Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War

by Annia Ciezadlo

  “What did it taste like?” I asked.

  “Ahh . . .” he replied, looking into the distance, savoring the memory of travel. “I remember it was red; it had fruit in it. Very delicious, very sweet.”

  The Najafi fish was delicious, I told them, hastening to change the subject. And because we were among friends, I remarked that my grandmother was Greek and that it was very similar to one of the many Greek ways of making fish—stewed in a tomato and onion sauce.

  “Greek?” said Dr. Amal. “Have you read Aristotle? I am very inspired by the Greeks.”

  “We read Aristotle in our hawza,” Sheikh Fatih said.

  “And The Frogs by Aristophanes,” said Dr. Amal. “This is an excellent description of politics. It could be describing politics in Iraq to this day. Have you read it?”

  “Yes, and The Clouds!” I said. “Aristophanes is my favorite Greek playwright! But forget about The Frogs—have you read Lysistrata?”

  Dr. Amal shook her head. She frowned and looked around at Sheikh Fatih and Dr. Salama. Nobody had read Lysistrata.

  “It’s my favorite Greek play!” I said, oblivious to the cliff I was galloping toward. “It’s about this time when the Greeks were at war for—I don’t know, years—and the men won’t stop fighting each other. So the women all get together and tell the men that until they stop fighting . . .”

  I stopped suddenly when I realized what I was about to say. I looked around the table. They looked back at me expectantly: Dr. Salama in her black abaya; Sheikh Fatih in his clerical turban; and Dr. Amal, his elderly mother. These were deeply religious people, no matter how much Greek philosophy they read. How could I describe Lysistrata to them—a play turgid with raw sexual jokes, originally performed by men wearing giant leather phalluses? A play whose plot hinges on women telling men that until they stop the war they can forget about getting laid?

  I shot a desperate glance at Mohamad. He had not read Lysistrata. He was waiting for me too.

  “The women get together, and they make an agreement that until the men stop fighting, to, uh, not have anything to do with them,” I concluded.

  Dr. Amal and Dr. Salama looked at each other, their eyes round with astonishment. They looked back at me.

  “This is wonderful!” said Dr. Salama. “I must read this play! This is exactly what we are trying to do with the women of Sadr City!”

  By the end of July 2004, a month after L. Paul Bremer transferred power to the interim government of Iraq, our poet friend Ali’s brother and nephew had been murdered in an ambush intended for him. Someone—militants, criminals, there wasn’t much difference—had tried to kidnap Sheikh Fatih’s wife. Another friend’s uncle had been shot, for no reason that anybody knew, as he stood in his front yard. Abu Rifaat and most other Iraqi Christians were desperately trying to flee the country. Even Alan King was leaving. We met him in the Green Zone for a dismal farewell dinner just before his tour of duty ended. “I feel like I’m abandoning these people,” he said, his pink face looking close to tears. “Like this is a sinking ship, and I’m getting out on a life raft, and leaving them behind. We’re leaving this place worse than when we got here.”

  As for Roaa, she had quit her job at Al-Hurra. Iraqi journalists had a very low life expectancy. One day, an old man sitting on a curb told one of her colleagues that even though he didn’t agree with the insurgency, he wanted to help them kidnap “all of you who are working for the Americans.” Roaa gave notice not long after that. Before we left—we would return in a few months, or so we believed at the time—she invited us to her house for lunch.

  As soon as we pulled into the driveway, Roaa looked quickly down the street and drew the metal gate shut. In the short walk from her driveway to the front door, Mohamad and I were careful not to speak English to each other. When neighbors asked who had come to visit, as they surely would, Roaa would tell them we were Kurdish relatives from Sulaimaniya. I was wearing Umm Hassane’s black-and-gray polyester hijab—I never left home without it these days—and Abu Zeinab had driven us there in his new car with the driver’s seat on the right, a car that nobody would ever think was American. We had needed all this intrigue for interviewing insurgents or female activists, who lived under constant death threats from the insurgents, or for university professors, who were being assassinated one by one. But by the summer of 2004, we also needed these cloak-and-dagger maneuvers for more innocent missions such as eating lunch with an Iraqi friend.

  I had thought that lunch would be a casual affair. But when we walked in the house, we saw that it was something else: a sufrah, a spread. “Beitik aamra, sufrah aamra,” goes an Iraqi expression that means something like “May your house be always open to others, may your table be always full of food.”

  Roaa had cooked a farewell feast of all my favorite local dishes. Starting the night before, she had made an enormous dolma, the characteristically Iraqi mixture of stuffed vegetables—not just grape leaves and zucchini, but also tomatoes, green peppers, eggplant, and even onions and swiss chard; all stuffed with fragrant rice and meat and stewed together for hours in a pot with a layer of lamb chops at the bottom. It dominated the table, a steaming mountain of purple, dark green, and red, the colors brooding and saturated as in a Braque painting. She made a northern Iraqi dish called kubbet hamudh, oblong patties of ground farina stuffed with spiced meat, then simmered like matzo balls in a tangy tomato broth. She had also made tebsi baitinjan, because she knew I adored it. (She had laughed at me when I told her how much I loved it: “You know, Annia, in fact it is very easy to make.”) And in a nod to Mohamad’s nationality, she served tabbouleh, fluffy and fresh, with the bulgur slightly crunchy, the way they make it in Beirut.

  “I had no idea you could cook like this,” I said, as we sat down at the table. Roaa wanted to be a diplomat, an ambassador. Not a housewife.

  She smiled sideways at her mother. “We have a saying: that whoever learns from a good teacher will turn out even better than the teacher.”

  Her mother smiled back, proud despite the teasing nature of the compliment. She might have taught her daughter to cook, but she also raised her to speak her mind.

  We sat down at the table. Roaa’s quiet, protective elder brother, Schwan, was there too. I finally met Roaa’s younger brother, Shko, “a genius at computers” whom I had been hearing about for months. He was shy and plump and smiled instead of speaking. “I’m encouraging him to apply to good colleges,” she said, “because now there are no more extra points, no more president’s friends.”

  Only Roaa’s father was absent. At the age of sixty-seven, he was in Jordan looking for work. “We don’t like this idea, because he’s old now,” said Roaa. “But it’s hard for him to sit and do nothing.”

  I thought that it must be hard for her too, but I did not say this.

  After we had demolished as much of the mountain of dolma as we could, after there was no more tebsi to be consumed, Mohamad and I looked at each other and said something about leaving.

  “Where are you going?” said Roaa. “We haven’t had dessert!”

  Disappearing into the kitchen, she came out with a covered pie plate. We migrated to the living room to drink coffee and tea on wooden chairs and sofas by the window. She uncovered her masterpiece: a banana cream pie, topped with a layer of clear cherry-red Jell-O. Festive banana slices hung suspended in the glassy red gel like little moons.

  “How did you learn how to make this?” I asked, dumbfounded, forgetting that recipes, unlike people, can cross national boundaries whenever they please.

  She tucked in her chin and raised an eyebrow at me, looking for a moment exactly like Umm Hassane. “You know, Annia,” she said, laughing, “we do know how to make these things. This is a specialty of ours, in fact.”

  The food Roaa cooked for us that day inherited a cosmopolitan idea, a convergence of cultures that was still encoded in its DNA. The kubbet hamoudh took the old indigenous grains, refined them, and mixed them with meat. It absorbed the tomato,
the turnip, and other invaders from Asia and the Americas. Under the Ottomans, the Byzantines before them, and the Parthians and Sassanians before them, the stuffed vegetables had traveled over mountains and along rivers, from the Mediterranean basin to Mosul, Aleppo, and Anatolia, where it was known by the Turkish name, dolma; they visited the kitchens of Muslims, Christians, and Jews; of Kurds and Armenians, Sufis and Salafis, speakers of Arabic and Aramaic, kings and commoners, Ottoman pashas and British sahibs, until it reached the table where we sat with Roaa in Baghdad in late summer of 2004.

  For Roaa, the hours at home cooking made for a dubious salvation: a prison, but also a refuge. She had once dreamed of traveling to other countries. Now she couldn’t even drive across town. Trapped in their kitchens, Iraqis like her still longed to explore the world. By the millions, they went through the same motions: they boiled rice and sealed the pot with tinfoil—or, for the post-sanctions generation, a plastic bag—just as the ancients had sealed theirs with bread dough. They salted eggplant and then submerged it in water, weighed down with a plate. They washed chicken and meat, perhaps whispering, “Thanks be to God” as they picked up their knives to cut the flesh. They cored out zucchini, tomatoes, green peppers; millions of hands rolled grape leaves in Basra, Mosul, Baghdad, Sulaymaniya, Erbil, and a thousand villages across Iraq. Through the universal act of handing down recipes, they also handed down the memory of other places, other worlds. As long as that memory existed in any form—cookbooks, recipes, a banana cream pie—it would survive.

