by Zora O'Neill
In classical Arabic, counting is preposterously complicated, factoring in case endings, duals and plurals, gender, and whether you’re counting humans or nonhumans, and eight or eighty of them. In the dialects, most of this had been swept away. Teachers of dialects could usually say something like, “Don’t bother with the case of the dual. Scratch those rules about three to ten. Otherwise, it’s normal—singular nouns above ten, and four-and-twenty-blackbirds style for numbers over twenty.” Students would run a couple of drills, and the class could move on.
Now, though, Zaina had started from scratch, outlining the rools, step by step, all the way up above one hundred. Examine the object being counted, note the gender if necessary, make the required changes. This took a while, and as she was doing it, I marveled at another habit of Zaina’s: she was spelling words exactly the way they were pronounced. The Fusha word for fifteen was khamsat ʼashar (خمسة عشر, literally “five with ten”), but Lebanese usually moved the vowels a little and swallowed the last r (ر). On the whiteboard, Zaina wrote this as khamast’ash (خمستعش).
No, I thought, my jaw clenching and my hands tightening around my book. It’s two words, and it’s really ʼashar at the end! I had always been a mild spelling fanatic; typos provoked a little exasperated pop in my brain. My reaction now was a visceral twist of horror in my chest. Zaina had performed battlefield surgery on the ʼayn-sheen-ra root, just sawed its leg right off, with no anesthetic!
Zaina’s phonetic spelling actually made her counting rools more complicated than they were in Fusha, not easier. When a Lebanese person counts an object—that is, says “fifteen pencils” rather than just “fifteen”—then the ra is pronounced. So, in Zaina’s system, for the numbers eleven to nineteen, there was an extra step when combining the number with a noun.
“The rool here is to add a ra,” she said, tapping the whiteboard for emphasis. “Khamast’ashr ahweh. Fifteen coffees.”
You don’t have to add it—it’s already there, I wanted to yell. My leg was jiggling slightly, either from grammatical vexation or the coffee I’d drunk to make sure I was awake for this morning class. I was not accustomed to the Beiruti level of caffeine intake. Fifteen was apparently a perfectly plausible number of coffees for a Lebanese person.
I wasn’t alone in my agitation. Kaspar was studiously reviewing his notes, clicking his mechanical pencil as he surveyed his notebook.
“But what is the rule for two objects?” he asked.
“I told you,” Zaina said, tapping the board again. “Add –ein.”
“But that is not a rule,” Kaspar replied with the diction of a debater. “A rule has an input and an output. Where is the number? What is the output here?”
Zaina was puzzled. “You just add –ein: kitabein, two books, ahwetein, two coffees.”
Kaspar muttered as he wrote in his notebook. “So, this is the output: ahwetein.”
The disagreement didn’t dampen Zaina’s spirits. Where the word rool didn’t apply, she used her second-favorite word: excebtion. Whenever one of us raised a question about consistency, it was her default reply: Hayda excebtion.
By the end of class, the rools were close to dissolving completely. As I left the room, Irene, the American who had studied Fusha for years, fell into step next to me.
“Welcome to our class,” she said with the slightest hint of sarcasm. I was glad I wasn’t the only one who felt adrift.
We Don’t Talk About Politics Here
Lebanon is only four thousand square miles, a skinny rectangle smaller than Connecticut, hugging the eastern coast of the Mediterranean. Beirut is at the midpoint, which puts everywhere else within just a few hours’ drive. But for decades Lebanon wasn’t conducive to weekend getaways. Only gradually since the civil war’s end had Lebanon enjoyed longer periods of relative peace, and in this time, a number of hiking clubs had been established. They led trips out of Beirut nearly every weekend, and I joined one, in hopes of speaking more Arabic outside of class.
When I arrived at the bus, I was surprised to see that the group was not, as I had expected, a mix of tourists and locals, but almost all Lebanese, speaking Arabic among themselves. What I had been hoping for, sure—but presented with a crowd of forty strangers, I was intimidated into silence. I smiled vaguely at a few people seated near me, then fell asleep.
