For the next week, the streets would be ruled by gunmen, prostitutes, and the Sri Lankan, Ethiopian, and Filipina maids that Beirut housewives sent out grocery shopping when they were afraid to go themselves. The occasional civilians would scurry from one house to another and look at strangers with distrustful eyes.
The day after the fighting, the only businesses open were those that sold essentials like food or news. Knots of five or six men huddled around newspaper vendors. At Malik al-Batata (King of Potatoes), famous for shawarma and French fries, a small group of men had gathered to read a death notice pasted on the wall. It was for one of our neighborhood shabab, the teenage boys who had tried to fight off Hezbollah. He had been shot in the battle. Suddenly I remembered saying hello to Hajj Salim, yesterday outside the mosque, and the terrible look he had given me in return. There would be trouble in the neighborhood for sure.
At one p.m., we got a knock on our door. It was our friends Sean and Nizar, who lived in East Beirut. They had not been able to drive or take a taxi to Hamra; the gunmen had blocked off the neighborhood with barriers and checkpoints. But they had walked all the way from their apartment at the end of Gemmayzeh, about an hour by foot, to visit us.
“How stupid is this?” said Nizar. He strode inside and started to pace up and down. “How fucking stupid are they? This whole thing was a trap to lure Hezbollah into using their weapons against the Lebanese. And what do they do? They fall into it. How stupid are they, how fucking stupid . . . Kis ikhta, hal balad!”—Fuck this country!—“I’m done with it. I’m leaving this country. I’m done.”
Outside our apartment, a crowd of mourners had gathered at the bakery. Some were shouting hoarsely. As we watched from our balcony, a couple of SSNP gunmen walked down Adonis Street from the direction of Smith’s. They ordered the mourners to go back to their homes. People began to shout at the gunmen: “How can you do this?”
The militiamen fired into the air. The mourners dispersed, and the street was clear. Sean and Nizar decided to go back home before anything else happened.
“You know, maybe you guys should come stay with us,” said Sean, as they stood by the door saying good-bye. We shook our heads: We weren’t going anywhere.
The next day was the funeral for Ziad Ghalayini, the boy who had been shot, and another young man who had been killed with him. Hundreds of people stood outside on the sidewalk and in the street. The balconies were packed with women screaming and crying. The mosque muttered prayers.
A group of about twenty men ran up the street, carrying the coffins and chanting “Ziad, Ziad, habib allah!”—“Ziad, Ziad, the beloved of God!”—and screaming. Whenever one of them lost his grip, another would take his place. The coffins were covered in green satin cloths with yellow script. One of them had a tarboosh sitting on top of it, the little red fez that the Ottomans had required their subjects to wear—the symbol of a man.
They carried the caskets around the block, from building to building, rocking them gently back and forth. The women screamed and ululated, collapsing against one another, waving their arms and beating their breasts. They brought Ziad’s casket into his family’s apartment and left the other one in the hearse. The sobbing and shouting got louder from inside the house. Everyone in the street stood watching and listening to the screams of “Ziad! Ziad!” A hoarse male voice started shouting, “They should all get out! They should all get out!”
Abdelghanim, one of four friendly brothers who ran a small grocery store, came over to say hello. “Did you know him?” he asked. I told him I knew him by sight. He shook his head. “Poor kid, he was such a good kid, he was always around on the block, and he helped everyone.” He expected trouble after the funeral.
The men brought the coffin down the stairs. The women waved good-bye from the balcony, weeping, clapping both hands to their foreheads, and then throwing them open wide. As the coffin came out the front door, the women ululated. They threw a shower of rose petals and rice: This funeral was the only wedding he would ever have. An old woman arranged white lilies on the hearse. Men filed out, crying, leaning on one another’s shoulders.
As they carried the coffins back to the mosque for the final prayer, a Shiite neighbor showed up to offer condolences to the family. But the women started shoving and pushing at her. “Get out!” screamed one of the women, as they chased her away. “Go back to Nasrallah!” Mohamad and I looked at each other and decided that it was time to go back inside.
