I remember meeting a friend of a friend in Baromètre, an angry, bespectacled young man who said, “Your country is under attack, so you find yourself defending Hezbollah. This is a fundamentalist organization! They’re against everything I stand for! But not to defend them is to say that you agree with Israel, with what Israel is doing to this country. Who else is going to defend Lebanon? Do I want the Syrian Baath Party to defeat Israel? So that it can fuck me, like it fucked me before?”
I remember sitting in a different café, interviewing the head of an anticorruption organization, who said, “We are in a war; yet here we are, in the heart of Beirut, in a café packed with people, all very well-dressed. You might think that is very shallow, but this is what makes Lebanon different. This is what made us survive the civil war. This is the way to resist any war.”
Calls from friends outside Lebanon were like echoes from a distant past. My friend Cara had once lived in Israel, just north of Kiryat Shmona, in one of the areas Hezbollah was firing rockets at. She remembered the sound of bombs falling at night. She called me almost every day. Once she called to say that her ex-brother-in-law’s house had been hit by a rocket. Another time she called to see if I was okay, and I said: “I think so. I can’t talk right now. I don’t have any wine. I have to go get wine to cook with.” The fact that I have absolutely no memory of this conversation tells me something about memory, and war, and my state of mind at that time.
I called Ali Fahs, the farmer from Souk El Tayeb, to see if he was okay. He was trapped in Jibsheet, the small southern village where he lived. The bombing was very intense there, and he hadn’t left his house in fifteen days. He passed the time writing a manifesto, an open letter to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, American President George W. Bush, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Did I want to hear it?
“Olmert, Bush, and Condi Rice, there is no difference,” he read. I could hear paper rustling as he spoke. “In the name of democracy, you are killing the children and innocent people. And destroying all means of life and humanity. Instead of stopping the war, you put oil on the fire. You send funds and deliver bombs to kill more and more innocent people. Under your forged democracy, you know, and we know, the main reasons for this war is the New Middle East Plan.”
For the first nine days, people in Lebanon were hoping that the United States would pressure the Israeli government to agree to a cease-fire. Then, on July 21, the Bush administration announced it was rushing a delivery of precision-guided bombs to Israel. That same day, Condoleezza Rice said that a cease-fire would be a “false promise” if it happened before Hezbollah was defeated. “I have no interest in diplomacy for the sake of returning Lebanon and Israel to the status quo ante,” said Rice. “What we’re seeing here, in a sense, is the growing—the birth pangs of a new Middle East, and whatever we do, we have to be certain that we’re pushing forward to the new Middle East, not going back to the old one.”
Describing the death of Lebanese civilians as “the birth pangs of a new Middle East” fed people’s worst suspicions about the United States: that it harbored secret imperial designs on the region; that it was preparing some apocalyptic master plan; that it didn’t value Lebanese lives as much as those of Israelis.
“All this war, just for that!” Ali exclaimed. “They want to make the Middle East new, to be in Israel and America’s hands.” There was no more talk of California or gas stations now. He finished his manifesto.
“Will you print that in your newspaper?” he asked. “Of course, you will correct my English. I didn’t complete it yet, but I would like to write more. I would like to make something—I am fifteen days at home, I cannot even work.”
I didn’t tell him that I didn’t have a newspaper, or that American editors were already bored with this little war that seemed so big to him. I asked him if he had enough food and water, if he and his family were going to be all right.
“I am a professional in food,” he reminded me with dignity. “I have labneh, I have laban, I have everything. You can keep it a long time.”
Of course! A siege meant nothing to a maker of mouneh. Until the war ended, Ali and his family would live off his mouneh, food meant to last through winter or war, eating away the stock he once had hoped would take them to California. He was even feeding his neighbors, who had run out of food.
“In the mountains, we have food enough for two months,” he said. “We have zaatar, we have burghul; we can live for two months.”
