The Wet and the Dry Read online

  On either side of the small road, we soon saw the sloping vines of Coteaux de Botrys shining despite a pall of smoke, and the valley that falls down to the cranes and the construction dust of Batroun and the blue line of the sea. Wealthy villas crowned the hilltops. The redhead was already there in slippers, holding a bottle of Cuvée de l’Ange. The winery is just a house with a terrace, and Neila is a general’s daughter with a taste for grenache.

  She had made a lunch with chicken stewed in beer. The terrace looked over the valley of vines, and on the far side rose the country mansion of Beirut’s largest car salesman. It looked like a maximum-security prison surrounded by electric fences and arc lamps. We drank the Cuvée de l’Ange, a mix of Syrah, Mourvèdre, and grenache, and listened to the aerial echo of Israeli warplanes, which have right of passage over the whole country. Neila told me why she wanted to come back to Lebanon and make wine. There was something frail and watchful about her, a grimly delicate humor that waited to reveal itself. Her wine goes to the head. Michael also, as it happens, is a child of exile—his Lebanese father and Egyptian mother took their children to London to escape the civil war, and he returned only in the nineties, his Arabic almost forgotten. He had to learn his own language all over again. Yet his political roots in Lebanon are profound. His grandmother was early on involved in the Syrian National Party, which in the 1930s advocated the union of Lebanon and Syria, before it became quasi-fascist in recent years; his father’s family is old Mount Lebanon.

  Both of them burn with an idea of what the future of the country might hold if a cosmopolitan and bibulous spirit were to become entrenched. Drink becomes the wedge of freedom in a land otherwise haunted by the religious men in black. So they looked down at Batroun, and Neila said, “It’s Greek and Phoenician, like us. Someone told me once that Dionysus set off for Greece from here. He went with the wine ships that traded with Attica.”

  Dionysus might have been a Phoenician god originally from these mountains, exported through places like Botrys; a god whom the Greeks regarded as an import from the East and whose earliest festivals were rooted in the Attic wine ports. But he was a dead god here now. The god of the desert was now in the ascendant once again.

  With a papaya tart we drank Neila’s arak Kfifane, made from aniseed and merweh grape and distilled five times, and I asked her why she slept with a gun under her head.

  “The goats, they eat the grapes. I shoot them.”

  But also one never knows who will come out of those beautiful hills. A wine critic or a man with a Kalashnikov.

  Parts of the Bekaa are modeling themselves on Napa or Bordeaux—the tourist seduction, the country inns, the twee foodie experiences. The wet and the dry, as it were, side by side in a spirit of mutual incomprehension, as in those counties in Texas where you can buy a beer in one and yet not drink it in the next one along. “I’ve heard,” Michael said, “you have to put a bottle of wine inside a paper bag when traveling on the New York subway. Is that true?” Naturally it is. On the street, in the subway, in a park. It is the same principle as the Victorians covering their piano legs. It would be unimaginable in Arab Beirut outside of Shia neighborhoods like Dahiya.

  I said I had also noticed that Beirut had more lingerie stores than New York, and better ones, too. And for that matter Gemmayze had wilder bars than the Brooklyn I lived in. Each society engages in its own war on pleasure. The American war on pleasure is more total, perhaps, more earnest, because Lebanon in the end is a Mediterranean place, Greek and Phoenician as its people are always reminding you, as well as Arab. A glimpse of the Arabs as they would be without Islam.

  I recalled a political meeting I went to in Dahiya with some moderate Shia clerics. It was held in a community center at night, the doors watched by armed guards, and someone had asked the clerics if they thought their moderation would ever extend to allowing a bar to open in that neighborhood. It was intended as a humorous aside, and the clerics smiled along, stroking their nicely tailored beards and understanding that such questions are merely provocative. The answer was no.

  At nightfall we went to Abdel Wahab in Ashrafieh on the street of that name, Abdel Wahab El Inglizi, named it is sometimes thought for some Englishman or other passing through Beirut. The restaurant has an upper terrace open to the sky, the tables widely spaced and filled with large parties at their ease. We ordered little sausages, fatoosh, moutabal, and labneh and a bottle of Le Brun from the Domaine des Tourelles in the Bekaa, considered by many the greatest arak of the Middle East.

