Everything is a drama in this country. It is a land of raised voices and extraordinarily drawn-out arguments. I’m starting to think that the Lebanese actually enjoy arguing because they don’t stop when they could. And, more telling perhaps, they argue when there is absolutely nothing to be gained by it.
If, for example, you are walking down the street one day and happen past a man accusing a parking valet of parking his car too close to the curb and scratching the wheel rims, you can be sure they are going to stand there arguing for at least fifteen minutes. Both parties will begin encouragingly enough with a line of defence or attack, as position dictates, but then instead of the argument evolving somehow the men will keep repeating the same one or two points with breathtaking single-mindedness. Nothing changes except the volume of the voices, which grows louder and louder till you are certain that the argument must surely either collapse with a final, sputtering hiss or erupt into frightening and unseemly violence. But no. This kind of altercation doesn’t come to blows, nor do the arguers run out of steam.
When you really take a good look at the two men you will perceive a calmness beneath the vigorously gesturing arms and red faces. There is something familiar about it that you can’t put your finger on at first. Eventually, if you live amongst the Lebanese long enough, you will. The day will come when you finally realise that what you’re witnessing is a little bit like play acting. Watching two Lebanese argue gives you the slight sense that you are watching the rehearsal of a play and that at any moment the director might yell, “Okay, let’s stop there for today,” and two men who were a moment ago eyeball to eyeball, forehead veins ready to burst, will abruptly turn and wander over to the water cooler together, chatting about football. It’s not that the man with scratched wheel rims isn’t genuinely angry. He is. It’s just that if I came across two guys shouting at each other like that in Calgary I’d be afraid one was about to pull a knife on the other but here I wouldn’t even spare them a glance.
Lebanese women argue, too. They also cry with aplomb. This morning I was in a book store thumbing through the classics, wondering if I should waste money on another Dostoyevsky novel which I will revere, be in awe of, praise as literature far above the appreciation of mortal man etc. and never read past the third chapter, when I heard the sounds of a minor accident coming from the other side of the shelves. It was the scuffling of shoes skidding on fake-wood flooring, a child’s robust cry of alarm, and the crash of books as well as body hitting the ground. Well, I thought to myself, trailing an indecisive finger over Steinbeck and wishing as always that he’d taken more road trips with Charley, I guess some kid was running around a corner too fast and skidded on the cheap floor. Judging from the way he hollered as he went down he’ll be all right.
Then I heard a woman crying and the sound immediately filled me with real alarm and I stood up so fast that I dropped the handful of Archie Double Digests I’d been holding (for Noonie, not me. No, really). I hastened to the end of the aisle and saw on the floor in front of me not a child but a woman, somewhere in her twenties, curled on her side and weeping. Another woman was already crouching down beside her as I arrived. Books lay in a heap on the floor beside them and it took me a moment to realise that there was no child and that the voice I had heard was the woman’s.
“Where are you hurt?” the lady beside her asked.
“It’s my leg and my arm,” the victim moaned.
“Oh dear, oh dear, let me help you,” said the kind woman quietly; I saw from her badge that she was a store employee.
If this had been my first day in Lebanon I would have assumed the victim had broken a bone and possibly dislocated something as well. Why else would she make all that noise? Yet as I looked at her it became quite obvious that she wasn’t really hurt at all. She might have been crying from embarrassment; she was a bit overweight, after all, and wearing silly, high boots with a pencil heel. But I don’t think she was embarrassed in the least. If the same thing had happened to me I would have dragged my mangled legs straight out the door without a peep to anyone and never come back to that book store again.
This is Lebanon, however. Here, pain is meant to be fully expressed, not stifled, bottled up and allowed to fester into an eventual psychiatric illness as we do so encourage in my culture.
Several people helped the weeping woman to her feet while the rest of us gave her sympathetic (or, in my case, incredulous) looks and watched as she was led to the office at the back. I saw the shop employee pick up the phone and after a moment begin speaking. Snippets drifted back to me: “… her leg…” “..she doesn’t want to go to the hospital…” while the other woman continued to cry immoderately.
