In my first couple of weeks, I’m also trying out different cafés every day, hoping to find the perfect environment where I can settle in for hours and work on the freelance editing and writing assignments I brought with me from the States. I have four long-term projects I’m working on right now, and the income from those, plus my free rent in Beirut, means I can get by well enough if not lavishly. This week I have to finish editing some content for a corporate website, and I have to turn in a column I write regularly for a travel magazine, where I interview chefs about their favorite restaurants around the world. As a freelancer, I can technically work from anywhere on the planet. In practice, it’s a little trickier to find a spot where you can work efficiently, avoid procrastinating, and most of all: breathe. Every place I try so far is too smoky—Lebanon has been slow to see the charms of indoor-smoking laws—or else it’s too sterile, too chainy, or too loud.
Socially, I’m off to an even slower start. Since I got here, I’ve been staring guiltily at a list of people I need to call: relatives I haven’t talked to yet, a couple of old Beirut school friends I’m occasionally in touch with by e-mail, friends of friends who happen to be in Beirut right now, sources to meet for possible food or travel magazine assignments. But between my work deadlines and my general sense of listlessness—I’m lonely for my New York friends and for Richard, and I don’t have much of a life or routine to speak of yet in Beirut—I haven’t mustered the energy to pick up the phone much. A catch-22.
One blue afternoon—clear sky outside, stubborn blues in my head—my aunt Zelfa calls. She lives in London, but this week she’s passing through Beirut with her husband, Randal, her father, Cecil, and her daughter and son, Soumaya and Skandar, the latter better known as Skandar Keynes, the teen heartthrob who played Edmund in the Narnia films.
I’m looking forward to seeing them, my witty and tirelessly well-traveled British relatives. It’s been a few years since I last saw Skandar, when Zelfa invited me to hang out on the red carpet at the New York City premiere of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. (I’d mostly gawked at Tilda Swinton and was, of course, utterly ignored by the photographers.) Skandar, a serious-minded university student back in England, is also the one person in our family to have somehow stumbled into Hollywood fame, and he’s barely in his twenties.
For the most part, the rest of my clan has never been prone to the glamorous life or been exceptionally good at making money. But a few people in my family are prominent in their fields. Besides Edward Said and the Keynses—Randal, an author, is a descendant of both Charles Darwin and John Maynard Keynes—there’s the late, renowned Oxford historian Albert Hourani, my mother’s uncle. He was the author of a number of scholarly works including History of the Arab Peoples, a serendipitous bestseller since it happened to be released just as the first Iraq War kicked off in 1990. A handful of business-savvy, charismatic relatives, both here and abroad, run the international food-production companies Cortas and Clic, which may be where I got the food gene. And a number of uncles, aunts, and cousins lead low-key lives but are talented historians, political scientists, mathematicians, physicists, and doctors. Many are based in Europe or the States, although a few in my generation have returned to Beirut to raise their kids and pursue their careers in Lebanon.
As we chat on the phone, Zelfa asks me to drop by the apartment where she and her family are staying on their Beirut visit. I walk over to catch up with them over tea. They want to know how I’m holding up so far, and I tell them about my somewhat rocky first couple of weeks in Beirut. Skandar tells me about his stint filming another Narnia sequel on Australia’s Gold Coast. An hour later his sister, Soumaya, restless with the whole parent-sibling scene, asks me to walk off with her to a café to play backgammon. I’ve only played backgammon, a staple of old-man village life in Lebanon, once in my life. She’s dying for a game. I’m not sure why a recent Cambridge graduate with a posh British accent and a taste for trendy clothes is so addicted to backgammon, but I learn that her grandfather taught her to play. She ends up playing both her and my sides of the board, after we find one on a shelf at a café nearby. I haven’t spent this much time with her since she was much younger, but I already love her sharp wit and glowing smile, peeking out from under a mass of curly brown hair. Alas, she’s headed back to England in a few days.
