Jasmine and Fire (13 page)

The real words were something like “Jibnit Picon, a French cheese, from cow’s milk,” but the dirty version rhymed nicely in Arabic. When I get home from the store, I open a wedge of Picon and wrap it in a piece of Arabic bread. I haven’t eaten it in so many years, and I’m curious if it will be remotely edible now. Hmm, not too bad: just salty creaminess, with a sticky, almost plasticky texture. It’s processed cheese and tastes like it, but it’s not horribly objectionable, I have to admit. The Choco Prince is sheer pleasure, just as I remember it. Buttery biscuits sandwiching a chocolate cream filling. All processed, nothing terribly original going on. But a very basic kind of comfort and joy. Two major culinary fixtures of my childhood, and here they still are.

The
days before my parents arrive quickly fill up. I stop by a restaurant called Tawlet, specializing in Lebanese regional dishes, and catch up over lunch with its owner, Kamal Mouzawak. He opened Tawlet a few years ago after creating the Souk el Tayeb, billed as the first farmer’s market in Beirut, although in some ways it’s a revival of the prewar produce souks around downtown. I’d
met Kamal in New York at a food event a couple of years ago, and I’d run into him here in Beirut while shopping at Souk el Tayeb a few weeks ago. The market is downtown on Saturday mornings, and I’ve tended to sleep through it most weekends, but when I’ve motivated myself to get up in time, I’ve always been glad I did. It’s one of the most reliable places to find high-quality, organically grown fruits and vegetables—plus cheeses, honey, pastries, and cooked dishes made by the farmers’ families.

While Kamal greets some Tawlet regulars, I flip through this week’s issue of
Time Out Beirut
as I devour a plate of kibbeh nayyeh, the Lebanese lamb tartare, wrapping it up in fingerfuls of pita with a slice of white onion, a pinch of salt, and a drizzle of olive oil. Soon Kamal comes back to the table and tells me he wants to introduce me to another New York expat now living in Beirut. She and I look at each other for a long second, then both smile. It’s a journalist named Kaelen, who had worked at
The Village Voice
at the same time I did, more than a decade ago. We never knew each other very well, but I’d heard she’d moved to Beirut about ten years ago to cover the art scene and ended up staying and marrying a Lebanese. She’s on that list of people I’ve been meaning to contact in Beirut. I should’ve guessed, after all the other coincidental run-ins I’ve had so far, that I’d bump in to her sooner or later. We catch up for a few minutes, then she has to start her interview with Kamal for a profile she’s doing for a magazine, but we vow to plan a proper drinks session.

An unexpected e-mail arrives that night. An acquaintance from a recent freelance project in New York tells me two of her friends from the States are visiting Beirut this week, on a whim, while en route to a Dubai fashion event, and asks me if I’d mind showing them around a little. I make plans to meet them the next
night: Alison, a magazine editor in New York, and her friend Stacy, a TV writer in L.A. We meet for a drink at the glass-enclosed rooftop bar of the new Le Gray hotel downtown, where they’re staying, then head to the dinner I’ve booked for us at Abdel Wahab, a Lebanese restaurant I like in Achrafieh.

It’s a hot night—the temperatures still haven’t dropped—so instead of walking, we take a taxi across the flat, open middle of downtown. We cross Martyrs’ Square, with its bullet-ridden metal statue of gun-toting Lebanese revolutionaries who were hanged by the Ottomans in World War I, and drive past the luxurious new brick mansions of the Saifi Village neighborhood on the eastern edge of downtown. Our taxi then goes up a slow-sloping hill into Achrafieh. We walk into the restaurant, my companions admiring the ornate green and gold door that leads in and up to the leafy rooftop terrace. Over plates of eggplant fatteh, and shish taouk dipped into the creamy garlic sauce known as
toum
, and fresh sumac-spiced fattoush salad, and glasses of
arak
, the local anise liqueur, we chatter about the New York media world, people we know in common, and their impressions of Beirut.

“Such a beautiful and fascinating little city. I can’t believe more Americans don’t come here. Is there much tourism going on these days? Do people still think it’s dangerous?”

