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

by Annia Ciezadlo

  “I only use the best ingredients in my fatteh,” Abu Hadi told me, and to prove it he held up a white plastic vat of Taanayel yogurt, a foil pack of Lurpak butter. But he didn’t have to prove anything. I could taste it in his fatteh.

  After a breakfast of fatteh or foul I felt ready for anything, even Abu Ibrahim. I would head back up Makdisi, past Book Sale and its posters of Stalin, Marx, Che Guevara, and Hugo Chávez. I would stop by Smith’s, the famous grocery store that had stayed open during the civil war, to pick up salad greens and a few other staples. A block back down Makdisi, then a right on Gandhi Street, across Hamra, and I would be at Abu Ibrahim, the khadarji, or greengrocer, who sold the freshest fruit and vegetables.

  Abu Ibrahim was born Mohamad Ali Sadi Gul in 1953 in Mardin, Turkey—“the most beautiful country, the best mountains, best buildings, best streets.” His parents died when he was only nine, leaving him an orphan. So he moved to Lebanon to join his grandfather, one of about a hundred thousand Kurds who migrated to Lebanon during the twentieth century. Now he had a thriving business: a cool little cave in the side of a building, packed with zucchini, eggplant, lettuce, tomatoes, and whatever fruits were in season. He piled up boxes of parsley, mint, romaine, and cilantro on the sidewalk so they spilled over the pavement in a green wave. Customers clustered around him, haggling and badgering and elbowing one another for his attention. He weighed their purchases against octagonal iron weights he piled on the two arms of a bent metal scale. He swaggered up and down the sidewalk shouting huskily at his children, who helped him sell vegetables. He had twenty-six, he told me once—yes, twenty-six, he said, sticking out his bristly chin—“from the same wife!”

  A pale, balding man standing behind him with a head of lettuce rolled his eyes and snorted with disbelief. But I believed Abu Ibrahim: he was tough as an old tree, and I could imagine him having a wife even stronger than he was.

  I set down my shopping bags. It was avocado season, and he had a box of them laid out on the sidewalk. I stroked their glossy reptilian hides and dreamed of avocado cheesecake. Meanwhile, Abu Ibrahim went rooting through my groceries.

  “What is this?” he roared.

  I looked up to see Abu Ibrahim’s son emptying out my shopping bags from Smith’s. Abu Ibrahim himself was holding up my cellophane pack of salad greens. It was marked 1,250 Lebanese lira, which is less than a dollar.

  “Lettuce for one thousand, two hundred and fifty!” he howled, as if he were the one being robbed. “I sell it for five hundred! Tomatoes for three thousand! I sell them for fifteen hundred!”

  An old woman looked up from the eggplants and frowned at me sharply over her glasses. The men who lounged across Mahatma Gandhi Street, outside the building where Moroccan prostitutes were said to live, watched with interest.

  “This is special lettuce, special tomatoes,” I protested in wilted Arabic. “No not-good thing inside.” I didn’t know the Arabic for “organic” or “no pesticides.” I definitely didn’t know the Arabic for “community-sponsored agriculture project that benefits small farmers.”

  “Why are you paying such prices?” he bellowed. “Why do you buy vegetables from these thieves? You should buy them from ME!”

  I couldn’t blame Abu Ibrahim: he was just trying to protect his monopoly. Lebanon was a nation of monopolies, a country founded by bankers and merchants, where laws awarded the right to sell foreign goods to one holder exclusively. If you bought Lipton tea, Kraft cheese, or Lindt chocolates, you were buying them from the same family, because nobody else had the legal right to import those goods. (Hariri had tried to abolish the exclusive agency law, but even he could not prevail against the oligopolies that had run the country since its founding.)

  My other local khadarji explained it like this: “If I want to buy potatoes, I have to go to somebody from the X family, because he controls all the potatoes. He goes to the Bekaa Valley, where the potatoes are grown, and he tells the farmers: ‘Here is some money—grow your crops, and when they are grown, you will sell them to me.’ And the poor man is in debt to him; what can he do?”

  He sighed heavily. “The whole Middle East is like this. The whole world!”

