In Beirut, stillness threatens. If nothing is moving, no one is making money. Lebanon has no public transport; the ministry of railways is fully staffed but has no working railways. The country depends on its pitted and potholed roads. Normally, highways are jammed with taxis, vans, trucks, and delivery scooters nipping between them, as well as hundreds of thousands of cars. Commuters travel the length of the coast every day, usually driving on their own. They have an itch to keep moving, except when they are texting. A normal day in Beirut is a racket of air horns and shouts of ‘Yalla!’ (‘Come on!’). When Lebanon locked itself down, the clearing of the roads was not so much a relief as a forfeiture of an economic ritual.

Most people lost their connection to progress, yet they were stoical. Staying at home was easy compared to facing the armed gangs that had suppressed the popular revolution a few months earlier. All that was left of the crowds that had surged through the city were two guerrilla sculptures in Martyrs’ Square: one was a phoenix made from bamboo rods, the other a metal cage in the shape of a love heart, filled with spent teargas canisters. There was also a giant billboard in the shape of a raised fist, tied to the national flagpole. The flag at the top had been shredded in a storm. The ribbons of red and white, the green cedar sliced in three, were not replaced for months. The plain concrete of the square wavered in the sun, scanned every day by the creeping shadows of the Al-Amin Mosque.

Even the border regions near Israel, where the two countries had twice come to the brink of war during the past twelve months, fell quiet.

It was people, not the state, who enforced the lockdown. Lebanon is a society of clans, protective circles that are invisible beneath a blustering hospitality in good times but that tighten their grip when menaced, calling children to ground and limiting contact with outsiders. This exclusionary instinct is the source of Lebanon’s blood feuds as much as of the warmth of its households. During the pandemic, it proved vital to keeping people indoors. Friends joked about enjoying uninterrupted weeks of their grandmothers’ cooking.

Besides, there was little progress to miss. Economic collapse is the pane of glass you don’t notice until you walk into it. As you lie on the floor among the shards, the warning signs you had ignored return unbidden as memories. In these weeks of silence, you thought back past the revolution to the time of rumour and pessimism that came before, and wondered when the long descent had begun. Those closed shops and empty malls, the sudden pauses in conversation, the lowered eyes, the shrugs of 2019, became meaningful portents. The poor had known it at the time but were not asked. For all of my first year in Lebanon, a soup kitchen I knew had been giving one daily meal to people who were half-unconscious from hunger.

The first sign, for me, that Lebanon might be reviving was an email from one of the charities where I volunteered. They hoped to resume a project. My diplomat wife – diplomats were among the few professionals still allowed to work in their offices, carrying many signed and countersigned passes, one for each guard post – also began to come home with news of partial reopenings. Perhaps it was a coincidence that the government eased restrictions just as summer set in, but a more likely motive was the urge to go out and soak up the heat. As June wore on, a short strip of Armenia Street in Mar Mikhaël found a new lease of nightlife, but it was a shallow revival. Everyone prepared to risk infection in the rooftop bars was already there by dark. Everyone else stayed away. No more midnight queues at street doors, no more meandering partygoers in the small hours, no more voices bantering in the lanes. At the bar frequented by hip alternative groups on our corner, a fight broke out one night and spilled onto the street. There were screams of abuse. Every night afterwards, business was dead.

Many Beirutis retreated to their ancestral mountain villages, where it was cooler. We seized the chance to spend some days in the north around the Qadisha Valley, a gorge that eats into a ring of mountains. The peace there was immense. Pink and red roses thronged in garden beds. Cracks in the canyon wall overflowed with creepers. In the cupped palm of the mountains, high above the canyon, were the Cedars of God, which are mentioned in The Epic of Gilgamesh and the Psalms. For the first time in years, we were enveloped in green shade. A cuckoo called from somewhere high in the branches. The giant trees huddled close together, barely stirring. Once inside the grove, it was difficult to find a way out. The sky had disappeared. The notion that this landscape diminished human strife occurred to me more than once.

Next day, we took a wrong turn and drove through a hilly stretch of back country, filled with orchards so lush they obscured the gorge below. Plenty, I thought. Then I looked again. No one was tending these orchards. Early fallen fruit was rotting. On a muddy lane we passed some women in ragged veils, leading thin, barefooted children. These orchards were abandoned. The landowners must have deemed them uneconomic. Perhaps they had forbidden their client farmers from harvesting the crop as some sort of penalty. At any rate, it was a scene of wasteful control. The family groups tiptoeing among the trees were Syrian refugees, who would probably have been assaulted and driven away had they been found picking fruit. Even through months of deepening poverty, these were the realities of life in Lebanon that East Beirut would not admit.

