the citizen-viewer

Last night Eric and I moved from our lodgings in the Movenpick Hotel (and Resort) to a regular apartment, rented for the week through our translator.

The Movenpick is a large hotel built into the face of the rocky bluffs that rise from the Mediterranean and bound the city of Beirut on the west. From the road that runs along the top of these bluffs, you see a low-lying modern building that looks like a shopping center with a reception hall. The lobby is there, in the top floor of the hotel, and the other floors drop down below it.

On the flats between the hotel and the sea, dotted with palm trees, is a multilevel plaza with two enormous swimming pools, one Olympic-sized and the other, about as large, shaped like a long-necked gourd. There is also a kiddie pool. Oh, and there’s another Olympic-sized pool indoors, or so I heard.

These pools, the outdoor ones, are surrounded each day by hundreds of bronzed Lebanese ladies and gentlemen and a few dozen pastier foreigners, lazing about in lounge chairs, ordering drinks from the Leisure Team and occasionally taking a dip.

To the south of the pool area is a marina for hotel guests and owners of the luxury apartments in the south wing. To the north is a private beach. These are the only two parts of the hotel where you can see the effects of the recent war: Oil spilled from the power plant at Jieh has drifted north with the current, painting a black, tarry stripe across the beach and along the hulls of the jet skis and motoboats in the marina.

The Movenpick is the kind of place where the staff remembers what kind of omelette you ordered yesterday at the buffet breakfast, glides in front of you to open doors and forces you to say good morning, and thank you, and nod appreciatively dozens of times a day. “That place will kill you,” said one of my contacts in horror when I told him where I was staying.

Despite the torpor induced by easy access to air conditioning and 300-thread-count sheets, I managed over the course of the week to see something of the outside world.

Directly from the airport, Eric and his driver took me to Dahiyah, or more precisely Haret Hreik, the part of southern Beirut which serves as the urban base for Hezbollah. Haret Hreik is often called a suburb in news reports, but it is actually a densely populated, entirely urban area full of five- to ten-story apartment buildings.

Or I should say was, because an impressively large part of it has been made much less dense by the Israeli airstrikes. (You’ve seen others’ photos, now you can see mine.) Where Hezbollah guards used to stop any outsider from entering their zone, they now check passports and press passes to allow journalists the chance to see for themselves.

They are not so much showing the scope of the destruction to illustrate the extremity of the Israeli assault as they are featuring the destruction as a measure of their own resilience.

Everywhere among the ruins stand determined-looking young men (one or two of whom seem to follow you around to make sure you don’t photograph any mullahs or fall into a hole). Cranes, bulldozers and dumptrucks are grinding along in huge clouds of dust, clearing rubble, while on the crushed tops of shortened buildings teams of men work in silhouette, sorting debris.

But the clearest sign of the meaning we are supposed to take from this comes from the red banners hanging on the ruins, some in Arabic and some in English, with taunting slogans such as “Made In America (Trade Mark),” “The New Middle BEast” and my favorite, “Extremely accurate targets.” All of them, and even the yellow plastic tape that cordons off the most dangerous areas, carry the slogan “The Divine Victory.”

Over the course of the week we returned to Haret Hreik a couple of times for pictures and one time to meet with a member of Hezbollah’s media committee (in the Hezbollah Media Relations tent) to discuss those banners.

But before I go back over the week — if I go back over the week — I’ll get up to date with the lodgings. The new place is in the eastern part of central Beirut, more or less in a neighborhood called Achrafiye, off Rue Saint Louis, near the Orthodox Hospital. OK, Street 82, come on by.

In contrast to the southern suburbs, which are dusty and identifiably third-world even when not blown up, this is a neighborhood of small, crooked streets lined with a mixture of decaying French colonial wrecks and smaller apartment buildings of a more recent vintage. A few of them get a little Beverly Hills, but most tend toward the Soviet.

Despite that, you could almost imagine you are in a down-at-the-heels neighborhood in a European city. A few European and American fast-food chains are around, but mostly it’s corner groceries, bakeries and of course Internet shops. These are Christians, one of the minorities who, it’s feared, might leave Lebanon and take its economy with them.

Inside, the apartment takes me right back to Cambodia. High ceilings, white concrete walls, old print tile on the floor, cheap bed frames, a shower that barely trickles, a gas stove run off a propane tank, someone else’s old dishes, fat cockroaches wandering in. There is, however an unfortunate shortage of geckos on the walls.

The apartment was most recently held by an Italian journalist, we’re told, named Filippo, who must have left in a hurry, as various presumably less important possessions are scattered around. Tonight I dined on some pasta he left, along with a half a jar of store-bought pesto. I don’t guess he’s been gone for too long, as the Bulgarian white wine hasn’t really turned. I might stay away from the rosé though.

Filippo also left, thank you very much, a stovetop espresso pot and an apparently tolerant relationship with a small black cat who feels quite at home in here, all the more so since I put down a bowl of Friskies for him, and chases down the cockroaches with enthusiasm, if not efficiency.