An elderly lady came up in the elevator with us. She was very upset and could not stop talking. Her sister lived in the building, she told us, and she had a daughter in America, studying at a university, and it was important to tell the Americans that not all Lebanese were like Hezbollah. She followed us out of the elevator, although she did not live on our floor, and stood in the hallway talking. It seemed rude to leave her—she was almost in shock—so we stood outside our doorway listening for a long time. “I’m very sad about Ziad,” she said. “Whenever I would come visit my sister, he would always come up to me and ask for the car keys, and he would park my car. He was a very good kid.”
She looked at Mohamad. Here it comes, I thought.
“What is your family name?” she asked.
“Bazzi.”
“Oh,” she said, lifting her eyebrows. “Bazzi. You’re Shiite.”
“Yes, I am.”
“I’m Sunni, but my husband is Shiite. He’s a doctor at AUB. He rejects everything that’s happening.”
She looked at him expectantly. She was going to make him say it, make him prove his loyalty to the human race.
“And you,” she prompted. “What do you think of what’s going on?”
“Yes, I reject it too,” said Mohamad. “We all reject these things.”
Abdelghanim was right: There was trouble that afternoon. In Tareeq al-Jadideh, during another funeral procession, Sunnis attacked Shiite businesses, and a Shiite shopkeeper opened fire on the crowd and killed two people. Each side blamed the other for kidnappings, forced evacuations, sectarian cleansing. “It’s so dangerous,” said my friend Adessa, when she called to see if we were all right. “Because how many times have you heard people from the civil war say, ‘Well, they were going to come get us’?”
The rumors ricocheted around the Internet and telephones: kidnappings in Zarif, kidnappings on the Corniche. A lady at Sporting told Leena’s sister-in-law that Hezbollah was kidnapping Sunnis from Zarif. Umm Hassane’s neighbor told her to warn Hanan not to go home, because the Sunnis were forcibly evacuating Shiites from Tareeq al-Jadideh, where Hanan lived.
Suddenly I remembered that Munir also lived in Tareeq al-Jadideh. I had forgotten.
“Annia, you should leave,” he said when I called. “This is my country, and this is the shit of my people. You don’t have to tolerate it. I don’t have to tolerate it! I was just telling Joseph: Let’s leave and go to India.”
In late 2006, Munir and several business partners, one of whom was a Buddhist, had opened a gay bar and restaurant called Bardo. This was Tibetan for the place your soul goes in the afterlife while waiting to be reborn—“an enchanting place,” he told me once. It fit the fantasy of India as the East, a mystical happyland of saffron-soaked enlightenment.
“India? Munir. Habiby. They have sectarian riots there that make this look like children playing. Hindus and Muslims, thousands of people killing each other. Setting whole trains on fire. Everyone inside burning to death.”
He was silent.
Too late, I remembered that Munir had no New York to move back to. He needed his imaginary India the way I needed Tango Night—as an image of how the world could be, the kind of dream palace we all need, especially in Beirut, and it was part of what helped him not to hate.
“So they have this kind of thing in India too?” he said sadly. “The whole world has gone mad.”
The retaliations began. The fighting spread outside Beirut, to battles in the Chouf Mountains between Hezbollah and its onetime ally, the Progressive
Socialist Party. In the northern town of Halba, Future fighters stormed the offices of the SSNP and killed nine men inside. Three Future fighters died in the assault; their comrades videotaped the dying SSNP men with cell phones and posted the grisly videos on the Internet. Hezbollah replayed it as propaganda, pointing out that Sunnis were killing Sunnis now and warning that the footage was not for “children or the faint of heart.” Umm Hassane watched the bloody video, despite the warning, and became upset. “What is this slaughter?” she said to Mohamad over the phone. “They mutilated the bodies and trampled on them. Wallah, the Israelis never did such a thing. What are these sights? A thing that makes the heart cry.”
Hezbollah was keeping the airport closed. Sunni gunmen set up checkpoints on the road leading to the Syrian border and put up posters of Saddam Hussein. They checked the ID cards of anybody trying to enter or leave the country and demanded to know if they were Shiites.
