But the more I prowled the streets of Hamra the more these fears receded into the angry past. Somehow in the months of back and forth, of driving and flying from Iraq to Lebanon and back again, Beirut had become home.
A few weeks after we returned, a real estate agent offered to show us an apartment in a neighborhood on the other side of downtown. We walked through Hamra to the American University of Beirut, past the banyan tree at the Medical Gate, and down John Kennedy Street. Past the pale ghost ship of the Holiday Inn, still empty and bullet-scarred from the War of the Hotels, one of the many small, bloody conflicts that made up the fifteen-year civil war. Across Fakhreddine Road, and into Bab Idriss—the Gate of Idriss—a neighborhood named centuries ago when the city still walled itself in against invaders. We walked through Wadi Abu Jamil, the old Jewish quarter, past the few doomed Ottoman mansions, soon to be demolished, and the sleek reconstructions rising in their midst. The old buildings smelled of wild rosemary and chamomile. Bats flitted across the blue glass sky of early evening. We walked across Bank Street, past the Parliament building, and into the middle of downtown Beirut.
Downtown revolved around Sahat al-Nijmeh, Star Square, which was actually circular, a wheel of cobblestoned pedestrian streets intersecting in an open space with a tall art deco clock tower at its center. (Lebanon was under French control from the end of World War I until 1943, and the square was designed during the French Mandate years as a miniature of Place de L’Étoile, the axis of Haussmann’s radial plan of Paris.) In the large open circle around the clock tower, teenage girls and boys strolled around pretending not to notice one another. Children rode tricycles and threw rubber balls. Nannies from Sri Lanka and the Philippines ran after them, while parents lounged at open-air cafés and smoked water pipes. Chairs and tables spilled over into the streets, packed with people eating and talking and laughing. Aside from the Corniche, the road that skimmed between the edge of Ras Beirut and the sea, Beirut had very little public space. It was a pleasure just to be surrounded by people.
Before the civil war, the city center was a massive souq. People came from all over Lebanon to buy everything from food to furniture: clothes, coffee, newspapers, spices, books. Just as caravans had once connected to regional trade routes in the Roman colony of Berytus, the country’s prewar downtown was a gathering place where all Lebanese could sample the pleasures of cosmopolitan life. They could watch movies, chase prostitutes, join in demonstrations, sell their tomatoes, buy used books, or listen to a hakawati, a traditional storyteller. There were even informal coffee stands where villagers from the same area could congregate and drink coffee, waiting for shared taxis to ferry them all back to their hometowns together.
During the war, the Green Line ran through downtown. Snipers aimed at one another and any civilians in between. The beautiful old buildings with their Parisian arcades were torn and smashed. The streets were full of rubble and barricades. Two years after the war ended, Lebanon’s prime minister, Rafik Hariri, proposed a dramatic renovation of the old downtown.
Hariri was a billionaire construction tycoon who had made his fortune in Saudi Arabia, working for the royal family. He dreamed of restoring Beirut to its prewar status as a glittering commercial and banking hub—Dubai on the Mediterranean. He kicked out small shopkeepers, coffee stalls, grocers, booksellers, restaurateurs, and most of the area’s residents, and compensated most of them with stock in a brand-new company called Solidère. Many downtown tenants and property owners alleged that the company had deliberately undervalued their property, but there was nothing they could do: Solidère’s takeover of downtown was negotiated between Hariri’s company, Hariri’s government, and one of Hariri’s former employees, who was head of Lebanon’s reconstruction authority.
Hariri turned the ruined city center into a plush pedestrian mall where the global rich could nibble on sushi flown in from Asia, try on $100 feather-trimmed thongs at La Perla, and buy a thousand-dollar telephone shaped like a banana at Bang & Olufsen. Solidère and its top shareholders made billions as Lebanon’s debt skyrocketed: by 2005, Lebanon’s ratio of public debt to GDP was the second highest in the world (after Malawi), and Hariri, whose net worth by then was $4.3 billion, had ranked 108th on Forbes magazine’s 2004 list of the richest people in the world.
