Jasmine and Fire (21 page)

But the truth is, I still don’t know where I’ll wind up after my year in Beirut ends, or if Richard would even want to move there if we stay together. And I still don’t know if I want to have kids. My feelings for Richard do make me consider things I didn’t think I wanted—plus I’m thirty-eight, so if I eventually want children, there aren’t exactly years and years left to ponder the question. But we can’t seem to even bring up the issue of where our relationship is headed, if anywhere, let alone talk about anything more momentous. I’m afraid to scare him with big questions now, especially since I haven’t figured things out for myself yet. Staying close with Richard while I’m in Beirut has been feeling right to me so far, but I still can’t see the endgame from here. So what do I accomplish, and what do I lose, by pressuring him to answer questions about our future and ambushing him with a clock that’s supposedly ticking?

As of now, I’m feeling attached to my life in Beirut, and back in the rhythm of the city, and it’s hard now to think of leaving it all behind, harder than I thought it would be in those rough early weeks. Even so, there’s no obvious answer to the home question yet. Will I end up deciding Beirut is home and wanting to stay there? Will I try to convince Richard to move there if I do? Or
will I by chance meet someone else in Lebanon? Tough to imagine right now, but who knows what will happen to our relationship as we try to navigate the coming months?

Still, despite a rocky start, I—and we—have made it through my nearly half-year in Lebanon. Will we survive the months ahead? Will Lebanon?

JANUARY

The
international media can’t get enough of Lebanon. Journalists covering the country, foreigners most of the time, usually write about it in one of two ways:

“Tanks are rolling through Beirut’s streets! Again! Bloodshed and destruction everywhere! Stay tuned as we describe just what the F is wrong with Lebanon
this
time.”

Let’s call that Category A.

Or:

“Ah, this glittering seaside city, this jewel of the Mediterranean, this Paris of the Middle East. After decades of war and conflict, Beirut is back: thumping nightlife, beautiful women, stylish nightclubs overlooking bombed-out ruins. The Lebanese sure know how to party!”

We’ll call that Category B.

If you guessed I might be responsible for some of those articles, you would be right. But just one or two. Small ones. Category B. The paltriness of my oeuvre wasn’t from lack of trying. For years I pitched travel editors every story angle I could think of about Beirut: its dynamic food scene and nightlife, its insider hangouts, avant-garde style, and ancient heritage. And I pitched stories about Lebanese villages with fascinating histories and unusual foods or wines. But I was shot down at nearly every turn. Editors seemed happy to send me to Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean, to destinations dreamy or daring. But not to Lebanon. Those assignments, for some reason, mostly seemed to go to expats or travelers discovering the country for the first time.

So over the years I’ve resigned myself to reading article after article, in magazine after magazine, newspaper after newspaper, about Beirut as that delightfully paradoxical contrast of ruins and glossy modernity, feeling annoyed because it’s such a goddamned predictable angle, and no one has anything newer or more insightful to say. But mostly feeling jealous because I can’t get a Lebanon assignment to save my life.

I’ve been contenting myself with writing about my Beirut adventures on my blog—not quite the same thing, but at least I get to write exactly what I want, and how I want, and take up as much space as I want. I’ve also been idly wondering how many more times in the future of mankind journalists will find a way to recycle the “Beirut emerges from conflict to party again!” story.

In mid-January, I get my answer: at least one more time.

On January 12, soon after I return to Beirut from the States, the Lebanese government collapses. I realize a government collapse
sounds like a crisis, a potentially terrifying emergency situation, but here in Lebanon it’s just another eye-rolling day in the country’s chronically dysfunctional political life. It’s certainly not the first time the Lebanese government has collapsed, although to be fair I should point out that it’s the first time in the entire past two calendar years. What’s happened this time: Hezbollah has pulled all its parliament members from the government and cajoled some members of other parties into dropping out, too, in protest over Lebanese-government funding of the UN tribunal. Hezbollah is calling the tribunal corrupt and is still threatening to cause bigger trouble if some of its members are named in the Hariri killing. The “Lebanon Collapses!” news hits the headlines worldwide. E-mails and calls pour in from my concerned friends in the States and elsewhere: “Are you okay? What’s happening there?!”

In truth, when I first hear the news, I do wonder for a moment whether this time the collapse is serious, and whether the appropriate response is “oh shit” or the usual yawn. I am, for the time being, leaning more to the “oh shit.” I’ve been living in Lebanon for just a handful of months, and in the years since we moved away during the war, I’d been keeping up with the country’s constant ups and downs mostly from a distance. I want to play the coolly jaded Lebanese local, but to be honest, I’m not quite there yet.

In the summer of 2005, when I was in Beirut on a brief vacation and stopped in to visit the Lebanese National Museum and see the ancient Roman ruins there, I’d heard a thunderous boom outside. I called my dad on his cell phone.

“Don’t worry,” he’d said, in typically Zen mode. “It’s probably just a building being dynamited at a construction site.”

After leaving the museum, I’d learned on the news that the big boom was a car bomb, a successful assassination attempt on a
former Lebanese Communist Party leader and anti-Syria critic. For the rest of 2005, back in New York, I’d followed the news from Lebanon, and there was a string of similar assassinations of politicians and journalists.

