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

by Annia Ciezadlo

  At precisely eleven a.m., Hezbollah spokesman Hussein Naboulsi showed up. Three fighters in black jackets and dark baggy pants flanked him closely, casting glances from side to side, Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders as casually as purses. Reporters raced to him and screamed out questions that seemed as rhetorical as anything from Umm Hassane:

  “How do you justify the bombings of Israeli civilians?”

  “Where is Hassan Nasrallah? Is he dead?”

  “Are you using civilians as human shields?”

  Naboulsi ignored all the questions. “I’m gonna speak to you; you have to follow me!” he shouted, in his peculiar falsetto monotone. “If I tell you to evacuate, you’re going to evacuate! The cameramen, don’t go the way you want, just follow me. You’re gonna see buildings, roads, everything! We’re gonna take you to the heart of Haret Hreik, where the secretariat general was . . .”

  He stalked off into the wreckage, and we scrambled after him. The streets were a heaving sea of concrete. We were half-walking, half-climbing over the insides of people’s lives: a red plastic rocking horse, a radiator, half a sofa. Piles and piles of CDs. Plastic chairs, pajamas, cinder blocks. A college textbook on diabetes. Naboulsi kept up a stream of increasingly frenzied patter. “This is the Israeli democracy!” he shrieked. “This is the justice in the world today! If there is a conscience in the world, wake up! Wake up! Wake up before it’s too late!”

  Hezbollah’s packaged tour fell apart in minutes. Everyone wandered off into the maze of smashed concrete, shooting photos or writing in notebooks, and Naboulsi ended up scuttling around like a despairing third-grade teacher who had lost his field trip.

  Mohamad and I wandered off on our own and ran into our friend Nadim. He was standing in the middle of a canyon that used to be a city intersection and looking up a tall apartment block. The roof had been sheared off but had not fallen, and it tilted dangerously off the side of the building like an absurdly cocked fedora. “This is so fucking unbelievable,” he muttered. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

  During peacetime, when we need metaphors, we raid the language of war. But the idiom of wartime is food: cannon fodder, carnage, slaughterhouse. Buildings and people are pancaked, sandwiched, sardined. Perhaps it is because the destruction reminds us of the knowledge we spend our lives avoiding—that we are all meat in the end. The giant disheveled ruins of apartment buildings resembled a monstrous, trashed banquet table: this building here is a club sandwich, gripped in a gigantic fist, with beds and curtains and television sets squirting out the sides like mayonnaise. That one over there is a giant wedding cake, each floor a frosted layer, the side sheared off by a blunt knife.

  The Party of God had planted Haret Hreik residents among the ruins. Every so often, one of them would pop out and fulminate for the cameras. “My house is here; it was destroyed, like everyone else’s,” shouted a construction worker named Muhammad. He gave the stock line, which we would hear so many times before the war was through: “I will rebuild my house one, two, three, five, and ten times, God willing. Me and my wife and my kids are with Sayyid Hassan until death!”

  A block or two later we ran into a cluster of Lebanese journalists we knew gathered in front of a grocery store. Patricia from L’Orient-Le Jour had given up trying to write in her notebook and was simply standing, stunned and aimless. Rym from The Daily Star was looking around, her arms folded over her chest as if she were cold. The store’s metal shutters lay twisted on the sidewalk, which glittered with broken glass. Nearby, a donation box for Hezbollah’s Islamic schools, charities, and hospitals stood untouched on its pole, bearing the promise in yellow Arabic script: CHARITY KEEPS AWAY CATASTROPHE.

  “I used to live here,” said a middle-aged Daily Star reporter. “It’s beyond recognition.”

  But looking up at the splintered rooftops, we did recognize where we were. This pile of rubble was Aunt Khadija’s house, where we had gone the previous Christmas to eat mighli.

  Christmas Eve, 2005. Hanan was taking all of us—me, Mohamad, and her mother—to Aunt Khadija’s to see the baby. Khadija’s son Hussein had gotten married, and the young couple had just produced a daughter. Umm Hassane and I were both excited, but for different reasons, because with any luck we were going to eat mighli.

