• • •
AT SOME POINT, I stopped reading the papers, because the daily local news was too alarming. There was a strike at the electric company, which I knew because I walked past it each day and saw the signs and a handful of Beiruti soldiers standing guard. So we didn’t receive a bill for the next four months.
Meanwhile, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah made a rare public appearance, and he urged the citizens to calm down, saying, in effect, “Listen, this is your city; it doesn’t really do much good to burn tires and shoot things up in your city if you’re mad about Syria, ya know?”
There was only one thing to do: adapt. We bought candles for the power outages. We made sure our laptops were always charged so we were prepared when the power went out. We downloaded the power outage app—and yes, this was the insanity of the situation, they made a mobile application for the blackout instead of just fixing the electricity shortage. We found cafés that had generators and Internet so we could upload work. I stopped reading the news, I pretended like everything was okay, and I tried to just enjoy the city.
• • •
I STARTED DOING BETTER in my Arabic classes. I had adopted a technique for improving my pronunciation that was working exceedingly well. After Beijing, where I did some nighttime listening to Mandarin, I had decided that passive listening probably wasn’t doing me much good. After all, Patricia Kuhl’s study with infants showed what a difference talking to a live person versus listening to a CD had on retaining language. The CD had zero effect.
Each day in class, I put my phone on my desk and when my teacher was speaking, usually going down a list of vocabulary words, I recorded him. Then, while walking home, I put in my earbuds and listened to the recording, repeating each phrase. This active listening and speaking, repeating over and over again the same phrases with a native speaker in my ear, vastly improved my accent and helped me memorize new words quicker. It had the added benefit of distracting me, because walking home, past the now-empty electric company building, with child-men in full army gear with machine guns and smoking cigarettes outside, made me nervous. I could see the baby fat on their faces. They were too young. Their weapons were so big. What if they got spooked by something and started shooting things?
Usually my imagination would get the best of me, and my heart would race as I walked by and imagined a thousand deadly scenarios. However, now, with my teacher Majed in my ear, I could just walk down the street, quietly saying Arabic words as he said them back to me, the sun warming my skin, the street traffic, honking horns, and dangerous military youth all fading behind me.
For the rest of my studies, I completed all of Majed’s worksheets, the packets getting thicker every week. I loathed them. The exercises were excruciatingly boring: Here’s a sentence, take the subject and change its gender! But I also did other things. I wrote essays in Arabic; I copied and recopied Arabic words into my notebook. I committed everything to memory. We watched Spider-Man and random kung fu movies dubbed in Lebanese Arabic.
On the weekends, I went to the local farmer’s market and bought cherry jam or homemade tabbouleh. I made elaborate Lebanese spreads for the family with special pickled vegetables, cheeses, dips, and breads. Drew was so in love with the pita bread, it was so fresh and good, that we’d pick some up almost every day. The roses in our yard started to bloom, the bananas began to ripen, and Cole had slowly begun speaking again.
One day, I took the long steps to our house in Ashrafieh, and someone had spray-painted in huge block letters in both Arabic and English across three flights of stairs:
LET’S
THINK
POSITIVE
Eighteen
I studied for my final exam for Urban Arabic in the dark, sitting outside in my garden, the sound of my neighbors conversing on the street the only noise. It was another blackout, this one unscheduled, so we had no idea when it would end. I read by candlelight, flipping through my two notebooks, both completely filled with notes. Some of the pages were covered with new words I’d heard on the street, with or without English translation. Other sections had pages and pages of carefully copied vocabulary lists with my English translation and little notes about pronunciation.
The day of the exam, my hands were slick with sweat as we waited for Majed to hand out the materials. When he placed a thick packet in front of me, I quickly flipped through the contents. Sentences in Arabic to be translated into English. Questions in Arabic requiring Arabic answers. Grammar and vocabulary quizzes. Reading comprehension. All straightforward. I took my time, turned in my test and spent the next twenty-four hours playing the test over in my mind. Had I missed something? Would I pass? I felt like I had come so far, but who knew for sure?
