But what about here in Beirut? I asked her. Surely it was different here. Whom would she vote for?
She looked at me like I was crazy. Umm Hassane had lived in dahiyeh for almost half a century, but thanks to Lebanon’s arcane election laws, she could not vote there. Because her residency was still in Bint Jbeil, where she had been born, she had a choice: she could spend hours on a hot, diesel-fumed bus, rattling down to the village she left behind decades ago, all for the dubious pleasure of casting a vote for politicians who did not represent her. Or she could stay at home, spend the day coring zucchini and stuffing grape leaves, and actually end up with something to show for her time.
This Hobson’s choice was a function of Lebanon’s “confessional” system of government. As the French were leaving in 1943, Lebanese elites put in place an unwritten agreement that the president would always be a Maronite Christian, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim, and the speaker of Parliament a Shiite Muslim. Parliamentary seats were divided among eighteen officially recognized sects (with the smaller ones bundled into a “minority” seat). Initially, seats in Parliament were divided on a 6-to-5 ratio of Christians to Muslims, based on a 1932 census that showed Maronites as the majority in Lebanon. By the 1960s, Muslims began to outnumber Christians, but the government refused to hold a new census, and the Muslim desire for a proportional share of power became one of the flashpoints of the civil war.
The idea behind the system was that the balance of religions would keep the larger sects from overpowering the small ones. But by making religion the basic element of citizenship, and placing the different sects in a zero-sum relationship with each other, the confessional system made it virtually impossible for people not to have religious conflict: if Muslims gained a seat, Christians had to lose.
After the civil war, parliamentary seats were redistributed equally between Christians and Muslims (a ratio that still favors Christians, who now make up about a third of the population). The Parliament was supposed to approve an election law “free of sectarian restrictions,” but it never did, and by 2005, Lebanon had still not conducted a census since 1932—as it happened, the year Umm Hassane was born. If the people of Lebanon were allowed to vote on a non-sectarian basis, the current coterie of warlords and zaeems (including the two major Shiite parties, who had much to gain from the status quo) would risk losing its monopoly on power. Until that day, Umm Hassane and hundreds of thousands like her would not be able to vote in the capital where they lived, worked, went to school, slept, bought groceries, and paid taxes.
“Would you vote if you could vote in Beirut?” I asked Umm Hassane.
She turned around from the sink and gave us a withering look. “What do you think this is?” she asked, putting a fist on her hip and waving the other hand around the small dim kitchen, the oilcloth-covered table, the forest of concrete outside. “America?”
On March 8, 2005, Hezbollah’s leader, Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah, held a massive counterdemonstration in downtown Beirut to “thank Syria” for what it had done for Lebanon. Nasrallah had been hinting that the anti-Syrian opposition was poised to sign a peace agreement with Israel—anathema to Shiites with ties to the south, where memories of the Israeli occupation, which ended in May of 2000, were still raw. Hundreds of thousands of supporters of Hezbollah and Amal, the two main Shiite parties, as well as a constellation of smaller Christian and secular parties, flocked to Riad al-Solh Square, on the other side of downtown from Martyrs’ Square.
On March 14, one month after Hariri’s murder, the anti-Syrian coalition responded by holding its own massive rally downtown. Hundreds of thousands gathered in Martyrs’ Square, and with that, Lebanon had a new political fault line. Both sides—those who had demanded that Syria leave, and those who had rallied behind Nasrallah and his allies—claimed to represent the majority. Each side defined the other’s political beliefs in the darkest possible terms: If you questioned the anti-Syrian movement or its leaders, you were a terrorist sympathizer. If you criticized Nasrallah or his allies, you were a lackey of Western imperialism. If you thought both sides had earned criticism, then clearly you sympathized with the wrong side, depending on which one you were talking to, and were hiding your loyalties out of some nefarious motive. You had to take sides.
About a week after March 14, the khamsin began to blow.
