“Did you read it?” he asked.
“We did,” said Mohamad.
“Oh, I’m so happy!” said Abu Hassane, breaking into a toothless grin.
Pulling himself up straight, he placed his hand on his heart. “I’m very happy that now I can kiss you,” he said, still beaming. He bussed my cheeks three times, and we sat down at the table, surrounded by sacraments and prescription medicines, to eat mlukhieh.
The next day was hot and humid. Over strenuous objections from his wife, Abu Hassane walked to the neighborhood pharmacy to pick up some medicine. He collapsed outside the pharmacy and hit his head on the sidewalk. The pharmacist called an ambulance, which rushed him to the hospital, but although he was conscious, he couldn’t speak. A few days later he went into a coma.
Mohamad and I spent the next few weeks at the hospital, along with a constantly rotating cast of aunts and uncles, cousins, friends, and distant relatives. One night, Mohamad came home so angry that he could barely speak. He had spent all day navigating Lebanon’s health care bureaucracy: Abu Hassane was covered by the state-run medical insurance, and since the Lebanese government did not pay its bills, the top hospitals wouldn’t accept its insurance. When he finally got to the hospital, a distant cousin sidled up to him and said, “I was here at the hospital this morning, and you weren’t. Where were you?” To the sanctimonious cousin, Mohamad’s brief absence proved that he was a bad son and made for a prize morsel of gossip—exactly the kind of toxic family rumor that had made our Post-it Note marriage necessary.
“Now I know why this country is so dysfunctional,” he raged. “Because we spend all our time doing stupid, useless things just so people won’t criticize us. Why do we have to do all these stupid things?”
I patted the bed and held up the blanket so he could get in. “Most of your family is nice, though,” I said.
“And this is why Lebanese people who go abroad get so much more done,” he said, climbing into bed, still furious. “Because they’re freed of the yoke of their families!”
All of our young Lebanese friends had the same problem. Everyone loved their families, their traditions. But “tradition,” in the hands of certain relatives, became a venomous form of emotional blackmail. Aunts and uncles would call up their siblings and insinuate that they were bad parents if a daughter or a son remained unmarried. Competitive cousins would smear one another with vicious innuendos. And a shocking number of families—Christians as much as Muslims, in my experience—would ostracize sons or daughters who dared to fall in love outside their sect. There was no escape from the malevolent schadenfreude of the extended family.
I hugged him. Since his father’s collapse, he had come home in a rage every night: at meddling relatives, at the state-run medical system, at Lebanon. All of it perfectly legitimate, but all of it beside the point, which was that his father was dying.
Three weeks after his collapse, Abu Hassane died. The apartment in Tayuneh was rearranged for the condolences, the traditional mourning period when visitors stopped in to pay respects. The sofas and armchairs were cleared out of the living room, which was then filled with dozens of metal folding chairs to make space for a stream of relatives, friends of relatives, and relatives of friends. A tiny butternut-shaped woman was hired to channel an endless flow of coffee and tea into demitasse cups that she continually distributed on trays. Distant cousins sat in the living room for hours. Some cried, while others muttered condolences and stared sadly at the floor. Aunts and uncles traded gossip about who else was sick. Nobody brought casseroles or food of any kind, which I found hard to understand. Why wasn’t anybody feeding these people? An old man showed up in a rusty black suit and began reading verses from the Quran. Nobody knew who he was. Finally someone paid him five thousand lira to go away. Later we learned there was an entire class of freelance mourners, old men who scoured the obituaries, attended condolences of perfect strangers, and remained until they were paid off—a kind of squeegee men of mourning.
Hajj Naji hired a funeral singer for a majlis taziyeh, the mourning ritual based on the passion play of Imam Hussein’s death, a traditional feature of Shiite condolences. The singer was a tall, serious young man with pink cheeks under a patchy black beard. He was wearing a long white dishdasha and bearing a karaoke machine. Gravely, he plugged it in, attached a microphone, and began to sing. He stopped and cranked up the reverb, then began again. The narrative of Karbala thundered off the living room walls and echoed out the windows in long karaoke wails. He punctuated the melody with long, shuddering sobs that sounded as though some powerful force were ripping the notes from deep inside his body. I felt a flood welling inside my chest, but I didn’t cry, and neither did Mohamad; it was too public, too theatrical. The sorrow spiraled inside, feeding into some waiting reservoir of tears.
