All Strangers Are Kin

by Zora O'Neill

  We threaded our way through the narrow alleys into Tripoli’s medieval heart. This was what Beirut was missing: its own souk had been bombed to bits, its other relics torn down in the postwar real-estate frenzy. With no historic center, Beirut was unmoored—it could float off to associate with other world capitals, for better and for worse. Tripoli, though, was doubly rooted, by its souk and, on the hill above it, the Crusader fortress toward which Elie marched us with gusto.

  My image of the Crusaders was partly borrowed from Monty Python: hapless knights, clomping coconut halves together, had invaded the Holy Land, and Saladin, or rather, Salah ad-Din, the sultan of Egypt and Syria, had sent them all running back to Europe at the end of the thirteenth century. In relating the history of Qala’at Sanjil (a.k.a. the Fortress of Saint-Gilles), Elie was telling a different story, about very specific French knights. Some of them had not run home, but stayed put, married local women, and learned Arabic. In Syria, I had heard jokes about redheads having “Crusader hair,” but I had never considered intermarriage as a deeper reason for the Lebanese Christian affection for Gallic culture and language. Prominent Lebanese families, Elie reminded us, were named Sawaya (Savoie), Franjieh (Frankish), and Douaihy (from Douai).

  By the time Elie had led us around every corner of the fortress, my blood sugar was in a dive. For lunch, our small group repaired to a specialist in foul, for bowls of the garlicky fava beans. Elie’s exuberance had faded a bit too. As we ate, he told us about the dark side of urban preservation in Lebanon. “I’ll put it very simply,” he said. “There is no civil society.” The instability of the civil war had driven away anyone with the means to leave. “The ones who stay simply because they don’t want to leave, the ones like me, are rare.”

  He was an anomaly in a number of ways. I had just spent two awkward days in class drilling skin and hair colors, so I could decisively say Elie was the only guy with hinti (wheat-colored) skin and ʼasali (honey-brown) eyes in this café; everyone else’s were distinctly bunni, coffee-toned. He was also the only person wearing shorts, which wouldn’t have been remarkable in Beirut, but in this more conservative city, his bare, wheaten legs were the most exposed flesh I had seen all day. He set himself further apart by declaring his aversion to the hookah, or argeeleh, as it is called in Lebanon. “It’s terrible for your health,” he said. “And terrible for society. From eight in the morning they are smoking!” He gestured around the restaurant, where, for a change from Beirut, no one was smoking anything. “And women send their children to work lighting the pipes!”

  I had seen those kids. The argeeleh was such a staple of Lebanese life that you could have one delivered to your apartment, already lit and ready to puff. With a phone call, two kids would hop on a moped, one driving and the other on the back holding the pipe. The coals glowed red in the breeze as the moped cruised down the street. Elie might have been fighting a losing battle against child labor—not only was argeeleh demand high, but that looked like a fun job.

  Elie’s official tour-guide duties had ended back at the fortress, but he escorted a few of us out of the central city to the abandoned Oscar Niemeyer fairgrounds. The Brazilian modernist’s project aimed to put Tripoli on the world stage, shoulder to shoulder with the Paris of the Middle East down the coast. Then the civil war began in 1975, and construction was halted. Beyond the barricades were ruins of a future that never came: stark expanses of concrete, shaped into smooth, cold parabolas and domes. On the hilltop behind us, the Fortress of Saint-Gilles remained unshakable.

  Pierre and His Friends

  Jameel and Layal had loved each other for a long time. He was a lawyer, and she was an employee at a company. They had a regular schedule, which was how we students first became acquainted with them, in the chapter on habitual verbs. In fact, life for Layal and Jameel, with its evenings spent watching TV at Layal’s house, finishing a little work, and sometimes visiting with friends, sounded pretty boring. Then, in the next chapter, drama.

  “So, Mister Jameel, where were you yesterday? I called you more than twenty times and you didn’t answer!”

  “Baby, what’s up with you? Why so angry? I was with my friends at the beach.”

  The dialogue was titled “A Problem Between Jameel and Layal.” We took turns reading, going around the table. Jameel claimed he hadn’t called Layal to go to the beach because she had said she had a lot of work. In Layal’s view, he had sneaked off to the Pierre et Ses Amis beach club, up the coast, to party with his friends and flirt with girls in bikinis.

  Layal was willing to forgive him—this time.

  “But next time you go out, you have to call me, OK?” Dutch Danny read this line in his best nagging-shrew voice, while holding his thumb and pinkie to the side of his head in standard telephone pantomime.

  “Sure, love of my life, next time,” crooned Nick in response. He snapped his own imaginary clamshell phone shut.

  The punchline: Jameel calls Layal five minutes later to tell her he’s going to the store. His laughter was written هههههه—hahahahahaha—plus a smiley face for emphasis: ☺.

  My classmates and I cast puzzled looks at one another. What were we meant to learn from that? This section of the chapter was labeled “Words for Daily Life,” and off to the side of the dialogue, a graphic starburst highlighted new vocabulary: ghayyura, jealous.

  Nick brought his long arm down to slap the table in defiance. “That girl is crazy!” He had said what we were all thinking. “I’d never date someone like that!”

  “Shoo, ya Nicolas?” Zaina did the little side-to-side head-shake that means “I’m sorry—what?” Like her tsking habit, this shake, which I’d seen many other Lebanese use, was unnerving. It was too similar to how Americans indicated “no,” so I had to remind myself that she wasn’t disagreeing, but asking for elaboration.

  “You don’t like her?” Zaina persisted. “But she’s showing she cares about Jameel.” She wrote the word gheereh, jealousy, on the board in big, looping letters. “Jealousy means she loves him. Don’t you all think so?”

  We exploded in a storm of protests—as well as we could, given our limited Arabic skills.

  “Layal crazy,” British Sophie declared. She rarely spoke up, but now she seemed inspired. “Yes, my desire the man that is calling. But Layal crazy.”

  “Foundation of the relation strong is the trust,” I said earnestly. “The jealousy, no.”

  “The communication between two people, this is most important of thing,” Kaspar stated with his usual precision.

  Zaina tsked and tsked, ever more perplexed as we struggled.

  Andrew, the shaggy-haired Englishman who typically held himself a bit aloof, finally asked the question the rest of us were dancing around. “Is this,” he asked dryly, “a normal situation in Lebanon?”

  “Oh, yes, pretty normal,” Zaina answered. “This is a very important concept.” She turned back to the whiteboard.

  “Ghar ’ala—He was jealous for her. This is good jealousy, jealousy that shows you care. But ghar min”—here, she wrote the verb with a new preposition—“this is bad jealousy. Like, she was jealous of his new car.” It seemed similar to the distinction between jealousy and envy in English, with a difference: “Thou shalt not covet” was going strong here, and a jealous girlfriend was adorable.

  “But Sophie is ghar ʼala Nicolas for his good grades in class,” Zaina continued. This was a good thing in her estimation, but a new spin for me. Sophie was “jealous of” Nick’s grades, which meant she wanted him to do well. So a solicitous pride in one’s friends was jealousy too?

  The root of the verb ghar is especially flexible. It produces many other verbs, including one that means to haggle. From Zaina’s explanation, I saw the root’s internal tension, as well as its broader use. Layal was, in a way, haggling with Jameel over her right to keep tabs on him; Sophie, through friendship, had negotiated a share in
Nick’s success. People had been ghar ʼala me, in a good way, too: I was theirs, they’d staked a claim. In Cairo, Medo had asked me to spend all day at the mall with him; on my hiking trip, Sahar had seated me next to her and shown me off to the rest of the group. Multiple phone calls and demands on my time were ways of showing investment and love.

  “Well, I think he was cheating anyway,” Danny declared, to move us back to the juicy stuff. “Why would he not call her? He clearly wanted to go to the beach to talk to girls. Or to boys.” He wiggled his eyebrows.

  For the first time, Zaina agreed. “Yes, he was probably cheating.”

  Casting the blame on Jameel tapped a new spring of vaguely unpleasant vocabulary, and Zaina wrote the words on the board with relish. Betrayal. Cheater. To yell.

  “Stop!” Eliza, the French Lebanese woman, threw her hands up. This was a rare outburst; she spoke even less than Sophie. “I have fragile ears here. These are terrible words.”

  “Tsk, they’re very important words,” Zaina insisted, still writing. “Womanizer, niswenji.”

  This was a good one! The –ji suffix is from Turkish, and it basically means “the guy who does,” referring to whatever noun it follows. I knew it from Egypt, where it was pronounced –gi, with a hard g, and used for the makwagi (the guy who does the ironing) and the kababgi (the guy who does the kebab).

  Zaina was using the suffix in a somewhat more figurative, more judgmental way: niswen means women, so a niswenji is “the guy who does women.” She listed other juicy examples: sakarji (the guy who does booze), ’amarji (cards), hakwaji (stories, hence a gossip), and the even more abstract maslahji, or moocher, an expert at benefiting his own interest (maslaha).

  “Well, maybe Layal was texting so much because she was worried,” Irene allowed, with her usual calm, even enunciation. She was trying to make peace. “If Jameel had just texted back immediately, this would not have happened.”

  Zaina let out one last tsk and hustled us on to the next lesson.

  Nick’s parents had put him in touch with a Lebanese “uncle”—some older cousin or other—who owned a seafront restaurant, so Nick arranged an afternoon outing for the whole class, complete with two purring late-model, chauffeured Mercedes, a nice change from the rattletrap old ones that circulated in the city. We bundled in and cruised north up the coast. The day was splendid, the first lazy lick of high summer, with a cloudless sky and a soft breeze.

  As we were descending a hill toward the restaurant, I noticed flags fluttering on each lamppost: white with a green-and-brown geometric cedar tree. These flags—this icon, as well as a dozen other ones—represented political parties, and they were another part of the intricate code of Lebanese identity. I had noticed them, silently marking territory and allegiance around Beirut. So far, my symbol vocabulary was limited, but I did recognize this blocky cedar, and it gave me a chill. It represented the Phalange, which in its previous incarnation as a militia had orchestrated the massacres at the Palestinian refugee camps south of Beirut in 1982.

  It was irrational to fear the Phalange more than anyone else. Atrocities had been committed on all sides. And now the Phalange was a political party, nothing more, like all the other disarmed militias. Still, the Phalange generals had never been brought to trial; no one had. Instead, the postwar government passed the 1991 General Amnesty Law, which absolved everyone involved in the war without a single hearing. Lebanon would, as the local saying had it, yitwe safhet el-madi—turn the page of the past. The militias didn’t even have to rebrand themselves with new symbols.

  When I had arrived in Beirut, I had believed that the page truly had been turned, that the past had been sorted out, bundled up, and neatly stowed on a shelf. After all, more than twenty years had passed since the war. Looking at American history, though, I saw how laughable that expectation was. Our own civil war was a century and a half behind us, and it still caused trouble—often over a flag, in fact.

  Nick’s uncle, barrel-chested and tan as a coffee bean, greeted us with outstretched arms. Behind him was a giant table, and then the calm, blue Mediterranean. I held back briefly. But on what grounds? I knew nothing of his history. He only happened to reside on a road with some flags that reminded me of a past I had not even lived through.

  We ate fish in order of size, from finger-length sprats to dense, white-fleshed bass, and swiped salty french fries through thick, sour labneh. Aloof Andrew, behind his shaggy bangs, revealed secret knowledge of wine, ordering a different bottle of white with each course. In short order, we were all cheerfully buzzed.

  After lunch, Nick’s uncle led us to the nearby harbor for a boat tour. I felt cool climbing into his inflatable rubber raft, as it was the sort of boat that, in spy movies, the secret agents use to sneak into the hidden bay. And Nick’s uncle was the captain to end all captains, with a big gold cross nestled in his chest hair, a cigarette clamped between his lips. He grinned around the cigarette and raised a glass of whiskey to us, his awestruck passengers, then steered us out of port.

  From the boat, I could better see how the mountains met the coastline, almost pushing toward the water. Construction zigzagged up their steep slopes, following a meandering road. Where the rocks met the sea, they flattened out into large water-level tables. The occasional fisherman stood, surrounded and seemingly suspended by the water, flinging a long pole into the surf. Far behind, the cars on the highway zipped along, small as bees.

  Nick’s uncle slowed the boat to half speed and nosed it toward a stretch of pebbly beach. A palm-frond awning shaded a long wooden bar, and lounge chairs sat in a line. Irene pointed to the handful of people perched on bar stools. “I wonder, do we look incredibly cool to them or really dorky?”

  Her question was answered when we jumped out and headed for shore, flailing against the tide and slipping on algae-covered rocks. This could have been my Ursula Andress moment. Instead, I clambered up the beach doubled over, clutching my bikini bottom.

  Beers in hand, we gathered at a table to bask in the truly excellent turn the day had taken. After the second round, I looked down at the napkin under my bottle: Pierre et Ses Amis. Why did that ring a bell?

  In a second, I had it. We had arrived at the very beach club we’d read about in class, the one at the heart of the problem between Jameel and Layal.

  Kaspar was standing next to me. I nudged him and pointed at the napkin. Together we coolly surveyed the beach club, like detectives inspecting a crime scene. We had debated the case in class, but we had been missing this critical piece in the mystery that was Jameel and Layal’s relationship.

  “You know what?” Kaspar said. “I’ve been here for hours and I haven’t thought of my phone once. I don’t even know where it is.” We toasted: To Jameel and Layal! To jealousy!

  And maybe this was the normal Lebanese behavior that Zaina had been talking about. Until now, Beirut had struck me as hard, unrelenting, too flashy. Here was the antidote: You cruised up the coast in your silver Mercedes for a lavish fish lunch with a variety of local white wines. Then you zipped across the water in a boat that made you feel, fleetingly, like a Bond girl. You chilled out at the beach, under the wing of a man who looked like Tom Selleck.

  I had been harboring a slight disdain for Beirutis’ beer-and-bikinis standard of fun. It seemed too simple, too escapist—how could people be more concerned with their tan lines than with the state of their country? But if everywhere you turned you were confronted with some signal or symbol of conflict, maybe you’d want to escape too. Standing here in my two-piece, with a cold bottle in my hand, while the late-afternoon Mediterranean sun washed over me—this kind of fun felt good.

  Our captain rallied us back to our trusty craft. We left as awkwardly as we had arrived. I flopped into the boat backwards, like a tuna. Nick’s uncle grabbed Sally under the armpits and hoisted her up like a rag doll. Andrew momentarily lost his shorts.

  We
buzzed off merrily into the sunset, leaving Pierre and his friends to their more graceful life.

  We Have Not Taught the Prophet the Price

  I liked Rana Abou Rjeily as soon as I met her. “Let’s go somewhere else,” she said when we convened in front of the Hamra Starbucks. It was evening; the dapper older set that I had seen there on my first morning in Beirut, and every morning after, had concluded their performance for the day. “How about a communist bar?”

  By now, approaching the end of my time in the city, I had to admit my personal transformation had failed. I had not picked up a breathy Lebanese accent, and the more I saw of flashy Beirut fashion, the happier I was with my shapeless clothes. Style-wise, communists would be more my speed.

  The communist bar was not filled with the lumpen proletariat after all, but with the usual assortment of young, tight-T-shirted Beirutis. The lighting, at least, was mellow, and 1960s jazz was playing at an unobtrusive level. “I know, there’s nothing communist about it,” Rana said, pointing to an old French ad poster. Stalinist propaganda it was not. “It’s just what we call places like this.” She turned to peruse the beer list.

  I had expected Rana, a graphic designer, to be different too, clad in black and imperiously cool. And here she was, pink-cheeked, pretty, and nice. I had contacted her because I was curious about how type designers created Arabic fonts, wrestling flowing, cursive handwriting, a traditional art in itself, into the modern, mechanical world of print.