Jasmine and Fire

by Salma Abdelnour

  Another thing I’m noticing is that when I say my name out loud here—for instance, when I call ahead to book a taxi—I sound out my full first and last names even when the taxi dispatcher needs only my first name. In the States, it often takes forever to spell out my last name on the phone, and for transactions when I don’t need it, I avoid it altogether. Here I feel a strange new kind of pleasure when I say my whole name, Salma ‘Abdelnour, with its hard guttural ‘A. Abdelnour is a fairly common last name in Lebanon, and saying it out loud, Arabic sounds and all, makes me feel I belong here, that I’m owning my Lebaneseness, my Arabness. It’s a relief after living in the States for so long, and after feeling, for as far back as I can remember, that my name is too foreign, too cumbersome.

  Despite my American-versus-Arabic struggles, there’s no doubt I’ve been looking forward to Thanksgiving, this quintessentially American holiday. Finally, the third week of November arrives, but first there’s another big holiday: Lebanese Independence Day. On November 22, 1943, Lebanon officially won its freedom from France, and from that year on, Lebanon has celebrated its independence on that day.

  Some obvious jokes to be made here, of course. This is a country that, while technically independent for nearly seven decades now, has hosted an ongoing series of invading forces, essentially a continuation of what the ancient Romans, Egyptians, Crusaders, and Ottomans started when they marched through this land over the past half-dozen millennia. We’ve had the American Marines in 1958 and again in 1982–84, and Israel in 1982 and again in 2006, not to mention Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon for twenty-two years until 2000. And there was also, of course, the Syrian occupation of 1990–2005, which ended after the Independence Intifada (aka the Cedar Revolution) in Beirut, triggered by the assassination of the vocally anti-Syria ex–prime minister Hariri in 2005. Although that year marked the official ouster of Syria from Lebanon, Syria still manages to keep its fingers in Lebanon’s messy political cake mix.

  Independence Day here isn’t celebrated with quite the same gusto as, say, Fourth of July in the States or Bastille Day in France. Usually employees around Lebanon get the day off, the government throws a military parade downtown, and that’s about it. As I was waking up today, I heard the sounds of the military parade in the distance—a series of gunshots, part of the traditional twenty-one-gun salute. But this time I was ready for the noises, wasn’t startled by them as I was on that September night when I heard seemingly random fireworks and thought shells were raining on my neighborhood all over again.

  I spend Independence Day morning making an apple cake from a recipe Zeina gave me. Earlier this week my mother’s cousin Ramzi, always laughing and boyishly upbeat, had stopped by to drop off a big bag of red apples from the orchards near where he lives, in the town of Roumieh, a half hour from Beirut. I’ve been munching on them all week. But there are still about a dozen left, and in a phone chat with Zeina, she tells me about an apple cake she likes to make that uses up loads of apples. So I give it a try, stirring in brown sugar with vanilla, eggs, oil, flour, baking soda, more than a dozen sliced apples, and walnuts, and spicing it with cinnamon and allspice; the recipe is easy and quick. I try a bite as soon as I pull the puffy brown cake out of the countertop convection oven, wanting to taste it all gooey and hot before I let it cool. The apples have a nice chunkiness and sweet-tart taste, and the spices give the cake a subtle tingle.

  Funny that on this morning, Lebanese Independence Day, I’m baking something that reminds me of American apple pie—although the apples themselves are Lebanese, and the allspice is a mostly Middle Eastern seasoning. And funny too that an hour later, when my mom’s cousin (and Ramzi’s brother) Sami and his wife, Najwa, call to invite me over again for lunch, we eat the breaded veal filet called escalope along with French fries, Western specialties popular in Lebanon. Fahimeh, their longtime Lebanese cook, makes both particularly well. One could almost say that escalope and French fries, called batata miklieh here, have honorary Lebanese citizenship by now. We’ve essentially adopted both and made them our own, especially fries, which come with almost every sandwich order and even sometimes show up as part of a meze.

