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

by Annia Ciezadlo

  But food was the real battleground, and here the rhetorical question was Umm Hassane’s most powerful weapon. In response to our simplest questions, she would fire a rhetorical salvo that rendered us, her assailants, impotent.

  “Umm Hassane, are you hungry?”

  “How can I have any appetite?”

  “Umm Hassane, what do you want to eat?”

  “How can I eat with all this pain?”

  “Umm Hassane”—realizing that we would have to resort to specific questions if we had any hopes of an answer—“Do you want salad and potatoes?”

  “If you’re making some, maybe”—then, flinging up her hands in deprecation—“but not if you’re making it for me!”

  If we asked her “Biddik shi?”—Do you want anything? she would answer back, despairingly, “Shu biddi? Shu biddi akel?”—“What do I want? What can I eat?” Mohamad called this her “not-so-subtle attempts to tell us we don’t have anything to eat.”

  Most of the time, she would just say “Shu baarifni?” Literally, it means, “what do I know?” But like a teenager’s whatever, or a wiseguy’s fuggeddaboudit, the phrase shu baarifni contained a multitude of shifting meanings. In her mouth, it meant: Leave me alone; Don’t leave me alone; I don’t know what I want; I want you to know what I want without me having to ask, or even knowing what I want myself.

  Her other favorite expression was ma btifru maai, “it makes no difference to me.” This meant that deep, violent opinions were being suppressed through superhuman exertion on her part. All these expressions contained a depth of passive-aggressive mastery that impressed me greatly, no matter how frustrating, and I started to think Umm Hassane could make millions teaching corporate communication seminars.

  In the end, most of her rhetorical tricks just meant yes. But not simply yes. They meant, Why aren’t you eating? Why aren’t you eating what I eat? Why aren’t we all eating together, the same thing, at the same time?

  The food wars came to a head one Friday, when I asked her if she wanted a cucumber-and-labneh sandwich. Apparently it was one thing to serve an arous as a snack, and quite another to offer it for lunch.

  “I’ve been eating nothing but labneh,” she wailed. “I ate it yesterday, I ate it this morning. Azit nafsi”—my soul, my appetite recoils.

  “She was insulted that you offered her that,” Mohamad whispered to me in the kitchen. “It’s for babies.”

  “So what the hell does she want?”

  Mohamad went into the living room to investigate. After the usual “What, me eat?” formalities, she presented him with a list of grievances: we had no salad, no meat, no bread. Worst of all, we lacked the most essential oil of Lebanese kitchens: Mazola. She lamented the madness of cooking with nothing but olive oil—it was not for cooking, as everyone knew, and how could we live like this?

  Mohamad trotted back and forth, a reluctant ambassador, while I waited in the kitchen to find out what she wanted. Finally, after some wheedling, she consented to a shish taouk sandwich.

  I asked him to find out if she wanted garlic, hummus, and pickles, the traditional accoutrements of such a sandwich. He got an Umm Hassane answer: “What do I need with hummus?”

  “She’s being insolent,” he muttered, back in the kitchen, where we were both hiding from her wrath. “They’re all pseudo-martyrs, my whole family.”

  We loved having her. We would have bought her anything she asked for—but she refused to ask. Somehow this woman, the scourge of greengrocers and agriculture students, could not say what she wanted in the privacy of our home. She was trying so hard to stay out of our way, not to be a burden, that she ended up driving us half-insane.

  I was confounded. I loved to feed people, but I couldn’t cook for Mohamad because most of the dishes I knew how to make relied on ingredients he wouldn’t eat. And I couldn’t cook for Umm Hassane because she refused to tell us what she wanted. I finally had the kitchen I’d been longing for, with a real stove and a real refrigerator and a real kitchen sink. But I had no idea what to cook.

  “I have an idea,” I said to Mohamad one day, as we stood in the kitchen.

  What she really wanted was to be fussed over, to be coaxed and taken care of. But Umm Hassane was from my grandmother’s generation: brought up to put others first, never to acknowledge their own desires, except in the context of being denied. They showed their love by cooking and complaining. For these women, the kitchen was one of the few places where they could be the undisputed queens.

