We try to follow a map the next morning to the ancient Roman Hippodrome, one of the biggest chariot-racetrack remains in the world, but the rudimentary map we’re holding leaves all the side streets out, and we get lost on the way. Two teenage boys, walking home from their college campus nearby, see us fumbling through the map, and one of them asks in Arabic if we need help. They end up walking with us for half an hour, to the perimeter of the Hippodrome, which turns out to be sealed off by a locked gate. All four of us start circling the huge area together, trying to find the entrance. I tell the two guys that we’ll be fine, thanks so much for the directions. But they stay with us until one of them eventually spots an entrance, and they walk us over to it, then wave goodbye and dash off. Ah, the Lebanese. Rising to the occasion like champions, and going well beyond. So friendly and hospitable and helpful to strangers, more than I’ve seen anywhere else. Incredible that this same country specializes in bloodbaths, too.
The Hippodrome is deserted. We spot only an elderly man—must be a Greek Orthodox priest, with his long black robe, full graying beard, and huge silver cross on a chain—walking with a hunched-over old woman. In the distance we spot a young couple holding hands, teenagers probably looking for a place to make out. We nod hello at the woman guarding the front entrance, and she waves us in.
Inside the gate is an astounding sight: a huge oval-shaped lawn, where chariots raced in the days of the Roman Empire, is surrounded by a few stone bleachers, half-crumbled but still in decent shape considering they date back to between A.D. 200 and 600. A few meters away is the Necropolis, a burial site with marble and stone sarcophagi from the Roman and Byzantine eras. We walk through the enormous grassy field, then climb up to the top of a bleacher and zone out in the sun, looking out across the Hippodrome and the Necropolis, toward the edge of the city in the distance.
Later that day in the newer, more commercial part of town, we pass a few dozen store windows decorated with neon-pink stuffed teddy bears. Valentine’s Day is in a couple of days. The Lebanese, at least the shop owners and restaurateurs, heartily embrace this holiday, and if Valentine’s is not quite as inescapable here as in the States, the pink neon is still out in full force in Lebanon.
No idea what we’re going to do for Valentine’s Day—we haven’t discussed it yet. For our second and last night in Tyre, we crawl into our bed in the middle of the sea and giggle like schoolkids at how unbelievable it is that we’re here together, in ancient Tyre, a city that Alexander the Great tried to conquer more than two thousand years ago.
We’re back in Beirut on February 11, the day Mubarak finally gives up in Egypt. Now the Shiites of Bahrain, who make up a majority of the country’s population but have no representation in the dictatorial Sunni regime, are agitating for a revolution and getting brutally beaten and shot at. As with most Middle East news, it’s rare when something good happens—say, Mubarak is gone! Akhiran! Finally!—without something nasty following on its heels: in this case, the violent suppression of the protesters in Bahrain, the Persian Gulf island nation off the coast of Saudi Arabia.
Meanwhile in Lebanon, there hasn’t been much progress in forming a cabinet, but the political scene still feels relatively calm and uneventful now in mid-February. Still, Richard and I decide to lie low for at least the first half of the day on Valentine’s Day, the Hariri assassination anniversary. I’ve heard rumors that protests might break out to commemorate his death and rail against the current government stalemate.
“Stay home. Don’t go anywhere,” Josette tells me on the phone.
“We won’t. I promise.”
In Lebanon, sometimes it’s easier to just tell your anxious family what they want to hear. Then you just go about your business.
The protests, as it turns out, are a no-show, but a few high-profile parliament members from the March 14 Party announce they’re going to give commemorative speeches that night. We concoct a last-minute Valentine’s plan: after sleeping in late, we take a stroll from Hamra down to the Corniche, then over to Achrafieh, to wander around the winding streets and browse through bookstores, record shops, and whatever else we find. For dinner we go to Abdel Wahab, the restaurant where I’d taken the editor and TV writer from the States back in October, and I order a few of my favorite meatless dishes for us: eggplant fatteh, the sautéed dandelion greens called hindbeh, fattoush salad, and eggs fried in olive oil and sprinkled with sumac, a breakfast dish usually, but I love it at night, too. The food is mostly excellent, but the service tonight is a disaster, the waiters disorganized and apparently zonked out from the Valentine’s rush.
