And in the end there was simply the story itself. My family made yogurt and cucumber salad too (Greeks call it tzatziki) and I knew the flavor: the dried mint and cucumber, the coppery bite of garlic embedded in the creamy yogurt. I could see him now, in the kitchen with his family gathered around, as the deadly metal shell hurtled toward them through the sky, tasting the salad that saved his life.
Chapter 3
Bride of the World
Cities choose their people, not the other way around.
—Vassilis Vassilikos, The Few Things I Know About Glafkos Thrassakis
IN JULY 2002, Mohamad and I moved into an apartment in Brooklyn. But he spent most of his time abroad: Pakistan, Syria, Lebanon, the West Bank. In January 2003, Newsday appointed him its Middle East bureau chief. He would have to live somewhere in the region. Jerusalem and Cairo were the traditional choices for most American newspapers. But he wanted to move to Beirut, and he had asked me to move there with him. So that May, I went to Beirut for two weeks to see what it was like.
By day, cars owned Beirut. The city stewed in angry coils of traffic. Automobiles bullied through the streets and over sidewalks. The air throbbed with diesel. But at night people crept out into the streets. They sat and smoked water pipes, played music, drank coffee. They walked up and down by the seaside eating lupins, the little legumes that Mediterraneans serve with salt as appetizers or cheap street food. Men streaked past on mopeds, delivering embers for water pipes, and spangled the darkness with comets of orange sparks. If you want to see Beirut, the best place to begin is at night.
We started out at Regusto, where we collected Mohamad’s sister Hanan, their cousin Huda, and her husband Ibrahim. We proceeded to the back of a shopping arcade, to a bathroom-sized bar called Chez André, where the bartender snipped off the ties of anyone foolish enough to show up wearing one and hung them up over the pornographic cartoons, varnished in smoke-stain yellow, and the sign that commanded: “No Politics!” We drank Lebanese beer beneath a fringe of decapitated neckties, and somehow accumulated a mustachioed writer who looked exactly like the brooding old 1950s Hemingway. I never did catch his name.
And ended up at Baromètre, lurking behind thick curtains in the back of another shopping center. The girls were beautiful, the boys were studiously unkempt, and everyone seemed to know one another. The menu was written in Arabic on a green chalkboard that was barely visible through the haze of cigarette smoke and music. Ziad Rahbani, the brilliant composer, presided from a photograph hanging in the corner; in the picture he hunkered over a table and smoked intensely with his button-down shirt half open, which was what everyone in Baromètre was doing too. We drank a lot of arak, the milky, anisette-flavored spirit, while long-haired girls prowled from table to table like lions and Rahbani’s Arabic-inflected jazz jangled through the smoky dark. Shouting to be heard, everybody asked me the same question:
How do you like Beirut?
Berytus, Biruta, Beyrouth. The city goes back to the third millennium before Christ at least, and ever since then visitors have tended to fall in love with it. It’s a city of migrants, of people perpetually coming or going, where exiles and opportunists of all nations make themselves at home. “No, but Lebanon, we’re a special case,” as my friend Munir put it once, laughing. “We’ve been invaded by all of them: the Canaanites, the Phoenicians, the Turks, the Greeks, the Arabs. We have the blood of all these invaders in our veins!”
When Lebanon was under French control, people used to call Beirut “the Paris of the Middle East.” (Some called it the Switzerland, a more accurate moniker, in light of all the money laundering that went on there.) But this borrowed finery didn’t do the place justice. Old Beirut was Medinat alAlam, “City of the World,” where people spoke Greek in the port, Turkish in the souq, and French in the cafés.
