In “The Chronicles of Narnia,” the four Pevensie children are evacuated from London during the Blitz and sent to stay with an elderly professor in a house in the countryside. Last Wednesday evening, in an old Ottoman villa in West Beirut, Skandar Keynes, the fourteen-year-old actor who played Edmund Pevensie in last year’s film of “Narnia,” his mother, Zelfa, and his grandfather, Cecil Hourani, were packing their things and getting ready to evacuate. Two days before the Israeli attacks on Hezbollah began, on July 12th, they had arrived from Britain for their annual summer holiday in Lebanon, and had found themselves stranded there along with thousands of other foreign tourists. They had, in fact, been about to leave Beirut for the Hourani ancestral home in the ancient town of Marjeyoun, near the frontier with Israel. Marjeyoun is very close to the current fighting, and before being taken over by Hezbollah it had been the longtime headquarters of the Christian militia. Except for 2004, when Skandar was filming “Narnia” and the family decamped with him to the set in New Zealand, he has spent every summer of his life there.
Outside the walls of the villa, closely packed modern tower blocks rose all around. It is a noisome neighborhood of narrow streets jammed with people, scooters, and men pushing carts. Quite a few women wear head scarves. On a building in the next block a large banner in support of Sheikh Nasrallah could be seen. A half an hour before they were due to leave Beirut, Zelfa packed the car with their belongings, and Cecil waited by the front door, clearly edgy about the night journey ahead. Skandar chatted in the living room, a place of high timbered ceilings and flaking plaster, adorned with bronze pots and Chinese painted-silk panels of peacocks.
Skandar, a slim, handsome boy with tousled dark hair, was wearing a “Scarface” T-shirt over baggy shorts and blue canvas Vans. He said he had been looking forward to Marjeyoun, where he planned to spend his days swimming and reading. He had brought along his guitar, and hoped to catch up on some movies. “I don’t turn fifteen until September, and back in England I can only go to under-fifteens, which is frustrating,” he said. “Here in Lebanon they don’t care about age limits, and I can see any movies I like.” The day after Beirut’s airport was bombed, he’d gone to the cinema in Beirut where the new “Pirates of the Caribbean” was supposed to première; the theatre owners had turned him away, explaining that they hadn’t been able to fly in the reel. He added that he was a big fan of Johnny Depp. “He’s the man,” he said.
[Read the Rest at The New Yorker]
