We hug long and tight. I lead the way to the taxi stand.
“How did the trip go?”
“Pretty smoothly. I almost missed the connection at the Frankfurt airport because the flight out of JFK was delayed, but other than that, all good. Got my bags right away. The immigration line went really fast after we landed in Beirut. No one asked me, ‘So, Meester Geelman, vat eez ze purpose of your visit to zees country?’ ”
“This isn’t Nazi Germany.”
“I know. Guess I was being paranoid for a second.”
Richard’s flight was the cheapest I’ve seen from New York to Beirut: just under eight hundred dollars round-trip. In New York over New Year’s, when we found that airfare online and he bought his ticket, we’d high-fived each other. Bliss, excitement, a thrilling adventure on the way. And then five minutes later we’d gotten into a fight. I’d mentioned that maybe he should play down his Jewish identity when he’s in Lebanon, because of the country’s relationship with Israel and because people tend to assume that if you’re American and Jewish, then you must be a Zionist.
In his family and in the Hebrew school he was sent to, Richard was raised to see the Holocaust as the defining event of this era, and he grew up learning about the history of persecution that Jews have faced in Europe and elsewhere at various points throughout history. Among my own relatives and the Lebanese in general, the Nakba—the expulsion of most of the Arabs from Palestine in 1948—has been one of the defining events of our times. It’s had tragic repercussions in the decades since, on Lebanon as a whole and on the entire region, and it’s also profoundly impacted some of our own relatives who married Palestinians and have half-Palestinian kids.
I understand how political views are shaped by, even if not necessarily always defined by, our families and the political and geographical contexts we all grew up in. Part of the problem, maybe the biggest part, of trying to resolve some of the region’s seemingly eternal conflicts is that we’re dealing with populations who grew up within different contexts, and who in most cases have trouble integrating the other narrative into their own.
When I’d suggested, just after Richard clicked “confirm” on his ticket purchase, that maybe he should be cautious about bringing up being Jewish when he’s in Lebanon, at least until the people he meets get to know him better and feel unthreatened by potential political tension in the room, he’d gotten upset with me. My timing was admittedly awful—and I’d apologized for that, reassuring him that no Lebanese person, relative of mine or not, could ever pull us apart, or would even want to, if we want to be together. And anyway my family would be predisposed to love him, warm and funny and genuine as he is, not to mention that he’s with me.
“Just please,” I’d said, as we finally worked our way out of the angry cloud and decided to make the best of his trip, “lay off any ‘rah rah Israel’ when you’re in Beirut?” I was joking. As if he’d ever say anything like that, or even remotely want to. But when it comes to the delightful relationship between Lebanon and Israel, you can never be too careful.
Ever since I got back from Egypt, I’ve been making a list of places I want to take Richard, and all the angles of this country I want to show him: Lebanon as beautiful site of ancient civilizations, and Beirut as crazy bad-ass city, gentle old Mediterranean port town, hipster-bar-scene central, and eternally mixed-up, schizophrenic, unstable, but ultimately lovable place.
On his first full day, I decide to take him on one of my now-patented long walks across the city to show him the sweep of it all, from Ras Beirut on the west side through downtown and on to Achrafieh on the east side. It’s starting to rain as we set out on our walk, not ideal—but that’s okay, I figure, it’ll be more romantic, like in movie scenes where couples run through a darkening city, holding hands in the pouring rain.
Before we head across town, we pick up a man’ouche at the Hamra bakery around the corner from my apartment, and wind down to Bliss Street, then through the American University of Beirut. The campus descends downhill, along wooded paths and stone staircases leading through forested clusters and landscaped gardens planted with purple petunias, red hibiscus, and pink hydrangeas, all the way to the sea. Many of the campus buildings, graceful brick villa-style structures, were built in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and are dedicated to the Protestant missionaries who founded the university—Dodge Hall, Nicely Hall, West Hall (named, coincidentally, after an ancestor of one of Richard’s New York friends). A few more glassy modern buildings sit on the lower edge of campus closer to the waterfront. All over campus, peeks between buildings and through the branches of palm trees and pines bring cinematic views of the Mediterranean, and an underpass at the sea-level edge leads under the Corniche and to the university’s own beach, a summer hangout for students and staff.
