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

by Annia Ciezadlo

  The minute the song ended, she pulled out a pack of Marlboros. Half the women in the husseinieh lit cigarettes, especially the older ones, turning to each other for a light. A young girl down the aisle folded her Kleenex into a small precise square and slipped it somewhere inside her black robe. The relatives stood at the front of the room, their faces battered by the storm of grief. A long slow line began to ripple toward them between the chairs and sofas. People filed past them for kisses and gripping of hands. I followed the line, not sure if I was family or friend, if I would be giving condolences or receiving them, but when I got to Hanan she reached out and folded me in a tear-soaked embrace.

  Aunt Khadija had set a table outside her house, next to a low stone wall and a young fig tree. A tall pine tree spread green shade over the banquet she had prepared; there was mlukhieh, the moss-green stew that Mohamad and I loved; kibbeh nayeh; and great round metal trays of kafta bi saynieh, spiced ground meat layered with tomatoes and potatoes, then baked so that potatoes soaked up the tomato sauce and the flavor of the meat. She had filled enormous plastic bowls with tabbouleh and fattoush, and heaped mint and romaine and cucumbers on plates. We drank water from a clear glass ibriq, and this time I managed to shoot the liquid directly into my upturned mouth.

  For Mohamad, the youngest, Khadija had made shawrabet shayrieh, a traditional soup with angel hair noodles and spicy meatballs. It was his favorite. “I made this especially for you, Mohamad Ali,” said Aunt Khadija, in her husky voice like dark brown sugar, “because your mother tells me that you like it.”

  Everyone laughed: he might be pushing thirty, might have covered wars and revolutions, and have a big job and an American wife; but here in Bint Jbeil, he was still the baby of the family, and famous for his finicky eating.

  “That reminds me of a story,” said Aunt Khadija’s husband. “Do you remember the time when we all went to Aley?”

  In the early 1980s, during an especially dangerous bombardment, Umm Hassane and Abu Hassane and all their children piled into a car and drove to stay with relatives in the mountains outside of Beirut. The journey was long and dangerous, with many hostile checkpoints, and when they got there hours later they were shaking with relief.

  Mohamad, then just a little kid, complained that he was hungry. Umm Hassane offered to make him boiled eggs and potatoes mashed with olive oil—another one of his favorites. But when she began to boil the water, he stamped his little foot with rage: she was boiling the water in the wrong pot! The only pot he would eat from, he told them, was the one on the shelf at home. The adults all tried to contain their laughter as he demanded that Abu Hassane drive all the way back to Shiyah, get the pot, and bring it back here to boil his egg: Otherwise, he shouted, I’m not going to eat it!

  Back in the twenty-first century, Mohamad blushed as Aunt Khadija’s husband told this story in front of everybody. The whole family was here, reunited for the first time since 1994. Hassan had come from Paris. Ahmad from New York. Hassane, the nonstop talker, from Barcelona. Mohamad Ali, who grew up “outside,” and the only son who lived in Lebanon now. Hanan, who never left. And me.

  We sat outside listening to crickets and cars and other sounds of the countryside until evening overtook us. As we ate the remains of Aunt Khadija’s funeral feast, people remembered other stories from Abu Hassane’s life. Food unlocked memories, connecting the family to people and places no longer with us, to the dead. Like tradition, the repetition of familiar foods created the illusion that the past was still alive: we eat this food because we ate it before, when Abu Hassane was still with us. We marry as our ancestors have always married because the people we love—fathers, mothers, perhaps even ourselves—find comfort in repetition, in going through motions that have long since stopped being necessary or perhaps never were. Some traditions we choose to reject, like segregating men and women or buying a bride like a sack of potatoes. Others, like cooking for a family in mourning or swearing to love and support each other in front of people we love, we keep.

  Chapter 19

  The War of the Kitchen

  AFTER HARIRI’S ASSASSINATION, Mohamad and I suspended our apartment hunt—temporarily, we told ourselves, until the political situation calmed down. But the country did not settle down, and neither did we.

