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

by Annia Ciezadlo

  “Sure,” said a beefy young man in a Real Madrid jersey wearing a light- blue watch cap. His name was Maher Amneh. He was thirty-two years old and had a shop in Hamra Street that sold “unisex casual sportswear.” I had bought several T-shirts there. His cousin Bahi was an earnest nineteen-year-old student in a green sweatshirt and baseball cap. Bahi was majoring in management information systems, with a minor in finance, at the Lebanese American University. He hoped to graduate the following year.

  They had woken up to see their neighborhood full of barricades and burning cars, and they felt that they were under attack. They had come out into the streets to fight back.

  “Syria and Iran made this war in July, and we feel like we can’t speak when we see the streets with barriers,” said Bahi, breathlessly. “You can’t have only Shiites who can have . . .”

  “Can have weapons!” said Maher.

  “. . . and Sunnis don’t have,” said Bahi.

  In 1989, when they signed the Taif Accord, all of Lebanon’s militia leaders had agreed to give up their weapons. But Hezbollah was allowed to keep its arms as a “national resistance” against the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, which ended in 2000. For years, the regime in Damascus allowed Iranian arms to flow to Hezbollah through Syrian territory. After 2005, the Bush administration began pressuring Siniora’s government to disarm Hezbollah. Nasrallah swore that the group would never use its weapons against other Lebanese, but many did not believe him.

  “So because the Shiites have weapons,” I asked Bahi, “and you don’t—”

  “Illegal weapons!” screamed a bystander, a middle-aged man with a face like an old shoe and wandering, dilated eyes. He was clutching a lead pipe. “Terrorists! Terrorists!”

  “And they are occupying our areas,” said Bahi, patiently, trying to resume. “We have to clean our area. Hezbollah belongs to suburbs and the south.”

  “Hassan Nasrallah is a liar!” shouted Maher. “A big liar!”

  “They belong to the south and the suburbs,” repeated Bahi. “They are occupying our area. So it is our duty to free it.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “We’ll go there and we’ll ask peacefully to the army to free the Corniche,” said Bahi. “And if they don’t, we will attack them.”

  “Do you think that’s a good idea?” I asked.

  “We want to just live in peace,” said Bahi. “We won’t let them occupy our areas.”

  Our areas. “What area do you live in?” I asked.

  “Here, in Beirut,” said Bahi, shrugging.

  Lebanon was segregated by sect, he explained. Slicing the air with his hands, he divided an imaginary city into halves, quarters: Christians in one quarter, Muslims in another, Sunnis and Shiites separated. Beirut, he said, belonged to Sunnis.

  “Like here is for Sunnis, you know?” He waved his hand in a parabola around the neighborhood.

  “Are you from this neighborhood?” I asked.

  “Yes, yes, I live here,” said Bahi.

  “All the guys you see here,” said the bystander, “they’re from this neighborhood.”

  So: they were our neighbors. I did not mention this. Instead I asked them about their lives.

  When the 2006 war broke out, Bahi had lost his summer job at a company that sponsored hair products. He had to skip the fall semester of college because he couldn’t afford the tuition. Now he would graduate late. Iran had paid for the Shiites who lost their jobs, he told us. Who would pay for him?

  “They’re against everything, everything that will improve our lives,” he said.

  “For sure, there gonna be more fights, more injuries,” said Maher, smiling amiably. “That’s for sure.”

  Behind the two cousins, the rest of the Future shabab had spread out into the intersection. They were stopping cars and asking the people inside who they were and where they were going. And they were demanding to see their identification cards.

  During the civil war, when a person’s religion was written on his or her ID card, the card spelled the difference between life and death. The neighborhood militias stopped cars and demanded to see people’s papers, just like they were doing now. If you had the wrong religion, the wrong last name, then you joined the roughly 170,000 people who were killed or disappeared during the fifteen years of the war.

  “We don’t want them come into our area,” said Maher. “We are only searching for this. We don’t want to fight them—we only want to protect our area.”

