Aunt Nahla got out of the car and walked to the edge of the pile of rubble. She seemed very small surrounded by all that stone. She looked around with an expression almost of vindication—not satisfaction, but not surprised either, as if she wanted us to think she had been expecting this all her life. Then her chin crumpled and her carefully arranged face collapsed.
“It’s all gone,” she said, and started to cry.
Mohamad and I climbed over the rubble and ducked into the doorway to her house. Most of the fruit trees had been crushed under the tsunami of stones. But at the back of the courtyard, hibiscus and oleander were blossoming, pink and white flowers looking out over a sea of gray. We clambered inside and tried to salvage what we could. A picture of Aunt Nahla’s father, Mohamad’s grandfather. A small carpet. I took a few muslin bags of her mouneh, carefully labeled in Arabic, which we threw out when we realized it probably wasn’t safe to eat. Later we learned there could have been unexploded bombs in the rubble, but we weren’t thinking about that then.
We left Aunt Nahla with her neighbors and went to visit Batoul. Her house was in ruins too, but not as thoroughly obliterated as Aunt Nahla’s. The air was thick with chalky dust and a subtle but nauseating smell of decay, hopefully from rotting food. In the kitchen, the blast had picked up a jar of tomatoes and smashed it against the wall, leaving a bloodstained Rorschach splattered on the wall.
Batoul was sorting through the ruins with her daughter Zainab. She had spent the day taking anything salvageable out of the kitchen and putting it in the back bedroom, the only room with walls intact. She had gotten somebody to reattach the door so their things would not be looted. Now she was heaving trash around hopelessly, as though she didn’t know what to do next, like a person puttering around in shock after a car accident. “Look at what they did to us, what Israel did to us,” she wailed, sinking to the floor and collapsing onto a pile of broken concrete. “The house is destroyed. Destroyed!”
What do you say to somebody who has lost her house and most of her possessions? Hesitantly, I said hello.
She paused in the midst of her lamentations. She lifted her head as if noticing me for the first time. She looked up with eyes of Ashura, her chin trembling, thirteen hundred years of despair and dispossession staring at me through the ages.
“You’ve lost weight,” she said, with a reproachful sniff.
Batoul spread a woven plastic mat over the chunks of plaster, concrete, and broken glass. Zainab fetched the food rations. This was what people in the south had relied on for the past month: tuna, canned hummus, bread, and bottled water distributed by international aid groups. She opened the can of hummus and glopped it into a bowl, where it retained the shape and striations from the metal can. She had no garlic, no olive oil—the jars in the kitchen had all burst from the blast of the bombs. “Hummus without olive oil!” she wailed.
We sat on the mat and scooped up handfuls of tuna and hummus with the bread. It wasn’t so bad—she had found a lemon and some tomatoes—but Batoul was inconsolable. “Oh Mohamad Ali, look at what’s become of us,” she said as we sat and ate. “You and your mother used to come over, and we would feed you. And now we don’t even have a roof over our heads!” Batoul did love to complain, like all the Bazzis, but this was literally true: the roof was blasted open to the sky.
Starving cats began to gather in the courtyard. They crept closer, craning their necks and getting ready to run—too frightened to come closer, too hungry to stay away. “This is what I used to feed these cats,” said Batoul, giving them the last of the tuna. “And now we have to eat it ourselves!” It wasn’t really the tuna she was upset about, but her demolished house.
A neighbor showed up, a little old man with only one tooth. He had brought a plastic bowl of grapes, nectarines, and pears. He sat on the floor a little distance away as we ate. But when he offered some tentative words of encouragement, some bromide that things would get better, Batoul turned on him.
“You got money from Hezbollah, and we got nothing!” she hissed.
After the Divine Victory, the Party of God started recording the damage and registering families for compensation. The distribution of this money would be a source of confusion and conflict for months and years to come. Israel and the Bush administration had hoped that the relentless bombing would turn the Shiite population against Hezbollah. But by destroying their homes, and for many their livelihoods, the war had made many Shiites even more dependent on the Party of God than before. They had nowhere else to turn.
