Jasmine and Fire (36 page)

One Sunday in mid-June I go on another solo adventure out of town: I head up to Hammana, a village in the mountains less than an hour from Beirut. Every June it’s cherry season in Hammana, and on this day the town is throwing its annual cherry festival. On the way into town, I gaze at Hammana’s bright green hillsides, its mountain and valley vistas and vast cherry orchards. When I arrive in its small downtown souk, I find it lined with stands manned by cherry vendors and local artisans selling terra-cotta cookware, and cooks serving platters of hot homemade dishes. I walk around, taste the Hammana cherries, and load up on a few bags of the juicy sweet-tart bombs. I buy a bowl of z
ingol
, a souplike dish I’ve heard of but never tried before, made of soft, golf-ball-size bulgur balls and chickpeas in a fragrant broth of lemon, olive oil, and garlic. When I go back to compliment the woman selling the zingol, she offers me another bowl gratis. I try to pay her but she refuses. I do love this about the Lebanese—the reflexive hospitality, the generous instinct. Maybe I haven’t been looking in the right places, but I haven’t seen this quite as much anywhere else I’ve lived or traveled.

A while
back Diana had offered to bring me with her sometime to meet the families she’s friends with in the Palestinian camps in Beirut. I’m interested to get a feel for a part of Beirut that seems to exist unto itself, mostly neglected by the rest of the city, not to
mention the world. I’ve also been wondering how the refugees, particularly the second generation who never lived in Palestine but were born and raised in the Lebanese camps, think of home. I’ve been thinking, too, about the word
refugee
—what it means, and how it’s often associated with the destitute and abandoned, but doesn’t it also refer to anyone who’s had to leave home, seek refuge? Even to some of us who, thanks to luck and circumstance, had a softer landing? On a hot June Sunday—absolutely sweltering now, goodbye breezy early-summer days—Diana calls me up to join her, and we go visit her friend Rula, who lives in the Shatila camp with her husband and teenage kids.

Shatila, along with the nearby camp Sabra, was heavily bombed in 1982 under the command of the Lebanese right-wing Christian militias, working in cahoots with then–Israeli army chief Ariel Sharon; both parties had targeted the Palestinians, a mostly Muslim group rendered nationless post-1948, as an inconvenient element in Lebanon. Hundreds of refugees were killed, mowed down in a three-day-long massacre, most of them civilians. Thousands more were injured and maimed. Now, three decades later, the camp is a tightly packed cluster of concrete buildings, a few stories each, with narrow alleyways running between them. Some of the alleys are lined with tiny grocery stores, bread bakeries, the occasional mosque or school. We climb up five flights of stairs to Rula’s apartment and find her sitting over Arabic coffee with her husband and neighbors.

Rula is a short, trim woman with salt-and-pepper hair held in a tight ponytail, and a pleasant laugh that lights up her eyes. Diana spent a few weeks living on the roof of Rula’s building in Shatila last year while filming a documentary, and the two are now close: tall, soft-voiced British Diana, and diminutive, vivacious
Palestinian Rula. Diana and I have brought some pastries with us—zaatar-filled croissants and chocolate petit-four cookies—and we hang out in the living room snacking and chatting with Rula while Diana’s blond one-year-old daughter runs merrily all over the sparsely furnished space. Rula’s neighbor, a middle-aged Palestinian woman wearing a light-cotton dress and a head scarf, is there, too, and offers us cigarettes, and though I normally decline, this time I say yes. A plastic fan is blowing, the conversation flows–Rula’s son is trying to get a visa to the United States to find work—and soon her husband, Ziad, brings in Arabic coffee on a tray for us. I feel welcomed here and comfortable even though I’ve only known these people for a few minutes. We all chat in Arabic, though everyone in the room can speak English, too. Ziad tells some stories—funny, and also poignant—about his frustrating work as a taxi driver in Beirut, the only job he’s able to do since Lebanese laws prevent Palestinians from working in most professions.

