Jasmine and Fire (11 page)

An exaggeration no doubt, and a different scenario from mine. She was dating locals. James is an expat. Still, those words have come rushing back more than once since the party. I’ve been wondering if there wasn’t some useful warning in there, even though I’m not exactly looking to meet men right now. I may not know quite where things stand with Richard—we haven’t had any big “relationship” conversations since I’ve been here—but my feelings for him haven’t changed, and I’m looking forward to seeing him in New York later this month.

Also, the more I think about it, the more I realize that I need to wrestle with how I feel about Beirut on my own terms, without my relationship to it hinging on a potentially volatile romance
with a guy, whether it’s Richard or someone I happen to meet here. In New York, my feelings about the city never had anything to do with a guy. Here in Beirut, I need to do my best to find out if the city is still my home before I can welcome someone else in, whoever that may turn out to be.

Even
though I have a few friends here now, I’m reconnecting with family and with the old neighborhood, and my freelance work life is coming along, I keep waiting for that visceral “ah, I’m home” feeling to kick in. Maybe it comes in as a soft whisper now and then; mostly it’s been palpably absent.

But walking always helps bind me to a place and clarify my feelings for it. So I’m taking as many long walks as I can. Nearly every day I’m wandering around Beirut, intentionally getting lost and forcing myself to find my way back to my apartment, to really drill the city streets into my brain. I’m trying to learn and relearn Beirut up through my soles and ankles and knees, anchor myself to it physically. I’ve always discovered and rediscovered New York this way, taking clusters of streets and alleyways and neighborhoods at a time.

One morning in early October, I walk around the corner from my apartment to noisy Hamra Street and all the way to the western edge of it. I pass a handmade jewelry shop I like, and the new Applebee’s (
et tu
, Beirut?), scents of grilling hamburgers wafting out its door, and past a half-dozen condo construction sites, hearing the jackhammers and clanking sounds ring out over the car engines and honks and pedestrian chatter along Hamra. I reach a fork at the end of the block and turn downhill along a leafy, winding street to the Corniche. Walking downhill along this quiet path toward the waterfront, I stroll by a small scuba-diving shop and
the cream-white Hotel Mozart with its lovely twirled-stone balconies, and past patchy empty lots overgrown with weeds, edging up against dirt-covered old apartment buildings ten stories high with laundry hanging from their balconies. I follow the street’s downhill curve to the right, past a car dealership with a candy-red refurbished 1970s Datsun out front and a parking lot filled with late-model BMWs and Mercedes, past an old three-story abandoned apartment building with deep cracks running through its dirty stone walls, its crumbling rooms probably filled with squatters now. The sign over the entryway says
TOKYO
in faded red paint, the
Y
long since rubbed out by rain or age. The small wrought-iron gate out front is rusted, but a red hibiscus tree behind it blooms full and lush.

Emerging from the bottom end of that downhill street, I’m now facing the sea. I fight my way through six lanes of honking cars, none of them stopping at the traffic light, to cross over to the Corniche sidewalk. I spot the old Ferris wheel to my left. As a child, I used to beg my parents to let me ride that thing, but they didn’t like the looks of it; too creaky, too rusted. I walk along. On my right, across the Corniche away from the water side, I see a faded pink three-story house, reputedly once belonging to a murdered dentist by the name of Dr. Dray. A tragic story, if it’s true, but his name always makes me smile.

The Corniche is lined with palm trees. Ahead in the distance are downtown apartment towers and hotels of all heights, from five to two dozen stories tall, old or new or under construction. The city’s landmark black-and-white-striped lighthouse sits on a hill, across the Corniche from the water’s edge, and the newer, blander gray lighthouse rises up along the boulevard a short distance ahead of me. I walk past the Manara Palace Café, a longtime
seaside hangout for smoking argileh water pipes and drinking Arabic coffee, and past the Riviera Beach Lounge, its white umbrellas hiding rows of tanned men and women sunning themselves on chaises longues on this warm October day. A few meters away, down on the rocks just below the Corniche, working-class families and women wearing veils have brought their kids to swim for free. I think back to something an aunt told me a while back, that when she was growing up and one of the trendy, high-ticket beach clubs in Beirut was called the Saint Simon, she and her friends would content themselves with sunning at the “Saint Balash,” Arabic for “Saint Freebie.”