  On June 2, the newspaper columnist Samir Kassir was killed by a bomb planted underneath his car. On June 21, former Communist Party leader George Hawi was killed by a car bomb. On July 12, Defense Minister Elias Murr survived a car bomb. On September 25, a car bomb almost killed the television journalist May Chidiac, blowing off one of her legs and one of her arms. A series of small but strategically placed bombs went off in mostly Christian neighborhoods, killing a handful of people, and as the bombings and assassinations continued over the course of the year, you could feel the hate rising off the Beirut streets like steam. Tensions between Shiites and Lebanon’s other sects had been growing since Hariri’s assassination. The polarization had many causes: Iran’s expansionism, Hezbollah’s support for Syria. But one loomed above the others: Iraq.

  In October 2005, I got an instant message from my friend Abdullah, a literature professor I knew from Baghdad. He loved Hemingway, George Orwell, and George Bernard Shaw; he had a passion for Irish writers like Eugene O’Neill, and I was utterly charmed by the way his dark eyes lit up whenever he discussed books and ideas.

  Abdullah was visiting his uncle in mid-September when one of Iraq’s government militias swept through the neighborhood and arrested all the men. Iraq’s new Shiite-dominated government was rounding up Sunnis accused of being insurgents (often by “informants” who could be anything from a pissed-off in-law to a neighborhood racketeer) and torturing them. “They put us to torture very vehemently,” he instant-messaged me, “and after that they released me by saying SORRY WE ARE MISTAKEN.” He added matter-of-factly: “life in iraq is very dangerous no one can save himself.”

  I called Abdullah and asked him what happened. For seventeen days, he said, they kept him and about two dozen others in a cold, dark room too small for them to lie down. Every few minutes the guards would slam the doors to keep the prisoners from sleeping. They were not allowed to take baths, or even to wash their hands as part of the ablutions that observant Muslims are required to do before prayers. They interrogated him on three occasions, during which they used electric shocks “on all the parts of my body,” he told me, putting the emphasis on “all.” They forced him to curse Omar ibn al-Khuttab and Othman ibn Affan, the second and third caliphs of Islam, whom some Shiites consider usurpers. And they told his uncle that he should leave Baghdad—that the city belonged to Shiites now, not Sunnis.

  In November, American troops shut down one of the “secret” prisons, whose existence had been known to Iraqis for months, run by Iraq’s Interior Ministry. The ministry was controlled by the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a Shiite party with close ties to Iran. The discovery added to a sea change in American popular opinion—a growing push to get our troops out as soon as possible, to stuff the whole sorry country in the hole marked Not Our Problem Anymore.

  I asked Abdullah what he thought. “in fact the iraqis themselves are in great bewilderment,” he messaged back. “they dont want america to leave now.”

  His view did not reflect the majority opinion: polls showed that most Iraqis wanted the Americans to leave. But the majority of Iraqis were Shiites. How would they treat the minorities once they were in charge?

  The Sunnis of Lebanon looked at Iraq and saw their worst nightmare: a Shiite-dominated government, supported by Iran, where Sunnis were forced out of public life. People were beginning to repeat the ominous refrain that sectarian tensions were higher now than they had been in 1975, on the eve of the civil war.

  Lebanon’s fifteen-year civil war had begun with a convergence of conflicts—over economic disparity, urban-rural migration, ideological struggles, among others—of which religion was only one. But religion had a way of flattening other differences
, all the more so because it was tied to the political structure. The same thing was happening now. The Sunni-Shiite divide was beginning to eclipse pro- and anti-Syrian, Muslim and Christian, left and right. Most of the Lebanese Shiites I knew didn’t have much use for the Syrian regime, but that didn’t matter—their political parties were aligned with it. (It didn’t help that Syria was a Sunni-majority country ruled by a family of Alawites, a heterodox sect of Shiite Islam.)

  On December 12, 2005, a United Nations special investigator was due to issue a report on Hariri’s assassination. Just hours before the report, a remote-controlled car bomb killed Gibran Tueni, a member of Parliament and the publisher of An-Nahar newspaper, along with his driver and bodyguard. That night, the Lebanese cabinet formally asked the United Nations to create an international tribunal to investigate Hariri’s assassination and the series of other killings. Five Shiite ministers walked out of the cabinet in protest, leaving the government paralyzed for weeks.

