Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War

by Annia Ciezadlo

  In the mid-1980s (jelly bracelets, Wham! on the radio, Latin American death squads), we moved to San Francisco. Jobs were scarce, apartments even scarcer: landlords had their pick of tenants, and none of them wanted a single mother with a teenager. After looking at some terrifying transient hotels and running out of other options, we ended up in a homeless shelter called Raphael House. An obscure Christian sect ran the place for families who needed to get back on their feet.

  On the first night, my mother and I filed into a dining room full of long communal tables. The brothers and sisters passed out plates containing livid, gelatinous little squares of something called “tofu.”

  I stared at the stuff. It stared back at me, quivering wetly. You’re a long way from home, and California is a foreign land, it seemed to say. Eat me, my pretty, and you will never find your way back home again.

  Tofu was a phenomenon I had vaguely heard of, but naively imagined I would never encounter, like homelessness. A good midwestern girl, raised on corn and chicken and food you could grab ahold of, must have done something unforgivable to deserve this slippery thing.

  I looked at my mother: she looked as appalled as I was, which did not seem like a good sign. Clearly, we were in the grips of some California cult.

  One of the brothers saw me staring at the tofu—they ate communally with the shelter residents—and sensed my distress. “We don’t usually eat this stuff,” he said, a little apologetically, and we all laughed.

  It turned out the brothers and sisters were godly folk, despite their taste for Satan’s flesh, and most of the time they made real food. They ran Raphael House off the proceeds from a restaurant; once they invited us to a picnic with more than a dozen different kinds of bread. I remember thick brown boules with nuts and cheese baked inside; fluffy white loaves flecked with dill; and my first taste of Irish soda bread. I didn’t even know bread came in such permutations, all of them like opening up a new book, and it more than made up for the tofu.

  We stayed at Raphael House for three and a half weeks. It was difficult to register a homeless child for high school back then, but after some fast and elegant talking my mother managed to get me into a San Francisco magnet school, which I attended for one week before we pulled up stakes and left again.

  Overland Park, Kansas, was my third high school; but I remember it most for something the natives called “pizza” but which bore no resemblance to the pizza I knew—this was a kind of giant cracker enameled with Day-Glo orange Velveeta and cut into squares.

  St. Louis, Missouri, was a real city: it had the Sting Burger, the glory of the Delmar Loop, a hamburger blazing with spices and barbecue sauce and “not recommended for the faint of palate.” But the suburbs had a better tax base. My mother researched the public schools and moved us into the cheapest neighborhood of the best school district. This was high school number four, and by now my math skills were too shot to get into a good college, never mind the tuition. I didn’t care by that point anyway. I just wanted to keep moving. You might say I was looking for something; a psychiatrist might have described it as a desire to return to the Chicago house with the piano and my grandmother’s kitchen. That wasn’t it though—my grandfather had relented by then, and we had gone back to visit, but it wasn’t home anymore.

  There were days when we didn’t know where we’d be sleeping that night; months when I longed to go to school like a normal kid. But one thing I never questioned: dinner. Somehow my mother saw to it that we sat down to a proper meal every evening. A glass or two of wine and a Crock-Pot turned cheap cuts of meat into daube Provençal while she was at work; bacon, leeks, and cream (you only need a touch of each) transformed the proletarian potato into a queen. No matter where we found ourselves—a homeless shelter, a friend’s couch, our car—we would sit down to eat, and we would be home.

  Toward the end of my senior year, a friend with a car gave me a ride home. I didn’t usually let my classmates see our one-bedroom railroad apartment, where my mother slept on a foldout sofa in the living room so I could have my own bedroom. But Wendy was all right, so I brought her in, and my mother invited her to stay for dinner.

  That night we were having Suleiman’s Pilaf, a lamb and onion stew topped with parsley and chopped almonds and sultanas, served with rice and yogurt. It was one of my mother’s standbys, adapted from the British cookbook writer Elizabeth David, the woman who introduced postwar England to the warm sunlight of Mediterranean cooking—a nomad by choice, a vagabond aristocrat who learned how to make sumptuous meals from nothing.

