Jasmine and Fire Read online

  The Corniche, the wide and busy promenade along the waterfront, looks out onto the magical sea. Now, in August, women in string bikinis are lounging at luxurious beach clubs just steps below the Corniche, while others wear full head-to-toe hijabs and stroll along the sidewalk, jockeying for space with hell-on-wheels skater dudes and spandex-wearing cyclists and miniskirted young women and elderly street vendors selling sesame bread and fresh-squeezed pomegranate juice while, down on the rocky shore, the Mediterranean waves roll and splash.

  That sea has, for centuries, brought so much destruction to Beirut, from the ships bearing invaders and their weapons—the Romans, the Egyptians, the Turks—centuries and millennia ago, to the A.D.-sixth-century tidal wave that wrecked the city, all the way up to the Israeli invasions of recent decades. And through it all, those salty blue waters and sun-drenched beaches have also brought so much pleasure and washed away so much pain.

  Beirut is rushing back fast and strong now, as it always has when I’ve come back to visit. On its ruthless streets, now as ever before, drivers deal with the inadequate traffic lights by cutting each other off, and anyone operating any kind of vehicle needs to be instantly decisive and aggressive and defensive, all at the same time. There’s no time to think and wonder when or if to turn. You have to make a quick decision and run with it, or end up waiting at the same intersection for six hours, maybe six weeks. On the way to the apartment, my dear cousin Josette plows through traffic alertly and carefully but with a fierce determination and flips the facial equivalent of the finger to any driver who assumes she’ll play doormat. Along the way she tells me about the ever-rising number of people killed in traffic accidents so far this summer, as she slams the brake and shakes her head at a swerving moron in the oncoming lane, her blond highlights and gold hoop earrings catching the last rays of sunlight.

  We’re approaching my old neighborhood now, and minutes later we pull into Hamra Street, one of the main arteries of west Beirut, with all its retail and pedestrian hustle-bustle. As we line up in the bumper-to-bumper traffic, I look out at the strings of shops, the brand-new H&M alongside a few faded clothing boutiques displaying merchandise surely hanging there since the early 1980s, and the two-story Starbucks, and near it a couple of juice stands I remember from my childhood, and then a few feet away the wonderfully well-stocked Antoine bookstore, happily still there. Finally we hang a right onto Jeanne D’Arc, my street, my home way back in 1981, and again now.

  The street runs, tight and car-jammed, past a flower shop and a few grocery and stationery stores to the edge of the lush green American University of Beirut campus, a few short blocks down a gently sloping hill. We circle around the block five times looking for parking and finally find a spot near the apartment, which is on the fourth floor of a white-stucco, eight-story building that my great-uncle Bahij Makdisi, a prominent Beirut engineer, built in the 1950s.

  My aunt Marcelle keeps a set of keys that my parents gave her to our Beirut apartment, and when no one is here, she pops in and checks on it every month or so. It’s not a huge place: just a narrow entryway as you walk in, opening out into a dining room and two adjoining living rooms forming an L-shape, with a baby grand piano in the corner and a balcony flanking each of the living rooms; in the back of the apartment are three bedrooms, and down a short corridor leading off the dining room is a sunny kitchen. It’s a comfortable, modestly proportioned apartment for a family of four. But Marcelle and Josette, who live a half-hour drive away in east Beirut, supervise the place the way diligent, wary caretakers would look out for a sprawling estate—even though other relatives live in the building and there’s a concierge on-site. Today Marcelle has stocked the kitchen with tons of food for me, lest I starve to death immediately on arriving in Beirut.

  “Auntie, what’s all this?” I ask her in Arabic, glad at the chance to practice my language skills. I’m still fluent but a little creaky, and although my aunt understands English, I want to get into an Arabic habit from the get-go.

  “I thought you might like to have some chicken and rice after your long trip,” she begins, in an accent that mixes Beiruti Arabic with twinges of the mountain accent of Aley, the town where she and my dad, her brother, grew up. “There’s some tabbouleh, too. And just a few different kinds of cheese. I threw in some fruits and vegetables also. Some bags of fresh bread. I think I put some yogurt and mortadella in there, too. Cookies also. Just a few things you might like to snack on.”