  “But isn’t this a mixed area?” I asked him.

  “No,” he said, with calm certainty. “One hundred percent Sunni.”

  “There are no Shiites here?”

  “No,” he said again, patiently. “And everyone knows that.”

  We were standing just outside Abu Hassan—a Shiite-owned restaurant that sold mjadara hamra and frakeh, classic southern food, in the heart of what they considered a “Sunni” neighborhood. But I didn’t point that out; it would have drawn attention to the fact that we ate there.

  “We all know each other,” explained Maher. “So if we see anyone strange, it means he doesn’t belong to us.”

  “What would you do if you saw anyone strange?”

  “We would ask him: ‘What are you doing here, now, in this time?’” he said, and assumed a stern face, like a drama student stepping into the role, as he interrogated his imaginary captive. “‘So for what you are here?’ Just like this. And if he didn’t give us any answer, it means he comes from them, and he wants take a look—to count us.”

  In other words, he is a Shiite spy, sent to infiltrate the neighborhood and report back on their preparations.

  I wondered if Mohamad had brought his Lebanese ID card or his American passport. Either way, they would know he was Shiite the instant they saw his last name. Would his American passport outweigh his religion, or would they think he was a spy? What would have happened if he had run into this checkpoint, a few blocks from our house, without me?

  A black SUV drove up. One of its dark tinted windows rolled down. Inside, men with earpieces and walkie-talkies issued instructions to the guys in the street, one of whom came over and tapped Maher on the shoulder.

  “We have to go,” said Bahi. “We’re going to open this road.”

  “Well,” I said, smiling. I was shaking and my heart was pounding. But they couldn’t see that. “Good luck!”

  We walked away. They hadn’t asked Mohamad’s last name; hadn’t discovered that there was at least one Shiite in this neighborhood.

  “Oh my god,” I said, as soon as we got a few dozen yards away.

  Mohamad said nothing. He just looked back, over his shoulder, at our neighbors.

  The street we were on led to the upper part of the Corniche. At the end of a very long block lined by apartment buildings, hotels, and restaurants, we passed into territory held by Hezbollah and Amal. Men in black lounged warily in red plastic chairs in front of the Kentucky Fried Chicken. Angry, silent men stood at intervals on the median and the sidewalk. A row of minivans, the kind political parties used to transport people to demonstrations, was parked along the Corniche. The carcass of another burnt car lay ashen in the middle of the street.

  We walked up to a freckle-faced young man holding a long metal chain and asked him what was going on.

  “We’re just killing time,” he said, sullen and a little fearful. He looked about sixteen or seventeen. “There’s nothing happening.” It was clear from his Arabic that he was from the south—he used suffixes like -ish, the syntax and accent we knew from Umm Hassane. We talked to a few more people; they seemed equally unsure of why they were there.

  “Can we go home now?” said Mohamad.

  But when we walked back across the street, we saw the situation had changed in the fifteen minutes we had stood talking. A large crowd of men in black had gathered on the corner. Some of them wore black ski masks. One held a pickaxe. Others brandished pipes. A few were collecting cinder blocks from a gutted building on the c
orner. Upstairs in the open-walled apartments, men perched here and there to watch the street below. The reconstruction from Beirut’s last civil war supplied weapons and strategic locations for the next one.

  Suddenly a rapid fusillade of shots boomed out. The echoes ricocheted off the sides of tall buildings and rattled down the street toward the sea.

  “Jesus!” I shouted without thinking. (A few years earlier, it would have been “Jesus expletive Christ,” but one of the lessons Mohamad drummed into me was the importance of not cursing in war zones.)

  “That’s the army,” said Mohamad, infuriatingly calm, as he always was in situations like this. “They’re shooting into the air.”

  Men with their heads wrapped in kaffiehs started running, some toward us and others away. A black-clad man with a walkie-talkie shouted at them to come back. More shots rocketed down the long narrow street.

