Twelve
It’s easy to imagine Beirut before the civil war: a port city with French-style architecture, large beachside hotels nestled along the Mediterranean, the American University of Beirut brimming with smartly dressed students, and Mount Lebanon in the distance. Now, the pockmarked buildings and crumbling sidewalks are gnarled into a knot of alleys, stairways, and gardens, with overgrown vines climbing the sides of the occasional abandoned home. Eager to see our new city, we spent our first day walking around the charming old homes in the French-dominant neighborhood of Ashrafieh. Overripe oranges fell off the trees as we sauntered underneath. It was as if everyone had agreed to turn their tiny courtyards, alleyways, and rooftops into botanical gardens—and the temperate Mediterranean weather had conspired to let that happen. Beirut seemed like everything that Beijing was not: alive, growing, green, and scented with oranges and flowers. We loved it immediately.
In neighboring Gemmyze we found a French-style bistro that served chilled rosé at sidewalk tables. The sun was setting and the street had a pink glow. In a few hours this would become the nightclub section of town. A mix of Arabic and French floated above the postwork crowd at the café. I ordered Cole olives to keep him occupied so Drew and I could enjoy our wine. Our waiter switched to English, with only a light accent, after he heard me try to pronounce the French from the menu.
At first it’s hard to grasp how this trilingual city works. On the street you’ll see French street names, Arabic building numbers and license plates, and English signs. There seem to be no clear distinctions as to why they use what language when. The language mishmash feels like the way bilingual couples talk to each other—it doesn’t matter if they say, “Do you want une café?” or “Voulez-vous something to eat?” Except, here its trilingual, so it’s more like, “Hello, habibi, ça va?” (Hello [English], love [Arabic], how are you [French]?). Linguists call this code switching, a fluidity between languages that people slip into when they are around other bilinguals.
A group of twentysomethings swirling their glasses of wine behind us were chatting in French and then reverting to Arabic when the waiter came to refresh their drinks. Eventually one of them leaned over and said to me in English, “So where are you from?”
“The U.S., but we’ve been traveling for a while,” I said. “We’re here to learn Arabic. This is actually our first night in Beirut.”
“Oh, fantastic!” she said, seeming genuinely excited. “We are coming from Jordan for the weekend. We are studying Arabic, too. How long are you staying?”
“Six months.”
“Oh, you will be very fluent by then—”
Her friend cut in to agree. “I’ve been studying for two months in Jordan and I can get by pretty well,” he said.
I smiled, and they soon faded back into their conversation as Cole polished off his olives. Since China he’d become a fearless eater. The setting sun reflected off our wineglasses while we ordered more food, cheese, cured meats, and a small quiche. The Muslim evening call to prayer rang out from the large mosque downtown. Drew and I made a deal: We would live in Ashrafieh with the cute French cafés and overripe oranges. We would enjoy the summer in this land of beautiful people, where glamorous hotels lined every inch of the shore, where instead of sandy beaches there were endless infinity pools, with bar service, techno music, and the sweet aroma of fruit tobacco being smoked out of argileh water pipes, poolside. It was the beginning of the summer on the Mediterranean and I imagined this was like living in the French Riviera, except in Arabic.
We paid our check and returned to the hotel, walking through a cool stone archway to a private garden, where the hotel owner smoked cigarettes all day while his too-thin wife argued with potential customers about their reservation dates. “I’m sorry, I don’t see you in the system,” she’d say on the phone, a common refrain she’d stick to, as various hotel-booking websites sent her faxes and e-mails with reservation information, which ended up on her desk in a large overlooked pile. Her system on a guest’s arrival was to sort through all of the papers, often while lighting another cigarette, and then, exasperated, give up and hand you the key to whatever room was open.
Our room had marble floors, white painted moldings, and French-style windows. The next morning, the owner brought us a plate of Lebanese bread, labneh, marmalade, and a good salted butter. They said something to Cole in Arabic as they scooped him up, then asked, “Français?”