I keep walking, dodging joggers and all the zooming mopeds and bicycles on the Corniche sidewalk, and look out at the Jet Skiers going wild in the water, wondering if one of these days two of them are going to crash into each other. In the near distance, in the hills to my right, across the Corniche, I spot the AUB’s pink-brick College Hall clock tower, rebuilt after it was bombed in 1991 just after the civil war was technically over. Now the downtown skyline is coming more clearly into view, and I see the bombed-out Holiday Inn—a mid-1970s civil war relic—and a Starbucks on my right. Those two sights at once would make for a jarring view almost anywhere else, but in Beirut, where the decrepit and the brand new sidle up next to each other along nearly every street, no architectural pairing seems incongruous.

Slowly I’m approaching the old seaside district of Ain el Mreisseh, a web of small streets that rise up along a hill across the Corniche and are lined with lovely cottages. At the crumbling little fishing harbor that sits at the lower edge of Ain el Mreisseh, I see a group of straw-hatted men fishing along the rocks.
Just like the men who gather at Hamra’s cafés daily—keeping up their habit even as the old coffee shops give way to shiny new chain establishments—these harbor regulars, or their fathers and grandfathers before them, have been coming down here to throw their fishing lines into the water year after year, decade after decade, as the city has imploded and rebuilt itself around them.

About a half hour after I first hit the Corniche, I’m nearing the edge of downtown. Still walking on the waterfront, I pass an elderly white-haired man selling fresh-squeezed orange juice from a wheelbarrow, his back leaning against the seaside railing, the Mediterranean waves rolling softly and breaking a few feet behind him down against the black and gray rocks. A few feet away on the Corniche, I pass a white Ottoman-style house with arched windows, a red-shingled roof, and a garden of purple hydrangea trees planted outside, and two groups of elderly men sitting at tables playing backgammon in the shade of the overhanging branches.

On one side of the house is a gated entrance that leads, past pink bougainvillea bushes, down to the glamorous La Plage beach club, where I spot a group of bleached-blond Lebanese women in bikinis and enormous sunglasses spread out on fluffy white beach towels. Past the Alfa Romeo dealership a few steps away is the expensive crafts shop Artisans du Liban et d’Orient, with its exquisite mother-of-pearl-inlaid tables, gold-threaded caftans, sea-blue blown-glass bottles, and hammered silver serving platters. The store’s windows look out onto the water. I pass the famous Phoenicia Hotel, where visiting heads of state usually stay, and the new Four Seasons Hotel high-rise, with its curvy balconies and blue-glass windows overlooking the sea. Across from the hotel, rows
of billboards with quotes from the international press scream out: “
BEIRUT IS BACK … AND IT
’
S BEAUTIFUL.
”
—THE GUARDIAN
and “
BEYROUTH REVIT SON AGE D
’
OR.
”
—PARIS MATCH
. The posters are interspersed with oversize vintage photos of women water-skiing in the Mediterranean near the adjacent Hôtel St.-Georges and Yacht Club, and photos of decadent society parties from Beirut’s prewar heyday in the 1960s.

Now passing the iconic pink-stone Hôtel St.-Georges, scaffolded and in the middle of a prolonged renovation after it was wrecked in the war, and across from it a collapsed white building that was destroyed during the Hariri assassination car bomb, I notice that the hotel’s Yacht Club, at least the outdoor terrace part, is open for business again, its long blue pool flanked by white umbrellas where members of the city’s leisure class, and surely a few nostalgic souls, are sunning themselves under the piercing midday rays.

Time for a lunch break. I cross over from the Corniche, winding through the traffic toward downtown. I make a right after the Tom Ford boutique and go up a hill, past still more luxury-condo construction sites and into the new Beirut Souks shopping area at the edge of downtown. All the shaded benches in the Souks complex are full, shoppers with Carolina Herrera and Balenciaga and Zara and Stella McCartney and Jimmy Choo bags texting or drinking iced coffees out of the hot sun. Before the war, Beirut’s downtown was a noisy, crowded area where people of all classes—coming from the posh Achrafieh district on the east side, or the mixed-class west, or the poorer suburbs, or the mountain villages—gathered to shop for produce or housewares or jewelry or knickknacks sold in small tightly clustered shops and at vendors’ stands in the old, long-destroyed souk. But in the area’s
new postwar incarnation, it’s an almost strictly upscale shopping district that looks more like a glam Western shopping mall, with rows and rows of shops along an indoor-outdoor arcade of herringbone-patterned stone buildings and arched tunnelways, designed by the Spanish celebrity architect Rafael Moneo and the Lebanese Samir Khairallah. The Souks are surrounded by expensive new real estate, construction sites shielded by billboards promising luxury residential and office buildings, and a swank new marina going up just across the Corniche on the waterfront.

