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The downtown was perfect except that it was a lie, a shiny facade slapped over a war that had evaporated but never ended, questions that nobody asked, a history too contentious to be taught in school. A new generation was coming of age in a segregated country, in neighborhoods cleansed by their parents’ religious slaughters. The warlords, militia leaders, engineers of kidnappings and torture—those men still ran the country. The armies of Shiites, Christians, and Druze had tucked away their guns and shrunk themselves down to political parties. None of the reasons for fighting had been discussed or resolved or excised. Lebanon had decided to live as if it were all a bad dream, a false thing that could never happen again, as if they had not torn themselves into a thousand pieces, as if they had not spent fifteen years slaughtering one another. Syria had sent in soldiers and intelligence agents after the war, passed out power among the different communities, and squelched dissent. The blank architecture was the face of collective amnesia. Lebanese moved through that city and the war breathed on their necks but nobody talked about it.

I’d ask: Aren’t you afraid you will have more violence? Because it doesn’t seem like anything is resolved.

They all said no. Oh no, never! The Lebanese have learned their lesson. The war was not really our war, not of us. It was America and Israel and Syria and Iran, meddling from outside. Wars take money, and we can’t afford another war. We are too tired to fight. This new generation will be better. War is impossible.

Those were the stories they told themselves in the city built on garbage.

Hariri’s death spun the city like a top, through days that melted into night and then day again, dizzy and sleepless with fever. Rich housewives and students cutting classes and old hardened fighters marched down into the streets by the thousands, the tens of thousands, and on big demonstration days, the hundreds of thousands. They hid away their militia flags and bought Lebanese flags instead. Suddenly patriotism was fashionable and party politics were gauche—or so the party leaders quietly instructed their flocks.

They took over Martyrs’ Square, the one downtown spot left battle scarred, where bullet holes still showed on the central statue of triumphant gods and fallen fighters. Around the statue stretched vacant lots where large, unanswered questions lurked. It was into that awkward, gaping space that demonstrators surged. The shrine to the civil war would be the rallying ground for a new Lebanon. They pitched tents, threw up a stage and a booming sound system, and announced that they would stay until the Syrians were out of the country.

Syria out

We hate you

Fuck Syria

The crowd melted, the crowd morphed. It was a picnic, a rave, a campfire, a rock concert, a party of Christians, Sunni Muslims, and Druze that rolled through days and nights. A man dressed as a grim reaper carried a coffin through the crowd. Turn around and you saw college girls with the Lebanese flag painted on their faces. The old snipers and guerrillas who had become taxi drivers and shop owners stood quietly with hands in their pockets and unknowable expressions on their faces, roaming the encampments with guns in their pants. The darkness came down from the hills and skimmed over the sea to the sky, and footlights shone from the grass. The girls wore skin-tight jeans and knee-high boots. Babies crawled at their feet. Somebody blew a harmonica. Music throbbed from the speakers, big and sweeping, as if some bygone army were marching off to war. The flag wavers worked in shifts. There was a joke that floated around Lebanon that year, as winter made its long descent into spring. It started as a cartoon, I think: A Filipina maid stands alongside the diamond-draped housewife who imported her as slave labor. The housemaid carries a sign: “Madame says, ‘Syria out!’”

The young people were giddy with it all. The mingling of Christians and Muslims gave them the idea that