Jasmine and Fire (25 page)

One night later that week we go out to a few Hamra bars with my cousin Shireen and some of her friends. Richard instantly gets along with the whole crew, but when he starts getting sullen later in the night—the music at the last bar we hit is too cheesy, he whispers to me, a sort of Euro club mix, and the beer he ordered is flat—we leave. I’m annoyed at the negativity and start to panic that things are taking a bad turn and he’s already sick of Beirut; then I remember, we’ve had moments like this in New York. Cheesy club music makes me cringe but doesn’t make me want to
bolt out the door as quickly as it always does him. Plus, I decide to give him the ever-useful jet lag exemption.

On Richard’s birthday, we’re invited to dinner at Karim and Hala’s. My cousin and his wife don’t know it’s his birthday, of course, but we decide to accept the invitation. I want Richard to get to know more of my cousins, since I consider them among my closest friends in Beirut and since it’s less pressure, for now, than meeting a throng of older relatives. Besides Shireen, so far he’s also met Josette, when she joined us for coffee one afternoon, and also my cousin Kamal and his wife, Nour, when they had us over for dinner earlier in the week. Those rendezvous all went beautifully, Richard appreciating everyone’s fluent English and cracking jokes, lightening the mood—his specialty.

We walk into Karim and Hala’s living room, and they greet us, Hala chic as always in slim beige pants and a cowl-neck and stylishly cropped dark hair, and Karim the young professor in jeans and a sport jacket. Nearly every inch of their walls is hung with art and lined with bookshelves. We meet the small group of guests, most of them Middle East–focused academics like my cousin. The predinner conversation in the living room ranges from the latest news about the various Arab revolutions to some disastrous recent decisions by Israeli president Netanyahu, whom I know Richard can’t stand either. But he decides, perhaps wisely for now, not to chime in.

At the dinner table, Shafiq, the guy sitting across from Richard, steers the conversation to whether the new Lebanese prime minister, Miqati, will ever be able to bring Hezbollah and the opposing March 14 Party together to form a cabinet. I can tell Richard is already annoyed with Shafiq: a thirty-something academic
play-acting the wise old intellectual as he sighs and rolls his fingers around a string of worry beads. On top of that, Shafiq keeps diverting the conversation at the table into Arabic, when at least three people, the spouses of Karim and Hala’s AUB friends, don’t speak Arabic. I do get irritated when Lebanese insist on carrying on in French or English when everyone in the room speaks Arabic, but in mixed groups like this, with non-Arabic speakers, why not speak a language we all understand? Everyone is speaking English tonight except Worry-Bead Guy.

But Richard is less focused on the subtle linguistic swordplay than he is on the food. When we accepted the dinner invitation, I’d mentioned to Hala that he doesn’t eat meat—but I’d also told her to please not do anything special. Richard can easily make a meal out of salad and bread and often likes to. Still, she’d gone out of her way, Lebanese-style, and put a lovely plate of roasted vegetables on the table alongside the roast beef, and served a sweet and spicy pumpkin soup, and several salads including a striking one made with red and yellow beets and goat cheese. Richard is clearly touched by the vegetarian-friendly feast and leans over to thank Hala as she sets out a dessert platter of
atayef
, small, blini-like pancakes I love filled with sugared walnuts. The chitchat around the table is animated, guests chiming in with witticisms about the eternal horror show of Middle East politics, in Lebanon and beyond. Eventually Shafiq decides to strike up a conversation with Richard, since they’re sitting directly across from each other but haven’t exchanged a word yet.

“Where are you visiting from?”

“New York.”

“Do you have a connection to the Middle East?”

Hmm
, I wonder, as I overhear them talk.
What does this
question mean?
Richard could easily pass for Jewish or Arab or lots of other ethnicities. Is Shafiq’s question innocent, or is it a veiled interrogation?

“I went to Egypt once, about ten years ago,” Richard answers, keeping things simple.

Pause.

“Also Israel.”

Silence now between them. Neither Richard nor Shafiq hits that tennis ball again. Worry-Bead Guy pours himself another glass of wine and turns to the woman on his left to start up a new conversation. Richard looks at me, wondering if he played this right. I telegraph
yes
with my eyes. I mean, it’s the truth after all. It could have sparked an interesting conversation, one that could’ve been conducted on mutually friendly and curious terms. But Shafiq didn’t bite. Still, the dinner was fun and went smoothly all in all: no tussle at the table between the two of them, and no awkwardness that couldn’t be drowned out with a few extra swigs of wine.

