Anti Lebanon. Carl Shuker
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Davidoff billboard across the Corniche read: LUXURY STARTS HERE, but its beautiful Arab girl’s hazel-brown eyes stared intensely away from here, over the amusement park and out to sea. The billboard was high above the empty tourist café where Leon still, even now with prices down out of season, could not afford the coffee.
Leon worked security for a Luna Park that was in bad shape. The bumper cars, some damaged since the car bomb and benzene-hungry, sat weird, scattered and silent, covered in canvas. Bars of neon on the Ferris wheel were missing or dead so even in stasis it seemed sometimes as if it were moving, or attempting the illusion of motion in deceleration, an optical trick: that reversed wheel-within-a-wheel. A rearguard action of which they all were guilty: putting on a cheerful face.
Welcome to Lebanon, we say, and smile our beautiful smiles.
They are often at their leisure when they die, these assassinated men. Men like the Phalangist Elie Hobeika, lady-killer, Palestinian-killer, whose fiancée was shot by the PLO at Damour in 1976, and who led the Christian militiamen into Sabra and Shatila in 1982 in long-displaced revenge, and went on to become minister for the displaced after the civil war in another kind of revenge, this one ironic. Hobeika was on his way to scuba dive, his car-bombed car full of wet suits and masks, oxygen tanks adding to the blast.
The car bomb that killed the Future Movement MP Walid Eido was before Leon’s time at the Luna Park. It went off in an alley beside the park, behind the beach club where the MP came to swim. The explosion killed Eido, his son, two bodyguards, two members of the Nejmeh football team practicing on the pitch nearby, four other civilians, and as well as damaging several of the Luna Park’s rides it destroyed its haunted house.
So many months later, there are no more ghosts there. All that is left is the scrap scattered in the haunted house’s concrete footprint. A shrapnel-pocked wooden ghoul peeking halfway out a barrel from which it will not rise again. A glowing plastic corpse whose light inside is dead, propped crooked in a coffin up against the wall. Their purpose and function now obscure, about them all in piles lie fragments of dusty engine, masks and pulleys, capes and curtains. Samir, Leon’s coworker in the evenings, a silent African ticket puncher and handyman, had his leg broken in three places by the blast and was on crutches for a year. No one minds that he stays inside the office. Many of the Luna Park’s rides were originally built in Italy fifty years ago and they are endlessly repaired: throughout the war, throughout everything. There is the Ballerina, a great torso of a woman twenty feet high whose fiberglass arms are outflung as if lifting her neck and breast into the brisk, warm Mediterranean winds. Her bright fiberglass skirts hold not secrets but little cubicles with seats and they spin and pleat to reveal not thighs nor petticoats but the greasy machinery within.
The original owner of the Luna Park built the non-Italian rides—actually built them, Frankensteined with scavenged parts, like the swinging ship, el-Safina, and the Russian Mountain, a miniature roller coaster of little cars on a gently undulating track inside a gaudy metal man-made maze. He built the full-size and silenced Ferris wheel too—an uncanny idealist, a dreamer, an entrepreneur and engineer, who made and maintained this tawdry, beautiful place for longer than anyone remembers. After the Eido bomb, he semiretired and brought in a new manager (a Christian who brought in Leon, in turn, as a favor to his father) and without him things began to slip, faster and faster.
What a trash, what trash . . . There are twenty-year-old punching balls with coin mechanisms that predate the hyperinflation. A spar would cost as much as dust. The stitching on the balls is burst, the stuffing leaks out, and the leather is so weathered they hurt to hit. Patchy Astroturf carpets the areas under the children’s rides, as dirty and manged as the grass it might have replaced. The last properly maintained and functional ride left uncovered at night in May before the season starts is right in the middle of the Luna Park, surrounded by ribboned-off attractions that aren’t attractive anymore. It is a child’s carousel, a small, undecorated roundabout with five flaking horses and only ever turned on when requested, because of the price of benzene.
