Jasmine and Fire (29 page)

“I feel weird that we walked in on them like that.”

“I’m glad we jolted them a little. I guess I should respect their privacy, but it’s about time they got used to seeing a woman in the doorway.”

On the way to the souk, we pass by a famous pastry shop called Abdel Rahman Hallab and stop in for Arabic coffee and some morning dessert:
osmalliyeh
, a tangle of vermicelli noodles fried until they’re crunchy, and topped with a creamy, soft white cheese and a drizzle of the sugar syrup called ater.

We find a busy weekday hustle-bustle at the souk, when we arrive on foot a few minutes later. We wind through the mazelike alleyways, past vendors selling fresh fish splayed out on ice beds, butcher stands with whole sheep hanging from hooks, rotisseries with rows of roasting chickens, and women shopping for vegetables with their kids in tow, haggling over prices. In one corner of the souk is one of Tripoli’s old
hammams
, public baths. We open the door to peek in the entrance, and a man dispensing towels up front asks in Arabic if we need help. I tell him we’d like to visit an old hammam. He says this one is for men only. “Is there one nearby for women?” I ask.

“No, but you’re welcome to come in if you just want a tour. Hold on.”

He disappears inside and comes back a few minutes later.

“Ok, it’s ready. Come this way.”

We follow him into the main hammam area, room after room of tiled baths and saunas. A few men wearing towels step out of the way and nod as we walk by. I guess he told them to cover up; there’s company coming. We emerge into a salon area, a square-shaped room lined with rug-covered banquettes for lounging. He offers us tea. We politely decline, and I ask if I can buy a few bars of soap from the stacks on shelves against the wall. It turns out
they aren’t for sale, only for use in the baths. But he gives me a price if I want to buy some, fifty cents each, and I take two—at least some contribution, albeit a feeble one, for his time and hospitality.

One end of the souk leads through a series of twisting alleyways into the city’s old soap factory, Khan el Saboun, now mostly a string of shops selling soap and surrounding a big tiled bath, which looks as if it hasn’t been used in a century. We buy some soap made from olive oil and keep walking through the alleys and past more meat and fish and produce vendors. At a bakery on the edge of the souk, we pick up a snack of the sesame bread called
kaak
filled with melted Picon cheese—the blandly creamy processed cheese I grew up with and used to make fun of with my school friends. Somehow the cheese has also become a ubiquitous filling for kaak, but when served warm and slathered on the inside of the ring-shaped loaf, it becomes hypnotically good, its slight saltiness melding with the tastes of sesame and toasted bread.

It’s nearing lunchtime, so we hop a service taxi to the port area to walk along the waterfront and make our way to a seafood spot. So far we’ve encountered only Arabic speakers in Tripoli.

“I know I said you didn’t need to come if you didn’t feel like it,” Claire tells me in the cab, “but I don’t think I could’ve ever found my way around if it was just me.”

“You would’ve figured it out,” I reply. “But it may have taken a few hours longer. I have the worst sense of direction, but at least I can help with the Arabic!”

I’m glad I decided to join Claire on this trip. I’m loving the adventure of exploring a new city and feeling like a tourist in my own country again. We stop for lunch at a restaurant I’d heard about called Silver Shore near the harbor—today it’s filled with
a business-lunch crowd of mostly men in suits—and we order a platter of fresh fried Sultan Ibrahim fish piled high. We voraciously attack the plate and smile at each other, happy and full.

A digestive walk along the waterfront after lunch, and a half hour sunning our faces on the rocks along the beach, and we’re ready to investigate the Oscar Niemeyer pavilion, also known as the Tripoli International Fair. We take a service taxi there and arrive to find what looks like an enormous landscaped park surrounded by a gate. There’s hardly anyone inside. Reminds me of the day Richard and I ambled around with those college kids looking for the Hippodrome in Tyre and found the area deserted.