  In January 2005, Mohamad went to Iraq to cover the historic parliamentary elections. I stayed in Beirut and made appointments with real estate agents and simsars, the neighborhood fixers who act as informal brokers. I even made an appointment with Solidère’s rental agent, who made it clear he would rather rent to Gulf millionaires than to Lebanese expats and their foreign wives. But he grudgingly admitted to having some apartments. If we came back the following Monday, they might let us look at a few.

  On Sunday, Mohamad flew back from Iraq, exhausted but exhilarated by the jubilation of the Iraqis at their first real election in decades. Monday he slept late. I went out to the balcony and watched the midday sunlight play over the zigzag jumble of satellite dishes and rusty antennas. I imagined what it would be like to have our own apartment, how it would feel to settle into Beirut after the wanderings of the past year and a half. Perhaps we would keep a cage of canaries on the balcony, as people did here, and potted hibiscus and bougainvillea, our contribution to the network of gardens suspended in midair. I would plant tomatoes in big buckets.

  A sudden thunderous boom cracked through the city. Startled pigeons ruffled the air.

  “Mohamad!” I ran into the dark bedroom and shook his shoulder. “Sweetie, did you hear it? There was a huge explosion! I think it was a car bomb!”

  He whimpered the way men do when you wake them up. If he heard anything, he’d absorbed it into his dreams. I shook him again.

  “Why did you wake me up?” he groaned.

  “There was a car bomb!”

  “Annia, you think everything is a car bomb,” he said. “It was just a truck backfiring. I’m going back to sleep.”

  I went back out on the balcony. Seven stories below, a lone car sped silently down Hamra Street. Jeanne D’Arc, normally clogged with honking cars at midday, stretched empty. A man ran down the sidewalk shouting hoarsely.

  I went around to the other side of the balcony, the one that faced the mountains and the Mediterranean. Across the far rooftops, between our balcony and the rippling raw silk of the sea, a black cloud of smoke began to rise.

  Chapter 17

  The Green Revolution

  ON FEBRUARY 14, 2005, a truck bomb filled with one ton of TNT ripped through Rafik Hariri’s armored motorcade as it drove along the Corniche. Soldiers and policemen gathered around the enormous crater the bomb blasted out of the road. Rescuers dragged charred bodies from flaming cars. On Future TV, the anchor wept as she announced that Hariri, the billionaire former prime minister who owned the television station, was dead. Angry crowds gathered at Hariri’s mansion, just up the street from the Berkeley, chanting anti-Syrian slogans. Outside the hospital where the victims were taken, women rocked and sobbed and held one another. Just hours after the killing, opposition politicians gathered at Hariri’s house and drafted a statement accusing the Syrian regime and Lebanon’s reigning pro-Syrian government of his murder.

  I took a servees downtown that night. Streets that usually bustled with cars were empty except for the occasional speeding taxi. Intermittent cavalcades of young men roared through the darkened city on mopeds fluttering with pictures of the murdered tycoon. In Zuqaq al-Blatt, a historic neighborhood with Ottoman and French Mandate buildings, they had smashed the windows of the few shops that remained open. Glass glittered on the sidewalks. The restaurants downtown were dark, their $200 prix fixe Valentine’s Day dinners forgotten. Within hours, the bombing stripped away the fairy tale we had wanted to believe—that Lebanon had recovered, that daily life had resumed, that the war was over.

  Like many wars, “the Lebanese civil war” was not a single conflict so much as an epoch, a long twilight of battles that flared up and died down just unpredictably enough to keep civilians unsettled. Proxy wars between Syria, Israel, Iran, and others played out as a series of nei
ghborhood gang wars between heavily armed militias: the War of the Mountains, the War of the Flags, the War of the Camps. Most of the Lebanese people I knew had referred to the war, while it was happening, with an astringent little euphemism that recalled Northern Ireland and its endless “troubles.” They called it “the events.”

  For most Americans, the defining moment of the Lebanese conflict came in October 1983, when a suicide attacker slammed a truck bomb into the U.S. Marine barracks outside the Beirut airport and killed 241 servicemen. The American military investigation concluded that Shiite militants had carried out the bombing. These militants would later coalesce into Hezbollah, the group whose name means “Party of God.”