Finally the tide of mourners retreated. Mohamad and I found ourselves alone in an empty apartment with Umm Hassane, Hanan, Hassan, and several dozen empty folding chairs. Somebody bought a rotisserie chicken; we tore into it with our fingers, dipping it into garlic sauce and eating it with pickles and shreds of marquq, paper-thin country bread. The coffee lady flung herself into a folding chair and fell violently asleep, snoring, her head tipped back to reveal an entirely toothless mouth. We cleared the table, made tea, brought one another coffee, and Hassan spoke to me in our customary mess of Arabic and English and French.
“Are you coming to Bint Jbeil?” he asked with an encouraging nod. There would be a memorial service the next day in the family’s ancestral village, and the whole family was going.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not sure if Mohamad wants me to.”
This was an understatement. “I don’t think you should go,” Mohamad had said the night before. “I think you’ll feel out of place.”
This described his feelings more than mine, but I didn’t point that out. He was having a hard enough time already.
“I think he’s afraid of having to translate for me,” I told Hassan, switching to French. “I think these family gatherings are difficult for him. I think it’s difficult for him to change constantly between the two worlds, the two languages. It makes him tired. So I want to go, but I don’t want to fatigue him.”
Hassan nodded. After his father died, he had insisted on distributing money to the poor, in accordance with Islamic tradition; but a few months earlier, he had also brought us a bottle of Saint-Émilion from France. If this was a contradiction, it was one he seemed to reconcile with a grace that I admired precisely because it was not effortless. The constant orbit between languages and worlds was hard work, and I could tell it cost him, but he did it all the same.
“I know what you mean,” he replied. “It was hard for me too when I first married Annemarie. But you’ll get used to it; he’ll get used to it. I’ll talk to him. You should come with us.”
We left Beirut under the serene gaze of Nabih Berri, at the end of Raousheh, on a billboard that until recently had been occupied by the Syrian president. Berri accompanied us all the way south, in various heroic poses—Berri resting chin on hand and looking pensively into the distance; Berri in a manly political embrace with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah; Berri shaking one finger in the air; Berri making a fist and looking like a wiseguy in black sunglasses. Berri was the leader of Amal, the speaker of Parliament, and one of Lebanon’s most powerful and corrupt politicians—the godfather of the Shiites.
Amal emerged in the 1970s as the armed wing of the Movement of the Deprived, a civil rights group founded by the visionary Iranian-born cleric Musa al-Sadr. By the late 1960s, Shiites were beginning to escape from the feudal conditions of peasant farmers or sharecroppers called fallaheen, and Sadr’s movement sought to channel their displacement into political power. But in 1978, the cleric disappeared during a visit to Libya (his family believes he was killed by Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi). After Sadr vanished, his movement fragmented: its more religious members would later form the backbone of the new, Iranian-backed milit
ia Hezbollah. Amal and Hezbollah were technically rivals, but over the years they had perfected a symbiotic division of spoils: Hezbollah got Shiite souls, and Amal got their land and money.
Once, during the civil war, thieves broke into Umm Hassane’s apartment and carted away all her furniture. Most people would simply shrug, throw up their hands, and cry, “What can we do? This is Lebanon.” Being Umm Hassane, she hove off to her neighborhood Amal office, with a “connected” relative she had browbeaten into coming with her, to complain. “Auntie, they didn’t know it was your house,” the local boss explained. Gallantly, he proposed a solution: her own possessions were long gone, but they would rob someone else’s house, someone with no wasta, no connections, and give her the new victim’s furniture. She declined.
Closer to Bint Jbeil, Berri began to give way to airbrushed photographs of martyrs: Shiite guerrillas who had died fighting the Israeli military since 1978, when it occupied a swath of the south that included Bint Jbeil. After the Israelis finally pulled out in 2000, Hezbollah planted triumphant reminders of its victory all over town. A rusty Israeli tank guarded the entrance to the village. Giant posters of Nasrallah and Berri flapped over Bint Jbeil’s water reservoir, where Hezbollah had erected neon-yellow sculptures of rockets and hand grenades.
