On the last possible pontoon, three berths along, Janet saw a blue-and-white-hulled boat listing Latakia as its home port. The name, Sea Mist, was picked out in Arabic script below the title in Roman print, which Janet presumed was required by some international maritime agreement.
The sails were stowed but there was a man in the stern, hunched over what appeared to be an engine flap. He was balding and a sagging stomach hung over his belt, straining the T-shirt to contain it.
“Marhaba,” said Janet.
The glance was barely perceptible but Janet knew he had seen her. He gave no response. Her dismissal as a woman, Janet recognized. She said: “H ather illak?”
Without bothering to look up, the workman said: “No, it belongs to someone else.”
“ Heloo.”
“It is adequate. How did a Western woman learn Arabic?” He looked up at last, curiosity winning, blatantly studying her body.
“I teach,” she replied, in English also.
“But not Arab ways,” he said, dismissive again. He moved to go back over the engine cowling.
“Syrian registered?” said Janet, stopping him.
“So?”
“Do you sail there often?”
“Of course.” He was leaning against the flap but not bothering with the engine now.
“I am told it is dangerous.”
“Not the Syrian coast.”
“Lebanon then?”
“Awaih, bas meen fara’a ma-oh Lubnan? ” he said, testing her by reverting to Arabic.
“Some care about the Lebanon,” Janet answered him at once.
“Not enough.”
“Do you ever sail there?”
The man lounged inside the yacht, looking at her for several moments, but not replying. Then he said: “The Lebanon, you mean?”
Janet nodded.
Again there was a hesitation. The pontoon heaved beneath her feet and she saw that the T-shirt was stained, not just with engine oil but with sweat-marks under the arms. With intentional awkwardness the man said: “I wouldn’t know.”
Bastard, decided Janet. She thought of the word in Arabic, too, wondering how he would react if she openly called him a’krout. She said: “Some must”
“I suppose.”
“You worked this dock long?”
There was a shoulder lift, the only response.
Janet could feel the perspiration making its own pathway down her back: a lot of it was not because of the sun. Trying to stir his obvious chauvinism, Janet said: “It would take a brave man, to risk sailing there.”
“Or a fool,” he said, not responding to the taunt, either.
“Do you know such people?” demanded Janet, direct once more.
The exaggerated shrug came again. He was playing with her, Janet decided: acting out his own strange charade. “Perhaps you know where such people gather?” persisted Janet.
The man looked beyond her, generally towards the town. “Around,” he said.
It was time to be even more direct, Janet guessed: she had nothing to lose. She said: “I have?50, in sterling. I would give?50 to learn the names of places where such people gather.”
The man’s lips parted, in a smile made unpleasant by two teeth missing in the front. “I have heard things,” he allowed.
“Like what?”
“You said?50?”
Janet took the money, two?20 notes and one?10, from her shoulder bag and folded them to make the amount look thicker. She did not offer the small bundle to the man.
He held out his hand.
“The names,” Janet insisted, keeping hers by her side.
The man said nothing, remaining with his palm outstretched. Janet peeled one?20 note from the remainder and passed it over the sliver of water separating them. The man just stopped himself snatching at it.
“There’s the Marina Pub,” he said, jerking his head back towards Athens Street. “A place called the Rainbow, on Kitieus Street. I’ve heard another meeting place is the Archontissa restaurant, although at night, not during the day. And at night there’s the Byzantium restaurant… it has a nightclub, too… and the Sanacosta. Mostly around the center of town although the Byzantium is out a bit, along Artemis Avenue.”
“I can find them,” said Janet, eagerly. She was about to pass over the rest of the money and then hesitated. “What about the name of a person?” she asked. “Do you know anyone?”
The man made a beckoning movement with his hand, for the other ?30. As Janet gave it to him, there was a head shake of refusal. “Don’t know any people,” he said.
“Thank you for the places, at least,” said Janet. It was actually working, she thought excitedly as she climbed from the marina. At last it was working, and she was getting somewhere! Not just one place but several. Surely from all the names she had she was going to be able to find somebody!
Because it was the nearest, Janet went first to the Marina Pub at the end of the pier. It was just past mid-day when she got there. It was already jostled with a combination of sun-pink tourists and weather-tanned occupants of the marina. Through the expansive windows, Janet could make out the yacht of the hostile Englishwoman, although she was no longer on the air mattress. The workman on the Sea Mist was back at the engine hatch.
Janet got a seat near one of the windows and ordered kokkineli rose, gazing around. She wanted someone who was resident, on the marina at least, and Janet realized at once that at this time of the day the place was too crowded to make any guesses and certainly not any approaches. She made the wine last, finally ordering another, and-although she was not really hungry-justified her lingering occupation of the table by choosing a sandwich of spitted lamb, in an envelope of pita bread. It was almost three o’clock before the clientele thinned. She attempted to get into conversation with a group at the bar whom she overheard talking in both French and Arabic but was rebuffed. She got a friendlier reception from two men and a woman talking French but after half an hour of conversation discovered they were cruising from Cannes, had never been to the Lebanon and had no intention of attempting to do so.
Her hopes soared on her third approach. Almost at once the couple talked of being Lebanese, actually residents of Beirut. Eagerly-although not showing it-she let them lead the conversation, only occasionally risking the intrusion of a question, not wanting to hear the story that gradually emerged and even more unwilling as it did so to confront the gradual descent of her hopes. The man had been a high-rise store owner whose premises had been situated literally between the Maronite Christians and Sunni Moslems when the war broke out with those first shots in April, 1975, in the civil war which was not a civil war any longer because no one knew what it was any more. He had been cautious-a half-boastful smile at this stage of the history-although he had never imagined (“who could?”) it would degenerate into what it had now become. But they’d been able to get out so little of their capitaclass="underline" far too little. They’d already had their yacht (“good fortune when there was so little”) which was now their home. Their livelihood-the high-rise in the most desirable district of Beirut-they’d seen destroyed by the successive exchange of gunfire and mortar and artillery, until it had been cut from its multi-million (“multi-million in any currency you like”) size as if some giant hand had been slicing pieces off a special cake. They’d fled before the anarchy, of course: risked just one return. The formerly proud skyscraper had been a disappointing bump of concrete and steel, the girders and the rusting frames appropriately like the bones of something long dead and picked clean, like things were picked clean by vultures. They had two souvenirs: the front door key, and a fish mold the vultures had somehow, inexplicably, missed in the rubble. The woman said she’d never been able to use the mold again: how could she? Both smiled and accepted Janet’s offer of more drinks, the woman kokkineli like Janet was drinking, the man ouzo which he milked white, with water, with obvious nostalgia.