Back in that world, with the brief reopening of borders and the resumption of old business hours, the farewells began. I was a regular at a bar in Gemmayzeh called Aaliya’s, which was popular with expatriates. I would sit there for hours working or reading. The same people wandered in and out. Though you might not exchange a word, you would exchange a nod. The staff were friendly. The owners ran book groups and were generous with wine. It was at Aaliya’s that many expatriate friends chose to hold their farewell drinks. Journalists, United Nations staff, charity workers: they were leaving for an Australia where you understood that life was also growing harder. Lives were shrinking. Years of experience in aid or journalism might not lead anywhere.

At one of these farewells – the last, as it turned out – I talked with Mira, one of the staff of Aaliya’s. She told me she was moving to France to study theatre. This farewell was partly hers. I wished her luck and thanked her for her friendly presence over the past year and a half.

‘Now is the time to leave,’ she said. ‘Khàllas. [Enough.] Are you?’

I explained that I wasn’t.

‘Consider it. Everyone is.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah. Not just expats. We’re all thinking about it. Those who can are leaving. Those who can’t are struggling. Those who won’t are cooking up something bad.’

Compared to most new apartments in Gemmayzeh, our home was not large, but it did give us a sense of spaciousness. The ceilings were double our height and at the centre of the house the living and dining areas formed a single long room, like a white-walled art gallery. At each end were glass doors that reached from the floor to the ceiling and flooded the house with sunlight. From one end we looked out into a jeweller’s workshop, and further – over low rooftops, between two condominiums, and past a grain silo and a breakwater – toward the sea along the north coast. On a clear day we could see as far as Batroun, which meant we were looking at about a third of Lebanon’s coastline. On a rooftop between us and the sea, boys would play soccer. At the other end of the house, we overlooked a villa that had been beautifully restored, and the ruined shell of another that was boarded up but still had the delicate tracery of its pointed-arch window frames intact.

Such villas are everywhere in Beirut. Some stand in prominent positions on main streets. Most are hidden away up lanes or walled inside overgrown gardens, at the feet of buildings like ours. They belong to a different city, the capital of a sleepy Ottoman province that became a French Mandate protégé but retained a character all its own. The villas are generally square in shape with pyramid tile roofs, limestone walls, and high ceilings, with all rooms arranged around a large salon. Their most eloquent feature is the ‘triple arcade’, a triad of high windows in the salon façade, echoed by another triad of pillars and smaller picture windows near the ceiling, some way inside the room. The idea is that the paired triads usher sunlight into the house and connect the salon with the outside world. The effect is easeful and hospitable, an architectural expression of the greeting Ahlan wa sahlan (‘You are our kin, be at ease’) with which hosts unfailingly welcome visitors into any place that is theirs, be it a salon or a taxi. These houses once dotted every hill on the Beirut peninsula, and were not exclusively the homes of the rich as most are today. Even early high-rises from the first half of the last century adhered to the ‘rule of three’, incorporating triple arcades on every floor, even though the apartments were much smaller than the villas. Living in homes that held less light did not mean losing the will to let it in.

The words Ahlan wa sahlan were spoken to us every day, in the most ordinary circumstances. It seemed effortless but never automatic. We learned that foreigners like ourselves were the only class of people to whom the phrase was spoken without strain. In each home, guesthouse, restaurant, office, or shop that we entered, we realised how privileged we were when hosts or owners heaped welcomes on us. They rarely met a stranger to whom they could not offer unreserved kindness. We saw how often the Lebanese recoil from welcoming or even speaking well of one another. As often as people welcomed us, they apologised for the way their country had deteriorated while we were living there.

The lady who owned a secluded guesthouse in the rocky hinterland of Batroun, a silent region of woods and vineyards, checked tears as she showed us around the house (‘Look! Look at how the light comes in!’), swallowed several times as she apologised for a year of political turmoil and power outages, then stopped speaking entirely. She stood beside us, quivering. At last, she said through set teeth, ‘The revolution … It is ours. We must punish them. Punish them all. Hang them.’

Beneath the kindness there was shame. Shame for oneself, for one’s country. Shame on others. We came to recognise it as a common feeling, though not one that created community. In Lebanon, the idea of the private sanctuary creates not refuges but enclaves, isolating people from one another.

