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Lebanon: Rum and Shadows
By Emanuel Jalonschi
“Why are we stopping?”
“We need shells.”
He props the shotgun
against the inside of the rusted van. There’s a swilling
noise from the rum bottle propped in the hands of
our Lebanese driver. He’s a member of the military
with a sense of humor, a good liquor gut and nasty
distance on his shotgun aim.
“This **** is hot.”
The four of us that speak English laugh, drunk between
the cheap rum and the sultry, crisp August heat.
The three of us that
don’t speak Arabic scratch eyeing the shotguns.
We’d been looking
for Lebanon. Which is too literal and probably more
precise than what was actually going through our minds;
we were in a disconnected, foreign state trying to
define a point of reference.
What is Lebanon?
Why am I here?
A slow lazy wind
pushes the dry foliage into a brambling scratch—silence
in the car. My traveling companion takes the uncapped
bottle swigs three big gulps and turns to the medium
sized Arab next to him, “Hey man, have some. Its good
for you.”
We laugh.
He drinks, eyes rolled
back under a heavily tanned brow. We’re packing shotguns,
headed to the mountains (seven minutes from where
we’re staying). There’s a sense of something needing
to happen to make this whole trying excursion worth
it.
Dangerous water,
angry steadfast men who have served time in a middle
eastern army packing deep memories and occasional
anti-colonial resentment against skinny drunken Americans;
crossing guards armed with kalishnikovs and coronas,
being shot at by an over-protective tractor owner,
the deep, infinite slowness of every moving second.
Something had to happen to bring these images of our
journey together into some reasonable mosaic.
Returning to the
car with a few boxes of shells, we are ready to go.
We have two shotguns (maybe three, the rum had been
moving around for a while). The van, more a covered
pickup, weevle-wovles clumsily up the side of the
first hill.
Soon we’re passing jokes about the looks of local
girls. This permeates language barriers and another
round of rum moves around over friendly overtones.
“Here’s to the benet, benet heluii!” (To beautiful
women!)
***
Three nights previous we’re on a
rooftop smoking argile (hookahs to most Westerners).
There’s a singer with a keyboard. In the scorching
summer months, an evening spent on a cool rooftop
with song and drink makes the mundane more palatable.
The singer, a friend of our generous and friendly
neighbors, works as a cab driver or electrician
or something; but he is also a singer. He does weddings,
plays restaurants. He’s a singer.
“You know hip hop?” I hear from my left, enveloped
in one of those foreign accents obviously infused
with the MTV generation.
“Yeah.”
“You like it?” He
asks. He doesn’t smoke argile but he drinks. He’s
been hitting the amoza (the local beer in Liban).
Clouded in smoke,
“Yeah it’s cool, man.”
“Cool. Cool.” He
smiles glossy eyed and merry. He pronounces cool with
an elongated “oo” pursing his lips and squinting a
little to give it effect.
My traveling companion yells across the room, “Hey
dude, these guys are in the army.”
It was my companion’s
city—Rahbe. It stands over a red mountain that cascades
in waves of dry green bushes to a huge, emphatic bowl
of a valley. The mountains themselves are massive.
Though dry and littered with bramble, the thick redness
of the dirt gives the huge natural fixtures an almost
fleshy look. When the sun goes down, bleeding, almost
liquid in the distance, the horizon turns a type of
burgundy that looks more painted that natural.
Here the town is
mixed. Some are Christian and some are Muslim.
Down in the valley
there’s a mosque. Every day as we walked by the mosque
there would be a man in his fifties. Skinny, with
deeply entrenched eyes behind veined and wrinkled
gray cheeks, he would stare at us, two anomalies (stranger
than himself) in this town. Every day he sat perched,
pious, deeply contemplative. Never once during our
stay did he speak a word to us or anyone.
When we first came
into town, we were obvious outsiders, especially those
of our party who had long mangy hair not to mention
some tattoos and piercings. In Rahbe, everybody knows
everybody in their neighborhood. The town is about
three to five hundred deep in population but there’s
definitely a palpable sense of deeply interwoven community.
He knew us for outsiders
and for all we knew we were bad omens on his personal
spiritual journey. When we returned from one of our
stays at the Hotel Canaan, heads shaved, faces now
tanned under the unrelenting glare, he stared, hard,
unflinching. Here the community, mixed as it may be,
has a strong self-sufficient identity.
There are no street
names here. There’s the big road and roads that are
known by various landmarks. Sometimes it’s a person’s
house. Here you get mail by the town’s name and the
name of your family (i.e. Rahbe, Liban, the House
of John Doe).
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