I woke up on the outskirts of Tripoli, Lebanon’s second-largest city, on the coast north of Beirut. The bus had slowed, and I peered out the window to see what the holdup might be. We were in line at a checkpoint, and alongside the road, a row of tanks had their turrets pointed squarely at our bus.
Pro- and anti-Syrian-regime factions had been launching artillery at each other over the past few days—though not on this road, Michel, the club leader, assured us, over the bus’s microphone. As we inched through the checkpoint, he pointed up the hill with a tour guide’s precisely angled open hand. “Bab at-Tabbaneh, that’s the neighborhood where the fighting has been,” he said with a steady smile.
Michel’s Arabic was as precise as his gestures, so I understood most of his commentary on roadside attractions. These ranged from a Stone Age archaeological site to a Palestinian refugee camp notorious for a grinding battle in 2007. A man leaned across the aisle to introduce himself. He was older than me, muscular but balding, dressed head to toe in multipocketed, quick-dry hiking gear. “Michel took us to the southern border this winter,” he said, pulling out his phone. “I’ll show you the pictures.” In the photos, Michel was smiling, just as he was now, and pointing to Israeli flags, coiled razor wire, tanks at the Hezbollah war museum.
At the hotel, I was assigned a bed in a little prefab trailer with two other solo travelers. One of them, Sahar, was a woman in her late forties with an unkempt bob and freckles. Lucky for me, she didn’t speak much English—and unlike most Beirutis I’d talked to, she didn’t seem to mind speaking Arabic with me.
The first five minutes were awkward, though, as we explored our room together. Thanks to her heavy Lebanese drawl, I failed to recognize the word bab, door—the very first word I had learned in Arabic. Finally she discovered the flimsy accordion-style door that separated the toilet from the rest of the room. “Ah, el-baaaayb hon,” she said—Oh, here’s the doooor—and we both relaxed.
Sahar steered me outdoors, chatting on in what she called nahawi (grammatical) Arabic, a term for Fusha that I’d heard once or twice in Egypt. There, it suggested fancy talk, putting on airs, and judging from her grin as she shifted registers, Sahar meant it in the same vein. She charged around the hotel grounds with enthusiasm and opinionated commentary. I trotted after her as she yanked green fruit off the almond trees (some for me, some for her, some for her pockets), speculated on the cost of our trailer (she wanted one for her patch of land outside Beirut), and then parked herself on the terrace next to the central stone hotel building. Together we admired the view down the rolling hills, dotted with farms, to a distant sliver of sea.
“I’ve traveled all over Europe and other parts of the world,” Sahar said, “but in fifty years, this is the first time I’m seeing my own country.”
For dinner, our group occupied one long table on the hotel’s balcony, which was still sealed up against the cold. I followed Sahar like a duckling after its mother, and she parked me in a seat opposite her. Glass separated our table from the main restaurant hall, where a family was hosting a baptism party. The guest of honor, a toddler dressed in a red satin bow tie and a white tailcoat, was passed from guest to guest, squeezed by old grandpas and teenage girls in strapless taffeta dresses.
A barrage of meze landed on our table, and a man at the far end doled out bootleg arrack from a Johnnie Walker Black bottle. Sahar pointed out the tastiest dishes and made me repeat the names: sambousek, little pastry bundles of savory lamb; fattoush, salad with sour and juicy purslane; wara’ ’einab, silky grape leaves with only the lightest stuffing of r
ice.
As she served us, Sahar trailed her crocheted sweater sleeve through a glossy tomato sauce. “Il mange comme je mange,” she said merrily, and raised her arrack glass for a refill.
Some other women at the table did not share Sahar’s cavalier attitude toward clothing. They sported complete ensembles, generously accessorized with gold and full makeup. On the bus, in a sort of social triage for dealing with forty strangers, I had written off these ladies as not my sort of people. But then the most lavishly tanned woman, in a one-shoulder peacock-pattern shirt, waved her bangled wrist down the table at me. She had overheard Sahar and me speaking our “grammatical” fancy talk. “Oh, I love Fusha!” she cried. She interrogated me in mellifluous Arabic and proceeded to quote several lines of poetry.
