“I’ll call the Sayyid,” he said, getting up from his chair. “I’ll take you. We’ll go get Abu Hassane, and we’ll go to see the Sayyid right now.”
Even if I wanted to get married, this meant trouble. Like Israel, Lebanon had no civil marriage: you could be wed only by religious authorities. Young Lebanese had been pushing for civil marriage for decades, but the men of God—Muslim and Christian alike—had defeated them every time. Neither mosque nor church was willing to surrender the power, or the revenue, that came from controlling the most intimate decisions in people’s lives. If two Lebanese from different religious backgrounds wanted to tie the knot, they had a couple of options: they could take a twenty-minute flight to Cyprus, on an airplane packed with young Lebanese in love, and get a civil marriage. Or one of them could convert.
Some liberal clerics would marry a Christian and a Muslim without requiring the Christian to convert. But Hajj Naji would not choose this kind of cleric, and Mohamad knew it. An uncivil marriage, like the one we were being hustled into, was the last thing either of us wanted. Unless he acted fast, we would end up married, and I would end up Muslim; or he’d have to tell Hajj Naji why we couldn’t. Either way he’d have a lot of explaining to do.
Somehow Mohamad didn’t think Hajj Naji would understand my existential bohemian angst over marriage. I could barely articulate it myself. So he thought of a better excuse. “Well, we can’t really get married right now,” he said, with a regret that was at least partly sincere. “You see, I haven’t spoken to Annia’s family yet. If we got married without her family’s consent, they would be insulted.”
Offending the family of the bride: Hajj Naji, with his bevy of daughters, could scarcely suggest it.
The relatives murmured assent, impressed at Mohamad’s prudence. A marriage would happen, there was no doubt. But it would be negotiated in the correct manner, as an agreement between families and in this case also between nations. Mohamad would make the pilgrimage to Chicago, as I had made mine to Beirut. I would present him to my family, as he had presented me to his, and an alliance would be arranged.
Reluctantly, Hajj Naji sat back down. We had escaped for now, and he knew it.
“You have reason,” he said, nodding. “Reason is with you.”
“We’re going to get married when we go back to America,” said Mohamad, improvising wildly. “In New York, a civil marriage.”
This would have been news to me if I had understood it. But luckily for him I had completely lost the conversation’s thread by then.
“That is good,” said Hajj Naji, holding up a forefinger. A civil marriage, after all, was better than no marriage whatsoever. “But you still have to do a katab al-kitaab for it to be valid.”
As we left, he reminded us: “Don’t forget to do a katab al-kitaab. I’ll call the Sayyid whenever you’re ready.”
As we walked down the dark hallway of Hajj Naji’s building, Mohamad turned to me with a relief I only partly understood. “No more relatives,” he said. “I promise.”
Luckily this promise only lasted a few hours. Later that evening, we met up with Mohamad’s older sister, Hanan. The three of us went to visit Huda, who was Hanan’s best friend, and Ibrahim, who greeted us by shouting “Welcome!,” and throwing open the door as though we were visiting royalty. Ibrahim was tall and courtly, a little stooped, with sad, wise eyes and a haze of curly hair around his ears. Huda was wearing pink lipstick and her tiny cherry-painted toes poked out of glamorous strappy sandals.
Inside Huda’s apartment, which was full of Japanese prints and art books with colorful reproductions of paintings, we sat and drank mango juice and talked. Hanan spoke a little English, but she was shy about her grammar, so mostly she just sat and stared at me with those big oil-black Bazzi eyes. She made Mohamad look like a talker. Huda made up for both of them: chain-smoking Huda only stopped talking to smoke and only stopped smoking to talk, and sometimes collapsed into coughing laughter.
Both Ibrahim and Huda worked for the Ministry of Labor (unemployment was about 20 percent, said Ibrahim), so I asked Huda what she did at work.
“Do? What do I do?” she scoffed in French, frowning and rearing back her head at the idea. “Why, I write poetry!”
Everybody was a poet. Later that night, when we got to Baromètre, Ibrahim got very drunk and began reciting Arabic poetry to the guy who looked like Hemingway. I got very drunk and confided to Huda that I wasn’t so sure about this marriage thing.
“I am bigger than Mohamad five year,” I said in my Arabic baby talk.