  A distilled rather than a fermented drink can be an experience of being “out of time,” and yet it does not obscure the past. A fermentation excites and fills one with optimism and lust; a distillation makes one morose, skeptical, and withdrawn.

  We drank this Le Brun, and the latter feelings began to arise. But with them came a detachment, a sense of distance from the self that was refreshing. There was in this drink, also, a strong sense of place. Not just of Lebanon but of the Bekaa Valley where it was made. It came from the country’s oldest winery and distillery. Drinking it was not frivolous or carefree. It was like entering a church.

  • • •

  When the French engineer François-Eugène Brun came to the Bekaa Valley in 1868 to lay down the Damascus-to-Beirut railway for an Ottoman company, he found a Christian land worked by monks. Modest and probably thorny wines were made in the remote monasteries of the valley, and Brun decided to stay and make his own variation of them. Wines for the sacrament in the churches of Damascus and Beirut. The difference was that he intended to sell it in the cities. So was born Lebanon’s first commercial wine, and Brun’s descendants by marriage and inheritance still work the tiny Domaine des Tourelles, off the main road that runs through the farming town of Chtaura two hours from Beirut. The next day I went there.

  After the last actual Brun, Pierre-Louis, died in 2000, the winery was bought by Nayla Kanaan Issa-el-Khoury and Elie Issa, descendants of the original Brun’s Lebanese wife. I was met by Christiane Issa, their daughter, who runs the company’s PR, and it is she who took me through the nineteenth-century warrens of little rooms stuffed with decayed Christ pictures and sacks of green aniseed with their grassy perfume and the tasting rooms with their shelves of Orangine and Brou de Noix and dusty wine medals from the 1930s. The Coq compressors from Aix looked as ancient as water wheels, and through the windows I could see the scarfed Shia girls walking between the walls and glancing over into the arak distillery, which is haraam, with a look in the eye that is difficult to define.

  Since the Bekaa is Hezbollah’s stronghold, it is not impossible that one day the Valley will stop making wine altogether. Christiane entertained this dark idea with a kind of apocalyptic relish.

  “Think of the birthrates. They are out-breeding us.”

  “Who are?”

  “The Muslims. We can’t keep up. The Bekaa will soon be all Shia. We’ll be switching to fruit juice production.”

  “Is it possible?”

  “It is possible. What if they just said, No more alcohol?”

  She opened her hands wide.

  After the visit I walked out into the main road of Chtaura, thick with the farm dust of passing tractors and the pickups racing to the Syrian border. The town cowers under jagged peaks that belittle its efforts at homeliness and business. It seems like a menaced desert frontier.

  Down the hill were a few shawarma restaurants with cars parked outside, loud, family-fun places with ovens and grills. On the way to one of these, I saw a shop where I could buy a can of beer. Since I was parched and could not contemplate opening the two bottles of arak I was carrying, I stepped in, bought the beer, and walked on to the largest of the shawarma places, which was called Ikhlass.

  I noticed at once that the mood was not entirely normal. It was possible, after all, that my two bottles of arak and can of beer had been spotted at once, even though they were legal. The glass doors were guarded by a small posse of the men in shades whom one learns in this part of t
he world to give a wide berth to. But now they could not be avoided. I went up to the outdoor grill and got the shawarma. The men in shades rotated toward me, distastefully curious. There was something going on inside the restaurant. It was a prominent Hezbollah cleric in for his lunchtime shawarma. The men in shades stared at my beer and I asked the grill master if I could sit inside and drink it with my shawarma. Sure, he said. You can drink that stuff if you have to. Since there was nowhere else to go but the street, I went into the restaurant past the scowling guards and sat as far away as I could from the dining cleric. It was, in fact, the staff who appeared most jarred. The men around the cleric, for their part, appeared merely contemptuous. The cleric turned for a moment and looked at me. A conversation, I thought hopefully. But there was no chance of that. Their eyes alighted upon the frothing can of beer, and in them was a sort of hardened pity, as if I and my can did not really exist in this world.