The guard at the gate asks us where we’re from—the compulsive Lebanese question—and I say, “Beirut and New York.” He waves us in. Ahead are a half dozen futuristic-looking concrete structures of various shapes and sizes, seemingly abandoned and part rusted. There’s a huge St. Louis–like arch, and a hollow dome, and two other structures that look like life-size spaceships. We climb up one of the concrete spaceships on a rickety rusted metal stairway and look down onto the city. Only a couple of other people are in the park today. We spot a skateboarder on one of the Niemeyer-built ramps—all the curvy surfaces in this park must be heaven for daredevil skaters—and a group of three blond tourist-looking types walking around. There’s a woman in a tracksuit taking what appears to be a brisk cardio walk. Other than that, silence—just these wild, surreal-looking buildings.

We walk around, take pictures of each other, then venture into the dome and find an echo chamber inside, and a shallow pool of black-looking water surrounded by a small empty amphitheater. I’m having
Blair Witch Project
flashbacks. I hurry back out. The peaceful green park is a restful break from the noise of the souk,
and we’re too entranced to leave the pavilion right away, so we stroll around for a while and eventually head back to the gate. I ask the guard in front if anyone ever uses this pavilion, and he says yes, they have a book fair coming up next month, and they use the grounds sometimes for car shows and other exhibits. But the main building, an exhibition hall space that reminds me of the Javits Center in Manhattan, seems to have been deserted for years; we see only shattered glass inside when we peek in.

I ask my parents about the pavilion on the phone a few days later. They’ve never been to see it, either. Dad says he hasn’t heard anything about it in years but remembers construction work on it started when he was in engineering school at AUB in the 1960s, and a few of his friends had worked on the project until it was abandoned at the start of the civil war.

Claire and I take a bus back to Beirut that evening, and before we get on, I double-check with the driver that this is an express ride to the city. “Of course,” he answers. But before we pull out of Tripoli, we stop at a coffee shop, and the driver calls out to the passengers—the bus is packed with about three dozen people—to ask if anyone wants coffee. We stay parked outside the café for half an hour while the driver picks up coffee, cup by cup, and hands it to everyone on the bus who put in an order. I’m marveling at this absurd mutation of Lebanese hospitality, but finally we’re off. Not so fast, though: we make about twenty ad hoc stops on the way to Beirut, dropping people off by the side of the road, picking up passengers on the sidewalk. It takes nearly three hours before we’re back in Beirut. Express indeed.

I’d been wondering if Claire would be sick of me by now, her tenth day in Beirut, but the vibe between us is still feeling comfortable and easy. Back in the city, we get together for a drink with
our former
Village Voice
colleague Kaelen, whom I had run in to at the restaurant Tawlet in the fall. We meet up at Ferdinand bar in Hamra and reminisce about our
Voice
days and compare impressions of Beirut. Kaelen has been happy living here over the past decade and writing about the art scene—she seems to have taken to Beirut from the start. Slim and stylish, her dark hair in a chic layered cut, she could pass for a native Beiruti at first glance. How strange for the three of us to be reuniting here, but somehow it seems natural—as if, once again, this Hamra street were a side street in the East Village, the three of us popping into a bar near the office after work.

On our way home so Claire can pack and catch her late-night flight, we stop briefly at a café to smoke argilehs. She’d been wanting to try one, and I like smoking a water pipe, but I don’t do it much these days since apparently the pipes are worse than cigarettes, and I technically quit smoking years ago. The apple-mint tobacco tastes light and sweet, and the air feels like early spring as we sit on the café’s outdoor terrace and watch people walk by on their way to nearby bars and restaurants. A couple of pretty young Asian women pass by, wearing the shapeless pink-pajama uniforms that employers here make their domestic workers wear. Back at home we listen to the Rayess Bek hip-hop CD that Claire had bought at Virgin while she packs, and we reminisce about favorite moments from her trip. We squeezed in a lot in her week and a half here, and it all flew by so fast. I hug her goodbye before I go to sleep; in a couple of hours, in the middle of the night, a taxi I’ve called for her will be picking her up to take her to the airport.

The next day, to distract myself and fight the postvisit loneliness, I drag myself to T-Marbouta café to work on my magazine
essay. I spend the entire day there finishing up the piece and snacking on the spicy Armenian sausages called
soujouk
and on fattoush salad, and drinking glass after glass of frozen mint lemonade. In the afternoon, I click send on my story.
Akhiran
. At last. Done.

