027
God's Only Daughter

An open square, stone and adobe, rich-mix scent of sea-salt, cedar, diesel, frangipani. Dinner at the scattered outdoor tables of a corner restaurant; the cool breath of an east breeze pushes down from the mountains and gentles the heat out to sea. Scattered around the square, transistor radios tuned to a dozen stations in as many languages and dialects voices but, from the one closest to hand:

I'm God's only daughter
I'm the one that he grows his garden for ...

... and, in that wilful blindness so monstrous in hindsight, it is still possible to believe that Beirut is God's only daughter, nestling in the Garden of Delight that is Lebanon.

I'm his favourite song he likes to sing
And he sings it best in the morning ...

... but, for this fragile haven, it's no longer morning and the song is almost over. Despite professional knowledge that history is never far behind, despite smothered memories only fifteen years old, the illusion is built on a collective act of deliberate amnesia. Beirut is a golden island of prosperity in a torn and factional sea, commercial capital of the region, but all of this is maintained by the power of the Phalange on hidden foundations of poverty. However much we turn our eyes away to look at green mountains, blue sea, concrete and glass tower blocks, this is late evening in what will soon be "the days before the war".

To the West, my adopted home was partitioned last year by coup d'état, civil war and invasion. To the North and East, and in my lost no-longer home to the South, neighbours and brothers have rattled sabres since their last mutual bloodletting eighteen months ago. Some of us were in Amman when whole city blocks, buildings and occupants, disappeared under the tank treads of "The Cleansing"; we all have similar tales to tell, we all want our idyll so badly. We want it so badly that we invent it: ignoring every lesson we've learned, we come down from our ivory towers to visit it, to exclaim over it, to ignore the cracks, to assure each other shrilly of its permanence.

Somewhere, out of sight but close at hand, a single shot. We all tense. One man (Fedayeen? Mossad? Police?) somersaults backwards out of his chair into the cover of a water butt, right hand in left armpit under his jacket. Nothing more happens; we relax, mutter sagely that "these things happen"; the man behind the water butt looks embarrassed, rights his chair and sits down again. But "these things happen" for a reason, as part of a pattern. In a few short months, the single shot will have become a constant background of machine gun fire as the oppressed lose patience with our spurious fantasy Eden. A year hence, the idyll will be in ruins the towers, ivory or concrete and glass, will be deserted as we fly elsewhere in search of other idylls. When I come here next the towers themselves will be pocked and worm-eaten by shell fire, the squares reduced to knee-high mounds of stone and adobe; God's only daughter dead, disfigured, unrecognisable amongst the rubble.

When I go to bed at night
He gives a smile and
Turns out the light.