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PARTISAN REVIEW
the car and formed about him. Then they marched grimly into the
shack.
III
Perhaps they were not as grim as all that. In any case, noth–
ing happened. Vaguely, later, we heard that a woman had been smug–
gling textiles from Rome. We were shuttled across an empty strip of
desert to another airport and there installed in a small courier of the
Middle Eastern Airlines. We flew over the Nile delta and then out to
sea, so as to avoid Israeli territory. Then I closed my eyes, we landed in
Beirut, and my passport was there, despite my nightmare, in my pocket.
Weeks later, when I had come to love Iskandar Riachy, and he
had learned that there was no mystery in my name, I told him the
shameful story of my passage through Cairo. He laughed at my anguish.
Since they had sent a colonel and four men, he told me, I might have
known it was for a woman. For me,
comment done,
they would have
sent at least a batallion. . . . This jangled my newgrown Lebanese
nerves, so that I stiffened and looked around the table for an Egyptian–
or simply a Moslem. Riachy laughed again and added in a loud voice
that the Egyptians were a lion-hearted people, and the Lebanese were
also a lion-hearted people. The Iraqi, too, were a lion-hearted people,
and the Transjordanians. These facts were well-established, for he had
printed them himself in his newspaper.
The strange thing was that his irony was double. Riachy was
an Arab, after all. He laughed at what he had said and yet he believed
it. He laughed because he believed. There were cabinet ministers at the
table, and other grave persons, Moslem and Christian and Druze. They
also laughed, for they were no longer able to pretend that they had not
heard. In the end, we were all laughing with Riachy, but we all had
different reasons.
Reasons within reasons-I stand on the threshold of this unspeak–
ably ancient world and strain my senses to distinguish the reasons. There
is a constant and excruciating feeling of
deja
vu
and, at the same time,
of lost liaisons, words almost but not quite understood. I live in the
Lebanon as in a dream whose tone and abiding problem is my un–
certainty. Not simply because these people nod when they mean no,
shake their heads when they mean yes- that much one can learn, and
the bare bones of language. But nothing is simple here, Wajdi Mallat
warns me. This sweet and subtle scholar, with his perpe"tual frown
and his tormented black eyes, has been assigned to act as my guide. He
has a long dark face and curly black hair, an interminable Koranic