But one waiter unwittingly earns his tip: he tries to speak Arabic to Richard, thinking him a local. In fact, a bunch of people around Beirut have attempted that, too, from the man who runs the grocery shop on the ground floor of my building, to Ali the concierge. Even in New York, no one can ever guess Richard’s ethnicity: Indian, Iranian, Arab, Jewish, Native American, Spanish, Greek, Italian? He’s heard it all.
I can tell he’s flattered to be addressed in Arabic here, even if I haven’t been particularly diligent in my attempts to teach him a few phrases so he can reply. I ask him over dinner if being mistaken for a local puts him at ease.
“It does actually,” he says, as we spoon the eggplant fatteh onto our plates. “But everyone has been really friendly so far. I haven’t sensed any anti-Semitism here. A big anti-Israel vibe, yes, but I get it. If I were Lebanese or Palestinian, I’d hate Israel, too. It’s true, though, what they say about Lebanese hospitality, seriously.”
After dinner we go see The Fighter, subtitled in French and Arabic. The crowd in the theater is rowdy, but tonight, amazingly, no one talks over the actors’ voices or answers a cell phone during the movie, as often happens here. In fact, all the action-cheering noise from the audience makes the movie even more fun, as if we’re watching it in a live theater. All through the balls-out brutal Hollywood boxing extravaganza, Richard pokes me with his elbow, smiles, grabs my hand. We survived Valentine’s Day, our way: a deeply un-Valentine’s movie, and a hearty, if spastic, last-minute dinner of some meatless greatest hits.
Before Richard got here, I’d been wondering if I’d be able to feed him well in Lebanon if we skipped the meat. Yes, Lebanon’s cuisine is famously loaded with vegetables and legumes and many ways of getting your protein deliciously and without meat. It’s tougher, in my mind, if you don’t eat seafood either, but thankfully Richard loves fish. For lunch on his birthday, I’d taken him to Feluka, a restaurant on the Corniche with a sunny terrace overlooking the sea, and we’d ordered a platter of Sultan Ibrahim, a local fish similar to rouget. Deep fried and sprinkled with sea salt and lemon, it’s hot, crispy, and tangy, especially fantastic with cold beer. That day Richard had declared Sultan Ibrahim his new favorite fish. One night at the apartment, I’d also taught him how to make mujaddara, a comfort food classic of lentils, rice, and fried onions. We’d boiled lentils, fried thinly sliced onions in a pan, and stirred them in with uncooked rice, seasoning the mix with cumin, allspice, salt, and pepper and simmering until the rice was cooked through. The mujaddara was a homerun, too.
“Let’s make this in New York next time you visit,” Richard had said as we ate the dish with warmed-up pita bread.
“I’ll smuggle in some lentils from Beirut just for fun, although we’ll find the same ones in Brooklyn, too.”
On his second-to-last day, we head to the city of Byblos. It’s gray and drizzling in the morning, but the sun is blazing by the time we arrive in the port town, forty-five minutes from Beirut. Richard is drawn to ancient crumbling ports, I’m finding, and happily this country comes through. No question, we specialize in ruins here in Lebanon—but many of them date back thousands of years. Byblos is considered one of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited cities, spanning more than seven thousand years, and the remains here are from ancient Rome up through the Crusader era and beyond. The Lebanese call the city Jbeil, after its biblical name Gebal. It’s like a th
eme park of ruins, a panorama of remains from Roman and Crusader stone castles and amphitheaters and tombs, all perched steps away from the Mediterranean and excavated starting only in the early 1920s. In the distance, the Beirut skyline wraps around the bay.
The waves are crashing hard here on the Byblos coast this afternoon, and the sun is now shining fierce and strong. I imagine a ship landing here in 3000 B.C., in the time of the Egyptian pharaohs, who would send boats to Byblos to collect timber from Lebanon’s cedar trees for use in building their tombs. On my Egypt trip in January, I’d seen an almost perfectly preserved ship in a small museum near the Giza pyramids; the vessel was built around 2500 B.C., presumably to be buried with the afterlife treasures of the pharaoh Cheops, and was made mostly with cedarwood from Lebanon.