  I outlined a plan: I would ask Umm Hassane to teach me how to cook traditional Lebanese food, under the pretext that I needed to learn how to prepare food for Mohamad, like a dutiful wife. Instead of the fancy fusion stuff I made only for myself, she would teach me how to make Lebanese peasant food—mlukhieh, sayyadiyeh, burghul wa banadura, kibbeh nayeh. I would learn something new; she would have a mission, something to make her feel appreciated. And if it made me look like an obedient wife, that was a price I was willing to pay.

  The day we planned to make mlukhieh, I stumbled into the kitchen late. Umm Hassane had been awake since seven a.m. rehearsing each bit of prep work. Next to the sink, a raw chicken lay spread-eagled on the counter, waiting for me with naked accusation.

  “Wash her!” she commanded, hobbling into the kitchen and pointing to the chicken.

  “Make coffee,” I muttered, heading for the kettle. I could barely communicate in English, let alone Arabic, until I’d had my coffee.

  Clearly I hadn’t understood. Drawing herself to full height, Umm Hassane pointed toward the sink and repeated her orders: “The chicken! Wash her!”

  We hadn’t even started cooking, and already we were hurtling toward one of those clash-of-civilization conversations where people kept shouting Arabic nouns over and over—“WATER! WATER!”—thinking I was deaf as well as simple-minded, but never explaining exactly what they wanted me to do with the goddamn water. Meanwhile, I would stand there, choking on basic verbs, and thinking, This is just a taste of how it must feel to be a taxi driver, a busboy, a chambermaid, any of the starter jobs immigrants get in America while they’re learning English. These encounters usually deteriorated into something like this:

  “Make coffee!”

  “Wash chicken!”

  “Coffee!”

  “Chicken!”

  “COFFEE!”

  “CHICKEN!”

  Then I remembered an old habit of my grandmother’s. Whenever she was craving something—a hamburger, a cigarette, a beer—she would say: “You want a beer, don’t you? Don’t you want a hamburger? You want me to roll you a cigarette?”

  At the time it drove me crazy. “No, Grandma, you want a hamburger,” I would say. Why couldn’t she just admit that she wanted a beer? She ran the kitchen; why couldn’t she just take what she wanted? That my grandmother’s life revolved around other people’s hungers—that she needed to justify her desires, even to herself—was something I didn’t figure out until after she was gone.

  “Umm Hassane,” I said. “Don’t you want a cup of coffee? You like coffee, don’t you?”

  Thus was born our morning ritual of cake and coffee. That morning, before making mlukhieh, Umm Hassane and I sat out on the balcony eating chocolate cake and drinking coffee. From then on we did it every morning. We would hold blunted conversations and watch the city perform its morning rituals: pigeons wheeling in the sky, traffic jamming on the Corniche, maids beating carpets on balconies. She would stretch her legs and luxuriate in the sun. Normally, she might disapprove of such idleness; a person should be off cleaning houses. But since it was part of my cooking classes, that made it okay. Really, she was doing it for my sake.

  One morning, as we sat looking at our sliver of Mediterranean water, she swung her legs down and scooted her chair closer to mine. She leaned forward, fixed me with an intense expression, and commanded:

  “Bring me a baby!”

  “But we have a cat,” I said. “Who needs a baby?”

  “A cat! Wh
at’s a cat?” she said, angrily brushing aside this evasion. “Bring me a baby!”

  How could I explain to her that our lives were still too unsettled, too unstable? That war correspondents don’t just go gallivanting around the Middle East having babies; or that even now, as we began to tentatively settle down, we still didn’t know where we wanted to be? I definitely didn’t have the Arabic—or even the English, this hour of the morning—to express the array of emotions this demand evoked.

  “I want a baby,” I told her, all innocent shrugs, “but Mohamad doesn’t.”

  This was another trick I had learned in Umm Hassane’s school of culinary and rhetorical arts: whenever she wanted something her way, she would claim, piously, that Mohamad Ali likes it this way or Mohamad Ali wants this. But I should have known better than to try to wield the master’s sword against her.

