Documentary : In Lebanon, a Season of Weddings and Wistful Homecomings : Despite celebrations, the Lebanese are less than optimistic about the future in their war-torn homeland, a visitor finds.

BEIRUT —  The dancing guests hoisted the newlyweds onto their shoulders and for a happy moment the pool-side party against the sparkling lights of Jounieh Bay recaptured the spirit of old Beirut.

Mixed groups of Muslims, Christians and foreigners speaking English, French and the singsong cadences of Lebanese Arabic stood on the warm, humid seaside terrace, laughing at a steady flow of puns and repartee.

We were among guests who had converged from many points of the globe for one of the many weddings in Lebanon’s great matrimonial summer of 1991.

“One Cabinet minister we invited had gotten 157 invitations for August alone,” said the bridegroom, Michael Kuli, amid the traditional ululations. “We have nearly 30 guests just at home, and we’ve been partying for over a week.”

The marriages may suggest a sense that the 16-year Lebanese civil war is nearly over. But Lebanese themselves did not seem optimistic that their nation could reunite so easily, or bounce back as the prosperous Middle East hub it once was.

Kuli and his new wife, Samia Nakhoul, would like to leave despite their successful journalistic careers. So would many other Lebanese, shattered by the war and trusting little in a peace enforced by Syrian army garrisons.

A reported 100,000 Lebanese who fled during the war are said to have flocked back this summer to see if this small Mediterranean state of 3 million people was ripe for return or investment. Most, it seems, were disappointed.

“This place is terrible. I could never live here again,” said Gus Nakhoul of Los Angeles, brother of the bride, on his first trip to Beirut since the start of the war.

I was also going back to “sniff the air,” as the Lebanese say, to test the truth of my friends’ assurances that one could now safely relive the magical moments I enjoyed as a foreign correspondent there in the early 1980s.

If mortal danger gave zest to life then, it did not now. I was taken aback by the brief kidnaping of a foreigner while we were there, the pervading presence of heavily armed soldiers and even the old physical presence of the Green Line dividing Christian East and Muslim West Beirut.

“That’s a nice radio you have there,” said a Syrian soldier, pushing his helmet into our car amid the nighttime blackness of the shattered buildings. “Yes, but it’s the only one I’ve got,” I pleaded. He let us go, but it was a reminder that strong nerves are still needed to live in Beirut.

Above all, I was surprised at the people. At best, a wry pessimism seemed to have replaced the once-irrepressible optimism of the Lebanese.

The bride’s sister, Sola, arriving from Cyprus, put it this way: “I don’t like it when I come back. It’s more rotten each time. There is no friendship anymore. People are just out to grab everything they can before going themselves.”

Would nobody stay? Did no one share the conviction of the customs agent who, after relieving us of a $40 bribe, waved us into Lebanon with a tray of luscious local fruit, cardamom-flavored coffee and the words, “Everything here is the best?”

True, a few fancy boutiques still sold the latest silk fashions from Europe and America. Nightclubs still vibrated until dawn, a few water-skiers crisscrossed the Mediterranean bays and lithe bodies sunbathed at the St. Georges Hotel pool, a flashy spot amid the wreckage of the old hotel district.

And everywhere, even on bullet-pocked walls, on wrecked cars and even the sides of checkpoint sentry boxes, posters of singers have replaced those of militia leaders and martyrs of the fighting.

But this is only a facade. The roads are tattered, the infrastructure a disaster and telephones so unreliable that the Kulis organized most of their wedding in person, driving back and forth for hours to make arrangements rather than face the frustration of fruitless dialing.

Once-lovely old Lebanese stone houses are bullet-pocked, cracked and crumbling. The few buildings of the rich stand in isolated oases of wealth, an endangered species needing high defensive walls.

Even the cars, once the symbol of wealth, status and independence here, are now aging models and badly maintained. Once-slick Lebanese driving has turned aggressive. Quite a few motorists do not even bother to display license plates.

Repairs to buildings tattered by bullets and shells during the war have barely started, and tales of corruption are poisoning key projects like the rebuilding of downtown Beirut along the Green Line.

Muslims crossed over without problem to attend the Christian wedding, part of an inter-communal tourism unprecedented in previous lulls in the civil war. Some Lebanese travel agencies even organize tours to long-inaccessible parts of their own country. But it does not seem to be a source of great comfort.

“I went for the first time in 17 years to (Muslim) West Beirut, where I used to work in the hotel district. But it was all destroyed, finished,” said Tony, a 47-year-old hotel receptionist.

“During the war I had to sell all my land just to get my children educated,” he said. “I have nothing left now, except my job. For the first time, we have really decided that when we have the money, we just want to leave.”

Paul Kuli, father of the bridegroom and leader of Lebanon’s small Syriac Orthodox community, said 20,000 of his co-religionists had gone abroad during the war and that he could offer nothing to persuade those remaining to stay.

Indeed, he predicted, the state created by France partly to be the home of the Middle East’s Maronite, Greek Catholic, Syriac and other Christians might have none left in 50 years’ time.

The guests at the wedding seemed to constitute a society not in transition to peace, but in transit abroad.

Palestinian Christians talked of fixing papers in Cyprus to return to Kuwait; Maronite Christians spoke of U.S. green cards and Syriacs of going to Canada, a century after the Ottoman Turks pushed them out of their Anatolian hometowns and into Syria and Lebanon.

“Loyalty to the Oath” is the caption for hundreds of posters around Lebanon praising the newly strengthened Lebanese army. But according to Kuli, the national spirit is ailing and politics is about greed.

“Every person and political leader should have a level below which they cannot descend before the damage done to the state is damage to him as well,” he said. “We’ve gone far beyond that danger point and have not turned back.”