“Let’s see if we can find Sultan Ibrahim again for lunch,” Richard says after we walk through the Crusader castle and out into a sunlit patch of grass overlooking the sea.
We do find it, at Bab el Mina, a restaurant on the harbor. Cold bottles of beer, fresh seafood, the ancient port, the blue sea, and both of us here on a gorgeous afternoon. Bliss.
On Richard’s last morning, I take him to meet my great-aunt Nida, who I adore for her wit and her stories, which I’ve dropped by to listen to on a number of afternoons over tea. She’s also the one who’d said to my mom months ago, “Damn those men.”
I’m nervous that she’ll ask us if we’re engaged. I give Richard a heads-up.
“Don’t worry. Let’s go have tea with her. I like meeting your family.”
Nida greets us warmly, insists we eat the man’ouches she’s set out for us, and launches straight into one of her stories. She’s the best storyteller I’ve ever met and has a razor-sharp memory. She speaks both Arabic and English in the same eloquent, punctuated tones, her hands growing animated, her eyes lighting up behind her glasses, her sharply elegant features forming into a smile or a generous laugh.
As we sip our tea, she tells us how she met her late husband, Freddie, in the 1940s. He was a friend of her brother’s and was visiting Beirut from Cairo, where he had just started his career. He came by her family’s house in Beirut to say hello and sat down for coffee with her and her parents and siblings. By the time he returned by ship to Cairo a week later, the two had already fallen in love. They started writing letters every day, and he told her he’d be back for her the next summer. Then one excruciatingly long year later, he wrote her at the beginning of summer to tell her that for work reasons, he wouldn’t be able to come to Beirut that year. She was devastated, furious, and stopped replying to his letters. Then one day weeks later, she decided to write an angry response—the 1940s version of “Have a nice life”—but her mother intercepted the letter and edited it. “If God wills us to meet again, we will,” her mom added at the end.
The following year, two summers after they first met, Freddie came back for Nida. She was icy to him the day he showed up at her family’s doorstep, but he stayed for coffee with them, and slowly she started warming to him again, realizing her feelings for him hadn’t died, and here he’d come all this way to see her. He proposed that summer, and they stayed married and in love until he passed away last September.
This is one of the best love stories I’ve ever heard. I wonder, though, how the story would have played out in the age of cell phones, texting, and instant messaging, when there are so many ways to communicate what’s on your mind right this second—with no filter, no delay, and potentially disastrous consequences.
After their long-distance stint, Freddie and Nida lived in Cairo for a while but ended up moving back to Lebanon. Both had roots and family here, so the decision about where to make their home, if not a no-brainer, wasn’t too tangled. In my case, it may not be so easy. Beirut was already starting to feel more like home to me before Richard arrived, and having him here for two weeks made it feel even cozier. My anxieties about his visit mostly vaporized as the days went by, and it felt easy and natural having him around.
As we kissed goodbye in front of the taxi that took him to the airport on his last day here, a voice in my head was saying, Move here!
But I didn’t say it out loud. Another voice, much like Nida’s mother’s, took over, and I said something a little less hasty: “Safe travels!”
MARCH
It’s coming up on spring this month and my birthday—and maybe even the birth of a new Middle East. It remains to be seen whether this season will bring changes beyond Egypt and Tunisia and overturn more regimes known, over the past century, mainly for cruelty and repression instead of for their ancient heritage or their artistic and intellectual contributions to civilization. But since Mubarak finally fell in mid-February, and before him Ben-Ali in Tunisia, the revolutionary wave has picked up momentum in nearly every country in the Arab world.
One afternoon in March, a few weeks after Mubarak’s fall, I sit in at a talk at AUB by Rashid Khalidi, a historian and professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University. He’s in town this week from New York to speak about the Arab revolutions—what everyone is calling the Arab Spring, even though it’s still technically winter—and I’m curious to get some perspective about what’s going on around the region from Khalidi, a Palestinian American and something of a celebrity academic both in the States and here.