Huda shrugged; she was bigger than Ibrahim, too, so what’s the fuss? “C’est mieux comme ça.” She stared at me, goggling her eyes with exaggerated innocence. She sucked the last drag out of her cigarette and lit one more.
“Nous sommes Chiites,” she explained, pronouncing “Shiites” the French way: she-eats. “Et nous avons une forme de mariage—”
“Mutah!” I shouted.
“—qui est le meilleur du monde!” she agreed, wheezing into a spasm of husky laughter.
Mutah is a form of temporary marriage, mainly practiced by Shiites, between a man and an unmarried woman. The marriage contract expires after a mutually agreed-upon period of time—anywhere from a few hours or days to decades—and the couple can get married without a cleric. I knew that mutah sounded better on paper than it was in practice—that women who did mutah were stigmatized, while men were not, and that Iranian clerics popularized it after the Iran-Iraq War partly to get out of paying pensions to war widows. But I still thought that if applied properly it was the most civilized form of marriage I’d ever heard of.
Huda agreed: you can be married just as long as you want to and no longer, she said, tossing a flirtatious glance toward Ibrahim. He expounded on how mutah is better for the woman, and better for the man, too; it can be renewed ad infinitum; you can convert it into the regular kind of marriage, if you like, but why would you want to?
We drank more wine. An old man hauled out an oud and started singing Arabic folk songs and everybody sang along: “Al-Hilwa di Cou Cou.” I asked Huda what the words meant and she turned and batted her kohl-ringed eyes at me and started to sing it (everybody did that if you mentioned a song): the pretty girl gets up at dawn to bake bread; the rooster crows, cou cou, and the workers get ready to work. “Oh you who have the wealth, the poor man has a generous God . . .”
A terra-cotta bowl of chicken livers bathed in lemon juice and garlic taxied down onto the table. The others started ordering meze in combinations I’d never imagined, Jabberwocky food, portmanteau creatures from a parallel world: slices of sausage, thick like pepperoni but spicy like chorizo, stewed in sweet pomegranate syrup. Little saucers of hummus with tender spoonfuls of sautéed lamb and pine nuts nestled in their belly buttons. Tiny glasses of crystal-clear arak that clouded into milky iridescence when you added ice. A pickled baby eggplant stuffed with chopped walnuts and hot red peppers and slicked with olive oil.
“What is this?” I asked, when the eggplant appeared.
“This is makdous,” said Hanan. “It is good to eat with wine or arak.”
Who thinks of such things? What god leant down and whispered in what mortal ear to put walnuts inside an eggplant? And then to eat it with wine? I wanted to cry. I ate all four makdouses and ordered four more. The aquamarine smell of anise fogged upward from the arak.
“Should we order kibbeh nayeh?” someone asked.
Sudden quiet. Everyone looked at each other. Some shook their heads sorrowfully: don’t say we didn’t warn you. But others nodded and elbowed each other with shining, conspiratorial eyes.
A few minutes later, it appeared: raw lamb ground with spices and cracked wheat and patted into a mound the size of a large man’s hand. Scored with a fork and topped with roasted pine nuts. Hedged with raw onion slices and sprigs of mint. Hanan anointed it, pouring dark green olive oil over the small mountain until it pooled on the plate. Hands descended from all directions, one of them mine, ripp
ing off rags of bread and tearing into the raw meat like lions. The kibbeh slid into my mouth, smooth and almost buttery, until the kick of the spices unfolded. Watching the others, I took a bite of mint and one of raw onion, and the two sharp blades of flavor tore open the bloody taste of raw lamb.
Drunker now. Hanan leaned over the table toward me. She was shouting something and smiling; I couldn’t hear. She said it again: “How do you like Beirut?”
I opened my mouth to answer. The lights went off. An ear-splintering screech, then an industrial-strength grinding noise that I realized, when I saw the cake with the giant sparkler stuck in it, was a scratchy old cassette recording of “Happy Birthday” in Arabic. The girls at the next table leaped up and started swaying their hips, tossing their arms in the air and snapping their wrists; at the break, they threw back their heads like old women at a wedding and ululated.