Living in a concrete-slab building nearby are some other friends of Diana’s, a couple with three sons and a daughter in their teens and early twenties. We pass by to bring them pastries and stay for a coffee. The couple is sitting with friends and with their teenage son, who is stretched out on his side on a mattress in the living room, nursing an injury. Turns out he was shot by Israeli soldiers during the Nakba Day protests in mid-May and has just come out of the hospital after several weeks.

As I sit here in front of a sweet-looking, dough-faced kid who, in his mind, was joining his friends in the camp to protest what he and Palestinians all over the Middle East continue to mourn as the loss of their country—and who was shot for being in the
wrong place (in Israeli soldiers’ view) at the wrong time—I’m suddenly aware of what someone who either doesn’t understand or doesn’t share this view of the Israel-Palestine struggle might think of this tableau. What if I just presented these bare facts: me in a Palestinian refugee camp, having coffee with a family whose son has just been shot by Israeli soldiers for venturing too close to the border?
So, having coffee with militants, then?
I imagine someone asking. How would this look or sound to someone who hasn’t grown up here, hasn’t been soaked in the realities of this conflict, and has only watched one-dimensional renderings on televisions oceans away? Even some Lebanese people I know would flinch at this kid’s decision to protest, wondering,
Aren’t we done with this struggle already? Why should we keep on carrying the Palestinians’ burden along with our own?
Or, as I overheard an acquaintance at a party asking the night before crowds streamed to the Israeli border for Nakba Day, “Isn’t it time to move on?”

But when Palestinians have so much difficulty getting visas so they can look for work opportunities overseas; when they can rarely find work in Lebanon, which still denies them their basic rights and outlaws their employment; and when, as Israel and the United States and various parties to the always-stalled peace talks tell them again and again, they cannot hope to return to Palestine in their lifetimes, how exactly can they—and the whole region—move on?

Walking me out of the camp to find a taxi back to Hamra, Walid, the twenty-four-year-old brother of the boy who was shot, gives me a brief tour of Shatila: the mosque his family goes to over here, his old high school over there (he’s now enrolled in a master’s program at a university in Lebanon), and the burial ground of the
Shatila massacre victims over there. I ask him whether, growing up in Lebanon and having never been to Palestine, he was raised to think of Lebanon as home.

Walid, stocky with curly brown hair, his smiling cheeks still showing signs of baby fat, comes off as a vibrant young man, eager to start his life. He tells me he and his siblings and friends in the camp grew up thinking of Lebanon as temporary, and thinking of Palestine as their real home. But it’s strange to think of your home as a place you’ve never actually been, Walid adds after pausing for a minute. He tells me he was afraid to go down to the border to protest on Nakba Day because he suspected things might turn violent, and he wondered if he’d get too emotional catching a glimpse of the place he’s been hearing about all his life and never seen. He’d tried to convince his brother it would be dangerous to go to the protest.

Walid seems undaunted by what’s ahead for him in life, and I don’t sense that he’s downcast or embittered. Not yet anyway. He tells me he’s one of only three Muslim students in his graduate program. At school he’s become friends with some students who grew up in families loyal to the Phalange, the Christian right-wing militia that participated in the 1982 massacres of Palestinians in the Shatila and Sabra camps. He also befriended Jewish students he met on a recent trip to the United States, sponsored by a nonprofit that’s trying to expose Palestinians to life outside the camps, and expose Americans to young Palestinians and their hopes for the future. Walid tells me: You don’t have to agree completely about politics to be friends with someone. I tell him I, too, have friends from lots of different backgrounds, and we don’t always agree politically. Walid nods: If there’s friendship, he says, then pauses, trailing off.

JULY

It’s getting
too hot to walk much—the city is a bona-fide sauna now in early July—but I’m venturing out on foot as often as I can, and for as long as I can stand. I’m still mulling over whether I’m ready to leave Beirut, and walking, as always, helps me sort out the clamor in my head. On these walks, I’m also memorizing the city again, as many parts as I can, the way I did in those weeks when I first arrived and was trying to reconnect with the streets, carve out my paths through them. All these months later, as I contemplate leaving, walking around feels like a way to seal the city in, once and for all, to fuse the streets to my body.

