Jasmine and Fire (6 page)

But one morning I wake up to a sunny August day, light spraying orange through my rust-striped curtains, and I’m instantly washed in nostalgia. It’s pretty here this morning, peaceful and calm. It hits me how sweet it feels, bittersweet but serene, to be in Beirut right now. Maybe I did make the right decision coming back to live here.

Suddenly a wave of guilt—debris from a dream? long-repressed survivor’s guilt?—busts through. Do I deserve to feel
serene now, today, about waking up to a bright summer morning in Beirut? I skipped over most of the horrific 1980s in Lebanon, was ensconced safely in Houston—unhappy and awkward and culturally alienated, but safe from civil war as I romped around with Samir and the schoolkids in our neighborhood and fudged my way through perplexing new kickball and softball games. “Demented and sad, but social,” to quote Judd Nelson’s line from
The Breakfast Club
. Or maybe my slogan would’ve been “Hopelessly confused and foreign, but lucky to be thousands of miles from rabid armed militias.”

It’s a little too easy to ride out most of the war in America, then come back to Lebanon now and say, “Ah, I remember the old neighborhood. How utterly charming.” Was six years of war too short, too easy? Should I have lived through hell for another nine years, like so many others in Lebanon, stuck here by circumstance or necessity or a perfectly reasonable fear of the unknown?

Is it fair that I’m coming back only now? I realize some of these questions are spurious. I wasn’t the one who decided we should leave during the war. But Beirut is much easier to live in now, and my old neighborhood is not so hard to acclimate to, especially after a decade and a half in New York City: cool new bars and hipster cafés and boutiques and fragrant old bakeries just steps from my apartment here in Hamra. Of course, my new life hasn’t exactly been easy so far. I’m struggling to adjust emotionally. Still, my physical surroundings feel oddly familiar. They’re not just relics of my past; they also make for a fairly smooth transition from my New York life.

The cities remind me of each other in more ways, too. In New York, neighborhoods are constantly changing, forgotten one
decade, trendy the next. That’s true of Nolita, where my apartment is, and also of Hamra, the legendary, formerly hip, later war-ravaged, and now hip again albeit still rundown neighborhood in west Beirut. But from what I’ve seen, no city goes through cycles of rejuvenation and decay quite like Beirut. Even long after the war ended, Lebanon still lives through periods of conflict and renewal. Some Lebanese try to find patterns, or at least humor, in this grim routine. I’ve heard my relatives and friends quip that every time Beirut manages a few straight years of peace, and becomes chic again with the international jet set, and inevitably gets named one of the hottest destinations in the world by some glossy American travel magazine, that means only one thing: a horrific season of bombings, mayhem, and political catastrophe is surely on the way. The Beirut-based British journalist Robert Fisk once wrote about this place: “Some cities seem forever doomed.”

Forever doomed, or forever rising phoenixlike: however you look at it, Beirut is not the same city now that it was three decades ago, or even five years ago. How could it be, after a fifteen-year civil war, multiple episodes of strife, and the beginning of a new century in an ever-changing, techno-mad global culture? But it is somehow, also, the same city. Any city worth a damn goes through changes but stays fundamentally itself, deep in its soul. If cities have souls.

To get past the bad dreams, the rough mornings, and the ruminations as I try to readjust to life here, I know what I need to find—besides mental peace: a cup of good strong coffee. I’m something of a caffeine addict, and one of the first things I did when I moved to New York was to figure out where in my neighborhood I could get decent coffee. I’d been spoiled by the excellent brew in Berkeley when I was in college, and I was surprised that in
New York it wasn’t so easy to find at the time, although that’s improved lately. Some mornings I like to make coffee at home, while other days I’m eager to get out the door first thing. On those days, I pick up coffee to go and cling to the warm cup like a security blanket, nursing it for as long as I can as I slide into the day.

So far in Beirut, my caffeine routine is still shaky. Sometimes at home I brew Arabic coffee—stirring spoonfuls of the ground dark-roast beans into a small iron kettle filled with boiling water and watching over the liquid as it boils again. Arabic coffee is meant for drinking in tiny porcelain cups though, black or slightly sweetened, and I prefer to have a shot or two as a postmeal digestive. In the mornings, I like my coffee milkier and in a bigger cup. But despite the recent influx of American-style takeout coffee spots in Beirut, I’m having a hard time finding a place that serves decent drip coffee or espresso drinks to go.

A few blocks from my apartment is a place called Café Younes, the flagship coffee shop of an old Beirut brand of coffee beans, and I adore it for its smells and its Beirutness and its history. On visits here in past summers, I’ve stopped in just to inhale the roasty smell. I love walking through the narrow Hamra streets to Younes, gazing at the antique coffee-making equipment inside, lounging at the outdoor tile tables under the big shade trees, smelling the aromas wafting out the door, and drinking small cups of Arabic coffee in the afternoon. In the past couple of weeks, I’ve experimented with their coffee-bean varieties and picked out a few that brew up beautifully in the French press at home. But I’ve found Younes’s takeout coffee unfortunately mediocre, lukewarm, and flat-tasting on the days I’ve tried it.