During the second, larger Israeli invasion, in 1982, Mohamad’s family fled to Bint Jbeil. As the Israeli army advanced up to Beirut, it was safer to be in a part of the country already under Israeli occupation. They stayed with Umm Hassane’s sister Nahla in her family home, a beautiful stone house that was more than a hundred years old.
Now, twenty-three years later, as we drove to Bint Jbeil, a discussion broke out inside the car: Hanan wanted to go straight to the memorial service, but Hassan insisted that we go to see Aunt Nahla first. I hadn’t seen the house, he pointed out—“Mais non, she has to see it”—but really, I suspect he wanted to visit the old place himself.
We piled out of the two-door rental car and headed down the narrow stone streets of the old city. Past sky-blue wooden doors with Arabic calligraphy, down a long stone passageway, tantalizing glimpses of treetops brushing the sky above the walls, and then through the wrought-iron gate of octagonal stars.
Inside the courtyard, Aunt Nahla’s garden blazed with hibiscus, bougainvillea, oleander, and rose geraniums. Oregano grew out of rusted barrels and olive oil tins. Cherry tomatoes spilled out over the flagstones. The courtyard was full of trees, their branches bent under the weight of green oranges and knobby green pomegranates just beginning to blush salmon-pink at the stems. The whitewashed wall enclosing the yard had an outdoor sink, topped by a sliver of mirror, for performing ablutions and preparing food alfresco.
Everything except the bougainvillea and oleander was edible. Aunt Nahla would put hibiscus petals into zuhurat, the infusion of herbs and flowers that people drank for colds. She boiled rose geranium leaves in a delicate syrup for pouring over pastries and distilled bitter orange blossoms into a fragrance for flavoring puddings. She melted the garnet pomegranate seeds into the sweet-and-sour molasses that gave her fattoush its flavor. Beyond the wall, spiky red fruits jutted out obscenely from a stand of prickly pear cactus; she would peel them, stripping the spines, and boil them into jam.
Aunt Nahla hobbled out to greet us, a tiny old woman dressed in a black polyester skirt and orthopedic shoes. She seemed mystified that we wanted to see the old house—it was just her house, nothing special. But as Hassan ran from room to room, lecturing us on each one, she seemed to swell up a little, and by the time I asked to take her picture, she was arranging her headscarf just so, and protesting that we hadn’t given her enough warning so she could tidy up.
The front door led directly into Aunt Nahla’s cool blue-green kitchen, which was long and narrow like a little ship’s galley. Painted shelves rested on wooden brackets carved in curlicues. A wooden board was nailed to the wall, studded with metal hooks from which Aunt Nahla hung hard plastic yogurt containers that she reused as storage tins. In the next room there was a floor-to-ceiling namlieh, a screened wooden cabinet for keeping food safe from marauding ants. In the high ceilings, next to small windows designed to catch the breeze, were hooks for hanging smaller, dollhouse-sized namliehs.
“Regarde, Annia!” said Hassan, and grabbed an earthenware pitcher from the kitchen counter. It was round-bellied and long-necked, with a tiny little spout projecting off the side, and little crocheted doilies covering the openings. The ibriq was an ancient design, the same shape as the Spanish porrón; it kept water cool, even in the summer, and people still used ibriqs to share water without touching the container to their lips. Holding it far above his head, Hassan tipped it back so that the water shot out of the tiny spout and directly into his open mouth, like wine from a medieval goatskin. I tried this maneuver and ended up with water down the front of my shirt.
The old Lebanese houses were built around food. (Sometimes literally: under the Ottomans, Lebanese villagers built false walls into their houses to hide their grain from the empire’s tax collectors.) Aunt Nahla’s house had a room for the saaj, a convex metal griddle for cooking bread, and a stone for grinding grains, and a special room just for preparing and storing mouneh. The word mouneh comes from mana, “to store,” or lay in provisions. In Lebanon it can refer to any food preserved for winter or hard times—pickles, jam, dried cheese, makdous preserved in olive oil, sun-dried tomato paste, honeyed fruit, even meat preserved in rendered fat. But it can also refer to the tradition of making the food. It’s one of those words that encompass an entire way of life.
