A Lebanese guy also reading, sitting too in the departures Cafe Ritazza, asked if I had a visa, and I said yes while thinking no, and started to get nervous. But the card and stamp was all it was, Elena’s address and a curt wave of the hand from the official at the desk. She picked me up and we went for a walk on the Corniche, seafront promenade, and caught up. Groups of people out smoking shishas and drinking coffee, sweet smoke and charcoal in the air, and men fishing with tiny lights on the end of enormous rods, families ranged round on benches and plastic chairs, and a group of rollerbladers speeding over a ramp. A low driven BMW, loud on the euro-techno, squeals by, the passenger’s index finger pointing to the night sky in time to the music.Just walked around Ashrafiye, Christian E. Beirut today, read in a park, took photos of decapitated statues there, had a kind of pizza sandwich with herby meat sauce, lemon juice and chilli, whose name I cannot remember, frustrating as the guy repeated it to me over and again, for $1, 1500 lebanese pounds. A bomb went off nearby in March last year, killing a politician. There’s a block completely destroyed, and great stones on the opposite pavement. Walking down past it the first time I wondered what had happened there. Passing back up the street later, I crept into the space through an old doorway, up a pile of rubble, past a black low passage with a strange hum coming from it, and photographed the trees, a twisted branch, a coathanger tangled in branches, and stepped carefully, the air carrying a scent of dried shit. 

I stopped to ask a man about it sat outside a carpenter’s shop- as usual I start to talk to people in the business of repair- and he said it had been knocked down to make way for a huge tower sometime soon. He showed me round his shop, all the handmade cabinets and clothes horses, and tools and band saw and belt sander, the fresh strips of inlay and veneer. His father had started to work there in 1940. They would clear it soon, too, to make way for another tower, perhaps two. One son an interior designer about to join his wife in Canada, another in IT in Switzerland, and his daughter finishing a marketing degree in a private university here. When the shop went, he’d stop working. Though he liked his work, he no longer needed to contine. His phone rang and I shook his hand as he spoke into it in Arabic, and walked on up the street.Two posters of a bearded kindly-looking man on a wall, Arabic writing, one a pencil portrait, the other from a photo, with writing in a different script torn from the bottom of one of the several copies pasted there. I stopped to take a photo- gotta scratch the itch- and a car park guy smiling comes over and points to a small olive tree ouside Supermarche Achariyfe just across the road. Bomb there- he says, miming explosion with his hands and pointing to the posters. In French he tells me this was where the man was killed in March 2007. That tree and the plaques and inscription were his memorial, but beyond that, to me certainly, lacking Arabic, and knowing little of the place or the man, there was no physical evidence of violence, so I had confused the yellow mud and wilderness of the empty block down the way, and the blocks of concrete strewn on the pavement, with the site of the blast. So it goes