in the curve of its bay. As I grew older, I often imagined him like this. And again and again, I mistook this image of him for the image of a happy childhood.
From his shirt pocket, Father produced a few toothpicks. From a cloth bag, some red crepe paper. He tore off some and handed it to me.
“For the flags,” he said, and began to tear the paper into small, narrow strips.
We patiently attached the paper strips to the toothpicks, which we then stuck into the nutshells that were still intact. At some point we stopped and looked at the grass, where lots of little nutshell ships lay between our feet. A whole fleet, complete with red flags, ready to set sail.
“Come on.” He stood up, and we went down to the water, which was lapping at the shore. The sun and the mountain chain were mirrored in the malachite-green lake. For a while we just stood there, holding the little ships in our hands, breathing together. “A cedar can grow to be several thousand years old,” he said. “If a cedar could speak, it would tell us stories we would never forget.”
“What kind of stories?”
“Lots of funny ones, I expect. But lots of sad ones too. Stories about its own life. Stories about people who passed by or who sat in its shade.”
“Like you?”
“Like me. Give it a go. Try it with the fir trees.”
As we stood by the water, I thought about the wind swishing through the needles. The sound it made was the fir trees whispering, telling each other about their lives. I hoped that one day they’d remember how we stood here by the water and I tried to imagine what they were saying about us.
As a boy, I felt an insatiable longing to see Lebanon. It was like the enormous curiosity inspired by a legendary beauty no one has ever seen. The passion and fervour in the way Father spoke about his native land spread to me like a fever. The Lebanon I grew up with was an idea. The idea of the most beautiful country in the world, its rocky coastline dotted with ancient and mysterious cities whose colourful harbours opened out to the sea. Behind them, countless winding mountain roads flanked by river valleys whose fertile banks provided the perfect soil for world-famous wine. And then the dense cedar forests at the higher, cooler altitudes, surrounded by the Lebanon Mountains, whose peaks are snow-capped even in summer and can be seen even from an inflatable mattress on the sea far below.
We stood on this lakeshore, breathing the same air and sharing the same longing. In my opinion, after love for one another, there is no stronger bond between two people than a shared longing.
“What would the cedar on our flags say?” I wanted to know.
Father smiled briefly. I could almost sense the words on his tongue as he struggled to find an answer. But he just pressed his lips together.
We launched our little ships. Only a small number lost their flags a few metres along the way; most flew them proudly in the breeze. Father and I stood and watched. He had put his arm around my shoulders.
“Like the Phoenicians,” he said.
I liked that. Me, Samir, captain of a Phoenician walnut-shell ship.
“May they sail for a thousand years!”
“May they return with heroic tales!”
Father laughed.
I have often thought back to that day in the late summer of 1992. I know that he wanted to do something to make me happy, and it did indeed make me very happy. Hardly any of our ships sank. Some of them rocked dangerously, but none capsized. We stood there watching until the very last nutshell was no more than a tiny dot, and I remember how proud I was.
But I also remember how his arm felt heavier and heavier on my shoulders. His breathing became deeper and deeper, his gaze more and more trance-like, as if he were no longer looking at the ships but at some point in the distance. The reason I remember it so clearly is that it was one of the last days we spent together.
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3
Meanwhile, history was being made in Lebanon. Beirut, once a dazzling beauty, rubbed its disfigured face and staggered out of the ruins. A city felt for its pulse. In the neighbourhoods, people thumped the dust out of their clothes and wearily raised their heads. The war was over. Militiamen became citizens again, laying down their guns and taking up shovels instead. Bullet holes were filled in, facades painted, burned-out cars removed from the pavements. Rubble was cleared away, the smoke dispersed. The huge sheets hanging in the streets were taken down, as there were no longer any snipers whose view needed to be blocked. Women and children swept debris off balconies and removed boards from windows, while fathers carried mattresses back up to bedrooms from the cellars that had served as bunkers. In short, the Lebanese did what they’ve always done: they carried on.
At night, though, when the moon illuminated the freshly made-up facades and the sea reflected the city’s lights, the clicking of boots reverberated through the streets and alleys. But not just there. In the slums at the city’s edges, in the surrounding villages, in coastal towns, and in the mountains—from Tripoli in the north to Tyre in the south—the sound of clicking could be heard. Lebanon was hosting a ball, and Beirut wanted to be the prettiest one there. But the makeup artists were Syrian soldiers. And when daylight returned, revealing how shoddily makeup and darkness had concealed the wounds, the handiwork of the men in clicking heels was displayed on the sides of every building. In the early hours of the morning, people in the streets stopped to stare up at walls now covered in posters of the Syrian president, Hafez al-Assad, who looked back down at them from beneath his neatly parted hair. So there could no longer be any doubt about it. It was undeniable, plain for everyone to see: the Syrians were in charge. And they were going to make sure that people danced to their tune. Parliamentary elections were to be held. The first since the war had ended. The first in twenty years.
Lebanon’s principle of confessional balance means that each religious community has an allotted number of representatives in parliament. It’s a unique system. The country’s many religious groups, who had spent the past fifteen years slaughtering each other, were now expected to fight with words rather than weapons. And the same religious groups who had battled each other in the city’s trenches were now supposed to sit opposite each other in parliament as if nothing had happened. A general amnesty. Time to close the history book and look to the future. But to anyone walking through the streets of Beirut in the feverish weeks leading up to the election, it was clear that chaos still reigned, except that its soundtrack was no longer gunshots and explosions, but the wild shouting and roaring of election campaigners distributing flyers. Armed with paintbrushes and glue, these commandos covered the neighbourhood walls with posters. They stopped cars in heavy traffic and thrust leaflets into the drivers’ hands. From “I’m your man—in good times and in bad” to “This is my son—vote for him,” the leaflets communicated everything but concrete promises. People took the leaflets home. Many threw them in the bin, embittered by the absurd show going on around them. Others put on their finest clothes and solemnly made their way to the ballot boxes, hoping to take a step into the future. During the election campaign, not one candidate presented persuasive arguments or plans for rebuilding the country. What was the point? Damascus had tailored the constituencies to fit certain candidates. The Syrians, who had first entered Lebanon in 1976 as a peacekeeping force and then never left, orchestrated an election in a country where they still kept forty thousand soldiers, a country where over half the population had only ever known the sounds of bomb blasts and gunshots. Hardly anyone believed the Syrians would actually leave Lebanon by the end of the year as promised. The election resulted in a parliament too fond of the Syrians to let
