Jasmine and Fire Read online

  It took some years before I realized that, no matter how much time kept going by, I could never quite shake the sense that something was off inside. And that, despite my best efforts, I couldn’t figure out how to feel at home again anywhere.

  But what did home mean anyway? What was I looking for, especially as time went on and my life in Beirut disappeared deeper into the past? Was it a less uneasy fit with the world around me? Or some other nebulous feeling I craved but still couldn’t name?

  Whatever it was, I had a hunch that at “home,” I wouldn’t always need to explain myself, my name, my culture, my past—even if the questions were often friendly. Or even if no one was asking me to explain anything, I wouldn’t be wondering quietly if they looked at me a little differently or suspiciously. I wouldn’t always be the one with the mysterious, interesting background. Interesting could get oppressive, especially when the part of the world I came from remained endlessly complicated and messy, and its people, let’s be honest, not always so well loved worldwide.

  But another question nagged at me, too: Was I just being a wimp about this outsider business? After all, millions of people on earth have left home, kept a foot in two different cultures, and managed to live their lives well enough, balancing the two halves of their world. No such level-headed solutions for me, apparently. As the years have gone by, I’ve had trouble switching off a certain split-screen vision: If the United States and Lebanon are two parallel universes, two possible and potentially viable places for me to call home and play out my life in, was I choosing and living in the right one? Even though I’d come a long way by now from the shy new foreign girl hiding in the outfield during kickball games, and had built a compelling life in New York, I couldn’t stop wrestling with the questions: Should I stay, or should I try once more to live out my life in Lebanon? Could I, after so many years, ever really go back, ever find “home” there again?

  I could name plenty of reasons not to move back. Despite my fond memories, the place I once called home had come to feel increasingly distant over the years, foreign even. I wondered if, since we left, Lebanon had gone through profound changes that I couldn’t tap in to just by passing through on my occasional visits. Surely it couldn’t be the same place, after the long and punishing war, and after millions of Lebanese had escaped to safer havens all over the world, many thousands returning years later with new ideas and ventures. Obviously I, too, had changed and grown in the decades since I left. And now that I had built momentum in my journalism career in New York, I wasn’t sure packing up and leaving was a brilliant idea. Not to mention that Lebanon’s political situation had never fully stabilized after the war and was once again looking shaky.

  And then there was the small matter of my love life. I’d recently restarted a romance in New York with a guy named Richard, an on-again off-again flame. I couldn’t tell if the relationship was going anywhere this time, but I did know I liked him a lot. We’d first met a few summers ago through mutual friends, and I was attracted to him from the start—his warmth and quick wit, his dark blue eyes and floppy brown hair, his hilarious impersonations. He’d pursued me hard when we initially met that summer, then gotten cold feet a few months later. We soon got back together, but I broke things off myself weeks later, convinced he was still just playing around. Fast-forward a few years, and we’d found our way back to dating again, somewhat casually, over the past months, just as my Beirut plans were beginning to take shape. By that point I had already promised myself I’d commit to one exploratory year in Beirut, for starters, and had begun putting the word out for a subletter for my Manhattan apartment.

  At one point, I did ponder canceling my Beirut move altogether. The summer weeks before I left New York were turning out to be hauntingly romantic, with lots of beach weekends with Richard, and nights cooking and watching movies, opting to stay in, just the two of us, instead of going out. But conversations about our future would invariably go in circles. Richard seemed sad that I was leaving, but when I’d ask whether he thought our relationship had a shot at surviving, he’d sound confused or defensive. “How should I know! You’re the one who’s leaving! I don’t want you to leave!” A couple of weeks before my move, I asked him, “Should we make a point to stay together when I leave, or just see what happens?” He didn’t know. Neither did I, truth be told; our history so far didn’t necessarily inspire much confidence. Our relationship would either make it through my Beirut year or it wouldn’t. But I did know this at least: my “home” question wasn’t going anywhere.

