Jasmine and Fire (15 page)

“You
should break up soon because you are likely to break up over Thanksgiving, anyway.”

This advice comes from one Rebecca Elliott, a Ph.D. student in sociology at UC Berkeley, in an op-ed published in the
New York Times
. It’s aimed at high school students who are about to leave for college and are unsure what to do about their boyfriends and girlfriends back home.

She goes on:

“You’ll give it an earnest try, but you’ll start to resent each other for forming new attachments, for not really ‘getting’ what it’s like at your respective schools, for being the reason you’re both missing out on important experiences.”

Sound advice. The same thing did happen to me in
college. My high school boyfriend and I stayed together our first fall semester at different schools, but then broke up right on schedule, during the holiday break, feeling too estranged after the first transformative new adventures of our lives.

I’m not exactly the target audience for that
Times
op-ed now, being two full decades past eighteen. Still, I’ve been wondering, ever since James tried to ask me out, whether I should be exploring new options if they open up here in Beirut—not with him necessarily, but just on principle.

Richard had brought this issue up over the summer, just before I left New York.

“It’s going to be raining men in Beirut” was what he’d said to me back in August. During my October visit to New York, we’d conveniently dodged the subject of our relationship and its future, enjoying our time together but both feeling too sheepish, I suppose, to have any momentous talks yet.

It’s hardly raining men in Beirut, but I also have my umbrella up right now. I’m dropping the word
boyfriend
into conversations that I’m sensing are about to take a “Can I have your number?” or “I have a guy for you to meet” turn. Is this a bad idea? Should I let the rain just pour on down, whip me right up into the storm, and see what happens?

But I’m reminding myself, again, that I’m not a college freshman. I’m in my thirties. I’ve dated plenty of guys since then, and I’d like to think I’ve learned one or two things about myself and about relationships over the years—even if a few teeny little issues, like the Where Is My Home question, are still working themselves out.

I’ve at least figured out that if home were to boil down just to where some guy happens to live, it may as well not even exist as
a real question. I need to know if I can love Beirut, if I can come back home to it, for reasons deeper and sturdier than a romantic relationship. Whatever happens between Richard and me—our time together in October, however sweet, didn’t shed much light on our future—I’m not sure putting myself on the market here would be a terrific idea at the moment.

I do know one thing, though: it’s November, and it’s coming up on Thanksgiving, and this year for the first time I’ll be spending the holiday in Beirut. Of course, it’s an American holiday and doesn’t officially exist in Lebanon, and it may slink by without a sound this year. I’ll miss it if it does. Ever since my family moved to the States, I’ve had a thing for Thanksgiving. It’s not just the food—I’m not even that wild about turkey. It’s the boisterous, generous mood of the day. That is, of course, if you’re lucky enough to have a food-fixated family like mine who’d mostly rather gorge themselves than fight. This year I’ll likely spend Thanksgiving solo, with a shish taouk sandwich (it’s chicken; close enough) and a rom-com classic on DVD.

But I’m still hoping for a Thanksgiving invite. Wouldn’t be such a far-fetched idea. Every Lebanese person I’ve ever met who has lived a stretch in the States is crazy about Thanksgiving, too, and the odds aren’t so bad that one of them will re-create the holiday here this year. There are obvious theories I could float about the love affair between Lebanese émigrés and this ultra-American holiday: Thanksgiving is about eating piles of food, filling every inch of the table with overflowing platters, packing the house, and stuffing your guests until they collapse—all things the Lebanese have a special talent for even when there’s no particular occasion to celebrate.

Of course, Thanksgiving is also about counting your blessings, and the Lebanese, religious or not, have a few compulsive year-round expressions for that, too:
Nishkur’allak!
Thank God!
Hamdulillah!
Praise God!

Getting together with relatives, for most of my American friends, is a prospect fraught with anxiety. For the Lebanese, it’s just what you do. All the time. Sure, you may love some aunts and uncles and cousins more than others, and some may piss you off to no end, but they must all be kissed three times on the cheeks, welcomed, entertained, endured, and above all fed. Copiously, and often. The Lebanese are traditionally around their extended families almost daily, so big family dinners aren’t quite the exotic, tension-fraught occasions they can be in America. On top of that, turkey, in no way a part of Lebanese cuisine, is considered an unusual and glamorous Western ingredient here in Beirut, and figuring out how to cook it expertly is the sign of a certain genius and cosmopolitan panache.