  “Mohamad doesn’t want one?” she growled, flicking aside his opinion with a toss of her chin. “Who cares what he says? Bring me a baby!”

  PART IV

  Eat, Pray, War

  Eating is a small, good thing in a time like this.

  —Raymond Carver, “A Small, Good Thing”

  Chapter 21

  Fear and Shopping

  I WAS SITTING IN Arabic class, on a warm July morning, when Leena called. “Hezbollah kidnapped two Israeli soldiers this morning; I’m going to get a pedicure,” she announced, as though this was the natural progression of things. “It might be a while before I get a chance to go to the beauty salon again,” she explained, and that’s when I began to suspect there would be more than a prisoner exchange this time.

  “All right, class,” said my Arabic teacher, sighing. A great beauty in her day, Hayat wore spectacles on a long golden chain and wool sweater sets. Her eyebrows were always penciled in precise arches, her chocolate brown hair reassuringly rigid. I thought she was going to send us home, but Hayat met disasters, displacement, and war like a quintessential Beiruti:

  “Today I think we are going to learn some new words,” she said. “Who knows the verb ‘to kidnap’?”

  Turning to the blackboard, she wrote the Arabic terms for kidnapping, explosion, assassination. Soon the students were shouting out vocabulary words: How do you say prisoner exchange? Negotiation? Car bomb?

  A few minutes later, Hayat’s phone rang and she answered. Her expression changed as she listened. “Maal asaf,” she said, and sighed again, “I think we should probably all go home.”

  I walked down Bliss Street toward home. Isolated cars and taxis were speeding toward whatever destination they believed was safe. Soldiers and armored vehicles trundled down the streets, heading for the Corniche and the airport road. Stores and schools were still open, but that first day, as the Israelis bombed southern Lebanon, most people in Beirut stayed home.

  “Usually, during the civil war, people started rushing to the stores, filling their baskets, whenever they thought there would be an attack,” said Hayat when I called her that afternoon. “Today the grocery stores were like normal, except less people than usual.” The whole city was waiting.

  The next day, Israeli warplanes bombed the Beirut airport and the fuel stores of the Jiyeh power plant. Silently, simultaneously, the entire city heard the same call to action, and all of Beirut answered the call, preparing for war with an ancient Lebanese tradition: shopping.

  At Smith’s the shelves were already empty. The dairy cabinet was cleaned out—no yogurt, no labneh, no milk. While I dithered and waited to see what would happen, my neighbors were already rampaging through the supermarket, stripping it like battle-hardened commandos—which, in a sense, they were. In wartime, shopping becomes a Darwinian exercise in amassing the most calories in the least amount of time. Beirutis were so practiced at this adrenaline-driven combat shopping that they could do it without even losing their sense of style.

  I watched haplessly as a young hipster slouched through the dairy section in impeccably mussed hair and Diesel jeans, shadowed by a Sri Lankan maid in a crisp ironed uniform. With infinite boredom, he pointed at items on the shelves: a box of pasta, a jar of artichoke hearts. She retrieved these desiderata and placed them carefully in his basket. He rambled on, glancing from side to side through sleepy, half-closed eyes like the store was a nightclub and none of the girls were pretty enough for his taste. He was so cool he was barely burning any calories. I was breaking a sweat just watching him.

  I wandered through the aisles picking up the random, useless products that remained: a can of creamed corn. Tricolored pasta. Vacuum-packed bacon. Dried tortellini, which Mohamad and I would eat all through the war, and forever after refer to, with a shudder of revulsion, as “the war pasta.”

  People bought siege food, anything that wouldn’t need refrigeration—powdered milk, canned hummus, beans, cracked wheat. But they also succumbed to less rational cravings, like the yogurt, which would spoil once the electricity started going out. When I called my friend Nahlah to see what she wanted, she asked for Rice Krispies. I bought her six boxes and a chocolate cake mix for myself. And everybody lined up to buy bread.