“No, English.”
“Ah,” he said, and then waved Cole’s hand at us, “Say bye-bye to Mama!” and I waved as he took Cole outside. I watched them through the window for a minute, then went back to our breakfast. Drew and I silently conversed with a few meaningful looks:
This is okay, right?
Right?
I hope!
We had relaxed a bit since China. In Thailand it was common for the waiters to take our son while we ate, and play with him in the back of the restaurant. It seemed like some cultures viewed small children as community property. If the locals knew you well enough, they even stopped asking permission—after a while, the woman who ran the smoothie stand in Chiang Mai began to wave frantically at us when we arrived. She would run over, abandoning her customers and blender, to take Cole without a word and bring him back to her stand, holding him on her hip and feeding him strawberries while continuing to blend smoothies.
Still, I walked over to the window and looked down at the street below. The owner was holding Cole and waving Cole’s little hand at the guy who ran the shawarma shop across the street. A half an hour later Cole was returned, happy and clutching a lollipop.
• • •
WE NEEDED TO FIND a place to live, and this time, I looked for a local agent who spoke English to help us. The agent we ended up hiring spoke three languages: French, Arabic, and English. His English had only the slightest accent. He picked us up at the hotel to drive around Ashrafieh and look at houses, making small talk with Drew while Cole and I sat in the back. He talked about the conflict as he drove through the intense traffic, going down one-ways in the wrong direction, swerving around cars, gesturing like eh, I’ll give you the back of my hand and then shouting Arabic out his window. Arabic when spoken is beautiful, like a very guttural poetry. But yelled, it sounds intense. The hard kh and throat-scraping gh sound violent.
I tried to make conversation. “So, people really love to party here, huh?” I asked. We had heard the clubs going until daylight, and this was on a weeknight. People streaming out of the clubs in the morning went home as everyone else headed to work, the new day’s sun not shaming them at all.
“Yeah, of course,” he said. He kept checking his hair in his mirror. He wore a lavender button-down shirt that had been freshly pressed—in fact, he looked like he could have come from the clubs himself. The entire car smelled of his cologne, like musky sandalwood. “When the Israeli air raids came, people just moved from the clubs on one side of the city to the other side, then kept partying.”
Drew and I looked at each other in disbelief and sang out in unison, “Really?”
He shrugged as if to underline how not-a-big-deal this was.
The agent was talking about the thirty-four-day conflict in 2006 between Israel and Beirut-based Hezbollah. It was hard for us to imagine incoming rockets being an insignificant enough occurrence that you’d just go to a different nightclub instead of running to shelter. Then again, by that time, Beirut citizens had already lived through the Lebanese civil war, so anyone in their twenties or thirties had most likely grown up with the sound of incoming artillery.
“Do you know what the main business is here in Beirut?” our real estate agent asked us.
“Ah, tourism?” Drew offered.
“No. Money laundering. Look at these.” He waved at the businesses we were passing, little shops full of odds and ends.
“They don’t make any money. It’s all fronts. If you need mo
ney laundered, you send it to Beirut.”
“Ha!” Drew said, but I was dubious. Sometimes it’s fun to impress the tourists with half truths. I suspected he was putting us on. This guy couldn’t have been more than twenty-one, but I could taste the hustle on him. After all, his whole business was based on trying to put something together from only his contacts and his English skills: connecting tourists and incoming students with apartments, raising the price to take a monthly cut, or negotiating a finder’s fee with the largely Arabic-speaking older generation. I wondered if he told the same stories to all of his clients. Probably.
Despite my skepticism, when he pulled into a side road and led us down a cracked set of steps to the back of an old church, I inhaled sharply.
“Wow.”
The house was perfect. It was shaded by a canopy of flowering trees, set far from the street, half forgotten, with a towering church and apartment buildings obscuring it from the street, a relic from a much smaller Beirut. It seemed to be the best of all worlds, a country house plopped unexpectedly in the middle of a busy city, a little oasis waiting for us.
