The road to Beruit

 

My excitement about attending Fairouz’s concert coupled with the feelings around returning back to Aleppo made me a bit hasty and I skimmed through the monuments on my way. To get myself ready for the long journey, I took a quick shower, grabbed my bag, had a snack, bought a load of desserts and waited in the bus station with a victorious smile. The bus came on time; I checked that I still had my two passports and sat comfortably next to a window. I looked at the green landscape under the last rays of sun while trying to sort a quick plan for the night, as I was supposed to reach Beirut after midnight. The bus was quiet and the passengers looked serious, or maybe I was in ecstasy. After a while, the bus stopped in complete darkness at what turned out to be the border and everyone handed their passport to an expressionless officer. He flipped through my empty British passport quickly, and then asked for Syria’s entry visa. With all the confidence in the world, I indifferently replied that I didn’t enter the country by that passport; the officer came closer, and was expecting more elaboration. He started to yell without wrinkling his marble face with a single grimace, “How did you enter the country?”. Again, and as coolly as possible, I showed him the visa stamp in my Egyptian passport. He disappeared with my passport – I held the British one with me – and the passengers started to murmur. Within 10 minutes his head popped in the bus to shout my name, I followed him to an office, where an old fat officer considered my story a rescue from another dull night in the middle of nowhere. While I was explaining the whole tale, I realized that the bus was moving, I tried to ask the officer to stop the bus; till that point I was thinking that it was a silly misunderstanding and I’d be back on my way. The old officer stood up, raised his voice in a melodramatic way and informed me that I might never enter Lebanon. He tried to explain that the Syrian border was not the problem, he could easily kiss my Egyptian passport an exit stamp, but the Lebanese brothers wouldn’t let me in with a passport other than the one I left Syria with. All of this seemed illogical, the guy was irritating, a symbol of bureaucracy, dictatorship and stupidity. I told him about the confirmations I had gotten from the Lebanese Embassy in Cairo, then he lost his temper, started to curse and told me to go and beg the guys on the other side before he stamped my passport, as he was sure that I would need to be in Syria and did not want to stamp my passport twice. I was accompanied by another officer, a skinny teenager, who neither cared nor was able to understand my situation. There were only a few meters separating the two countries or the two offices, I couldn’t see anything in that dark night apart from dense reeds and I can still remember how humid that area was. At the Lebanese border I found the most handsome and well-built officer on earth who told me the same piece of information. I was mad and kept repeating “Lebanon and Syria are two separate countries, aren’t they?”, no matter how provocative I was, Mr. Lebanon did not respond. I waited for a while expecting that it was someone’s big mistake, but nothing was going to change, there wasn’t even a Lebanese Embassy in Syria, as the latter was treating the former as a semi-autonomous region. The gelled head was not offended by my questions, he was smart enough to suggest that I could return to Aleppo or Damascus and catch a flight. The officer accompanying me started whining, as he had to run to his fat boss. “Ma beyseer tomro’ men hown” is what the Lebanese model repeated; informing me that I could never cross the border without a visa on my Egyptian passport, or an entry and exit visa on my British one.  I was defeated by Arab politics, the old fat officer was happy to prove his point and at that point I was sure that the concert was gone. Plan B would never work, Plan C would be very expensive. I was extremely mad, remembering how spontaneously I had started my trip, and how lucky I had been to find a ticket. The bored officers ordered me to wait on a bench till they found a car to take me back to Aleppo. I spent hours and hours on that border with the humidity and jealousy killing me. I was able to see Mr. Lebanon moving around his office; so Lebanon was a place guarded by a supermodel and could only be reached by plane, what a fairy tale.

To cut a long sad story short, I spent the whole night waiting for a car to take me away from the concert and as soon as I reached Aleppo I jumped in a bus heading to Damascus. From there and without hesitating I took a car to Jordan and I spent the whole day traveling with a defeated and grim face. By the time Fairouz was supposed to start singing I was sitting on one of Amman Central Station’s benches, waiting for an Aqaba bus.

From Spaghetti in Harar