  I went to Château Massaya and had lunch with the winemaker Ramzi Ghosn. He insisted that Hezbollah was not a problem. Their people made substantial earnings as vineyard workers, and in the light of this reality the clerics would turn a blind eye. Shiites always cut a deal. It was the Sunni fanatics who were the darkest version of the future.

  “The boys with beards up in the hills, they are the ones who make me sleepless at night. They are the madmen. The Shia are something else.”

  “Not true fanatics?”

  “Not about these things.”

  Halfway through lunch two German tourists arrived. They were “mobile publishers.” They had just brought out a biography of Khalil Gibran and were sailing around Lebanon by themselves in a minivan filled with their books, which they hoped to sell in towns and villages across the land. They were hearty, sensitive, and sandaled—in short, everything I loathe—but the man with his graying mustache and vivid eyes was a true scholar of Lebanese wine. He could list them all, literally, and then he could provide each name with an instantly recalled tasting note. It was a feat of memory and also of devotion, of love for a culture in which he was, in the end, a superfluous visitor.

  “Oh, we love Lebanon,” they kept saying, nodding sadly, as if it were a mystery even to themselves.

  They joined us and we drank some of the house Massaya. It was serviceable wine and went well with the lamb chops, the labneh, the fresh mint. I was sure that the conversation would now settle into the usual babble of gastronomes and foodies, but as we were about to talk about wine, there was a distant overhead rumble, and Ramzi said, quite laconically, as if the following observation were not even worth making, “It’s the Israeli air force. We are a country that cannot even control its own skies.”

  The Germans tutted over Israel.

  “You see?” the wine scholar said. “Now you know why Hezbollah has such a following.”

  “Between Israel and Hezbollah,” the lady said. “Poor Lebanon.”

  Ramzi now rose nationalistically to the occasion.

  “We are surrounded by more powerful countries. Yes. But none of them have our joie de vivre, our way of life, our wine”—he fumbled a little—“our women, our—our—well, our lamb chops. Have you ever eaten a better lamb chop in the Middle East?”

  “Never.”

  “There is nothing in the Middle East like us. Where else can you drink wine?”

  “Israel,” I said.

  There were exasperated shrugs.

  Did I know, Ramzi continued, that the Bekaa Valley was the northern tip of the Rift Valley that extended all the way to Kenya and was the birthplace of the human race?

  “What a dreadful idea,” I said, “that the human race had a birthplace.”

  After an apple dessert, to catch the dusk, I made my way a few miles into the valley to the Umayyad ruins of Anjar, a bleak and lonely place at sundown.

  The Arab city was abandoned in the eighth century, though no one knows why. The ruins today are encircled by a long wall, outside which lies a shabby village populated with resettled Armenians. The signs are all in Armenian, but the Syrian secret police maintain a heavy presence—they ran Lebanon from this unnoticed backwater for many years. An atmosphere of physical fear oozes from the empty roads, and the elegant, pencil-thin vaults and arches of the Umayyad architects stand in cool isolation.

  As I walked up the main flagged road, I sensed that the columns on either side were actually Byzantine, looted from another site perhaps, and at the ancient city’s main crossroads huge Roman columns rose out of classical pediments scored with Greek graffiti. It is the language of power, too, but expressed in porphyry.

  The Umayyad elegance stands side by side with this more powerful and more ancient form, uneasy, envious, and imitative but reaching out for a definition of its own. I sympathize with those newly arrived Arabs of the seventh century, a desert people obsessed with water wandering into a land of vines where the peasants still cried “Dionysus!” at harvest time. When the inglizi got lost, however, in the dark mazes of the past, the armed guards came to look for him with torches. They called “Hey, Tommy!” into the abandoned bathhouses and mosque, alarmed that the Syrians might suspect that he was up to no good, whereas in reality the suspicion was merely that he was drunk and good for nothing, not even for finding his way home.

  Lunch with Walid Jumblatt

  Beirut for me is like Naples, a place that tears up the stable personality of the visitor. The crime and lassitude, the beauty, the intense melodrama of the street, the melancholy sea; the bars where life seems to stop and then begin again and then stop again. Bars in a city that is half Muslim are like brothels in a city that is Catholic, and the Beirut bar has an innocent intensity all its own. Though come to think of it, Catholic cities are excellent places to find brothels.