  Her worries are, particularly in Beirut, absurd. The apartment is in the middle of the thumping Hamra district, packed as ever with countless restaurants, cafés, and late-night street food stops. You could easily fill up, at any hour of the day or night here, on just a dollar or two, even if the chicest clothes and shoes and hotels and restaurants in Beirut will cost you more than they do in New York. But I’m not complaining about finding shelves and shelves of food in my fridge and pantry tonight. Fantastic luck to have such sweet, perpetually worried relatives.

  Along with the flashing images that make up my mental representation of Beirut, as it looked in the 1970s and early 1980s and as it looks in many ways even now—the wide and crowded Corniche overlooking the Mediterranean, the crumbling war ruins all over the city, the shiny high-rises, the tangled intersections, and everywhere the jasmine bushes and dark pink bougainvilleas—my favorite Lebanese foods also rush like flashcards through my brain. The first thing I’ve always done, just before a visit to Beirut in summers past, or a visit to any city for that matter, is to list all the foods I’m determined to eat while I’m there, even if it means doubling up on lunches or dinners when time is tight. Now that I’ve managed to parlay this lifelong pathology into a career as a food and travel writer, my whims have taken on the urgency of deadline assignments, even if they’re really just self-indulgent missions I’ve dreamed up for myself—partly for sheer pleasure, partly for education, and partly as an excuse to disappear for hours on rambling adventures.

  But my fridge is so full right now, there’s no room even for the big bottle of water I’ve been dragging with me since Rome, let alone for any immediate food-gathering I might do on my own tonight. I spot the classic Lebanese dish of rizz w’djej—strips of tender chicken over rice studded with golden raisins and pine nuts—along with the creamy and thick yogurt cheese known as labneh, plus a plate of dandelion greens called hindbeh sautéed with garlic and topped with thin strips of sweet fried onion, and a basket of fresh Arabic bread, and a bowl of bright-green lemony tabbouleh garnished with small lettuce leaves—all foods I love, and enough to feed me for days. Since it’s nearly dinnertime now, I convince Josette and Marcelle to stay and eat with me, and we take out the chicken and rice to heat on the stove, as well as the tabbouleh and bread. I’m too wiped out and emotionally shell-shocked to make much conversation, but they tell me how happy they are that I’m here, and this time not just for a quick flyby vacation. We exchange family gossip and tsk-tsk about the once-again-grim political situation.

  “War is like salt and pepper here,” Josette says to me, shaking her head and scooping up a mouthful of tabbouleh with a lettuce leaf.

  At the moment, the perpetual standoff between the Hezbollah party and Lebanon’s southern neighbor, Israel, is heating up again, in part over a UN special tribunal investigating the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri and other prominent politicians and journalists in 2005. The tribunal is rumored to be about to implicate members of Hezbollah in the killings, and Hezbollah is blaming Israel for collusion. In the past few weeks there have been skirmishes between Hezbollah and the Israeli military along Lebanon’s southern border. Other long-running political tensions are brewing around Beirut. Last week a fight over a parking space among a group of Sunni and Shiite men in a Beirut suburb led to a shoot-out that left several civilians dead. In Beirut, seemingly small-scale scuffles like this have, in tense times, triggered longer outbreaks of violence and even war. Some are saying this parking space incident is an omen of a bigge
r sectarian war, yet another one, to come.

  In a way, these worries are like warnings about The Big One, the huge earthquake that will allegedly hit California this century. It will happen, seismologists keep saying. The question is when. Now? Maybe. Maybe not for a long while. But it’s bound to happen eventually.

  After Josette and Marcelle leave, I discover there’s no wi-fi signal in the apartment tonight, so I walk around the corner to a smoky Internet café to send Richard an e-mail, letting him know I’ve arrived safely. There’s an e-mail from him waiting in my inbox, saying how much he already misses me. Reading his note makes me swallow my stomach and tighten the small muscles around my mouth. I can’t cry in here, not within sight of the chain-smoking cashier and the teenagers playing video games at terminals next to me. I e-mail him back—I’m so tired, I miss you so much, more news tomorrow—and I head back to an empty apartment. Unlocking the door and walking into the dark, quiet space, this time without family around, is hard. Not just hard: it’s been a long time since I’ve felt this disoriented and down. My head is pounding from jet lag, and everything in me aches, from my feet to my neck to my heart to the inside of my brain.

