Weird Story

OK, check this out. Very strange indeed. It's a story about information flow, in its various forms, and about life in this region. It happened yesterday.

My landlord - let's call him Elie; this is what living in a paranoid country does, by now I don't think it absurd that 'General Security', the not-very-secret secret police here might get bored and start doing blog searches for the term 'Beirut', and I don't want to pass them any real names - had been telling me that he'd been receiving phone calls for me on his mobile. In these calls, a guy with a strange accent ('like Gulf Arabic, you know what I mean', as Elie puts it in his own strange American accent - I am not good at covert action apparently, I am giving him away already!) had told him 'I have money for Eva'. Naturally, before he told me this, Elie had asked me inconspicuously if I happened to be waiting for any money shipments. Why give away any information without doing a bit of intelligence gathering first? You never know!

Anyway, so eventually I managed to obtain the number of this money-guy from my landlord. 'He's an Israeli', was his latest conspiracy theory about the mysterious caller. Never mind that you can't even travel to Lebanon with an Israeli stamp in your passport, let alone an actual Israeli identity. When I called, the pseudo-Israeli solved part of the mystery: the money he wanted to give me was money that the owner of my flat in the US owed me. Instead of wiring it and paying fees for it, he apparently preferred to send it through a trusted friend. No problem. Except that he could have told me before so that we could have skipped the whole Gulfie/Israeli part.

As the money guy - I still hadn't managed to find out his name - was a new arrival in Beirut, further fuelling the foreigner conspiracy, we agreed that I would come to the suburb where he was staying (New Jdeideh) and meet him in front of City Mall. So I spent about 45 minutes in a service (shared) taxi stuck in traffic and cruising through New Jdeideh, an apparently poor part of Beirut where the remains of civil war damage stand out much more prominent and ugly than in other parts, until I finally was told to get out in the middle of a roundabout and right in front of the new, shiny City Mall by the highway. A direct taxi would have taken about 15 minutes, but they do get quite expensive. Unfortunately I still had to cross the highway, which almost cost me my life, but hey what's new, this is normal in Beirut.

In front of City Hall, I had to call the guy again because he apparently forgot about our appointment (also a normal feature of life here). He said he would be right there and that his name was Hamid. I told him that I wear black-framed glasses - not too common here, unlike in Europe - so he'd recognise me, and sat down on a bench facing the entrance. One, two, three guys walked in through the glass door after being checked by the security guard, and all of them stared at me, presumably because I was staring at them, trying to figure out if they might be Hamid the money man.

Finally he arrives, a square-looking guy with glasses and a leather coat and a big friendly smile. He apologizes for the delay and pulls out his wallet to hand me the money in US dollars. By now I feel really tired and slightly irritated with the whole episode, if not at Hamid who is after all doing me and the flat-owner (almost wrote his real name...!) a favour. To be polite and despite feeling really tired and just wanting to get out of the blasted City Mall asap, I ask him where he is from - Iraq - and what he is doing here, is he visiting? Hamid looks at me slightly apologetically and points at his head. 'I am here for medical treatment. I live in Baghdad and a car bomb exploded next to me, and now I have some problems with my eyes.' My head feels really heavy and I feel a little bit betrayed by this sudden revelation - how could that just come out of nowhere?? Now I notice several auburn marks on his head and neck that look like scars. I feel like I should be doing or saying something appropriate, only I have no idea what that might be. 'I hope you'll be better now', is all I manage. Hamid smiles and says with a giggle, 'Insh'allah!'. That's a good one! 'Insh'allah', I reply, having learned that you can't really go wrong with that answer, and he shakes my hand with a firm grip like he would with one of his buddies, not like a man would with a woman (according to my own Middle East experience). And then he just vanishes through the glass doors, and I stay behind clutching the stupid dollars and feeling terrible, and wanting to run after him and make up for that terrible thing that happened to him! Instead, I walk into the next mall store, the Geant supermarket, and wander around slightly bewildered between giant aisles of imported French cheese.