The neighbor had gotten a stipend to rent an apartment until his compensation came through; but even though their house was uninhabitable, and their apartment in dahiyeh was utterly flattened, Batoul and Hajj Naji had not gotten any rental money. Batoul believed this was because they were not “close to” Hezbollah—in other words, they lacked wasta.
“I got the money because my house was destroyed,” said the neighbor, shrinking away from Batoul, who was not a small woman.
“You got it because you have wasta,” she snapped. “Look at our house? Isn’t it destroyed?”
He started to say something, but she interrupted him. “Hezb wasta!” she shouted. “Hezb wasta!” she screamed again, her voice hoarse with rage, and that was how the meal ended.
A few days later, back in Beirut, I was sitting in Walimah with Munir. “I think that after this war we’re going to have a lot of new believers,” said Munir, gloomily lighting a cigarette. “A lot more sexual frustration.”
Munir’s nephew Bashar had just returned from Tyre, the southern seaside town that was overrun with reporters and aid workers and all the other by-products of war. It was full of strange new characters now, according to Bashar—Iranian charities, Iranian money. Men with beards.
“They want to teach us how to be Shiite,” he said, curling his lip. “But in the wrong way.”
“What’s the right way to be Shiite?”
“To love life,” said Bashar. He was a young man.
Munir laughed, sounding infinitely tired, and stubbed out his cigarette. “Yes, but it can’t be a one-sided relationship, you know,” he said. “In order to love life, you need life to love you.”
At the first Tango Night after the war, Georges and I sat over a bowl of mlukhieh and caught up on the past month. One of the wonderful things that happened during the war (perhaps the only good thing) was the way that Lebanon’s post-civil-war generation filled the chasm left by the government’s failure. Young doctors examined the refugees, prescribed medicine, and delivered babies. Young actors put on plays and theater workshops to entertain bored, frightened children. The gay rights group and the anticorruption association fed refugees. Zico House and T-Marbouta, two of Hamra’s best cafés, had converted themselves into refugee centers for the duration of the war, and ultra-chic Club Social put on a benefit concert to collect money. Georges had spent this time driving around to the schools in his neighborhood, which were full of refugees, and giving free medical exams.
“Annia, I have a question for you,” he said. “During the war, I would always see these people on TV, and sometimes in the schools, saying they would sacrifice their children for Nasrallah.”
The party line: Me and my family are with Sayyid Hassan until death. I will sacrifice my sons for Hassan Nasrallah.
“Is it true?” he said, wrinkling his smooth forehead. “Do the Shiites really feel that way?”
“Of course not,” I told him.
I was a little shocked by the question. It was not my place to answer, but Mohamad was not there, and one of the reasons I loved Georges is that he bothered to question something most people believed they already knew.
After the war, I wrote a story about how Hezbollah used the ruins of dahiyeh as propaganda. But journalists, Israelis, and even many Lebanese were all complicit in a subtler propaganda. They were building a myth, one that bound Hassan Nasrallah and Ehud Olmert and CNN together in a convenient lie: That Middle Easterners—in this case, Lebanese Shiites�
�don’t value their lives the way Westerners do. That they love being martyrs. That they are happy to sacrifice themselves for some apocalyptic cause. That they died because they liked it.
Dan Gillerman, the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, used this myth to defend Israeli bombings of Lebanese civilians at Qana, including the deaths of sixteen children who, according to him, had chosen to “sleep with a missile.” Lebanese PR executives would employ this myth in their sectarian postwar slogan, “I Love Life,” which implied that Shiites willingly chose death over life. And Nasrallah himself used it before, during, and especially after the war, when he thundered: “They desire thrones; while we wish to be carried in coffins.”
But when the television cameras went away, when the reporters put away their notebooks, and the sharp joy of survival was followed by the guilt and hatred that only bloodshed can bring—when all that was over, nobody said, “Me and my wife and children are with Sayyid Hassan until death.” You did not hear “I will sacrifice my sons for Hassan Nasrallah.” They said “Hummus without olive oil” or “Hezb wasta” or even “You’ve lost weight.” They spoke of the practical, everyday business of food and shelter and being alive. But it didn’t matter what they said in private, when the cameras were gone. Nobody heard it but themselves and their families.