  I allow just one what the fuck am I doing here? self-laceration tonight, as I’m opening my suitcase and taking out a nightshirt to sleep in.

  The regrets come crashing in: What am I doing? I’m leaving behind my close friends, and a New York life I love, and a relationship that might have a future, and I’m turning my entire reality upside down for—what? To relive my childhood, to recapture a life that was interrupted so long ago? Shouldn’t my childhood be over already, damn it? Beirut was just an early, long-gone chapter of my life. The New York life I’ve worked so hard to build is the now, the present, the reality. Isn’t it?

  But if that’s true, then why is my relationship with Beirut, which sometimes feels like yet another one of the volatile on-again off-again romances in my life, still unresolved? Why do I crave a final reckoning with this place?

  I need to do this, I remind myself, and I need to do it now. Before I make any firmer commitments in New York, or to Richard if we make it that far, and before I potentially have kids (I’m thirty-eight, so I’m not breaking any speed records on that front), I need to make sure I’m living in the right place and that my head, on this one issue anyway, is straight.

  Despite my smooth journey from New York, and a loving cousin and aunt who filled my fridge and drove me home from the airport and kept me company over dinner, my first night in Beirut sucks. I wake up at five o’clock to the sound of water crashing down on my dresser. It’s cold water from the air-conditioning system backing up through the pipes into my bedroom—a problem my mother had warned me about. Before I went to bed, I was supposed to check on a pipe on the balcony and make sure it wasn’t dislodged, so I’d avoid a middle-of-the-night leak. But I’d forgotten.

  I’d also forgotten that in this building, as in pretty much every building in Beirut that I know of, the basic utilities are always breaking down. When I’d had no water in my New York apartment the morning I left, that was a fluke. Here? Just another day in Beirut. The electricity goes out for a few hours every single day across the city, early morning or midday or evening, depending on what neighborhood you’re in. There’s frequently no Internet signal, and often it’s excruciatingly slow. On past visits to Beirut, the elevator in our building has broken down. Now the latest meltdown is happening just inches from my bed. My new digital video camera happens to be sitting directly under the leak from the air-conditioner—but is thankfully still in its case.

  Lebanon has had a major drought this summer, but in my apartment there’s water all right, too much water at the moment, and it’s splashing cold and hard into my bedroom. A slapstick scene, an I Love Lucy episode, but I’m not in the mood to find it funny. After I go out onto the balcony to adjust the pipe, I can’t fall back asleep. I’m exhausted and strung out on travel and on ninety-two different emotions, desperately missing New York and feeling my childhood memories rushing back here in my old bedroom. I’m hearing all the old familiar Beirut street noises, the car horns and motorcycle engines and the sidewalk chitchat at all hours, the middle-of-the-night muezzin’s call to prayer from the mosque nearby, a baby crying in a building across the street. A rooster crows and reminds me of the one that used to live on a rooftop on our street during the war and would crow every morning at four. This rooster I’m hearing tonight is farther away, but not far enough. I sit in bed as the hour turns six, then seven, and listen to cars start their compulsive honking on the already trafficky streets below, and hear shopkeepers clanking open their aluminum shutters.

  I’m hungry again, exhausted, sleepless, and sad, and I need serious comfort food. A little after seven, I walk out in search of the breakfast I’m craving, a man’ouche. I find it at a tiny old bakery around the corner from my building. This is the seminal Beirut breakfast: doughy flatbread smeared with olive oil and zaatar—a spice mix of sumac, thyme, and sesame seeds—and served hot, straight from the oven. I like mine slathered with labneh, the creamy yogurt cheese. My head is a mess, but my mouth, my eyes, my stomach, they’re really enjoying this man’ouche, this warm, life-giving morning bread. I could eat this every single day, forever. No body-sculpting or health expert would ever advise such a thing, and I don’t care—well, maybe just a little, but definitely not today.

