Jasmine and Fire (24 page)

Even my mother, while living in a Beirut apartment next door to her married brother’s family in her twenties, after her parents died, got some needling questions from relatives concerned about her chastity: “Why not just move in with your brother?”

I’d like to think if I were alive then, I would’ve faced down the questions and lived alone if I needed or wanted to. Or would I have married, even if I wasn’t madly in love or feeling ready to commit to a particular person for life, just to avoid being constantly judged and harassed? Or would I have just sucked it up and lived with my parents until I was ready to get married—even through my late thirties? Would I have done what I wanted and helped my parents turn a blind eye, found sneaky ways to avoid embarrassing them or bringing down the judgment of those who still insisted on tsk-tsking, even well into the twenty-first century?

I’m lucky to even have these choices
, I remind myself. In another generation, or another country, or another family, I would probably have been married with kids a long time ago and would never even have considered the alternative. Or if I’d been determined or brave enough to postpone or dodge that path, I might have been banished.

So yes, I’m fortunate to even be hashing all this out right now. Fortunate but confused.

Before Richard arrives, I ask around for advice on how to explain his visit to people who might judge. Should I act like it’s no big deal that he’s here visiting me, staying with me, and horrors—no we’re not engaged? Or should I just introduce him as an old platonic friend?

The opinions I get range from “Just do what comes naturally, no need to lie, and people will have to deal with it, and if they can’t, then you don’t need them anyway” to “You don’t have to tell anyone; just say he’s a friend; you know how the Lebanese like to talk and gossip and butt in,” to the more paranoid “Cohabitation is actually illegal in Lebanon, so be careful” (although I haven’t heard of any cases where the police went after a wayward couple). I want badly to go with option A, because that’s the most natural and least absurd of the scenarios. But maybe I’ll bend the truth just a little so as not to ruffle feathers.

It’s
an almost supernaturally blue-skied afternoon when Richard lands in Beirut. I go to the airport to meet him, and as he walks out the terminal door, an intense happiness washes over me, a warm tingly feeling. Yes, he’s supposed to be here. With me. All I have to do now is make Beirut okay for him, maybe even incredible. Maybe we can live here together someday. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

We hug long and tight. I lead the way to the taxi stand.

“How did the trip go?”

“Pretty smoothly. I almost missed the connection at the Frankfurt airport because the flight out of JFK was delayed, but other than that, all good. Got my bags right away. The immigration line went really fast after we landed in Beirut. No one asked me, ‘So, Meester Geelman, vat eez ze purpose of your visit to zees country?’ ”

“This isn’t Nazi Germany.”

“I know. Guess I was being paranoid for a second.”

Richard’s flight was the cheapest I’ve seen from New York to Beirut: just under eight hundred dollars round-trip. In New York over New Year’s, when we found that airfare online and he bought his ticket, we’d high-fived each other. Bliss, excitement, a thrilling adventure on the way. And then five minutes later we’d gotten into a fight. I’d mentioned that maybe he should play down his Jewish identity when he’s in Lebanon, because of the country’s relationship with Israel and because people tend to assume that if you’re American and Jewish, then you must be a Zionist.

In his family and in the Hebrew school he was sent to, Richard was raised to see the Holocaust as the defining event of this era, and he grew up learning about the history of persecution that Jews have faced in Europe and elsewhere at various points throughout history. Among my own relatives and the Lebanese in general, the Nakba—the expulsion of most of the Arabs from Palestine in 1948—has been one of the defining events of our times. It’s had tragic repercussions in the decades since, on Lebanon as a whole and on the entire region, and it’s also profoundly impacted some of our own relatives who married Palestinians and have half-Palestinian kids.

I understand how political views are shaped by, even if not necessarily always defined by, our families and the political and geographical contexts we all grew up in. Part of the problem, maybe the biggest part, of trying to resolve some of the region’s seemingly eternal conflicts is that we’re dealing with populations who grew up within different contexts, and who in most cases have trouble integrating the other narrative into their own.

When I’d suggested, just after Richard clicked “confirm” on his ticket purchase, that maybe he should be cautious about bringing up being Jewish when he’s in Lebanon, at least until the people he meets get to know him better and feel unthreatened by potential political tension in the room, he’d gotten upset with me. My timing was admittedly awful—and I’d apologized for that, reassuring him that no Lebanese person, relative of mine or not, could ever pull us apart, or would even want to, if we want to be together. And anyway my family would be predisposed to love him, warm and funny and genuine as he is, not to mention that he’s with me.