There was enmity between sects before the civil war, which not only hardened it but beggared the will to forgive. Battles from street to street, shootings on buses, car bombings, massacres in the Palestinian camps at Sabra and Shatila south of Beirut – the bloodshed was not a side effect of military action. It was sheer rage and sadism.

The war is supposed to have ended in 1990. The truth is it only became invisible. The surviving militias and their political wings reoccupied and reactivated the apparatus of the state. Restoration work began. To all appearances, Lebanon was seeking to remake itself as a democracy with an open economy. Enough people were fooled for investment to flow. Leading clans in each sect grew rich.

Lebanon today is a mafia state. Parties siphon off revenue for a sectarian constituency – Shi’a Muslim, Sunni Muslim, Maronite, Orthodox, Druze – while staging a caricature of free politics. Citizens who are not party loyalists are corralled into the black market and must buy their way through life. Paying tips is routine when seeking government services. To maintain electricity, citizens pay cartels for access to local generators (the national grid fails for hours each day). Basic transactions are saturated with the silent demands of power struggles. The Shi’a party Hezbollah is the only political force still known to be armed, but private firearms are common. Handguns stick out of young men’s pockets as they tinker with their scooters. People shoot colourful tracer fire into the air from AK-47s at midnight on New Year’s Eve.

The mafias derive a veneer of legitimacy from the state’s supreme laws. Uniquely, the constitution allocates power according to religion. The president must be a Christian, the prime minister a Sunni, the speaker of parliament a Shi’a, and so on down the ranks, to the point that a deputy manager of a sub-department must be Orthodox and their chief assistant Armenian. Designed to look harmonious, the arrangement entrenches and foments barely repressed loathing and contempt.

My doctor spent most of his spare time in a valley in the Chouf region south of Beirut, the ancestral home of the Druze and some Christians. When I told him my wife and I had spent a weekend in the ancient city of Tyre, he asked me what it was like. Tyre is less than an hour’s drive from the Chouf, but in all his life my doctor had never visited it because it is a mostly Muslim town.

Such ingrained disgust leaves Lebanon crippled, but its official functions are too convenient for the political class to change. Governments fall amid threats of revenge, but caretaker arrangements can last for years. As long as revenue keeps moving, elections are a waste of time. Private wealth outstrips national GDP by a factor of eight to one. Those who have wealth flaunt it. The roar of traffic around Beirut’s streets comes from the engines of Ferraris and McLarens, as much as from wheezing dump-trucks or taxis. Downtown Beirut is a jewel-box of designer shopfronts and hotels.

In 2019, the credit ran out. Banks began calling in debts that could never be repaid. Indeed, the banks were in debt to one another. Within months, the collapse of thirty years of counterfeit normalcy was total. Poverty came to more than half the country. In October that year, a spontaneous revolution – unlike anything in Lebanese history in its mood of joyful, secular, pan-sectarian, pan-generational hope – forced the government to resign. Our apartment echoed with the sound of millions of voices, raised as one in Martyrs’ Square and in the streets around our Gemmayzeh house, chanting the single word ‘revolution’ – ‘Thow-rà! Thow-rà!’ – all night, mixed with the banging of tear gas canisters and Molotov cocktails, the revving and ramming of cars, the crash of glass and doors being smashed in. But the revolution failed to break apart the system beneath. Leaderless, inchoate, and without a plan, the revolution itself was broken. As winter came on, government security forces beat and fired tear gas at the demonstrators from the front, while anonymous thugs rode motorcycles into the crowds from the rear, setting their banners and tent settlements on fire. These gangs were creatures of the political class. Night after night, the crowds diminished, as the passionate millions who had filled the streets began to stay at home. By Christmas, as the sun set at 4pm behind storm clouds, Beirut was deserted. The state stood, leaning on its crooked institutions.

Among these is Beirut’s port, a symbol of mysterious wealth and the most heavily defended place during the revolution. Lebanon imports eighty per cent of its goods and materials: grain, vegetables, steel, phones, respirators, Maseratis. Beirut’s port is the only one capable of handling the volume of cargo that allows the country to function. Its workings depend on consensus between rival parties, a mutual choke-hold. There were constant rumours – or open secrets, depending on your source – that Hezbollah kept a cache of weapons and explosives at the port, and that if war broke out it would be the first place the Israelis carpet-bombed. The port was unscathed by the revolution. As the Christmas storms rained themselves out, the only thing we saw moving from our windows were the ships, sidling in and out on the grey sea.