Every summer, and into the fall, Aunt Nahla and her neighbors got together to make mouneh. They stripped and skinned the prickly pear fruits to make preserves. They rendered pomegranates into the syrup that flavored fattoush and lahmajin and sometimes—depending on who was cooking—the spiced meat inside kibbeh qras. They spent a day making tahweeshet kamuneh, cumin mix, the blend of spices for grinding with kibbeh nayeh. Aunt Nahla’s was full of pepper flakes so powerful that one whiff made me sneeze. And the women spent two days preparing zaatar, the pungent greenish-brown powder that they made with salt, sumac, sesame seeds, and the dried leaves of wild Syrian oregano (also called zaatar, confusingly enough, and universally mistranslated as “thyme”).
Aunt Nahla made eleven pounds of zaatar every year. She would keep one pound for herself and take the other ten pounds “down to Beirut” to give to the rest of the family along with handmade muslin bags of bulgur and glass jars of mouneh. While they ground the zaatar leaves and roasted the sesame seeds, the village ladies drank many cups of coffee and tea, and traded in much vital gossip—some of it, I had no doubt, about her nephew Mohamad and his American wife.
The memorial service for Abu Hassane was in Bint Jbeil’s husseinieh, a Shiite meeting hall that functions as something between a mosque and a community center. This one was a flat gray building that looked like a suburban elementary school from the 1960s. Once we entered the building, the men and women separated. I followed the women into a sprawling room with rows and rows of wooden benches, like church pews, covered with foam cushions upholstered in polyester print. Chairs and sofas ringed the walls. At least a hundred women sat on the benches, some of them young, but most of them old. Thick pillars held up the low ceiling, giving the impression of the nether regions of a ship. Red, pink, and yellow plastic flowers garlanded the pillars and the walls. At the front of the room a platform held a wooden lectern, also festooned with flowers. Behind the platform, just below the ceiling and above more flowers fastened to the wall, hung photographs of Shiite clerics, including an airbrushed portrait of a suave, bearded young Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, leader of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, looking as dewy-eyed as the tanned blond Messiahs I remembered from midwestern churches.
An old woman with a meaty face walked to the lectern and planted herself behind it. Without saying anything, she settled her black robes and began to sing. The microphone crackled and roughened the sound, but
the liquid of her voice came through. It billowed over us in waves, washing upward then back down, cascading through a chicane of notes until she reached the bottom and took a sucking, sobbing breath and began all over again. It was those weeping indrawn breaths that got you, ripping away your composure the way a crying baby summons panic, some involuntary response to the sound of another human body in anguish. The song’s rhythm pounded at us, remorseless as the ocean. One by one, the faces of the women around me reddened and crumpled and collapsed. Tall, black-robed young women walked up and down the aisles holding out boxes of Kleenex just as Catholics pass the offertory plate during mass. Now I understood why every aisle was full of small plastic wastebaskets. Weeping women threw wet tissues into them, so many they spilled over. Tears began to surge up inside me, a tidal wave from so deep I didn’t even know it was there, and suddenly I thought of my grandmother, whom I had never properly cried for—I was always going to do it later, when I settled down—and I felt myself dissolving.
Just then the old woman stopped singing and began to recite the fatiha, the opening chapter of the Quran. The women rustled, rippled, and began to compose themselves. She started singing again, a melodic folk song this time. I caught lines about bringing water, a well, and someone who was gone—an ancient tradition of mourning songs, going back to pre-Islamic times, often sung by women; songs that spoke of long journeys on foot, of coffee that grows cold because the beloved is not there to drink it, of the water that pours from your eyes like the water from a spring. The beat echoed the human heart but also the cadence of walking. It throbbed from verse to verse, and slowly the women began to strike themselves to the beat of the music. They thumped their chests, and thighs, and their steady whump was like the beating of a massive heart. I felt myself disappearing into the slow trudge of the sound, and the feeling of anonymity was strangely comforting after the weeks of hospitals and relatives. An old woman with a clever, leathery face sat next to me, pounding her chest; on the offbeat, she cupped her hand open to the sky, the heraldic gesture of an apostle in a medieval Italian painting.
Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War Page 23