“Security,” for this, in the off-season, in Beirut, is a joke. When the new manager finishes his half-day at half past four, it is left to Leon and Samir to watch over the park as the sun goes down and the clouds go pink and purple and mauve, till darkness, till midnight, for that possible visit of three hopeful children a night. Leon is supposed to “walk the perimeter” for half an hour. Watching the scooters heading up to the Raouche. Watching for rich girls walking to their dates. The rich men coming to train at the sporting club. Watching bankers’ wives with bandaged noses walk their little dogs and get some exercise—in the rush on plastic surgery in conflict when there’s no society. That night, as any other working night when it was warm enough, he climbed the fence and went down to the rocks and smoked and ate his chicken sandwich from Makhlouf’s. He drank his thermos coffee and listened to music as the sun set down the Mediterranean, like the last man in the last job, security for a dead Luna Park in a city about to fall.
At the Luna Park it was a guilty, wordless arrangement Samir and Leon had after the boss left: to keep out of sight as much as they could after half past four (as everything is kept shut down unless requested, for the benzene, anyway), and not invite too many random requests for visits by suggesting the Luna Park was much manned or secure. Morale was bad. They work together in silence, getting away with it, leaving on only the lights or what was left of them. Samir smokes in the corner of the office invisible from the street, his bad leg propped upon a stool, and ashes his full strength Marlboros in the corner of a cardboard box with a meditative caress, wiping off the butt’s protruding waste on the rim like a skim of paint from a brush. Leon had left him there thinking, feeling the aches, filling his box of ash, and went out on the rocks to look west, watch the sea.
It was May so he could stay out there later and later. He didn’t know anything much, really, about Samir. If Samir knew about him, or his sister, how she died, he didn’t say, so, for a time, maybe four or five months, this thing they had: Samir’s injury, Leon’s languor: It had been okay. Summer was coming, meaning more Arab and Euro tourists despite the tensions. Pale Samir was okay, and so was their silence and their arrangement, but it was this situation that started Leon’s real troubles. Out there alone, among all the cigarette butts and plastic bags and pistachio shells, huddled in a Leon-shaped hollow in the rocks, he had listened to his iPod on loop and fallen asleep. It only took a couple of hours. Asleep, he missed his phone, and missed the greater silence falling all around.
And then the shooting had started.
A fat-bladed helicopter roared down the coast, an old Lebanese Army Iroquois by the sound. He jogged home from the Luna Park down the middle of the empty lanes of the Corniche in the dark. The sea whispering to hush, love in the mossy lava rock beside him. The palms rustling above. The gunfire echoing up in the city. Whole floors of the apartments and the hotels around him in darkness. The salt-stench of the effluent pouring into the sea from the buried river in Ain al Mreisseh where the fishermen gather for pickings rich.
Leon was good at running quietly. He saw and skipped the patches of gravel, leaped scars on the road that would audibly reveal his footfalls. Scared, knowing that running, as well as standing still, made him a target for a chancer on a moped with a handgun making the most of the conflict. Along the waterfront he ran east, past the Hard Rock Café to St. George’s, past the Hariri assassination rubble and holes, the cordoned-off hotel, then Downtown, to the Place des Martyrs and to the Christian East, and to his father.
Leon Elias’s sister was killed in front of him because, his father would later say ad nauseam, she was too good, she was too strong, she had too much potential, the sun was white as her skin, the sea her eyes, and so forth, and everyone knew her and Leon knew his father felt, she was just like me.
She was killed by three Christian assassins in the street outside Makhlouf’s, while inside Leon crouched behind a plastic chair pathetic, holding her chicken shawarma. Killed for her strength. Abu Keiko’s hair went white overnight and now around his mouth the fringes of his beard and moustache are yellow with nicotine. He repeats himself, tells people, almost gleefully, his hair went white “in one second.” But Leon was there; it took the terrible day and a night. Leon was also there when his uncle Joseph came to the old house, saying he knew the men who had done it. They were from the