“We’re going downtown. We’re going to eat.”
“What do I want with food? I already ate!”
“You should come with us. You can walk around.”
Walking around? “I haven’t been out in a while,” she said thoughtfully.
At this point, Umm Hassane did something she had probably never done before in her life: she abandoned her tea. She changed into her best black cloak, the one Mohamad called her “super hajji” robe, and called Hanan to brag that she was going downtown.
“Look at her, she’s beaming,” said Rym, as we piled into her car. Umm Hassane peered out the window of the front passenger seat. Mohamad and I rolled down the back windows and stuck our heads out like dogs. Rym was driving and laughing at the same time.
We parked by Martyrs’ Square and started walking. Umm Hassane limped fiercely toward the city center, clutching Mohamad’s arm. “Shu biddi bil balad?”—“What do I want with downtown?” she demanded loudly, with a shrug that fooled no one.
At the restaurant, we debated whether to sit inside or outside. Outside was more pleasant, but would Umm Hassane be cold? She shrugged: “Mitil ma bidkun,” “as you wish.” Did she want to sit outside? She shrugged. “Mitil ma bidkun.”
We sat outside, the better to enjoy the sights: the cobblestoned streets, the stray cats. There was a little old man with Tourette syndrome, a fixture of downtown Beirut. He walked around selling glossy posters of the old city center and barking at tourists. He seemed to be the only other person downtown that day. When he saw us sitting outside, he yelped with joy and ran over. We already had some of his posters, but we bought another one, a sea-blue photograph of prewar Martyrs’ Square lined with palm trees and art deco movie palaces.
Umm Hassane outdid herself that day. The waitress brought menus: “Don’t get me anything,” she insisted. “I don’t want anything; I already ate!”
The waitress brought plates and laid down table settings.
“Why is she getting me a plate? Didn’t you tell her I’m not eating?”
“Keep the plate, just in case.”
“I already ate!”
“Do you want tea?”
“I already drank tea!”
We ordered it anyway. She drank it instantly, although it was scalding, and complained it was too cold. Did she want more? “Shu biddi fi?”
We gave her some cold meze—hummus, stuffed grape leaves, tabbouleh. She devoured them while protesting that she wasn’t hungry.
Her eyes lit up when the batata wa bayd arrived.
“You’re eating batata wa bayd?” she said, drawing her head back, narrowing her eyes, and staring at it sideways.
“Yours is better, of course,” I said, shoveling a big chunk of oily fried potatoes and eggs onto her plate.
She ate it.
“Taybeen, ma ishbun shi,” she sniffed—“there’s nothing wrong with them.”
Having praised the food, she surveyed the plates littering the table and sighed.
“Why didn’t we stay home?” she said with a shrug. “I would have made you batata wa bayd!”
Rym turned to me. “Is she always like this?” she asked in English.
Mohamad and I both laughed.
“This is nothing,” I said.
“Usually,” said Mohamad with pride, “she’s worse.”
The waitress stood over us, her hands clasped apologetically: They were shutting down early, because there were no other customers but us. Did we want anything more before the kitchen closed?
Reluctantly, we decided to go home. Then Rym had another idea.
“Umm Hassane, do you want to go see the tent city?”
Mitil ma bidkun—as you wish.
But then she added, “If you’re going”—in her language the closest thing to yes.
We walked through Sahat al-Nijmeh, and Rym bought a cloud of pink cotton candy bigger than her head. The old man barked happily to see us, his only customers, again.
“Downtown is deserted,” Rym kept saying. “It’s dead!”
When we reached the blue metal barricades, we stopped, suddenly hesitant to venture across to the other side.
“Well, we’re here already, let’s go,” said Umm Hassane, shrugging, as though we’d been dragged there against our will. She walked through the barrier, and we followed.
On the other side of the barricade, men huddled in canvas tents. Others swept up garbage. The strike had killed off the festive mood, and all that remained were hardcore Hezbollah loyalists who stared at us and then looked away. A water tank was plastered with angry slogans and cartoons of the prime minister embracing Condoleezza Rice.
