The Crossing Place: A Journey among the Armenians. Philip Marsden
turned into a courtyard and the Arabs got out and one of them leaned back in and said: ‘My friend, you better be careful.’ And the driver pulled away again and the buildings in the streets seemed suddenly sharper as I searched desperately for something I recognised.
Armenian script. When I saw it appear above the shops, I felt for the second time the relief of sanctuary and realized how much, in a Middle East where I felt an unwelcome alien, I depended on the Armenians. So much so that later that day I gave in. I’d promised myself I would not go into West Beirut: West Beirut was under Muslim control, kidnap country. But there was an Armenian there going to Yerevan and I needed to speak to her. The Armenians said they’d get me in, by ambulance, and we were waved through all the checkpoints.
As I waited to meet my contact, the door of the office suddenly burst open. A man stumbled over the threshold, sweating and short of breath. ‘You have a British here?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘You must leave at once. You have been seen.’
I left. I climbed into the back of the ambulance and we headed out of West Beirut towards the Ring and the burnt-out strip of the Green Line. An Armenian nurse sat with me. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll soon be through the checkpoint.’
‘I’ll be glad to get back to Bourdj-Hamoud.’
‘They took two yesterday. A French and a Belgian.’
‘Where?’
‘Just near here, but they were drug dealers. They shouldn’t have gone in. We have an expression in Armenian that a broken jar breaks again on the way to the rubbish tip.’
The evenings in Antelias, with the monastery gates locked after sundown, were long and dark and empty. On my last night a thunderstorm tumbled down from the mountains. The lights failed, came on again, then disappeared altogether.
I stood up from the desk in my room and went to the window. The rain was falling with a tropical ferocity. It sluiced off the flat roofs and filled the headlight beams of the traffic – bobbing Buicks, battered Mercedes, empty trucks swishing into the night. A pack of wild dogs splashed through the puddles. Two Lebanese soldiers crouched beneath their rain-capes on the turret of a tank. Then for an instant Beirut was lit up by lightning and the thunder again took a whip to the hills.
There was a knock on my door. A young priest holding a candle said His Holiness would like to see me. I followed him through the darkened passages to a room with a great arched window that rose from the floor and surveyed the courtyard below. Often I had looked up at that window and watched the bishops pace behind it like caged birds. Now the rain spotted its surface and ran down it in wide rivulets. The Catholicos sat alone watching it in the dark, preying on a large cigar.
‘Please, sit down,’ he said.
We sat in silence for a moment, looking out at the rain.
‘You will not see me again,’ he announced.
‘Oh?’
‘Lent is coming and I am tired. I shall go to Oxford to rest.’
‘A retreat?’
‘A retreat.’ He looked away and again we were silent while the rain hissed outside. The Catholicos looked down on the flooded courtyard like a brooding general. Then he asked, ‘And you?’
‘Damascus,’ I said. ‘I will leave tomorrow for Syria.’
‘You will have trouble in Syria.’
‘I was hoping perhaps you could help me cross the border.’
‘I will leave a letter for you, but I would not go to Syria. The police will make trouble.’
I could not tell him that in fact I would be relieved to be out of the Lebanon, that at least in Syria there were police. So I thanked him for his advice and for all his help, and wandered back through the unlit cloisters to my room.
Early the next day an Armenian photographer took me into Bourdj-Hamoud to find a lift to the Syrian border. It was a bright morning. The night’s storm had left its mark in shining pond-sized puddles and the traffic was heavy. Cars queued three deep at the checkpoints, impatient to get into the city to trade and shop and busy themselves in the Beiruti way. No one, except me, seemed at all bothered that in about twelve hours’ time the deadline for the land offensive in Kuwait was due to expire.
Coming through the checkpoints in the other direction were dozens of vehicles with skis strapped to the roof. That year on Mount Lebanon the snow had been frightfully disappointing.
‘Terrible,’ the photographer lamented. ‘All thin and slushy.’
‘I’m sorry to hear it,’ I said.
‘But this year they are all going skiing. If there’s one thing the Beirutis are good at, it’s forgetting,’ he chuckled. ‘I mean, does this seem to you like a city that’s been sixteen years at war?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It does.’
History will search in vain for the word ‘Armenia’.
Winston S. Churchill
After all, who now remembers the Armenians?
Adolf Hitler, discussing use of his death-squads
The main road from Beirut to Damascus had only been open a few weeks. Lebanese government forces controlled it to the pass below Mount Lebanon, Syrians beyond that. Shared taxis had begun to ply the route between the two cities, braving the checkpoints for the sake of a good fare.
Looking back down towards Beirut, it could have been any Mediterranean town with its bushy-pine slopes and the dust and the terraces and the olive groves. From a distance it looked like Nice or Genoa. But the road was scarred with tank tracks and by the time we reached the abandoned hill resorts of Aley, Sofar and Bhamdoun all the villas – once the summer courts of the Gulf sheikhs – were utterly destroyed. At the pass of Dahr-al-Baidar, where the Syrians took over, fog brushed the mountain slopes and piles of snow lay beside the road. At the checkpoint, an old Volvo burst into flames. The Syrian soldiers dashed about in a panic, piling snow on the bonnet to smother the fire, barking orders, letting the traffic through without question. The Armenian taxi-driver accelerated past them with relief and we started the long, sweeping descent towards the Bekaa valley.
For me, the Bekaa embodied all the most dangerous aspects of the Middle East. From years of news reports and hearsay, I imagined a place something akin to the Valley of the Shadow of Death or one of the inner circles of Hell. I saw a dark shadowy declivity into which crawled extremists too extreme for Beirut; I pictured Western hostages tied to the bottom of cars and, from above, Israeli planes bombing and strafing its southern reaches. Out of the valley came trained terrorists and hashish (for both of which it was the world’s leading supplier), and each year the Syrians earned more than a billion dollars from the opium. Even its name sounded dark and threatening: Bekaa – like a rifle shot or a cry of jihad.
So it was a surprise to find that the valley was very beautiful, that the Hizbollah and their hostages woke to mornings of a brilliant, feverish light; that the militias – Palestinian, Shiite, Kurdish – could run their combat training against a backdrop of sensuous, flesh-smooth slopes. But I was pleased to get across it, through the narrow corridor of Syrian control, up to the Lebanese frontier on the far side. At the Syrian border beyond, I waited seven hours for a visa. President Assad scrutinized me from three walls with his benign bank-manager’s stare.
Just before four o’clock, an official summoned me to the desk. ‘Border closing.’
‘My visa?’
‘Bukra. Tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow