in my open plan mosquito dome under the silent and eternal gaze of the Scorpion, the Big Bear and the Southern Cross.

In the meantime, former Sudanese president Jaafar Nimeiri passed away and a mint-new AirBus bound for Paris went off the radar and by all accounts seems to have ploughed into the stormy Atlantic.

On the topic of death, why do all animals dying a natural death assume the same posture in extremis? Reclined on the one, less photogenic side with neck and head always stretched upwards, proffering that final cry to the heavens, “my God my God, why have you forsaken me?”

But the one leaves only for the other to arrive. So baby horse foals gestate for 13 months, camel foals and donkey calves about a year and baby sheep/goats about 5-6 months, here at least if not elsewhere, and I very serendipitously chanced upon a mother cow inducting her new-born calf into the ways of the world, social mobility, really, learning how to walk.

But some animals are just born under a bad sign. I think if ever there was a living manifestation of a ‘built-in handicap’, it has to be a goat’s myth-sized bollocks. The average male caprine has balls almost the size of its unadorned head, something like a near seventh of its bodymass. And when it starts running away from you it looks as if it’s got a gunnysack of turnips tied at the belt between its legs and fleeing at the same time. Which is probably why they’re always slaughtered without a fight.

On one particularly nondescript evening, my local Sudanese colleagues purchased and roped a young black-white goat to a nearby tree for slaughter at dawn. Alarmed, I started trying to plead with it to calm down by feeding it the greenest and most fragrant mango leaves I could find from the mango grove which we had entirely annexed by this time. The entire night the young buck baa-aaa-aaa-ed in fear and trembling and there was no way even I could hope to influence his lot: by releasing him in the dead of night I would only have had another scapegoat in his place on the morrow.

By the time I awoke at dawn, his baaa-baaaas had been silenced, his blood profusely let – not that there is a lot in general – and preparations for lunch and dinner were underway. Some time later I walked to a wadi behind the encampment and suddenly caught sight of his oddly meatless but furred-and-hoofed cadaver, rigor-mortis-ed, lying on the one, hollow side with re-attached head stretched to the heavens in a deafeningly silent plea for divine if not human mercy.

Goodbye little one. You may never ever get to hear this, but although you were slaughtered you truly live on, holy and sublimated in this body’s sustenance and constitution. In the end, like Mr. Gibran once told me, ‘the law that delivered you into my hand shall deliver me into a mightier hand. Your blood and my blood is naught but the sap that feeds the tree of heaven.’

I want to become vegetarian but meat is soooo deliriously delicious. It’s a bit pointless even stating this innit, like, how flies though unrivalled in their consumption of organic waste spend the other half of their lives trying to clean their bulbous heads with their forelegs cat-style. Pointless.

But the truth of the matter is that aside from livestock (and prewar Darfur is almost world famous for this, haven’t you heard), wildlife and game like elephants giraffes antelopes in Darfur have entirely vanished over the past century unlike the teeming savannas of Central African Republic and large parts of safari-pretty east Africa. Entirely vanished, kaput, except for the ornithological spread which remains a most wondrous thing. There’s this huuuuuge bird measuring nearly 1m when erect (on its feet) known locally as Abu Nduluk, not unlike a pelican crossed with an emu (Abu Dodo might make for more fitting nomenclature). And then there’s the gorgeous iridescent turquoise-azure swallowtail-like creatures. On two occasions, two perfect strangers wanted to not only show me their birds but hopefully trade them for cash, birds that turned out to be ma-jest-ic hunting falcons of the variety you typically find on the Arabian peninsula. I would buy one of these if only to pick out all those spiders and camel spiders in this neighbourhood. I don’t know what I’d do if I saw another adult camel spider in my mosquito dome. During one of our dinner-in-the-dark sessions, 10 velociraptorish camel spiders/solifugae tore through our dining mat in the space of 10 minutes, all mysteriously heading toward the same highway exit to the right. They looked like miniature bulldozers with the scoop raised upwards, running on Ferrari engines all ten of them.

 
But then, no majestic bird of prey would go after segmented lifeforms would they? Only rabbits or, on occasion, those poor goats again, thinking there was a funny-looking bunny running between their legs.

*     *     *

Photos coming up on facebook.

Present reading

Koby Oz’s “Moshe Chwarto vehaOrev”

Michael Axworthy’s “Iran: Empire of the Mind”

Beppe Severgnini’s “La Testa degli Italiani”

Last night spent outfield in Sandikoro village 10km southwest of Alpha Lima Juliet must've been one of my worst.

So I crawled into my mosquito dome at 2230hrs and nearly went commando because it was so hot. To try and ease falling asleep, I pick a corner away from my 4 other local staff, already socially obliged as we were to sleep in the pulsating middle of the village rather than the village's barren edge just as we would've preferred.

And then one of my local staff, already a distal 10m away from where I'd set up shop, decided to fall asleep to Sudanese radio. News radio. Verbal news bulletins and synthesizer filler music and high-timbre talk shows. And then the improbable happens - he starts snoring.