One year after that assassination epidemic, I had watched the 2006 summer war between Hezbollah and Israel in nauseated silence in my New York apartment, strung out on anxiety and unable to sleep or concentrate on work. CNN was covering the war in the predictable way, meaning mostly from Israel’s point of view, paying more attention to the tragic but smaller-in-number deaths of Israelis than to the hundreds of Lebanese civilians killed by Israel’s stunningly disproportionate response to Hezbollah’s reckless kidnapping or killing of five Israeli soldiers. I watched bombs fall on my city every day, all over again, that July and August, and could barely believe it was happening. But I’d been far away from the bombings and the wreckage and the death—safe in New York, or safer than in Lebanon at any rate.

Now here I am in Beirut, hearing “government collapse” news not from an ocean away. For this particular round of political chaos in Lebanon, I’m right here. And wondering, how afraid should I be?

A few calls to friends and family in Beirut confirm my other suspicion, the one that got trampled by my anxiety reflex:
Nah. Nothing to worry about. Not yet anyway. Come on, this is Lebanon. We’re used to these breakdowns
.

“What? This? It’s SSDD,” says Zeina.

Leave it to a Lebanese to turn a jaded phrase—“same shit, different day”—into a handy acronym, ready to deploy at all the countless opportunities that spring up here.

But scary or not, this political crisis is definitely real in at least
one way: it’s another shiny new gift to an international media that can never resist a good “oh my god, Lebanon!” story. Here we have one once again. Catastrophe! Collapse! Lebanon in Danger!

So once we’re finished with this latest news cycle, I wonder how long it will be until the inevitable “Beirut Is Back!” travel stories start streaming in.

Well, I hope I at least get to write one of them.

About
a week later in January, once the international “Lebanon Collapses!” news cycle dies down—it lasted a good twenty-four hours before making way for news about the huge East Coast blizzard that same week—I get a call from an editor in the States asking if I’d like to do a big Middle East travel story. Sweet! At last! But … it’s not about Lebanon. It’ll be about Egypt. Can I get myself to Egypt as soon as possible and do a travel story for the next issue? Hmm. Yes. Yes, I can.

I go online and book a flight for the last week in January.

In the days before I leave for Cairo, the situation in Lebanon is tense, several orders of magnitude tenser than it felt when the government had its somewhat ho-hum meltdown two weeks ago. Things are taking a nastier turn. Hezbollah ratchets up its threats that it will raise hell if the UN tribunal goes forward with its predicted indictments, and a few scary, ominous street incidents break out in Beirut. One morning groups of men wearing all black are seen hovering on street corners all over the city. The men just stand there silently, and though nothing else happens that day, their presence causes panic, and schools send kids home for the day. Some businesses close, too. The incident is rumored to be Hezbollah’s doing—as if to say,
Remember, we have our own militia, and we’re fully capable of making things unpleasant around here
.
And we’re not so ecstatic about the way things are going with the tribunal at the moment
.

Meanwhile, Richard has bought his plane ticket to come visit me in Beirut in early February, so I’m particularly anxious about the developments in Lebanon, even more than usual. Will Lebanon become too dangerous to visit, yet again? Damn this place. Impossible to ever make long-term plans here. I talk to Zeina on the phone. She’s depressed. Gone is the joking “SSDD” Zeina of a week ago. She tells me she hopes her daughter will leave Lebanon when it’s time for college and never look back.

“There’s no future here,” she says to me in Arabic, her voice sounding far away this time, wilted.

She and her husband, along with most people in Lebanon, have to worry about crucial, high-stakes issues like whether to go on trying to raise kids or pursue a career here, whether to keep planning a future in this country. At the moment, my main concern is whether my boyfriend can vacation with me and prance around Lebanon for two weeks. That’s a tiny bit less dire. Nonetheless this country has a way of squashing plans and dreams, big or small. And always when things are starting to look up again.

The night before I fly to Egypt, I hang out with my childhood friend Sawsan. She’s living in California, doing a postdoctorate there, but is in Beirut this week visiting her parents. We go for drinks at the Hamra bar Ferdinand, and to an alleyway nearby that’s crammed full of bars and usually a noisy, social crowd. But tonight all the hangouts we go to are barely half full. That’s usually a bad sign around here. It takes a pretty nasty vibe to keep Beirutis out of restaurants, bars, and clubs. Everywhere we go, people are talking about
al wad’
, the situation.

At least Egypt will be a badly needed mental vacation, an
escape from this insane asylum, I figure. The trip will be hard work—fun, too, sure, but hard work no doubt. I have to make my way around Egypt and do all the reporting for this story in just five days, but at least I’ll get my mind off Lebanon.

Off I fly to Cairo, on the sunny, mild morning of January 24, 2011.

I’d heard two days before my trip that antigovernment demonstrations were being planned in Cairo for that coming Tuesday, January 25. I rejiggered my itinerary so I’d leave Cairo for Alexandria on that Tuesday morning instead of spending the day in the capital, just in case there was any serious mayhem and violence stemming from the demonstrations. I’m slightly apprehensive but not too worried about the protests. I tell myself, with a sense of relief that I’ll later be mortified to own up to, that Egypt has a tenacious dictatorship that will probably suppress any unrest before it spreads. Slim chance that the situation in Egypt could deteriorate so quickly—not like Lebanon always seems to. The Middle East–related anxieties I’m feeling that week are firmly fixated on Lebanon.