Early in 1975 one of my sons was standing at a municipal bus stop on the Corniche, waiting for a bus to take him home to our area, called Musaitbeh, after a long day at school—the American Community School of Beirut. Beside him on the curb a Lebanese youth also waited. The two of them exchanged remarks about the lateness of the bus. Then, since they were going in the same direction and interested in one another, they decided to walk. Maybe they would have a chance to get on the bus farther down the line. Instead they strolled and conversed all the way around the Raouche, along the western rim of Beirut. When they reached Mar Elias Street, Jim invited the boy to take a small detour and come to meet his family.
A little anxious about why my high school sophomore was so late coming home from school, I was relieved to see him and with some surprise welcomed the visitor. Jim was the least likely of our offspring to bring home a stranger. Mazin was several years older than Jim and no longer a student but worked in some kind of factory. He had a weary look, which at the moment I attributed to the long walk they had taken. While we chatted, we shared a drink of something (in the kitchen as I remember), and before he left I invited Mazin to come for a visit on Sunday afternoon.
That’s how it happened that this Muslim boy began to appear at our door consistently once a week. We learned where he lived, in a Muslim community a kilometer or two from our home, and once Jim went to visit him there, having been invited for dinner. At first Mazin would stay at our house an hour and leave, but his visits grew longer and longer. Jim ran out of things to talk with him about, and Wayne and I were left to keep him company. On Sunday evenings Wayne and I always went to an English language service with our teenagers. One day it was time to go to church, and he was still there, so we invited Mazin to go with us, and he accepted. He appeared to be comfortable and happy in the church and remarked later that the people were really nice. I think he most appreciated the opportunity to practice his English even more, and his attendance became a habit.
I’m sure Mazin liked our family and enjoyed the whole Sunday experience, but we knew the young man had his own motives for cultivating the relationship. He wanted to leave the country, and he thought maybe we held his ticket to somewhere. Over and over he brought to me application forms for American colleges and universities. Just to fill them out he needed a lot of help.
My feelings about this were conflicted. Going away to study was fine; many Lebanese young people did that, but Mazin did not seem qualified for any of the institutions he was applying to. I hated to see him get a bunch of rejections, and I tried in subtle ways to tell him that acceptance in one of these schools could be a disaster for him. What if he actually went there and enrolled and then could not do the work? But he seemed sure that the only problem he had was just getting to America, or somewhere. He was, in fact, possessed with anxiety about this and said again and again that he had to leave Lebanon. This was a puzzle to us, and we kept trying to get explanations.
He did complain bitterly about the lack of opportunities in his job and especially the pay. He was not qualified for a better job and felt trapped. I suggested that he study somewhere in Beirut to get better qualifications, but he insisted that he needed to leave the country. There was a bitter edge on his words. I remember his telling me that his boss’s son drove a fancy European sports car while he himself could not afford a bicycle. I could see that this inequity existed in Lebanon. The very rich and the very poor lived in sight of one another. I began to notice then that Mazin wore the same sport jacket every time I saw him, and that it had lost its shape and was a little frayed around the edges.
About this time Jim went for a ride on his small motor bike late on a Saturday afternoon. Fun and safe places to ride in the city were few, so our boys sometimes found a really big parking lot with only a few cars in it, where they felt free to buzz around doing figure eights and wheelies on the bike. The Spinney’s supermarket lot was the closest of these, and that’s where Jim went on this particular day. He came home with a terrifying story.
Two men had exited the supermarket, shouting and chasing one another through the parking lot with pistols, causing Jim to stop quickly where he was. One of the men then was able to put a hand on Jim’s shoulder and use him as a shield while he shot at the other. How it all ended I don’t even know anymore, except that Jim got home safely, a little breathless and pale.
On Sunday afternoon we told Mazin this story and somehow the incident opened a new window into what our friend might be thinking. He told us that lots of young men were joining militia groups and acquiring guns. Some of them were trying to get him to participate, but he didn’t want to. The direction the conversation took did not seem reasonable to us. Of course there were always militias, but it seemed then, and seems even now, that the incident at the supermarket was about some personal conflict or maybe a petty crime. But Mazin related it to his own worries. One particular Sunday he seemed unusually agitated, and he said, “This is a terrible place. I have to get out of here.” More than once he said this, and we never knew how to react. We had experienced Lebanon as a very fine place to live.
I decided that the young man must be in some kind of personal predicament from which he needed to escape. It did not even occur to me that it was Lebanon that was in a predicament.
On April 13 the violence erupted. A busload of Palestinians, passing through a Christian community, was ambushed by a militia group and riddled with gunfire. Twenty young men died. The militia group claimed that the Palestinians opened fire first, killing their leader’s bodyguard. In the days that followed random explosions shook our neighborhood. One day the booms seemed to travel through the community in our direction, each one a block closer than the previous one. People and cars disappeared off the streets. And then, hearing just one vehicle, we watched from our windows while a man with a small plastic bag, got out of a Volkswagon “Bug,” walked half a block, left the bag in a doorway and kept walking. The car picked him up again and kept moving out of sight. After a short delay an explosion shattered glass and started a fire at the place where the bag had been left, and five minutes later we heard another explosion a bit farther away.
It got worse, until we were shoving bookcases against the windows because of machine gun fire in the street, and finally the booming of heavy guns reverberated through the city. Even then we didn’t know that a full-blown civil war had begun. We thought we knew the Lebanese, and nothing we knew suggested that they wanted this violence. Somebody else must be messing with Lebanon, and it would be over soon.
I think we saw Mazin only once after that. He dropped by at an odd time. We told him that as soon as school dismissed for summer we would be traveling to America. That seemed to be something he had feared, but it was our routine furlough and a short one. We had no doubts and assured him that we would be back in September.
In fact, it was more than a year, and even then I came alone, crossing the battered Green Line at the museum. It was now the summer of 1976 and Musaitbeh was a different world. Tens of thousands of people had died. The streets stunk with garbage, and I was told that the garbage trucks had been used to pick up bodies. Though the neighborhood was spookily quiet, I went to our Mar Elias St. apartment building, intending to pay the rent for another year, only to find that we had lost our house. The story about this is in my book.
I asked about the neighborhood where Mazin lived and was warned not to even think of going there.
We never saw or heard of him again.