I looked at the photographs of black-masked gunmen standing at the border with RPG launchers, under posters of Saddam, and suddenly understood Mohamad’s desire to move back to New York.
“I’m sorry I made you come back here,” I said.
“Well, I can’t leave now,” he said, and shrugged.
That afternoon, Ziad’s family put up an enormous vinyl banner of their dead son, about twelve feet tall, on the outside of their building. Inside their apartment, which was directly across from ours, the windows were open into a living room lined with chairs for condolences. The chairs were full of little boys and girls around three to five years old. A woman led them in a chant:
Li ilaha illa Allah
Al-shaheed habib Allah!
There is no God but God
The martyr is the beloved of God!
The children pumped their tiny fists in the air, just as their older brothers and sisters had been doing for days. They shouted happily, as if it were a game, a nursery rhyme, and whoever shouted loudest would get a treat.
On Wednesday, May 14, Arab leaders flew into Lebanon to negotiate. Hezbollah removed roadblocks from one side of the airport road so the negotiators could meet with all the Lebanese political leaders. The airport was still closed, but nevertheless it felt as if a great weight had been lifted off the city. All over Hamra, people were telling each other al-hamdillah al-salameh, “thanks be to God for your safety.” Even the religious khadarji smiled broadly when he saw me.
I went to Abu Hadi for fatteh. He ladled the steaming chickpeas into my bowl and complained happily that he was on his own—his assistant, who lived in dahiyeh, had not been able to make it to Hamra for days.
“Do you have customers?” asked an old man, one of his regulars, hunched over an enormous bowl of fatteh.
“I always have work,” said Abu Hadi. “Thanks be to God.”
At the cheese shop on Sidani Street, the salesman smiled. “I have to ask you something,” I said, although I believed I knew the answer. “Why did you stay open that Friday, during all the shooting?”
He half-smiled, half-shrugged. He was a ghanouj. “Because people want cheese.”
Why? Why, in the middle of a firefight, do people decide that they must have cheese?
He smiled with everything he had this time. “Because they think they will never be able to taste it again.”
That night, Mohamad and I walked a friend home. The streets were still half-wild, and she didn’t feel safe being out alone at night. We were walking back through Ain al-Mreiseh, along the sea, when we heard the gunfire. Such was the sectarian map that all Beirutis carry in their heads that we knew the result of the meeting as soon as we heard it: happy fire from the Amal-controlled areas meant the government must have rescinded its orders. The fighting was over for now. But the war would never end; like Mohamad said, you ended it yourself. Moving back to New York was the ending to his wars. I would have to find my own.
We walked home to the noise of gunfire, avoiding the Amal areas. We clung to the sides of buildings, under balconies, watching red blossoms of tracer fire arc through the night sky. As we approached our block, we saw a new vinyl banner stretched all the way across the street. Blood-red Arabic script declared: TREASON’S MARTYR. Underneath was a picture of Ziad standing in front of the Pigeon Rocks, the famous arched cliffs in the sea off the Corniche. He was smiling and striking a manly pose that only made him look even more like a child: hips cocked, hands in his jeans pockets, tilting his head to the side. He was wearing a white T-shirt with big black letters that said, in English, STILL VIRGIN.
“It’s so sad!” Mohamad exclaimed.
That could have been you, I thought but did not say. If you had stayed in Beirut when you were ten, instead of moving to New York, that could have been you, standing in front of the Pigeon Rocks, trying to look like a warrior; it could have been me, if I had grown up here, or any one of us.
“Yes it is,” I said. I took his hand, and we walked back home.
Epilogue
TWO YEARS LATER, almost to the day, I was on the phone with Umm Hassane. She was in Beirut. I was in New York.
“Umm Hassane,” I said, shouting because the connection was bad and my Arabic was still wretched and she was still deaf. “I’m making mlukhieh. How do you make mlukhieh from dried leaves?”
“Why do you want to make mlukhieh?” she asked, rhetorically. Thousands of miles of ether snarled and hummed but I swear I could almost hear the rolling of her eyes. “You can’t! It’s too hard!”