From the roof we could stretch our arms out and touch the tops of banana and orange trees with the tips of our fingers. There were deep red blossoms spilling over into the stairwell. The small courtyard below was a small jungle of a garden with broad-leafed plants, cream-colored roses, and the beginning of some kind of vegetable patch.
“We want it,” I said. The agent played it cool, but I knew he’d just made a big commission. He called the owner, a lawyer whose office turned out to be only a block away. The owner of the house came home to negotiate the deal. We all shook hands and then he and the agent turned to Drew and said, “Okay, let’s talk.”
The men were going to negotiate, apparently. They left me outside with Cole while they ironed out the details inside for what seemed like hours. Normally I would handle this kind of thing. Drew was ill equipped for negotiating in general, let alone a rental contract with a lawyer in another language; he’s too nice, too accommodating, and too American. When he returned sheepishly with a handwritten Arabic contract, I laughed.
“I love this house, but we just got screwed,” I said.
“I know. He was funny; he was very intense and wanted all of the rent at once.”
“Did you say no?”
“Yeah, of course. I was like, ‘I have had bad experiences in the past,’ and he was like, ‘Why are you so serious? Look at you, you look at me like you will eat me.’ It was weird.”
“But the house is ours, right?”
“Yup!”
“Okay, good, because I don’t think Cole will ever want to leave.”
Cole looked up at us from his current work of filling a flowerpot with dirt and then dumping it out again. He looked quite pleased to be absolutely covered in potting soil. After being cooped up in a Beijing high-rise condo, I was happy to see him being a kid, outside again, in the dirt.
That was it. Beirut was our new home.
Thirteen
Two men were yelling in my kitchen. The first was an old man in denim, who moved with the steady pace of someone walking underwater. The second was our perfumed and crisply dressed landlord, Pierre the lawyer. The day before, the old man had installed a new washing machine, something we had requested when we moved in. An ancient gas stove hulked in the corner, next to a faded refrigerator and dusty countertops. But the washing machine was shiny and new, the stickers from the store still affixed to its face.
To get the washing machine to work, the old man had snaked a crimped tube down from the roof, where the water cistern was located. We visited the water cistern every morning to turn on the city water, to fill up the cistern, before the city turned the water off for the day. Sometimes we forgot, and on those days we’d have no water. More often, Drew would turn it on, we’d forget to turn it off, and two hours later we’d hear the telltale drip, drip, drip of an overflowed cistern spilling excess water into the street.
The old man had drilled a hole in the ceiling and pushed the crimped tube through, then used duct tape to attach it to the washing machine. It worked marvelously at first. The washing machine hummed ever so slightly and we left our clothing to a well-deserved scrub.
Then, yesterday: Drip. Drip. Drip.
“Drewwww! Is that the water?” I yelled from the bedroom.
He rushed upstairs to the cistern and I could hear his loud walking above. He returned a moment later.
“Nope, it’s still filling up. Not overflowed.”
“What is that, then?”
We walked into the living room and the dripping soon became a splashing sound. The kitchen. We rushed in to see the crimped tube, torn duct tape and all, dangling loose from the ceiling and flooding the kitchen at an incredible clip.
“Turn off the water, Drew!”
He ran outside and cranked the water faucet shut. The stream lessened, then abated.
“Duct tape. Oh, God. What was he thinking?”
“I’ll call Pierre.”
Now, here we were, and Pierre was in our kitchen yelling at the old man. What could he be saying? Rationally, I suspected it was something like this:
“Okay, so you’re going to fix this?”
“Yes, no problem, I will fix it.”
“Great! I am glad to hear it. Thanks so much.”
The thing is, that Arabic when spoken loudly could sound harsh. It was impossible for me to tell if what he was really saying was something more like: “What the sweet baby Jesus is the matter with you, you doddering old fool? I will ruin you! Don’t you know who I am? Well, do you?”