Seven and a half minutes into this psychotropic nightmare, I hear the voices of 3 Masalit villagers slightly beyond our rest area, gathered for what must surely have been a post-dinner digestif and this guy is recounting a really long retelling of a rewrought remake of a short local joke, based on a real life event, and of course, he's making the woman giggle-laugh-guffaw in cycles of 3/4 time, like a waltz, with almost equally ascending and descending variations in volume.

21 minutes into this metronomic horror, I abruptly recall there are several donkeys for every household here and there are 99 households in this village according to the sheikh. Like instant powder prophecy, one after the other starts braying. If you've never heard a donkey bray solo, it is the single most painful, emphysematic noise any living and undead being can possibly aspire to produce of its own free will, and in an entire village of freewill donkeys, you inexorably reach the conclusion that they're choking on a mixture of hedgehog and banana puree. Once the refrain finishes, the dogs start barking, and then the horses and the goats casually join in.

On top of all this, literally right on top of all of this, I look up through my transparent mosquito dome and into the neverchanging face of the moon. The Full Moon. The brightest farking thing there is in the African sky.

By the way, Sandikoro or Thandikoro pronounced in the original Fur language merely means pussy. The one without its own freewill. How many placenames between Earth and Moon can actually lay claim to a body part?

 The tension in the air is turning from thick to gelatinous. The ICC arrest warrant is still expected sometime these weeks, like it has been all these painful months of suspense, but expected all the same. Oxygen has become paranoia, all of al-Geneina’s candy circuit’s slowly going underground and the war economy is just about becoming the only real activity in tandem with the recidivist petty criminality looking askance in your direction from every acacia tree and adobe-brick corner. Armed groups are making preparations to move or are already moving in two opposite directions, one toward Khartoum and the other toward unsisterly N’djamena, and some backtracking is expected at various proxy clashpoints, which has happened before and will happen again and again and again.

Keys are turning in most locks, barbedwiredwalls – both local but mainly expats’ – are being vaulted over with ease and a dark sense of purpose and landcruisers are being speedily plundered on all fours and fobbed off to the highest bidders but anyone’s fairgame. Everyone’s fair game.

It may not be Gaza under Cast Lead’s groaning strain, but it’s certainly feeling no better.

So I make my way from Jerusalem post-AD 70 to Roma post-Titus, just to see what effect that kinetic transition involved between diametrically opposed historical memories.

I glide off the airport, take the train to Stazione Termini in eastern Rome and from there share a cab with two sympathetic Israeli women (whom I meet at the Milan stopover who’re doing some ‘tata’, I think, healing course here) to a B&B in Castel Sant’Angelo-Piazza Cavour, where I finally meet Laura who’s agreed to join me for a couple of days from Ferrara up north. Rome is so huge we have to divide and conquer, and so we gradually visit all of the area around Piazza Navona, the Pantheon, Trevi Fountain and the Spanish Steps (quite an ample swathe of territory actually) walking as if the self-esteem of our legs depended on it, and finally in the evening she takes me to this excellent Roman restaurant in Piazza Mercanti in Trastevere – the working class and allegedly most authentically Roman neighbourhood in the city – called “Da Meo Patacca”, where I gamely stuff my face with two things I’ve always wanted to try when in Rome (they don’t do it the same way in Melbourne’s South Gate): Abbacchio ar Girarrosto (spit-roasted lamb) and Saltimbocca alla Romana (veal wrapped in prosciutto and sage), simultaneously. The next few days are filled with carefully improvised and executed expeditions all over the entire City intramuros, within the old walls.

Speaking of expeditions. Rome seems to be overrun with a ridiculous number of its own youth out on school expeditions, gite scolastiche, even more so than in other European capitals, like the swarming hordes I saw in Paris’ Champs-Elysées just last spring. In other words, there’re more Romans sightseeing Rome than there are Europeans sightseeing Rome, not to even say their own capitals.

The next evening after walking some 20km, Laura has to return for her PhD submission and so I accompany her to Stazione Termini. How strange. A year ago when we last planned to meet up (after we left Melbourne Uni where we were both teaching together, she accountancy and me anatomy of sorts – tongues) in Geneva, it was I who left, taking the train with me to Zürich and saying byebye to her. This time round, it was her who took the train with her to Emilia-Romagna, and I, strangely enough, remained behind in the Italian capital, praying to get lost in its austere embrace.