What’s different about these uprisings, Khalidi tells the crowd gathered in the university auditorium, is that for the first time in history, Arab populations are rising up not against a colonial occupation—which they’ve repeatedly done in the past—but against their own internal regimes, which have failed to deliver any kind of stability or economic growth or, perhaps most important of all, dignity.
Khalidi gets some cheers when he tells the packed room that for the first time in recent history, and maybe ever, Arabs are looking pretty good in the international media: “The way these revolutions are changing the American public image of the Arab world is astounding. It’s a good thing, for the first time, to be an Arab in the United States.”
Although he’s a rousing speaker, he strikes some sober notes in his talk. He cautions against overoptimism, since it’s not yet clear what will come next, if and when the other corrupt Arab regimes fall, and how the realities of postrevolutionary Egypt and Tunisia will play out.
And what about Lebanon? Khalidi doesn’t say much. Even though the political stalemate here continues, nothing else is really happening at the moment. There’s no dictatorship to overthrow; it’s just the usual seesaw of inertia and instability. But the irony that Lebanon is now the quietest country in the Middle East escapes no one. How’d that happen?!
It’s a relief that at the moment we’re not on the verge, at least not the razor’s-edge verge, of another civil war. Meanwhile, despite how inspiring it’s been to watch the revolutions around the region, things are getting even more horrendous for the protesters in some countries, particularly in Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, and now Syria—each of the regimes crushing protests ever more violently and ruthlessly.
But the ground in the Arab world is indeed shifting in a way it never has before. Of all the years to move back to the Middle East, I’ve lucked into this one, if luck is the right word. Even if I’ve never been one of those journalists who run to a war scene for the adrenaline high—I’m more likely to just run—living in the Arab world as the entire region goes through dramatic changes is an undeniable rush.
During his talk, Khalidi quotes Wordsworth: “Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.” An optimistic flourish for these heady, dangerous times.
No one knows yet if a new Arab world really is about to spring to life. But something else, also miraculous, will be born this month: my brother Samir’s first baby. She’s actually due on my birthday, in late March, and with luck I’ll be meeting her as a newborn when I visit Samir and his wife, Laila, in California in early April. Our parents are, needless to say, excited that one of their kids is finally procreating.
Before I hea
d to the States to meet my niece, I have to write an essay about my Beirut experience for ForbesLife magazine and host my friend Claire from New York. She’s been one of my best friends ever since we worked together at The Village Voice in the late 1990s, and she’ll be here staying with me for a week and a half this month. Claire has been going through a breakup over the past few weeks, as well as apartment-moving hassles in New York, and she’s eager for some Mediterranean-style eating, drinking, hanging out, and forgetting. She’s a magazine journalist, too, writing mostly about art and pop culture, and hopes to find some inspiration during her visit. I’m hoping this trip will come through for her on all counts.
I’ve planned a full week of adventures for us, and I’ve also set aside a couple of days when Claire can be off to explore on her own while I work on my ForbesLife assignment. I’m looking forward to writing this piece, the first substantial article I’ve been assigned on Lebanon—and incredibly, it’s neither about Beirut’s wild nightlife nor about the catastrophic political scene, but just a meditation on what my life here is like now.
I’ve been excited to see Claire and get lots of catch-up time with her, but I’ve also been wondering if there’s still any lingering tension between us from an argument we had when I was in New York around Christmas. It was nothing major—just confusion around a dinner plan we’d made for one of the handful of nights I was in town. We’d both been looking forward to spending time together but were crazed with tight schedules that week, and we’d ended up feeling rushed during our dinner. Hurt feelings and miscommunication ignited into a little fight, although we’d resolved it that night. But this will be the first time I’m seeing her since then.
My relationships with friends have been on my mind more than usual in these months in Beirut. As I’ve been cultivating some promising new friendships here and rekindling old ones, I’ve also been missing everyone I’m close to back in the States. But I’ve been noticing that with Lebanese friends, not just ones I’ve known since childhood but also people I’ve met more recently, I tend to have an easier time feeling confident and more like myself right away. My insecurities about seeming approachable, being trusted and valued, don’t seem to kick in as powerfully here, and my fears of rejection somehow aren’t as persistent or pronounced.
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