I had no idea. They smiled at the end, and it seemed amicable. The entire interaction was so far removed from the reserved culture in China—I couldn’t imagine what my tutor would have done if I started shouting at her. The woman wouldn’t even take her coat off until I instructed her. Another previous tutor had skipped out on collecting his last paycheck just to avoid confrontation with me.
The washing machine issue resolved, it was time for me to go to class, and Pierre addressed me in silky English, “Do you want me to walk you to the stairs?”
I sighed internally, but said, “Thank you.”
“It’s on the way to my office, no problem, no problem.”
Ashrafieh was perched on a hill overlooking downtown. To leave our neighborhood we would go down one of the many staircases that are found at intervals between the center and us. That was where we were headed, but it always took forever. Pierre insisted on accompanying me to the staircase as an act of chivalry but knew everyone in our little neighborhood, so he greeted almost every person we passed. When he spotted one gentleman, he said, “Here, take this . . .” and dropped his phone and keys into my hands.
The men embraced and kissed each cheek, then talked in Arabic for minutes while I stood there holding Pierre’s stuff, feeling diminished. The conversation wrapped up, and he took his things back. We walked in silence to the stairs that he knew I’d been on many times before, and he told me, “Okay, the stairs are right here.”
I know, Pierre. I smiled at him and thanked him.
“Be careful!” he said. I nodded.
• • •
I WAS THE WORST STUDENT in my Arabic class. I had found the school online, my other options being another private school or the American University of Beirut. My school was the cheapest one, closest to my house, and it let me enroll online, so I signed up for classes before ever seeing the place.
When I arrived, I found hand-painted murals on the outside of a bustling restaurant filled with students smoking pipes, eating hummus, and listening to club music. Upstairs was a hostel. Students studying here for the summer could pay a little extra to stay at the hostel, so there were several rooms of dorm beds. My classroom was in the adjacent building, a simple white room with a U-shaped formation of desks. Our teacher, M
ajed, stood at the whiteboard, writing Arabic letters with a dry-erase marker.
On the first day, Majed asked, “So does anyone know the first letter of the Arabic alphabet?”
One student’s hand shot up. “Aleph.”
“That’s right, and here’s how you write aleph in Arabic,” Majed said, turning his back to us to write on the whiteboard. Wait, some of the students already know some Arabic? I thought with a panic. I scribbled notes furiously on my notepad to keep up.
Majed started on the right side of the board and moved left (Arabic is written from right to left). As he wrote, he spoke the entire time, explaining that the letters in Arabic have four different forms, depending on where they fall in the word. In English, that would be like using a different letter T for:
table—beginning, or initial
castle—middle, or medial
hat—end, or final
t—by itself, or separate
In Arabic it looks like this:
“Who knows the second letter?”
Same student. “Ba’?”
“That’s right.” And he proceeded to draw a bracket like a stretched-out U with a dot under it. “Alone,” he announced. Then a backward L with a dot under it. “Beginning.” Then, the same backward L but with an underline on both sides, and a dot. “Middle.” Then, the same one as alone but with a leading line. “End.”
My classroom time was straight rote memorization for four long hours each day, but doing it alongside other classmates in a community felt completely different from memorizing vocabulary solo in Beijing. After class, we all headed down to the restaurant together and ordered food and drinks. We told stories about ourselves and how we ended up in Beirut. I was daunted that I was so much further behind than almost everyone in the class, but having some kind of connection, to be able to gripe about how hard Arabic was and then laugh about it took the pressure off.
After class, I would walk home through Gemmyze, where the school was located, up the big hill to Ashrafieh. For reasons I had trouble naming, living in this city felt easier. There was no lost-in-translation feeling, even though I didn’t understand the language. I still didn’t have a good dictionary, which was an issue I’d had in Beijing, since you can’t really look up Chinese characters in a dictionary. In Beirut the problem was that they simply didn’t have a decent dictionary for the spoken Levantine dialect. When I inquired at the school, they shrugged. “Ah, we are working on creating one.”
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