to listen. I would have walked to Provincetown and back. Skandar’s youthful experiences were so far from Manchester-by-the-Sea. When I was fifteen, I painted faux-anarchist slogans after school in the art room and tried to hang them up around the halls. For me, a day trip to Faneuil Hall was the acme, the ne plus ultra. When he was fifteen, he saw neighbors and classmates slip out of view, either into militias or out of the country; and eventually he, too, boarded a plane for Paris and finished school as a boarder there. When he was barely more than twenty, still studying in Paris, his oldest brother was killed by a bombing: he’d been visiting a friend, had stayed overnight, and the apartment building was destroyed. It was another family friend, working with the Red Cross, who’d pulled his body from the rubble.
“When you’re young—but even now—how do you understand this?” he said when he first spoke of it, walking the night streets. “You can’t understand it. It makes no sense. You can allow yourself to be swallowed by your anger, but this will kill you. And yet how can you look at the panther, how can you look him in the eye, when he won’t stay still? When he’s nowhere and everywhere, belongs to no one and to everyone? So if you’re me, how you deal with this is that you say, I’ll look at how we talk about the panther. I’ll study the history of history, the ways that we tell the stories, and don’t tell other stories, and I’ll try to understand what it says about us, to tell one story rather than another, to tell it one way rather than another. I’ll ask the questions about what is ethical, about who decides what is ethical, I’ll ask whether it is possible, really, to have an ethics in the matter of history.”
“I don’t know quite what that means,” I said. I didn’t want to seem stupid, but it was more important to me to try to follow. He had very handsome square hands, and he waved them about in the cold air, displacing smoke, or breath, or both.
“Why did I start with the panther? Is it that I’m trying to make you see, and feel compassion for, the small six-year-old boy that I was? Now this will be your first thought about Lebanon because of me. Well, maybe Hariri first—I would have avoided that if I could. So, violence first, but second, the small boy full of dreams. But I could have started by telling you about PLO raids into Israel at that time, the mid-sixties, or about the war much later, or about the Israeli role in Sabra and Shatila, or I could’ve started by telling you how Beirut is today, all beautifully rebuilt like the city of my childhood and yet different from it. I could have told you the Hariri story, which I haven’t yet done …
“What does it mean, you see, that the first thing every American child knows about Germany is Hitler? What if the first thing you knew was something else? And maybe some people would say that now it’s important, after the Second World War, it’s ethical and vital that Hitler is the first thing a child knows. But someone else can argue the opposite. And what would it do, how would it change things, if nobody were allowed to know anything about Hitler, about the war, about any of it, until first they learned about Brahms, Beethoven and Bach, about Hegel and Lessing and Fichte, about Schopenhauer, about Rilke—but all this, you had to know first. Or one thing only, the Brahms Piano Quintet in F Minor, or the Goldberg Variations, or Laocoön—one of those things you had to know and appreciate before you learned about the Nazis.”
“But the world doesn’t work like that.”
“No, it doesn’t.” He smiled in that vague way, as if amused by a joke only he had heard. “But what does it mean that it doesn’t? And what would it mean if it did?”
Skandar didn’t always—or even often—tell stories about his youth, although surely, as he insisted, it was significant that he told one of them first of all. He talked about their time in America, and global politics, and Paris, a bit; but often about Lebanon, its history—bits of history over centuries, millennia: Phoenician history, Roman history, Ottoman history. He told me that Rome’s capital in the Middle East, Heliopolis, could still be visited,