  In the Middle East, food without bread is like soup without a bowl. Most Arabic food is either made with bread, or designed to be eaten with bread, or it is bread. In lean years, bread could extend a meager serving to feed an entire family. Life revolved around bread. If a piece of bread fell to the ground, Umm Hassane would kiss it and press it to her forehead before putting it back on the counter.

  Most Beirut neighborhoods have a furn, a communal bread oven where people gather in the mornings and early afternoon to get freshly baked manaeesh: crisp little pizzas topped with zaatar, cheese, ground beef or lamb, or spicy Armenian sausage, to name just a few incarnations. The furn also supplies news, gossip, conversation—communion in the most generous sense.

  During the Lebanese civil war, the neighborhood bakery became even more important. When cooking gas was scarce, people reverted to the age-old practice of taking their dough to the neighborhood oven, summed up in the old proverb “Let the baker bake your dough, even if he steals half of it.” Women and children went out for supplies—they were less likely to be mistaken for combatants—and the women who gathered at the neighborhood bakery became known as niswan al furn, “the ladies of the oven.”

  In my friend Barbara’s East Beirut neighborhood, bakeries were neutral ground during the civil war. People would pass one shared newspaper down the line, discussing its contents. “You often had brothers in the same family in different militias, fighting each other,” she said, “but when they were in the furn, they were neutral. There was no fighting there.”

  But others had darker memories. As a child, my friend Samar would stand in line for hours to buy bread, only to see fighters from Amal and other militias swagger up to the front of the line and seize the entire neighborhood’s ration without even paying. “I would wait in line for bread, and then the grown-ups would come and take it, and I would cry,” recalled my friend Malek (who grew up to be a professor of nutrition). Sometimes militiamen would take over an entire bakery: if they controlled the bread supply, they controlled the neighborhood.

  During the war, the invisible network of obligations that we call a social contract began to break down. When the destruction reached the neighborhood bakery, it was the ultimate blow. If you had bread, you could convince yourself that you had what it represented—a stable, civilized life.

  I bought five loaves of bread. It would mold in a day or two, but who doesn’t feel better after smelling freshly baked bread? So many Beirutis bought bread that day that the bakers’ syndicate issued a statement to the local radio stations that people should stop hoarding bread. “If you do continue to stockpile bread,” the bakers warned ominously, “it will contribute to the crisis.”

  I had to laugh. The bakers made it sound as if an army of housewives and Sri Lankan maids had caused the war. I imagined what Umm Hassane might say: “If we stop buying bread, will Israel and Hezbollah stop bombing each other
?”

  After stocking up on bread, I drove to Haret Hreik with my friend Jackson, a radio reporter. Earlier that day, Israeli Brigadier General Dan Halutz had warned that unless Hezbollah stopped firing rockets at Israel, the Israeli military would start targeting Hezbollah areas, even in Beirut, and that residents of dahiyeh should draw their own conclusions. We wanted to ask ordinary Shiites what they thought of their brand-new war.

  The streets were empty except for shabab, young men, whizzing past on mopeds with yellow Hezbollah flags fluttering off the backs. A few older men hurried home with hastily purchased groceries, battening down for a siege. Inside one apartment building, we saw families filing out of the elevator, mostly elderly couples fleeing the neighborhood, clutching overnight bags. All the people we talked to said that they supported “the resistance.” But they looked around nervously as they said it: Hezbollah is always watching, always listening, and this is what they were expected to say. They all looked terrified.

  That night the city was utterly silent. At 3:30 in the morning, it started—a humming, a shearing through the sky, coming from all directions as if it were rising from the sea. Just then, the call to prayer wavered out from the mosque. The faint recorded voice of the muezzin was drowned in the rising growl of the warplanes.

  I went outside and stood on the balcony. The buildings huddled quiet all around. A flare shot up from not far away, a red shooting star, and it arced out over the silent city and toward the sea. Then came the jackhammer bursts of antiaircraft guns. Then the first bombs. I went back inside and lay awake listening until dawn drained the sky of darkness.