Our half of the long table all turned to look at me, amused and expectant, as though I might offer a few verses in response. Sahar patted my hand and beamed at the crowd—I was her pet, her prize. Fortunately, the DJ for the baptism started just then, and the room filled with the pounding beat of the dabkeh, the traditional dance of Lebanon and Syria. I was spared.
Over the music, my conversation with Sahar dwindled to her quizzing me by pointing to nearby objects. “What’s that in Arabic?” she asked. “And that?” Weirdly, in class, I had just learned the words for chimney (madkhana), up which grilled-meat smoke was billowing, and stork (la’la’a), of which there was a taxidermied specimen wedged in a corner of the main hall. Perhaps because Lebanon was so small, I mused over my arrack, all the words were cooped up here, and easier to catch.
By the time the meat course had been cleared, I was talking with Georges, seated next to me, because I could hear him better. He was Michel’s right-hand man, and when I had noticed him on the bus, he fell victim to my social triage as well. Muttering into his walkie-talkie, he had looked officious, as well as potentially mean, with a bald skull and a handlebar mustache.
Actually, he was a softy, with a snaggletoothed grin and pretty good English. As we talked, he peeled the fruit that had been set out in a bowl in front of us. He had work-toughened hands with a few bruised nails. His day job was as an electrician, but his conversation was philosophical.
“I shouldn’t say this, but Lebanon is better because of its diversity,” he said, apropos of nothing. I’d encountered these same sudden transitions into politics before, as if the topic simmered steadily in the subconscious and occasionally bubbled to the surface. “It’s good to know that other people think a different way. Then you can experience more.” His vague statement danced around a very specific issue: Lebanon’s omnipresent sectarian system, which, for legal and cultural reasons, required identification with one of eighteen officially recognized religious groups. Sectarianism cut through the whole country, though in cosmopolitan Beirut, people liked to pretend they lived beyond it.
I was relieved when Georges shifted to the topics of food and travel, because we could talk in more specific terms. “Think, in Saudi Arabia they don’t have Ladurée macarons, because they use alcohol,” he said. “Those people are missing out! Here, I don’t miss pork—I don’t really like it. But ham from Parma! That is something special.”
Georges was a well-traveled electrician. “I went to Nigeria,” he said. “Their food is yucky, just bread and yam. But I want to taste it. I have to taste it!” My heart swelled with warmth—to think I might never have spoken with this fellow curious eater. I could see why Sahar had introduced him earlier as Mar Jiryes—Saint Georges.
Georges had recently been to Doha, I was interested to hear. “I didn’t know if I should talk to the women,” he said—their niqabs had made him nervous. “Was it OK to shake their hand? Will I understand them?” he recalled. “But they were so smart, so educated. We talked about very interesting things.” I eagerly told him about the wonderful Qatar Swalif team and our conversation about oral history and poetry.
In the next room, the DJ cranked the dabkeh louder, and the baptism party embarked on a lurching line dance. Georges wrinkled his mustache in distaste. “So boring, the same rhythm every time,” he whisper-shouted in my ear. The deafening volume of the party suggested Cairo; the line dancing and my anise-laced liquor reminded me of Greece. In the greater arc of the Mediterranean, we were roughly between the two.
Meanwhile, to my left, a stern and regal jolie laide, distinctly makeup-free, was interrogating Samira, the other woman who was sharing the room with Sahar and me. Hiding behind lank hair, Samira had unpacked her suitcase in our room in silence, and throughout dinner she had answered questions with single words. Now she was heatedly spitting out a torrent of Arabic. Between the dabkeh beats, I caught something about Saudi Arabia, then “divorce” and “my babies.”
After her outburst, Samira slumped back in her seat, breathing a little hard. “Excuse me,” she muttered, and abruptly stood up and left the dining room.
“Magique noire!” the stern woman hissed at no one in particular. She was a lawyer, from a long line of Lebanese judges. “They do not respect women. Their laws are black magic.”