Mohamad held his mother’s arm as she hobbled down the street. She nodded with approval when she saw the men sweeping up garbage. “Where do they have the big gatherings?” she asked, looking from side to side.
On television she had seen tens, hundreds of thousands of people, all waving and cheering. We showed her the big pink building where people had once assembled, but there were no more happy crowds now. No more children and families dancing dabkeh. Just angry men sitting in tents.
I’m not sure exactly what we expected—some pride, perhaps, in the spectacle of Shiites taking over downtown. But after a minute she stopped, looked around, and frowned.
“Look at them!” she declared, at the volume of an old woman hard of hearing. “They’re just sitting around!”
Hezbollah men turned and glared at us with clenched faces.
“They’re not working!” she scolded, sweeping her free arm to encompass the entire city of tents.
“Your mom’s going to start a civil war!” I hissed. Mohamad tried to shush her, but this only made her louder.
“They’re sitting with neither work nor trade!” she crowed, using a southern expression for lazy, idle slackers. “They’re getting paid to just sit around!”
Hezbollah is known for many things, but grace under criticism is not one of them. I imagined what we must look like to the Hezbollah men crouched resentfully in their tents: two unveiled women, one of them eating pink cotton candy and wearing a cherry-red jacket; one cranky old hajji, barely able to walk, supported by her son, who seemed to have brought her to the tent city expressly so she could parade through and tell them they were bums.
Perhaps Umm Hassane’s Bint Jbeil accent and black hijab saved her. Perhaps it was her super hajji robe. More likely, they had orders not to interfere with visitors. In any case, the shabab contented themselves with dirty looks, and we hustled her home as quickly as we could.
The minute we walked in the door, she descended on the phone and started calling relatives. She was eager to lord it over them: she had been downtown, she had seen the tents. We retreated to the balcony to wallow in relief.
“I guess her sectarian loyalties only go so far,” I said.
Mohamad laughed. “As you know, she has no compunction telling people how she feels about them,” he said. “She doesn’t hold back.”
He looked sideways at me.
“I guess that’s why I married you,” he added. “Maybe you’re not so different from her.”
A week later, the military fortified the barricades that divided each side from the other. Soldiers dragged in thick gray concrete walls, wreathed in festive snarls of concertina wire. Everyone thought of the old Green Line that had once split downtown in two. The barriers were necessary to keep people from crossing over and fighting, they said, and possibly starting a civil war.
“But you know the real reason they put those barriers up, right?” I told Mohamad. “They put them up to keep your mother out of downtown.”
Chapter 26
My Previous Experience in Warfare
I WAS SITTING AT my desk, next to the window, when the blast rolled up the street and smacked against the glass. The windowpane sucked in, then out, and came just short of breaking. I could hear the tinkle of glass shattering in the building next door.
By this point, June 2007, it was almo
st routine: A car bomb just down the block, at the Sporting swim club. Walid Eido was the fifth member of parliament to be assassinated in the past two years. We called Leena and our landlord Ralph, both of whom went to Sporting regularly, and our friends called us with an extra edge of alarm this time because it had been so close.
I called Georges back later that night. He was scheduled to leave the next day, for a four-year medical residency in Cleveland, and this valedictory car bomb did not make his departure any easier. “Annia, I can’t stand this,” he said. “You don’t know how much it hurts to see such a thing as you are leaving. It makes it so much harder to leave.”
But I did have at least some idea of how he felt. We were leaving too, and I was not happy about it. In the summer of 2007, Mohamad got two job offers: a one-year fellowship as a Middle East analyst and a position teaching journalism in New York. He accepted both. He was ready to leave Lebanon. But I was not. I was furious.