  However the Beirut move turned out, I knew I’d miss my New York life, at least at first. The city felt more right to me than anywhere I’d lived or visited since Beirut. I had a solid group of friends there, and I had plans nearly every night of the week. I was always meeting fascinating new people in my work and through friends, and I loved traveling for assignments or working on my freelance writing and editing projects at cafés and libraries all over town. New York’s pulsing street life kept me alert, and I never got bored.

  But even there, that old feeling of being an outsider would creep in again, sometimes in subtle ways or for trivial-seeming reasons. I sometimes suspected my persistent misfit anxieties were more about being human than about being far from home, whatever home even meant at this point. Still, I couldn’t begin to know until I’d tried to answer my own questions. Would Beirut feel easier somehow, more right? In Lebanon, would my anxieties about never being fully an insider, about seeming out of my element, finally vanish, and I’d slide into my surroundings the way a river flows into the ocean? Naturally, fluidly—unquestioned and unquestioning.

  “Wow, it’s so neat that you’re doing this now,” an acquaintance I ran into at a party in New York said to me the week before I left. “People usually try moving abroad in their twenties.”

  “Er, thanks?”

  I guess she meant well, but I felt patronized. I inched away from her, but later that night the subject came up again. This time a friend’s date drunkenly confessed to me that she still cries over the house in Maine where she spent childhood summers with her grandparents, who’d sold the place years ago.

  “That was the only place that ever really felt like home to me. I wanted to be there all the time. Now it’s gone.”

  At other parties that summer, whenever my Beirut plan came up in conversation, people would chime in with stories about a long-abandoned city they still longed for, or a beloved house they’d lost, or a onetime vacation to a place that had unexpectedly felt like home in a way that caught them by surprise.

  As I got ready to leave for Beirut, I tried to prepare myself to be sorely disappointed. I kept thinking about how the late Palestinian intellectual and Columbia University literature professor Edward Said, who was married to my mom’s first cousin Mariam Cortas—and whose work I profoundly respect—had resigned himself to always feeling exiled. He’d grown up with Palestinian parents who’d lost their home in Jerusalem and had shuttled the family between Egypt and Lebanon, before sending the young Edward to boarding school in the States. Before Said passed away in 2003, he published a memoir, Out of Place, where he concluded, “I’m so resolutely against having this tremendous sense of where you belong. It’s overrated.”

  That may be so, but it sounded to me, with all due respect, like sour grapes; since you don’t quite know where you belong, you decide belonging is overrated. I wasn’t ready to trash the whole concept yet. Or before I could reject the idea of belonging, which sounded to me like another way of saying “home,” I needed to see if I could find home again, and feel at peace—see if I could finally, you might say, live up to my name.

  Of course, it would be ironic if it turned out my true home was still Beirut—arguably the least peaceful place on earth.

  AUGUST

  I’m sitting on my suitcase, trying to force it shut so I can zip it; I leave for Beirut later today, and right now I’m grateful for these distracting last-minute tasks. If I keep dwelling on my decision too much
, I’m afraid I’ll chicken out and call off the car service to the airport. But as drastic as the big move feels to me right now, in my last hours in New York, I’m reminding myself that it’s not such a crazy idea, at least from a logistical standpoint. It shouldn’t really affect my work too much: I’ve been a freelance writer and editor for a couple of years now, having decided to quit corporate magazine life after nearly a decade and a half in the industry, to make time for well-paying freelance projects I’d been offered, and to be able to travel for long stretches without giving up a paycheck. I could do the vast majority of assignments from Beirut just as easily as from New York. And at least I don’t have to worry about finding a place to live, since my parents have held on to our Beirut apartment all these years, although they’ve continued living most of the year in Houston.

  Though two of the normally pain-in-the-butt logistics of a move—the job, the house—are thankfully not an issue, the should-I-shouldn’t-I’s are still running through my head, even now at the last minute. For weeks I’ve been rehearsing every scenario that might play out in Beirut, knowing I’m probably leaving out all the actual, unpredictable scenarios that will in fact unfold. I’ve been lying in bed for hours night after night, rocked by waves of insomnia and sadness and excitement and fear.