Not long after, I excused myself. I had been waking up so early for class that by 10 p.m. I was close to passing out. I edged my way out of the dining room, thick with cigarette smoke, and around the staggering dabkeh line. The baptized kid was snoozing on a grandmother’s shoulder.
In our trailer, Samira was brushing her teeth. I asked if she was OK—she had looked almost nauseated when she had left the table.
“I’m fine,” she answered in terse English. “The medication I take makes me tired.”
She arranged herself in bed, then sat watching me as I dug around in my bag for my own toothbrush.
“Do you take medication too?” she asked, almost hopeful.
“No, fortunately I don’t have to.” I paused. “What’s your medication for?”
“I hear sounds.” She lay back, pulling the sheets up to her chin. “It is terrible. I can’t tell what is real.”
I commiserated as best I could while brushing my teeth. It must be terrible, always having to doubt herself. Did the medication work?
“Somewhat. Sixty or seventy percent.”
I climbed into my bed, next to hers. The three little beds were lined up in a row.
“Well, before we go to sleep, I have to tell you that I snore,” I said. Samira hadn’t shown a great sense of humor, but I risked a joke. “You won’t be imagining it.”
To my relief, she giggled. “Well, I’ll pretend I’m imagining it—for your sake!”
“No need to be so polite,” I said with mock seriousness. We both cracked up as I snapped off the light.
“This is a nice group of people,” I said in the dark.
“Yes, it is,” Samira murmured.
The hike itself was a bit beside the point. After a late, somewhat bleary breakfast, Michel herded us to an overlook and pointed out the day’s route, down a hill and across a valley to the next village. “Are there land mines?” someone called out, and nervous laughter rippled through the crowd.
“No, no, that’s just in Jezzine,” Michel answered with his usual calm and even smile.
Not far down the hill, a woman sprained her ankle and had to be carried away. I briefly got lost, along with a group of Armenians. During one of the frequent rest and snack stops, someone made a joking reference to a Lebanese general. Faces froze midbite, and Michel appeared out of nowhere, still smiling. “We don’t talk about politics here.”
When the bus rolled up, we piled on and collapsed in our seats. Over the microphone, Michel explained that we weren’t going back the way we had come; the road through Tripoli was closed.
The tanks, I recalled, and I slipped off to sleep. When I woke, we were in the clouds, with a skyline of stubby, Seussian trees—all spiky clumps and occasional rangy branches. The bus slowed to a crawl on hairpin turns. I dug a guidebook out of my bag. In the
spot on the map where I guessed we must be, along the Syrian border, was empty space, no roads at all.
At the pass, an army checkpoint emerged in the fog. The black-clad soldiers waved us on. After another ten minutes, we rounded a curve and a sun-bleached valley opened before us.
An exclamation rippled across the bus: “Ah, Be’aaaaaa!”
The Bekaa Valley is Lebanon’s big-sky country, an expansive stretch of fertile land that was a respite from the mountains. The bus picked up speed. I read the word amal spray-painted on cinder-block sheep pens. Hope, I thought. How nice. Then I remembered: Amal was the name of a Shiite militia.
Just after sunset, we stopped at a roadside store for sandwiches of bread and white cheese, available in a dozen subtle variations. I ordered one with honey as well, and thought how pleasant our alternate route home had been. As Michel hustled us back onto the bus, I noticed that all my tripmates were talking urgently into their phones. I had lost track of Sahar and Samira. As we turned onto the highway that headed west to Beirut, Georges made his way down the aisle. His big mustache accentuated his frown.
“Did you hear Michel? Do you understand what is happening?” he asked me, checking on my Arabic comprehension. I told him I’d understood the Tripoli road wasn’t safe. Why did people seem so worried now that we were on a different route?
“A big man, a Sunni cleric, was killed today. The protests are starting. The road is closing behind,” he said. His voice was low and tense, and without the aid of arrack, his English was more abrupt than it had been the night before. “But we made it. Thanks God.”