We walk through campus and exit out the lower end, crossing the street onto the Corniche. By this point it’s raining hard, but we keep on walking and getting soaked, Richard gaping at my daredevil street-crossing technique, the only way to get anywhere as a pedestrian in Beirut. Cars won’t stop on their own and rarely obey what few traffic lights there are, so, just as drivers do, you have to make a decision to cross and go with it, forge right through the traffic.
We continue toward downtown and head to the center and the Martyrs’ Square statue of the Lebanese nationalist revolutionaries who were hanged by the Ottomans in 1919. Before the civil war, before I was born, the Martyrs’ Square area was known as Place des Canons, or the Burj (“armory” in Arabic), and for anyone who has seen vintage postcards of downtown Beirut, that’s the big palm-tree-lined square surrounded by lively pedestrian sidewalks and bus-ringed streets. A popular old guidebook called Lebanon Today, found on the bookshelves of many Beirut homes, including ours—it was published, poignantly, in 1974, a year before the war started, and predicts on page 187 that “Lebanon will always remain a haven of peace and stability”—described downtown Beirut this way: “The visitor would be well advised to mingle with the crowds in the Place des Canons itself … then the souks—narrow streets, frequently roofed—where you are carried along by the crowd … People often come here just to drink a lemonade or a fruit drink or taste the pastries or other dainties which they eat as they walk along.”
But that prewar version of downtown Beirut hadn’t been around very long by the time that guidebook was written. The statue of the revolutionaries had only just been erected in 1960, and the lawn and street arrangement that characterized the square and its surroundings before the civil war had been inspired by relatively recent French urban planning trends of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In a place like Lebanon, though, wrecked then rebuilt so many times over the millennia, starting way back before it was even a real country, the shortlived recent past becomes as sepia-toned as the ancient, hazier one. I feel wistful about Place des Canons even though I was never alive to see the way downtown looked back then. The Martyrs’ Square reincarnation, with only that 1960 statue still present (albeit now bullet-ridden from the events of the 1970s and 1980s), has newer associations for the civil war generation like me. That part of downtown, a mostly flat and empty square ever since the war, is where the so-called Cedar Revolution happened in 2005, as masses of Lebanese gathered to protest Syria’s postwar occupation of the country.
It’s pouring even harder now, and Richard and I are both drenched top to bottom, as we head through the square and toward the ancient Roman baths and the parliament building. I’d wanted this walk to surprise and enchant him, give him a taste of the city’s contrasts and complexity, but although he’s being a good sport, we’re both tired, soaked, and getting cranky.
On our walk, Richard has been transfixed by the noisy car-and-moped-crammed streets, the vendors selling fresh pomegranate juice and sesame bread from wheelbarrows, the chaotic mix of crumbling ruins and spanking-new buildings, and the sea that curves around, blue even on a rainy February day. But he’s annoyed with the nonexistent sidewalk
s and the impossibility of walking here without pausing to defend your life from a speeding car or a perilous pothole every seven seconds. It’s time for a break. He stops me at the next corner.
“Intense city, wow. Insane, and so cool, and exhausting. Drink?”
It’s five o’clock, and we’re walking now across Martyrs’ Square toward Achrafieh, the mostly Christian neighborhood of old stone mansions and churches and posh boutiques on the east side of town. We try stopping at a couple of bars I like around here, first a place fittingly called Time Out, and then Pacifico, the bar I went to with Mirna and her friends weeks ago. No luck at either place; the doors are locked. This is when I learn that lots of Beirut bars, many of the ones in Achrafieh anyway, don’t open until seven P.M. Not because of any puritanical law—just a widely shared feeling of Why would you want to sit in a bar at five when it’s not packed with people yet? What’s the point of starting early? Pace yourself. It’s a long night ahead.