Wars are all alike, but everyone experiences them differently; part of the ugliness of war is how it intensifies those differences. You are reading my account of one war—my imperfect memories of what I saw and felt and did. Others had their own perceptions and their own realities. But everybody, even refugees who had been bombed out of their homes, said the same thing: “We don’t hate the American people. Only the American government.” A refugee from Haret Hreik said it to us after going back to his flattened apartment to retrieve his pet bird. A refugee from the south said it to us at the Berkeley Hotel. A talkative, roly-poly servees driver named Muhammad Awada said it to me while he was chain-smoking, driving across the Fouad Chehab overpass, and trying to turn around and talk to me all at the same time. “We don’t hate the Americans,” he kept saying. “We love America! My car, American—Toyota Corona! My cigarettes, American—Marlboro!”
I didn’t explain that the car was a Carina, not a Corona, or that Toyota was actually Japanese. He had enough on his mind already. In colloquial Lebanese Arabic, you “drink” cigarettes instead of smoking them; I got the feeling he might have drunk a few Coronas too, and not the Toyota kind, because he kept shouting: “I drink Marlboros! I drive Toyota! I love America!”
And then he would turn around to face me, taking his hand off the wheel to punctuate the sentence with his cigarette, causing his car to swerve across several lanes, and exclaim: “We don’t hate America! We love America, we love it too much! Why—doesn’t—America—love—us?”
After a week in the hospital, Umm Hassane came back with her complaining powers fully restored. She had disapproved of our eating habits before the war, but now they were even worse. We didn’t keep much food in the house because the electricity would go out for eight, ten, twelve hours, and anything in the fridge would spoil.
I was beginning to appreciate the persistence of mouneh. Lebanon’s history of war and famine had kept the old traditions so close to the surface that they were almost second nature. My friend Adessa was trapped in Bsharri, her ancestral village in northern Lebanon, and because they had no lemons her family had reverted to the age-old practice of flavoring their tabbouleh with verjus, the sour juice of unripe grapes. (“That’s what kept us sane,” she told me later, “that the tabbouleh tasted like tabbouleh.”) The old women got their grinders out and started grinding cornmeal and flour by hand. My Arabic teacher Hayat was stuffing leftover tabbouleh into grape leaves, another old-fashioned practice that had survived because of times like these. In our house, we got by on modern-day mouneh—Picón cheese, ready-made hummus from Smith’s (they spelled it “Homos” on the container), and cans of tuna fish.
For Umm Hassane, this haphazard eating was the final insult. Everything was falling apart: Hanan had fled to stay with friends in the mountains, everybody’s houses had been destroyed, the Lebanese government was doing its best impression of a failed state. Even Nasrallah seemed lost, his beard grown into a wild gray tangle overnight. One day, as we sat down to a meal of Homos and tuna fish from Smith’s, she said, “It hurts my heart to eat this food.”
We interrogated her on what she meant. Did she mean it gave her heartburn? Or was she grieving that she couldn’t cook? Eventually, after much cross-questioning, with Mohamad translating her cryptic pronouncements, we determined that she wanted to make tabeekh.
“But how can I?” she lamented.
Mohamad and I looked at each other guiltily.
“When the war is over, when we’re not so busy, then we’ll do some re
al cooking,” I promised her.
A day or two later, when I had a free morning, I took Umm Hassane aside. There was a dish that only a few restaurants made—a creamy, fluffy mixture of potatoes, onions, and scrambled eggs. It was classic home cooking, the quintessential comfort food—Lebanon’s moral equivalent of macaroni and cheese. Mohamad and I both loved it.
“Umm Hassane,” I said. “I know you’re sick, but will you please show me how to make batata wa bayd?”
She began by surveying my onions. Before the war, I had bought a giant wreath of small Spanish onions from Ali Fahs, dozens of them woven together by their own dried stems. They were still firm, their pearly skin striped with hints of minty green.