The next day, Majed prepared to give us our exams and he stood in front of me. “I am so disappointed. Why didn’t you study?”
My jaw dropped. “I did!”
He smiled. “I know!” He handed me my exam. Ninety-five percent—I had gotten an A and, I later found out, the highest mark in the class.
I was elated. After the brutal hit my confidence took in China, this was total vindication. Arabic was hard, but it wasn’t that hard. I would now be moving on to the advanced class, and six weeks after that I would start MSA—the literary language of Arabic.
Back home, I showed Drew my results and did a happy dance. We poured a glass of wine and had a toast. “Cole, Mama can speak Arabic!”
Of course my joy was short lived, because soon after my exam, and all through the next two weeks, I felt extremely ill. I wasn’t sure if it was the flu or what. One night I tried to drink a glass of wine in an effort to relax. I finished the glass, ran to the bathroom, and immediately threw up.
I tried to take it easy, but it was time for class again, and this time I enrolled in private lessons with Majed. I didn’t want to go into the advanced course and run into the same rote memorization techniques. Plus, with the same students as my first class moving on to the second, my hope was that I’d avoid all the “why the teaching method sucks” arguments that seemed to take up so much of our class time. I also scheduled fewer classroom hours so I that could spend more time using the language outside my studies. I planned on using the rest of my tuition money to take nonlanguage classes in Arabic, maybe some cooking classes—or if I had to, hiring someone to hang out with me and chat in Arabic.
Even though I was sick, I still went to my private lessons with Majed. I had a plan. Much like the soundboard for Mandarin, in which each morpheme was recorded as spoken by a native, I wanted to get every piece of vocabulary we had ever covered into one recording. So I drew up a massive vocabulary list, taking all of my notes and textbooks, and for our first lesson, I asked Majed to be my vocal talent. It was a lot to record. But it would give me a complete audio guide to the language and I could really drill into correcting my pronunciation. (I never seemed to attack my kh and gh sounds well enough to satisfy Majed). Majed did it but hated the entire concept. It was like trying to get a cat to take a bath. On my recording, there’s a lot of sighing between words, and by the end he was rushing through the words as fast as he could go.
I was working through the advanced textbook on my own, and Majed and I would meet to go over my work and talk about grammar and new vocabulary. By this point, everything was in Arabic. There were no more translations to get me by, so sometimes I wasn’t clear on the pronunciation if there were no vowel markers on a certain word or if there was a certain Beirut twist that wasn’t explained in the text.
I’d been excited to get away from the rest of the students and focus on learning instead of complaining, but I soon realized that it wasn’t only the rest of the class that had frustrated me, but also the style of instruction. Majed had a set idea of how to teach, and even when I tried to push him hard toward a more conversational approach, he kept veering back to standing at the whiteboard and reciting grammar rules. I thought I would learn more from simp
ly keeping up running dialogue in Arabic. Majed was growing frustrated with me, but can one really learn a language simply by being lectured to for ten hours a week about the grammar rules? It wasn’t connecting for me. I was stubbornly insisting on the kind of instruction that I needed.
Meanwhile, I was feeling increasingly ill. I hadn’t consumed any alcohol since the wine-vomiting incident—just the smell of it turned my stomach—but then again it seemed like everything I ate did that. I’d been sick for about 10 days, and every afternoon I was taking longer and longer naps. One day I came home and walked into the kitchen and was almost knocked back by the smell.
“Drew, come here!”
“What?” he said, rushing over.
“Do you smell that? What is that?”
“I don’t smell anything.” He sniffed the air like a hound.
“You don’t? It smells like rotting fruit and vegetables. It’s disgusting!” It was a sickly sweet odor, like rotting fruit.
“Nope.”
Then, I remembered—I’d smelled this scent once before, almost exactly three years earlier. Oh holy crap. “Drew, I’m pregnant.”
He looked floored. “No, you are not! Come on!”
I took a pregnancy test the next morning, while Drew paced outside the bathroom door. Two blue lines. Pregnant.
