The next day, which was March 1, I put on my rubber gloves to do some dishes and found them infested with tiny crumbs of plaster. Chunks of drywall coated the kitchen and everything in it: cookbooks, dried roses, bags of pasta, jars of kamuneh, bottles of red wine vinegar, olive oil, carefully wiped wineglasses, dried chickpeas, bulgur, chamomile, cinnamon sticks; all stacked precariously on top of one another as though I were trying to wall off this tiny kitchen from the world.
I looked at this jumble of dusty dry goods, this fragile repository of my domestic gods, calculated that we had been living in the Middle East for exactly two and a half years, and suddenly all the years of wandering, of exile from my grandmother’s kitchen, of living in cars and on other people’s couches, flooded up and pressed against my skull.
“You’re such a fucking asshole,” I screamed at my husband, hurling one of the hotel glasses at the hotel wall. It shattered and sprayed shards of glass into my own shoes, which were lined up against the wall next to the door. “Do you realize we’ve been here for two and half years and we’re still living in a fucking hotel?”
“Well, technically, that’s not true,” Mohamad pointed out, unwisely, “because we’ve really only been living here since January of 2005.”
This was a longstanding argument between us: I maintained that we moved to Beirut in October 2003, when we left New York; he claimed we moved to Beirut in January 2005, when we left Iraq behind for good. Likewise, the Christian calendar begins with the birth of Jesus; the Muslim calendar begins in 622, the year the Prophet Muhammad made his hijrah, or migration, from Mecca to Medina. Sometimes I would tease Mohamad about his January 2005 “hijri calendar.” This was not one of those times.
“I don’t care!” I shouted. “I want a real apartment! I want to live somewhere! I want a fucking kitchen!”
Technically, we had a kitchen—the minibar refrigerator, the cocktail-sized sink, the two electric burners we had been strictly forbidden from using. (I did use them, and the staff, who liked us, looked the other way.) I measured it one day by lying down: it was exactly as long as I was tall, and not much wider, like a coffin. Calling it a kitchenette would have been putting on airs.
I slid down to the ground, hunched against the wall, and started to weep with rage. Mohamad crept toward me—hesitantly, in case I started throwing things again—and put his hand on my shoulder.
“I promise you, okay?” he said. “I promise we’ll get an apartment.”
I had to get out of the tiny room. I called my friend Leena and we decided to meet for a drink at Walimah. It was Thursday night—an ordinary night, or so I thought, but when I got to the restaurant I found it transformed. At night, the tall windows with wooden shutters let in breezes from the garden outside. Lanterns hung from the ceilings, and globes of milky apricot glass shone like radiant fruit. The tables were gone from the middle dining room, which was full of the twisting, whirling arms and the tossing hair of couples dancing. A husky voice was singing a circular, syncopated song that sounded like a cat stalking up on a bird. The air was a soup of sweat, and wine, and something else—mlukhieh.
This was Tango Night, the Thursday night milonga that Munir had inaugurated. I loved the word milonga, which means a kind of music, a style of dance, and a regular event—a rendezvous where people dance tango together. Like a floating craps game, a milonga is a communion that resides not so much in a physical place, or a time, but in a gathering of souls.
I sat in the front room drinking vodka and absinthe with Leena and Munir and watching the dancers ripple across the tiled floor like sea creatures. “In the past month, I’ve heard the kind of sectarian views that I have never heard before,” said Munir, without a hint of his flirtatious manner. “And I’ve heard it from people that I never thought I’d hear this kind of talk from.”
An angel passed over and we sat silent for a moment. Munir was projecting the Carlos Saura movie Tango (about the Argentine dirty war, although Munir denied this) on the wall with no sound. On the screen an old man’s face wailed in wordless song, a mute and knowing moon above the dancers as they skimmed across the floor. One of the tangueras was wearing ruby sequined high heels that matched her cherry-colored curls. A tall woman in her late forties lounged in a chair and stretched out legs encased in thigh-high leather spike-heeled boots that managed, on her, to look elegant.
One of the dancers threw himself into a chair next to us. He was slender, with black hair slicked back over the smooth, benevolently sexy face of a young Valentino. He had been dancing for hours, and his black shirt, unbuttoned just enough, was soaked with sweat. This was Georges, the tango instructor. As soon as we started talking, I knew we would be friends.
