Jasmine and Fire (12 page)

Ever
since I can remember, I’ve planned food-related endpoints and landmarks for my journeys near and far. On that walk to downtown, I didn’t know I’d end up eating eggplant fatteh for
lunch, but I knew I wanted to find something delicious and Lebanese that I hadn’t had in a while, and fatteh turned out to be just the thing. Another October morning I go on a more food-focused trek. I take a service taxi across downtown and into the Achrafieh neighborhood, on the east side of the city. I walk around the winding streets looking for a place called Sahyoun, which I’ve heard serves the city’s best falafel. After I wrote a rant about falafel on my blog the other week, I’d heard from a bunch of readers instructing me to go to Sahyoun. I’m a falafel skeptic; it’s not my favorite Middle Eastern culinary invention, but I’m willing to be converted after all these years. I stroll through the curvy uphill streets of Achrafieh, past the mustard-yellow brick Maronite church L’Église Notre Dame de l’Annonciation, with its serene tree-lined courtyard, into alleyways full of posh boutiques and old bakeries. A few cars pass by along the twisty streets, nothing like the perpetual traffic jams of Hamra. Here the buildings seem more orderly: either clusters of two- or three-story stone houses, their balconies draped with flowers, or condo buildings, mostly upscale but modest in height, no laundry visibly hanging from their rails.

Eventually I emerge on the southwestern side of the quiet residential area and reach the five-way intersection of Damascus Road, a wide avenue with an accurate name: the road does eventually lead to the Syrian capital. The intersection is flanked by parking lots and construction sites and has wide-open sightlines to the tall, bland condo buildings of southeast Beirut in the near distance, and to the crumbling-stone civil war ruins dotted among them. I find Sahyoun, actually two Sahyouns, which turn out to be side-by-side falafel stands owned by competing brothers who have both kept the same name; copyright laws are, one will quickly note in Beirut, very low on the list of enforcement priorities.

I order a falafel sandwich from the stand farther downhill, the one I’ve heard is better, and watch the cook take the hot falafel spheres off the revolving round fryer and wrap them in Arabic bread, topping them with dollops of tartar sauce, deep-red slices of tomato, and a sprig of mint. I take a bite: not bad, actually pretty good, fresh-tasting instead of too dry or too soggy, and not overly cluttered with ingredients. The mint leaves add an unexpected punch, brightening the creamy, fried sandwich filling. This is a much better falafel than I’ve had in recent memory, maybe anywhere. It even lives up to the hype. I won’t crave one of these every week, but I’ll be back.

Food pilgrimages, to me, aren’t only about the food, or the trip. It’s not just that I love to eat and to wander around. Even a relatively short, taxi-assisted trek to Sahyoun, and a winding stroll back, after having found the thing I was looking for—no matter whether I enjoyed the food itself or not—makes me feel recharged. Meandering through the city, taking in the sights and sounds, and reflecting on my day or my life or whatever other subject floats through, clears my head. It’s a mobile meditation, with an edible reward at the end. Reminds me of one afternoon in Manhattan, before I landed my first food-writing job at
Time Out New York
, when I’d read about a certain kind of Portuguese cheese bread in the newspaper and had walked from Houston Street forty blocks uptown to Hell’s Kitchen to look for the bakery that makes it. The roll itself wasn’t such a thrill, and the cheese was too bland, at least the way this bakery made it. But I loved the search, the ramble, the mission fulfilled.

Another balmy Beirut morning in mid-October, I walk downtown again, stopping this time at the Virgin Megastore, housed in an old brick theater with slim dark red windows, to buy a CD
from a now-defunct Lebanese trip-hop band called Soap Kills; then I pop into the downtown branch of the classic Amal Bohsali pastry shop to buy a piece of
knafeh
. Knafeh is one of my favorite breakfast-dessert hybrids, a cakelike confection made with a crumbly dough called
mafroukeh
, topped with a melted, oozingly stretchy mild local cheese called
akkawi
, and generous drizzles of hot sugar syrup. Bohsali serves an exceptional knafeh, and although it makes for heavy eating at any time of day, it takes me straight back to childhood and back to family dinners in Houston, when my parents would pick up knafeh from a Lebanese pastry shop there, or order it by FedEx from an Arabic confectionery in Michigan, to reheat at home.