  I have no problem with giving escalope and fries honorary Lebanese status. I like almost any food when it tastes great. I may make part of my living as a food writer, but I’m not a food snob. I do wonder, though, about the local cuisine giving way to more cosmopolitan competitors. Here in Beirut, the hot new restaurants are almost always French, or Italian, or Japanese, or even American, with occasional exceptions. As much as the Lebanese profess to be proud of their cuisine, and to forever miss their mother’s cooking, and as much as they teach their housekeepers to prepare the recipes they grew up with, when Beirutis go out to dinner or to impress, it’s very often at a foreign restaurant.

  Of course, it’s easy for me to say all this when I’ve essentially just arrived back in Lebanon and haven’t been eating Lebanese food at home nonstop my entire life. But I wonder if Lebanese people’s feelings for the local cuisine, whether they crave it constantly or whether they’ll take almost any other food as long as it’s foreign, have to do with how much they personally love or resent life here, and how much they forgive or hate Lebanon for what it is or what it’s become: whether pride in the country’s ancient heritage, cultural complexity, and close-knit family life, for instance, trumps hatred of its depressing political scene, slumped economy, and seeming inability to get its act together. Do our eating choices, I wonder, represent an underlying passion for and vote of confidence in Lebanon—or an urge to escape at any chance possible?

  Unlike escalope and French fries, my own national origins are Lebanese all the way through—but lately my paperwork is out of date. I need to renew my Lebanese identity card so I can travel all over the country without risking getting in trouble at checkpoints in certain restricted areas. Right now I have a temporary Lebanese ID paper called an ikhraj qaid, which I use as a supplement to my American passport to get past immigration at the airport (otherwise I’d need a visa to be in Lebanon longer than three months) and as a just-in-case document I carry around in the event I’m asked for ID at a checkpoint. But the ikhraj qaid just expired, and it’s time to get it replaced, as well as apply for my real national identity card. For that I have to go up to Aley, a village in the Mount Lebanon range forty-five minutes southwest of Beirut, where my father’s side of the family comes from and where all their descendants must, by law, continue to register births and deaths and marriages and divorces in person. Very old-school.

  Josette drives me to Aley on a gray November morning and tells me to brace myself for a series of interminable waits in bureaucratic office after office. Once the forms are filled out in Aley, it can take months, even years, to receive the ID card. It took both my mother and my uncle Kamal, who were born and raised in Lebanon, several years to get their ID card renewals completed and sent to them. But incredibly, Uncle Kamal’s American wife Diane, New York born and raised, whom he met and married while she was a year-abroad student in Beirut in the 1960s, recently received her renewed Lebanese national ID just two months after she applied for it in Aley. Classic. Fair-haired Westerners in Lebanon? Roll out the red carpet.

  The whole identity card routine is almost comic in its hyper-bureaucracy—except that it’s also a giant pain in the ass. Josette and I spend a half hour trying to find a parking spot along one of Aley’s tight streets on this busy weekday morning, and finally we find one a ten-minute walk from the center of town. As we stroll toward the municipal building, I reminisce about childhood weekends in Aley visiting my grandparents during lulls in the shelling, when I’d play on the swings of their rooftop terrace and pick honeysuckle. My grandfather Jiddo Gibran always seemed so calm and Buddha-like, smiling as he’d hand Samir and me pieces of kurbane, a sweet briochelike bread traditionally eaten by Orthodox churchgoers on Sundays—and Teta Alyce was always more high-strung, worried, but loving as a grandmother and a wonderful cook.

  Sadl
y there’s no time today to lollygag along the Aley streets, now home to strings of terraced restaurants and shiny new hotels along with the dusty old shops and squat stone buildings overlooking the tree-lined mountains and valleys. Josette and I walk into the small, traffic-snarled center of town and climb up the stairs of the municipal headquarters and into the office of the lieutenant mayor of Aley. Dignified-looking in his gray suit and gray hair, he peeks out from behind a cluster of government workers milling around his desk, stacks of papers in hand, and greets us. He remembers Josette, who is always driving one family member or the other up here to do the ID renewals. He offers us coffee, and after the obligatory “how’s the family doing?” chat, he sends us to another office so I can fill out some papers. One of his assistants accompanies us, a short, stressed-looking man who fast-walks through the corridors, his dress-shoe heels clicking along the tiled floors.