  PART III

  Beirut

  Beirut is boiling like a cooking-pot!

  —Tawfiq Yusuf Awwad, Death in Beirut

  Chapter 16

  Republic of Foul

  AFTER A MONTH in New York and another month of pointless apartment hunting in Beirut, I missed Baghdad. I missed the date palms, the dry yellow heat, and the hard consonants of Iraqi Arabic. I missed Roaa, Dr. Salama, and Abu Rifaat. In October 2004, The Christian Science Monitor had asked me to join its regular rotation of Iraq correspondents in mid-October, and I was looking forward to going back.

  There was just one problem. In the two and a half months we’d been gone, nine foreign journalists had been kidnapped, most of them freelancers like me. A group calling itself “the Islamic Army in Iraq” had executed an Italian freelancer and sent a videotape of his body to Al-Jazeera. Militants were still holding two French reporters, one of whom we knew. An Australian journalist was snatched immediately after he left the Hamra Hotel, and it seemed clear that somebody in the hotel or just outside it had tipped off his kidnappers. They targeted freelancers or small news outlets with no security, like the Monitor.

  Two nights before my flight to Amman, I was watching a grainy video on Al-Jazeera. Masked, hooded figures stood in front of a black banner with white Arabic calligraphy. Their mouths opened and shut soundlessly as they shouted. A captive was kneeling in front of them. With no emotion, just a flicker of curiosity, I noted that it was me. One of the masked men grabbed the captive’s head and tipped it back, and at that point I woke up. I did not feel afraid, but I knew this dream was telling me that I should.

  “Look, Annia, I know you love working for the Monitor,” said Mohamad. “And if you really want to go, I’m not going to stop you. But just remember that you don’t have to prove anything to anybody. I know you’re a good journalist.”

  “I’m not trying to prove anything.” I was angry; everyone seemed to think this was some kind of emotional issue, but as far as I was concerned feelings had nothing to do with it.

  “I know you feel like you’re abandoning the story if you don’t go back,” he said. “I know how that feels. I know it’s not about ego. But just remember that no story—nothing you could possibly write about—is so important that it’s worth dying for. And you’re not going to be helping anybody, you’re not going to be bringing anyone’s attention to the story, by being there and getting kidnapped.”

  The day I was supposed to leave for Amman, the Monitor’s staff reporter Scott Peterson called me. “Listen, Annia, things are really not good here,” he said. He spoke very quickly and sounded distracted. “Margaret Hassan was kidnapped this morning.”

  Margaret Hassan was an Irish woman who had married an Iraqi, converted to Islam, and lived in Baghdad since 1972. She worked for an international charity and had spent decades helping Iraqis get health care and clean water.

  “We don’t know what happened. Maybe she wasn’t kidnapped. It’s not clear. But it’s not good. It’s not good. Are you sure you want to come?”

  “No,” I said.

  Mohamad’s parents invited us to stay with them until we got our own place. But we needed a more central location to start apartment hunting in earnest. Our friend Hazem, the writer for Al-Hayat with whom we had spent Ramadan in Baghdad, helped us get a discounted room. It was at the Berkeley, a small hotel on Jeanne D’Arc Street in a neighborhood called Hamra. We didn’t think we’d be there long.

  Beirut juts out from the eastern Mediterranean coastline like a giant goat butting into the sea. The northwestern corner of the city sticks out even more, a stubborn little hump called Ras Beirut, “the cape of Beirut,” and this is where you will find Hamra, the famous street that gave the neighborhood its name.

  Hamra was historically a mixed area, with Muslims, Maronites, Armenians, Greek Orthodox, and even American Protestant missionaries. It was a rebellious, cosmopolitan quarter from the beginning—one of those places where fact and fantasy converge, which is probably why it has always attracted writers. A disproportionate number of novels are set in Ras Beirut, especially those about the civil war or the period before it, when Hamra Street was the city’s most glamorous shopping drag. Here was the store where our friend Leena came to buy panty hose during the civil war, even as militiamen stalked the streets; there was the famous Wimpy restaurant—in 1975, the height of fashionable prewar Beirut. Now it was a dusty time capsule where old men sat on cracked orange plastic chairs and smoked over the same cup of coffee all day like patient gray lizards.