So I’d even argue that Thanksgiving is better suited for Lebanon than for America, even if the Puritans were just about the only foreigners never to invade the eastern Mediterranean.

Days after my mini—angst session, a promising e-mail subject line pops up in my inbox. I click open the message, and find—yes!—an invitation to a Thanksgiving dinner with my parents’ friends Bushra and Ziad. They’ve never lived in the States, but three of their kids—all around my age—live on the East and West coasts. Bushra and Ziad are going to celebrate Thanksgiving on the exact day, the third Thursday of this month, which although not a holiday in Lebanon will now officially feel like one.
Nishkur’allah
.

Bushra is one of the best home cooks I’ve ever known. I’m eager to see what she does with the turkey. Mainly I’m glad to have something to look forward to this month, the first fall I’ve spent in Lebanon and the first cold (okay, cold-ish) season I’ve experienced here since I was nine. Up until now, it had been a long hot Indian summer ever since I landed in Beirut in August, and even though that’s disastrous for agriculture and terrifying for the planet, the truth is I’ve always dreaded winter. So I guiltily thank the cold for creeping in so late this year. Right now it’s hovering just over fifty degrees Fahrenheit; the temperature likely won’t drop much lower than that as the winter goes on, but with the sun having vanished today, it feels chillier outside than it actually is.

The
first couple of weeks of November bumble along slowly. On mornings when it’s not raining—fall and winter are the rainy seasons in Lebanon—I sit at the colorful mosaic-tiled table on the balcony working on my laptop. When I’m distracted or need a break from my computer, I gaze out onto the corner flower shop below, run by a large Sunni family who’ve lived on this street ever since my mom’s Protestant grandparents built their house on this block in the early twentieth century. On the rooftop across from mine, I watch as, midmorning every day, one of the middle-aged men of the flower shop family, his hair turning prematurely stark white on his head and along his bushy mustache, flies his flock of pigeons around and around in widening circles, like Forest Whitaker in
Ghost Dog
.

On rainless afternoons, I take walks. One day after turning in an editing assignment, I reward myself by heading off on an adventure on foot. I decide to explore downtown some more, and I bring with me a new book I’ve just bought called
Beyroutes
—a
combination guidebook and critical treatise on the city. As I wait for my building elevator, I flip to a random : in modern-day Beirut, writes one of the contributors, “a visitor can recognize a certain restlessness to reconstruct, to renew, or to realign the present in reference to a certain past.”

I follow the book’s walking tour around some monuments downtown: the ancient Roman road that runs at the seaside edge of Martyrs’ Square, the part of downtown that before the war was a bustling area of shops and theaters and is now a flat open space dividing the city’s east and west sides. The Roman road runs past a hole in the ground into which passersby can see Byzantine-era ruins from a caravanserai, a sort of roadside refreshment area for caravans traveling through Beirut around
A.D.
400. The road is paved now, of course, just another trafficky artery through Beirut, but I’d never realized before that it had ancient roots. The walking tour takes me past the two mosques on the edge of downtown: the small and elegant, caramel-colored sixteenth-century Amir Assaf Mosque and the larger Omari Mosque, originally a Byzantine church; the enormous new sky-blue-domed mosque built by the late Rafik Hariri is visible just behind. I walk around one edge of the city center and up a set of stone stairs to a parklike area where pedestrians can look down at the ancient Roman baths that were excavated here and that now form part of a quiet garden set below street level, and then look up at the Grand Serail, the Ottoman-built parliament building, heavily guarded and still the seat of the Lebanese government.

Afterward I climb back down the stone stairs, wind through some streets, and stop in to see the huge, luxurious TSC supermarket in the Beirut Souks shopping center. The supermarket, tucked between the Souks’ clothing and shoe boutiques, is like an
art gallery of high-end food, its sleek black-and-white aisles and butterscotch tiled floors a shiny backdrop for rows of perfect produce and products: purple and white eggplants, trim bright yellow bananas from Somalia, boutique international teas, imported pastas, cured meats, beautifully packaged spices, a fastidiously arranged frozen-foods section, and areas where shoppers can perch at high stools and order sushi or freshly made salads or the elegantly plated Lebanese home-style specialties of the day. But browsing the aisles, I sense no sign of real life in the store, as I haven’t in much of the new Souks area when I’ve passed through it on my October walks and again today. Just a few scattered rich people browsing, window shopping.