She held it by the tail at arm’s length, like a dead cat. She tore off an onion and tried to peel it whole. It was too fresh, the skin clinging tightly to the flesh, and she threw it down in disgust.
“What are these onions?” she demanded, flaunting an accusatory palm in their direction. “Why did you buy so many?”
I took over the onion operations, cutting in half and then peeling, scoring along latitude and longitude like a vengeful god, until we had about a cup and a half of finely chopped dice.
Now for a pot. I got out my set of stainless steel pots and pans, a wedding present from a generous friend, and displayed a couple for her to choose from.
“These pots are no good,” she said. “Tefal is better.”
“Umm Hassane, these are very expensive pots,” I told her, indignant, and pulled out the big guns: “From America!”
“From America?” she sniffed, and raised a skeptical eyebrow. That these inferior pots, with no Teflon coating, could have come from America—land of Mazola and Tylenol!—was a preposterous claim. Far more likely was that Annia got ripped off again.
“Put them in there,” she says, pointing sternly to my medium-sized Tefal. She poured in corn oil, then onions, covered the pot, and turned down the flame as low as it would go.
“How long does it need?” I was writing down times and weights and measurements, poised over my notebook like a cub reporter on her first big story.
She gave me one of those Jesus, where do they find you people? looks, the kind I remember so well from my first forays into a restaurant kitchen. “Until it’s ready!”
While the onions were getting themselves ready, Umm Hassane chopped the potatoes into half-inch squares with the economical knife work of a master chef. I scraped the avalanche of little squares into my big glass measuring cup.
She watched with outrage: this was too much.
“Why?” she cried out. “Why do you need to measure everything? It only needs five potatoes, two onions, and that’s it!”
My Arabic was far too flimsy to convey the concept of recipe standardization, let alone the ambiguities of a world with different-sized onions and potatoes. I mumbled something about wanting to remember how to do it next time.
“Just put two onions and a few pieces of potato, and we’ll be fine!” she said, with a note of pity. She dumped the potatoes in with the onions, added some salt, and covered the pot once again. “We’ll cook this,” she said slowly and clearly, as though explaining to a dense child, “until it’s ready.”
I had spent countless hours, and destroyed many a batch of potatoes, trying to figure out how to make batata wa bayd. I had boiled the potatoes, and then chopped them, only to see them crumble in the pan to a soggy, oily sludge. I tried frying the potatoes like short-order home fries, then adding the chopped onions afterward, and ended up with oily leathery potatoes encrusted with burnt black onions. I fried the potatoes and the onions separately, then added them together, and that wasn’t right either: the flavors didn’t blend. During all this experimentation, it never occurred to me that you would caramelize the onions first, then slow-cook the potatoes in a covered pot, or that the onions would melt into the potatoes in this lyrical way.
“I’m learning a new way to make batata wa bayd!” I exclaimed, delighted to finally learn the secret of this deceptively simple dish.
She frowned. I made it differently before?
“Annia doesn’t usually make it this way,” explained Mohamad, who had just walked into the kitchen.
“She makes it the way your brother in Spain makes it,” said Umm Hassane, distressed.
“No, no, Annia makes batata wa bayd too, but not this way.”
Umm Hassane stalked out of the kitchen and flung herself down on the sofa in theatrical despair. “If you wanted to do it that way,” she cried, “then why did you ask me to make it for you?”
Mohamad realized his mistake and followed her into the living room. “No, no, we wanted to learn how to make it this way,” he pleaded. “This is the right way.”
“I don’t know how he makes it!” she wailed, inconsolable. “They call it tortilla. You fry the potatoes, then you add eggs—”
“No, we want it this way,” he said hastily. “When Annia makes it, she boils the potatoes, then fries everything together—”
“She boils the potatoes!”
Umm Hassane was aghast: this was proof that we didn’t want it her way. “Well, if you wanted it that way, why did you have me do it?”
“No, we don’t want it that way—we want it your way,” he entreated.