We decide
that weekend to take an overnight trip out of the city and spend some time exploring a place neither of us knows. Reading up on local history, stumbling into intriguing sites, hidden side streets, strange bars, doing whatever comes up. We’re good at this in New York. Let’s do it in Lebanon. I ask around about cheap charming hotels outside the city, and based on an enthusiastic tip from Diana, we decide to go to Tyre and stay at a little inn called Al-Fanar. The inn is in Hayy al Masihiyye, the old Christian quarter, near the ancient port and the old souk. Tyre also has some of Lebanon’s most famous ruins, and I haven’t been here since I was a child.

We spend our first day walking around the old souk, eating
fresh fish on the harbor, where fishermen have slung their lines since the eighth century
B.C.
We drink frosty Almaza beers at a deserted but appealing little bar with ancient-looking arched stone ceilings. Our room at the inn, in a yellow two-story house, is perched right on the sea near the lighthouse and seems to jut directly over the water. As we crawl into bed that night, we look out the window. It’s like we’re actually in the middle of the Mediterranean. We sleep for ten hours straight.

We try to follow a map the next morning to the ancient Roman Hippodrome, one of the biggest chariot-racetrack remains in the world, but the rudimentary map we’re holding leaves all the side streets out, and we get lost on the way. Two teenage boys, walking home from their college campus nearby, see us fumbling through the map, and one of them asks in Arabic if we need help. They end up walking with us for half an hour, to the perimeter of the Hippodrome, which turns out to be sealed off by a locked gate. All four of us start circling the huge area together, trying to find the entrance. I tell the two guys that we’ll be fine, thanks so much for the directions. But they stay with us until one of them eventually spots an entrance, and they walk us over to it, then wave goodbye and dash off. Ah, the Lebanese. Rising to the occasion like champions, and going well beyond. So friendly and hospitable and helpful to strangers, more than I’ve seen anywhere else. Incredible that this same country specializes in bloodbaths, too.

The Hippodrome is deserted. We spot only an elderly man—must be a Greek Orthodox priest, with his long black robe, full graying beard, and huge silver cross on a chain—walking with a hunched-over old woman. In the distance we spot a young couple holding hands, teenagers probably looking for a place to make
out. We nod hello at the woman guarding the front entrance, and she waves us in.

Inside the gate is an astounding sight: a huge oval-shaped lawn, where chariots raced in the days of the Roman Empire, is surrounded by a few stone bleachers, half-crumbled but still in decent shape considering they date back to between
A.D.
200 and 600. A few meters away is the Necropolis, a burial site with marble and stone sarcophagi from the Roman and Byzantine eras. We walk through the enormous grassy field, then climb up to the top of a bleacher and zone out in the sun, looking out across the Hippodrome and the Necropolis, toward the edge of the city in the distance.

Later that day in the newer, more commercial part of town, we pass a few dozen store windows decorated with neon-pink stuffed teddy bears. Valentine’s Day is in a couple of days. The Lebanese, at least the shop owners and restaurateurs, heartily embrace this holiday, and if Valentine’s is not quite as inescapable here as in the States, the pink neon is still out in full force in Lebanon.

No idea what we’re going to do for Valentine’s Day—we haven’t discussed it yet. For our second and last night in Tyre, we crawl into our bed in the middle of the sea and giggle like schoolkids at how unbelievable it is that we’re here together, in ancient Tyre, a city that Alexander the Great tried to conquer more than two thousand years ago.

We’re back in Beirut on February 11, the day Mubarak finally gives up in Egypt. Now the Shiites of Bahrain, who make up a majority of the country’s population but have no representation in the dictatorial Sunni regime, are agitating for a revolution and getting brutally beaten and shot at. As with most Middle East news,
it’s rare when something good happens—say, Mubarak is gone!
Akhiran!
Finally!—without something nasty following on its heels: in this case, the violent suppression of the protesters in Bahrain, the Persian Gulf island nation off the coast of Saudi Arabia.

Meanwhile in Lebanon, there hasn’t been much progress in forming a cabinet, but the political scene still feels relatively calm and uneventful now in mid-February. Still, Richard and I decide to lie low for at least the first half of the day on Valentine’s Day, the Hariri assassination anniversary. I’ve heard rumors that protests might break out to commemorate his death and rail against the current government stalemate.

“Stay home. Don’t go anywhere,” Josette tells me on the phone.

“We won’t. I promise.”