“I guess so,” I reply. “A lot of tourists want to feel it’s a hundred percent safe before they visit. It’s the Middle East, though. There’s always something brewing. But I’ve been overhearing more American, European, African, and Asian tourists around Beirut lately. Not tons, but more than I’d noticed in the past.”

After dinner I take them on a stroll through the cobblestoned Achrafieh streets down to the adjacent Gemmayzeh area, lit up as always, its bars buzzing but quieter than in midsummer, and we
drink beers at a little dive bar called Godot before I drop them off by taxi at their hotel.

A happy side effect of this night is that I felt like the Beirut expert in the group. (Competition was not stiff, granted.) I’d made the plans and ordered the food and drinks, and after our nightcap I’d sent Alison and Stacy off with advice on where they should stroll and explore the next day, and on where to find original handmade Lebanese textiles and housewares to take home. As we walked to Godot, I also gave them a general overview of Lebanese politics, since they asked about the current situation. I don’t think I would’ve felt this confident showing visitors around just a few short weeks ago. But more and more, I’m realizing now, this city is mine. I live here. More and more I know what to do, where to go—or I know enough for now, anyway. I haven’t yet figured out the home question and likely won’t for a while. But I’m feeling much less like a visitor.

At what point, then, does one definitively cross over from “visitor” to “local”? In my sixth or seventh year in New York, I would jokingly ask my native Manhattanite friends, “Am I a real New Yorker yet?”

The answers would usually range from “Yes, ever since you were born,” to “No, in New York you have to give it another three years at least.”

I’ve
been thinking in these past weeks about how we negotiate spaces, how we take foreign environments—cities, neighborhoods, houses—and make them familiar, or how they gradually become familiar over time, whether or not we ultimately fall in love with them. Spaces that seem cold, new, and unfamiliar to our bodies and movements gradually take our shape, and we start to
flow through them naturally, unthinkingly. We may feel love for some of those spaces, indifference to others, but still most of the spaces we move through start to mold themselves to our lives, to become easy and practically unconscious.

Maybe the where-is-home question is ultimately chicken and egg, whether it’s about specific spaces or entire cities. Do we move to a city and then it becomes home? Or in these days, when we have more choices of where to live, do we choose to live somewhere long term mainly
because
it feels like home?

The German twentieth-century philosopher Martin Heidegger was preoccupied with physical spaces and our relationship to them. With apologies to the Heidegger scholars I studied with at Berkeley (and who gave me wondrous A-grades even though I remained mostly in the dark about his major work,
Being and Time
), this is what I took away, and what I still think about all the time. One of Heidegger’s ideas was the notion of “worlding,” or the way we come into contact with objects and spaces around us, and the way we construct and negotiate our world by unconsciously responding to and interpreting the spaces we move through. I notice how my bedroom here in Beirut felt alien when I first arrived in August, even though it’s the same bedroom I slept in as a child and have stayed in on summer visits over the years. But compared to my New York bedroom, which I’d grown so used to in recent years, this space felt foreign when I walked into it in August, not yet molded to my movements and my life. The bedroom had been an unconscious part of my life before, a very long time ago, but no longer. Now, a couple of months later, I move through it naturally again, unthinkingly.

My living room in Beirut, too: I felt strange and uncomfortable
and lonely moving around in it at first, trying to decide which part of the long navy-blue sofa to sit on, whether to put my feet on the thick-legged wooden coffee table, whether the vase-shaped antique table lamp was at the right height. I needed to forge my own pathways through that room, arrange my stacks of books and magazines and papers on the coffee table in a way that felt comforting and accessible to me. Now I move through that room, too, as if I’ve always inhabited this space, not minding or even noticing if the table lamp is too low or the coffee table a little too high to put my feet up on. I’ve gotten in the habit of automatically sitting on the right-hand side of the sofa, nearer the window. It’s as if I’d been living here all along, during those civil war years away when this room, this apartment, became foreign and distant spaces in another world.

But sometimes familiarity with a place doesn’t, despite all efforts, make it home. Once in Vienna I passed in front of the house that the twentieth-century Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein spent years designing only to discover that it was unlivable. When the house was built, with Wittgenstein’s precise specifications about the height of ceilings and the plainness of doors, windows, and other normally ornamental bits, hardly anyone in his family could live in it. It was too austere and too devoid, on principle, of any decorative touches. One of Wittgenstein’s sisters publicly declared the house unlivable, and another lived in it only briefly. It now houses the Bulgarian embassy. On paper the house was a minimalist’s dream. In real life it was chilling, lacking any of the small soothing details that bring comfort or a human touch, at least to those it was built to house.

