A Writer's World (6 page)

Imagine a terrace table beside the sea in Beirut, during the brief moment of the Mediterranean twilight, when the shops are raising their shutters for the evening’s business, and your restaurant rustles with the first silks and sibilances of the night. There are prawns on your table, perhaps, or red mullet from Sidon, fruit from the lush Bekaa valley, a gay white wine of Lebanon or some haughty vintage out of France. Around the bay the city rumbles, hoots and chatters: there is a clink of metal from some unseen smithy, a suggestion of spice and raw fish on the breeze, the echo of a blaring radio beyond the promenade, a distant clanging of trams – all the hot, heavy, breathless symptoms of an expiring Levantine day, like a sigh in the sunset. Below you the last of the water-skiers scuds home in a flurry of spray, showing off to the girls on the beach. Out at sea a tall elderly schooner loiters, like a ghost in the half-light, and beyond the breakwater, perhaps, an Italian liner steals out for Greece with a soft tread of her turbines and a flutter of her flags. Sometimes an airliner labours in from the sea, blinking its red lights as it lands beyond the cedar groves, and sometimes a razzle-dazzle sports car, top-heavy with blondes and young muscle-men, screams and skids along the corniche towards the night clubs. All along the shore the tall
white buildings stand, concrete and rectilinear, with their parasols and their lighted balconies, their dim-lit bars and their muffled music.

Now, before the night comes, while the evening is still purple and hazy, while the velvet twilight lasts – now you may taste the impossible beauty of Beirut: for rising in strides above the capital, in serried terraces, above the skyscrapers, above the last suburbs, above the olive groves, above the foothill villages, above the winding Damascus road – there, lording it above sea and city, stand the mountains, ‘afloat in heaven’s pool’. A sheen of snow hovers about their high ridges, and their tawny slopes tumble away through scree and field and olive grove to the Mediterranean below. Beneath their serenity Beirut festers and celebrates: and even as you watch, sipping your wine or toying with your fish, the lights go on like star clusters in the villages of the hills, higher and higher up the slopes, until at last the dark falls, the end of the sunset fades, and away above Beirut only the snow of the summits remains like a dim corona in the night.

The King received his wedding guests standing beneath a portrait of his father the unbalanced King Talal, and beside him stood a royal cousin – King Feisal II of Iraq. How small and helpless and nice they looked, those two little kings, both of them youths, both small and stocky, with their
somehow ill-fitting dark suits and their hands not quite at ease – Hussein, not long from Sandhurst, standing roughly to attention, Feisal, a little more experienced, with his legs apart and his hands clasped in front of him. Kings they were, but kings in a troubled and republican world.

The really significant moment of that lavish day (for the capital was alive with parades and demonstrations from dawn to fireworks time) was the assembly, later that evening, at which the King officially met his Queen. In the past this would have been held behind the curtained doors of the harem, and the innumerable ladies of the household would not for a moment have been exposed unveiled to the gaze of the world at large. This time, though the affair was still predominantly female, some men were allowed to attend it; and the ladies, far from being veiled, appeared bewitchingly, or at least compellingly, uninhibited.

I stood in a corner of the room while the assembly prepared itself for the arrival of the royal couple. Circassians in long black cloaks, astrakhan hats, high boots and cluttered accoutrements guarded the entrance to the hall, as the eunuchs would have stood sentry in an earlier age. At the head of the stairs were two bold lancers in scarlet tunics and white breeches. But the body of the room was a mass of women. They were dressed magnificently, a glitter of satins and brocades and furs, a mosaic of lipsticks and mascara, a tinkling kaleidoscope of earrings, a flurry of sequined handbags. Chanel and Dior thickened the air. When the Queen Mother of Jordan arrived a sibilant Arabic whisper rippled through the hall; for the first time she was appearing in public with no veil above her sumptuous silk gown.

All the same, I could not help feeling that we were close in spirit, if not in textile, to the huddled jealousies and schoolgirl pleasures of the harem. How often and how brazenly did those women of the court eye each other’s couture and coiffure! How heavily accentuated were the outlines of their eyes, like eyes seen through diaphanous curtains in forbidden corridors of the Seraglio! How scratchy and talon-like were the fingernails, how pinkly fleshy the figures, and how passive and doll-like those emancipated ladies looked, in serried and perfumed phalanx, as if some lascivious Sultan was about to pass through their ranks, picking a beauty here and a beauty there with a lordly gesture of his forefinger!

But it was only little King Hussein who entered the room, with his calm, intelligent, literary wife. The illusion vanished in a trice, and as the court ladies smoothed their skirts and pressed the wrinkles from the wrists of
their gloves, a cameraman in a crumpled jacket suddenly pressed his way past the Circassian guards and said just one more, ladies, please, give us a nice smile now.

A revolution is an awesome thing and we think of it, as often as not, in grand abstractions. We talk spaciously, like astronomers, of the turmoil that is now sweeping across the Arab world and only occasionally, in sharp passing moments of enlightenment, do we collate the great political design with the poor little human conscience, struggling there beneath the manifestos. One such flash of illumination occurred this morning in the officers’ mess of the Jordanian Army training regiment on a hill outside Amman.

The mess was white with tablecloths, as though lunch were about to be served, and the silver baubles of the regimental collection gleamed from their glass cabinets handsomely. The neon lighting was bright in spite of the sunshine. There were pictures of armoured cars on the walls, and a faint tangy fragrance emanated from the dwarf pines outside the window. The trial was taking place of five Jordanians accused of conspiracy and the possession and illegal use of explosives, the penalty demanded being death: and here, as in some fierce silhouette, you could see the images of revolution clear and cruel.