“Just please,” I’d said, as we finally worked our way out of the angry cloud and decided to make the best of his trip, “lay off any ‘rah rah Israel’ when you’re in Beirut?” I was joking. As if he’d ever say anything like that, or even remotely want to. But when it comes to the delightful relationship between Lebanon and Israel, you can never be too careful.

Ever since I got back from Egypt, I’ve been making a list of places I want to take Richard, and all the angles of this country I want to show him: Lebanon as beautiful site of ancient civilizations, and Beirut as crazy bad-ass city, gentle old Mediterranean port town, hipster-bar-scene central, and eternally mixed-up, schizophrenic, unstable, but ultimately lovable place.

On his first full day, I decide to take him on one of my now-patented long walks across the city to show him the sweep of it all, from Ras Beirut on the west side through downtown and on to Achrafieh on the east side. It’s starting to rain as we set out on our walk, not ideal—but that’s okay, I figure, it’ll be more romantic, like in movie scenes where couples run through a darkening city, holding hands in the pouring rain.

Before we head across town, we pick up a man’ouche at the Hamra bakery around the corner from my apartment, and wind down to Bliss Street, then through the American University of Beirut. The campus descends downhill, along wooded paths and stone staircases leading through forested clusters and landscaped gardens planted with purple petunias, red hibiscus, and pink hydrangeas, all the way to the sea. Many of the campus buildings, graceful brick villa-style structures, were built in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and are dedicated to the Protestant missionaries who founded the university—Dodge Hall, Nicely Hall, West Hall (named, coincidentally, after an ancestor of one of Richard’s New York friends). A few more glassy modern buildings sit on the lower edge of campus closer to the waterfront. All over campus, peeks between buildings and through the branches of palm trees and pines bring cinematic views of the Mediterranean, and an underpass at the sea-level edge leads under the Corniche and to the university’s own beach, a summer hangout for students and staff.

We walk through campus and exit out the lower end, crossing the street onto the Corniche. By this point it’s raining hard, but we keep on walking and getting soaked, Richard gaping at my daredevil street-crossing technique, the only way to get anywhere as a pedestrian in Beirut. Cars won’t stop on their own and rarely obey what few traffic lights there are, so, just as drivers do, you have to make a decision to cross and go with it, forge right through the traffic.

We continue toward downtown and head to the center and the Martyrs’ Square statue of the Lebanese nationalist revolutionaries who were hanged by the Ottomans in 1919. Before the civil war, before I was born, the Martyrs’ Square area was known as Place
des Canons, or the Burj (“armory” in Arabic), and for anyone who has seen vintage postcards of downtown Beirut, that’s the big palm-tree-lined square surrounded by lively pedestrian sidewalks and bus-ringed streets. A popular old guidebook called
Lebanon Today
, found on the bookshelves of many Beirut homes, including ours—it was published, poignantly, in 1974, a year before the war started, and predicts on page 187 that “Lebanon will always remain a haven of peace and stability”—described downtown Beirut this way: “The visitor would be well advised to mingle with the crowds in the Place des Canons itself … then the souks—narrow streets, frequently roofed—where you are carried along by the crowd … People often come here just to drink a lemonade or a fruit drink or taste the pastries or other dainties which they eat as they walk along.”

But that prewar version of downtown Beirut hadn’t been around very long by the time that guidebook was written. The statue of the revolutionaries had only just been erected in 1960, and the lawn and street arrangement that characterized the square and its surroundings before the civil war had been inspired by relatively recent French urban planning trends of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In a place like Lebanon, though, wrecked then rebuilt so many times over the millennia, starting way back before it was even a real country, the shortlived recent past becomes as sepia-toned as the ancient, hazier one. I feel wistful about Place des Canons even though I was never alive to see the way downtown looked back then. The Martyrs’ Square reincarnation, with only that 1960 statue still present (albeit now bullet-ridden from the events of the 1970s and 1980s), has newer associations for the civil war generation like me. That part of downtown, a mostly flat and empty square ever since the
war, is where the so-called Cedar Revolution happened in 2005, as masses of Lebanese gathered to protest Syria’s postwar occupation of the country.