I stroll back to Hamra through the short hills above the Wadi Abu Jamil district, taking a path I haven’t gone on before. I navigate back to Hamra mostly on instinct, trying to sharpen a directional skill that’s always felt sorely lacking. I walk along a paved pathway above the construction sites of Wadi Abu Jamil, past parking lots, trees, and renovated old houses, and reach the foot of a concrete stairway that leads up to the edge of the neighborhood, from which I’ll cross an intersection and end up at the eastern edge of Hamra. Before I climb the concrete steps, I stop to look up at a butter-colored old townhouse with elaborately carved stone balconies and a lovely violet house next to it.

As I’m reaching the top of the stairs and about to cross over to Hamra, an armed guard stops me and asks where I’m going. Home, I say. He looks me up and down, waits two seconds, waves me by. One of the mansions owned by the family of former prime minister Hariri is nearby, so there are armed guards and chained-off sidewalks and tanks positioned on the street, as in so many other spots considered likely targets all over the city. Beirut still
looks like a military zone in certain places, until you get used to it and almost stop noticing.

Despite the interruption, I’m finding this route through the hilly edge of downtown so pleasant today—it’s quiet and traffic free and cuts a straight line through to Hamra. As I walk, I try to picture how Beirut looked in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when it was all rangy gardens and agricultural fields and stretches of grass sprinkled with yellow
houmayda
wild-flowers, with red-roofed stone houses dotted across a wide-open landscape reaching down to the Mediterranean. As a young girl, my mother would walk back and forth from Hamra to the Ahliah school in Wadi Abu Jamil every day, taking roughly the same path as I’ve taken today, but with no construction sites to snake through, no buildings blocking the view clear across town and down to the sea.

I’m conscious, as I take these long walks now, that my stride is firmer, more confident than it was in those early weeks in August and September. With my feet, I’m already starting to feel like I own the city again, at least in some small way. I’m memorizing it physically, learning the routes. Route/routine. It hits me that this is what a routine is—a kind of route. I need routines to feel at home. More and more they’re taking shape, my routines, my routes.

I was thinking as I walked today about what a city can say to you if you listen. New York, to me, has always seemed to say:
Here you are. Stay. This is what you’ve been looking for, isn’t it?
Beirut, as far as I can tell now, is saying something like
You can stay if you want, if you’re up to it. But it’s not going to be easy. Not in the least
.

Obviously what a city “says” to anyone is a projection. The question is, can that message be ignored, overruled? Time can
potentially override it, and so can new friends and routines, but might the city still say what it always said, even if it says it in a slightly lower voice as the years go by? Can you fall in love with someone whom you knew early on you weren’t in love with? Can you fall back in love with someone or something you once loved, after years of mystery and distance?

As I
sip my coffee one morning, I scan through cultural listings on a local website and read about an event that night to celebrate the launch of a book called
At the Edge of the City
. It’s a compilation of essays about the Horsh al-Sanawbar, an eighty-acre park in southeastern Beirut that’s mostly closed to the public. The reasons it’s closed are nebulous, and apparently some of the contributors to the book have tried to get official answers out of the government but gotten nowhere. The theory seems to be that the authorities are trying to keep the park, the 80 percent of it that’s officially closed, pristine, so city elites who have a government
wasta
—a personal connection—can use it privately, without having to commune with the riff-raff. I go to the event that night, just a few blocks from my apartment, and walk in as the book’s editor, Fadi Shayya, is talking about the history of the park and showing a nineteenth-century postcard of the Horsh as a snowy pine forest, with men riding through it on donkeys. The park had been created in the seventeenth century by the Druze ruler of Lebanon under the Ottoman Empire, Fakhreddine Maan, to protect Beirut from the southern winds. In the centuries since then, it’s been alternately protected, neglected, and bombed, most heavily during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. For the past decade, the Île de France municipality has been contracted to help maintain the park.

During the Q&A session after the presentation, I strike up a conversation with a friendly-looking woman named Joumana, one of the contributors to the book, who made some of the more fascinating comments about the park’s history. She also looks slightly familiar. We quickly find out that, in typical Lebanese style, we know people in common: she’s friends with the son of some old classmates of my parents, and it turns out Joumana and I met briefly at his wedding reception a few summers ago. Since then she’s grown out her hair, but her delicate features and warm smile instantly come back to me. Joumana lives in Dubai now but is here visiting for a week, and she invites me to a related event the next night at a place called Sanayeh House, in a district not far from Hamra and adjacent to a public park called Sanayeh.

