Enough History for One Night

Two old aunts pass by. They’re cleaning house, and one of them has got this big Manila folder with her, brimming with pictures of my in-laws in the early stages of their marriage. Maybe you want them, she says.

Life was good back then, it seems, because it is a collection of black and white pictures taken in a wide variety of social settings in Lebanon. Night clubs, dinners at the Phoenicia and the Casino du Liban, dances in Broumana and I don’t know what. The hairdos are absolutely amazing, and men in suits wear dark sunglasses at night. It’s like I am looking at an old Oum Kaltoum movie. My in-laws social night life was definitely more glamorous and busy than mine (has ever been, I might add). So how come there aren’t any pictures of the children when they were young? I ask. I think that for as long as I have been married, I must have seen a total of 2 pictures of my husband as a child.

“Oh, they were in the house at Kantari,” she replies, as a matter of fact.
At the beginning stages of the war, in 1975, fighting erupted right in front of their doorsteps and the family had to flee to another neighborhood. The house ended up in a militarized zone, although the term militia-lized zone would be more accurate, and was no longer accessible. When they could finally return - some months later - the house was looted of pretty much everything.
“The furniture, the paintings, everything, including the family photographs,” she says. “Oh, and there were so many of your husband and his brother. Your father in-law would make pictures all the time. Oh well, all gone.”

And while they are shuffling through the stack of pictures, I hear one of them say “You remember Salim? They burned his hand and shot him. He was a friend of the family.” It’s a picture taken during a dinner at the Phoenicia hotel, when it was still right at the sea side. “That’s him, next to your mother in-law (with the flowers in her hair),” and they point him out. The first guy on her left.
I had to Google him. This is what I found. He was a publisher of a Lebanese magazine called al-Hawadess. His name was Salim Al-Lawzi. When the war in Lebanon broke out he felt he could no longer report from there, so he went to Paris. In 1980 he had to return to Lebanon on a family emergency. On his way back to the airport to head to France, his car was stopped. His wife and driver were let go. Salim Al-Lawzi disappeared for about ten days to two weeks, only to reappear as a body amidst some bushes. His writing hand had been almost skinned to the bone, either by the use of acid or by sharp instruments. And his body had been pierced in several places before being finished by a shot to the head.(As told by Al Jazeera founder Omar Al-Issawi )
What did he owe that too? He had written an article criticizing Syria's Baath regime.

This place is so loaded with history that it’s incredible! The family pictures got looted during the civil war and a family friend assassinated. That’s enough history for one night.