by Zora O'Neill
“I visited the family argument the land,” he said, and I filled in the blanks with a feud among brothers, an argument over inheritance, a rocky orchard on the edge of a mountain village.
On TV, a newscaster reported that the Lebanese Shiite pilgrims who had been kidnapped in Syria were still being held.
Tony’s father pointed his chin at the TV. “They’re with Hezbollah, I’m sure.” He said it as four syllables, He-zib-ul-lah.
“I have good friends in Syria,” he went on. “ Lattakia shooting. Now we do not go.”
I filled in the blanks, and my eyes widened.
He leaped up. He had seen where my mind had gone: to the mounting war in Syria, and his friends in Lattakia had been shot. “No, no, my friends are safe!” he said. “We used to go shooting birds, hunting!” He mimed tiptoeing through tall grass with a long rifle, like Elmer Fudd, then, for the birds, he hooked his thumbs together and flapped his hands. “Syria is beautiful for hunting.”
Many Lebanese did not consider Syria beautiful for anything. It was their overbearing neighbor, effectively an occupying force after the civil war. Syrian troops came in to keep the peace, then stayed for decades. In March 2005, after massive demonstrations in Beirut, the Syrian troops rolled home. Now, after a few years of relative peace in Lebanon, Syria was embarking on its own civil war, and it was creeping over the border.
Tony’s father had run to the kitchen. He returned clutching something, and he gestured for me to open my hand. Into it he placed a tiny songbird, frozen solid but still fluffy in its little jacket of feathers. “These are the most delicious,” he said. I was afraid the bird would defrost from the warmth of my hand, it was so slight. I handed it back.
“You eat them whole, right?” I had read about this, the Lebanese penchant for eating tiny birds, as the French did with ortolans, beaks and skulls and innards and all, though at least no feathers.
“Yes!” said Tony’s father, excited that I appreciated this frozen treasure. He dashed back to the kitchen to refreeze the bird, shouting a recipe over his shoulder. “Put them on the grill with some lemon and garlic.” When he came back out, he was kissing his fingers, like a cartoon Italian chef. “They’re delicious.”
Tony’s dad had more show-and-tell: a bird, a live one, in a little silver wire cage. It was white and sidestepped nervously on its perch. “Are you going to eat that one?” I asked, laughing.
He looked a bit shocked. “Haram, no!” For shame! He set a blue quilted cozy over the cage. “It’s time for him to sleep,” he told me, patting the cover gently.
That was my cue. It had been a somewhat unorthodox ʼasrooniyeh, but my afternoon tea had given me a chance to practice Arabic for more than a minute. And perhaps I had served Tony’s purpose after all.
From Jbeil and its waxwork Jesus, I returned to Beirut in the morning, and before lunch I was in the southern city of Sidon and an entirely different atmosphere. The highway was edged with billboards adorned with the caterpillar-browed face of former prime minister Rafic Hariri, assassinated by a car bomb in 2005. Hariri was a Sunni Muslim, and this was his hometown.
On the edge of Sidon’s old city, I stopped at a bakery for a manoucheh. The bread was blissfully hot and fragrant with herbs, and I stopped and savored my good fortune. I had the whole day all to myself in a new place.
I was eating and trying to read some posters stuck on the wall when a voice at my elbow said, in English, “You speak Arabic?”
I started and turned to see a man with a shock of white hair, a chiseled chin, and fetching crinkles around his caramel eyes. He looked like an aging French film star.
“I, uh, behki ʼarabi, mais . . .” The question was confusing (if he thought I spoke Arabic, why didn’t he ask me in Arabic?), and oregano-infused olive oil was dripping off my elbow.
The handsome man produced a sheaf of napkins from his suit pocket. Once I was degreased and we had established we would speak English, things were easier. Alain was a sixty-two-year-old native of Sidon who had worked in France for much of his life; he lived here with his two sons; and would I care to come to lunch?
Perhaps I should have held out for a stranger who wanted to speak Arabic, not English, but Alain lured me easily. He had just been to the library; he showed me the books, which included Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad.