The next evening I spend the half hour before the event starts walking around that neighborhood, past rows of glass-balconied condo buildings, searching for the address Joumana gave me and peering at the map I printed out. I spot another woman who seems lost, too. She looks about my age and is wearing stylish low-slung pants and a slim-fitting purple sweater that sets off her shoulder-length chocolate hair, and she seems approachable despite her striking looks. We make eye contact, she introduces herself as Mirna, and we quickly learn we’re searching for the same place and that Joumana invited her, too. We amble around together, lost.

We ask for directions several times and keep getting pointed to Zico House, a well-known events venue nearby. We eventually walk in, thinking Sanayeh House must be a nickname for Zico House, and go up the stairs, following the light and noise to a room where the door is cracked open. This has to be it. We push open the door and walk in. A group of people who seem to be in their twenties and thirties are talking animatedly, as someone with
long black hair and a wool hat writes on the chalkboard. Sounds like a vigorous discussion, and Mirna and I stand briefly, waiting for an opening in the chatter so we can make sure we’re in the right place and take our seats.

I silently clear my throat, then hear myself saying “Hi …”

Suddenly everyone in the room is quiet, staring at us. I eke out my question.

“No, this isn’t Sanayeh House,” a voice from the back of the room chimes in. More silence. No one else speaks up. I’m mortified that we’ve barged in and interrupted, although I’m not sure what we’ve just walked into.

We apologize clumsily and hurry out. Mirna tells me, when we reach the bottom of the stairs, that we must have crashed a transsexuals meeting. I later learn that Zico House, among its many functions, is a meeting place for a Lebanese organization that lobbies for gay, lesbian, and transsexual rights. No wonder people in the room looked anxious when they saw two unknowns standing in the doorway watching. Lebanon is less aggressive about persecuting gay and transgendered people, at least vis-à-vis other countries in the Middle East (which isn’t saying much, I realize), but two strangers barging into your meeting is understandable cause for worry here.

By now the Sanayeh House event, wherever that is, must have started. Mirna and I both call Joumana’s cell but don’t reach her. We keep on looking, and a half hour later we give up. But we’ve hit it off nicely, Mirna and I, in our clueless wanderings. I’ve learned that she grew up here and has just moved back from Dubai for an urban-planning job. We’re new Beirutis and old Beirutis, the two of us. We exchange numbers.

I e-mail Joumana the next day to apologize for getting lost and
not showing up at her event. Later in the week, she invites me to lunch with Mirna and another friend of theirs. The group of them are easy to be around, and refreshingly, nothing feels forced about our conversation, even though I’m the newcomer to this crowd. The chitchat roams from Beirut-versus-Dubai (a favorite topic around here these days, with so many Lebanese emigrating to Dubai for work), to relationships, and to what we love and hate about this city.

It’s a stroke of luck to have stumbled into Mirna and Joumana—hanging out with them feels oddly effortless. Joumana seems to have a sharp, creative mind but also a genuineness, a mellow vibe, an appealing expression. It reminds me a little of what first drew me to my New York friend Claire, a certain lighthearted openness and a quick intelligence coming through all at once in her eyes. Though Joumana is returning to Dubai soon and comes to Beirut only occasionally, perhaps Mirna and I will get together again. I still don’t know many people my age in Beirut and could use a few more friends.

I’m about to have more company soon, too. My parents will land in Beirut in late October for their annual Lebanon homecoming trip, and I’ll spend a few days with them here before I head to New York. I want to stock the fridge before they arrive. At the Co-op, a compact two-story supermarket a few blocks from the apartment, where my mother used to shop when we lived here, I pick up a few tubs of labneh and of tangy Lebanese yogurt, and some bags of Arabic bread, and a few kilos of the vegetables and greens my parents like having around: the finger-sized local cucumbers, tomatoes, radishes, and fresh zaatar leaves, a local variety of thyme, to fold up with bread, labneh, and olive oil at breakfast. I grab some carrots to slice into sticks and soak in water
flavored with lemon juice and salt—a popular Beirut snack. I also can’t resist buying a tube of Choco Prince cookies and a box of Picon cheese, for old times’ sake. Choco Prince billboards and TV ads were ubiquitous when I was growing up here, and Picon commercials had a jingle that my school friends and I had endless fun with: