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PARTISAN REVIEW
to take its revenge. I lunch with the gentle poet, Wajdi Mallat, while
his friend Aboussouan tells us of the murder of his family by the Stern
Gang in Jerusalem. I dine with Riachy,
Iskandar dhu-al-Qarnayn,
whose long hands sketch roundnesses in the air as he describes the beauty
of the Lebanese women, especially those of his Mountain, for whom
angels have been known to abandon the heavenly hosts. To be sure,
they were Jewish angels. Or I am at the President's ball, talking about
pipelines with Takhieddine Solh, the Lebanese representative at the
Arab League. He reminds me, but comically,· in the rolling of his eyes,
of the lovely Egyptian girl with whom I have been dancing. These peo–
ple are charming, charming. But the mind is lying in wait.... In the
great vaulted salon of the French consulate-general, Riachy seizes me,
pumps my hand, gathers a grinning circle around us. "Our most danger–
ous visitor! Have you heard? He plots with the Opposition!" A long
line of bearded rabbis come solemnly into the salon, following a gnome–
like little leader who wears a black skull-cap and trembles with lively
fat. But of course they are not rabbis. They are Maronite priests, Riachy
tells me, or Syriacs; or dignitaries of the Greek Rite, or Armenians;
those who have red facings on their robes are bishops. Riachy covers
his eyes in horror. These people have infested his beloved Mountain
since the time of Paul; their ancestors supplied cedars for Solomon's
temple, and now they are eager to pay tribute to Ben-Gurion, the traitors.
Any master will do, save the Arabs. He points out a Greek Orthodox
with a magnificent headdress and, sitting in lonely grandeur in a corner,
a stout specimen with a stubble of beard and an air of benign intrans–
igeance. This one resembles the old Hebrew scholar of B'nai Agudeth
in Newark, who haunted my dreams for a period when my mother was
pleading with my father to have me confirmed and not let me grow into
manhood like a heathen. My mother failed and I grew up, indeed, like
a heathen, which does not prevent Raichy from smiling maliciously as
he whispers into my ear that the stubble-faced stimulus to my memory
is the Grand Mufti of the Lebanon, the highest-ranking Moslem prelate
in the country. He has just returned from a visit to the Palestinian
refugees, who are dying like flies in the south. Would I like to meet
him?
Many of these people have blue eyes, like my mother. Nowhere
else in the Arab world have I seen so many blue eyes, except among the
Berbers and Chleuhs of North Africa; but, for the Arabs, the Maghreb
was a land of conquered outposts, by the same token as Spain. The
Lebanon, like Palestine, lay close to the source-lands of Arabism, where
all the eyes were black.... And now young Khalil El-Khoury arrives, to
lead me to the fantastic buffet. Raichy and I take leave of each other,