On the walk to his house, he told me his wife had recently left. This might have been a warning sign for a more sensible solo female traveler. But the story intrigued me (“This Facebook, it can destroy families”), and he had shown me the fresh meat he had bought for kibbeh nayeh, the spiced raw beef and bulgur he would prepare for lunch, so I kept following him.
At his apartment, his teenage sons were just waking up, staggering around in stretched-out T-shirts. “Marwan is a computer genius,” Alain boasted, by way of introduction to the younger one.
“I am a hacker,” the kid said, blinking behind his glasses.
The boys drifted away, and Alain gave me a tour of his bookshelves: Agatha Christie, Khalil Gibran, tomes on balagha, the art of classical rhetoric, which was still a cornerstone of Arabic education. Then we went to the kitchen, where he took off his suit coat, rolled up his sleeves, and directed me to make a salad while he prepared the meat. He had lived alone in the past, he said, and he could do it again now. “And besides,” he added, “if a man enjoys life, he should take care of his stomach.” He plunged potatoes into frying oil and set to carving radish flowers to garnish the kibbeh.
The sons made a token appearance at lunch, but they soon melted away again, to computers and friends. Alain and I cleaned our plates of the spiced meat and the last sprigs of succulent purslane. I asked Alain why he had left France.
“Life in Lebanon is easy—but not good,” he said with a philosopher’s sigh. “You understand?”
At first I didn’t understand. If I had been asked to characterize life in Lebanon, I probably would have given the opposite answer. Life seemed hard because of the little annoyances: feeble Internet, obnoxious drivers, road closures. One of the first full sentences I had learned in Beirut was Rahet el-kahraba’—The power’s gone out. Yet I also saw evidence of the good life, in the fresh produce, the Mediterranean breezes, the leisure time to chat after a lazy lunch. This, I would have thought, would be a reason to move home from France.
These superficial hassles and perks didn’t figure in Alain’s calculations, however. For him, life was easy because he was able to retire—he no longer worked as a waiter in a foreign country. Here, he lived off the income from this building; the neighboring lot, also his, was filled with fruit trees. He leaned off the balcony and picked us two flesh-red plums.
But, he had been reminded after a few years at home, life was not good in any moral sense. He was thwarted by the fundamental rule of Lebanese life, the sectarian system. The end of the civil war meant the various sects no longer battled each other outright, but the National Pact, set at independence in 1943 on principles established under the French Mandate, was still followed. The law required that government posts be parceled out according to sect: the prime minister was always a Sunni, as Rafic Hariri had been; the president was always Maronite; seats in the National Assembly were fixed at a six-to-five ratio of Christians to Muslims. This quota system trickled down to civil life, Alain told me: to get any meaningful job, one was required to show affiliation with a political party, which was virtually synonymous with sect.
Alain refused to play the game, but he feared for his sons, who would soon have to choose a side in this society. In light of this, my concern over sect-appropriate vocabulary was trivial. As an outsider, a tourist, I didn’t have to choose anything. I could opt out of the whole mess, in much the same way that I had been able to sidestep revolutionary loyalties in Egypt and watch Mamma Mia! with a retired regime crony.
“At my sons’ age, I was in France!” Alain cr
owed. His boast lightened the mood; the sun shone through his thick white hair. I could picture him, tanned and wiry, prowling the streets of Paris. His children were so soft, so boyish by comparison. They had the world at their fingertips—Marwan was plugged in right now, hacking into blogs in Sweden—but they seemed so vulnerable. Alain stood to adjust the curtains around the balcony.
In this shade-dappled hothouse, he turned the conversation to his ex-wife. Something had been wrong for about a year. She was depressed, messy, mean. “She forgot her sons’ names,” he said. “She called them Stupid, Piece of Meat, Animal.” He had decided to wait it out. If she asked for a divorce first, he would not have to pay.
After she had left, Marwan looked through her files on the computer and discovered the Facebook messages between her and another man. Marwan swore never to speak his mother’s name again.
I was starting to feel a bit uncomfortable. Was this a segue into some sleazy invitation? Was it unhappy Saeed of the mountaintop parking lot all over again, a seduction by tragedy?