It is funny that much of postcard-Rome’s skyline is dominated by the Vatican state, another country altogether. So I decided to walk up the equally austere and somewhat colonnaded Via della Conciliazione toward the towering hulk that is St. Peter’s Basilica, on and on and on right straight up to the upsized Cupola where Rome unfolds in all its splendour and nakedness. I spend five short hours in the Vatican Museums and at the end of it, accidentally walk into the Sistine Chapel and start gaping wide-eyed, along with half the world’s tourists already present there, equally wide-eyed, a bit like entering a really colourful goldfish bowl. In a matter of minutes, about 11, I get whiplash trying to look at the Sistine Chapel in its entirety: it isn’t possible to maintain the neck at 90 degrees for 10mins non-stop without permanently jamming something in your spinal cord or clavicus. But. Back to the other country under scrutiny. Rome’s actual jewels lie in the near-comprehensive ruins of the Roman Forum as well as the Palatino palaces that seat smack in the city’s heart, crowned by the Colosseum on the right end and the grotesquely colossal Monument to Vittorio Emanuele on the wrong end. And I finally meet the twins Castore and Polluce in person, stationed all these years outside the Campidoglio, Rome’s Municipality. Castor and Pollux. What memories, on carnal earth as in high Heaven. After 9 days in Rome, I don’t want to ever see another church-basilica again. Just as after three days in Istanbul, I don’t ever want to see another Mosque again, especially if it also looks like and once upon a time served as a church-basilica. To treat my ecclesiastophobia, I go at lunch time to Ostaria di Nerone, near the Colosseo, and order the best Coda alla Vaccinara I’ve ever had (oxtail braised in tomato-sauce with celeries).

As with almost every city I visit, I get possessed, at some point, with this inexplicable urge to see how the local Chinese community lives, how they adapt to their host environments, and I tell myself if there’re Chinks living (as opposed to working for oil, in Black Africa for instance) in a place as unthinkable as Tel-Aviv, then it is only a matter of time before they start exporting cheap clothing and even cheaper shoes to the Moon (according to certain accounts they’re already there, living on the dark side in a crater painted red and auspiciously called Chinatown) and maybe in the near future, just maybe, to the Sun. To that effect, I decide to loiter as unsuspiciously as I can in the vicinity of Stazione Termini and particularly around Piazza Vittorio and that entire stretch in between, even going as far as eating in a Cantonese Restaurant on Via Cavour where however I end up chatting with these two gay Italian men sitting next to me, Francesco and Giorgio. I soon discover the restaurant’s a gay magnet for unobvious reasons but by this time, I’m already stuck with my springrolls. Unlike Napoli, Chinese Romans seem a little more acculturated and involved in their host society – with the accent haunting their every utterance. And this really funny maitre d’ at the Cantonese Resto, Ah Foh, who couldn’t stop coming over to our table with hilarious one-liners, answered to the name “Alfonso” as well, for obvious onomatopoeic or mimetic reasons (unlike the link between Kev and Abderrazak. Now they’re just calling me ‘Abd’).

Moving on from Chinese produce, I go visit the historical Ghetto near the Isola Tiberina, the island partition between Trastevere (“across from the [river] Tiber”) and Rome-in-ruins, the home of the FatebeneFratelli hospital, and itself the world’s smallest inhabited island according to the errata section of some tour guide (!). What remains of the real, walled-in Ghetto in the Portico d’Ottavia area is, by all appearances, an immense and beautiful Synagogue (Tempio Maggiore) and a street behind, Via Santa Maria di Pianto-Via del Portico, filled with Roman Jewish restaurants, kitschy Kosher fastfood and glittering Judaica. And of course, I go straight into La Taverna del Ghetto, run by a Roman Jewish woman married to a Tel Aviv-er, and order Carciofi alla Giudea (artichokes fried Roman Jewish style - deeeelishhhhhhass) and Lingua Ebraica (veal tongues, cut out because they stuck them out, those beefheads).

That evening, after prayers at the same synagogue, I make my way to Campo de’ Fiori for dinna at Ostaria Romanesca: Trippa alla Romana, Roman tripe, in tomato sauce (again). The square was as raucous as a 1m x 1m storeroom without lights without oxygen and everyone was in the nearest pub watching Rome play against Read Madrid. The game soon ended and Campo de’ Fiori rose from the dead.

By the second weekend, after nearly 6 days of touring the eternal city on me own, Gianpaolo (a good friend whom I met in Melbourne in 2005 and with whom I worked, not at the Uni, but at a resto, him making the best bruschette ever and I eating them I mean serving them) and Valeria train up from Naples to join me at GP’s cousins’ place, Sara and Wanda, in Trastevere’s Piazza della Scala where the five of us sleep for two nights. In the interim, we go window shopping on Via Condotti, eat gelati, and go drinking in Trastevere, mostly, considering the botched attempt to enter Villa Borghese’s Art Café on the last night we were there.

Rome as a city is chic incarnate, haughty, ostentatious and yet as well, and I cannot possibly overexaggerate, heavily austere, severe, august, being the Cathedra of the Catholic world. This fact/suspicion is given ample afflatus and punch in the ubiquitous formula SPQR, inscribed on ruins, plaques, manhole covers, upon every unsuspectingly inscribable surface: Senatus Popolusque Romanus, the Senate and People of Rome. The titular “Head of the World” does not suffer animate and inanimate things which lack, not substance, but style. And then on 8 March, Women’s Day, the entire city suddenly blooms mimosa yellow, of course, to stylish effect. In a city whose architectural sensibilities favour sonorously immense physical volume, it is however the minutest cars (i.e. Smarts) that are commandeered by the hottest women (standard deviation: 0.0075).

Napoli, on the other hand…