The next Tango Night, when I dragged Mohamad with me, Leena had filled the front room with foreign journalists. In the middle, tango dancers circled across the floor. In the back room a circle of politicians sat around a table smoking, sharp-faced men in black suits with dark circles under their eyes. Husky, intimate roars of laughter flared from their table. It was covered with bottles of Johnnie Walker that glowed amber in the candlelight.
“I think we have a pro-Syrian plot being hatched in the back room,” Leena murmured when we came in, leaning over. She had the rare ability to circulate between worlds, and Tango Night was made for that: you could have a table of pro-Syrian politicians in one room, and the front room lousy with American diplomats, their meat-necked security detail standing outside with little coiled earpieces, and everybody dancing in between.
One of Leena’s journalists ordered mlukhieh. He had spent three years in Beirut and never tried mlukhieh, and now that he tasted it, he did not like it. He put his spoon down and grimaced at the white bowl and its primeval dark green soup.
“What is this stuff?” he asked.
“It’s spinach,” said an American newspaper reporter.
“It’s okra,” corrected a British travel writer.
“It’s mlukhieh,” said Leena, amused.
Mlukhieh is made from the leaves of the jute plant, Corchorus olitorius, and like okra, people either love mlukhieh or they loathe it. There is no neutrality on the mlukhieh question. Swampy, dark-green mlukhieh tastes like a dark, still pond in the middle of a deep woods. It has the loamy, fertile funk of wet leaves disintegrating into soil. The stew has been a famous North African dish for centuries; in nineteenth-century Tunis, it was so treasured that loyal city watchmen received five cows and a sack of mlukhieh every year. In Japan it is prized as a health food; in the Philippines it is made into a stew called saluyot.
Wardeh made her mlukhieh two ways: the first was Egyptian style (finely chopped leaves, accompanied by diced onions and vinegar). The second was pure southern Lebanese, the veiny, tea-green leaves stewed whole with chicken, cilantro, and hot red peppers into a garlicky morass. She served it with bread and lemon juice, over rice, and it soaked into the grains like a summer rain into dry earth.
In English, mlukhieh is known as Jew’s Mallow (deliciously misspelled on one company’s frozen packets as “Jew’s Mellow”). Nobody seemed to know why. When I asked Sami Zubaida, the Iraqi scholar, he hazarded a guess that English speakers first encountered it from Jewish émigrés, which made sense. Clifford Wright, in his encyclopedic history and cookbook Mediterranean Feast, speculates that Jewish dietary commandments made the bitter leaf especially beloved to Alexandrian Jews; and this makes sense to me too, because I consider the eating of mlukhieh a minor sacrament. But mlukhieh tastes of the forbidden as well as the sacred: The mad Caliph al-Hakim, of Egypt’s Shiite Fatimid dynasty, banned mlukhieh (supposedly because the Sunni Caliph Muawiya loved it), and perhaps this explains why Egyptians adore it so much to this day. Legend has it that mlukhieh is taboo among Druze because it’s an aphrodisiac, but just as many Muslims drink alcohol, many Druze eat mlukhieh. For some reason—a tradition deep in the subconscious, perhaps—the few Beirut restaurants that did make mlukhieh all served it on Thursdays. When I asked Wardeh why, she gave a magnificent
shrug and denied any meaning. This only added to the sea-green mysteries of mlukhieh.
I finished the journalist’s mlukhieh, since he didn’t want it, and went to the bar to talk to Munir. Georges came up, lithe and sweaty as a young faun.
“Watch out for this guy,” he said, pointing at Munir. “He loves to take your dreams and crush them!”
“I’m benessniss,” said Munir in Arabic, smiling. Another Untranslatable: to gossip, to stir up trouble between people. “Like Iago!” he added, laughing over his shoulder as he went off to torment someone else.
“Dream wrecker!” shouted Georges at Munir’s back.
He turned toward me. “Do you know, Annia, that I have never been in love?”
“How old are you?”
“I’m twenty-five years old,” he said, tragically. “What if it’s too late? What if it doesn’t ever happen for me?”