  There is an empire that spans the Middle East, the Balkans, and Eastern Europe; an empire not of humans, or their gods, but of puddings. The inhabitants of this Pudding Belt—be they Muslims, Christians, Jews, Armenians, Turks, Greeks, Russians, Serbs, or Poles—create an endless supply of ceremonial puddings. Some are sweet, others are savory, and many are both. All these puddings have two things in common: They are all made of seeds, ancient symbols of death and rebirth—cereals, beans, nuts, or all three. And they are all made to be shared with people outside the family circle, as an offering to the gods, alms for the poor, or a dish made in thanks for a lucky event and passed out to forty neighbors—ten in each of the four directions.

  These puddings belong to a deeper, more ancient tradition than any of the faiths and nations that have usurped them. Some consider them descendants of the pudding Noah made from the seeds that he took on the ark; others describe them as the foods of the Prophet’s family. But the ironic and even beautiful thing is that each nationality or sect holds them equally sacred. Turkish Sunnis make ashura and give it to neighbors to celebrate good fortune. Polish Catholics eat kutia on Christmas Eve to celebrate the imminent birth of the savior. Greek Orthodox Christians make kolyva and share it with passersby to commemorate the dead. And Lebanese of all faiths make mighli to celebrate life—the birth of a child.

  When a baby is born to a Lebanese family, visitors file in for weeks, like the Magi, bearing gifts and envelopes of cash. In return, the family—regardless of class, geography, and sect—serves them mighli, a cinnamon-scented rice pudding topped with nuts. People believe that the spices in mighli will help the new mother “bring the milk.” But mighli transcends its physical function and passes into the realm of symbolism: When Leena’s second cousin had a baby in New York, Leena’s mother made mighli in faraway Beirut and served it at a family dinner, making sure to mention that it was in honor of the New York birth.

  I had heard all sorts of stories about this pudding. So when I learned we were going to visit the young couple at Aunt Khadija’s, I asked Umm Hassane if there would be mighli.

  She shot me a penetrating look. “You want mighli?” she asked.

  I could see the wheels turning inside her head: Mohamad and I had been stubborn on the baby front so far, but perhaps this interest in mighli betrayed a deeper hunger. If I wanted to fill my belly with mighli, might I not also yearn to fill it with a child of my own? And someday soon, God willing, serve mighli from my own hands? She threw on her long black overcoat and her best headscarf, and as we left the apartment, I saw a gleam of baby lust in her eyes.

  I expected the Christmas decorations, the poinsettias wrapped in red foil, the lighted butcher shops and sweet stores, to disappear entirely once we passed the giant painting of Musa al-Sadr that guarded one of the entrances to dahiyeh.

  But the first thing we saw once we passed the Vanished Imam was a row of giant inflatable Santas. Syrian day laborers lined the side of the road, hungry-looking men with sun-dark skin, all wearing red-and-white polyester Santa hats. The stores that sold cheap aluminum teakettles, Chinese notebooks, and plastic flowers were bursting with gigantic red Mylar bows and potted poinsettias. One store’s outside wall was being stormed by a platoon of Santa commandos. Another had a six-foot mechanical Santa stationed at the entrance that roared to life periodically, swiveling his hips like a belly dancer and roaring “HO HO HO! MER-RY CHRISTMAS!” The war on Christmas, which is what American Christians were calling secular and ecumenical holiday traditions that year, hadn’t made it to the Shiite heartland of dahiyeh.

  In Aunt Khadija’s living room, we sat with Hussein and his tired-looking wife, Lina, who was a schoolteacher. We chatted about the baby before t
urning to the national obsession—more talked about than sports or the weather, let alone religion or politics—of time off.

  Earlier that year, when Hariri was assassinated, the government had immediately launched its time-tested crisis-management plan: it shut down. Come December, the prime minister decreed that everybody had to give up a few days of holiday vacation to make up for the lost workdays.

  “Why should we sacrifice our holidays for the actions of the Syrians?” Aunt Khadija demanded.

  “But Christmas is not our holiday,” said Hussein. “What does this holiday have to do with us?”

  “Christmas is a national holiday,” said Aunt Khadija, severely. “It belongs to everyone.”

  A squall from the baby put a stop to the time-off discussion. Hussein, Lina, and Aunt Khadija all ran to the nursery. As they disappeared down the hall, Umm Hassane seized her chance.

  “Should we ask about the mighli?” she said, leaning forward, with a glance toward the kitchen, as if this was our chance to dash in and steal some.