Chapter 4
Mjadara
MOHAMAD RETURNED TO Baghdad, and I went back to New York. But something had changed. A few months after we fended off Hajj Naji, I was talking to Mohamad over the phone when he mentioned that he would get more vacation time if we were married.
“So why don’t we?” I said.
I hadn’t planned to say it, but the minute it came out of my mouth I knew I meant it. And not just for the vacation time.
There was a long pause. “Really?” he said finally.
That was the romantic part. To this day I’m not sure who proposed to whom.
Umm Hassane sent my mother a green embroidered robe and some prayer beads. My mother sent Umm Hassane dried mint from the garden of our house in Chicago, where she lived with my grandfather, who was now in his nineties and mellowed considerably. I conquered my fears and we were wed—not by a cleric, as Hajj Naji envisioned, but in a New York City apartment, in an extremely civil ceremony presided over by a family court judge I had interviewed for an article about domestic violence. The judge spoke so movingly about marriage that I wondered why I had ever been afraid of it. Marriage is a journey, she pointed out, not a destination; for a lapsed Catholic and an accidental Muslim, getting married by a Jewish lesbian judge, and about to leave for Baghdad, this seemed like the best possible map.
In September 2003 we packed our lives into a hundred boxes marked NEW YORK: STORAGE and BEIRUT: SHIPPING. In October we followed our boxes over the sea to Beirut.
In Beirut, late-summer sun glinted off the Mediterranean. The rains had not really begun yet, and the sea still held the summer’s warmth. Greengrocers lined the sidewalks with the last of the jabalieh tomatoes, big meaty pink and green fruits whose rippling flesh puckered into circles like little baboon butts mooning you all in a row.
Because we hadn’t found an apartment yet, we were staying with Mohamad’s parents. They wanted us to do one more wedding, an Islamic one. Then I would be family under the laws of God as well as man. But Aunt Khadija (“Cool Aunt”) told them it didn’t matter, and there was no time anyway—we were based in Beirut, but Mohamad had to go back to Baghdad. And so, in lieu of a honeymoon, I decided to go with him and try to freelance.
It was not bravery that took me to Baghdad but fear. When I thought about how it would feel to sit by the phone waiting to hear from Mohamad every day, wondering whether he was all right, my heart pounded in panic. It had been bad enough in New York, where I’d had my own life. What would it be like in Beirut, a strange city where I had no friends, no home, no ten-hour workdays to keep me exhausted enough to dull the fear? And so I decided that instead of sitting at home, waiting for the fear to find me, I would go out and find it first.
Abu Hassane wasn’t sure about this plan of taking the new bride to Baghdad. But Umm Hassane clucked with approval. The way she saw it, Mohamad would have someone to take care of him—to cook for both of us and to see that he ate properly. That I intended to work (not like some other wives!) was the best part.
“It’s good—she’ll be working, not just sitting around,” she would say, and nod. “And she can cook for Mohamad. He needs someone to take care of him.”
Secretly, I think Umm Hassane believed Mohamad would be more careful if I was there in Baghdad with him. I would be her emissary, a spy in the masculine house of war. We didn’t tell her that he’d probably be taking care of me more than the other way around. But there was a lot we didn’t tell her.
Mohamad’s parents grew more and more worried as our departure approached. Saddam Hussein was gone, and that was good; but Iraq was still no place for a nice Shiite boy, let alone his brand-new American wife. On August 19, a truck bomb outside the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad had killed twenty-three people, including the U.N.’s chief envoy to Iraq. Ten days later, a massive car bomb in Najaf had killed the Shiite Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim and more than a hundred other people. They watched this and other catastrophes unfold on Al-Jazeera with growing dismay.
“We sent you to America so you could get away from all this war,” Umm Hassane would grumble, pointing at the television as if Iraq were just the latest chapter in the Lebanese civil war. Abu Hassane would nod. “And now you chose this job where you’re going straight back into a war!”
Most reporters would sell their own mothers to land a war zone assignment. That meant nothing to Umm Hassane. To her, “bureau chief” sounded like a mudir kabir, a big boss. In Lebanon, a big boss sits in an office with shiny drapes. He waves his arm: coffee is fetched. He yells into his telephone: an army of underlings is dispatched. If her son was such a mudir kabir, why should he have to go to Iraq in person? He should ship some unlucky minion there while he stayed in Beirut. They didn’t understand that covering Iraq made it possible for him to be in Beirut—that for their son, the road home led through Baghdad.