  I went to Tueni’s funeral two days later with Chibli Mallat, a renowned law professor and human rights activist. Thousands of people marched behind the dead man’s coffin. Giant truck-mounted loudspeakers blasted a looped recording of a pledge Tueni had made eight months earlier, during the March 14 rally against Syria: “We swear by God Almighty,” the dead man’s voice intoned again and again, “Muslims and Christians, to remain united forever in defense of our great Lebanon.”

  But Tueni had been talking about the last war. In Beirut, they were getting ready for the next one.

  “We have, in Lebanon, some people who share the dream of the terrorists,” a puppyish twenty-three-year-old named Ahmed al-Masri told me, shouting to be heard over the loudspeakers as we walked in the funeral procession. “And we will not be able to do anything as long as they are here.”

  Al-Masri was a follower of Saad Hariri, the son and successor of the murdered tycoon. He offered to introduce me to some higher-ups from Hariri’s Future Movement. I said I would rather talk to him. His solution for the Shiite problem was simple, he said: sectarian cleansing. “We should send them all back to Iran,” he shouted.

  Back to Iran: they were outsiders, invaders in their own country. We marched on, Tueni’s voice reverberating in the background, endlessly invoking Muslim-Christian unity while Muslims spoke of cleansing other Muslims from the land.

  Anyone who thought that the hatred had ended with the civil war never tried apartment hunting in Beirut with a Shiite. Even more than money, hatred was the force that determined where you lived.

  “Thanks to God, we’re finally getting rid of these people,” said one landlady we met, sliding a glance toward the real estate agent, who nodded sympathetically.

  These people were squatters who had moved to Beirut during the Israeli occupation of the south. These people, in other words, were Shiites, and many non-Shiites felt that they didn’t “belong” in the city.

  This was part fable and part true. Many of the Shiites who had fled the south ended up squatting in buildings of families who had been religiously cleansed—Christians who had been chased out of West Beirut by Sunni militias, for example. Shiite militias like Amal settled the displaced families in the empty apartments and later used them as human bargaining chips to extort money from landlords and the government. In Wadi Abu Jamil (the Valley of Abu Jamil), this was such a profitable game that people called it the Valley of Gold.

  When the war was over, some Beirutis hoped that the Shiites would just leave—they preferred them in the south, forming a human shield between Beirut and Israel. To see a young Shiite return from the United States with an American wife, an American job, and an American expense account, ready to rent the apartments they had just kicked his kinfolk out of—that must have stung.

  This particular landlady reconciled sectarianism with greed by demanding a grossly inflated rent with such rudeness that Mohamad and I simply got up and walked out of negotiations. If she was this boorish now, how would she behave once we paid her the customary six months’ rent in advance?

  Then there was the converse: Shiite landlords who wanted to rent to a nice Shiite boy. “I have other people interested,” said one landlord, probably lying, “but I want to rent this apartment to you, because you’re Metawali”—a derogatory term for Shiites, dating back to Ottoman times, that Shiites had appropriated and used as a form of bonding. Mohamad frowned: this greasy sectarian complicity left a bad taste in his mouth. It was a beautiful place and cheap, but we didn’t rent from that landlord.

  Another apartment building was plastered with pictures of Bashir Gemayel, the assassinated Christian warlord. WHO IS YOUR ENEMY? demanded Arabic graffiti outside the back balcony, and answered: YOUR ENEMY IS THE SYRIAN.

  One of our closest friends was a Syrian-American who lived in Damascus and visited us often. I wanted her to feel welcome, but the place was cheap and lovely, and I also wanted a home. Mohamad turned it down: “If there’s fighting, we’ll be trapped,” he said. I thought he was being melodramatic—hadn’t the fighting ended fifteen years ago?

  Finally we found a landlord who seemed different. He was a Lebanese-Iraqi whose mother had run an exclusive prep school in pre-Baathist Baghdad. He had a pet turtle. He had class. He wooed us with multiple cups of coffee, long conversations about Iraqi art, and reminiscences of cosmopolitan life in Baghdad before Saddam.