  “No, no!” said Hanan, horrified that her mother was going to embarrass us all by asking for food.

  Umm Hassane subsided, but it was only a tactical retreat. Her eyes gravitated toward the kitchen, where mighli awaited. She might have issued some secret old-lady signal, or perhaps a clandestine old-lady phone call had already taken place, because not long after that, Aunt Khadija came back from the kitchen with little silver bowls brimming with the pudding of fertility and life.

  Mighli is as firm as flan but more solid. There are no eggs; the pudding gets its bounce from powdered rice. It is usually a warm speckled brown from the spices—cinnamon, caraway, sometimes anise, in some areas even more. Old-fashioned mothers stand over the mighli for an hour, stirring until it thickens. Newfangled ones make it in a “Presto,” a pressure cooker, and it’s ready in minutes. You put it in the refrigerator to firm, and then comes the best part. You go to your neighborhood nut seller and tell him you need “mighli mix.” He will give you something more or less like the following: walnuts, raw peeled almonds, pine nuts, shelled pistachios, coconut shavings, and sultanas. Some people use cashews too; others put nothing but walnuts and coconut. Sprinkle the nuts on top of the mighli, and you’re ready to bless well-wishers with your bounty. All you need is a baby.

  “Or you can buy a mix,” said Hussein’s wife, Lina, the young and practical schoolteacher, who still exuded the weary satisfaction of a new mother. “You just pour it in boiling water, and it’s ready.”

  Umm Hassane said nothing but fluffed herself like a chicken and radiated disapproval.

  “Is it any good?” asked Hussein, shooting a cautious glance between mother, aunt, and wife.

  “Yes, it’s good, it’s good,” the young mother maintained.

  Everyone raised their eyebrows and said “Hm!” in that skeptical, what-will-they-think-of-next way.

  Aunt Khadija had clearly been tipped off. As we left, she detained me at the doorway, glancing first at Mohamad, and then at Umm Hassane, and pressed three giant plastic tubs of mighli into my hands.

  I rounded the final corner, passing Aunt Khadija’s flattened building, circling back to where the tour began. A bearded, black-jacketed Hezbollah gunman stood waiting against the wall. “Yalla, yalla,” he shouted, jerking his head to hurry us along.

  “Can you believe this is Lebanon?” said Rym, walking up to our car. “Where we were sitting and smoking argileh two weeks ago?”

  On Rym’s birthday we’d sat in downtown Beirut with her friends, a mixed group of Saudis, Lebanese, Canadians, Americans, even a Polish lady she’d dug up somewhere, outside Rym’s favorite restaurant, which was T.G.I. Friday’s. It seemed even more distant, now, than that Christmas only seven months ago.

  I shook my head: No, I can’t believe this smoking wreck is the same Lebanon.

  We stood next to Abu Hussein’s car, afraid to stay but somehow also reluctant to leave.

  Finally the bearded gunman reappeared. “Airplane, airplane!” he shouted in Arabic, flapping his arms like a child imitating a bird.

  There weren’t any warplanes overhead, but nobody wanted to risk it. Everybody ran for their cars and drove away.

  Chapter 23

  Cooking with Umm Hassane

  I HAD MJADARA HAMRA. I had hummus and tabbouleh. I had shish taouk, juicy and orange, tucked under a blanket of warm bread soaked with tomato sauce, grilled with onions and bloody, blackened tomatoes. I had gone to our favorite neighborhood restaurant, Abu Hassan, which stayed open throughout the war, and returned with a feast. But nothing, not even the mjadara hamra, could tempt Umm Hassane. She frowned at the food as though it had betrayed her.

  “Umm Hassane, eat something,” I begged, setting the plate down on the coffee table in front of her. “You have to eat something.”

  “I’m not hungry,” she said. “How can I have any appetite? What do I want with food?”

  As the awful July continued, Umm Hassane grew more and more mdepressa. She stopped eating. She spent hours lying on her back on the sofa, flipping from Al-Jazeera to the Lebanese satellite channels and then back again, watching endless footage of bombing and Nasrallah’s never-ending speeches. She hardly spoke. One evening, she sat straight up, glared, shook her finger, and announced: “There were going to be 1.6 million tourists to Lebanon this summer.” Then she lay back down and was silent for the rest of the night. Over the past few days, as the electricity flickered in and out, the bombing thundered in the dark hours before dawn, and Nasrallah’s bearded face flashed from the television screen, she had stopped eating altogether.