Through it all, there were the villas. The windows of some glowed with warm light in the evenings. Others were decorated with national flags and hung with banners bearing slogans (‘Resign. All of you means all of you.’ ‘Thowra.’ ‘Eat the rich.’ ‘Sure, sex is great, but have you ever fucked the system?’). Still other villas – as many as have been restored – stood dark, deserted, blown open, limestone walls covered in graffiti and cratered with bullet holes. That winter, as every winter, a few of them collapsed in the heavy rain.

In Warehouse Twelve at the port – across the road from the motor records office, where I once spent days registering our car – sat a stockpile of nearly three thousand tons of ammonium nitrate, of a refined grade used for fertiliser and explosives. For years, no one had moved it, because no one had agreed on how to make money from moving it. The same warehouse stored confiscated fireworks and drums of cooking oil. Not long before 6pm on 4 August 2020, possibly because someone was trying to weld shut a hole in the back wall, the fireworks ignited.

My wife had had a long day preparing the embassy for a new lockdown that was to commence that evening. She left work exhausted at about twenty to six and drove through heavy traffic to Achrafieh to deliver personal mail to a colleague and friend who was sick at home. Just after six, she drove the few minutes down the hill to our home. I had spent the day working at my desk, beside a window facing the port. When my wife arrived, I greeted her in the hallway. We opened our mail in the kitchen, which also had large windows facing the port. Mail was always a treat: it came once a week. Chatting, we wandered into our bedroom on the other side of the house, where our cat lavished affection on my wife and ignored me, as usual.

In the middle of our conversation, the middle of a sentence, there came an immense, shuddering boom from somewhere not too distant. We felt tremors beneath our feet. From our bedroom window we could see nothing unusual. We looked at each other. That, we knew, was an explosion. My wife was deputy ambassador. It was her job to find out what such an event could mean. She did not have her phone on her: she had left it in the kitchen. She walked quickly through the house to fetch it. I followed. Our path took us past the floor-to-ceiling windows that looked towards the sea. My wife reached the kitchen and picked up her phone. I was crossing the threshold, out of the dining area, when the entire building rocked. The floor bounced beneath us. My wife shouted, ‘Get down! Get out!’

A shadow, like a bird crossing the sun, came rushing at our windows. At one blow, with a surge of thunder, the tall windows of the long gallery crashed in and a wall of air punched its way through the middle of the house like an express train howling down a tunnel. I never completed the final stride into the kitchen. As the blast tore into the house, it sent a piece of glass or metal flying into the last part of me that had not crossed the kitchen threshold: my exposed right heel. I was barefoot. The gash spat blood in all directions. My step turned into a twisted leap, but I had no time to experience pain. I was blown into the kitchen and up against the pantry cupboard. Behind me, reams of glass, metal, huge splinters of wood, and other debris were flying in. With the tail of my eye, I saw the dining table, chairs, sideboard, and rug in the room I had just left being lifted up and hurled down the long gallery, as paintings were prised off the walls, canvas billowing like paper. White gyprock partitions were torn down. I was shoved against the cupboard as if by strong hands. Hollering at the ceiling with my arms raised above my head, my wife crouching between the kitchen door and the pantry as boxes of glassware fell on her, this instant drew itself out as long as an hour of lockdown, and somehow I found a chance to think: We have been hit, a hurricane has burst into our house, this is what it is like to be torn apart and thrown away, any second the floor will fold in and the building will split apart, and we will give way with it, there will only be this heaving and crashing and thundering until everything ends.

Next thing, the rush of air one way stopped pressing on us, and there was a shock the other way, followed by the sounds of heavy, solid objects cracking – our heavy wooden doors were being punched to pieces – a force that I felt right through the walls and floor and my own chest, like cannon shots. The blast had flown straight through our place and left in its wake a violent backdraft.

The stranglehold released our bodies. We could hear the blast charging on through the city, a single wave, which even then we recognised as the result of a gigantic explosion that had followed the first ambiguous noise.

Dust, paper, glass particles, smoke, fine ash, and chunks of plaster were settling around us. We were panting, turned towards each other, grey and caked all over, shaking with panic, looking into each other’s wide-eyed faces – and alive.

We seized each other, patted each other down. Staggered out of the kitchen into the hallway. Front door blown in half. Lift ejected from its shaft on to the landing. Alarms screaming. My hearing was dampened. My wife’s voice reached me, but her words were muffled. There was a pungent, rotten smell. Something stung our eyes. Vapour and dust were mingling in the air. I began to see that ceilings and walls were ripped open throughout the house. Furniture smashed in piles.