  In 1989, Hariri had helped organize a summit in the Saudi resort town of Taif, where he had built a luxury hotel for his royal patrons. Lebanon’s political and militia leaders signed a Saudi-brokered peace deal that redistributed power among the major sects and installed the Syrian regime (with America’s blessing) as the guarantor of peace in Lebanon. The end of the fighting and the postwar agreement raised high hopes: Government jobs would be distributed according to merit, not sect. A bicameral legislature would be formed. Syrian troops, which had been in Lebanon almost continuously since 1976, would redeploy and ultimately leave. By early 2005, none of these things had happened, Syrian troops still remained, and the small anti-Syrian opposition had begun to grow. Hariri had never officially joined the opposition, but he was planning to run an independent slate in the upcoming parliamentary elections, and opposition politicians believed the Syrian regime killed him in order to prevent him from challenging its rule over Lebanon.

  Hariri’s family decided to bury him downtown. They located his funeral tent between the Virgin Megastore and a mega-mosque he had built just on the edge of Martyrs’ Square, the big open area that lay a short walk to the east of Sahat al-Nijmeh. During World War I, when the country was racked by famine, the Ottoman military governor Jamal Pasha (known in Lebanon as “the butcher”) executed Lebanese nationalists in the public square. Later it became a gathering place lined with movie theaters and cafés; then a front line in the civil war; and afterward, a large empty space where protesters would gather. In the 1990s, Lebanon’s Syrian-controlled security forces had beaten and arrested demonstrators in the square. But they could not prevent people from assembling there now that it was a grave site. The funeral procession attracted thousands, and Martyrs’ Square became a magnet for mourners.

  A week after the assassination, the opposition called for a massive demonstration. No party banners, instructed party leaders, only the Lebanese flag. Employees of global advertising agencies unveiled a brand: a red-and-white color scheme and the word “Independence” in English, Arabic, and French. Thousands of protesters marched toward downtown holding signs: STOP SYRIA. SYRIA OUT. TRUTH, FREEDOM, INDEPENDENCE. One massive sign said simply, in giant block letters: HELP. Once the crowd arrived in Martyrs’ Square, they set up a tent city and vowed to remain until the government fell and Syrian troops left Lebanon.

  For the next few months, downtown Beirut hosted something between a wake and a rave. Money, posters, flags, and food flowed in from political parties. Teenagers pounded tent stakes into the earth. Middle-aged men wearing bespoke suits walked around clutching bags from Patchi, the upscale chocolatier, and passing out flagpoles. At night, singers and emcees would shout slogans from a giant stage. Hundreds of people strolled up and down, mostly young girls and boys dressed in their best, strutting and preening like joyful, revolutionary mall rats. The Lebanese called this peaceful uprising the independence intifada. The Bush administration declared it the “cedar revolution.” American pundits proclaimed it proof that the Iraq war had been worthwhile: the Iraqi elections had awakened an “Arab spring,” a wave of democracy that would sweep through the region, starting with Beirut.

  Mohamad and I spent most of our nights downtown that spring. Dinner downtown became a ritual: We would eat dinner at Al-Balad, a restaurant just off Sahat al-Nijmeh that served Lebanese country food, and then walk around talking to the young people that filled the square. They were thrilled to be part of a mass movement; they spoke eagerly of throwing off years of humiliating Syrian rule. Most of them believed that once the Syrians left, all of Lebanon’s economic and political problems would leave with them.

  By now I was beginning to see the deep vein of depression that ran through Beirut, even among those young enough to have missed most of the civil war. Lebanon was particularly cruel to its young: about a third of college-educated Lebanese had to migrate abroad to find salaries that matched their qualifications and the high cost of living in their own country. Zuhair al-Jezairy, the Iraqi journalist who spent part of his own exile in Lebanon, described it mournfully as “not so much a country for its children as a staging post for their future exile.”

  The income from Lebanese working in other countries made up almost a quarter of Lebanon’s GDP. But the young people who were forced to leave their own country in order to keep its economy afloat were not even allowed to vote from abroad. This was partly a product of Lebanon’s feudal political system: the Parliament was still stacked with zaeems, hereditary clan chieftains who passed down seats to their sons and nephews. The result was a legislature in which many members, as a Lebanese good-government group once dryly put it, “lacked experience in drafting laws.” A new class of warlords had arisen during the civil war, militia leaders or military men of humble origins, and if anything, they were more corrupt than the hereditary zaeems.