On one side of the court sat the accused. There were two placid, shabbily dressed Jordanians in
kuffiyahs
, sitting silent and composed, as though they were in church. There was a fattish, puffy-faced man with a towel over his head, clearly so harshly used by his interrogators that he was near death already: great blue weals scarred his hands, his movements were agonizingly slow, suffering stared from his watery eyes, and sometimes with a gesture of despair he heeled over and laid his head on his neighbour’s lap. And at the end of the row sat a pair of lovers, he tall and bearded, she slim and wide-eyed, the very epitome of revolutionary and Byronic romance. The young man was cheerful and smiling, in a blue open-necked shirt: the girl was pale but proud, her great black eyes anxious and unsettled, in a dress with orange stripes and a white bangle, and a fragile gold crucifix round her neck.

On the other side of the room sat authority in the form of a military court, stern and khaki-coloured, and shuffling its papers portentously. The defence lawyers sat in double-breasted suits at one table. The prosecutor, a scared and ineffectual subaltern, sat at another. Two rather pudgy majors formed the ancillaries of the bench, and the president was a brigadier, red-tabbed and beribboned, of fine commanding presence and assurance: his face was large and craggy, like a face from the desert, his voice was very loud and rather rasping, and he glared at the court from deep-set eyes above a clipped and bristly moustache.

So they sat there, the accusers, the accused, and the judges: and all around them jostled the audience, idly lounging or half-heartedly enjoying themselves. There were troops of soldiers, apparently off-duty, sitting in the courtroom or crowding about the open door. There was a handful of eager attentive civilians. Policemen sat stoutly in their spiked helmets, vacant but willing, like country coppers on bicycles in pre-war English comedies. A few foreign pressmen doodled on their pads (‘You might do an atmosphere piece on it, old boy, but you can’t call it hard news, except for the girl angle’). A policewoman with bobbed black hair, gold earrings and a forage cap, sat incongruously among all the men, her face heavily powdered. There was a sense of muted and unhilarious recreation to the scene, such as you might experience in a suburban cinema during a fairly dreary second feature.

In fact, though, this little courtroom was alive with terrible emotions, with fears and loyalties and defiances, and all the conflicts of human judgement that are the basis of revolutions. The touching young lovers were facing death and had (if the charges against them are true) been perfectly prepared to blow any number of strangers to oblivion to further the cause of nationalism. Sweet was their obvious affection, and pretty the girl’s dress, and delicate her crucifix, but they were living close to savage things. The nervous young prosecutor, fiddling with his tie and smiling ingratiatingly at the brigadier, was relying upon alleged confessions obtained by methods of remorseless violence; perhaps he was only thinking of his promotion, poor chap, but if he looked across the room he could see the great blue weals still, as that crippled prisoner painfully moved an arm to pull the towel closer around his head.

The brigadier, presiding so forcefully over the hearing, knew that he might well be writing his own death sentence too; the forces he was judging are much more powerful, much more irresistible than the strength of his own authority, and if ever at last revolution reaches
Amman itself he will doubtless suffer the penalties of loyalty. They were all anxious people, every one, judges and prisoners and prosecutors and jailers and all, caught cruelly in the whirlpool of change.

And what of the audience, metaphorically sucking its thumbs on its kitchen chairs? It represented that bog of apathy in which the human conscience, perceptive or misguided, sparkles like a diamond. It sat in the middle of great emotions; a tortured man on one side, a pair of star-crossed lovers on another, and you could almost hear its unspoken communal plea, above the harsh pronouncements of the president: ‘Pass me my work basket, will you, dear, and I’ll get on with my knitting while you men have a good old talk. What I always say is, you can’t change human nature, can you?’

Old Jerusalem is golden still, especially seen from the Mount of Olives or through the gnarled trees of Gethsemane on a late summer evening. It is still the holiest of holy places, still a magnificent Islamic city, still a fortress. Its buildings, scarred in the recent fighting, stand mellow and serene; through its tortuous streets move the pilgrims and priests, Beduin, bootblacks, coffee-sellers and gowned merchants of its tradition; upon its ramparts, guarding the embattled frontier with Israel, soldiers of the Arab Legion stand guard in pink-checked
kuffiyahs
and battledress.

It would be alien to its tradition for Jerusalem to be peaceful. Deaths and battles, armies and sieges, bloodshed and privation are the normalities of the city. Among its sparse hills the place certainly lies in a wonderful
silence, calm and cool, with the first chinks of lights appearing and the call to evening prayer ringing from the mosque on the Hill of Ascension. But an implacable frontier divides the Old City from most of its modern suburbs, and the blaze of lights on the western ridge marks the centre of New Jerusalem, in the hands of the Jews and as inaccessible to the Arabs as Bhutan. An enemy is literally at the gates.

The spirit of Jerusalem has withdrawn from the grand new suburbs, now mostly in Israel, into the walled city where it belongs. The streets are crowded, prosperous and clean. Big American cars are driven precariously up ramps along stepped alleyways, for many rich Arab retailers, driven from New Jerusalem, have set up shop within the walls. They will tell you, as you drink their spiced coffee, of the enormous emporia, the vast estates, the bursting bank balances they invariably seem to have left behind – a myth of vanished opulence, a sort of gilt-edged Atlantis of the soul. Sadly such unfortunates will take you to the top of their buildings for a view into No Man’s Land. There it runs, a strip of depressed and littered soil, cluttered with derelict buildings, coils of wire, piles of miscellaneous rubbish. Into a few tumble-down buildings near the Arab line a few poor house-hunters have surreptitiously seeped; in the middle an Israeli housewife, oblivious of international asperities, has hung her washing; and on the very edge, close to the walls of the Old City, a small Jewish army post sits boldly behind sandbags on top of a ruined terrace.