A great contempt; an awful-silver feeling.
“Well, they mercury-bombed the anti Lebanon aquifer, and my sister was shot to death,” Leon said.
Lauren exhaled sharply in disbelief. Georges was shaking his head.
“Don’t,” murmured Pascal.
“I just didn’t see the point,” Leon said.
A long, chill silence. Leon almost laughed.
“Exactly,” Etienne said in evident satisfaction, as if they were agreed.
It had been at the American University of Beirut in Ras Beirut that Leon quit his degree. He had arranged a meeting with Henri Fors, his professor through undergraduate and a year of honors, and his abandoned dissertation’s supervisor (as if anyone cares about honors dissertations, anyway, he thought now), and his friend, a friendship he hoped or really felt he’d half-achieved but then had utterly marred.
Henri Fors, though an LU professor based at the southern campus, spent an inordinate amount of time at AUB, where he’d graduated before the war, dealing with a department with way more clout, prestige, history, and, yes, money than his, but in terms of employment remained closed to him like a clam due to a personal thing with the head of department. It had been at AUB one fine spring day that Leon had arranged a meeting with him at a bench in the gardens. The bench sat beneath some trees and overlooked through the gap in the foliage the steep bank down to the tennis courts, the Corniche, and the strip of pure blue Lebanese Mediterranean. There was a plate screwed to the wood of the seat he chose that read ABDALLAH SALAM 1909–1999, WHO LOVED THE VIEW FROM THIS BENCH. It was one of Fors’s favorite places too, he knew, and it was years ago now he’d sat beside him on that bench and told Fors he was quitting.
Henri Fors had survived fifteen years of civil war as a civilian and academic and had witnessed, too, the end of every sensible piece of water management (through graft and cronyism and the zaim system and simple pure corruption) in a country whose wealth and waste of water were legend. Fors had catalogued every piece of failed pollution legislation; recorded throughout the war—a terribly difficult and perilous thing to do—the heavy metal deposits at every river mouth north and south.
It had been during his time under Fors that his professor broke the news, to a deafening lack of response, of the critical state of the Sidon rubbish dump, which had grown so big it qualified as a quarter of the town, high as a four-story building, before it collapsed into the sea. There in Sidon, where destitute fishermen, receiving fixed prices from a consortium of fishmongers, were reduced to destroying their seabeds fishing with dynamite. They often lost their hands and forearms too, in black accidents they could never remember, and had to live out the rest of their days in the coffeehouses watching the backgammon while friends held cigarettes and glasses of tea to their lips as they waited patiently and futilely for prosthetics. What fish they couldn’t catch now strangled in the Sidon supermarket bags. A land still bearing the imprint of its creator. Fors, this man who’d recorded every calamity and every disgrace with resolve and good humor and a basic human optimism either blind or profound. Leon had to let his face tell this amazing man in short that just one dead sister and one ruined aquifer and that was it, another sinkhole of a losing stream, he couldn’t go on, was quitting the program.
“Well, that’s disappointing, but if it’s what you feel you have to do.”
Lunchtime in the great gardens of AUB with Henri Fors three years ago: sitting side by side on the old bench, their feet on the foot-worn and polished stones. The breeze had moved quietly in the trees and he had heard no traffic and nothing but the wind as a muffled shuffle in the leaves and all had seemed for a minute possible, before he said the words: substantial yet weightless: asylum and study, a future, endeavor and peace, as students and teachers strolled behind. He had imagined a man he never was and now would never be, a man engaged with the rock and water of his country, a man who made an imprint on that land, who was a repository of its past, its ills, and its potential, a man excited by the parsing of a problem. And he had been there that day to tell Fors it wasn’t going to happen.
“Well, that’s disappointing.”
It was about money, it was about family, dead rivers and sisters and lost jobs. It was about his mother bent over Keiko’s coffin with her palms upraised. About his father screaming in the bedroom. It was about a ball of lead in his chest he carried through the streets that seemed sometimes to crack and lighten, in places like that, on that bench, looking at that special view in the fluttering light of the trees’ fantasy—but outside in the real world it found its form again. He called it reality. U.S. destroyers and Israeli Sa’ar class warships passed through that gap in the trees, cruising off the cape. As he had told Fors it was over, but not why, the beloved man seemed to be receding from him: Leon no longer, suddenly, could quite make out the features of his face, wrinkles that had once revealed facts to him like Fors’s love of swimming, his long hours, reddened eye rims, and the cigars he loved and gave up. The professor receded and assumed a strange and human, vulnerable form, in mismatched jacket and trousers, a shining brown bald spot that seemed ready for some wound, chunky brogues, five foot tall, standing over there, walking, vanished, gone.
Leon’s film, his only film, a film he made—un film de Leon Elias, produit par, réalisation, musique, son, montage, montage son Leon Elias and avec extras plus Keiko Elias or a photograph of her at least—was made after her death, after he quit Fors and university, with a borrowed camera and an old Compaq laptop and pirated Final Cut and Logic Express learned on the job. He called it In the anti Lebanon and subtitled it, after a poem by an Italian suicide named Cesare Pavese, Death Will Come and It Will Have Your Eyes.
His film was about his family and his sister and their history though he hadn’t really intended it to be. He hadn’t intended it to be well-received either: to secure, as it did six months ago, a berth in the short experimental section of the Festival du Film Libanais known as “Né à Beyrouth”—born in Beirut.
Cut loose from his degree, from Fors, life had gone quite silent. Leon had stayed home in the bedroom of his house of mourning and collaged: magazine photos and old TIME/LIFE photo hardbacks cut up and pasted on card over which he scrawled song lyrics (“those midwives to history put on their bloody robes”) and taped or glued or sewed stones, cement, and tree branches. But the results weren’t satisfying; he was blank in doing it and bored after and only later, finding the sheets of card beneath his bed, realized that he had been making sketchbooks for his film. He borrowed the camera from Pascal; from Pascal too he’d inherited the third-hand Compaq laptop (ca. five years old) and he learned to gently massage it into abnormally extended life: to use only ever one app at a time, to on a weekly basis faithfully defrag the disk and decant raw video to leave large tracts of the hard drive spare, like it was a sick old cow from which he’d get his milk or starve.
And what to do with a completed but hopelessly experimental short film? With a kind of contempt he submitted it to the Heritage section of the sixth film festival, which had been postponed from the year prior and its July War. The Empire Sofil Theater, the usual venue, had instead been used during the day for the children of southern refugees to make their own collages on trestle tables in the foyer, and Cannes Critics’ Week films were screened for their pale insomniac parents at night.
He was informed by email that In the anti Lebanon was selected from only 190 submissions, and bumped from the Heritage slate. This was a selection premised on nostalgia and lament—it was dedicated to edited selections of dozens of old pre– and civil-war era 8mm family films rescued from the Sunday markets, implying to those who might have the imagination the