Whether or not a city, or a house, is ultimately a viable, beloved
home must have at least partly to do with how it feels wrapped around you—its spaces, the whole shape and tone of the place, whether it fits snugly or widely, whatever your taste. Or is it ultimately a moot point to wax philosophical about home? Isn’t home just the place where you grew up, or if not that, then the place where you live now, work, have friends or family?

Still, I can’t get around the idea that sometimes “home” doesn’t feel like home—or home doesn’t feel like “home”—and sometimes a place that isn’t “home” feels like home. (Put the quote marks wherever you like.) Maybe home used to be, necessarily, the place where you were born or grew up or where you live and work. But now that “home” can be a choice, at least in theory, just like every other consumer or lifestyle option, I don’t think there’s any going back to a world where Home wasn’t a concept as much up for grabs as Career or Hobby. Now that we can almost easily, in many cultures, switch houses, towns, jobs, spouses, and friends, will more of us do as the most adventurous expats have done for centuries—leave the home of our past, if it doesn’t fit right, and look for our true home?

But for anyone who has the option, I wonder if it would be a net plus to be able to say: “This city where I grew up, or where I’ve moved for work or for a relationship, or where I’m living my adult life at the moment, isn’t the city where I feel most comfortable, happiest, most optimistic. So let me find another one—after all, there are roughly 36,000 other cities in the world to choose from.” Or would that just bring on eternal questioning and longing? Would it be simpler to say This City Here Is Home, thanks to family or work or other necessities, and be done with the whole thing?

On days when the blues creep in, I wish I’d never left all my familiar routines in New York, and my good-enough comfort
there, to come back to Beirut. On clearer-headed days, I do know what I’m doing here—seeing whether it still fits, snugly, in the way I want home to fit, but also not too snugly.

My parents fly in from Houston today, and they call tonight, a Sunday in late October, to say they’re en route to Hamra from the airport. The electricity has just gone out in our building, more severely than during the usual partial blackouts. We have a generator, but it’s not kicking in right now for some reason. An electrician is here, on his night off, trying to figure out the problem, so the building concierge, a lanky thirty-year-old named Ali, helps haul my parents’ luggage up four flights of stairs to the apartment.

I open the door to let them in, we hug, and my mother says cheerfully that it’s so refreshing to walk into a lived-in apartment. Normally when they come to Beirut on their visits, the apartment has been empty for long stretches. I haven’t seen Mom and Dad in a few months, since before I left the States, and I’ve missed them. Even though it’s nearly midnight when they get here, just after they finish dropping their bags in the master bedroom, we sit down for a nightcap glass of wine and catch up a bit. They’re obviously exhausted and ready to crash, but I hear myself dropping the million-dollar question: “Where is home for you guys? Is it still Beirut? Is it Houston?” My mother chuckles, says nothing for a few seconds, then tells me she needs to think about it when she’s more awake. My father answers right away: Houston is more comfortable, he says, because as much as Beirut feels like home and they’re planning to spend more time here now that he’s just retired, the city gets claustrophobic after a while, and he craves the infrastructural comforts (reliable electricity and a building elevator that works, for instance) and more open spaces. But coming to Beirut feels like a battery recharge. Seeing friends and family
makes him feel a connection and vitality he doesn’t feel in the same way in Houston. He seems to have figured out what each city means to him, and how it fits into his life now. My mother still doesn’t say anything; she just gazes out the window.

Friends
and relatives drop by from morning to night the next day to welcome my parents back. My mom’s cousin Mona, stirring sugar into a cup of Arabic coffee and leaning back in the wooden rocking chair in our living room, glances over and says to my mother, “I wonder if I know any nice men for Salma to meet.” My great-aunt Nida stops by, too, that afternoon and, in between casual chichat with my parents and me, looks over and says to my mom, “Salma is lovely.
Yikhreeb zouk al rjal
. Damn those men.” Meaning
“It’s crazy that a man didn’t nab her”
?