Love Bubble

by Vartan Koumrouyan

There was not a before and an after, a physical separation that changed the course of events, or changed me to become another person. It was a continuation of the same wonder that I didn't understand then as I still don't understand now. The war served as a balm ointment whereby it made me stop asking myself difficult questions. I blamed my failure on the war, and I only identify the pre war period of those childhood moments as belonging to the purest forms of my experience in life, that specific environment, or that’s how it looked to me. 

If I came to look at the current geopolitical condition within its historic reach, I might as well mention Gilgamesh who travelled to the mountains of Lebanon to kill the ogre and avail himself of the Cedar timber to build his temples and dams on the Euphrates. But I refer to the recent war that I have not forgotten and I don’t pretend it didn't happen. I look at it remotely and remember only the flare in the sky when the bombs exploded in Beirut, the checkpoints or the nights when we slept in the shelter and Monsieur Selim listened to Oum Kalsoum whispering on the radio in the most melancholic way, "Anta Omri", 'You're my Life', as the shelling happened outside.

Today, they talked about​ a nuclear showdown​ on TV. Armageddon and the end of times​ akin to Fukuyama’s End of History. So easy for them to tell, where it starts and where it stops. 

Aircraft carriers and destroyers are sent to the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea. Political analysts explain geopolitical tensions. Revolutionary Guard. Regime change. Sanctions, oil embargo, Hormuz strait, ​market crash. On this the Jalisco cartel boss ambushed in Mexico. Cars, ​buses are on fire. ​Live gunfire on ​the runway. Smoke of fire on buildings. ​​Stranded tourists by the pool on YouTube shorts​ advise other backpackers to remain indoors.

​Warhol’s fifteen minutes fame technology made into a ​'breaking news' live ​coverage.  It’s a skirmish, I’ve seen better.

I remember the time when I listened to a song that had the line “get your kick on Route 66”. Those were the early days and I was just a boy, beginning to learn how to think freely, as I watched the Karantina Camp burn from the balcony. We had heard that the refugee camp​ being shelled and in the morning a thick black smoke hung all over Beirut and a plume had drifted over the sea tapering away into the thin dawn dust, for a lack of a breeze,  visible all the way from our balcony​ on summer nights.

I don’t remember which song it was. It doesn’t capture my imagination as it once did. I’ve lost interest.

I was reading the biography of Jack Kerouac at that time. Neil Cassidy and Jack's 18 hours ​drive to visit Bill Burroughs on his farm​. That was before he wrote Naked Lunch in Tangiers​ and Jack lived for a few days on Rue Des Hirondelles in the Latin Quarter in Paris.​ I was so taken that I went looking for that cul-de-sac one night when I was drunk, looking at the top of the buildings, guessing which one it was, half expecting him to call me up.

Now, a walk along the riverside is enough. We have moved to Paris since. My father’s business was bankrupt and we lost all the family’s fortune​. Sold the house and lost that money as well. ​Bankruptcy narrowed my exuberance. In the realm of discovering the world, I’ve seen enough of Route 66.  

A walk along the riverside is enough of an anticlimactic experience of the free world​ in Paris, and the overflowing river is the proof. Now I have to walk on empty back streets with nothing to look at. It’s been raining for a week. It’s just a drizzle, but a drizzle multiplied with miles of ​depressing low skies will certainly bring this gush of a turbulent current, pushing dead wood and ​muddy froth in an eddy near the retaining basin funnelling through the sluice. It will wash all the dog piss under the bridge. The water had a quality I didn’t recognise before when ​the flow was smooth and tame. It amplifies the noise of the traffic on the street above when I reach the bridge and the promenade is already flooded. It will need another week for the mud to dry, if the rain stops. Just a skirmish. 

The doomsday nuclear showdown will start later. Even so, I’ve seen better, when I was a boy, and the war was a game the grown up played, and it didn’t change. So the big boys now are sending more ordinance to Mesopotamia. That’s the real “kick” the liberal world wants to see.

It was under the qualification of the “ongoingness” that I think the war never ended insofar as it stayed in my memory. I was not guilty of it but maybe a victim, convincing myself that it's not my fault and my wasted life was the only outcome, attached to its coattail like an addendum, a post-it afterthought to the general pessimism I was feeling that was beyond my will that I was unable to quell. I remember with fondness certain moments when I joined my grandfather's bed under the window with the pine trees adumbrate on the curtain to listen to the stories of his exile during the first world war, that I began to feel the wonder of words and how they expanded my imagination when he talked about horses, the Anatolian caves where he slept on his way to exile because he was then shipped to the island of Corfu, with the rest of the surviving children of his age during the genocide of 1914. 

We saw the humiliating troops withdrawal “kick” from Afghanistan. Freedom liberation kicked in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya as well. The year the Karantina Camp burned coincided with Bob Dylan’s Blood of the Tracks album, which I later bought. The songs on that record were a new version of a freedom I believed in then.