  Back the way we had come, a line of Lebanese soldiers ran across the width of the entire street. Just past them, on the other side of the line, were the Future guys we had talked to outside Abu Hassan. On our side, the black-clad Amal and Hezbollah guys surged forward. Men on both sides were shouting and throwing rocks, bricks, and cinder blocks at one another across the line of soldiers who stood in the middle holding their rifles up and ready to fire.

  Suddenly more shots rang out, a barrage of them this time, much louder and much closer than before. People started running down the street, back toward the Corniche, and we ran with them, and I had the sudden feeling we would never get home again.

  “We need to get away from here,” I gasped.

  We stood at the corner by the Corniche and watched as a shapeless melee of about a hundred men rolled our way. All of them had something in their hands: metal pipes, cinder blocks, chains, boards with nails sticking out. The chains chattered like rattlesnakes. One man swung a heavy metal chain tied into a knot at the end, a homemade Hail Mary. They were all shouting, running, kicking, hitting, throwing, melded together by some centripetal force. They gathered around a car, shouting. They beat it with pipes, lifting them high and slamming them down as though killing an animal. One of them hurt his hand and howled with rage as though the car had attacked him.

  A couple of wiry, well-tanned young men with gangster fades stood at the corner next to us. They were wearing Puma tracksuits and around their necks little silver amulets of Zulfikar, the double-bitted sword of Imam Ali—a symbol of Shiites, also used by Amal as a gang sign. They surveyed the scene with feline smiles.

  “This is not cool, man,” I said.

  “This is right down the street from our house,” said Mohamad.

  The shooting stopped. We walked back down the street, hoping to make our way home. The two sides had retreated to their respective ends of the very long block. The soldiers stood with stiff, nervous faces, their guns pointed up in the air. Broken glass, giant chunks of concrete, rocks, and pieces of wood and metal lay all around them. A couple of neighborhood kids ran out and started playing in the broken glass. They whooped with excitement.

  Shouts echoed from down the street. The Future guys were coming back, marching from the direction of our apartment. They were chanting something, a slogan that grew louder as they approached: “Airi bi Nasrallah wa al-dahiyeh killha!”—“Fuck Nasrallah and all of dahiyeh!”

  The new slogan summoned shouts of rage from the other side. They began approaching from the opposite direction, clanking chains and pipes, shouting their own slogan about the government’s acting interior minister: “Ahmad Fatfat is a Jew!”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t go back this way,” said Mohamad, beginning to sound distressed.

  We turned and ran back toward the Corniche, again, away from our apartment. We would never get home. Men rushed past us, chanting, in the opposite direction.

  “This is terrible!” I panted, as we scrambled down the street. “This is just like when you were a kid!”

  “Yes!” he said, sadly. “It’s like neighborhood gangs.”

  We stopped outside one of the small hotels on the block. A frightened-looking couple with three children were wheeling their suitcases into the lobby. They stood just inside the door, craning their necks to see down the street.

  “They look terrified,” said Mohamad. “As they should be.”

  “They picked the wrong time for a vacation in Beirut.”

  Later that night we realized they were probably internal refugees—Lebanese families fleeing neighborhoods where they had suddenly become the wrong sect. On Corniche al-Mazraa, where Leena lived, the clashes were even worse. The Future shabab there were holding up pictures of Saddam Hussein, who had been executed by Iraq’s new Shiite-led government three weeks earlier.

  By then we were safely home, back on Najib Ardati Street. But home was another country now, especially for Mohamad. The civil war had come and gone, a generation had grown up, and he was still just a few blocks away from the Green Line.

  In 1987, after twelve years of civil war, a political scientist named Theodor Hanf conducted a study. The vast majority of the Lebanese people he surveyed wanted a democratic solution to the fighting—in other words, a negotiated peace. No victors, no vanquished.

  But a stubborn 10 percent believed their militias could triumph over their opponents, expel them from the country, and rule forever after. Those 10 percent—and the blood they were willing to shed for their visions of total victory—were enough to keep the war in motion. Twenty years later, in January 2007, Lebanon stood at the edge of another civil war. Whether normal life would resume, or whether the country’s long civil war would pick up where it left off, still depended on a stubborn fraction of the population.