“What is this job?” she would demand suspiciously, as if the newspaper was trying to put one over on us. “How much do they pay you? Why can’t they send someone else?”
They were proud of Mohamad’s career: he had gone to America and returned a success. When he covered the Arab League summit in 2002, his Lebanese press card had translated “Bureau Chief” as Kabir alMurasileen—literally, “Biggest of Correspondents,” which made him sound like a king among correspondents. He won a silver journalism award shaped like a round medal; Umm Hassane thought it was the Nobel Prize, which it resembled, and when he handed it to her she held it at arm’s length and harrumphed a little, to show what she thought of the Nobel people for not giving it to him sooner.
A few days before our departure, Mohamad’s father came to us with a last-ditch conspiracy. “Don’t go to Iraq,” he begged. “I’ll go to Dr. Nabil and get him to write a report saying you’re sick. Then the newspaper will have to send somebody else!” Abu Hassane blinked his watery eyes, looking bewildered and frail, as Mohamad gently explained that he couldn’t weasel out of a foreign assignment with a note from the family doctor.
Torn between pride and worry, Umm Hassane responded like mothers the world over: with food. She stuffed us as if layers of fat could cushion us against car bombs and RPGs; as if she might keep us in Beirut by making us too fat to heave our bodies away from the dinner table.
She made all of Mohamad’s most beloved foods: yakhnes, the hearty vegetable stews with zucchini, okra, peas and carrots, fat green beans, or whatever else was in season. Glistening mounds of oily Lebanese rice cooked with toasted vermicelli. Fattoush with chopped scallions and cucumbers and mint bathed in garlicky lemon dressing. Salty hand-cut French fries that we dipped in fresh yogurt instead of ketchup. And for me she made mlukhieh and freekeh, the green leafy stew and the roasted wheat with chicken that were rapidly becoming my new obsessions. And of course, she made Mohamad’s favorite, mjadara hamra.
Mjadara is classic peasant food, an ancient dish whose name means “the pockmarked one,” for the dark lentils embedded in grain. But people also call it “the favorite of Esau,” because they believe it was the biblical “mess of pottage,” the famous red lentil stew that the hunter Esau traded for his birt
hright.
Most of the mjadara that you see these days is made with rice. But in Lebanon, especially in the villages, people still make it with bulgur, cracked parboiled wheat. And in some villages, people flavor it with onions caramelized so deeply they are almost charred. These blackened onions turn the whole dish a deep, dark reddish black that never fails to make me think of Esau telling his brother Jacob, “Quick, give me some of that red, red stuff.” That’s how they make it in the southern village where Umm Hassane grew up.
The first time I tasted mjadara, I couldn’t understand why Mohamad rhapsodized over it so. It was just lentils and grain. But the red-black onion flavor lingered on my tongue: the burnt onions gave the mjadara a bacony depth. The bulgur was chewy, almost meaty, and had a lot more to say than rice, and I found myself craving that red, red stuff.
Very few restaurants know how to make mjadara hamra. Caramelizing the onions to this color without burning them is like making the roux for a Cajun gumbo—look away for just a moment, and it will burn, and even the most experienced cook will have to throw it out and start all over again. Umm Hassane stirred the onions for almost forty minutes, brought them just to the point of charcoal, and then there was always a moment where she looked worried, muttered that maybe she had burnt the onions after all, and if I had been sitting down instead of hovering over her shoulder I would have been on the edge of my seat. But she never burned them.
As she set down the dish, she never failed to remind us, flipping a reproachful hand toward the table: “You’re not going to get this in Iraq!”
Mohamad was happy that I had decided to go to Baghdad with him. But as our departure date approached, we found ourselves erupting into little fights. This was not necessarily a bad thing: we were learning how to fight constructively, the way kittens learn how to hunt by play-fighting with each other. But it took a lot of practice. We fought over food, and over taxis, and over my halting attempts to speak Arabic. We fought over little questions like what we were going to pack and big questions like why we had decided to move to Beirut. We fought over French fries. But every time we fought over these very small things, we were really fighting over the larger question of what it would be like to be together in Baghdad.
Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War Page 6