There’s no resemblance at all here to an old Arab souk, to the bustling, dusty market stalls that existed around downtown before they were flattened by war and reconstruction. Much of the construction of the new Souks was finished only this past year, and so far the district hasn’t been attracting enough shoppers to create a din. On a weekday like today, I hear just a soft burble of voices, and heels click-clacking on the cobblestones. Bored security guards are standing around every few meters and staring idly, directing the usual once-over at passing pedestrians.

I follow the gentle hill that leads from the new Souks area into central downtown, then cross Weygand Street toward the twelfth-century Omari Mosque, near the edge of the business district, and into the star-shaped central square called the Najmeh, or L’Étoile; on one edge of it sits the ornate St. George’s Orthodox Cathedral, built in 1767 and restored after the civil war. I walk inside the church, escaping the sun, and sit in one of the pews for a few minutes, staring up at the gilded frescoes along the walls. My mind drifts back to the Orthodox ceremonies I’d go to with my family and my grandparents when we used to visit them in the mountain town of Aley, when Samir and I were kids, and when it was safe to leave home for a weekend. I can still almost smell
the warm, spicy incense and hear the priest’s slow chants booming through the chapel: “Unto the ages of ages.…”

I grab an outdoor table at a Lebanese restaurant called Al Balad, in a yellow stone building near the newer of the two downtown clock towers, this one built during the French Mandate era in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Looking over the menu, I realize I want to try much more than I can eat all at once, but I’m not heading home right after lunch; it would be a waste to overorder since I can’t take a doggie bag today. I finally decide on the eggplant
fatteh
, a dish I crave often and occasionally make in New York. It’s similar to the chickpea dish called tiss’ye that I love and last had at Umayma’s Ramadan dinner, but this one is made with roasted strips of eggplant instead of warm chickpeas. Like the tiss’ye, the eggplant fatteh is also a layered dish, with generous ladles of garlic-spiked yogurt, topped with fried pieces of Arabic bread and showered in pine nuts sautéed in butter. Al Balad makes an exceptional fatteh. I luxuriate in every bite, no need to share with anyone on this solo lunch.

As I eat, I watch pedestrians, mostly European and Gulf tourists on this sunny Tuesday afternoon in October, as they stroll along the stone lanes, stopping to gaze up at the buildings that line this part of the central downtown. Most of the buildings are just five or six stories high, in saffron and earth-toned stone with dark green or brown shutters, and were originally built during the Ottoman or French colonial period. Some of the buildings survived in part after the civil war, but most have been heavily reconstructed, in a few cases around walls that could still be salvaged.

I continue my walk past the center of downtown and up into the gently hilly Wadi Abu Jamil area, the city’s old Jewish quarter, now a cobweb of construction sites, and I walk through the
neighborhood along a black cobblestone sidewalk, past the old synagogue that’s currently being renovated, and past my late great-aunt Wadad’s Ahliah school. I emerge on the other side and make a right at the street that leads back down the hill toward the Corniche. There I make a left and walk back along the seaside for a while. Crossing back over, I pass the statue of the 1950s Egyptian and Arab nationalist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser and walk from there up the sloping street that leads back toward the AUB campus and Hamra, past a traffic jam of SUVs and mopeds and wheelbarrows piled high with onions for sale, then around the bend to Bliss Street, the campus’s main drag, named after one of the Protestant missionaries who founded the university in 1866. Finally I’m making a left past the Dunkin’ Donuts on Bliss and heading along a tight, car-crammed block toward my building.

All in all it’s been a five-hour ramble, including my break for lunch. I’m sweating and my face is flushed—it’s still hot here, not quite middle-of-summer heat but close—and although I’m tired, I feel I can keep doing this for hours, for days. I’ve never taken such a long walk around Beirut and never spent this much time just wandering around the city solo, trying to learn how the pieces all fit together—especially now, after so many of its parts have been rebuilt. On past summer visits, I’ve usually taken cars or taxis around the city, mostly tagging along with family. I needed this walk today—for the exercise, sure, but even more, for the sense that I’m reattaching myself, physically, literally, to Beirut, to its streets and its rhythms.