Every spring, a wind rises up from Egypt and the Libyan desert and blasts Beirut with its hot breath. The weather changes overnight with the khamsin, or “fifty,” named for the number of days it can last. Some scientists and Bible scholars believe that the ninth plague of Egypt from the book of Exodus—the “darkness which may be felt”—was a khamsin. It is “an ill wind that blows no one in the Middle East any good,” wrote Time magazine in 1971, adding that the khamsin can “madden men,” cause car accidents, and increase crime rates by as much as 20 percent. A professor at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University diagnosed this mysterious malaise as an overabundance of positive ions. The ions made old people depressed and lethargic, but had the opposite effect on young people, who became literally supercharged with positive electrical energy. These physiological effects, Time noted, corresponded to the ill winds of other continents—France’s mistral, Austria’s foehn, and California’s fabled Santa Ana, to which writers from Raymond Chandler to Joan Didion have attributed wildfires, murder, and suicide (not to mention a rash of overheated metaphors).
But I loved the khamsin. The wind made me feel reckless; it promised unexpected pleasures and dangers. Overnight, the cold rain of Beirut winter turned into unearthly heat. The air smelled like sand. The sky turned orange. Suddenly it was time to switch from shoes to sandals, to go outside at night, and people would shake their heads and say: “It’s the khamsin, the khamsin!” with that knowing pride people always show toward events that surprise them every year. That spring, a few days after the khamsin began, Hanan’s friend Hassan called to tell us that he had green garlic.
Lebanon had a universe of wild edible greens that marked the seasons more reliably than any calendar. Country people foraged for them in fields, on mountainsides, and in vacant lots. Grocery stores and khadarjis did not usually carry these greens—they were too uncultivated, too ephemeral. But you could get them from Bedouin women who sold produce on the sidewalk. I bought my greens from Umm Adnan, who sat across from Café Younes; Hassan had introduced me to her when we first moved to the neighborhood. Umm Adnan was somewhere in her sixties—she didn’t know exactly where—and she had been making her living this way for twenty-five years. She would wake up every day at four in the morning, arrive at her spot before eight, and set up shop right on the sidewalk with big black garbage bags full of greens: fresh mint, oregano, parsley, romaine, arugula, purslane, and, if you were lucky and it was in season, green garlic.
The coming of the green garlic was always an unscheduled seasonal gift. People would hold impromptu dinner parties. Friends delivered armfuls of the slender green spears to each other and sautéed them with pencil-thin asparagus and wild fennel. Or they mixed it with sleeqa, the grab bag of wild weeds that country people gathered in the spring. Hassan’s garlic came from his family land in Khiam, considerably south, where it appeared earlier than in Beirut. On a warm windy evening in late March, we went to Hassan’s place for a dinner feast of early spring greens.
A couple of Hanan’s friends were there, including the big writer I had met in Baromètre, back in 2003, the one who looked like Hemingway. Hassan’s five-year-old daughter ran through the apartment laughing. The pale green shoots of garlic were streaked magenta at the bottoms. He chopped them into segments and sweated them in a skillet. He had a pile of khubaizeh too, a hairy green mallow that grew in vacant lots, abandoned buildings, and piles of construction debris. He chopped the khubaizeh and braised it in its own juices with wild fennel and caramelized onions. The green garlic he sautéed with scrambled eggs, a traditional Mediterranean way of serving vegetables and wild greens, and sprinkled with ground coriander. He loaded a plate with r
adishes, scallions, hot green peppers, and goat yogurt. He brought the garlic and khubaizeh to the table on big plates, two heaping mountains of green, and passed out pieces of flatbread. We tore into the khubaizeh first, the wilted leaves still thick and wet with dark green juice. Behind their fennel camouflage, the mallow tasted weedy, treelike—a leaf you could imagine giraffes or buffalos gnashing on. And then I tried the eggs, with their green whisper of garlic. Grown-up garlic dominates the plate, but this was different: hiding under the sweaty, animal smell of garlic was something grassy and almost sweet.
“This ‘cedar revolution,’” said Hassan. He was speaking Arabic, but he mouthed the Bush administration neologism in sarcastic, American-accented English. “This is just more propaganda. Nothing will be different in the end. Until now, nothing has changed.”