Spending that time with Soumaya, even just a couple of hours fumbling through a backgammon game and taking a stroll afterward, has an unexpected effect on me. Soumaya spent the entire summer living in Beirut and studying Arabic, and she got to know some great little hangouts around Hamra. One is the café where we’d played backgammon, a cozy little spot with fragrant coffee and classic Arabic music on the sound system, and I’m eager to try it out as another of my home offices. Another is a well-stocked DVD shop she pointed to as we passed by. And one is a small takeout restaurant and butcher shop called Cheikha, where we’d stopped after backgammon to pick up shawarma sandwiches: warm, packed with freshly rotisseried strips of pink lamb, and oozing with tartar sauce. I have a feeling I’ll be coming back to all of these places. As I fall asleep that night, stuffed with shawarma and feeling happy about the spontaneous hangout session with my relatives and especially Soumaya, I realize that I’d been feeling like a tourist here in these past weeks, but suddenly I feel a little less so. Bit by bit, I’m starting to acclimate, to feel out a rhythm and build a repertoire—crucial in any city if it’s ever going to feel like home.
This is the hottest August in anyone’s memory, and the city is a sweatbox. But I’m losing myself for hours at a time in air-conditioned cafés, in a fog of deadline work. In between I’ve been accepting more lunch and dinner invitations from my relatives, the only real social life I’ve mustered so far, but it’s a start.
One Sunday afternoon, my dad’s cousin Laure, a gossipy and affectionate woman who always looks put-together in her silk blouses and knee-length skirts, invites me to lunch at a new restaurant called Babel in the posh Christian suburb of Dbayeh. We try out some of the menu’s weird but oddly compelling spins on Lebanese food: sushi-shaped pieces of kibbeh nayyeh—a Lebanese lamb tartare—here rolled in sesame seeds and topped with pine nuts. I’d rather eat straight-up kibbeh nayyeh, a mound of soft minced lamb topped with fruity olive oil and scooped up with fresh pita. But this tweaked version is admittedly tasty. As we eat, we watch a huge table of overdressed, Botoxed women and cigar-smoking men next to us throw a lavish baptism feast for their baby daughter. This particular slice of Beirut, aggressively cushy and willfully insular, disengaged from reality—if I may jump to conclusions about these total strangers here at the restaurant—has always made me feel I’ve landed on a low-oxygen planet far away. Laure whispers to me in Arabic about one woman’s revealing, architecturally complicated dress.
“Shoo labsi hay?” What is she wearing?
“I’m not sure. A dress, I guess?”
“What’s that strap that wraps around her back and her butt and makes her ass look like a strangled balloon?”
I nearly spit out my wine.
Even as I slowly ease into my new life here, my mornings are still mostly rough going: Almost daily I wake up at seven to the sound of power drills from a construction site down the street—there seems to be a construction site every ten feet in Beirut—and sometimes the sounds rip me out of an anxiety dream about losing everything I know in New York, or failing to make any friends or establish any real home in Beirut. My existence is ultimately lonely and unrooted. I don’t belong anywhere. I will be forgotten. My dreams keep circling around these themes.
But one morning I wake up to a sunny August day, light spraying orange through my rust-striped curtains, and I’m instantly washed in nostalgia. It’s pretty here this morning, peaceful and calm. It hits me how sweet it feels, bittersweet but serene, to be in Beirut right now. Maybe I did make the right decision coming back to live here.
Suddenly a wave of guilt—debris from a dream? long-repressed survivor’s guilt?—busts throug
h. Do I deserve to feel serene now, today, about waking up to a bright summer morning in Beirut? I skipped over most of the horrific 1980s in Lebanon, was ensconced safely in Houston—unhappy and awkward and culturally alienated, but safe from civil war as I romped around with Samir and the schoolkids in our neighborhood and fudged my way through perplexing new kickball and softball games. “Demented and sad, but social,” to quote Judd Nelson’s line from The Breakfast Club. Or maybe my slogan would’ve been “Hopelessly confused and foreign, but lucky to be thousands of miles from rabid armed militias.”
It’s a little too easy to ride out most of the war in America, then come back to Lebanon now and say, “Ah, I remember the old neighborhood. How utterly charming.” Was six years of war too short, too easy? Should I have lived through hell for another nine years, like so many others in Lebanon, stuck here by circumstance or necessity or a perfectly reasonable fear of the unknown?