  Wendy lived in what I thought of as a mansion, with multiple bedrooms and an actual dining room. I always imagined people in houses like that eating duck in aspic off matching plates under crystal chandeliers. But when we all sat down at our small kitchen table, which was also where I did my homework, Wendy looked stunned. In her house, she told us, everyone just foraged in the fridge or got pizza somewhere. Nobody cared what or when the kids ate.

  “Do you eat like this every night?” she asked, with something that sounded like awe, and when my mother said yes, I saw that home could be something you made instead of the place where you lived.

  I continued to wander throughout college and beyond: Chicago, Portland, Minneapolis, Oakland. Back to Bloomington for a while (Hinkle’s Hamburgers, where they would always ask, in one breath: ketchupmustard? picklesonions?). After college I shuffled off to Buffalo, where I waited tables in a series of greasy spoons and waited for the recession to end. Buffalo was icy sidewalks and urban blight, $1.99 steak and eggs, and a bottomless cup of coffee at the old Pano’s diner at three in the morning.

  After four years on America’s frozen rim, I migrated south to the big city. Aside from a handful of native New Yorkers, most of the people I knew there were transplants like me, which is probably why it was the first place I felt at home.

  And then I met Mohamad. Another reluctant nomad.

  Chapter 2

  Afghanistanism

  AFTER THE DAY of the grape leaves, Mohamad and I started calling each other every day. A few weeks later he took me to his favorite restaurant, Afghan Kebab House. The restaurant’s name blazed in crimson neon in the window, surrounded by the green neon outline of Afghanistan’s borders. Underneath, lavender neon spelled out: HALAL MEAT.

  Inside, the ceiling was draped in canvas, making the restaurant feel like a tent. Small tables lined the walls. Waiters hustled through with sizzling trays of kebab that filled the room with the fragrance of allspice, cinnamon, and roast lamb. As soon as we sat down, Mohamad got up again and went to say hello to the owner. He knew him from a story he had done about the Afghan community in Queens. They gripped each other’s hands, talking quietly, and for a moment I felt the world billow about us like a sail.

  The waiter brought us bolani kashalu, crisp oily little turnovers packed with soft potatoes and herbs and blistered brown on the outside. Next came banjan burani, charred, buttery eggplant slices buried under yogurt sprinkled with dried mint. Finally the kebab arrived, tender and smoky, flanked by light brown basmati rice, grilled Afghan flatbread, and salad drowned in creamy white dressing flecked with herbs.

  Mohamad always had chicken kebab. He loved the way it all came on one big plate, the rice and meat and salad each staking out its own semi-autonomous zone. It reminded him of his mother—how she’d used to arrange the food on his plate in exactly the right proportions, the proper configuration of meat, salad, pickles; how she would smother everything in yogurt sauce. I was the one who tried the fish kebab, the bolani stuffed with scallions, and the narinj palau, rice pilaf studded green and orange with pistachios and orange rind.

  A poster hung on one of the rough brown walls of a young girl, glaring out from deep red folds of wool. Her name was Sharbat Gula, though nobody knew that back then. In 1985, the year she had appeared on the cover of National Geographic, the frozen stare of her sea-green eyes fixed the world’s attention on the flood of Afghan refugees fleeing the Soviet occupation.


  Then the Cold War ended, Soviet troops left Afghanistan, and aside from military historians and feminists, most Americans forgot about Central Asia. There was even a word for this willful oblivion: Afghanistanism. People used it to criticize newspapers for wasting space on faraway, irrelevant topics like Afghanistan.

  But the orphans of this forgotten war grew up to join the Taliban, and they were growing bolder and more extreme. In February 2001, the bearded militants publicly executed two women accused of being “prostitutes” by hanging them in a soccer stadium while hundreds watched. Three weeks later, the Taliban dynamited two sixth-century statues of Buddha. The Taliban’s leaders had declared them idols, forbidden by Islamic law. The giant Buddhas were historic enough to make the front page of The New York Times.