But Hariri rebuilt what others had destroyed, and for this people were willing to forgive a lot of corruption. The son of a Sunni fruit picker from Sidon, he was a self-made man—charismatic and blunt, given to lavish gestures—and few other Lebanese leaders had articulated a vision that transcended sect and neighborhood. He had never been a warlord, never had a militia. People grumbled at how he had taken over downtown, but many, even some who had lost their family homes or businesses, loved him anyway. The apartment we were to look at was in a neighborhood his company had reconstructed, a place called Saifi Village.
Beirut still had neighborhoods where old men wheeled up every morning on bicycles hung with hoop-shaped sesame breads called kaak, shouting “Kaaaaa-EEK!” Women would come out on their balconies, lower money down in baskets to the old men, and reel them back up filled with bread. Old men would push carts of fruits and vegetables through the streets. Shopkeepers would feed stray cats on the sidewalks. Lottery ticket vendors would walk up and down bellowing, “This is the day! This is the day!” Tiny old women in high heels would march down the potholed sidewalks every morning to the grocery store. Idlers would take over the sidewalks for their open-air salons but step aside whenever a woman sailed past, and sometimes croon a few bars of a love song, so that on some days, as you walked down the street, it seemed like the entire city was singing one continuous serenade.
Saifi Village was not that kind of neighborhood. During the war, the area had been a front line. Now it was a stucco fantasyland of pink and yellow pastel villas with white filigreed shutters. It was surrounded on all sides by highways and parking lots, making it virtually unreachable by foot. The empty streets made you feel like you were trapped inside an architect’s plaster model. Little gardens were closed off to the public by locked gates. Boutiques offered handcrafted leather purses that cost three or four times Lebanon’s monthly minimum wage, which was then $200. No way could we afford to live here, which was fine with me.
The real estate agent was gloomy, with a defeated slouch, and he shuffled us morosely through the overpriced apartment that all of us knew we would not rent. Then, as we stood outside the quaint little boutiques, Mohamad mentioned that we had been to Baghdad.
“Baghdad?” said the agent, suddenly standing up straight. “They have car bombs there! All the time! Just like here, during the war!”
He pointed across manicured shrubberies to the parking lot. “You look at a car—BOOM, it blows up!” he said, throwing open his arms to illustrate the explosion. “This car here; that car there! You never know which car! It could be any car! Two, three car bombs a day!”
He dropped his arms back down at his sides and beamed at us, sighing happily. He missed the car bombs.
I knew how he felt. It wasn’t that I liked war, exactly. I had longed for a normal life the whole time we were in Baghdad. But when it came, I was left with a feeling of unreality: we went through that, survived all that—and for what? So people can buy $700 artisanal handbags? Neither world—neither the car bombs nor the pink pastel reconstruction—seemed real.
Things were getting worse in Iraq. Roaa had another job, but she was getting anonymous instant messages urging her to “the jihad” and insinuating that women who worked with “the occupiers” were . . . she didn’t use the word, but I could imagine what it was. I wanted to grab everyone and shout in their faces that the war was still going on. I wanted to have a normal life, but I did not want the Iraqis, who were struggling just to have any life at all, to be forgotten.
Beirut seemed to offer a kind of solution. The economy was a mess, the political system a shambles. After the civil war ended, the Syrian regime ran Lebanon as a satellite state. The Assad family and its
cronies funneled money and goods out of the country, extorted Lebanese business owners, and beat or jailed Lebanese who protested their policies. Lebanese politics was punctuated by a string of unsolved assassinations that started during the war years and continued into the oughties. Nobody knew how much money had disappeared from the Lebanese economy—an unfathomable entity even before the war—only that it was a lot.
But fifteen years after the war ended, you could walk down the street and buy a loaf of bread without being killed. People rarely talked about the war. It was surreal to see people paper over old hatreds, but it also gave me hope that life could resume after a war. People didn’t have to love each other, or even like each other; all they had to do was join in the unspoken agreement to live together, to make it work somehow. And if you looked at the rhythms of daily life in Beirut, it seemed to be working.
