Elie

Journalist Zahra Hankir fortuitously met with Elie Halabi days after the devastating Beirut blast in August 2020. This is the story of their friendship

Note from the author: This piece was originally published by Cityscapes Magazine, in their July 2021 edition.

The edges of Lebanese identity papers, pinned by rubble, fluttered like butterfly wings in the wind. Beirut, that early-August afternoon, was unrecognizable — its buildings now shells comprising shattered windows, collapsed ceilings, broken pipes and mangled metal. Rays of the day’s last sunlight bounced off mounds of glittering, shattered glass and onto the weary faces of the city’s survivors. Among those faces was that of a small, silver-haired man. Sitting on a flimsy plastic chair, his sunken eyes looked out over a mask, from behind which I sensed he was smiling at me. A trickle of blood escaped a dressing on his arm that kept slipping as he waved clumsily. “Welcome, come join me! But keep a distance — I don’t want you to get corona!” said the man I would come to know as Elie.

I arrived in Beirut from London on August 7, just three days after one of the world’s largest non-nuclear explosions battered the Lebanese capital. Despite port officials’ repeated warnings to the government, a stash of 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate had sat unsecured for six years. The blast took place in a city already reeling from Covid-19. A spike in cases had led to restrictions on businesses that compounded an existing economic crisis rooted in government corruption. Over half the population was living in poverty.

The pandemic also had thrown my life off course, albeit in far less seismic ways. I was in the midst of relocating to New York for work when the US had halted immigration. Having already left my London apartment, I decided to temporarily move back in with my parents in South Lebanon. My mother and father, like many Lebanese, had felt the blast at the city’s port as a cruel culmination of the state’s neglect. With their country seemingly crumbling around them, I thought I could offer them support as I waited out my situation.

Upon arrival to Beirut, I quarantined at a hotel as per Covid-19 restrictions. Pushing through the plastic sheets that replaced the hotel’s blown out foyer, I took to the streets in desperate search of something, anything, to do.

Scanning relief efforts, I had joined a dozen teenagers, some of whom were 20 years my junior, to sweep debris at a primary school not far from the blast site. Filled with optimism and energy, the volunteers flirted and cracked jokes as they packed food boxes for the homeless and painstakingly picked shards of glass from soil and cork boards. But all I saw was the school’s eerily empty halls. A large Lebanese flag partially draped over a chalkboard revealed scrawlings from an arrested French lesson; a speaker lay where it had fallen from the walls and split into two; a clock was stuck at 6:07 p.m. — the precise moment of the explosion. Silently sweeping the endless debris, my own sense of uselessness enveloped me: how could anything I do possibly make a difference in a calamity so tremendous?

The following day, I ditched the teens, deciding instead to walk neighbourhoods pulverized by the explosion. Glass crunching underfoot with each step, I passed aid workers roaming rubble-filled streets strewn with bedsheets, stuffed toys, novels and once-framed family photos: fragments of lives lost or forever changed.

I was searching for people to interview when I stumbled upon Elie. I was unsure about whom to approach, sensitive to intruding on a grieving and aggrieved community. The explosion had left some 200 people dead, thousands injured and hundreds of thousands homeless, and here I was, a journalist in pursuit of quotes. But, sitting alone, Elie seemed also to be searching for someone to speak to.

He would pull up a chair and speak to the young men who hung out there. It didn’t matter whom he talked to, really. He just wanted to be around someone, anyone

Dressed in a loose, olive green shirt exposing a white undervest, and creased oversized trousers, the somewhat grizzled man fingered wooden rosary beads. He had a soft voice and a gentle demeanour, and greeted passers-by by their first names, asking how they were faring in the blast’s aftermath.

Introducing myself as a reporter, I reluctantly asked for permission to photograph him. To my surprise, the 62-year-old man’s eyes lit up, grateful for the attention.

“Should I take my mask off, and should I put this cap on? Do I look older with or without it?” he asked. With frail fingers, he styled his rakish moustache and flattened some stray hairs before posing.

But even as he chuckled shyly, asking how his hair looked, his eyes crept towards the rubble, darting around, before resting on a damaged coffee table. Covered with a tatty floral tablecloth, the broken piece of furniture was, I realized, a kind of shrine, bearing a plant, framed pictures of Jesus and Mary, a photo of an elderly woman decorated with pearl and gold rosary beads — and a death notice.

Within moments, the man’s smile turned to tears. “Can I tell you my story, my daughter?” Elie asked.

“This was my home, my kingdom,” he began, gesturing to the skeleton of the three-story building behind him. He then recounted for me the events of August 4.

Moments after the earth shook and the skies darkened, he had heard his sister-in-law, the woman in the photo, Claudette — who lived on the second floor of the building — crying out for help. Her screams intertwined with those of his Syrian refugee neighbours: two daughters and their mother.

“I couldn’t tell who was who,” Elie remembered. “All I knew was that the women needed me to pull them out of the rubble; that I would be their saviour.”

But Elie was himself immobile, paralyzed by the stones that once made up the walls of his kingdom. Within minutes, he was pulled from the wreckage and taken straight to the hospital by ambulance.

Since the blast, Elie had been regularly visited by nightmares replaying in slow motion what happened that night. Often, he would wake up at ungodly hours in a sweaty panic, realizing that the four women had perished.

He blamed himself for their deaths, convinced that he alone could have saved them.

“I feel strange, knowing that I survived and that I’m even talking to you now,” he told me.

Over the weeks and then months after we first met, from early August through late December, Elie called or messaged me daily. Sometimes he recited prayers and poetry. Mostly he wanted nothing more than to be heard, to have someone check up on him.

I returned his calls when I could, but not nearly as much as I should have. Sometimes, life got in the way.

At others, I worried he had become too dependent on speaking with me, and that the boundary between journalist and interviewee had been breached.