It occurred to me that I’d been hearing a lot of crying lately. Last weekend I attended the memorial service for an elderly member of M’s family. As is the custom, the actual burial had happened the day after the death and the memorial service was held about a week later. We drove the long, terrifying road (no lane designation and a continuous game of chicken with oncoming traffic) from Beirut to the ancestral village on Saturday and spend the evening visiting with M’s considerable extended family (he has 73 first cousins, just to give you an idea of scale). A lot of time at such gatherings is spent just identifying one another, especially kids who have grown up since last time they were seen. Not only are there several hundred members of the extended family but there is widespread practice of name-economy. “Who’s that? Is that Nabil’s son?” one aunt will whisper loudly to another. “No, that’s Ali’s son.” “Which Ali? Fatima’s husband or Sarah’s brother?” “No, no, neither of them. You know, Mohammad’s son Ali.” “Oh, him. Yes, I can see the resemblance in his -- wait a minute, which Mohammad? ”
The next morning we trooped down the road to the funeral hall. Actually, they are two halls: one for the men and one for the woman (the men’s hall is new, the women’s quite old and dingy, making me think that maybe chivalry really is dead). And actually, I didn’t troop down the road with the rest of them. I was late, on account of trying to have an entire bath by standing in front of the wash basin with a small facecloth and a bar of soap. It took a lot longer than I thought it would, and when I was finally dressed I realised that I was very hungry and had to eat something before we left so I put two eggs on to boil but the wind gusting through the house (with all the windows closed, mind) blew out the flame and I didn’t come back in to check on it till the eggs should have been done. So I had to relight the burner and wait for the eggs to cook while the others went on ahead. I stuffed down the eggs and a cup of the exquisite juice M’s mom squeezed from fresh blood oranges bought along the roadside and trotted down the hill with just a few minutes to spare. I was sure that I knew the way to the funeral hall. There’s only one road, really, but somehow I took a wrong turn and ended up having to ask a couple of women the way. They were going to the funeral, too, and in fact were relatives of M’s, and told me to hop in their car with them. A few hundred metres later we pulled up in front of the hall.
It was the second time I’d been to the hall so I was prepared for the utter lack of style or comfort within. The building is simply a large square of cinderblock walls with a flat roof over it, painted on the inside with that grey-toned white which makes me feel queasy. There was a raised platform at the front of the room and hundreds of white plastic chairs set up in rows to face it. There was a huge paper poster, perhaps ten by twelve feet, hung on the wall at the front of the hall. Arabic words I couldn’t read (which isn’t saying much) were written on it, above a dark and Tolkien-looking scene of a winged horse and a warrior in plate armour.
Hundreds of women filled most of the seats in the hall as I walked in and found Noonie. We took chairs near the back, as far as possible from the speakers which we remembered from last time had threatened to hammer right through our ear drums.
When a lady got up on the platform and began to fiddle with the sound system we knew we had chosen our seats wisely. She tested her voice and it initially came over at a perfectly suitable volume but it wasn’t loud enough for her by half. She cranked the dial till our ears started ringing and that was where she left it. She began to speak. And the problem for me is, my grasp of Arabic is really weaker than it appears. I get by in day to day chat because I know all the most common words and expressions. But when someone starts speaking with vocabulary I’m not familiar with, I’m totally lost. And it’s even worse if they use formal Arabic, which is as different from the local dialect as Chaucer is from today’s English. I can’t follow a line of it. I’ll keep hearing individual words jump out and am drawn, irresistibly, into trying to stitch them together into a meaningful message. I’ve written before about the perils of such activity.
What fascinated me about the funeral was how the speaker wound the mourners up by telling them sad religious stories. Well, I say “telling” but that is the wrong word altogether. What she did was wail in such a heart-breaking, minor key, with such dramatic words of death and tragedy, that almost everybody in the hall began to shake and cry. And I don’t mean cry in the silent, stiff-upper-lip way which you would expect at the funeral of a very old man who went off quietly in his sleep. Oh no. These woman cried loudly, shoulders shaking, tears streaming down their cheeks. It made me squirm with embarrassment. One woman spent the entire time walking up and down the aisles with a box of a kleenex and a waste basket for used tissues. She kept trying to give me more kleenex which made me feel embarrassed anew because I hadn’t used even one.
The service last about an hour and a-half and the speaker kept at it without pause the entire time. She would wind the women up, get them all crying, then she would speak more calmly and eyes would dry. After a while she’d start up the wailing again and the crying would break out once more.
I supposed, and M agreed, that it’s very beneficial to squeeze all that emotion out. And it doesn’t take long to consider the advantages to a family or society of being upfront with your feelings. I acknowledge this knowing I won’t ever be able to be this way myself (fun as it would be to try it on my family).
The last time I cried in front of anybody was in 2006 when I got an email from M saying that our cat Hoolio had gone mad with terror from the bombings in Beirut and flung himself through a screened window to his death seven stories below. M has, at times, suggested that I cared more about that cat than about some people but it’s simply not true. I’ve just been fortunate enough not to lose anyone I’ve been close to. The day will come and I’ll cry, a lot. But mostly when I’m alone.