Earlier that week I had gone to Sahadi’s, the Arabic grocery on Atlantic Avenue, and pulled a number out of the mouth of a little machine. The store was packed with New Yorkers waiting to get at the olives and feta and hummus and baba ghanouj. When my turn finally arrived, I told the guy I wanted dried mlukhieh.
He gave me a sharp sidewise look, a skeptical who-are-you kind of look, and I braced myself for the inevitable question.
“You make mlukhieh?” he said.
I laughed. Not the question I had been unconsciously expecting. But I liked this one better.
“Why not?” I said, and employed my best Umm Hassane shopping behavior—a shrewd glare, a flip of the chin, a flap of the hand. A shrug of contempt, as if such a question was unnecessary between us.
“You are Arab?”
“No,” I said, and smiled.
A few years ago, I might have hastened to explain that I wasn’t Arab, but my husband was Lebanese, and doesn’t everyone like mlukhieh? I might have pointed out that mlukhieh was African, expounded on the similarities between Egyptian mlukhieh and southern-style collard greens, both stewed with meat and served with onions quick-pickled in sweet vinegar. I might have offered up my Greek pedigree, or confided that an Iraqi friend had introduced me to mlukhieh, right here on Atlantic Avenue, back in the summer of 2001. But while these things do matter, do make us who we are, there are also times and places where we can agree to put our particular histories aside. I have learned to appreciate that.
“But you know how to make mlukhieh?”
“Yes.”
He grinned triumphantly, as if I had just proved a point he’d put some serious money on. “Why not?” he said, and filled the bag with mlukhieh.
My return to the homeland did not begin well. It was late 2009, winter was coming, and everyone I knew was getting laid off. Mohamad and millions of other people were sick with swine flu. Our government was still spending hundreds of billions of dollars and uncountable lives on two wars, both of which had been grinding on for years, yet all anyone seemed to talk about was movie stars or sports. If they did talk about the war in Iraq, it was in neatly packaged, microwavable soundbites that bore no relation to Roaa, Abu Rifaat, Dr. Salama, Abdullah, or any of the other Iraqis I knew. New Yorkers were so busy fondling their smartphones they seemed to have forgotten basic skills like how to walk. Friends required me to schedule appointments weeks in advance, claiming they were “booked,” as if they were hotel rooms. People seemed afraid to express strong opinions in person, yet the Internet was craw
ling with them. Bedbugs were back too.
I called my friend Cara. She and Mohamad had lured me back here, and I was miserable, and it was her fault.
She laughed. “Did I ever tell you what happened when I moved back here with Amiram? We were back from Israel for about a week. And then one day he came to me, and he said: ‘I don’t understand. Why don’t the neighbors come over and drink coffee with us in the morning?’”
They do that in Lebanon too. It’s called a subhieh, from subuh, morning. An Untranslatable: it could be anything from a gala charity breakfast to a group of ladies who lunch. But mostly it means an informal gathering of neighbors or friends who get together, ideally every morning, to drink coffee and talk. Something about giving a name to these gatherings elevated eating and drinking and conversing to an institution, a cousin to the milonga, the tertulia, or even Sheikh Fatih and his mother’s forbidden book club. Not so much a time and place as a communion, a moment when people conspire to put the world back in its place. We don’t have that here, I reflected bitterly. We have Starbucks.
“Listen, Annia,” she said. “People like us are never going to feel at home anywhere. Ever. We’re never going have that comfortable feeling of belonging.”
War changes your mental metabolism so that a part of you is perpetually at war and uneasy with peace. This is a physical reaction as much as an intellectual one, the way living through the Great Depression made my grandparents constitutionally incapable of throwing anything away. The way I only feel at home surrounded by people on the move. The way Lebanese people are constantly honking their horns, shooting into the air, or setting off cherry bombs, because they don’t feel right without noise. You will never see the egg, once you know how quickly it cracks, without imagining it shattered. A part of us secretly exults in disaster: we are proven right; things are exactly as bad as we always knew they were. That ugly part of us (and I have it in me just like anyone else) resents the people around you, the ones who seem only to see the smooth and perfect shell.
Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War Page 35