Georges spoke fluent French, English, Arabic, and a respectable Italian. He danced and wrote poetry. When he wasn’t doing these things, all of which he performed with grace and skill, he was a neuropsychiatrist. He belonged to that precious tribe that crossed between worlds, like Leena and Munir. His only flaw was the terrible disease of being twenty-five.
“Hang on a few more years,” I said, suddenly feeling very sophisticated and happy to be thirty-five. “I think you’re going to fall for somebody very soon.”
“Believe me, this is what I am looking for,” he sighed. “I want to get my heart broken. I can’t wait!”
Georges spun off onto the dance floor. The milonga music growled and moaned. Munir came back to the bar. I had another absinthe and confided that I didn’t know what to do with this husband of mine. He wouldn’t eat my food; he rejected every apartment we looked at. He didn’t like tango, didn’t like politics, and he was beginning to dislike Lebanon.
“Sometimes I think the only thing in the world he does like,” I said, “is me.”
“Listen, Annia,” said Munir. “Mohamad does not like to admit that he wants a home. He will never admit this, you know. But if you find a place, and if you make it beautiful, make it furnished and ready for him, he will be very happy.”
Chapter 20
The Operation
AFTER TWO YEARS and eight months (by my calendar), with heroic assistance from Leena, Mohamad finally signed the lease on an apartment in a neighborhood between Hamra and the sea. In May 2006, we reclaimed books, clothes, and furniture from storage. Home was on Najib Ardati Street, a couple of blocks from the Mediterranean, right next door to the old black-and-white-striped lighthouse that gave the neighborhood its name: Manara. There was a big balcony, and a real kitchen, with a real refrigerator and a real stove. From the kitchen window, I could see a trapezoidal sliver of Mediterranean water, which was a different color every day, a giant mood ring for the city.
I started going to Arabic classes on Bliss Street. My Arabic teacher, Hayat, lived next door to us, and so extensive was the infrastructure of neighborhood gossip that she knew exactly how much rent we were paying before we even unpacked. I adopted a tiny, half-starved orange stray kitten, whom we named Shaitan. And as soon as we moved in, Umm Hassane came for an extended visit, installing herself on our couch and taking possession of the remote control.
After the months of mourning her husband in the company of relatives, Umm Hassane had found herself alone in the empty apartment in Tayuneh. She began to feel mysterious pains shooting up her leg and back. She walked with agony, grimacing with every step, and barely moved from the living room couch. The doctor diagnosed a slipped disc and prescribed corrective surgery.
At seventy-four, Umm Hassane had never had an operation in her life, and the very sound of the word filled her with dread. (Like others of her generation, Umm Hassane refused to name illnesses like cancer out loud; instead, she would whisper “that disease.”) In Arabic, as in English, an “operation” can be military as well as medical: a battle, a raid, an attack. As the attack on her spinal column approached, she invoked The Operation as though she were going into battle and might not return.
Despite her fears, The Operation went well. She returned from it loaded with synthetic opiates and reclaimed possession of the couch and the remote control. She still could not walk without help, but she had more color, and even her litany of suffering had regained a certain vigor. But when we asked how she felt, she would scowl and announce, “The Operation failed.”
After a while she recovered enough for me to take her out on little excursions. She complained bitterly—“How can I walk with all this pain?”—but she never said no to a stroll. She would grip my arm as she limped up the street, looking around at new streets, new butchers and bakeries, new greengrocers; a whole new neighborhood of victims. Umm Hassane regained her strength by terrorizing local merchants and anyone else who crossed her path.
We were walking along Makdisi Street one day when a beggar woman approached us with an outstretched hand. Hamra was full of beggars—men, women, small children. Most people skirted neatly around them, looking away as if they were invisible. Umm Hassane flew toward this one like an avenging rooster.
“Get out! Go!” she hissed, flapping her hands in the woman’s face. The theatrical entreaty on the woman’s face changed to terror, and she scuttled off down the street.
“Umm Hassane, haraam,” I said. “What if she needs the money?”
“Needs the money?” she said, scowling. “Let her work!”
“Maybe she’s Palestinian or Bedouin,” I said. “Maybe she can’t get papers to work legally.”
Umm Hassane snorted. “She’s young! She can sweep floors! She can mop!”