  A journalist friend of ours named Mansour was sitting in one of Hamra’s famous cafés one day with a friend. They started speculating what would happen if there were another civil war: Each café would have its own militia, they joked. The Café Younes fighters would join forces with the Baromètre Brigades! Regusto’s regulars would march against the habitués of Starbucks! The image of Hamra’s eternal coffee drinkers rising up made them laugh.

  An old man chain-smoking at the next table heard them. He turned around and fixed Mansour with an ancient mariner stare.

  “I was here during the civil war,” he said. “I fought in Hamra. And you may be laughing now, but I can tell you, that is exactly how it was.”

  Our little two-room suite at the Berkeley was shabby but clean. The door opened into a narrow living room with a brown vinyl loveseat, a television, and one chair. (Above the loveseat hung an engraving labeled L’Arrivée des Mariés, of a nineteenth-century couple alighting from a horse-drawn carriage, which seemed to indicate it was the honeymoon suite.) To the right of the door, a tiny sink and a mini refrigerator were tucked into an alcove about four feet deep. On the left, past the television, a door led to a small bedroom with a bed, a bathroom, and a small vanity table that we used as a desk. It was not remotely luxurious: more like a very small apartment without a real kitchen. But the beauty of the Berkeley was its balcony, which was bigger than both rooms put together.

  Beirut is a city of balconies. The million and a half residents of Greater Beirut had only a handful of tiny, pocket-sized public parks, none of them particularly green. And so, like Nebuchadnezzar, people created hanging gardens. Balconies and rooftops overflowed with greenery: geraniums, bougainvillea, rosemary, and frangipani. A city of gardens in midair.

  From the top of the Berkeley, I could see one rooftop garden plush with teak furniture and potted palm trees that must have cost a small fortune at Exotica, the upscale tropical plant stor
e. Across the street, tomato and basil plants burst out of rusty olive oil tins, and old men layered in moth-eaten sweaters sat smoking on old packing crates in the evenings. A rooster strutted around with a lordly air, casting a beady eye from side to side as if supervising his serfs.

  Beirutis still kept pigeons on their roofs, an ancient practice the Arabs used during the Crusades to send messages from besieged cities (and once, in the tenth century, to send fresh cherries from Lebanon to the Fatimid caliph in Egypt). One Hamra pigeon keeper had dyed the lead bird of his flock a deep fuchsia, the same fluorescent pink as the turnips pickled in beet juice that Beirut restaurants served. Whenever I saw the white birds swooping across the blue sky, following their borscht-colored leader, I thought of the Beirut militia that reconciled war and fashion by dressing in hot pink uniforms. Perhaps some small postwar demigod turned the fighters into pigeons when the war was over. From the balcony, anything seemed possible.

  Our room was seven stories above the street; from that high, the car horns sounded like the faraway bleating of sheep. We could see hectic Hamra Street and the taxi stands and the men who sat arguing outside the Royal Flush gambling den and the Barbarella Amusement Center. We could see the mountains capped with snow in the winter sun and wreathed in fog in the fall rains. We could see the city’s gaudy flamingo-and-apricot sunsets. When dusk settled over Hamra, we could see the dancers from Morocco and the former Soviet republics file out of the Pavillon Hotel, shrink-wrapped into purple spandex hot pants, and climb into the minibuses that ferried them up the neon coastline to the super-nightclubs.

  I still flinched when walking past parked cars. I jumped every time I heard loud noises. I crossed the street to avoid garbage cans, which might contain IEDs, and in cafés I sat as far away from the cappuccino machines as possible. Walking past our peaceful neighborhood mosque, I kept half-expecting to see thousands of men pour out of it waving their arms and bellowing “Muqtada! Muqtada!” In early October, a small bomb had blown up a politician’s car as it drove through Ras Beirut. He survived, but his driver did not, and the explosion reinforced my belief that everything—slamming doors, backfiring trucks, children setting off M-80s—was a bomb.