So my search for good to-go coffee continues. Morning after morning I walk through the busy streets around my apartment.
The main Hamra Street drag was once the site of boisterous cafés that attracted intellectuals and artists from all over Beirut, Cairo, Alexandria, Baghdad, and Istanbul in the 1950s and 1960s, and was a beating heart of the era’s artistic and literary and political movements. Since that street and the surrounding neighborhood near the apartment took a heavy drubbing during the civil war, many buildings are now dilapidated, the bombing damage still visible, or else they’ve been torn down to make way for condo towers and shiny retail chain stores. Now international coffee chains line the main street—Starbucks, Costa, Caribou—occupying the spaces where legendary Beirut cafés like Horseshoe and Modca used to sit. Funny enough, I’ve noticed that the new chains attract groups of elderly men who sit around all day, nursing cup after cup of Arabic coffee and debating politics, just as locals used to do in the old days. It’s as if these lifelong Hamra habitués are willfully ignoring the sterile furniture and décor of the new chain cafés and thinking:
As long as there’s a coffee shop on the corner where we can gather and drink coffee and talk all day, then good enough
.

On my coffee search, I’ve ducked into the Starbucks on Hamra Street now and then; unsurprisingly, a latte here tastes exactly like it does in SoHo or on the Upper West Side. But it feels a little shameful to get into the Starbucks habit in Beirut. I’m not crazy about the coffee at the British chain Costa, which tastes dull or burnt to me most days, but the coffee at Caribou I find I like quite a bit: it’s strong, with the fresh-roasted smell I crave. The Minnesota-based chain, its Hamra branch furnished with leather club chairs and a faux fireplace, is a more recent arrival in the neighborhood, and it’s just a three-minute walk from my apartment, so I’ve been succumbing. I feel weird buying American chain-store coffee in a city with such a historic coffee shop culture,
but so it goes. As I feel my way toward a coffee routine—Younes some days, Caribou other days, and brewing at home on lazier mornings—at least I’m on my way to something like a life here.

Coffee has another crucial job to do as I navigate life in Beirut. It gets my brain cells in shape for the silent combat that goes on during my walks. In Beirut, everyone stares. At you. At him, at her, at everyone. Men whistle and hoot at women constantly. They can make you feel you’re naked no matter what you’re wearing. I dress here the way I dress in New York: in summer, a tank top usually, a skirt or light pants, sandals. So do at least half the women in Beirut. In most parts of the city, you’ll typically see some women wearing skimpy fashions—miniskirts, sleeveless tops, and even more revealing strapless styles—while other women walk along inches away in head scarves or sometimes a full hijab.

But despite, or maybe because of, the long tradition of skinbaring styles in Beirut, men on the street often call out lewdly. In fact, they’ll pretty much do that no matter what you’re wearing. It doesn’t take much for a woman to get stared at here. Be female, and be walking without a man or a full-body hijab—that’s about it. Sometimes you’ll be stared at no matter what you look like or even what gender you are. The unemployment rate in Lebanon is sky high, and business at neighborhood shops can be slow, so lots of store owners and their idle friends, usually all men, bring plastic chairs to street corners to sit around together, drinking coffee all day long, smoking cigarettes, and gossiping. And staring.

The glares feel intrusive, but if being ogled by strange men all day is the price to pay for Lebanon’s relatively permissive lifestyle, I suppose I can live with that. Unfortunately, the freewheeling dress code is deceptive. Lebanon is not nearly as liberal as it seems on gender issues. Lebanese women can drive, work, and dress
however they want, but they’re still struggling for equal rights and a voice in government. And as an adult woman here, if you’re not married—or if you’re married but don’t have kids—you’ll be made well aware that you’re living an alternative lifestyle. In some conservative families and more traditional villages, unmarried or childless women are harassed and shamed. Premarital sex, though widely practiced here, is still secretive. As a single woman in my thirties, I wondered before I arrived whether my status would be considered risqué here, even in the twenty-first century—or whether there are more women here like me now, taking their time with big decisions and trying to make choices that feel authentic and meaningful, rather than caving in to social and family pressures.
Is my lifestyle going to fly in a place like Beirut?
I’ve wondered. Too early to tell.

Well, if nothing else, at least I’ve finally sorted out the coffee problem. Whatever nasty looks or interrogations come my way, I’ll be caffeinated enough to have a fighting chance.

SEPTEMBER

As I
sit at my laptop on this Saturday in early September, working away while my New York friends are undoubtedly off at Long Island beaches for Labor Day, I’m thinking back to a time when getting stared at by strange men didn’t seem so unpleasant. In my early teen years in Houston, I longed for the fashionable bikinis I remembered coveting on the Beirut beaches, but I made do with a modest grape-colored two-piece, hoping it would earn me some stares, despite my flat-chested stick figure, from one of the tan blond lifeguards at our pool club. The first weekend of the fall season in Houston meant the annual Labor Day party at the community pool, and all our neighbors would be there, barbecuing and socializing and drinking homemade cocktails out of Thermoses
while the kids splashed around and jumped off the high dive for the last time that summer. The neighborly gatherings were always upbeat, and even though my parents stood out as the slightly awkward foreigners, they were game to have a beer and a burger, and talk about the children and the schools and the weather, and so were heartily embraced.

At those Labor Day parties, Samir and I and the kids our age would stretch out our beach towels on the lawn, share red-and-white-striped cardboard tubs of salty nachos coated in sticky neon-orange cheese, suck Mr. Pibb out of sun-warmed cans, and do cannonball jumps into the pool, our bodies slathered in woefully inadequate SPF 6 under the piercing Texas rays. Meanwhile I’d be casting sidelong glances at the lifeguards as they walked by. One summer when I was thirteen, I saw one of that year’s lifeguards, a tall, spiky-haired eighteen-year-old named Josh, turn my way. I could swear he winked from way up in his high chair, and my skin tingled from my cheeks down to my skinny sunburned knees.