Like me, Umm Hassane had once cleaned houses for a living. Unlike me, she considered it the unassailable solution to all complaints of social injustice, from poverty to forced migration. “Let them clean houses!” she would decree, with a regal sweep of her arm, like a slightly more practical Marie Antoinette.
At the end of every walk, I would have to redraw my mental map of the neighborhood: From now on I would walk an extra block down Sidani to avoid the butcher she had insulted. And it would be a month or two before I would get up the nerve to go back to the greengrocer on Adonis.
She was especially merciless to the young students at Healthy Basket. This was a community-supported agriculture project, started by the American University of Beirut, that sold produce from small-scale organic farms in a no-frills storefront. Their food cost a little more than the imports at the grocery, but it was still cheap, tasted better, lasted much longer, and supported local farmers. (I kept quiet about this last point, figuring fallaheen would rank with beggars in Umm Hassane’s sympathies.)
When I brought her hobbling up the stairs to Healthy Basket, the agriculture students smiled sweetly. Who was this adorable old hajji?
Umm Hassane looked around at the raw wood shelves, where onions and eggplants were piled unromantically in big wooden bins, and frowned. The khadarjis heaped their produce in rainbow-colored mounds and sprayed them with water so they glistened. They halved the finest blood orange so you could see the purple flesh within and laid it on top of the others. These people just dumped their fruit and vegetables anywhere.
“What is this place?” she demanded.
“Our food costs a little more because it’s grown without chemicals,” explained Eliane, one of the agriculture students. “It’s healthier, and it helps local farmers make a living.”
Umm Hassane’s face didn’t hide what she thought: This whole routine about farmers and chemicals was a scandalous ploy to put one over on dumb foreigners like me.
She picked up an apple and inspected it with rage. It was misshapen, as organic apples tend to be, with warts and dimples and a light dusting of dirt. It cost twice as much as the imported apples she bought in dahiyeh. She protested loudly as I paid two dollars for two pounds of apples.
My purchase was a tactical defeat for the side of honesty and thrift; so on the way out, just to show them who was boss, Umm
Hassane pointed at a lavender plant in the flower bed outside the store and ordered one of the agriculture students to dig it up and give it to us. He was too stunned to disobey. He uprooted the plant and handed it to us with a nervous smile.
“They’re tricking Annia, those thieves over there!” she hissed to Mohamad when we got home. “Byidahaku alaiha,” she fumed—they’re laughing behind her back, pulling her leg.
I couldn’t blame her. So many things in Lebanon were a scam. The economy was a scam; the real estate market was a scam; the political parties were nothing but pure scam. Even food was a scam: unscrupulous merchants would steam the labels off expired food, sell rotten olive oil, water down the milk. After a lifetime of mistrust, it was hard to believe that anyone would do something good for others—especially people with no wasta, like fallaheen—unless it was part of some bolder and even more sinister scam.
What annoyed her most was that these crooks didn’t even bother to make up a good lie. “Without chemicals?” She rolled her eyes, held up her hands, and appealed to the heavens with wrath: “How can you grow apples without chemicals?”
She dominated our living room. She occupied the couch all day and left it mined with wads of used Kleenex when she retired at night. She commandeered the guest bathroom, took the pump-top bottle of hand soap, and crushed it in her fist to extract the soap. We would come home to find her reclining like a pasha, surrounded by relatives from Bint Jbeil, headscarved old hajjis and tiny old men who sat stiffly in straight-backed chairs pulled up around her as she regaled them with tales of The Operation. She got more phone calls than both of us put together. Most mornings, I’d shuffle into the living room to find her already on the phone trading condolences with some relative.
In early July, a newspaper assigned me a story on the “Playboy Plotter,” the spoiled scion of a “good” Beirut family who had contacted al-Qaeda-linked groups over the Internet and expressed a desire to carry out bombings in New York City. When I called the plotter’s mother, she answered right away, as if she’d been waiting for my call. I asked her why she thought her son had become an Islamic militant. “Shu yaani?” she cried out, bewildered. I repeated the question in Arabic, although she supposedly spoke English, but she remained mystified. Finally I figured out it wasn’t the Playboy Plotter’s mother at all, but an old auntie from Bint Jbeil who was already on the line, calling for Umm Hassane, when I dialed. Even our phones barely belonged to us anymore.
Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War Page 26