Is it fair that I’m coming back only now? I realize some of these questions are spurious. I wasn’t the one who decided we should leave during the war. But Beirut is much easier to live in now, and my old neighborhood is not so hard to acclimate to, especially after a decade and a half in New York City: cool new bars and hipster cafés and boutiques and fragrant old bakeries just steps from my apartment here in Hamra. Of course, my new life hasn’t exactly been easy so far. I’m struggling to adjust emotionally. Still, my physical surroundings feel oddly familiar. They’re not just relics of my past; they also make for a fairly smooth transition from my New York life.
The cities remind me of each other in more ways, too. In New York, neighborhoods are constantly changing, forgotten one decade, trendy the next. That’s true of Nolita, where my apartment is, and also of Hamra, the legendary, formerly hip, later war-ravaged, and now hip again albeit still rundown neighborhood in west Beirut. But from what I’ve seen, no city goes through cycles of rejuvenation and decay quite like Beirut. Even long after the war ended, Lebanon still lives through periods of conflict and renewal. Some Lebanese try to find patterns, or at least humor, in this grim routine. I’ve heard my relatives and friends quip that every time Beirut manages a few straight years of peace, and becomes chic again with the international jet set, and inevitably gets named one of the hottest destinations in the world by some glossy American travel magazine, that means only one thing: a horrific season of bombings, mayhem, and political catastrophe is surely on the way. The Beirut-based British journalist Robert Fisk once wrote about this place: “Some cities seem forever doomed.”
Forever doomed, or forever rising phoenixlike: however you look at it, Beirut is not the same city now that it was three decades ago, or even five years ago. How could it be, after a fifteen-year civil war, multiple episodes of strife, and the beginning of a new century in an ever-changing, techno-mad global culture? But it is somehow, also, the same city. Any city worth a damn goes through changes but stays fundamentally itself, deep in its soul. If cities have souls.
To get past the bad dreams, the rough mornings, and the ruminations as I try to readjust to life here, I know what I need to find—besides mental peace: a cup of good strong coffee. I’m something of a caffeine addict, and one of the first things I did when I moved to New York was to figure out where in my neighborhood I could get decent coffee. I’d been spoiled by the excellent brew in Berkeley when I was in college, and I was surprised that in New York it wasn’t so easy to find at the time, although that’s improved lately. Some mornings I like to make coffee at home, while other days I’m eager to get out the door first thing. On those days, I pick up coffee to go and cling to the warm cup like a security blanket, nursing it for as long as I can as I slide into the day.
So far in Beirut, my caffeine routine is still shaky. Sometimes at home I brew Arabic coffee—stirring spoonfuls of the ground dark-roast beans into a small iron kettle filled with boiling water and watching over the liquid as it boils again. Arabic coffee is meant for drinking in tiny porcelain cups though, black or slightly sweetened, and I prefer to have a shot or two as a postmeal digestive. In the mornings, I like my coffee milkier and in a bigger cup. But despite the recent influx of American-style takeout coffee spots in Beirut, I’m having a hard time finding a place that serves decent drip coffee or espresso drinks to go.
A few blocks from my apartment is a place called Café Younes, the flagship coffee shop of an old Beirut brand of coffee beans, and I adore it for its smells and its Beirutness and its history. On visits here in past summers, I’ve stopped in just to inhale the roasty smell. I love walking through the narrow Hamra streets to Younes, gazing at the antique coffee-making equipment inside, lounging at the outdoor tile tables under the big shade trees, smelling the aromas wafting out the door, and drinking small cups of Arabic coffee in the afternoon. In the past couple of weeks, I’ve experimented with their coffee-bean varieties and picked out a few that brew up beautifully in the French press at home. But I’ve found Younes’s takeout coffee unfortunately mediocre, lukewarm, and flat-tasting on the days I’ve tried it.