  “Why is it that people are more upset about the statues than the fact that a month ago they publicly executed two women?” I asked Mohamad.

  “Or that they just massacred three hundred people a couple of months ago,” he agreed, a whiplash of anger in his voice that I didn’t recognize. I hadn’t heard about that.

  The Taliban, it turned out, weren’t as far away as they seemed: they had opened an office in Queens. Mohamad had interviewed the genial, richly bearded Taliban ambassador to the United Nations, who served him sugared almonds and green tea, and had written a story about the Taliban’s New York outpost. The small Afghan community in Queens was divided, Mohamad told me; some were pro-Taliban, others were anti. Only a few managed not to get reeled back into the politics of home.

  The owners of this Afghan Kebab House were Hazaras, Shiite Muslims, like most of the people the Taliban had killed that January. Mohamad was a Shiite too, or so I was vaguely aware; at the time it seemed like the kind of detail only the Taliban would care about.

  Our courtship continued through spring and summer. We called it our “cross-border romance,” because Greenpoint, in Brooklyn, was just over the border from Queens. I would ride my bicycle across the Newtown Creek, past the sewage treatment plant and the cemetery, then take Queens Boulevard to Sunnyside, and more often than not we would end up at Afghan Kebab House.

  One warm evening in early fall, I rode to Sunnyside after work. We went to dinner as usual, then went back to his apartment. By that point I was slowly colonizing all the empty space in his kitchen. I had clothes piled up on his floor, and I was rooting through them looking for a clean shirt to wear to work the next day.

  “Maybe we should think about living together,” he said slowly. “Not now,” he added hastily when he saw my expression. “But maybe sometime next year, like in the spring.”

  I was in love with him. But I liked my ritual of riding my bicycle back and forth, the feeling of freedom it brought me; on some inarticulate level, I thought maybe we could just keep doing that forever.

  “Let’s think about it,” I said. “We’ve only been going out for five months.”

  We agreed to sleep on it. We both had a long day ahead: the next day was the mayoral primary election, the culmination of a long and bitter campaign, and we would both be writing about it until after the polls closed.

  I woke up late, as usual, and wandered into the living room. He already had the television turned on. But there was no news of the election, no lines of New York voters streaming to the polls. Just a tall black-and-white building flat against a light blue sky with smoke coming out of its side.

  Six days later, he was on a one-way flight to Pakistan.

  In the months that followed, New Yorkers discovered a world that most of us had not known was there. We snapped at our friends for no reason. We forgot simple names and numbers. We lay awake at night, unable to sleep, and sleepwalked through our days. We coughed and wheezed our way through fall and winter. We swayed silently on the subway, a city of zombies, and stared at each other with baleful understanding.

  I worked on Wall Street, about eight blocks from Ground Zero. After work I would head out into the smoky night, past National Guardsmen and dump trucks full of twisted metal, through the militarized construction site that lower Manhattan had become. Mohamad called me every evening, no matter where he was. Islamabad, Quetta, Peshawar. Jalalabad when it fell from Taliban control. And every time the phone rang, my stomach would contract, fearing bad news.

  One winter evening, while waiting for him to call, I walked past a square where we had almost kissed on one of our first dates. Normally the little courtyard was bathed in the comforting orange glow of sulfur lights. Now it was dark and heaving with the hard gray bodies of rats. There were rats all over lower Manhattan those days, and the thought of why they had suddenly proliferated sent me home sobbing stupidly.

  That night, when Mohamad finally called, I tried to explain to him. It wasn’t the rats, but something else, something I couldn’t express: the dark streets, the checkpoints everywhere. The fire that burned underground for three months, insinuating the smell of rotting wet ashes into everything. Uniformed men with guns in the subway. The ruin that continued to loom over us long after the concrete and metal itself had been trucked away. This city had been our home, a living thing; now it was a military zone surrounding a mass grave.

  He sighed. A group of Pakistani militants had offered to let him interview a wounded al-Qaeda member. He was trying to figure out if it was safe. (A few weeks later, after the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl disappeared, they would break off contact with Mohamad.) But I didn’t know any of this until long afterward.