“Well, fine. I just thought you wanted it the other way.”
She stretched out full length and started whirling her prayer beads. We huddled in the kitchen and watched her warily through the door.
“Why did she want to do this complicated thing?” she demanded, addressing her suffering to the dark and silent television screen. “It would have been easier to make the tortilla!”
After about ten minutes, she responded to some inner culinary clock that told her exactly when the potatoes were done. She sighed, heaved herself up off the sofa, and shuffled back into the kitchen. Taking the lid off the pot, she held out a spoonful of potatoes and summoned me with the command: “Taste, taste!”
Taste! If I’ve got one bad habit, it’s not tasting enough while I’m cooking. I’m far too prone to rely on measurements, precision directions—words on paper—over the truth of my own senses. This, too, does not fly in Umm Hassane’s kitchen. She constantly forced me to sample, adjust, season: to trust my tongue instead of my words. Holding out a spoonful of the potatoes, she urged me to taste them “so we know it’s ready.”
They were melting, exquisite, like potato risotto, soft as macaroni and cheese. The potatoes were creamy, silky with oil and suffused with flavor from the sticky caramelized onions almost invisibly dissolved into them.
“This is better than tortilla!” I said.
“How do you know it’s better?”
“I just tasted it!”
She softened. Just for a moment, she looked happy. Then she recovered.
“You tasted it before the eggs were in it,” she grunted, and turned back to the stove.
Chapter 24
Supper of Stones
IN JUST THIRTY-THREE days, the war in Lebanon smashed the country’s infrastructure, devastated its economy, and set back sixteen years of postwar reconstruction. About twelve hundred people were dead, most of them civilians, and civilians were still dying: Israel had used four million “cluster” munitions that left behind hundreds of thousands of unexploded bomblets, and as people streamed back to their homes, the cluster bomb casualties were mounting. Hezbollah had fired nearly four thousand rockets at Israel, killing forty-three Israeli civilians, and had killed one hundred twenty Israeli soldiers during the fighting.
A few weeks after the cease-fire, Mohamad and I drove down to Bint Jbeil with Aunt Nahla. We picked her up at her brother’s apartment building in Ras al-Nabaa. They were waiting for us outside when we drove up, both dressed in their finest: her in a black beaded robe, the old man in a neat little formal shirt and trousers, although he was not coming himself. He shook our hands, and we set out on the journey.
Hezbollah had lined the airport road with bil
lboards. They were carefully color coordinated, like the banners of the independence intifada, and staggered in the manner of Burma-Shave signs. They heralded THE DIVINE VICTORY and NASR MIN ALLAH—literally, “Victory from God,” but also a play on Nasrallah’s name.
For the next several hours, we drove past parched tobacco fields, olive groves full of rubble, bridges cracked in half. In Ainata, a sign posted in a bombed and blackened gas station said: WE CONGRATULATE YOU FOR THE VICTORY. In Tibneen, a poster proclaimed: C’EST LA VICTOIRE DU SANG (“It is the Victory of Blood”), and shortly after that we came to Bint Jbeil.
After a while you run out of ways to describe the wreckage of war. The closest thing I can think of is New Orleans under water after a hurricane, but instead of water the city is flooded with giant blocks of stone. Some passageways had been cleared, the rubble shoved to the side and piled up in great mounds. In a few of these mountains of stones, Hezbollah had planted fluttering yellow flags with its green logo, a hand thrusting up and brandishing a Kalashnikov. Yellow banners declared: THIS IS YOUR DEMOCRACY USA.
We drove to the old city, the narrow streets where Hezbollah’s fighters had won its “Divine Victory.” The passageway that once led to Aunt Nahla’s house was gone, filled with an eight-foot-high pile of stone and rebar and wood. The entire top half of the house was sheared off. The gate was blasted open, and the stones tumbled in like a frozen wave. They reached halfway up the door.
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