  Once the intifada was a few months old, our friend Rebecca came to visit. Her brother Rudy had spent most of the spring camped out in Martyrs’ Square. But she had missed the revolution—she was still working in Baghdad, one of the many young Lebanese abroad, making better money than she would ever get in her own country. We went to dinner downtown and talked about the parliamentary elections coming up in May and June.

  Rebecca was from Bikfaya, the hometown of Christian warlord Bashir Gemayel, who was assassinated in 1982. Her family had always been loyal to the Gemayel dynasty. But that spring, as Lebanon prepared for its first postwar elections free of Syrian dominance, she began to question the logic of hereditary leadership. “Why does it always have to be a zaeem, or the son of a zaeem, who runs for Parliament?” Rebecca asked us over kibbeh and tabbouleh at Balad. “Why not me?”

  Dinners were for downtown. Lunches were for dahiyeh, a fifteen-minute drive (on a good day) and a world apart from Martyrs’ Square. Every weekend, Mohamad and I went to Umm and Abu Hassane’s for a home-cooked meal.

  Going to dahiyeh was like traveling backward in time. We would catch a servees, one of the dilapidated old taxis that careened around Beirut blasting their horns at unwary pedestrians and picking up multiple passengers for a dollar each. As we rode up Bishara al-Khoury Street, along the old Green Line, downtown and its nightclubs slid away behind us. The moth-eaten buildings of the civil war, the Beirut of snipers and militiamen, lumbered up ahead. At the end of the drive, past the fenced-off Pine Gardens and the walled Hippodrome, under the giant hand-painted billboard of Musa al-Sadr, a Shiite leader who disappeared the 1970s, we entered dahiyeh.

  Literally, dahiyeh simply means “suburb.” But over time, in Beirut, the word evolved into a shorthand for the constellation of neighborhoods—including Haret Hreik, Tayuneh, and Shiyah—just outside the city limits. In the 1940s, a French urban planner conceived Beirut’s suburbs as a genteel, spacious area where middle-class families could raise children amid trees and courtyards and little green parks. Alas, the well-intentioned Frenchman did not anticipate the demographic upheavals that would follow World War II. The economy of southern Lebanon depended heavily on trade with Palestinian cities like Haifa and Acre. In 1948, war broke out after the creation of Israel, southern villagers were cut off from their primary markets, and the economy of the south all but collapsed. For this and other reasons, villagers migrated to Beirut and its outskirts throughout the second half of the twentie
th century—among them, in the late 1950s, Mohamad’s parents.

  In March 1978, after a series of attacks on northern Israel by Palestinian guerrillas, the Israeli military invaded southern Lebanon and set up a “buffer zone” manned by mostly Christian Lebanese militiamen. More Lebanese Shiites migrated to the outskirts of Beirut, joining thousands already displaced from the south, and by the early twenty-first century a country that had been 88 percent rural in 1950 had reversed its demographics almost completely and become 87 percent city dwellers. By the late 1990s, dahiyeh was home to approximately half a million people, many of them Shiites from the south. The area was largely controlled by Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shiite militia that had emerged during the war and became one of the most powerful political parties in Lebanon. It was also a Syrian ally.

  Fifteen years after the war ended, the government had rebuilt very little in Beirut’s outlying suburbs. Electricity still went out for up to eight or even ten hours a day, because Lebanon’s electrical company could not meet the population’s demand. Water taps ran dry for days in the hottest months of the summer. These shortages were not unique to dahiyeh—friends who lived in other suburbs had the same problem—but they were worse there.

  I was curious to find out whether the intifada would inspire people in dahiyeh to vote their corrupt leaders out of office—if, having thrown off the Syrian overlords, Lebanon would finally elect politicians who could provide basics like water and electricity.

  “Umm Hassane, are you going to vote?” I asked her at one of our lunches.

  “Why should I vote?” she asked, setting down a plate of stuffed zucchini and grape leaves. “Nobody deserves it!”

  In Bint Jbeil, the village where Umm Hassane grew up, politicians would pass out bread, meat, vegetables, and olive oil a few days before the elections. The village women would spend the next two or three days making every dish in their repertoires: kibbeh, kusa, grape leaves, maqlubeh, and more. On election day, everyone would gather in the town square, stuff themselves, and vote for the zaeem who had passed out the food. Umm Hassane regarded elections with a certain cynicism.