It’s pouring even harder now, and Richard and I are both drenched top to bottom, as we head through the square and toward the ancient Roman baths and the parliament building. I’d wanted this walk to surprise and enchant him, give him a taste of the city’s contrasts and complexity, but although he’s being a good sport, we’re both tired, soaked, and getting cranky.

On our walk, Richard has been transfixed by the noisy car-and-moped-crammed streets, the vendors selling fresh pomegranate juice and sesame bread from wheelbarrows, the chaotic mix of crumbling ruins and spanking-new buildings, and the sea that curves around, blue even on a rainy February day. But he’s annoyed with the nonexistent sidewalks and the impossibility of walking here without pausing to defend your life from a speeding car or a perilous pothole every seven seconds. It’s time for a break. He stops me at the next corner.

“Intense city, wow. Insane, and so cool, and exhausting. Drink?”

It’s five o’clock, and we’re walking now across Martyrs’ Square toward Achrafieh, the mostly Christian neighborhood of old stone mansions and churches and posh boutiques on the east side of town. We try stopping at a couple of bars I like around here, first a place fittingly called Time Out, and then Pacifico, the bar I went to with Mirna and her friends weeks ago. No luck at either place; the doors are locked. This is when I learn that lots of Beirut bars, many of the ones in Achrafieh anyway, don’t open until seven
P.M.
Not because of any puritanical law—just a widely shared feeling of
Why would you want to sit in a bar at five when it’s not packed with
people yet? What’s the point of starting early? Pace yourself. It’s a long night ahead
.

We take a service taxi back to Hamra, pick up a bottle of the Lebanese winery Ksara’s Reserve du Couvent, an inexpensive, easy-drinking red that’s ubiquitous in Beirut, and head back to the apartment. We spend the evening in, making dinner and watching a movie—
Pan’s Labyrinth
, Guillermo del Toro’s hallucinatory Spanish film, on a one-dollar pirate disk I’d picked up. It turns into a cozy night of pasta, wine, and a movie, just like any we’d have in New York. Simple, easy, pleasant. Incredibly pleasant.

The next morning, and every morning for the two straight weeks he’s here, I wake up cheerful and rested—a personal record for me. Knowing we have days and days to spend together morning to night makes me feel a relaxed kind of joy that I somehow hadn’t anticipated in all my anxiety about his trip. One day we wake up at six to take a bus ride, around two hours long, to the ancient Roman ruins at Baalbek, in the Beqaa Valley east of Beirut. We arrive to find we’re the only ones at Baalbek on this rainy Tuesday morning in February, the first time I’ve seen the site so empty. But on past trips I’ve come here in July or August, when it’s overrun with Lebanese visitors and with foreigners who’ve braved whatever political volatility happened to be in the air. We hold hands as we climb up the stone steps of the Temple of Bacchus, a grand, columned affair bigger than the Parthenon in Athens and built more than two thousand years ago.

“Whoa. Holy shit. I can’t believe this place.”

I stare out at Mount Sannine, covered in snow, in the distance beyond the valley and the pine trees. We walk over toward the Temple of Jupiter, the six giant stone columns that have made the cover of nearly every guidebook ever written about Lebanon.

“Want a commemorative Hezbollah T-shirt?” I ask jokingly, pointing past the temple to the row of vendors standing outside the entrance selling shirts with the militia’s yellow and green logo: an outstretched arm rising up out of an Arabic-calligraphy scrawl of the word
Hezbollah
, and holding an AK-47. Baalbek is in a part of the Beqaa Valley controlled mainly by Hezbollah, not a fact that always makes it into the guidebooks. The roads in that part of the Beqaa are hung all over with posters of party militants and, Hezbollah being financed largely by Iran, of Iranian right-wing religious figures.

The sinister signage notwithstanding, I’m feeling proud of Lebanon as we walk around. These stone temples are so ancient, so shockingly well preserved through the millennia and the multiple invasions and wars. They radiate grandeur and timelessness. Few ancient ruins anywhere in the world rival Baalbek’s, in my not-unbiased opinion—but Mark Twain agreed. After his visit to Lebanon in the nineteenth century, he wrote: “Such grandeur of design, and such grace of execution, as one sees in the temples of Baalbec, have not been equaled or even approached in any work of men’s hands that has been built within twenty centuries past.”