We take a service taxi back to Hamra, pick up a bottle of the Lebanese winery Ksara’s Reserve du Couvent, an inexpensive, easy-drinking red that’s ubiquitous in Beirut, and head back to the apartment. We spend the evening in, making dinner and watching a movie—Pan’s Labyrinth, Guillermo del Toro’s hallucinatory Spanish film, on a one-dollar pirate disk I’d picked up. It turns into a cozy night of pasta, wine, and a movie, just like any we’d have in New York. Simple, easy, pleasant. Incredibly pleasant.
The next morning, and every morning for the two straight weeks he’s here, I wake up cheerful and rested—a personal record for me. Knowing we have days and days to spend together morning to night makes me feel a relaxed kind of joy that I somehow hadn’t anticipated in all my anxiety about his trip. One day we wake up at six to take a bus ride, around two hours long, to the ancient Roman ruins at Baalbek, in the Beqaa Valley east of Beirut. We arrive to find we’re the only ones at Baalbek on this rainy Tuesday morning in February, the first time I’ve seen the site so empty. But on past trips I’ve come here in July or August, when it’s overrun with Lebanese visitors and with foreigners who’ve braved whatever political volatility happened to be in the air. We hold hands as we climb up the stone steps of the Temple of Bacchus, a grand, columned affair bigger than the Parthenon in Athens and built more than two thousand years ago.
“Whoa. Holy shit. I can’t believe this place.”
I stare out at Mount Sannine, covered in snow, in the distance beyond the valley and the pine trees. We walk over toward the Temple of Jupiter, the six giant stone columns that have made the cover of nearly every guidebook ever written about Lebanon.
“Want a commemorative Hezbollah T-shirt?” I ask jokingly, pointing past the temple to the row of vendors standing outside the entrance selling shirts with the militia’s yellow and green logo: an outstretched arm rising up out of an Arabic-calligraphy scrawl of the word Hezbollah, and holding an AK-47. Baalbek is in a part of the Beqaa Valley controlled mainly by Hezbollah, not a fact that always makes it into the guidebooks. The roads in that part of the Beqaa are hung all over with posters of party militants and, Hezbollah being financed largely by Iran, of Iranian right-wing religious figures.
The sinister signage notwithstanding, I’m feeling proud of Lebanon as we walk around. These stone temples are so ancient, so shockingly well preserved through the millennia and the multiple invasions and wars. They radiate grandeur and timelessness. Few ancient ruins anywhere in the world rival Baalbek’s, in my not-unbiased opinion—but Mark Twain agreed. After his visit to Lebanon in the nineteenth century, he wrote: “Such grandeur of design, and such grace of execution, as one sees in the temples of Baalbec, have not been equaled or even approached in any work of men’s hands that has been built within twenty centuries past.”
One night later that week we go out to a few Hamra bars with my cousin Shireen and some of her friends. Richard instantly gets along with the whole crew, but when he starts getting sullen later in the night—the music at the last bar we hit is too cheesy, he whispers to me, a sort of Euro club mix, and the beer he ordered is flat—we leave. I’m annoyed at the negativity and start to panic that things are taking a bad turn and he’s already sick of Beirut; then I remember, we’ve had moments like this in New York. Cheesy club music makes me cringe but doesn’t make me want to bolt out the door as quickly as it always does him. Plus, I decide to give him the ever-useful jet lag exemption.
On Richard’s birthday, we’re invited to dinner at Karim and Hala’s. My cousin and his wife don’t know it’s his birthday, of course, but we decide to accept the invitation. I want Richard to get to know more of my cousins, since I consider them among my closest friends in Beirut and since it’s less pressure, for now, than meeting a throng of older relatives. Besides Shireen, so far he’s also met Josette, when she joined us for coffee one afternoon, and also my cousin Kamal and his wife, Nour, when they had us over for dinner earlier in the week. Those rendezvous all went beautifully, Richard appreciating everyone’s fluent English and cracking jokes, lightening the mood—his specialty.