If Lebanon could get over its civil war, I would tell Roaa and Oday and Salaam and Usama, then so could Iraq. It might take a while, but we would wait. In the meantime, I would settle down, start taking Arabic classes, and we would find an apartment.
A faded, smoke-stained, black-and-white photograph hangs behind the counter of many a small Beirut business. In these pictures, an old storefront is usually surrounded by bustling suit-hatted men, streetcars, gracious old buildings. Perhaps a proud owner is standing outside in a butcher’s apron or inside behind a cash register—the family business back before the war, when it was located downtown.
When the center of Beirut fell apart, the small shops that made up its commercial heart spun out into all corners of the city. Every neighborhood got a little piece of downtown: Hamra had the famous dessert maker Intabli and Café Younes, which filled our neighborhood with the aroma of roasting coffee beans, and many others.
With the center gone, the city’s collective mental map fell apart. The fighting had confined people to certain neighborhoods or sides of town. When it was over, a willed amnesia about the war spread across the entire city. People gave directions for a city of the past: pass by “Al-Nahar building,” where the newspaper of that name no longer publishes; turn the corner where Modca Café used to be; or drive down Nazlet al-Piccadilly, named for a movie theater closed for decades. The snipers were long gone, but people still avoided certain neighborhoods or streets without remembering why.
The foreigners who came to Lebanon learned one set of names—the written street names, which were useless. Beirut had hardly any street signs. The few it did have tended to hang bashfully on the sides of buildings, European-style, and were roundly ignored. The street labeled “Baalbek Street” on maps and street signs was better known as “Commodore Street,” after the Commodore Hotel (a nerve center of the civil war, now just another one of Hamra’s many hotels). My friend Paula grew up on Sidani Street. She did not know the name of Makdisi Street, a couple of blocks away; for her it was “the street before Hamra” or “the street that the Co-op supermarket is on.”
I met a real estate agent just down the street from us once. She had lived in Hamra her whole life, but when I told her I had walked from Jeanne D’Arc Street, she said I was mistaken; it was “very far from here,” she insisted, much too far to walk. I walked her over to Jeanne D’Arc, which was exactly two blocks away, and showed her a tiny, tucked-away street sign she had probably walked past a thousand times. There was another Jeanne D’Arc, she maintained—one that I wouldn’t know about, of course, being a foreigner. She was correct in her way: there was another Jeanne D’Arc, a Jeanne D’Arc of the imagination, and in Beirut such streets are as real as the ones made of asphalt.
Everyone I met seemed to carry an alternate map of Beirut in his or her head, a ghost map superimposed on the physical street grid. Each of these imaginary Beiruts was different from the other, and everyone insisted that their personal Beirut was the real one. People were always getting lost, no one could give directions, and you could never tell a taxi driver where you were really going, because he was driving through a different Beirut than you were. After a few weeks I began to believe that all cities are nothing but mass hallucinations.
Fortunately there was one set of directions everyone could agree on. In the absence of street signs, a functioning government, or any semblance of a social contract, I learned how to navigate the city by food. Ask a taxi driver to take you to Sidani Street, and he may not know what you’re talking about; he may very well deny such a street exists. Tell him to take you to sandwichat Marrouche, famous for shredded chicken sandwiches with garlic sauce, and he knew exactly where to go. The edible map was the most reliable.
There were Gulf tourists who came to Beirut knowing just one location: Barbar, the famous block-long empire of restaurants in Hamra. Barbar served everything from brain sandwich to fruit cocktails named after Hitler, Castro, Noriega, and Nelson Mandela; but it was best known for its shawarma and falafel. “They say ‘Take me to Barbar’ as soon as they get off the plane,” said Abu Hussein, a servees driver we knew from the neighborhood.
This system suited me just fine. I would never, ever forget how to get to Salim Hassan, the spice shop near the corner of Jeanne D’Arc and Makdisi, because it stocked black mustard seeds, fenugreek, and little bags of noomi Basra for a dollar. “Food is the only thing that works in Beirut,” our friend Bassem said once, and he was right.