In the years after World War II, Beirut became the cosmopolitan cultural capital of the Middle East—an Arab city, a Mediterranean city, but also a city that spanned the entire world. Poets, partisans, and soldiers of fortune all poured into Beirut. Some of those émigrés weren’t what they seemed—like Kim Philby, the mild-mannered Beirut-based correspondent for The Economist, who turned out to be one of the Cold War’s most notorious double agents. Dissidents fleeing tyrants came to Beirut to hide. Books fleeing censorship came there to be printed, like Awlad Haratina (published in English as Children of the Alley), Naguib Mahfouz’s epic allegorical masterpiece about the Abrahamic prophets: unpublishable in Cairo but welcome in Beirut. Exiled authors came to plot their next novels; exiled tyrants came to plot their next coups (including, for a very brief period, an up-and-coming young Iraqi named Saddam Hussein). Empires, real and imagined, rose and fell over arak and Arabic coffee in the cafés and bars of Beirut. By 1951, an estimated 30 percent of the world’s gold trade passed through the merchant houses of Beirut. Downtown Beirut had about twenty-five movie theaters at midcentury, making it one of the most moviegoing countries per capita in the world. The capital alone had fifty newspapers; by 1975, the government had issued licenses to more than four hundred—an empire of words. “Babel des accents Arabes,” wrote the Lebanese journalist Samir Kassir (son of a Palestinian and a Syrian, making him a quintessential Beiruti). A refugee city, a city of plots and pluralities, a city so packed with ideas they overflowed into the sea.
It was during that cosmopolitan moment, old-timers told me, that Beirut acquired another alias: Sitt al-Dunya, “Lady of the World,” and sometimes Arous al-Dunya, “Bride of the World.” And Beirut was in cahoots with Mohamad there too, that warm summer evening, because he hadn’t asked outright, but he had hinted that he wanted to get married.
I didn’t want to get married. I hated the idea, for complicated reasons that had nothing to do with Mohamad and everything to do with my own history. Marriage was the boot that had kicked me out of my peaceful midwestern childhood and halfway across the continent to California. Marriage meant exile, catastrophe, and homelessness. Marriage was a mistake other people made and then tried to lure you into: a colossal, cross-generational human Ponzi scheme.
More philosophically, it seemed to me that marriage was part of an identity imposed by others—families, churches, governments—rather than one you chose yourself. But Mohamad wanted me to move to Beirut with him, so it seemed like a good time to meet his parents. The marriage question could wait, preferably forever.
I had already met Mohamad’s brother Ahmad in New York. Ahmad’s wife had waited for a lull in the conversation. Then she pounced, and demanded, with a truculence I only later realized was defensive, “So, Annia. What do you think of Arabs?”
I would have thought the answer was obvious—I was living with one, after all. But she watched me through narrowed eyes, as though I might crack under interrogation and start calling them all terrorists.
Meeting the parents had all the makings of an equally awkward encounter. They didn’t speak any English (perhaps luckily, considering the sister-in-law), and I didn’t speak much Arabic. And they were Muslims. I was Catholic—a bad Catholic, in many ways, but I doubted that would improve my case.
A friend of ours had paraded several prospective brides before his parents. His Iraqi father had delivered a series of arbitrary verdicts: one was too old, another was too short. But one of them, I remembered, had been just right. She’s nice, our friend’s father had decided, she smiles. I resolved that I would smile a lot.
Mohamad rang the doorbell. The heavy maroon metal door creaked open, and I faced the enemy: a tiny old lady about five feet tall, wearing a faded blue cotton housedress. Black eyes gleamed under thin arched eyebrows, the same as her son’s. Her mouth drew down into a frown, but her eyes laughed; the combination suggested she was trying to look severe while struggling not to smile. Umm Hassane was seventy-one years old. Her skin was hardly wrinkled, but her face was beginning to collapse toward the middle, nose and chin clamping together on her mouth, creasing into an expression of permanent grudging amusement.
I smil
ed. She smiled back, an almost imperceptible crinkling of the mouth.
I smiled harder. “Hello!” I bellowed, using up one of my hard-earned Arabic words, and jacked up my smile like a Miss America contestant.
“Welcome,” she said, “welcome,” and she reached out and gripped my shoulder fiercely, pulling me down and kissing me on the cheek three times. I smelled garlic, lemon, and something green and grassy—cilantro. She looked at me, knowing and humorous, as if she had a good joke and planned on keeping it to herself but wanted me to know she had it anyway.
Abu Hassane, Mohamad’s father, peered anxiously over his wife’s shoulder. “Welcome, welcome,” he repeated, shuffling forward in his slippers. I smiled at him. He smiled back, a broad and intermittently toothy grin. We went inside.