And of course my love of music was not hinged on the continuation of the war nor the fate of the warlords. I only was in a negation phase that developed into a lifelong nihilistic tendency​, acquired from the little I learned later from Schopenhauer. The Bastille Revolution of course represented some hope, but that was an old tale. It slowly accrued on me a dislike of authority in ​all its forms or intentions. Not a frontal discord per se to engage a conflict head on, but a methodical aversion of any ​of its pretensions. ​It was an intellectual negation of the existing order par excellence that I keep sous cape until now.

I began collecting folk movement records at that time. The Appalachian Mountains hill billy songs. The Carter Family and Johnny Cash period, the Basement Tapes, that sort of stuff. I followed the trajectory that was a beacon all over the world, shining all the way across the oceans to ​where I lived near Beirut. 

The gulf of Jounieh was like an amplifier of the exploding fireworks​, very much like the sound of water flowing under the bridge. Sometimes they were ​deep thuds reverberating across the sea, echoes skipping on the surface, the water being immiscible to sound, the air sucking the echo to to its trajectory until it reached a hard surface, like a stone you throw in a well and the echo comes​up​wards to you.

I followed the trajectory of the music from its inception. I ordered books from London, Mystery Train, and Fifty Shades of Pale about the anatomy of​ Bob Dylan songs. Many other books. ​There was hope if you had an acoustic guitar​. The​ ethnic separation from the western world as opposed to the Middle East was not a source of confusion​ because I believed in every song from Sinatra, to Elvis ​to Bob. I searched for those songs late at night on the short wave of the radio transistor my father had, when I was not big enough to buy the records yet. Voice of America broadcast from Cyprus ​before I knew of the BBC​ World Service. At night the reception was clearer in summer, and I had ​a sound reception without interference​, free of the thunder ​storms in winter, when the voice blinked for a second and I imagined the lightning splitting the wave bands in the middle of the Mediterranean sea.

That was what later became known to me as “the soft power” of the empire.

It was not obvious with films like Easy Rider or Apocalypse Now, when Brando reads ​The Hollow Man in a cave to ​show how the poem stood against the bullies. It was entertainment. 

There was this big stone house at the end of a footpath facing the water basin near the mulberry tree in our garden, on the other side of the road, with a huge pine tree reaching the tiled roof covering almost all its length. A huge pine parasol with thick branches the size of the almond trees in blossom at the beginning of spring, the odour of the dew on the soft needles that the birds nevertheless heard when we walked along the stone wall with our slingshots and they were frightened and scattered away. Small birds with black feathers capping their beaks and the goldfinch that their migration coincided with the ripeness of the loquat, mulberry and fig fruits in the surrounding gardens.

Another oak tree stood by the stonewall of the neglected part of the land where we looked for snails, with a big carob tree at the end of the path, that at some point was widened and gravel was spread on it to let Monsieur Philippe park his truck beside the almond trees forming a hedge. Behind, there was the clump of tall slender reeds, thistle shrubs and thorny brambles bearing ripe berries no one dared pick up because we thought a snake lived in the fallen stones of the water basin. It was the only shaded spot that remained green all through the summer as the soil under the stones was damp, and a little further down, the land bore a shortcut traversing it to the slope of the pine hill towards the Adonis valley.

Because of the circumference of its trunk, the pine tree was no doubt planted when the house was constructed a century ago, under the Ottoman rule, with a frontage to an open veranda on its length and a “maskbeh”, a narrow potting area to limit the veranda with roses, jasmine, mint and basil, fragrant traditional herbs of the Levant, with a trellis for the climbing vine that supplied its shade in the summer, to welcome the natural beauty into the household with a fresh breeze.

The whole plot of the land belonged to a family who migrated to Brazil at the turn of the century, and the old man who still lived in the house was a distant relative. He was very rarely seen, but on a Sunday going to church. He lived like a recluse who wore a sarouel and we suspected he waited for us behind one of the windows to shoo us away when we went to pick his green almonds and hunt the birds that we seldom succeeded in hitting with the slingshots. 

The songs were a beacon in the tunnel and there was hope in The Hollow Man. There was hope in the Love you make and the Love you take, as in the Beatles song. People believed in these things. We would exchange furtive bits of paper, love chits I call them, on which the day to meet was scribbled, and ‘I love you’ at the end, with a small heart in a different coloured ball pen, at the sortie of the school. 

The Simonian School of Commerce was situated on the first floor of the building with a large balcony giving to a dusty field above the harbour, with a few cars parked on the sides where the boys played football during a ceasefire.

It was the method school kids used to convey a feeling in a written form instead of saying it in spoken words because they were shy. But for us, after the first encounter, we were not shy anymore, and we didn’t have to explain and talk about things. It was like we knew each other and it was natural that we finally met, especially when I played the songs Harry recorded on a cassette, driving to Espace 2000 or Le Castel in Kaslik to drink tequila, songs like Wild Horses or the Led Zeppelin heavy metal riffs. 

I liked the way she walked, I liked the way she shied away from contact with the other boys, and she liked the way I wore my denim jacket and came to school late to give the impression that I didn’t care. We were both different and we felt like we were going to be together forever, a happy ending like in a Hollywood movie, listening to the Beach Boys, a sunset, the pine trees in the garden and the purple dices of the bougainvillea in the hedge, my grandfather collected to take to church on Easter Sunday.