Perhaps Alain sensed my worry. “I invited you over so I could practice my English,” he said. “And you must do the same with Arabic.” It didn’t matter what sort I studied. Although, he added archly, “if one speaks Fusha, people think him a pedant.” I was at no risk of that—when Alain slipped into Fusha to demonstrate, I could not respond in anything but fractured Lebanese words, still wrapped in my unshakable Egyptian accent. “Just three or four weeks a year,” Alain concluded, “to keep the knowledge.”
More than halfway through my travels and studies, I was starting to look ahead. How would I maintain the Arabic I had learned? I couldn’t tramp around the Arab world for the rest of my life, hurling myself at strangers. I was married; I had obligations at home and other work to do. A few weeks a year, though, as Alain suggested—that seemed manageable. Together we cleared the table, and then he walked me to the bus stop.
I was always so concerned with how I spoke, I thought, as I bumped along the coast road on the bus. My Egyptian got me the wrong kind of juice, my Fusha was fading fast, and, until I had heard Alain’s analysis of the sectarian system, I had been afraid of choosing the wrong Lebanese word for fear of misidentifying myself. It was slowly dawning on me that none of the people I met cared about any of that. They just wanted me to listen.
The Weird Uncle
Beirut, the Paris of the Middle East—decades had passed since this swinging-sixties cliché had been true, at least physically. Fashion had moved on from classic Chanel to more eye-searing combinations, and the colonial-era buildings were gone or slated for the wrecking ball. But the French influence was still easy to hear. Nearly everywhere I turned in Beirut, someone was squealing, “Ah, oui, c’est chouette ça!” into a rhinestone-trimmed phone.
As a student, I found these Francophones irritating; I needed to speak and hear Arabic. Worse, the French was not just background noise; I often overheard a conversation and grasped it easily, almost subconsciously. Which would have been satisfying, were it not also a bitter reminder of how seldom I did the same in Arabic.
After World War I, under the French Mandate, French schools were established in the territory that became Syria and Lebanon. This was one prong of a divide-and-rule strategy to diffuse pan-Arab solidarity; the other was the sectarian system of government offices. So thorough was the French education that many teachers worried that Arabic would be stamped out, and they fought vigorously to preserve the language and the culture it carried.
Even after Lebanon became fully independent of France, in 1946, the French schools were maintained for many. After close to a century of this education, the language had naturally been woven into Lebanese. When you don’t know the Arabic word, I learned early on, a French one might be not just a good substitute, but the real thing.
In our class, Danny, who had learned French as part of his excellent Dutch education, was a master of this. “Yesterday I went to lunch with these lovely . . .” He fished for the word for ladies. “Madamat,” he concluded, flashing a convincing smile.
“Tsk—it’s demoisellat,” Zaina corrected. Of course it was.
Soon I had a short list of French-derived words: kuloon (stockings), mkarraz (stressed, from crise), and zhaghal (gigolo, for a particular sort of tight-jeaned, slick-haired guy on a motorbike). Not very useful, but beggars for cognates couldn’t be choosers.
After class one day, a few of us students sat in the café and reviewed our new vocabulary.
“Tishreejeh,” I said. “That means phone credit, right, Nick?” He was our go-to guy for real-life words.
“Yeah, like, baddi tishreejeh bi-’ashra—I want ten bucks’ credit.” He went back to talking with Eliza, the Lebanese Frenchwoman who barely spoke in class but was lively outside it. Irene reached for her big green Hans Wehr. Like me, she carried it with her always.
“I wonder what the verb is,” she muttered.
I’d been doing the same mental analysis. “Right—it’s sort of like a Form II verbal noun,” I said, referring back to my precious college verb chart and its morphology rules. “So the root would have to be sharaja.”
Irene had already found the entry. She looked up, puzzled. “It’s not even a verb. It just says sharaj, with the broken plural form ashraj: ‘loop, ring, eyelet.’” She paused. “Oh, buttonhole too. And . . . anus?”
“What?” I reached for the dictionary. She raised her eyebrows, an unspoken I-could-not-make-this-up.
“‘Sharaji, adjective: anal,’” I read the next line. “You have got to be kidding me.” This was like that evening in the desert in Abu Dhabi, when I had looked up the word I thought meant “edge of a dune” and found “miscarried fetus.”