Most civilians experience war not as the fighters and victims that parade across television screens, but as tired housewives peeling potatoes and wondering, all the while, at the stupidity of it. Being trapped in the house with Umm Hassane forced me to experience the awful, humiliating tedium of war without the anaesthetic of danger or the narcotic self-importance of risk—to go through it not as a witness, not as a journalist, but as a human being. That was what I had learned cooking with Umm Hassane: that was the real story. You have to eat the meal.
The first time I heard Umm Paula’s story about the supper of stones, I thought it was the story of a mother who feeds her children’s hunger on imagination and love: “They’ll think we have something to eat, and they won’t be hungry anymore.” It was a story about stories—about how they can conquer hunger and hardship, turn stones into supper just as Jesus turned water into wine at Qana.
When Paula heard this interpretation, she laughed. “Well, you can look at it that way,” she said. “It is a story, after all. We do use this phrase, a ‘supper of stones.’ But that’s not the way we use it.”
Umm Paula had said it was “an old Christian story,” so I hunted for it in medieval Christian story collections. Nothing. I asked everyone I knew where it came from. Many had heard the story, and they all said it was very old; but no one knew how old. It was like trying to trace masquf through the murky waters of history.
Long after the war, a friend told me that the story of the stones went back to the Abbasid Empire. He said it was one of the Machiavellian tales of rulers and ruled, of eaters and eaten, that ninth-century Arabic scribes adapted from earlier story collections during the great Abbasid translation orgy in Iraq. Kan ya ma kan—maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. But the version he told me went like this:
In the glorious reign of the great Caliph Haroun al-Rashid, commander of the faithful, the people of Baghdad were starving to death. While the caliph was drinking wine with his courtiers, he left the caliphate to his viziers, a clever, brutal family called the Barmakids. They embezzled millions of dinars. They taxed the people without mercy. And they assured the caliph that all was well: The people loved him, Baghdad was the city of peace, the envy of creation, the navel of the world.
One day (so the story goes) the caliph decided to see for himself. He put on ordinary clothes and went walking around the great city to see what he could see. Passing by a humble house, he stuck his head over the wall and saw the woman cooking stones.
When the caliph heard her story, he realized that the Barmakids were lying to him—feeding him a story, a line: a tabkhet bahas, a supper of stones. And so he threw the Barmakids in jail and chopped off their heads. And everyone, as we know, lived happily and well fed from then on.
PART V
God, Nasrallah, and the Suburbs
In the so-called Age of Ignorance, before Islam, our ancestors used to form their gods from dates and eat them when in need. Who is more ignorant then, dear sir, I or those who ate their gods?
You might say: “It’s better for people to eat their gods than for the gods to eat them.”
But I’d respond: “Yes, but their gods were made of dates.”
—Emile Habiby, The Secret Life of Saeed, the Pessoptimist
Chapter 25
There Are No Shiites in This Neighborhood
THE WAR WAS OVER. The rains came, and with them thunder, and everyone who heard the first thunderstorm that fall woke up with a shock and believed, for a moment, that the war had never ended. In the south, the rains washed hidden cluster bomblets out of trees and fields, a strange harvest, and brought the postwar cluster bomb fatalities to twenty-six. In November, six Hezbollah-aligned ministers resigned from the cabinet, paralyzing the government. All fall, Hassan Nasrallah railed that Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora and what remained of his government were American puppets. Nasrallah hinted that he was going to follow the “Divine Victory” with something even more unforgettable.