  The day after the strike, the roadblocks and burnt cars were gone. A street that was full of burning tires on Tuesday looked, on Wednesday, as if nothing had happened. Abu Hassan reopened. People drove to work, went shopping, came home, slept.

  But on Thursday, January 25, at around midday, some silent but unmistakable message spread across the city. Fights flared simultaneously at several universities. Snipers at the Beirut Arab University in Tareeq al-Jadideh. Clashes at Hawai University in Hamra. Fighting near Lebanese International University in Zuqaq al-Blatt.

  “The Future guys decided to clean up the neighborhoods,” said Rabih, cocking his head. News updates whispered out of his Bluetooth headset. “It’s going to get worse—now, you see, they’ll start at AUB and LAU.” These were the two big American universities that bounded Hamra.

  Suddenly all the roads filled with trucks, cars, and motorcycles. Cars rammed into one another in panic. Drivers leaned out of their windows and screamed. People trapped inside lay frantically on their horns, all of them blaring at once like an insane brass band. Everyone was rushing to buy groceries, get home, and get off the streets. The air smelled like smoke. It was time to go war shopping again: time to stock up on bread, on canned soup, on pasta and lentils and rice. Time to go to our local furn for manaeesh.

  Our neighborhood baker was Abu Shadi, a tree trunk of a man with a shoulder-length mane of wavy brown hair that he periodically streaked with blondish highlights. Abu Shadi had been feeding Manara manaeesh since 1988, and his dough was chewy, crisp, oily perfection. He was working double time, stretching the elastic rounds of bread with his enormous hands, buttering them with olive oil and zaatar, laying them out on long wooden paddles, and shoveling them into the roaring hot oven all at once.

  Men stood in front of the furn and waited for manaeesh. Usually they would be milling around on the sidewalk, joking and talking politics and gossiping with their mouths full of bread. But this day they just listened to the radio and looked at each other uneasily. The butcher next door pulled the metal grate down over his window with a thunderous rattle. Stores up and down the block were closing their shutters and locking their doors. A couple of teenagers, about fourteen or fifteen, climbed onto a moped. One of them had a baseball bat tucked under his leather jacket.

  A stooped old man in a cardigan
, walking slowly up the hill, stopped and frowned at them.

  “What are you doing with that stick?” he scolded.

  “We don’t have any sticks,” the older one lied, with sullen deference.

  “I see it, under your jacket!”

  The younger one smiled. “We’re herding sheep,” he said.

  The old man shrugged hopelessly and plodded on up the hill. The younger generation, who had missed the civil war, roared off to join the fun.

  That night, the army imposed a curfew for the first time since 1996. Four people had been killed, and more than one hundred fifty injured. There were checkpoints like the one in our neighborhood in other parts of the city, and snipers at the university just down the street from Hanan’s apartment. Snipers, checkpoints, curfews: it seemed like the seventeen years since the war had simply evaporated.

  By Saturday, the city was back to the angry, paranoid stasis that passed for normal in those days. People drove to work. Restaurants and stores stayed open, but they had very few customers. People went home and stayed by the television, waiting to see what would happen.

  Everyone except our friend Rym, who came over from Gemmayzeh with a car and an idea. All of Beirut was hunkering down, afraid to go outside. But downtown belonged to us, she said, just as much as it did to any of the sectarian factions fighting over Beirut’s streets. She wanted to go downtown, to the one area everyone was avoiding above all others, and have lunch.

  We agreed. Why not?

  “What about Umm Hassane?” said Rym, as we got ready to leave. “Why don’t we bring her too?”

  “Umm Hassane, do you want to go out with us?”

  “I just started drinking tea! Are you going to wait for me until I finish my tea?”

  “We’ll wait for you.”

  “You should have told me before I started drinking . . .”

  “We’ll wait for you!”

  “Where are you going?”