Shards from a Shattered Mosaic

As the fighting of recent weeks smashed the complex mosaic of Lebanese life, reporters struggled to piece together the meaning of what was happening. But the depth of the country's despondency and disintegration sometimes emerged most clearly from isolated incidents. TIME correspondents sent these diverse vignettes:

A French visitor was recently invited to lunch with a well-educated Beirut merchant at his home, which was in an embattled Christian neighborhood. The visitor was thus not too surprised to see several Russian-made AK-47 automatic rifles--the most common weapon on both sides--stacked in a corner of the dining room. Lunch was a pleasant affair, filled with interesting conversation; when it was over the host invited his guest to view the city from his roof. There sat a mortar, pointed in the general direction of the battle lines of the day. As the Frenchman watched in shock, the merchant dropped three quick rounds down the tube. What was he shooting at? "Ah, those Moslems," said the man, with a casual wave of his hand.

Despite the fact that the renowned St. Georges Hotel has had only a handful of guests for the past several weeks, its chef hewed to his cordon bleu standards to the last. In the restaurant, thoughtfully shifted back into the most protected area of the hotel because of snipers, service and cuisine merited the usual three stars. Scampi, saumon fume, salade Nic,oise--almost the full menu was available. On Monday U.S. Ambassador G. McMurtrie Godley was at one table, Christian Moderate Leader Ramond Edde near by at another. Shortly after 3, as Edde was finishing his coffee, an aide arrived to tell him the hotel had been taken over by a bunch of nervous and heavily armed youths from a right-wing Christian militia unit. Edde and most of the remaining diners left promptly. Two days later, worried by the fluid situation, the hotel staff prudently put some of the hotel's best white sheets out the window of the once proud St. Georges.

The schizophrenia of the city was such that the main headline of a newspaper one day read THE WORST is OVER, while a story on the same page warned that "security deteriorates further."

In a feeble attempt at sophisticated, hard-edged humor, the local English-language weekly Monday Morning recently ran a fashion spread on the "military" look, showing models with rifles under the headline THE APPROPRIATE LOOK. Last week the magazine outdid itself with two new fashion tips: the "refuse romper," platform shoes "designed to keep pedestrians from submerging in garbage heaps"; and the "dross dress," festooned with refuse so that the wearer can "evade snipers by melting into any garbage heap or, in the unlikely event that no such heap is immediately available, by lying down anywhere and becoming a garbage heap."

Though a rescue convoy tried to shuttle trapped civilians to safety, there was no sure source of help. The Chicago Tribune's Philip Caputo, badly wounded in both feet by a leftist Moslem sentry who decided to practice his marksmanship after the reporter had been passed through a roadblock and was walking away, was stranded in the embattled Trad hospital. Finally John Andres, a Briton working for NBCTV, made his way to the hospital and called a U.S. Marine Corps colonel, who borrowed the American ambassador's $62,000 armored limousine. Caputo, an ex-Marine who served in Viet Nam, was hustled out of the hospital in a wheelchair and eventually evacuated by air to West Germany.

Cynics have labeled Lebanon's fighting the "identity-card war." Reason: hundreds of people have been killed merely because their identity cards revealed that they were of the faith opposite to that of the men who happened to stop them on the road. Last week a group called the Front for National Salvation surfaced in Beirut, dedicated to the deliberate mutilation of the section of the card denoting a person's religion. In two days, more than 500 Lebanese joined in rallies to scratch out their religious affiliation.

Staring into his drink at Gerofinikas, one of the best restaurants in Athens, a displaced General Electric executive said gloomily, "The show is over, and Athens has become the new star." For decades Beirut had been a magnet for banks and big corporations, a city that took pride and profit in the swarms of glittery limousines that kept its avenues constantly clogged, the fashionable boutiques, the expensive nightclubs and casinos, the whole ambience of opulence and sin. But no one wants to invest or play in a battlefield. For weeks now a full-scale exodus has been under way, and many U.S., British, French, German and Japanese firms are relocating in Athens, an hour from Beirut by air. Most of the transplanted businessmen and their families were saddened by the abrupt leave-taking and by the swift decay of a once vibrant city. But inevitably not all of them were so sentimental. "It's almost like home," said an obviously contented sheik, newly of Athens. "The bouzouki music, the food. You might almost say the Greeks are Arabs wearing pants."

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