The World: 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 fumé, salade Niçoise—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."