Three and a half months after the war ended, on December 1, hundreds of thousands of Hezbollah supporters and their allies marched into a swath of downtown Beirut. They unloaded thousands of cloth-covered foam mattresses, just like the ones half a million refugees had slept on during the war, and set up a tent city in their own version of the independence intifada. Strips of barbed wire and blocks of concrete divided the demonstrators—the have-nots, in the iconography of this new revolution—from the rest of downtown, the haves. In parking lots where Land Rovers once ruled, farmers from Nabatieh planted green beans, tomatoes, zucchini, sunflowers, and cucumbers. Men performed ablutions and prayed on the sidewalk outside Buddha Bar. They chanted “Allah, Nasrallah, wa al-dahiyeh killha”—“God, Nasrallah, and all of dahiyeh,” which American newspapers translated as “God, Nasrallah, and the suburbs.” They demanded that Siniora resign, so that Hezbollah could form a new government in which the Party of God and its allies would hold more power. They thought that it would be a month or maybe two before the “Divine Victory” would be followed by an equally divine takeover, and they vowed to stay until this happened. Nobody knew, then, how long they would stay, or how much would happen before they would leave.
The first month was oddly festive. Throngs of veiled women and black-clad men mingled with Beirut girls wearing low-slung jeans and visible thongs in Hezbollah yellow. Men passed out orange scarves, the color of the Free Patriotic Movement, the mainly Maronite Christian party led by ex-army commander Michel Aoun. Boys wore curly clown wigs in bright orange and hoisted girls onto their shoulders to wave the Lebanese flag. A Hezbollah guy tried to score my e-mail address “for chatting.” Boys gave away little green sponges to symbolize a “clean” government, and several people told me and Mohamad they wanted campaign finance disclosure laws. More than a few of the demonstrators—including people from Beirut or dahiyeh—told us that they had not been downtown since the civil war. “If I bought a sandwich here,” said one man, pointing toward Maarad Street and Rym’s beloved T.G.I. Friday’s, “I’d be broke for a week.”
At Christmas, Hezbollah and its allies served a feast worthy of the Abbasids: the Party of God distributed hundreds of roasted turkeys, stuffed with pistachios, raisins, and cinnamon-spiced rice, and General Aoun’s movement served a forty-foot-long cake. The turkeys and cake were part of a long tradition of food as propaganda and power; of simats (from an old Arabic word for a meal or a cloth on which food was served), massive public banquets thrown by rulers, sultans, and caliphs to secure fealty. This food sent the same message as the groceries in the underground parking lots: Allah Karim. Your government may build pleasure palaces for Gulf millionaires while you scrape by on $200 a month. It may impose a regress
ive 10 percent value-added tax on everything except food and medicine. Its allies may send bombs to crush your houses and foul your fields and maim or kill your children. But God—and the Party thereof—will provide.
When the government failed to step down after almost two months, Hezbollah called a daylong “strike” on January 23, 2007. That morning, Mohamad and I woke up to the smell, now as familiar as an old friend, of burning metal. Najib Ardati Street curved emptily down to the Corniche. At the corner, the charcoal husk of a car smoldered forlornly, resting on its rims like a tired cow.
We went downstairs to visit our neighbor Rabih Dabbous. He was a tall, mustachioed rascal who ran a Yamaha dealership in the ground floor of our building. Militias were gathering a few blocks away, he told us: Hezbollah supporters against pro-government, with the army forming a line in between.
“If it continues,” he said, heavily, “then tomorrow morning you will have civil war again. Tomorrow morning.”
We walked up the street, then turned right and headed up the long block that led to the upper part of the Corniche. On the corner just outside the Abu Hassan restaurant, about a hundred men milled around. They were carrying baseball bats, lead pipes, bricks, and long planks of wood. They were all ages, but mostly young, in their teens and twenties. Some wore ski masks or bandannas over their mouths. Others wore hats or scarves in light blue, the color of the Future Movement, the Sunni political party of Saad Hariri and Prime Minister Siniora. A few had wrapped light blue ribbons around their foreheads, making them resemble some lost tribe of sectarian hippies.
We had done something stupid, but it was too late. They had seen us walking toward them, and turning around would make us look suspicious. There was nothing to do but approach them and try to forestall the inevitable question of Mohamad’s last name.
“Hi!” I said, walking up to the nearest couple of young men. “Do you guys speak English? My name’s Annia. I’m an American journalist, and this is my translator. Can I ask you a few questions?”
Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War Page 31