Despite my occasional silences, Elie showered me with appreciation for listening to — and reporting — his story. The details of his life first trickled, then poured. He spoke of his youth’s carelessness, and his time as an accountant at the Ministry of Telecommunications. He told me about how he struggled during the civil war, when both of his legs had been broken — a trauma resurfaced by the blast. “It was like I went 40 years back in a single moment,” he said.

Elie shared stories about his late wife, his three daughters, and Claudette, who visited him daily, offering a warm meal and company. His daughters were busy with their own lives, he said, so besides Claudette, his friends had become his whole world.

Before the blast, Elie frequently had coffee with Ahmad, the deceased Syrian woman’s husband. He spoke fondly of the man with whom he had shared the weight of desperation wrought by the economic crisis. “We’d listen to Aleppan ballads together, singing and speaking of brighter days ahead.”

Depriving himself of simple luxuries such as bananas, and only able to afford subsidized foods like bread, Elie nonetheless maintained faith that the situation would improve, and that his remaining years on earth would be filled with the joys of many friendships. When he felt isolated, he slept at friends’ homes — houses now eviscerated.

Elie himself had been rendered homeless by the explosion. Forced to move from house to house, he eventually was put up in a hotel by good Samaritans who had reached out after I shared his story (another had donated a fridge to him, but having nowhere to put it, he had called me, at once grateful and upset). Cooped up in his new but cramped and bare-walled residence that he said resembled a hospital room or a prison cell, he yearned to return to his neighbourhood, his palace, his kingdom.

And so Elie spent most days lingering amid the wreckage of his former home. Often, he would visit a local political party’s offices. He would pull up a chair and speak to the young men who hung out there. It didn’t matter whom he talked to, really. He just wanted to be around someone, anyone.

“Why do people tell me to pull myself together?” he asked me. “Depression isn’t gymnastics. All I want is to survive. Is that too much to ask?”

The pandemic compounded his desperation as he struggled to come to terms with the notion of social distancing. “I’m lonely,” he kept telling me. “Will you keep me company?”

As the months went by, Elie shared less about the details of his past and more about how he was feeling in the present: fearful, alone, sad, abandoned, angry. He couldn’t talk to people about these feelings, he said, because when he did, he was told to “pull himself together.”

“Why do people tell me to pull myself together?” he asked me. “Depression isn’t gymnastics. All I want is to survive. Is that too much to ask?”

Like many in Lebanon, Elie suffered in silence. The pandemic and the blast had exacerbated a national mental health crisis — supplies of antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication had dwindled, and just one in ten Lebanese had access to the care they so desperately needed.

I visited Elie when I could, bringing unworn items from my father’s closet. He teared up when I handed him the clothes. “Everything I’m wearing now is borrowed, even these shoes,” he told me. Were it not for the pandemic, I would have hugged or held the hand of this man who refused my money with unshakeable pride.

But really, it was he who checked up on me.

More than even my closest friends, it was this man who reached out at a time when I felt increasingly useless, unmoored and isolated.

“I wish you a morning filled with flowers,” he would say, noting that my name in Arabic means flower. And so my days, which were otherwise filled with reporting on Beirut blast survivors, began with roses, jasmines, carnations, narcissi, lilies and magnolias.

Elie became an unlikely friend. He continued to message me daily, even after I had left in October for a work trip in New York. Via messages and phone calls, I eventually started to open up to him, too, about my own worries — concerns over my parents’ health, and whether I should relocate to New York or move back to Lebanon and be with them as they aged.

“Move back here,” he said, excitedly. “What do you want with America, when you can stay here? This country needs you, your family needs you. And you can visit me and we can have coffee and knafeh together.” He proceeded to hum the lyrics of a Fairouz song: “Visit me… once a year. God forbid, don’t forget me all at once.”

In late December, Elie sent me a lengthy voice note. Running through a long list of flowers, his voice shook. I could hear that he was struggling to speak. He had fallen ill with corona, he said, but was starting to feel better, was regaining his strength. Even then, he was optimistic. “I put my faith in God, the best medicine,” he said. “When will you be back in Lebanon, so you can come visit me?” he asked.

Concerned but hopeful that he would recover, I wished him a happy new year and prayed that 2021 would be a better one. That he could be close to his now-displaced neighbours, whom he so loved, once again. That his palace would be rebuilt and his glory days restored.

I wished the same for Lebanon.

Returning to Lebanon from New York on a mid-January evening, I had planned to call Elie the following day to tell him that I would soon pay him
a visit.

Early the next morning, I awoke in a room at the same damaged hotel where I’d quarantined when I’d arrived to Lebanon back in August. Startled and jet-lagged — my thoughts still in Brooklyn but my body in Beirut — I searched, bleary-eyed, for my phone, which, when I found it, glared with a message from a friend of Elie’s.

Hospitalized after his COVID-19 symptoms had worsened, Elie had died of a stroke just four hours earlier. Elie, who craved company and was burdened by loneliness, died alone, in self-isolation. Not in a palace, or surrounded by loved ones. Not even in his cherished city, but in a hospital bed in a town unknown to him, as hospital beds in Beirut had filled up.

In his book, Beirut 2020, Diary of the Collapse, Lebanese author Charif Majdalani writes of the country’s “interminable mourning, physical decline, and loss of dignity”. Elie experienced all three in such a short time period and at such high intensity. This thought often keeps me up at night. But when it does, I try to remind myself that I did bring Elie some comfort in his final days, and that I am fulfilling a promise I made to him. Against the guilt that I could and should have done more, I listen to a message he sent me in August, not long after we first met.

“Thank you for all you have done for me,” he says in the message. “Please tell my story so that people know what I went through, so that they will remember me.”

God forbid you are forgotten, Elie Halabi.