  We follow as he zips through the hallways, outpacing the streams of men with briefcases who jostle past each other on their way into one of the many identical-looking doors. He opens the door to the room where we need to go, says a few words to the guy manning that office, and leaves. I wonder if he’s just expedited the routine; maybe since our family’s history in Aley dates back so many generations, he’s asked the guy in charge to deal with our papers quickly and send us on our way. Josette and I grab seats on the faded blue sofa and stare at the Lebanese tourism posters on the wall. We then proceed to sit there for an hour and a half, watching various people walk in, ask a question, light a cigarette, leave, or sit down, and like us stare at the walls as the clock ticks on. After what seems an eternity, the mustachioed man in charge of that room turns his attention to us and hands me the forms I need. I fill out my name, address, family members’ names, and so on. He waves us on our way.

  From there we walk with our forms to yet another office, in an awkwardly laid-out strip mall around the block, with the oxymoronic name Royal General Services Mall. In a claustrophobic little room, we find a tiny, reed-thin man sitting with a stack of papers on his desk and a huge leatherbound book. A number of people are ahead of us in line, and we watch the man slowly handwrite people’s names and information as they walk up to his desk to give him their filled-out forms. There’s not a computer in sight; incredible. We sit in that office for another hour, until finally the man looks up, summons us over, and slowly handwrites my name into the giant book. Very slowly, the black ink swooping up and dropping back down with every letter: … n … o … u … r. Done!

  Nope, one more stop: this time at an office where I have to get my fingerprints taken for the ID card. I stand in front of the fingerprinting machine, my palms facing down, fingers pressing hard onto the glass surface. One try, and we wait a few minutes as the guy in charge of that office squints at the prints as they come out of the machine. No go. Two tries, three tries, and finally he’s satisfied that the fingerprints came through clearly. Okay, we’re finished. The whole expedition, door to door (to door to door to door), took six hours. Nearly all day.

  My reward for the Aley trip comes a few days later—but not the ID card, way too soon for that. It comes in the form of a fantastically soothing Thanksgiving feast. Turkey may not have earned honorary Lebanese citizenship quite the way escalope and fries have, but it might be on its way; I’ve been noticing lots of turkeys at supermarkets this past week, and I’ve found myself eyeing them with more anticipation than usual.

  On Thanksgiving Thursday, I get dressed up in a caramel-brown dress and gold flats and walk through the Hamra streets, just a few blocks over to Bushra and Ziad’s. It’s twilight, and some of the boutiques, bookstores, and assorted other shops are closing for the night, their aluminum shutters rattling down, while others are staying open late, for the after-work shoppers who stream back home to the neighborhood as the sun sets. The restaurants and bars are already filling up, and the early-evening sidewalks are crawling with Thanksgiving-oblivious crowds.

  I arrive to find a full living room, packed with a crowd that includes Ziad’s sister and my parents’ friend Umayma, who cooked that wonderful Ramadan iftar dinner back in September, here with her Palestinian-Jordanian husband, Nasser. I also spot my parents’ old classmates George and Katia (my friend Zeina’s parents); and a friend of Bushra’s named Leila, who heads a department at AUB and who I’d heard mentioned might want to give me some editing work.