Strangely enough it was the big writer, whom I remembered as the most cynical of Hanan’s crowd, who replied. “Non, ça bouge, ça bouge,” he said, shaking his massive head slowly from side to side. “It’s moving. Things are changing at last.”
Chapter 18
Death in Beirut
I SUPPOSE IT WAS bound to get us sooner or later. We didn’t avoid it on purpose; it was just one of those things we kept putting off. In March, we had to cover the independence uprising. In April, came the historic withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon. May and June brought the parliamentary elections. And then, one sweaty July day when we went to Mohamad’s parents’ for lunch, fourteen centuries of tradition finally caught up with us.
“Maal asaf, I can’t kiss you on the cheek,” said Abu Hassane as he stood in the doorway, trembling. “It’s haraam for me to kiss you on the cheek.”
Nobody really knows what happened—whether he decided this on his own, which I find unlikely, or whether some relative got hold of him (I suspected Hajj Naji). Either way, Abu Hassane had become persuaded that because Mohamad and I hadn’t done a katab al-kitaab, we weren’t “really married.” Therefore, I was not officially part of the family; therefore, it was not permissible for him to kiss me on the cheek in welcome when I came to their house for our weekly lunches. “I want to,” he said, anguished, “but I can’t—it’s not right.”
Abu Hassane was not always so religious. But as he got older, he became addicted to worry. He worried about his health; he worried about the political situation; he worried, quite reasonably, about Mohamad going to Iraq. He worried about dying and going to hell.
Lebanon was a nation of worriers. During the civil war, the constant irregular diet of explosions, assassinations, and kidnappings made people reach for tranquilizers, antidepressants, Bekaa Valley hashish—anything to ease the stress. Fifteen years later, people still popped Xanax and Valium like aspirin. Most of the Beirutis I knew confessed to being mdepress, an Arabization of a word we all know. Doctors overprescribed everything, and even if they didn’t, their patients overmedicated anyway.
At one end of the dining room table, Abu Hassane maintained a little shrine to the gods of mosque and pharmacy. A small green-and-gold Quran; a tiny velvet prayer rug, for praying at the table, now that he was too stiff to pray on the floor; a qurus, a small amulet made of clay from Karbala, that Shiites use to pray; and Tupperware containers of carefully apportioned pills for all the physical and spiritual maladies of old age—gastritis, insomnia, infection. Long after the illness itself had disappeared, he would continue to take the medicine in the hopes of staving off the inevitable.
His eyes were more sunken these days, his walk more labored. His skin, a pale and waxy pink, stretched over his cheekbones. His voice wheezed like a car trying to start in the middle of winter. As his body grew weaker, he put his faith in spiritual prophylactics like a second Hajj to exorcise the sins committed since the first one. (Because he was too frail to brave the crowds, his Hajj would be undertaken by proxy, at a cost of $5,000, by a minion of whatever cleric ran this racket, but he decided against it in the end.) Making sure that we were “really married” was another tranquilizer for the soul, a last-ditch defense against sickness and dying and eternal damnation.
A few days later Mohamad appeared at the door of our bedroom. I was sitting at the desk, finishing an article about the evils of Lebanon’s sectarian political system.
“My dad gave me this thing,” he said, frowning, holding a piece of paper about the size of a Post-it Note.
“Yeah? So what is it?”
“It’s from Hajj Naji. He wants us to read it.”
“Why?”
“So we’ll be really married.”
“Oh.”
I remembered the wise judge who married us in New York. “You know, Mohamad and Annia, on one level, this is just a contract you’re making,” she had said. “But if it were only a legal contract, then it wouldn’t be a matter of such incredible moment in our experience as human beings; it wouldn’t be so resonant, so sacramental.” Slaves would not have fought for it in the nineteenth century; gays and lesbians would not be fighting for it now. So what is it, she asked, that makes this ceremony a sacrament?
I reached out my hand for the piece of paper. “Let’s do it,” I said.