  “Look, I have to go,” he said. His voice was tight. “I just wanted to let you know I’m okay.”

  “Can’t we talk a little longer? I just want to hear your voice.” We had been separated, at that point, for almost as long as we had been together.

  “Annia, there are wild dogs here,” he said. “I’m standing out in the open to get a satellite signal and they’re starting to circle around me. I have to go.”

  During that long, dark winter, I dragged all my friends to one Afghan Kebab House or another. I would inflict on them detailed reminiscences: Mohamad won’t eat fish kebab, but only chicken; Mohamad likes firni, the milky white pudding scented with rosewater and cardamom and sprinkled with crushed pistachios; Mohamad says it reminds him of Lebanese mhalabieh.

  Every time I was there, I would remember the last time Mohamad and I had dinner there together. It was a couple of days before he flew to Pakistan. I was struggling to hold back tears, to be tough and cool and not think about where he was going.

  “Look, I don’t want you to worry about me,” he said as we sat down to eat.

  “That’s ridiculous. How am I not going to worry about you?”

  He was silent. He was working long hours, spending most of his days writing about Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, and then coming home late at night to pack. I was concentrating on drinking and crying. I’m not usually a weeper, but I bawled like an infant in the six days before Mohamad left, when I wasn’t drinking heavily, and also when I was. Doing anything else felt completely useless.

  “Did I ever tell you the story about the window in our old place in Beirut?” he asked finally.

  I shook my head.

  In Beirut, in those days, there was always shelling. You didn’t know where it came from; it could have been one side, could have been the other. The courtyard in Shiyah was too dangerous to play in. But the Bazzi family’s apartment had bars on the living room window, just the right size for a kid to climb on. He would scamper up them and hang there like a little spider monkey. He called them his monkey bars.

  One day he was playing on the monkey bars while his mother and father made a yogurt salad in the kitchen with Hassane. Everybody else was in the living room: Hanan, Hassan, Ahmad, and their neighbor Amal.

  Three Lebanese in one room, goes the saying, and you’ll have four opinions. This applies to food as well as other forms of politics. As Hassane and his father watched his mother crush the garlic and slice the cucumber, everyone thought they knew the best, the only way to make the salad: T
wo cloves of garlic! No, that’s too much—only one clove of garlic! No, two cloves of garlic, but more cucumber! Less mint! What it really needs is more time to let the flavor soak in!

  Finally their mother called Ahmad into the kitchen to see if the salad had enough garlic. Mohamad leapt off the monkey bars and followed his big brother into the kitchen—whatever it was, he wanted a taste of it too.

  Just then a giant invisible fist punched all the breath out of the room. An artillery shell had hit the house next door. The window exploded into flying knives. Metal blades cut deep into the walls—shrapnel, fragments of bomb casing. Glass daggers tore all the way through the sofa; the family found them later sticking out the other side. One of them bit into Amal’s thigh. She didn’t even feel it at first, didn’t notice she was bleeding until Hanan saw the blood and started to scream. Suddenly everybody was screaming. The house filled with smoke. If Mohamad hadn’t joined his family in the kitchen—if he had still been playing in the window, on his monkey bars—he would have been killed.

  He sat back, folded his arms, and smiled at me with benevolent expectation.

  I stared at him, dumbfounded.

  “Is this story,” I said, “supposed to make me feel better?”

  “Well, yes,” he said, with a mystified shrug. Obviously I had missed the point: “The way I see it, if I was going to die, I would have died then.”

  The gambler’s fallacy. I laughed. This man prized reason more than anyone I knew. But men are superstitious creatures.

  “You realize that’s completely irrational, right?”

  He laughed. “Well, okay, maybe it is. But it always makes me feel better.”

  Yet somehow later, sitting in Afghan Kebab House without him, I found the story inexplicably comforting. Perhaps I’d picked up some of his faith in the invisible, in the web of circumstance that he believed could keep him safe. Or perhaps it was because he almost never talked about Beirut, yet he had handed me a story, a fragment of his past experience with war, in the hope that it would make the world seem like a safer place.