  But there’s no more time to fret. The subletter for my New York apartment moves in tonight, and I still need to finish packing and speed out the door. It’s early morning, and Richard has just woken up; he stayed over last night to say goodbye. But something ominous is already happening on my last day in New York: right now there’s no running water in my apartment or, it turns out, in the entire building. Richard and I both need to shower, but all the faucets in my apartment are bone dry.

  Having the water in my modern downtown Manhattan building vanish is just too fitting for a morning when I’m leaving for Beirut, land of constant electrical and water-pipe breakdowns. This must be a giant cosmic joke, or maybe someone-up-there is gently easing me into Beirut life before I even arrive. But humor aside, this sucks. I can’t go on two back-to-back international flights, a twenty-hour journey in total, without a shower. I go into the bathroom to try again, and water does start to trickle out this time—a freezing, arctic drizzle. Still not a drop of hot water.

  No way can I walk into an ice-cold shower on a morning when I’m already a fragile mess. Last night Richard and I had both cried, held each other tight, fretted, and said I love you for only the second time; the first time was last weekend, when he’d whispered it to me as we lay side by side in the guest room of a friend’s beach house, realizing we only had one more week together. Before finally falling asleep last night, we decided to try to make this morning like any other, just so we could get through it. We agreed to stay in close touch when I got to Beirut, and then see what happened as the months went by. We’d try to make the best of the situation and see where life led us as the year unfolded. Not the most comforting thought perhaps, but at least not apocalyptic.

  Of course, pretending this is just a normal morning—him heading to his teaching job, me to the airport as if I were only off on a short travel-story assignment—was a preposterous idea to begin with. The only way for me to make it through the morning and get myself off to the airport without dissolving again is to remember that I’m planning to come back for a week sometime this fall, to pack another suitcase or two with my winter clothes and boots and various things I couldn’t fit, thanks to my airline’s luggage limit; to make sure my subletter isn’t wrecking my apartment; and, if our spastic relationship survives until then, to see Richard. I’m wondering if he’ll still want to see me. But the minutes are ticking by now, and I need to keep my focus on two things: getting ready, and making my flight.

  I turn on the faucet again, daring to hope, but no; I flinch at the freezing splash, and … we both start laughing. Absurdity, slapstick, a dose of silliness. I need this right now.

  Richard clenches his teeth and braves a cold shower, then gets dressed, and we say goodbye, both of us still giggling about the water, kissing, hugging quickly but trying not to linger.

  How can I possibly leave? And how can I not leave now, after I’ve told everyone I’m going? Maybe I just want to hold Richard for hours and order pizza and stay here, with him, and with my New York life just the way it is, forever. Or maybe I’m ready to take on this adventure at last. I guess if Richard and I are meant to make it through it all, we will. I’m all over the place, everywhere. Excited, wrecked. Time to finish getting ready, zip up the bags, lock my apartment, and go.

  In the cab to the airport, I’m trying to stay as stoic as possible as I watch Manhattan’s postcard skyline, only half visible on this foggy morning, disappear behind me and Brooklyn’s tenements and rows of ethnic grocers and delis flick by on the Williamsburg Bridge. These workaday scenes, so banal I rarely even register them anymore, suddenly seem poignant as the taxi speeds me away, the colors of store awnings and sanitation workers’ uniforms and street vendor trucks standing out sharply now against the gray sky.

  Soon I’m waiting at the departure gate at JFK, leafing through a celebrity gossip magazine I find on a chair and trying to think fluffy thoughts: Is Jennifer Aniston pregnant, for real this time? Didn’t I see this same headline splashed on every gossip magazine a year ago, two years ago? Seems like yesterday. So a year is nothing, then! Right? …

  I board my flight, spilling coffee on myself as I try to jam my carry-on into the overhead compartment while juggling a nonfat latte in the other hand. The effects of the gossip mag are wearing off quickly. No, a year is definitely not nothing.

  I decide to let myself cry the whole flight long if I need to. Or ideally, I’ll be tough and stone-cold determined if I can manage it. Or I’ll slip into one of my Zen, play-it-as-it-lays modes, the emotional holy grail, available to me only in rare flashes throughout my life. All through the first eight-hour flight, and the two-hour layover in Rome, and the connecting five-hour flight to Beirut, I shuffle clumsily between the three states. I can’t fall asleep even though, incredibly, there’s no screaming baby and no turbulence on either flight.