He had two jobs to go back to; I had none. I had given up a good job to go with him to Baghdad, and now, after four years of freelancing, I was finally beginning to get magazine assignments. It was more than just the jobs, though: we had friends in Beirut, people we cared about, and it didn’t feel right to leave that behind. He had dragged me from one war zone to another, made me care about these infuriating people, and now, just when we were beginning to feel at home, he wanted to go back to New York and forget about the Middle East. But New York wasn’t home anymore. Beirut was.
That August, we packed up our Beirut apartment and loaded all our possessions into a shipping container. We found a new home for Shaitan, because Mohamad didn’t want to take her to New York, and said good-bye to all our friends. We had already said good-bye to Umm Hassane, which was hardest of all, and packed her off to stay with Hassan in France.
In New York, we unpacked a few boxes and arranged the most essential items in our new apartment. We piled the rest of the boxes in an eight-foot tower in a corner (where they would remain, unpacked, for the next two years). And then, in late fall, I came back to Beirut.
Four years earlier, when I married Mohamad and joined him in Baghdad, some well-meaning friends took my mother aside. They invoked the kitschy specter of Not Without My Daughter, the movie where innocent, all-American Sally Field marries an Iranian doctor. The doctor seems nice enough at first, but once they move to Iran he succumbs to some atavistic Islamic urge and makes her into a virtual prisoner and slave. This Mohamad might seem normal, the friends warned my mother. He might seem like any other American. But once he gets her over there, among his own people, the veneer of Americanness may wear off—he might, as they put it, start to “change.”
My mother thought it was hilarious. She told Mohamad and me, and we all had a good laugh at the image of him reverting to some swarthy stereotype from the pages of an airport paperback. Nobody considered the possibility that the one who would change might be me.
Back in Beirut, Hezbollah was still occupying half of downtown, the government was still paralyzed, and when the president’s term expired, in late November, the country’s increasingly polarized factions could not agree on a replacement. By Christmas, when Mohamad came for a visit, the country had been without a head of state for a month. At this point, that seemed like a long time; later it would not. Food prices were spiraling upward, and small riots were breaking out over bread and gasoline and other staples.
Then, on February 12, 2008, the Hezbollah operative Imad Mughnieh was assassinated in Damascus. Mughnieh was one of three Hezbollah members on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s list of “Twenty-two Most Wanted Terrorists.” American officials suspected Mughnieh of masterminding the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, among other attacks. Everyone expected trouble.
Umm Hassane was still in France with Hassan and Annemarie. Everyone wanted her to stay and wait out the inevitable “events.” Being Umm Hassane, she insisted on coming back to Beirut. I was bouncing from apartment to apartment, staying with one friend or another while looking for a furnished room that I could rent for an indeterminate period of time. Small clashes were beginning to break out, as they always did when the political parties were deadlocked. It was a way of heightening the pressure.
There was an atmosphere of fear and suspicion mixed with exhaustion. Everybody seemed permanently tired and pissed off. A taxi driver told me I was welcome in Beirut, but not my husband, because Shiites only wanted to destroy the city.
I met an old lady in Walimah. She asked me what I was doing in Lebanon. (There were plenty of Americans in Beirut, but people always seemed to be asking me that; “It’s because we’re all miserable here and want to leave,” a Lebanese friend explained.) She seemed so sweet, so harmless, that I made the mistake of telling her my husband was Lebanese.
“Oooh,” she said and raised her eyebrows. She cocked her head and cooed: “And what is the family name?”
“He’s Shiite,” I snapped. “Since you asked.”
“Oh no, I’m not . . . I didn’t mean . . .” she said, trailing off and looking guiltily at the floor.
“Yes you did,” I said. I felt bad, but I told myself she deserved it.
A few days later, a small but significant earthquake shook southern Lebanon. “This is all the people in Lebanon need,” said Mohamad, when he called to see if I was okay. “You should come home.”
But home, for me, was not New York. In the back of my mind, despite or perhaps because of everything that was happening, I was still hoping I could convince Mohamad to come back—if not now, then sometime.