In Lebanon, sometimes it’s easier to just tell your anxious family what they want to hear. Then you just go about your business.

The protests, as it turns out, are a no-show, but a few high-profile parliament members from the March 14 Party announce they’re going to give commemorative speeches that night. We concoct a last-minute Valentine’s plan: after sleeping in late, we take a stroll from Hamra down to the Corniche, then over to Achrafieh, to wander around the winding streets and browse through bookstores, record shops, and whatever else we find. For dinner we go to Abdel Wahab, the restaurant where I’d taken the editor and TV writer from the States back in October, and I order a few of my favorite meatless dishes for us: eggplant fatteh, the sautéed dandelion greens called hindbeh, fattoush salad, and eggs fried in olive oil and sprinkled with sumac, a breakfast dish usually, but I love it at night, too. The food is mostly excellent, but the service tonight is a disaster, the waiters disorganized and apparently zonked out from the Valentine’s rush.

But one waiter unwittingly earns his tip: he tries to speak Arabic to Richard, thinking him a local. In fact, a bunch of people around Beirut have attempted that, too, from the man who runs the grocery shop on the ground floor of my building, to Ali the concierge. Even in New York, no one can ever guess Richard’s ethnicity: Indian, Iranian, Arab, Jewish, Native American, Spanish, Greek, Italian? He’s heard it all.

I can tell he’s flattered to be addressed in Arabic here, even if I haven’t been particularly diligent in my attempts to teach him a few phrases so he can reply. I ask him over dinner if being mistaken for a local puts him at ease.

“It does actually,” he says, as we spoon the eggplant fatteh onto our plates. “But everyone has been really friendly so far. I haven’t sensed any anti-Semitism here. A big anti-Israel vibe, yes, but I get it. If I were Lebanese or Palestinian, I’d hate Israel, too. It’s true, though, what they say about Lebanese hospitality, seriously.”

After dinner we go see
The Fighter
, subtitled in French and Arabic. The crowd in the theater is rowdy, but tonight, amazingly, no one talks over the actors’ voices or answers a cell phone during the movie, as often happens here. In fact, all the action-cheering noise from the audience makes the movie even more fun, as if we’re watching it in a live theater. All through the balls-out brutal Hollywood boxing extravaganza, Richard pokes me with his elbow, smiles, grabs my hand. We survived Valentine’s Day, our way: a deeply un-Valentine’s movie, and a hearty, if spastic, last-minute dinner of some meatless greatest hits.

Before Richard got here, I’d been wondering if I’d be able to feed him well in Lebanon if we skipped the meat. Yes, Lebanon’s cuisine is famously loaded with vegetables and legumes and many
ways of getting your protein deliciously and without meat. It’s tougher, in my mind, if you don’t eat seafood either, but thankfully Richard loves fish. For lunch on his birthday, I’d taken him to Feluka, a restaurant on the Corniche with a sunny terrace overlooking the sea, and we’d ordered a platter of Sultan Ibrahim, a local fish similar to rouget. Deep fried and sprinkled with sea salt and lemon, it’s hot, crispy, and tangy, especially fantastic with cold beer. That day Richard had declared Sultan Ibrahim his new favorite fish. One night at the apartment, I’d also taught him how to make
mujaddara
, a comfort food classic of lentils, rice, and fried onions. We’d boiled lentils, fried thinly sliced onions in a pan, and stirred them in with uncooked rice, seasoning the mix with cumin, allspice, salt, and pepper and simmering until the rice was cooked through. The mujaddara was a homerun, too.

“Let’s make this in New York next time you visit,” Richard had said as we ate the dish with warmed-up pita bread.

“I’ll smuggle in some lentils from Beirut just for fun, although we’ll find the same ones in Brooklyn, too.”

On his second-to-last day, we head to the city of Byblos. It’s gray and drizzling in the morning, but the sun is blazing by the time we arrive in the port town, forty-five minutes from Beirut. Richard is drawn to ancient crumbling ports, I’m finding, and happily this country comes through. No question, we specialize in ruins here in Lebanon—but many of them date back thousands of years. Byblos is considered one of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited cities, spanning more than seven thousand years, and the remains here are from ancient Rome up through the Crusader era and beyond. The Lebanese call the city Jbeil, after its biblical name Gebal. It’s like a theme park of ruins, a panorama of remains from Roman and Crusader stone castles and amphitheaters and
tombs, all perched steps away from the Mediterranean and excavated starting only in the early 1920s. In the distance, the Beirut skyline wraps around the bay.