On these sweltering July days, I stop often at Bliss House, a college-kids hangout at the edge of the AUB
campus, to pick up one of their fruit cocktails, which aren’t really cocktails (no alcohol) but instead some of the most thrilling fruit concoctions I’ve had. My favorite is the fresh-squeezed strawberry juice topped with a mountain of chopped pineapple, mango, kiwi, apple, banana, strawberries, grapes, almonds, and a dollop of sweet ashta cream. One of these fruit bombs in hand one morning, I stroll downtown to the Beirut Souks, the recently rebuilt downtown shopping area. The first few times I came here last summer and fall, I felt alienated from this spanking-new downtown, felt it was much too artificial and scrubbed and soulless. Now, on this sweatbath of a summer day, when I need some light-cotton tank tops and a couple of skirts and a new bathing suit, I figure I might be able to find what I’m looking for at one of the few discount shops in the Souks or, if I’m lucky, at a sale in one of the pricier designer stores.

Fans are blowing soft breezes through the Souk’s tunnel ways, and window-shopping here feels not too unpleasant today, similar to what walking around Houston’s malls felt like when we first moved there. Sterile and lacking any street life, sure, but conveniently laid out, the air-conditioning a lifeline on days this brutally hot. Beirut has plenty of street life everywhere else—too much, some might say. So an easy-to-navigate, architecturally stunning shopping center isn’t too bad an option, is it? It depends on the weather, and on your mood, I suppose. And it depends on your willingness to overlook this area’s past as a livelier, noisier, smellier, more diverse city center. With any luck, downtown will recover that dynamism again someday.

The other night I had a dream that I was trying to explain Beirut to a group of American friends who had all come to visit me at the same time, knowing I might be leaving soon and wanting to
see this place while they had a handy guide. I heard myself spout the usual clichéd contrasts of the glossiness and the grime, and the east and the west, and so on. But in my dream I took them not just to the major sites but also to Dahieh, and to Dora, a part of Beirut where many of the city’s Asian and African immigrant workers live and where some of them have opened food and spice shops, textile stores, and home-style restaurants. These businesses crowd along the dusty streets that spoke out from the enormous central Dora intersection, from which buses leave Beirut for points north and south. If you live in New York, Dora is Flushing, or Sunset Park, or Jackson Heights. A bustling ethnic enclave, and maybe you’ve seen something like it before. In Beirut, it’s one of the necessary reality checks to a snazzy district like the new Souks, and a chance to dig deeper into a city that sometimes seems to worship only the tidiest, shiniest surfaces.

Shireen and I decide one July day to get to know Dora better, not just pass through it quickly en route to somewhere else, as I’ve only ever done before. We spend an afternoon strolling around and poking into the cluttered shops. I buy a spicy cashew curry sauce, to stir into rice and chicken I’ll make some night; she buys a beautiful purple Sri Lankan fabric to sew into a handbag. As we’re eyeing the samosas stacked up on a tray at the front of an Indian food and spice shop, the owner tells us his family runs a restaurant upstairs. We find the tiny stairway hidden in back and climb up, to find a few Indian men sitting around platters of what looks like
biryani
. That’s today’s lunch dish, we learn. The place doesn’t look gleaming-clean at first glance, but two efficient women are working side by side in the kitchen—spotless when we take a closer look—and the customers are chatting with the cooks. Everyone here must be a regular. Soon we’re served heaping plates of the
warm rice, spiced with turmeric and cardamom and topped with pieces of roasted chicken on the bone, with a boiled egg and a cold yogurt-cucumber sauce on the side. I haven’t had biryani this good in years. We linger over our plates—too much food, but we devour every last rice grain—and I marvel once again at the variety of people and communities this city manages to squeeze in. Incredibly, as relatively small as Beirut is, it never seems to run out of neighborhoods, alleyways, realities. Anyone eager to poke around will always find new places to stumble into.