A wholesale surrender, longing, and in the end, losing. The poetry of Bob Dylan gave this relationship a remarkable gravity, especially Visions of Johanna and Girl from the North Country, which was in effect dissimilar to the muggy Mediterranean atmosphere of the mezzanine where we met, her dark eyebrows adumbrate in the dim light seeping from the window trap into the Saturday afternoon love bubble.

My friend Oscar showed me his father's hunting gun one day. Not the muzzle loading flint antique rifle but a new double barrelled gun, I remember he said it was a “Beretta” with its smooth polished butt, serrated small inscriptions on the side plates, the way it clicked shut promptly with mechanical precision. A gun gave strength to the household, even when it was idle in the wardrobe, and the men liked to go on hunting expeditions in the mountains and the Syrian border before the war. I would wake up to the sound of gunshots at dawn during the migration of birds coming up from the African coast to cross inland to the Bekaa valley. Distant shots popped when the sky dawned over the hills at the end of April and the beginning of May, when the weather changed the luminosity of the sky and made it look whiter and visibly bigger as it gained a depth when the night faded and the temperature suddenly lost its chilly snap of the morning, and we begun to wear shorts and sandals without socks.

With the war, people purchased automatic weapons. Many boys my age took the habit of toting handguns and joined the political party. My best friend Pierre showed me his father’s Smith & Wesson 45 like the one Clint Eastwood used in Dirty Harry, just to show off in the neighbourhood with its big bullet the size of a forefinger, but I doubt if he ever fired a single shot, not even one. We suddenly knew about the existence of these weapons when men from the upper parts of the neighbourhood mounted roadblocks to check the identities of passengers in the cars, on the corner of Librairie Samir and the Playboy Amusement Centre, when the pinball machine were suddenly imported into the country and were in vogue like the firearms, when armed men came to this amusement centre to gamble for money, quarrel and laugh and sometimes shoot in the air, copying the ‘cowboy saloon mentality.’

You don’t understand what a war is when you’re ten years old, nor its implications. To us it was just a play as we had so many areas to scout in the neighbourhood towards the almond orchard and the pine trees on the hill overlooking Adonis. It was our first understanding of the world and the excitement we felt to aim at the birds, to puncture the dewy cobweb, to throw stones at toads in the water basin on the hill.

There was a big water basin full of tadpoles and a deep well in the valley with its rusted water pipes supplementing it that was perhaps a government program of irrigation. It was in disuse, the canal going down the slope clogged and broken, empty but for a sheet of water hardly covering the stones we threw in it every time we scouted that area.  

The grown ups had their ways to entertain themselves. The older men liked to keep their hands and minds busy, when after talking about the situation on the front line that divided Beirut in two parts, they would sit down to play cards or backgammon almost every night, either on our patio, or on the veranda of Monsieur Selim, the barber. Monsieur Joseph, a teacher of Arabic literature in Ecole Saint Antoine, was there every night, as was Monsieur Philippe, the truck driver who delivered merchandise to the Arab countries and was absent for weeks sometimes and who smoked the ‘narguilé”, the hookah, and I had to prepare the charcoal every time. Monsieur Fouad and his brown ‘More’ cigarette green pack, ‘Menthol-tawil’ he used to stress, long, menthol that lasted longer, just to make fun. Monsieur Chéfik also would be present. He worked in the water company and had a white Peugeot 404 parked under a huge eucalyptus tree near his house. My father would tell me "call Monsieur Chéfik", and I would run up the road to knock on the kitchen door and tell his wife that my father was waiting for him.

The women, our mothers, served them lemonade, coffee, watermelon and pastries and then sat in a corner of the patio or on the balcony to leave them deal the cards silently like in the old western movies they watched in Empire or Byblos movie theatre in the Martyre Square. Monsieur Joseph and Monsieur Selim never uttered bad words, but giggled when they won the hand to spite the other team. But my father used bad words to show he’s angry at the dice. Monsieur Chéfic and Monsieur Mounir smoked constantly and couldn't tolerate the noise and shouted at us to “play somewhere else." The cards never seemed to give them a win, and sometimes when they parted, they spoke in low voices about the war near the mulberry tree and smoked one last cigarette before going home.  

They would leave the cards with the ashtray on the table and a piece of paper with the score, a line and a set of numbers on each side of it, and my father would tell me to turn the lights off, and I would unplug the electric line extended from the window, tied to a branch of the mulberry tree of the patio and suddenly it was bedtime and the starry night of dreams at the end of another fantastic day.  

It was like an unconscious tale of adventure and it coincided with the injured dog we found one day in the garage where my father parked his Mercedes near the shelter, a dog who begun to follow us when he recovered from his injury, probably hit by a car because he had a broken hind leg that my grandfather fed and named Jolly Jack. I wonder where he picked the name from. Perhaps from his old book translation that he kept with his glasses tucked under the pillow of his bed. He read in the garden or in the shade of the vine trellis near his bee hives, and he would call me again and again to show me the words he was reading and I would notice tears in his eyes and think these words were the source of his melancholy and joy, and of his happiness, I guess...