My wife began frantically calling someone on her phone – someone in her chain of emergency contacts. She was already instinctively following protocol, activating the embassy’s response and checking on colleagues, not least the friend she had just left. For the next four days she worked and did not sleep.

I forced my way through sagging door-frames to get into the room where our safe was, to retrieve our passports and the ever-ready survival kits so that we could get out. Still barefoot, I picked my way over floors thick with broken glass to reach my study, where my shoes were. I had to clamber over heaps of fallen plywood. Our bedroom door had been blown into the study, where it had sliced through books and shattered the window beside my desk.

The cat had vanished.

With something on my feet at last, I staggered back into the gallery. The windows at the far end had broken inwards, but between their twisted steel frames and the flayed blinds, I could see that the tiles had been blown clean off the roof of the restored villa opposite, leaving a perfect pyramid skeleton. The boarded-up ruin had caved in.

I peered out of the gallery’s toothless mouth towards the port and the sea. The glass in the jeweller’s windows was punched into crude unbroken shapes. The condominiums to the left and right looked as if they had been torn open. Their innards dangled from edges. The lower rooftops where the boys had played were scattered with concrete and lengths of black steel. The grain silo, just visible through thick orange smoke, was reduced to scraps.

Even through the dampened hum of my hearing, a sound reached me that I thought was the old snarl of traffic. Then it began to separate, first into the crash of failing structures, then into sirens and screams. Voices shrieked through the air from high up and suddenly ceased. People were falling. Others from down in the hollow of Gemmayzeh Street wailed in anguish. Most of what they said I could not comprehend, but words like ‘bomb’, ‘attack’, ‘help’, and ‘get away’ did reach me. My wife later told me that some of the voices had shrieked in Arabic, ‘It is the end.’

Then I noticed the red cloud that was towering into the sky over our half of the city, like a giant enraged creature, poised to stamp its other foot.

Author’s apartment following the explosion in Beirut (photograph supplied by the author)

The doctor who treated me said that whatever cut my heel had missed severing my Achilles tendon by millimetres. I had large pieces of glass in the soles of both feet. I limped for weeks until the last piece emerged.

Spared by less than a second from being shot through and mown down, I felt half a ghost. Even the discovery that our cat had survived, unhurt, could not dispel the numbness inside me.

In the days that followed, I watched eyewitness footage over and over. It showed a white sphere of ultra-compressed air expanding at about the speed of sound. There went our life, the old skyline, the old way objects stood. There went two hundred dead. Had it not been for the new lockdown, Gemmayzeh would have been even busier that summer evening.

It was from this footage, too, that I learned of the thick plume of smoke that had been rising from the port before the blast was triggered. While I had been at my desk, the fire had been out of sight behind another building. Just out of my sightline, it must have burned for at least an hour.

I could not reconcile the vision of a perfect sphere with the tearing apart of our neighbourhood. Drifts of broken glass. Torn lumps of brickwork. Upturned furniture in the street. Houses crumpled like stacked plates. Blood smears. The lanes outside our place teeming with strangers, some frantic to reach somewhere, others milling, looking at nothing. Vacant, automatic eyes.

Friends in Achrafieh and Gemmayzeh lost their homes, were buried under walls and scarred by flying glass, but survived. Some cannot remember what happened. I do remember it all and I will to the end. It was a rehearsal for what the end is like. The way it enters without knocking. The way it has come to generations of Lebanese who did not live past the shock and thunder and swallowing darkness of past explosions. Who did not have our luck, to stand where the whirlwinds of a blast wave happened to find a still centre.

My wife and I had never set foot in Lebanon before we moved there. We have no family history connected with it. Though we were prepared to grow to love the country, and did, we ran our lives on the belief that we should stay detached from it, not partaking in its conflicts, reserving ourselves for our private world. That was where Lebanon found us. In our home, as in every home, it blew away the pretence of sanctuary.

This essay won the 2021 Calibre Essay Prize. The Calibre Essay Prize is worth $7,500, of which the winner receives $5,000, and the runner-up receives $2,500. The Calibre Essay Prize was established in 2007 and it is one of the world’s leading prizes for a new non-fiction essay. We gratefully acknowledge the long-standing support of Colin Golvan AM QC, Peter McLennan, and Mary-Ruth Sindrey.