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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Sightseeing with Mr. Ibrahim the next day turned out to be like some kind of bizarre fraternity initiation or religious penance. As we walked through the old Crusader castle and Roman ruins at Byblos, Mr. Ibrahim demanded that I peek into every single tomb, climb every single rampart and photograph every single colonnade.
"When will you come to Lebanon again?" Mr. Ibrahim would shout every time I tried to complain about this. "This is the history of my country!" As we walked from ruin to ruin, Mr. Ibrahim wanted to know my opinion about each detail of the experience, and he got grumpy whenever he thought I wasn't being enthusiastic enough.
Amid this tireless touristic browbeating, I slowly learned things about my hellbent host. Mr. Ibrahim, I discovered, was 32 years old, the son of a Sunni Muslim father and a Maronite Christian mother. As a child, he and his family lived on the Green Line, and the young Ibrahim came to admire the American soldiers who patroled his neighborhood. Sometimes, the soldiers would give him vacuum-wrapped MREs (meals ready to eat) -- dehydrated Army food that tasted like chicken or beef or coffee. Ibrahim idolized the foreign soldiers, and -- much to the consternation of his family -- he hung a small American flag in his bedroom. Eventually, the Americans withdrew from Beirut, and Ibrahim's home was destroyed in the ongoing fighting. Salvaging what they could, he and his family moved in with relatives on the outskirts of town.
After the fighting subsided in 1990, Ibrahim went into business, first selling simple household items from Lebanon and later importing goods from overseas. He first became rich by introducing certain European detergents and soaps to the Lebanese market, and that's still his main line of business -- even though he speaks of branching out into jewelry and women's shoes.
If there was something in which Mr. Ibrahim took the most pride, however, it was the fact that he had not so much as touched a girl in all his 32 years. When we traveled back down the coast toward Jounieh, I quizzed him about this, and by the time we'd taken the cable car up to the Christian shrine at Harissa, Mr. Ibrahim was happily bragging about his utter lack of a sex life. As we climbed the winding staircase up to the huge Virgin Mary statue, Mr. Ibrahim told heroic stories of celibacy with the same lusty enthusiasm most men reserve for tales of sexual conquest.
"I've had 30 different women who wanted to do sex with me, and I told them all no!" Mr. Ibrahim bellowed proudly, startling a group of Sri Lankan pilgrims as we spiraled our way up to the bronze Virgin. "Some of them rented hotel rooms for me! One of them showed me her panties! But do you know what I told her?"
"What did you tell her?" I asked wearily.
"I told her no!"
Oddly enough, Mr. Ibrahim was equally preoccupied with people who were highly promiscuous. Adbul, he repeatedly reminded me, had fathered two children out of wedlock. During his days as a competitive bodybuilder, Abdul had once had sex with five women over the span of three days. Another associate of Mr. Ibrahim's, a 60-year-old Saudi man, had supposedly been married to 80 women and fathered 42 kids. This man's latest wife was a 17-year-old Syrian girl, and on their wedding night he'd taken Viagra and had sex with her 18 times. After that night, Mr. Ibrahim noted happily, the Saudi man had been paralyzed for three days.
After Jounieh and Harissa, Mr. Ibrahim had Adbul drive us back to Beirut. At first I thought this meant I would finally get to go home, but instead we ended up cruising the city for two hours. Meticulously avoiding war-damaged areas, Mr. Ibrahim pointed out signs of the prosperous new Lebanon: shopping malls, cinemas, resort hotels and luxury high-rises. "Look!" he would holler obsessively. "This is just like Europe!"
Amid all his shouting, Mr. Ibrahim seemed to be a man who very earnestly wanted to erase all the reputation and memories from a war that had ravaged his home. Somehow, through sheer force of personality, he hoped to turn Lebanon back into a booming, Westernized country. And I think he saw me as a kind of captive emissary who could bring the good news back to America.