I began building a map of Hamra in my head. A good day in Beirut starts with foul (pronounced “fool”), so that’s what my map started with. Foul means “fava beans,” but it is also the shorthand for foul mdamas, the soupy breakfast of stewed dried fava beans mixed with garlic, lemon juice, olive oil, and—depending on taste and location—chickpeas and spices. (In the Levant, fava beans and chickpeas are also the main ingredients of falafel, and something about the combination seems to work magic no matter what form it takes.) There’s an old proverb that varies from country to country and goes something like this: “Foul in the morning, breakfast of kings; foul for lunch, food of the poor; foul in the evening, the dinner of donkeys.” (It rhymes in Arabic.) Another proverb commands darkly: “Ma t’oul foul hatta yaseer bil makyoul”—“Don’t call it foul until it ends up in your bowl,” the Arabic equivalent of “Don’t count your chickens until they’re hatched.” All of which underlines the supreme importance of foul.
In Beirut, every neighborhood worth the name had a fawal—a bean man, a maker of foul. Certain fawals were famous: the one in Zarif, behind the Future TV station, practically had his own cult. Customers lined up in front of him, some bearing their own bowls, like hopeful beggars. If he didn’t like the looks of you, he’d serve everyone else first, and you’d be lucky to get your bowl of beans. (My friends called him the Hummus Nazi, after the Soup Nazi from the television show Seinfeld.) But I preferred my Hamra fawal, Abu Hadi. Down through the thicket of side streets between Hamra and Bliss, across from Moderne Butchery, sandwiched between the old porn theater and the devout Muslim greengrocer, was the narrow storefront of Bassam Badran, now better known as Abu Hadi—for my money, the best fawal in Hamra, and possibly all of Beirut. He called himself Malik al-Foul—the King of Foul.
Abu Hadi had a greyhound face, five o’clock shadow, and big brown eyes full of that anxious motherly expression good cooks always have—permanently preoccupied with a pot about to boil or a customer that needs to be fed. Born in Damascus in 1969, he worked as a hairdresser until an arm injury inspired him to turn his love of food into a living. “At home, I don’t let my mother cook,” he told me once. “In my family, everybody waits for me to get home, because they enjoy eating with me and tasting what I cook.”
And then he used one of the Untranslatables: “ana bshaheeyun,” I awaken their appetites, or in this case something like “I take such pleasure in eating that it makes people’s mouths water just to see me.”
Watching Abu Hadi cook always gave me this feeling. His narrow storefront was usually packed with people, mostly men, either waiting covetously for beans or savoring them at the two small tables and the ledge across fr
om the counter where he held court. He was constantly whipping omelets in a tiny bent frying pan, blending hummus in his ancient Moulinex, sending his prep cook across the street to Moderne Butchery for meat, and packaging everybody’s beans with a plate of mint, tomatoes, scallions, hot green peppers, pickles, olives, and bread. He made the full range of dishes you can expect from a good fawal: foul, hummus, and hummus with meat; msabbaha (the swimming), whole chickpeas bathed in lemony garlicky tahini sauce; balila (the wetted), whole chickpeas mixed with garlic, salt, and cumin. But my favorite was fattet hummus, one of the many exquisite Arabic dishes that revolve around day-old bread. He would crush a clove of garlic into a paste in a bowl with salt, whisk in a generous ladleful of soft stewed chickpeas from the tall brass amphora simmering on top of his two-burner gas ring, and dump the mixture into a metal takeout container almost in the same motion. Somehow, simultaneously, like a multi-armed Hindu goddess, he would whip tahini into yogurt and top the beans with it. He’d throw a bent and blackened aluminum pot on the other burner, cut half a stick of butter into it, reach under the counter for a pinch of pine nuts and a handful of dried pita shards, and set them to sizzling in the hot butter. Once they blushed caramel, he flung them on top of the yogurt, where they formed a buttery puddle, and dusted the whole landscape with dried mint, cumin, and paprika: a miniature mountain range, sharp cliffs of crisp golden bread, valleys brimming with butter, snowed in by white yogurt spangled with green, brown, and dark red.
Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War Page 20