  On the third visit, after the second cup of coffee, he turned to Mohamad. “So . . . you’re a Bazzi,” he said, delicately. “Are you with Hezbollah or Amal?”

  The great Lebanese question. Mohamad’s branch of the family was known for producing stubborn, rebellious Arab nationalists, beholden to neither Amal nor Hezbollah—a legacy of that same mythical, long-lost Arab renaissance as the landlord himself. But religion flattened these distinctions: if you were Druze, the assumption was that you followed Jumblatt or Arslan; for Sunnis, it was Hariri; and if you were Shiite, of course, you must be loyal to Hezbollah or Amal. If you denied it, well, people would say, everyone knows those Shiites lie—they even have a word for it, taqiyah, a religious doctrine that permits Shiites to conceal their true beliefs in a hostile environment. The question of sectarian loyalty was the Lebanese equivalent of “When did you stop beating your wife?” Denials only confirmed your guilt.

  Mohamad explained that as an American, and a journalist, he didn’t have to pay fealty to any of Lebanon’s political parties. The landlord frowned and looked unconvinced. He offered us the apartment eventually, but the sectarian screening had made both of us uneasy, and we backed out of negotiations.

  Months later, some friends of ours rented from this landlord. They were a mixed group, Lebanese and American and Canadian. Taking aside the North Americans, the landlord offered them some advice: they should get rid of their Lebanese roommate, a medical student—he was a Shiite, and you couldn’t trust such people.

  Beirut could close its doors on us for not having enough money; for being the wrong sect; for being too stubborn to pay the inflated prices landlords charged returnees and foreigners. But there was one place that couldn’t turn us away. In Beirut’s geography of hate, bars and restaurants were uncontested ground.

  One day, Hanan took us to the restaurant where her best friend Munir bartended. It was called Walimah, a word that means “banquet”—a massive celebration, a feast that might last for days. The restaurant was in the ground floor apartment of a graceful old French Mandate building, one of the few still left in Hamra, right down on Makdisi Street. Tall philodendrons grew up around the window. Outside the front door, a green chalkboard with the day’s specials written in Arabic and English was the only indication that you were entering a restaurant and not someone’s home.

  We pushed open the heavy wooden door, its curlicued metal framing the scalloped glass panes. Inside, the restaurant preserved the layout of an old Lebanese house. There was a central gathering room, now a dining room, with smaller rooms off each side. Windows and archways between the rooms allowed you to see from one to the ot
her and gave the impression of being outside and inside at the same time: the home as miniature village, with the central room as town square.

  A dark wooden bar curved through the small entrance room, the wall behind it glittering with bottles of vodka, whiskey, absinthe, and other liqueurs. At the end of the bar, two windows cut into the wall looked into the first dining room. An open doorway led into the large middle salon, now the main dining room, with two large tables and a round wooden waiters’ station topped with marble. A tall, glass-paned French door led to the balcony. In the back was a third dining room, the mirror image of the first one. Deep, seductively padded banquettes piled with rainbow-colored brocade pillows ran along the front and back walls. Each room had high ceilings and tall windows with wooden shutters. It reminded me of the Runcible Spoon, my favorite Bloomington café, in an old converted wooden house that smelled of coffee and cinnamon, with a porch and a backyard and sunny windows. It felt like home.

  “We should come here all the time,” I whispered to Mohamad.

  “Especially since we know the owners,” he said, thinking practically.

  Munir was not what I expected. He was tall and sleepy-eyed, with shaggy silvery whiskers, a French accent, and the lazy, affectionate grace of an avuncular tiger. He had a habit of ending sentences with “you know,” especially when he was saying something you violently disagreed with, and he loved arguing even more than I did. He could beat anyone at Scrabble. He will deny it when he reads this, because he loves to contradict what people say, but the fact is Munir was a ghanouj—the kind of tease who flirts shamelessly with everybody, regardless of age or gender, not necessarily in a sexual way but out of sheer coquetry. (Baba ghanouj means something like “father is a flirt.”) He made allowances for beauty, but not other weaknesses, and he flatly refused to discuss politics: