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

by Annia Ciezadlo

  He watched me, frowning, as I struggled to explain why I was here in Beirut when Mohamad was in New York. It had to do with my writing, the situation, our lives. I had gone to Baghdad four years ago to be with the husband I loved. Now he was in New York—a city with parks, and sidewalks, and laws against landlords asking about your religion. And I was in a verminous, overpriced apartment that periodically had no running water, surrounded by sectarian tensions, on a vague mission that I only half believed in myself. I had my reasons, but I wasn’t very good at explaining them.

  When I finally petered out, the old man held up his index finger like an alcoholic oracle. With the painstaking dignity of an all-day drunk, he said:

  “Don’t be complicated.”

  I knew the old man used to be in a militia. I knew which one too, but it didn’t really matter: The militias that swore to annihilate each other one day would be allies the next. It was all about strategic alliances, marriages of convenience, and the only constant was that they did whatever they had to in order to win. People would fabricate intricate lies, denying they had ever fought each other, or they would come up with complex justifications for killing people who had been their allies just months or weeks earlier. They were still doing it: General Michel Aoun had opposed Syrian rule until 2005; by 2008, he was aligned with the Syrian-backed Hezbollah. In 2004, the Druze warlord Walid Jumblatt was praising suicide bombers for killing Israeli civilians; a year later, the Bush administration and conservative pundits were touting him as a hero of the “cedar revolution.” You might believe their bullshit the first couple of times you heard it, and try to follow some logic in the shifting alliances, but after a while the elaborate mental contortions of the party ideologues just made you laugh.

  You couldn’t live in Beirut without being complicated. But people were always telling me not to be.

  “Simplicity is a virtue,” a Lebanese restaurateur told me once, watching in horror as I piled one ingredient after another—zaatar, cheese, green onions, red pepper, sesame seeds—onto my manoushi.

  “Yes,” I said, “but it’s not one of mine.”

  Mohamad came to visit again in April. He grumbled mightily that I was dragging him back to Lebanon, but he did get a lot of work done, and I began to believe that perhaps he was beginning to like Beirut.

  One night, we went to a play called How Nancy Wished That Everything Was an April Fool’s Joke. (Most of the plays about the civil war had complicated titles.) Onstage, four ex-fighters, three men and a woman, sat mashed against each other on a tiny couch, like passengers in a crowded servees. In the play, each character narrates his or her own transformation during the civil war: They all start off ambivalent, but then, inevitably, something happens to make them angry—“My blood boiled over,” they repeat periodically—and they join the fight and eventually die. Gradually you realize that the same four people keep dying and coming back to life, only to rejoin the fighting (often with a different faction), die again, and do it all over again. The secular leftist ends up joining the right-wing Christian Phalange party and dies. The Communist joins Amal, and eventually Hezbollah, and dies. The Arab nationalist gets regligion and joins the jihad in Afghanistan and Chechnya. (He dies a lot.) Every time they come back, they say, “From my previous experience in warfare, I knew . . .” And yet they keep on fighting.

  Not long afterward, we were walking through Wadi Abu Jamil when we noticed workmen unloading hundreds of gleaming white toilets into one of the few remaining vacant lots. By early evening there were six hundred of them, all standing at attention in neatly ordered rows. A poster demanded, HAVEN’T FIFTEEN YEARS OF HIDING IN THE TOILETS BEEN ENOUGH?

  The army of toilets was an installation by the Lebanese artist Nada Sehnaoui. During the civil war, people took refuge in hallways, basements, and especially bathrooms—any small, enclosed space that offered shelter from incoming fire. As a child, Mohamad had spent many sleepless nights huddled in the hallway with his parents, listening to artillery and machine-gun fire. When the fighting was particularly heavy, they would drag mattresses into the hallway and prop them against the walls.

  People were tired. The rhetoric had been rising for months, but neither side had dared to do more than talk. Most Lebanese were sick of fighting. Nobody but politicians had the appetite for blood.

  But then, in the early hours of Wednesday, May 7, the government issued an order outlawing Hezbollah’s underground fiber-optic communications network. Since this network was part of its military infrastructure, Hezbollah accused the government of trying to disarm it on behalf of the United States and Israel. Nasrallah announced he would give a speech on Thursday at four p.m. That morning, just before noon, Mohamad went out for foul.

  Abu Hadi, our Hamra fawal, was engulfed. Dozens of customers surrounded his little storefront, all of them shoving and shouting out their orders. Mohamad recognized the customer in front of him: it was one of the actors from the play, the one who had joined the jihad in Chechnya. He ordered hummus with meat, hummus bi tahinah, fattet hummus, and msabbaha, and by the time he was done, there was nothing left but foul. It took Mohamad an hour just to get two bowls of foul. By then he realized we should probably stock up.

  We were old hands at this by now: We split up and coordinated by cell phone. I went to Healthy Basket, which was lush with the bounty of May: strawberries, tomatoes, lettuce, cilantro, zucchini. Mohamad called me from Smith’s: no meat, no bottled water. No laban and labneh. Milk was running low. Bread was long gone.

  The next day, the newspaper Al-Akhbar ran a full front-page photograph of people frantically shoving their way into a local furn, taken from the baker’s point of view: Hands reached in from every direction, all holding crumpled little wads of bills, enough for a packet of bread. A woman’s face contorted in panic as the people behind her smashed her up against the window. In the window above people’s heads, almost unnoticed, a hand reached down, dangling its clump of bills: an agile shopper who decided to beat the crowd by climbing on top of the bakery stall.

  At four p.m., Mohamad went to watch the speech with a friend who lived on the other side of Hamra. I was on the phone with a friend in New York, a few hours later, when I heard the crackle of gunfire. I figured it was the usual post-political-speech happy fire. Nothing unusual.

  “God damn it, don’t these people get tired of fireworks?” I said, so my New York friend wouldn’t be alarmed.

  I went to the kitchen. The back balcony faced Sadat, the street that marked the boundary of Hamra proper. This was the direction from which Mohamad would be walking. I looked out the window to see if I could locate the gunfire—not that you can “see” bullets, but visual information was always comforting.

  Just then, at around seven o’clock, I heard a loud whump, the punch of air suddenly filling a vacuum. It was a sound I remembered from Baghdad—a rocket-propelled grenade. Men walking down Sadat Street started to run. I got off the phone. Where was Mohamad?

  It was probably only ten more minutes until Mohamad got home, but it felt like hours. Hamra Street was abandoned, he said. As he ran home, he saw gunmen setting up barricades and firing RPGs. We didn’t realize it until later, but he had come back just in time.

  We went out on the balcony to see what was happening. At the bakery, our neighborhood shabab were excited. One of them disappeared into the upper floors above the bakery and reemerged wearing a black balaclava and holding a rifle. He swaggered around pretending to shoot. He held his rifle from the hip, pointing up, like a Liberian child soldier. Nobody had shown him how to hold it properly.

  A couple of boys walked down the street, past the church, to the corner. One of them dragged a Dumpster into the street and then fished a couple of narrow French doors out of a pile of construction debris. He propped each French door at a delicate 45-degree angle against the side of the Dumpster. Then he went to the Mozart Hotel across the street and commandeered several plastic planters with feathery, palmlike plants.

  Mohamad and I watche
d in amazement. In 2006, Hezbollah had fought the Israeli military, one of the most technologically advanced armies in the world. The Party of God had Iranian-made weapons, matériel capable of disabling a Merkava tank. These guys were making barricades from French doors and potted plants.

  At around eight o’clock, the streetlights blinked off all at once. The only people on the streets were teenagers on mopeds. We heard machine gun and rocket fire coming from Hamra, getting closer.

  I made dinner with the pasta and vegetables we’d bought that day, peas and garlic and cherry tomatoes and basil and parsley. I was very proud of myself for thinking ahead: we might get shot, but at least we’d eat well. We went to sleep at about one in the morning to the sound of gunfire and RPGs and stun grenades. There was nothing else to do.

  All night long, two tomcats staged a wailing standoff in the vacant lot under our bedroom window. There was a terrible thunderstorm that night, and the fighting seemed to stop for about three hours, but the tomcats kept going; when I woke up the next morning, at seven a.m., they were still at it. I could hear grenades too. I went back to sleep.

  When I woke again, at eight, the air smelled fresh and strange, scoured clean by smoke, like the Fourth of July. I went out onto the balcony. The street was empty, all sign of Dumpsters or French doors swept away. The shooting was very heavy and very close, and I recognized the firecracker smell as cordite. I could hear shouting: “Allahu Akbar!”—“God is great.” It was as though I had woken up in a different city.

  I was still half-asleep, but some primitive sense of self-preservation told me to get off the balcony. I went back into the bedroom and shook Mohamad. “Sweetie, I think you better get up.”

  There was a long, narrow horizontal window high in the wall over our bed that looked out at the Mozart. We stood on the bed and looked out the window.

  Across the street, there was a small leafy garden where kids usually played ball. Three Hezbollah commandos in gray-green fatigues crouched in it now, cradling Kalashnikovs in the caves of their shoulders and steadying the barrels on their knees.

  More fighters were advancing slowly down the block through the gunfire. They would walk a few steps, stop, and then wait for a hand signal from the commandos in the garden, who were covering them. They held their rifles at their shoulders and swung them in tightly choreographed arcs, facing opposite directions, as they went slowly down the street in a sinister ballet. They had been very carefully trained.

  “Don’t go outside!” they shouted as they advanced. “Stay inside! Don’t go out on your balconies!” Periodically they also shouted, “Allahu Akbar!”

  A teenage boy with a mop of shoulder-length curly hair ran up the sidewalk toward the garden. He had taken off his shirt and shoes to show that he wasn’t armed. He held his hands in the air and ran through gunfire. The commandos in the garden reached out and beckoned, shouting for him to hurry. He ducked into the thicket behind them.

  One of the garden commandos swung his AK-47 around toward our building. Stupidly, I noted that it was pointing right at us.

  The feeling started in the back of my neck—a great mouth picking me up with powerful teeth by the back of the neck and shaking me like a kitten. My neck told my brain to pay attention to what my eyes were observing. Very slowly, my brain took the isolated pictures my eyes had sent it and assembled them into logical sequences:

  The boy surrendering; the hand signals: there were snipers in the buildings.

  The commando saw the curtain flutter; he thought we were snipers: that is why his rifle was pointing this way.

  “Get away from the window!” snapped Mohamad.

  We dove down to the bed, then scrambled off it, away from the windows, running half-crouched back into the hallway.

  The phone rang. It was our friend Ben, a radio reporter who lived further down the hill, past the garden where the gunmen had been. His back window had been shot out. He suspected there were snipers on his roof. Earlier that morning, he had looked out his window and seen a body lying on the sidewalk.

  I went to the balcony and looked down the block. I couldn’t see any snipers, but snipers don’t want to be seen. The water tank on top of the Mozart was gushing out water. It must have been shot.

  “You should come over,” I said. “I think it’s safer on our block.” Safer was a relative term—our next-door neighbor Balsam had snipers on her roof too. But our block seemed more secure. I started filling empty bottles with tap water in case our water tank got shot out.

  We looked out a little later. The gunmen were calmer, surveying the block. Then, at about nine or ten a.m., there was another blister of gunfire. We moved to the hallway and set up our computers there. The apartment had an extra sink in the hallway that led to the bedrooms. This was a common feature in older West Beirut apartments, where visitors might need to wash their hands without entering the family quarters, but it was also convenient for a situation like this, when it was dangerous to venture to the kitchen or the bathroom; I wondered, illogically, if this was the real reason for putting a sink in the hallway. We could hear intense gunfire coming from Sadat Street, just half a block away, and also from the opposite direction where Ben’s apartment was.

  Our friend Deb, a reporter for National Public Radio, called a little later. She was staying at a small hotel on Sadat Street called Viccini Suites. The fighting was heavy on Sadat, which led toward Hariri’s palace, and everyone in the hotel had spent the night in the basement.

  I looked out the window and saw two gunmen standing just outside the doorway of the Viccini. “We’ll come get you,” I told her. “It’s safer here at our place.”

  It was Friday, the day observant Muslims go to the mosque for midday prayers. At noon, the muezzin started muttering the duaa, the invocation that signalled the beginning of Friday prayers, and the neighborhood let out a collective exhalation. Men headed down the street to the mosque. Women went to the bakery. They left empty-handed, I noticed, and I concluded that the bakers must have run out of bread.

  Our street was calm, but there was still gunfire crackling up and down Sadat, and still the same two gunmen stationed outside the Viccini. I called Deb again. She said the gunmen had come downstairs and confiscated everyone’s cell phones, checked their ID cards, then gave them their cell phones back and left. “I’m coming to get you,” I said.

  The street seemed calm when I walked up to Sadat. I passed my landlord’s brother on his way to the mosque. “Hello, Hajj Salim,” I said, and nodded. But he just stared at me heavily and walked on.

  I collected Deb and we walked back without incident. The gunmen had returned a second time, she told me, to apologize for taking their cell phones. “Somebody trained those guys real well,” she said, shaking her head.

  Ben came over, and I threw myself into feeding everybody. I made a massive tuna salad with pasta shells, shaved fennel, feta, sliced grape tomatoes, and pitted black olives. I dressed it with capers, lemon juice, olive oil, and mustard. Chopped basil and parsley. Lots of black pepper. I was being complicated again, but there was nothing else to do, and this was something useful. Food had always been a comfort, a way of reinforcing normal life. But when a normal life was impossible, through nobody’s fault but my own—I could be living peacefully in New York, but I had insisted on being in Beirut—food allowed me to pretend.

  I realized that I hadn’t made anything for Mohamad, who refused to eat tuna. I started boiling the rest of the pasta for him. At about 2:45 p.m., just as I was about to drain it, fierce gunfire broke out so loud and so close that all four of us ran and huddled in the hallway by the sink.

  Deb crouched on the floor over her cell phone, describing the battle to someone at National Public Radio. Mohamad hunched against the wall, with his computer propped on his knees, filing a story. I sat on the sink. Ben slid down to the floor. He motioned for me to get down lower, but I shook my head.

  The gunfire went on and on, and I found myself wondering where all these bullets came from—h
undreds every minute, like raindrops on a roof.

  Suddenly I remembered Mohamad’s pasta. It had been boiling for a good fifteen minutes! It would get soggy. You couldn’t waste food in a situation like this.

  I scuttled into the kitchen at a half-crouch, keeping my head below window level. The kitchen was a dangerous place—the big window and the glass door faced Sadat Street, where most of the gunfire was coming from. But the certainty of soggy pasta seemed to me, at that moment, much more dire than the possibility of getting hit by a stray bullet.

  “What are you doing?” shouted Mohamad from the hallway.

  “Too late!” I shouted. I turned off the burner, dumped the pasta into the colander waiting in the sink, and rushed back into the hallway.

  Deb and Ben and Mohamad looked up at me, appalled; I didn’t understand why. Didn’t they know that as long as I was cooking, I would be safe?

  After another five minutes, the gunfire stopped, and it didn’t occur to me until much later that I had been acting at all irrational.

  In Hamra, the fighting was over by Friday afternoon. Later that day, we walked around the neighborhood. The streets were littered with broken glass and empty shells. At Future TV, militiamen had burned the offices and destroyed the archives, throwing the videotapes onto a smoking pyre on the sidewalk, and put up posters of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in the offices. On Sidani, a few blocks from our house, all the food shops were open, even the Subway sandwich franchise. The gunmen stood everywhere, watching us with cool, unfriendly faces and saying nothing. On Gandhi Street, a few prostitutes walked past, dressed in pajamas, talking softly in Moroccan-accented Arabic and ignoring the gunmen completely.

  Outside Abu Hassan restaurant, someone had planted a flag of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party: a swirling red swastika, rounded like the blade of a circular saw, in a white circle on a black background. Looking down Hamra, in the golden sunlight of early evening, we saw red and black flags all up and down the street. The flags stayed up throughout the crisis, which would last for about two weeks and kill at least seventy-one people.