I laughed, a deep, body-shaking belly laugh, and Drew didn’t even have to ask what it said. “Really?” he called out.
“I told you!” I yelled from the bathroom.
“I can’t believe it! Wow, that’s so crazy . . . and awesome!”
“Oh my God, we’re having a baby!”
“A baby!”
We danced around and hugged each other. Then I had to go lie down.
• • •
I DIDN’T EVEN KNOW how far along I was, so when I went to the ob-gyn with Drew and Cole in tow and she asked, “When was your last menstrual period?” I had to count back. I finally realized I’d had my last one the day we arrived in Beirut.
“May,” I said.
She looked at me and said, “Three months ago? And you’re just coming in now?”
Gulp. I was saved by her phone, which she picked up and answered in French, then switched to Arabic. She had a thirty-second rapid-fire conversation, hung up, and without a beat turned to me and said in English, “Okay, let’s go take a look.”
I hopped up on her examination table. Using her ultrasound wand on my belly, she showed me what looked like a very large baby.
“Yes. Okay. Mm-hmm,” she said.
“What?” I asked.
“You’re thirteen weeks pregnant. Everything looks good. There’s the heartbeat.”
Drew picked Cole up and pointed at the screen. “Cole! You’re going to be a big brother!” Drew said. We watched the baby wiggle.
I had some blood work done, stocked up on prenatal vitamins, and paid her in cash. Our travel insurance didn’t cover pregnancy, so it was all out-of-pocket. The total was $72. I tried to remember my per-visit cost before insurance in the States, and it seemed like a deal in comparison.
There wasn’t much time to consider the pregnancy and what it meant for our plans. I had just finished my sessions with Majed; I bought out the school’s entire stock of Beirut films and their even more advanced Cultures and Conversations textbook and wished them adieu. From here on out, I would go it alone, studying Arabic at home, perhaps hiring someone to speak with me. My days of rote memorization were behind me. It was all good timing because as a little respite from the summer heat and the never-ending wave of blackouts, we had to do a visa run; our tourist visa was about to expire, so we had to leave Lebanon for at least one day, then return and get a new ninety-day tourist visa. We decided to make a holiday of it and took the short flight to Cyprus to hang out at a beachside resort for a bit.
We went from sitting in the dark for hours a day during the rolling blackouts to being spoiled by constant electricity, free and strong Internet, and even cable TV. I watched 16 and Pregnant for the first time. We rented bikes and rode along the coast, swam in the clear waters, and ate ice cream after lunch. My morning sickness subsided almost completely. Drew constantly rubbed my belly and whispered “We’re having a baby” in my ear. After our daily swims, Cole quickly became accustomed to the idea of having Mama join him for his naps, our sunburned faces next to each other on the pillow, the taste of salt on our lips.
Nineteen
We returned from Cyprus tanned and happy. Our return coincided with that day’s rolling blackout, so the apartment was dark. We dropped the luggage in the bedroom, and I lay down on the bed with Cole for his nap. Drew made lunch in the kitchen. The sunlight lit half the room and gave him enough light to prepare chopped beef and hummus, with a heavy dose of olive oil and freshly cut yellow and orange bell peppers. Cole drifted off next to me, his freckles more pronounced across the bridge of his nose, a new development since Cyprus, hard-earned by spending entire days on the beach.
A few days later, while working on my computer, I got a message from a friend: “Have you heard? Are you leaving?”
Far away, across the Atlantic, on the other side of the United States, a man named Nakoula Basseley Nakoula had uploaded a video to YouTube. That film, The Innocence of Muslims, made its way to Egypt’s media over the summer. The New York Times described it: “The trailer opens with scenes of Egyptian security forces standing idle as Muslims pillage and burn the homes of Egyptian Christians. Then it cuts to cartoonish scenes depicting the Prophet Muhammad as a child of uncertain parentage, a buffoon, a womanizer, a homosexual, a child molester and a greedy, bloodthirsty thug.”
