The Violence Returns, and So Does He

I walked down the steps to the seaside restaurant looking for my old friend Issam.

I didn’t know what to expect. He’d been my driver, comrade and general dispenser of wisdom when I lived here as a foreign correspondent covering an earlier war. But I hadn’t seen him in more than 20 years.

Now I was back for the first time, chronicling Lebanon’s latest trauma -- and looking around for snippets of my past.

I’d heard that Issam had come up in the world, that he was the owner of a successful restaurant, a far cry from the days when we negotiated Beirut’s scary streets in his beat-up old car.

The steps led to the water’s edge, where Issam -- his midsection thicker now, his hair thinner -- sat reading the paper.

We recognized each other instantly and embraced, two much older men who had been in past wars together.

“You’ve come back,” he said, as if we’d seen each other the day before. “Come, we will have coffee.”

And so we did. We talked about children and years gone by and where our lives had taken us. Issam had made a small fortune, much of it from selling a shipload of electric generators to shopkeepers when power was scarce. Then he’d taken his money and invested it in this restaurant with a good address.

But though it was close to noon that day, the area was empty save for a few swimmers perched on the rocks and a fisherman casting his net in the shallow water near shore.

“In the summer, we are full all the time,” he said. “But not now.”

Seeing Issam may be the best moment of the time I’ve spent these last days watching history repeat itself. Twenty-four years after I covered another Israeli bombardment, I find myself sitting in the same hotel, my room overlooking the same tacky souvenir shops. Though I have lived and worked in other parts of the Middle East over the years, circumstance had kept me from returning to this city so filled with memories and defining moments.

At the Commodore Hotel -- today the dressed-up Meridien Commodore -- the famous circular bar where journalists drank until long past closing is gone, as is Coco, the parrot who did a pretty fair version of incoming artillery. Also gone is the hotel manager, Fouad Saleh, who seemed able to arrange almost anything, including prime rib, electricity and a telex during the darkest days of the 1982 Israeli invasion, when the rest of the city was dark.

A Benihana has replaced the lousy Chinese restaurant. And an expensive makeover has changed the look and feel of the place. But for now, it’s a media hotel once again because it has some of the best Internet connections in town.

In the years since my departure, much has changed in this city that residents wistfully, and wishfully, refer to as the Paris of the Middle East. As I watched from afar, it reinvented itself, however superficially. Old political rivalries were patched over and the bombed-out Green Line zone, which separated Beirut into the Christian East and Muslim West during the civil war, was rebuilt into a gleaming Middle East showcase.

Not all of Beirut has had a makeover. My old apartment building is looking a bit worn. It was hit by an Israeli gunboat in 1982 and my dining room table still has small chinks in it from the flying glass. A short time later, my downtown office was destroyed by a direct hit, which made me wonder whether I had personally offended the Israeli commander, a man named Ariel Sharon.

When I did a quick tour of the old downtown the other day, I found that the dingy corridor where I once had my office is now sleek and modern. But it was also devoid of people -- they’ve stayed away because so many have been killed in the recent violence.

The antiques store next to my old office building was open. Inside, a tiny, elderly woman named May Salameh, whom I had known from years before, sat behind her tidy desk. The store was barely illuminated because the only light came from the front window.

She recognized me, though I think only vaguely, and motioned for me to sit nearby.

We talked of the troubles, as they are called here, and she described how good things had been for a while. There was a faraway sound in her voice as she mentioned names from years gone by, famous Lebanese warlords now dead. And then she began to talk about how life in Lebanon is like the lottery: If you escape death, you are a winner.

“I have won some lotteries,” she said. “The last one was a long time ago, during the war, when I was talking to an old man selling berries on the street. I told him I’d like some but that I was in a hurry. So I walked away and then the explosion knocked me down. When I stood up, I looked around and the old man was dead. That was a winning ticket.”

Then she asked, “So what will happen now?”

I walked back to the Commodore, which is far from the luxurious Mediterranean hotels that have become the symbol of the new Beirut. I walked past a building with a fading sign that said “Tokyo Restaurant,” a onetime favorite that had stayed open even in the toughest times. Word had it that the owner, a Japanese woman, had moved her business to the Persian Gulf.

The streets actually hadn’t changed that much. People still parked illegally as a matter of course, and most of the storefronts in this part of town were much the same as they had been years earlier. As I arrived at the Commodore, the taxi drivers at the curb vied with each other for my attention. And one of the souvenir shop owners across the street beckoned me over. For me, he said, he would give the best price.

Some things, I thought, never change.

In my own small homecoming, I’ve found some of the characters who made up the fabric of my life here, such as May Salameh and Issam. Others, such as my old landlord, Samir, are long dead.

I went to see Issam a few more times at his cafe. He showed me where the Israeli helicopters had hit the lighthouse next to his restaurant.

“I was in the kitchen,” he said. “And no one got hurt.”

What about his business, I asked. What will happen if no one comes to eat and drink?

He shrugged, with the attitude of a man who had survived, even prospered, in the face of Beirut’s volatile ways.

“If they don’t bomb,” he said, “maybe they will come this weekend.”