We walk into Karim and Hala’s living room, and they greet us, Hala chic as always in slim beige pants and a cowl-neck and stylishly cropped dark hair, and Karim the young professor in jeans and a sport jacket. Nearly every inch of their walls is hung with art and lined with bookshelves. We meet the small group of guests, most of them Middle East–focused academics like my cousin. The predinner conversation in the living room ranges from the latest news about the various Arab revolutions to some disastrous recent decisions by Israeli president Netanyahu, whom I know Richard can’t stand either. But he decides, perhaps wisely for now, not to chime in.
At the dinner table, Shafiq, the guy sitting across from Richard, steers the conversation to whether the new Lebanese prime minister, Miqati, will ever be able to bring Hezbollah and the opposing March 14 Party together to form a cabinet. I can tell Richard is already annoyed with Shafiq: a thirty-something academic play-acting the wise old intellectual as he sighs and rolls his fingers around a string of worry beads. On top of that, Shafiq keeps diverting the conversation at the table into Arabic, when at least three people, the spouses of Karim and Hala’s AUB friends, don’t speak Arabic. I do get irritated when Lebanese insist on carrying on in French or English when everyone in the room speaks Arabic, but in mixed groups like this, with non-Arabic speakers, why not speak a language we all understand? Everyone is speaking English tonight except Worry-Bead Guy.
But Richard is less focused on the subtle linguistic swordplay than he is on the food. When we accepted the dinner invitation, I’d mentioned to Hala that he doesn’t eat meat—but I’d also told her to please not do anything special. Richard can easily make a meal out of salad and bread and often likes to. Still, she’d gone out of her way, Lebanese-style, and put a lovely plate of roasted vegetables on the table alongside the roast beef, and served a sweet and spicy pumpkin soup, and several salads including a striking one made with red and yellow beets and goat cheese. Richard is clearly touched by the vegetarian-friendly feast and leans over to thank Hala as she sets out a dessert platter of atayef, small, blini-like pancakes I love filled with sugared walnuts. The chitchat around the table is animated, guests chiming in with witticisms about the eternal horror show of Middle East politics, in Lebanon and beyond. Eventually Shafiq decides to strike up a conversation with Richard, since they’re sitting directly across from each other but haven’t exchanged a word yet.
“Where are you visiting from?”
“New York.”
“Do you have a connection to the Middle East?”
Hmm, I wonder, as I overhear them talk. What does this question mean? Richard could easily pass for Jewish or Arab or lots of other ethnicities. Is Shafiq’s question innocent, or is it a veiled interrogation?
“I went to Egypt once, about ten years ago,” Richard answers, keeping things simple.
Pause.
“Also Israel.”
Silence now between them. Neither Richard nor Shafiq
hits that tennis ball again. Worry-Bead Guy pours himself another glass of wine and turns to the woman on his left to start up a new conversation. Richard looks at me, wondering if he played this right. I telegraph yes with my eyes. I mean, it’s the truth after all. It could have sparked an interesting conversation, one that could’ve been conducted on mutually friendly and curious terms. But Shafiq didn’t bite. Still, the dinner was fun and went smoothly all in all: no tussle at the table between the two of them, and no awkwardness that couldn’t be drowned out with a few extra swigs of wine.
We decide that weekend to take an overnight trip out of the city and spend some time exploring a place neither of us knows. Reading up on local history, stumbling into intriguing sites, hidden side streets, strange bars, doing whatever comes up. We’re good at this in New York. Let’s do it in Lebanon. I ask around about cheap charming hotels outside the city, and based on an enthusiastic tip from Diana, we decide to go to Tyre and stay at a little inn called Al-Fanar. The inn is in Hayy al Masihiyye, the old Christian quarter, near the ancient port and the old souk. Tyre also has some of Lebanon’s most famous ruins, and I haven’t been here since I was a child.
We spend our first day walking around the old souk, eating fresh fish on the harbor, where fishermen have slung their lines since the eighth century B.C. We drink frosty Almaza beers at a deserted but appealing little bar with ancient-looking arched stone ceilings. Our room at the inn, in a yellow two-story house, is perched right on the sea near the lighthouse and seems to jut directly over the water. As we crawl into bed that night, we look out the window. It’s like we’re actually in the middle of the Mediterranean. We sleep for ten hours straight.
Jasmine and Fire Page 18