Nakoula was an Egyptian-born filmmaker and radical anti-Islamist, out on probation for bank fraud charges. His amateur filmmaking shouldn’t have been seen by anyone much less the whole world, but on September 8 it was broadcast on al-Nas, an Egyptian media channel with Arabic dubbing.
This would change everything.
On September 11, protests broke out across the Middle East, including at a U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, where U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three of his staff were killed. My friend’s message reached me that day, before I had even heard the news.
I pulled up Al Jazeera, which had the best real-time English-language reporting for the Middle East. Drew and I sat glued to our computers, watching live updates from across the region. In Cairo, three thousand protesters demonstrated, tearing down the American flag. In Yemen, three protesters were killed during clashes with the police. Protests occurred in Iraq, Iran, and the Gaza Strip. Police teargassed ten thousand protesters in Sudan. In Tunis, four more people were killed. In Lebanon, in the northern city of Tripoli, protesters burned down a Kentucky Fried Chicken—because Tripoli didn’t have a U.S. embassy to attack. One person was killed.
I e-mailed my friend Kayt, whose ex-husband was in the military, and asked how worried I should be. She said, “Not to alarm you, but nonessential personnel are being flown out of Beirut.”
There was a part of me that didn’t want to believe it. We waited. We watched.
The pope came to Beirut that weekend, speaking about the need for peace in the region. We didn’t go to see him speak because it seemed like an opportune moment for something bad to happen, but we did catch a glimpse of the armed procession pass us by in Gemmyze: SUVs with mounted machine guns with men perched on the sunroofs. The crowd on the street watched in silence.
That same day, the United States publicly ordered nonessential diplomatic staff to leave Sudan and Tunisia. Hezbollah, headquartered in Beirut and part of the democratically elected government in Lebanon, called for a week of protests against Americans. The following Monday, tens of thousands of Beirutis took to the streets, and Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah gave a rare speech, his first since 2008, saying, “The world does not understand the breadth of the humiliation. The world must understand the depth of our bo
nd with our prophet.”
The day of the Beirut protests, we stayed inside. Friends were sending us messages, wondering, “What’s happening? Are you leaving?” We didn’t know what to do. We watched it all unfold from within our house in Ashrafieh. The few times we did venture out for groceries, everything seemed exactly the same. The sun was shining, the birds were—no kidding—chirping in the trees, and the blossoming tree in our courtyard had shed so many of its flowers that we shuffled through a mound of fuchsia petals every time we walked out our gate. But we knew things could change very suddenly.
In 2006, during Hezbollah’s conflict with Israel, the city shut down, the road to the airport was blocked, and all commercial flights were grounded. Travel host Anthony Bourdain was filming an episode of his show No Reservations in Beirut during this time and had to be airlifted out. There was no other way out: Syria to the north and behind you and ravaged by civil war, the sea in front of you, and a closed border with Israel to the south. We had watched this episode years before thinking of coming to Beirut, but as everything unfolded, I kept remembering it. If things did get shut down, we could be stuck in a city that could unravel into protests, fires, shootings, or worse.
It was a delicate balance, both traveling to the Middle East with a child, which in general is safe to do, and the reality that sometimes, for certain periods of time, areas of the Middle East aren’t safe. It was a privilege to travel here, but even more so, it was a privilege to be able to leave, something our neighbors didn’t have as an option, so we weighed it carefully. It would have been easy to overreact.
Drew and I tried to stay calm, and it mostly worked. Maybe that was part of living in Beirut. We’d gotten used to the blackouts and the water cistern and the duct tape, and we’d also gotten used to a low-level but constant threat of violence. We were becoming a little like our neighbors. But the difference was, they had earned that indifference through a traumatic fifteen-year civil war. They lost loved ones. Their homes. Their livelihoods. A study by the American University of Beirut in 1999 showed that at one point most twenty-somethings in Beirut were suffering from PTSD. The weight of what they had seen stayed with them for life. While the Beiruti indifference was easy to adopt, for us, it would always be superficial. When it came down to it, we weren’t war-hardened and we hoped to keep it that way.
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