Umm Hassane had cooked zucchini stew. Her method involved grinding garlic and cilantro together in a mortar and pestle into a fragrant pesto, which she then sautéed to bring out the flavor even more. She had also made fattoush, the Levantine bread salad. She dressed it by mashing lemon juice, salt, and garlic together in the same worn wooden mortar, then letting them sit so the garlic could macerate into the lemon juice. The whole place smelled like garlic, beef stock, simmering vegetables, and lemons; to me, it smelled like home.
But before we could eat, we would have to talk. In Arabic.
Back in New York, I had learned a slew of useful Levantine Arabic idioms, from the general “How are you? What’s the news?” to more telling phrases like “The border is closed today, but I don’t know why.” And then there were the ones I called the Untranslatables: words or phrases that had no real English equivalent, but in my opinion should have, especially sahtain. It means “to your health” (literally, “double health”), and like bon appétit or buen provecho, sahtain is used for the highly civilized purpose of congratulating someone who is either eating, or about to begin eating, or has just finished eating.
Almost all of these words abandoned me the minute we walked in the door. I clung to “Hello,” and stoked my smile. We trooped into the living room and sat on matching brown sofas.
“You got fat!” Abu Hassane said to Mohamad as soon as he sat down. He wheezed with laughter like an old accordion.
Mohamad had gained a little weight, but this seemed awfully direct. I was not yet accustomed to the Lebanese way of welcoming wandering sons and daughters home. Over the next six years, I would learn many things; one of them would be the unfortunate habit of greeting people by pointing out minor fluctuations in their weight.
“Do you speak Arabic?” asked Abu Hassane, planting a hand on each knee, leaning forward, and squinting across the room toward me with good-natured curiosity.
“A little,” I replied, and added ungrammatically, “I am going class New York one time each week.”
He responded with a happy garble of Arabic, a rapid unintelligible stream from which I could snatch only isolated words: “Beirut . . . learn Arabic . . . good . . . New York . . . welcome.”
“She only speaks a little bit,” said Mohamad, laughing.
“Oh.” We went back to smiling.
It is strange to study a new language as an adult. Your comprehension leapfrogs ahead of your ability to articulate, and because you can’t converse at their level, people think you don’t understand them. The result is that you spend a lot of time listening to people talk about you in the third person.
“She’s pretty,” said Abu Hassane.
“Yes, she is,” replied Mohamad, who had an inkling I might be following some of the conversation.
“Does she have a job?”
“Yes, she works very hard. She’s an editor at a magazine.”
“At a magazine!” Abu Hassane exulted.
“Not like Ahmad’s wife! She doesn’t work!” Umm Hassane tilted her chin up, a typically Levantine gesture of negation, and flapped a dismissive hand.
Of Mohamad’s three brothers, only Ahmad had married a Lebanese woman. But Umm Hassane’s belief in work, as I would learn, trumped any feelings of national solidarity.
“How much money does she make?” asked Abu Hassane.
“Oh, well, not quite as much as me.”
Mohamad avoided meeting my eye. We didn’t explain to them that I was thinking of quitting my job and moving to Beirut with him. All that could wait until we’d passed the initial interview.
“Still, she works, she doesn’t just sit around,” said Umm Hassane. “That’s good.”
Abu Hassane beamed at me. I smiled as if I’d been lobotomized. Umm Hassane regarded all of us with her usual expression of secretly amused tolerance. And then she made up her mind. I had a job; I spoke some Arabic; I smiled. There was only one possible response.
“She’s very nice; we like her,” she said, nodding her head with finality. “She’s trying to learn Arabic, and she’s not lazy, like some women.”
She scowled momentarily, possibly thinking of her daughter-in-law, then continued:
“I’ll arrange everything. We’ll call Hajj Naji, and he’ll make an appointment with the Sayyid”—a Sayyid is any descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, but in this case she was talking about a local Shiite cleric—“and you’ll get married.”