  Bushra’s melodic, Syrian-accented voice soon rings out, “Yalla, tfaddalo.” Come, help yourselves to the table. Dinner is served. On the buffet: an enormous golden-skinned turkey, resting on an antique silver platter; two pans of sweet potatoes topped with browned, melting marshmallows; rice with vermicelli noodles and pistachios, Bushra’s spin on a stuffing; a saucer of traditional turkey gravy; and cranberry sauce in a blue bowl. I also spy something not normally present on a Thanksgiving spread: harrak osb’oo, a dish made with lentils, onions, tamarind, and cilantro, a Syrian classic and a Bushra specialty. There are also kibbeh meatballs, a lemony eggplant salad called raheb, and assorted savory mini-pies stuffed with wild greens or spiced beef or cheese. I go easy on the turkey, choosing the thinnest, reddest piece I can find, and for old times’ sake, I help myself to a big scoop of the candied sweet potatoes and a dollop of cranberry sauce. But what I’m really entranced with is the harrak osb’oo, a nuanced but earthy dish with pleasing sweet-and-sour notes. I need to get Bushra to teach me how to make this. I go back for seconds of it, and then thirds, and then force myself to put my fork down, though Bushra looks at my plate and says, “Shoo? Maakalti shi!” What’s this! You didn’t eat anything! You’ll hear this from a Lebanese host even if you’ve just single-handedly consumed an entire turkey.

  For dessert, Bushra serves mhallaya, a milky and slightly sour, cheese-based custard sprinkled with orange-blossom nectar and crushed pistachios, which is also Syrian originally and rarely seen in Lebanon. It’s like the perfect marriage of a creamy rice pudding and a delicate panna cotta, with a subtle tang. Bushra also sets out two large pans of her signature apricot phyllo cake, similar to baklava in its layers of flaky dough hiding a sweet filling, but this chunky apricot version, made with fruit she bought the other day in Damascus—the famous Damascene apricots—is her own invention.

  I get home at almost midnight, extremely stuffed but in a brighter mood than I’ve felt in days during this gray, increasingly chilly month. I’ve just spent one of the most joyous Thanksgivings in memory, in a cheerful group of old family friends reminiscing about Thanksgivings spent in years past with their grown-up kids in the States. The next night I get an e-mail from Richard about how he’s been spending his holiday break in Boston so far: shopping for pants with his brother Jeff, a bassist in a band, and watching the Celtics, and eating oysters and chowder. He tells me the oysters made him remember a night when the two of us stopped in at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central during my October visit: “perfect happiness,” he called it. I remember how that felt, sitting next to him at the old New York bar, picking out a couple dozen oysters from the East and West coasts, slurping them straight up or with just squirts of lemon, then walking through Bryant Park together in the late evening.

  Memories of that night are rushing back as I read his e-mail. I’m thinking about how being with Richard, our time together, can feel like perfect happiness. I don’t know what the rest of the year will bring for us, but right now this feeling is good; it’s enough.

  Before the week is out, I luck into two more Thanksgiving invites, both for the Sunday after the actual holiday: one from Zeina, and one from my Boston-expat friends Curtis and Diana. I say yes to both and get ready for a marathon day of nonstop eating.

  Zeina gets nostalgic at times for the years she and Marwan spent living in New York, and today she’s cooked up a beautiful, gorgeously browned turkey, which she serves, in a nice twist, with Lebanese sides—a dish of fresh okra braised in garlic and olive oil and called bamieh bi zeit, along with baba ghanoush, and mini savory pies topped with a wonderfully tart spread
made with fermented yogurt, called kishk. Sitting around the table is a small, intimate group: her parents, George and Katia, Marwan, their four-year-old daughter, and the in-laws. We finish off with knafeh, the syrupy sweet-cheese dessert I love. A cup of Arabic coffee later, and a relaxed lounging session in the living room, and I’m off, whispering apologies for having to dash out so soon, but leaving the family in a mellow post-Thanksgiving trance.

  At Curtis and Diana’s a half hour later, I meet a few more friends of theirs, and we all sprawl out in the breezy dining room, the balcony windows open to the cool November air. I eat a bit less this time, limiting myself to one thin piece of a buttery, cheese-filled quiche and a bowl of richly sweet and spicy pumpkin soup—an autumn favorite here, thanks to the seasonal pumpkin bounty. I find myself chatting with James again, the only other person there who hasn’t arrived with spouse and kids in tow. But today I’m not so worried about what meeting a cute single guy could mean for my romantic life.

  I’m thinking about Richard’s oyster note from yesterday. I’m crazy about that guy. I want another night like that, lots more of them.