“You think we should?” He handed over the paper as if he was relieved to be rid of it.
“Why not?”
Standing behind me, he looked over my shoulder, and we examined the document together. It was a small square of white memo paper, the kind they call “bloc-note” in Lebanon. Along the top, it bore the legend ANIS COMMERCIAL PRINTING. Underneath, Abu Hassane—presumably at Hajj Naji’s instruction—had penciled in Arabic:
I marry myself to you for a dowry in the amount of $50,000 American dollars, to be paid before the marriage.
Below that, it said in parentheses:
(Put the amount you want.)
“Let’s make it five thousand dollars,” said Mohamad.
“Nice try,” I said. “But I think I’m worth at least a hundred grand.”
He smiled. I smiled back and crossed my arms over my chest.
When we moved to Beirut, Mohamad had given me lessons in the art of bargaining. Never accept the given price, he told me; always bring it down by at least 25 percent, and preferably 50. He was the one who taught me to tuck my chin into one shoulder, gaze up through my eyelashes with coy reproach, and coo “ana zbuni indak”—“I’m a customer of yours,” a magical phrase that invoked an almost erotic web of obligations between buyer and seller. Properly applied, the rules of bargaining could transform purchasing a pound of eggplants into a flirtatious tango, a series of mutually choreographed compromises a little like marriage itself. But I don’t think Mohamad would have instructed me so closely if he knew that someday I’d end up bargaining with him.
He narrowed his eyes, the faintest smile around his lips. “It’s not legally binding anyway,” he pointed out. Playing for time.
“Fine,” I said, with a shrug, deadpan. “So we can make it a hundred and fifty grand then.”
In Iraq, I had spent a day in a Baghdad marriage court, watching brides promise themselves to grooms for x ounces of gold, y amount of Yankee dollars, or so many Iraqi dinars, all of it written directly into the marriage contract. But some brides waived the marriage dowry and wed themselves for just a copy of the Quran—a form of protest, a friend told me later, against being sold like a sack of potatoes.
I found the naked mercantilism of the Islamic marriage ceremonies alarming: the money transaction was the marriage contract. But I had to admit that they had a certain upfront quality—they acknowledged the messy truth, one we all try to avoid, that marriage is one of those places where love and economics collide. It was precisely this contractual nature that religious women like Dr. Salama valued. You can put anything you want into the contract, she told me once: custody, property rights, divorce. That gave women some power—at least in theory, because like a pre-nup, what goes into the contract in the first place depends on who holds the advantage.
As it happened, I had just heard the new Kanye West song, “G
old Digger,” and it had gotten stuck in my head. “‘Holler ‘we want pre-nup!’” I teased Mohamad. “’Cause when she leave your ass / She gonna leave with half!’”
He laughed, hesitated. I pressed my advantage.
“I’m not going for less than seventy-five grand, and that’s my final offer,” I said, setting the piece of paper down on my desk, leaning back in my chair, putting my feet up on the desk, and refolding my arms across my chest. “You want me to read this thing or not?”
This was the most important lesson of all, the one he had drummed into me: always walk away. When you walk away—ideally storming off in outrage after a diatribe against price gouging—they will call after you with frantic offers of lower prices. It always works. In commerce, as in romance, they don’t realize how much they need you until you prove you don’t need them.
“Okay, fine, seventy-five grand,” he said, laughing. “You’re worth it. But it’s not legally binding.”
Reader, I read it. “I marry myself to you,” I said, in as threatening a tone as I could muster while trying not to laugh, “for the sum of seventy-five large.”
“I accept,” he said. And thus we were wed. We didn’t even need a witness; they make it as easy for you as possible. Our Shiite shotgun wedding meant we were “really” married in the eyes of God. Whether we meant it or not, or whether that matters in the end, I leave to gods and lawyers.
The next day we went to Mohamad’s parents’ apartment for mlukhieh. Abu Hassane shuffled to the door in his slippers. He peered at us over Umm Hassane’s shoulder, his pale anxious face floating in the gloom of the hallway.
Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War Page 22