There are two main verbs for getting married in colloquial Lebanese Arabic. But only one of them, tazawaja, means simply “to get married.” The other, katab al-kitaab (literally, “writing the book”), is more commonly used for an Islamic marriage contract. In my Arabic classes, I had learned only tazawaja. Umm Hassane, devout Muslim that she was, used katab al-kitaab. So fortunately I didn’t understand the matrimonial portion of the conversation, which Mohamad didn’t translate until much later, in the safety of our hotel room. To me, it simply sounded as if I had gotten Umm Hassane’s stamp of approval. And so I sat there, still smiling extravagantly, oblivious to our impending marriage.
Umm Hassane had it all planned out: she and the relatives would marry us off before we could get away. But first, we would celebrate my visit, and my acceptance into Mohamad’s family, in the simplest manner possible: we would eat. We trooped over to the dinner table, which was spread with placemats made of yesterday’s newspapers, and sat down.
After the meal comes the tea: that’s the rule in Umm Hassane’s house. After the tea, relatives must be visited, especially when the family has a new acquisition to display. Abu Hassane wasn’t feeling well, so he stayed at home. Umm Hassane put on her long black robe and the headscarf she wore when going out of the house, and we went to Hajj Naji’s apartment building.
“This is the bride!” proclaimed Umm Hassane, sweeping inside and producing me with a triumphant little one-handed flourish, like a game show host.
A roomful of faces turned and stared. A roomful of eyes looked me up and down and then back up again. A bulky, square-shouldered woman, with severe eyebrows and deep furrows of discontent bracketing her mouth, heaved herself out of an armchair. She put one hand on my shoulder, as if to pin me in place, and surveyed me with mercenary appraisal. Her gaze traveled from my face all the way down to my feet, taking it all in—the wrinkled green cotton shirt, the dusty black leather shoes, the probably insufficiently modest skirt—before heading back up to my now-rickety smile.
“Congratulations!” she declared, hoisting her eyebrows in theatrical surprise. “She’s pretty!”
She kissed me on the cheek three times. Umm Hassane retired to a chair in triumph, tucking her chin up under her nose and looking pleased with herself.
This was Batoul. Mohamad and I ended up inventing secret nicknames for most of his relatives: Khadija, with her husky laugh and fashionable headscarves, was Cool Aunt; and Hajj Naji became Stern Uncle. But Batoul was always just Batoul, unadorned. The room was plain, even stark: no pictures on the cracked plaster walls, no carpet on the tile floor. Just hospitality stripped down to its barest essentials, chairs and sofas arranged around a coffee table. But it was a marble-topped coffee table, and at its center blazed an exuberant spray of lipstick-red fake roses.
An ornate gold-metal Kleenex dispenser huddled underneath. In a house without much frivolity, these little luxuries marked off the living room as public space, a special zone for guests.
We sat down. A headscarved daughter of about fifteen or sixteen circled around proffering a tray of little glasses of pineapple juice to everyone, starting with me. She darted furtive, fascinated glances in my direction as she served the others.
“She looks Lebanese,” said Batoul, still eyeing me with an air of assessment.
“She’s faqirah!” Umm Hassane declared with pride.
Faqirah: literally, it means poor. But it belongs among the Untranslatables. Faqir (male) or faqirah (female) can mean that you are downtrodden or impoverished. But like so many words born as insults, faqirah grew into a source of pride. In Lebanon, and especially among country people, it means down-to-earth, not stuck up. “She’s faqirah,” translated into midwesternese, would be something like “she’s good people” or “she’s just folks.” Umm Hassane had once told Mohamad she didn’t care who he married, as long as she was faqirah.
“Ah!” Batoul nodded, raising her eyebrows in appreciation. “That’s good!”
My brideworthiness was established. Now it was Mohamad’s turn. Batoul and Hajj Naji hadn’t seen him in years; you can probably guess what came next.
“You’ve gained weight,” said Batoul. “She must be feeding you well!” Everybody laughed and looked slyly at me.
Hajj Naji did not laugh. Eating together implied other kinds of communion—like living together in sin.
“When are you going to get married?” he said, laying his index finger thoughtfully next to his nose.
In traditional Lebanese families, whether Muslim or Christian, the father’s older brother or paternal uncle is often a guardian of the family’s collective morals. As Abu Hassane’s paternal uncle, Hajj Naji was the family patriarch. It was his job to ensure that family members did not stray from the path of righteousness. Hajj Naji took this role very seriously.
Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War Page 5