  Umm Hassane’s apartment was close to Shiyah, which ended up getting bombed, and she couldn’t go home. A magazine had asked me to go to the south, but we couldn’t leave Beirut because we had to take care of her, and I was beginning to get fed up. I didn’t want to have a baby, to cook and clean, to keep house. I wanted to be in the south, at the front line, telling the real story: civilians driving up through the bombs, or trapped in their houses, under bombardment. I knew this was a purely selfish drive—to avoid the awful guilt and helplessness of war by pretending to be doing something useful—but I was a journalist, not a housewife, and it was the most useful thing I knew how to do. The last place I wanted to be was trapped in my own apartment, taking care of a cantankerous old woman who started out trying to get me pregnant and now seemed to be trying to starve herself to death.

  The next day Mohamad went out reporting. “My mom’s so stubborn,” he complained before he left. “I told her not to sleep with the AC on, but she won’t listen. Last night she got so cold she was shaking.”

  Later that afternoon, I was on the phone with my editor when I noticed Umm Hassane trembling. She was hunched over on the couch, her entire body shaking violently.

  There was no air conditioner here in the living room. It was at least 85 degrees; she could not possibly be cold. Yet she was still shaking. I laid the back of my hand on her forehead, which burned like a hot lamp. Her face was white and drawn. She had lost a lot of weight. We hadn’t noticed. We had been covering the war.

  My editor was still on the line, talking about Nasrallah. I covered the phone with my hand and switched languages.

  “Umm Hassane, you are too much sick,” I said, in barely coherent Arabic. “You have to go to hospital.”

  “No, no,” she said. Even her voice was trembling. “I’m fine. I don’t want to go to the hospital.”

  She was not fine. She was too weak to sit up straight. I had to get her to the hospital right away; I had to get back to my editor, who was impossible to reach on the phone, and I had to finish my story.

  At that moment the other line rang. It was Hassan calling from Paris to see if we were all right. “Hassan, you have to . . . talk to your mother,” I said, struggling to keep Arabic and French in separate corners. “I believe that she is vraiment, vraiment malade . . . She must go to hospital. You talk to her. She must go.”

  She wouldn’t lis
ten to Hassan either. “Shu baarafni, I’m fine,” she insisted. “What do I want with the hospital? They’ll take money!”

  I begged, I bullied, I threatened. I used words I didn’t even know I knew. She wouldn’t go. The war had awakened some survival instinct toward absolute refusal and immobility. “They’ll take money,” she kept insisting.

  “Forget the fucking money!” I finally shouted at her, in English, knowing she couldn’t understand.

  Forget the fever; forget the war. Forget the entire Israeli military, with its Merkavas and cluster bombs and night-vision goggles. Forget Hezbollah, and its rockets and “resistance” and its black-clad commandos. If she wanted to be a martyr, I’d kill her myself.

  In the five and a half hours that Mohamad sat with his mother in the emergency room, he witnessed a parade of people with symptoms of stress and shock: tightness of breath, pounding pulse, panic attacks, heart attacks. Post-traumatic stress disorder. People sick from chronic war. When the doctors got to Umm Hassane, they found she had a severe kidney infection, and they hooked her up to an IV and kept her there. If we hadn’t taken her to the hospital—if we’d listened to her and left her at home—she probably would have died.

  The next few weeks passed in disconnected moments, splinters of time that stand out in my memory as clear and sharp as shards of glass. I remember seeing the neighborhood kids playing in an empty lot. Before the war, all of Beirut had fluttered with polyester flags of Brazil, Iran, Germany, and other World Cup teams, and the children had been playing soccer. Now they were standing on piles of civil-war rubble, waving plastic rifles in the air, and shouting: “I’m Hezbollah! No, you’re not, I’m Hezbollah!” I remember reading The Satanic Verses late at night, into the dawn, when bombs made it difficult and perhaps undesirable to sleep. The far-off explosions gently shaking the building, reminding me that people might be dying while I was safe in bed. I remember Munir calling and saying: “It’s like Waiting for Godot, no?” Paula calling and saying “He’s in denial, no? Sensitive people, they sometimes try to pretend that they are tough. It’s very useful, denial. I didn’t understand that until now.”