A stable home in a peaceful place made me nervous. Experience had taught me that these homes could be kicked over in minutes. But if I could learn to carve out a temporary home wherever I was, even in the midst of instability, I would be safe no matter what. Home was a moveable feast; you strapped it to your back, stuffed it in a jar, dried it in the sun, dug it from the ground. Home was wherever you broke bread with people you loved. You built it out of hotel rooms or the trunk of your car or couches in your friends’ living rooms. You coaxed it into existence it by reading books and cooking food and learning languages, by sharing meals and words with others. You carried it with you, folded up like a picnic blanket, and spread it out wherever you happened to be.
Mohamad called me the morning after some particularly violent street fighting. “You have to come home,” he said. It was three a.m. in New York.
“What about your mom?”
“She’ll be fine. She doesn’t need you to take care of her this time.”
I had been asking something much larger and more diffuse: Why was it so important for us to take care of her during the war but not now? Why had she stayed in Beirut and we did not? But I didn’t clarify any of that.
“We’re living in limbo,” he said. “We can’t settle down as long as you’re there.”
“We spent the whole time here living in limbo. Maybe I got used to it.”
He sighed. “You have to come back. It’s getting dangerous.”
“I can’t,” I said. “I have to be here. It’s what I’m writing about. How can I write about it if I’m not even here?”
“You know, Annia, you’re dangerously close to sounding like a war junkie.”
“Yeah? Like when you were in Nablus or Jalalabad? Or Baghdad right after the invasion?”
“This is more dangerous.”
“Oh really? More dangerous than when you were in Islamabad, flirting with the fucking guys who killed Daniel Pearl?”
“This is worse, Annia.”
“These were just clashes. They have clashes here all the time.”
“This is how the civil war started. With little incidents.”
I didn’t say anything. It was very cold in my friend’s apartment, and I had a hangover so crushing I could barely see.
“Why do you like it there so much?” he asked.
I was silent for a while. He had brought me to Beirut and then decided he hated it. I liked it for
many reasons, one of which was him. It didn’t make sense.
“Do you remember when we first started going out?” I said. “You used to laugh at Americans all the time. How people would get so worked up over their little emotional traumas—their parents were mean to them, they didn’t get enough toys growing up, they cheated on their wife or their husband, and now they feel bad.”
I used to call this his Third World Tough Guy act. But he hadn’t done it for years.
“Well, maybe I feel like that now whenever I’m back in New York. Maybe I don’t want to sit around in Williamsburg with our friends and trade ironic banter about the latest reality TV show. Maybe I don’t want to be one of those people who think their narcissistic little problems are the only bad things going on in the world.”
He was silent.
“Annia, the story’s going to have to end some time or other,” he said finally. “At some point you’re going to have to put down your pen and accept that the war may still be going on—will almost certainly still be going on—but your story ends here.”
Four days later, after three months of searching, I moved into an apartment. It was a block away from Smith’s supermarket, after the end of Makdisi, the street that ran parallel to Hamra. It was bigger than I needed, but I was tired of looking, and there was no lease, so I could leave whenever I wanted. The apartment was across the street from the St. Rita Maronite Catholic Church, where Umm Paula worshipped. It had a long balcony where I could sit and watch the neighborhood dramas: pigeons mating, people filing in and out of the church, the neighborhood shabab hanging out in front of the bakery. The bakery served as a social club for the local Future political machine, and the shabab spent a lot of time washing their boss’s SUV and then grooming it with a giant feather duster. Occasionally they would get into fights with one another or with shabab on a neighboring block, and at night they would drag chairs out of the bakery and sit in the middle of the sidewalk smoking water pipes.
A few weeks later, an old man in T-Marbouta, the Hamra café, asked me what I was doing in Beirut. He was wrinkled, gray, with a helmet of smoke-stained hair—one of the antediluvian leftists who held court drinking and chain-smoking all day in Hamra’s cafés.
Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War Page 33