If only downtown Beirut could feel more
sha’bi
again, more “of the people,” not just a stiff new monument to an aspirational life of riches and—Lebanon’s depressed economy and shaky political situation being what they are—of amnesia and self-delusion.

In the months since I got here, I’ve been playing tourist in my own city, but at least now I know where certain streets and landmarks and shortcuts are, much better than I ever have before, and I’m feeling more legit as a Beiruti, even if true long-term Beirutis never bother to do this sort of thing. The same way many New Yorkers have never been to the Statue of Liberty, myself included.

I sit on one of the benches ringing the downtown and text my cousin Shireen to confirm directions to her friend’s birthday get-together tonight. Shireen is a few years younger than me, a stunning Lebanese-Palestinian brunette with enormous thick-lashed eyes. She grew up in Washington, D.C., but moved to Beirut, just down the street from my building, after finishing her master’s degree at Columbia last year. We’d rarely seen each other in the States—we’re only distantly related—but a couple of weeks ago,
after a lively catch-up session at a family dinner in Beirut, we’d decided to start hanging out. After I text her, I get up and continue walking around for a while, poking along the downtown streets, no particular destination in mind.

The sun starts dropping, and soon evening falls. A real shame, this early darkness, the end of daylight savings time. Such short days. I need to get an earlier start on my walks, take in more daylight, since when the sun starts to go down, especially here, I feel a shot of the blues. But the blues are getting lighter as the weeks and months pass, now that I’ve been settling in little by little.

One of my uncles invites me to lunch one Sunday at his house across town, along with a bunch of older relatives. I haven’t seen some of them in years. It’s a cheerful gathering, and over cups of Arabic coffee before lunch, there’s juicy gossip about a married neighbor who ran off with a well-known divorced singer. We dig into a meze of more than a dozen plates—tabbouleh,
baba ghanoush
, fatayer, kibbeh balls, labneh, more—and feast on baked eggplant stuffed with ground beef and rice, and an enormous platter of roast lamb. It’s delicious home-cooked food, but it’s like having three meals at once. The lunch goes on for six hours. By the fourth hour, as we’re sipping
ahweh bayda
—“white coffee,” hot water flavored with orange-blossom nectar—I’m restless and wanting to get back on my way. I feel rude leaving first, and if I make a motion to call a taxi, someone will insist on driving me. That’s the way my relatives and the Lebanese in general tend to behave. Every minor inconvenience you intend to take on yourself, they want to take over for you—even if it’s actually less convenient for you if they do it. They’ll argue with you until they win. So I stay. I finally get home in the early evening, sapped, the day having vanished into that endless lunch. I’m feeling stagnant
and grumpy, and my ears are ringing with the hours of loud family chitchat.

But I try to slam the brakes on.
Stop complaining
, I tell myself.
Your relatives care about you, and they invited you over, cooked for you, regaled you with stories. That’s precious
. A thick web of family, to catch any one of us who falls. I need to strengthen that web for myself. This is part of why I’m here in Beirut. I’m picking up those strands that have frayed over the decades since we left the city. My big family can be overbearing at times, but I love them, and they’re here for me unconditionally. For someone with my chronic social anxieties, that’s nothing to take lightly.

Waking
up with a slight emotional hangover from the long lunch yesterday, still feeling claustrophobic and restless, I feel an urge to bust loose again. The sun is bright this morning, so, wearing a sweater and a scarf—too warm today for extra layers—I decide to wander around the Sanayeh Garden, the only substantial public park left in overbuilt Beirut; unlike the Horsh al-Sanawbar, it has no closed-off sections. I look at a map to decide on my path there, not the straightest course but one that will loop me around past the eastern edge of Bliss Street, and the stone wall demarcating the edge of the AUB campus, then through the quiet residential Clemenceau neighborhood to Sanayeh. I walk past Clemenceau’s posh women’s and kids’ boutiques, and its low pastel-colored apartment houses with wrought-iron balconies, to the cluster of red-roofed, ivy-covered stone buildings and flowering trees of Haigazian, a small private Armenian-founded university. I buy a labneh sandwich from a deli that sells dairy products from the farmlands of Chtaura in the Bekaa Valley. Too many tomatoes and olives in this sandwich; I like mine nearly plain, the
way they serve it at the Bekaa dairies I’ve visited in years past, with a generous smear of labneh sprinkled with just olive oil, dried mint, and salt.