So my search for good to-go coffee continues. Morning after morning I walk through the busy streets around my apartment. The main Hamra Street drag was once the site of boisterous cafés that attracted intellectuals and artists from all over Beirut, Cairo, Alexandria, Baghdad, and Istanbul in the 1950s and 1960s, and was a beating heart of the era’s artistic and literary and political movements. Since that street and the surrounding neighborhood near the apartment took a heavy drubbing during the civil war, many buildings are now dilapidated, the bombing damage still visible, or else they’ve been torn down to make way for condo towers and shiny retail chain stores. Now international coffee chains line the main street—Starbucks, Costa, Caribou—occupying the spaces where legendary Beirut cafés like Horseshoe and Modca used to sit. Funny enough, I’ve noticed that the new chains attract groups of elderly men who sit around all day, nursing cup after cup of Arabic coffee and debating politics, just as locals used to do in the old days. It’s as if these lifelong Hamra habitués are willfully ignoring the sterile furniture and décor of the new chain cafés and thinking: As long as there’s a coffee shop on the corner where we can gather and drink coffee and talk all day, then good enough.
On my coffee search, I’ve ducked into the Starbucks on Hamra Street now and then; unsurprisingly, a latte here tastes exactly like it does in SoHo or on the Upper West Side. But it feels a little shameful to get into the Starbucks habit in Beirut. I’m not crazy about the coffee at the British chain Costa, which tastes dull or burnt to me most days, but the coffee at Caribou I find I like quite a bit: it’s strong, with the fresh-roasted smell I crave. The Minnesota-based chain, its Hamra branch furnished with leather club chairs and a faux fireplace, is a more recent arrival in the neighborhood, and it’s just a three-minute walk from my apartment, so I’ve been succumbing. I feel weird buying American chain-store coffee in a city with such a historic coffee shop culture, but so it goes. As I feel my way toward a coffee routine—Younes some days, Caribou other days, and brewing at home on lazier mornings—at least I’m on my way to something like a life here.
Coffee has another crucial job to do as I navigate life in Beirut. It gets my brain cells in shape for the silent combat that goes on during my walks. In Beirut, everyone stares. At you. At him, at her, at everyone. Men whistle and hoot at women constantly. They can make you feel you’re naked no matter what you’re wearing. I dress here the way I dress in New York: in summer, a tank top usually, a skirt or light pants, sandals. So do at least half the women in Beirut. In most parts of the city, you’ll typically see some women wearing skimpy fashions—miniskirts, sleeveless tops, and even more revealing strapless styles—while other women walk along inches away in head scarves or sometimes a full hijab.
But despite, or maybe because of, the long tradition of skinbaring styles in Beirut, men on the street often call out lewdly. In fact, they’ll pretty much do that no matter what you’re wearing. It doesn’t take much for a woman to get
stared at here. Be female, and be walking without a man or a full-body hijab—that’s about it. Sometimes you’ll be stared at no matter what you look like or even what gender you are. The unemployment rate in Lebanon is sky high, and business at neighborhood shops can be slow, so lots of store owners and their idle friends, usually all men, bring plastic chairs to street corners to sit around together, drinking coffee all day long, smoking cigarettes, and gossiping. And staring.
The glares feel intrusive, but if being ogled by strange men all day is the price to pay for Lebanon’s relatively permissive lifestyle, I suppose I can live with that. Unfortunately, the freewheeling dress code is deceptive. Lebanon is not nearly as liberal as it seems on gender issues. Lebanese women can drive, work, and dress however they want, but they’re still struggling for equal rights and a voice in government. And as an adult woman here, if you’re not married—or if you’re married but don’t have kids—you’ll be made well aware that you’re living an alternative lifestyle. In some conservative families and more traditional villages, unmarried or childless women are harassed and shamed. Premarital sex, though widely practiced here, is still secretive. As a single woman in my thirties, I wondered before I arrived whether my status would be considered risqué here, even in the twenty-first century—or whether there are more women here like me now, taking their time with big decisions and trying to make choices that feel authentic and meaningful, rather than caving in to social and family pressures. Is my lifestyle going to fly in a place like Beirut? I’ve wondered. Too early to tell.
Jasmine and Fire Page 4