Irene took the book back and slammed it shut. “Thanks for nothing, Hans.”
With our Fusha backgrounds, Irene and I were accustomed to having to stretch our brains around surprising definitions. We even liked it. Irene maintained her own list of paradoxical Arabic words: Taluqa means to get a divorce, and also to jump for joy. Siban is childhood and sensual desire. ʼAla is related to families and wailing. Habasa yields the words for wedding ring as well as prison. Those had some internal logic, if you were cynical enough. This sharaj, though—this was nonsense.
“How do you possibly get from anal to phone credit?” I wondered aloud. I tugged Nick’s sleeve again.
He laughed cheerily, the laugh of someone unburdened by the logic of morphology. “People who talk on their phones too much are assholes?” he said.
Nick had been exposed to the singular details of Arabic from birth. To him, the language was like a weird uncle—he was never surprised by its quirks. He went back to chatting with Eliza; they had switched from English to French, as Nick had recently studied in Paris.
“Wait a minute, Irene,” I said. “How would you say ‘to load’ in French?” The gears of the Arabic-morphology machine were turning in my head. “Isn’t it charger? And could you use that verb to say you were loading up a phone with credit?”
Irene, who spoke French all the time for her Red Cross job, allowed that you could. And then the gears clicked in her head too. The ch in French was a soft sh sound, the g more of a j.
“Charger. Oh, right, the consonants are sha-ra-ja!” She laughed with jubilation. “Verbal noun, tashreej, so . . . tishreejeh! That’s brilliant!”
Ten minutes to learn a new word, but one we’d never forget.
The burning tires had been cleared off the road to Tripoli, which was good, because I was running out of places to go on the weekends. Word on the street in Beirut was that this northern city was still dangerous, yet it was apparently safe enough that a local historian was offering a free walking tour. I decided to risk the trip.
I took an early bus so I could have breakfast at Abdul Rahman Hallab, a famous pastry purveyor that occupied a giant castle-like building in downtown Tripoli.
Hallab’s specialty was knafeh, a storied Levantine sweet of soft white cheese sandwiched between—or rather, embraced by, as the root suggests—two thin layers of semolina or fine-spun pastry threads, crisped in clarified butter and doused in sugar syrup.
I had first heard of the treat from a fellow graduate student, a Palestinian raised in Jordan who had the aspect of Droopy Dog; the only time he was cheerful was when he talked about knafeh—or kunafaaaaaaah, as he said it, a heart-rending sigh. This man’s favorite pastry is said to have been invented in Nablus, in the West Bank north of Jerusalem. The cheesy delight spread around the Arab world, as did Palestinian refugees. Lebanon was home to more than 300,000 of them, about 7 percent of the population; the law blocked them from owning land and holding certain jobs. Knafeh had been embraced, even if those who invented it had not.
Knafeh does not indulge Proustian musing—it must be eaten quickly, before the milky-soft cheese congeals. Mine arrived molten on a small plate; the waiter pointed to the Hallab-branded squeeze bottle of sugar syrup. Within a minute, I had scraped the dish clean and slurped my coffee to the lees.
When I joined the walking tour ten minutes later, I was flushed with sugar and caffeine. I was glad to see I wasn’t the only person to go against the travel warnings—three other people had made the trip from Beirut. Our guide, Elie, was as energized as I was. Like all good urbanists, he walked fast, in sensible shoes, and talked with the passion and pessimism of anyone deeply involved in local politics. As we jogged along behind him, he pointed out historic colonial buildings at risk of demolition. “And there’s a nice old café,” he added, “but, pfft, they don’t use real cups anymore, just plastic.”
The city buzzed with commerce. A vendor straightened a display of baseball caps with a red-and-white-check print—keffiyehs for the hip-hop set—while an older gentleman sat nearby in a fez that he had carefully wrapped in a plastic bag. Men hawked espresso and cigarettes from the backs of minivans. The chemicals in my own bloodstream had reached a perfect simmer; I grinned ecstatically at everyone we passed. Knafeh was good not so much for how it tasted, but for how it made you feel.