Chapter SevenBeirut simmered like a hot brew of clashing ideas. But instead of feeling lost and alone, Zain loved the place. She had found her intellectual home. Nor did she see herself as a fugitive or a refugee, but as a citizen in her own country. Oddly, the Lebanese had a way of being more welcoming to people from elsewhere than they were to each other!
There were arguments, of course, over who was the true patriot—the Arab nationalist? The unionist? The isolationist? But the only weapon anybody pulled on his interlocutor was a pen. Accusations would fly, but with a kind of reserve, and via a kind of polite subterfuge. Whenever people met, they exchanged kisses on the cheek, and they were known for doing pendulum swings between the poles of intellectual attraction and its countless, m