  All in all, my trip, including the connection in the normally maddening Rome airport, is one of the smoothest journeys I’ve ever had, objectively speaking. My luggage makes the transfer from Rome to Beirut despite the tight layover: unbelievable. Even the customs and immigration lines at the Beirut airport go fast. I notice for the first time, as I walk through that legendary airport—wrecked by bombs again and again before, during, and after the civil war—that it’s been spiffed up recently into a gleaming twenty-first-century international hub and now seems to run more smoothly than JFK; not saying much, but impressive for a war-ravaged country with a less-than-stellar record for bureaucratic efficiency.

  My luggage, despite the uneventful journey, arrives in better shape than I do. By the time I step off the plane, I’m zonked from all the emotional turbulence, and just dead tired. My cousin Josette and aunt Marcelle are picking me up at the airport on this hot August afternoon to take me to my family’s old apartment.

  As I walk out of the airport terminal onto the sidewalk, breaking a sweat in the late-afternoon heat, my cousin Josette, a stunning and trim brunette in her forties, sees me and calls out my name. She’s always been one of my favorite relatives, warm but bitingly witty, a creative and successful interior designer who never married. I’ve often thought of her as exhibit A in the “see, it’s okay not to marry” campaign I’m forever waging silently against my relatives and against an imaginary Lebanese chorus, or maybe just against myself. My paternal aunt Marcelle, Josette’s mom, shy and soft-spoken, widowed when her husband died young of a heart attack during the war, is here, too, her chin-length dark hair neatly groomed, her dark purple skirt suit giving her olive skin a warm glow. We pile my bags into Josette’s trunk and drive off to my old family apartment in Hamra, part of the hilly Ras Beirut area—the name means “head of Beirut”—on the city’s west side.

&
nbsp; Yesterday I was walking around Nolita, the trendy Manhattan neighborhood next to Little Italy where I moved in the late 1990s while it was still a little rough around the edges. I’d spent the afternoon gazing long and hard at the sights I’ve passed daily for years with barely a glance, the tiny but adventurously stylish clothing and shoe boutiques, the crowded bistros and umbrella-terraced cafés, the elderly Italian men in their white T-shirts sitting on the creaky fire-escape balconies of old brick buildings, the clumps of hipsters and curious tourists milling around Café Habana on a busy corner of Elizabeth Street, the slow-strolling pedestrians on their cell phones, the old Italian meat and cheese delis—taking in all the details, a zoomed-in snapshot uploaded straight to my brain, to flash back to in moments of deep New York nostalgia if they hit me hard in Beirut.

  Today, a Monday afternoon in August, here I am arriving in Beirut on a humid hundred-degree day. The streets from the airport to Hamra are as chaotic as ever, cars and motorbikes going any which way: zooming in the wrong direction down one-way streets, cutting corners on the sidewalks, U-turning in the middle of traffic. In some ways, the city never seems to change, even as it’s constantly changing: a schizo mix of glossy new high-rise condo towers, side by side with nineteenth-century arch-windowed stone houses with graceful balconies draped in geraniums and fragrant jasmine and gardenia, and bombed-out shells of old houses and hotels destroyed in the war, all lined up along the narrow winding streets flanked by pink bougainvillea bushes and bright green Sukleen dumpsters, the neighborhoods ringed by multilane autostradas wrapping around and through the city, and everywhere brand-new Ferraris and SUVs, and beat-up 1970s Mercedes and Peugeots, and street vendors pushing wheelbarrows through the traffic, and young messenger boys on mopeds riding up on the sidewalks. Honking and yelling from car windows everywhere, the mournful and sweet ballads of the singer Fairuz, the iconic voice of Lebanon, competing with Method Man thumping out heavy hip-hop jams from the next car over. Running alongside all this daily mayhem, and curving around the Beirut coastline on the city’s north and west sides: the glittering bright blue Mediterranean.