  One night I might favor Grey Goose in Ashrafieh, and another night the rooftop bar of the Albergo Hotel on Abdel Wahab El Inglizi, that French Mandate street of shutters and cloistered gardens and multimillion-dollar condos and long strolls after dinner. The Albergo, in fact, is one of the bars I have written down in my Black Book of Bars in case, in an inebriated fit, I forget its address. A tall hotel in Belle Epoque style, it has an ironwork elevator, a beautiful and secretive bar on the ground floor, and another one on the roof laid out under shades and with views over the city’s lights. One can even drink on the floor below, inside the restaurant, where gin and tonics are served at sofas so deep that the drinker disappears into them like stones sinking into quicksand. But there are so many bars in this febrile city; in Gemmayze you can spend entire nights wandering through them, unable to count them or hold them to account. I have not even mentioned the Couqley in its alleyway, where I came with Michael to eat oysters with Entre Deux Mers and steaks saignants with bottles of Hochar red, a restaurant where one can drink all afternoon and into the evening and then into the small hours in the same way that you would smoke a pipe all the way down over the course of a day. And there are bars I have forgotten, name-wise, though I remember their dedication—touching and sincere—to a single prewar cocktail. One night at a bar opening by the fashion designer Johnny Farah in the port, Farah served us a Trinity, a kind of dinosaur dry martini that was reputed to be the distant origin of the more famous concoction. It’s a perfect three-way split between sweet and dry vermouth and gin, but here it was complemented by intense Beirut lemon zest and drops of orange bitters. Rich and clear, with an acidic sweetness, it has none of the formidably “grown-up” sourness of the dry martini, yet it’s not sickly. In Christian Beirut, its name no doubt has its own “feel.”

  Beirut is the only city where the bar and muezzin cannot dominate each other. From Abdel Wahab, Furn El Hayek runs gently downhill toward Saints Coeurs, past Ottoman houses with their balconies and high arches intact, the gardens dark with hundred-foot trees. Near the bottom, on St. Joseph University Street, stands Time Out, which may be the oldest continuously running bar in Beirut. It is built into three floors of a house that was once a table d’hôte in the late nineteenth century and is now like an
English country home with a basement of white stone vaults. Here is that perfect bar: a worn-in room with, at its center, a great wall of bottles in niches, and around it armchairs and oils and shaded lamps and, leaning on said bar, the white-haired and bearded Jacques Tabet, who during the civil war was known cryptically as Beirut Number Three. Tabet is Beirut’s most cantankerous and generous bar owner, and his creation is very like himself: interconnected rooms like salons in a private house, an unlit garden terrace, corners where men can smoke cigars without occidental disapproval. A bar for adults, in other words, and not for screaming children. In New York it would have been closed down long ago for this very reason.

  During the war the bar was hit numerous times by RPGs and small-arms fire. “Small ordnance,” as Tabet says, “because the people shooting at us were right next door.” Survival is part of its charm. “I hate being sober,” he continues, pouring me seven or eight red ports. “It’s a state that irritates me, as I am sure it irritates you. If I had been sober all these years, I would not have survived.” And downstairs in the basement of this house, which used to belong to Tabet’s great-grandparents, one finds Beirut’s most famous bartender, Johnny Khouris. To Khouris one must come when one needs a proper dry martini in Beirut. No one else’s will do. And so nights can pass under the chipped stone vaults that look as if they are made of chalk, among the house cats and the men who have that distant war still in their faces and in their gestures. Is alcohol, I wonder as I sit there, a substance that separates the consciousness from its true self and therefore from others? If that is true, then we spend our entire lives in a state of subtle falsity. But is alcohol the creator of the mask, or the thing that strips it away?

  There are moments, as I sit at a bar in some forlorn neighborhood, whether it be here in Beirut or elsewhere, alone usually and distanced from the human race as if by a stone wall, when I can hear something trickling deep inside my core, like a sound of dirty water moving through a wood, and it seems to me that I am living in slow motion. The fingers close around the glass in slow motion; the ice cubes shift in slow motion; the images in the mirrors around me are frozen. I have entered a sedentary state of suspended animation, my mouth moving and words coming out, but having nothing to do with me. I am a puppet, but the subtlety and charm of puppets should never be underestimated.