The
next week I’m off to the States to do my taxes, visit Richard for a few days, and head to California to meet my soon-to-be-born niece. I arrive in New York in late March, on the night before my birthday. I’ve barely told anyone I’ll be in town, since my trip will be short and I usually don’t like making a big deal about my birthday—but I’m hoping for a mellow dinner with Richard that night, at home or out.

Walking into his apartment as he runs up to hug me is heart-thumping, electric. The time away this year, tough as it’s been for us so far, seems to be confirming that what we have is worth hanging on to, even if the questions—will things really work between us long-term?—are still crackling in my mind. He tells me he’s planned where we’ll have my birthday dinner tomorrow, and winks deviously. I wake up the next morning jet-lagged but looking forward to the day.

When he gets off work, we meet up for drinks at a bar called Brooklyn Social and end up having several rounds of Dark & Stormys. Richard tells me he’s planned a sushi dinner for us—am I game? Yes. I’m desperate for great sushi, which I can’t seem to find in Beirut. Three drinks in at the bar, I realize I haven’t eaten since my early lunch—nine hours ago.

On the walk to the sushi restaurant, I’m a little woozy from the three strong rum cocktails on an empty stomach. But we’re both in an upbeat mood, gossiping about the bickering couple sitting
next to us at the bar. As we stroll, Richard jokingly says maybe we should stay away from any political topics tonight; over dinner or drinks, we’ve tended at times to latch on to some Middle East–related subject or other, and then not let it go for hours. The debate can be fun and thought-provoking sometimes, less so other times, but when it happens, it always takes over the night.

“Okay,” I say, and smile. “I won’t mention the Israeli Apartheid Week conference at AUB last month.”

“What was that?”

I start to explain, but wait—politics. I didn’t actually mean to get into it tonight. I was only half-jokingly bringing up the Middle East right at this moment. Better stop now. But it’s too late.

Over and over again in the past, we’ve agreed to disagree about whether any state should be defined by its ethnic or religious identity. But the mention of the apartheid conference, which I hadn’t even attended, opens up a subject—whether Israel should be considered an apartheid state—that neither of us really feels like arguing about at the moment. I’m stupidly thinking I can just blithely bring up the topic and then quickly drop it and continue with our jolly sushi plan.

He takes a deep breath. I can tell he’s not in the mood for this subject right now. But I hazily forge ahead with it. “The problem is that Israel refuses to see itself as a state that belongs to all of its people. Defining itself as a specifically Jewish state means non-Jewish Arabs, no matter if they were already living in Israel long before it became a state in 1948, don’t get the same rights.”

Richard is shaking his head: “There are ways to fix that problem without giving up the idea of Israel as a homeland for Jews, in a time when they don’t necessarily have anywhere else in the world where they’re guaranteed not to be persecuted. The
Holocaust is a pretty recent memory. Wasn’t Lebanon established initially as a homeland for a Christian minority that felt itself to be in danger?”

“Yes, but take a look at Lebanon. It’s not exactly an example of social justice or religious harmony.”

On our way to the Japanese restaurant, we both make halfhearted stabs at changing the subject, but mostly we keep trying to win points in the debate—which neither of us can seem to stop.

While we walk, I ask Richard to explain the difference between South African apartheid and the reality in Israel, and as I press him on the issue, I hear the cadence of his voice rise. He’s feeling attacked. I’m feeling frustrated that we’re both now in combative mode, each backed into different corners.

We’re taking faster strides on the sidewalk now, our argument heating up, getting louder by the second. We’re each still trying to make headway in the debate, but I wonder if, instead, we’re just sinking into the quicksand that drowns so many Middle East arguments. The so-called debates I see on the Middle East among TV pundits, or in op-ed sections of newspapers, usually get nowhere for the obvious reasons: opposing sides refuse to see past their own familiar positions and to try to reconcile them with the complex realities and struggles of another side. They talk past one another, each in their own bubble.

I’ve always admired Richard’s sense of empathy, his instinctive generosity of spirit, and his sharp rhetorical skills—even in the middle of our nastiest arguments. He and I both like to see ourselves as rational debaters who value humanity and ethical integrity over doomed tribal thinking. But in a part of the world where so many populations feel victimized and are trying to find their safe corners—and where “Arab” and “Jew” are loaded
identities—will it always be so maddeningly hopeless to get past the insular thinking, the paranoia?