  After going back to bed until noon post-man’ouche, but failing to make up for the night’s insomnia, I take a long hot shower and decide to spend my first day exploring a little bit instead of napping and crying alone in the apartment, a powerful temptation. I set out on a stroll around the Hamra neighborhood, to get my bearings again, and as I take tentative steps down forgotten blocks and get a little lost, I’m sure I look like a clueless tourist despite my Lebanese olive skin, dark-brown eyes, and long brown hair. I walk along a half-dozen of the crammed side streets shooting off from the main Hamra Street drag, poke into bookstores and record shops and clothing stores old and new, too zoned out to pay much attention to the merchandise as I spacily pick things up and put them back down, just to feel my body moving, feel myself somehow interacting with city life, even if I’ll need at least a half-night’s sleep, after all the travel, to function at a minimal level.

  On my way back to the apartment, I reintroduce myself to the aging grocer and his wife who own the small, cluttered food shop on the ground floor of my building, and to the hunched man who has run the stationery store down the street since my mom was a teenager, and to the tall white-haired man, reportedly a star of Egyptian films in his youth, who opened a flower shop across the street some decades ago. I muster enough pep for a few sputterings of “Hi! I’m back to live here now. It’s been so long, I know. How are things?” They’re all surprised I’m back. Life in Lebanon is not easy; why would I leave America? But they all greet me warmly, give me a cheek kiss or an affectionate pat on the back. “Ahla w’ sahla!” Welcome back!

  Not much accomplished in one day, but I’m already sapped and it’s only midafternoon. I return to the apartment and field some checking-in phone calls from Josette and from my aunt Nouhad upstairs. She passes by later in the day to sit with me a bit and welcome me back to Beirut and to the building, and smiles when she sees I look drained.

  “We’ll get together and catch up properly this week, whenever you like. And just come by or call anytime. So wonderful having you here.” Nouhad hugs me, her pixie-short hair brushing my cheek.

  The leftovers from last night are even more welcome right now, and after heating up some dinner, I climb into bed with a copy of Alain de Botton’s tongue-in-cheek self-help book How Proust Can Change Your Life, based loosely on the life and writings of Marcel Proust. Each of the five times I’ve read the slim little volume, I’ve felt I’d stumbled into the best head-straightening drug.

  I flip to the chapter titled “How to Suffer Successfully”:

  Sensitive to any disruption of routine or habit, Proust suffers from
homesickness and fears that every journey will kill him. He explains that in the first few days in a new place, he is as unhappy as certain animals when night comes (it is not clear which animals he has in mind) … Proust preferred to spend most of his time in bed. He turned it into his desk and office. Did it provide a defense against the cruel world outside? “When one is sad, it is lovely to lie in the warmth of one’s bed, and there, with all effort and struggle at an end, even perhaps with one’s head under the blankets, surrender completely to wailing, like branches in an autumn wind.”

  But there’s a helpful reminder lurking in all the self-pity. “Proust’s suggestion,” writes de Botton, “is that we become properly inquisitive only when distressed.” Dubiously uplifting, but somehow enough to slide me into a deep sleep. Finally.

  The following few days are spent walking along the Hamra streets again, lolling around in bookstores, browsing through Lebanese histories and novels, stocking up on groceries: soft and salty halloum cheese, paper-thin bread called khibz markouk, deliciously juicy lopsided tomatoes, sweet cucumberlike summer vegetables called me’te. I take naps, fight the blues, try to pull myself together by smiling for no reason—a trick I once read about in a newspaper mental health column—and answer more phone calls from aunts, uncles, cousins, and family friends. “So you’re here! How’s it going so far?” “It’s so nice to have you in Beirut.” “Will you come to lunch on Sunday?” “Are you free for dinner on Tuesday?” “Do you have everything you need at home?” “Will you promise to call anytime you need anything?”

  Having so much family around, scores of relatives on both sides who either never left Lebanon or moved back after the war, makes me feel instantly embraced in a way I’d forgotten about. How strange to suddenly be surrounded by people who love you for no other reason than that you’re Salma, their niece or cousin, or the daughter of their old friends. But at the moment, I’m too overwhelmed to sound upbeat on the phone, and I’m hoping they don’t hear the sadness in my voice.