Jasmine and Fire (26 page)

The waves are crashing hard here on the Byblos coast this afternoon, and the sun is now shining fierce and strong. I imagine a ship landing here in 3000
B.C.
, in the time of the Egyptian pharaohs, who would send boats to Byblos to collect timber from Lebanon’s cedar trees for use in building their tombs. On my Egypt trip in January, I’d seen an almost perfectly preserved ship in a small museum near the Giza pyramids; the vessel was built around 2500
B.C.
, presumably to be buried with the afterlife treasures of the pharaoh Cheops, and was made mostly with cedarwood from Lebanon.

“Let’s see if we can find Sultan Ibrahim again for lunch,” Richard says after we walk through the Crusader castle and out into a sunlit patch of grass overlooking the sea.

We do find it, at Bab el Mina, a restaurant on the harbor. Cold bottles of beer, fresh seafood, the ancient port, the blue sea, and both of us here on a gorgeous afternoon. Bliss.

On Richard’s last morning, I take him to meet my great-aunt Nida, who I adore for her wit and her stories, which I’ve dropped by to listen to on a number of afternoons over tea. She’s also the one who’d said to my mom months ago, “Damn those men.”

I’m nervous that she’ll ask us if we’re engaged. I give Richard a heads-up.

“Don’t worry. Let’s go have tea with her. I like meeting your family.”

Nida greets us warmly, insists we eat the man’ouches she’s set out for us, and launches straight into one of her stories. She’s the best storyteller I’ve ever met and has a razor-sharp memory. She
speaks both Arabic and English in the same eloquent, punctuated tones, her hands growing animated, her eyes lighting up behind her glasses, her sharply elegant features forming into a smile or a generous laugh.

As we sip our tea, she tells us how she met her late husband, Freddie, in the 1940s. He was a friend of her brother’s and was visiting Beirut from Cairo, where he had just started his career. He came by her family’s house in Beirut to say hello and sat down for coffee with her and her parents and siblings. By the time he returned by ship to Cairo a week later, the two had already fallen in love. They started writing letters every day, and he told her he’d be back for her the next summer. Then one excruciatingly long year later, he wrote her at the beginning of summer to tell her that for work reasons, he wouldn’t be able to come to Beirut that year. She was devastated, furious, and stopped replying to his letters. Then one day weeks later, she decided to write an angry response—the 1940s version of “Have a nice life”—but her mother intercepted the letter and edited it. “If God wills us to meet again, we will,” her mom added at the end.

The following year, two summers after they first met, Freddie came back for Nida. She was icy to him the day he showed up at her family’s doorstep, but he stayed for coffee with them, and slowly she started warming to him again, realizing her feelings for him hadn’t died, and here he’d come all this way to see her. He proposed that summer, and they stayed married and in love until he passed away last September.

This is one of the best love stories I’ve ever heard. I wonder, though, how the story would have played out in the age of cell phones, texting, and instant messaging, when there are so many
ways to communicate what’s on your mind right this second—with no filter, no delay, and potentially disastrous consequences.

After their long-distance stint, Freddie and Nida lived in Cairo for a while but ended up moving back to Lebanon. Both had roots and family here, so the decision about where to make their home, if not a no-brainer, wasn’t too tangled. In my case, it may not be so easy. Beirut was already starting to feel more like home to me before Richard arrived, and having him here for two weeks made it feel even cozier. My anxieties about his visit mostly vaporized as the days went by, and it felt easy and natural having him around.

As we kissed goodbye in front of the taxi that took him to the airport on his last day here, a voice in my head was saying,
Move here!

But I didn’t say it out loud. Another voice, much like Nida’s mother’s, took over, and I said something a little less hasty: “Safe travels!”

MARCH

It’s coming
up on spring this month and my birthday—and maybe even the birth of a new Middle East. It remains to be seen whether this season will bring changes beyond Egypt and Tunisia and overturn more regimes known, over the past century, mainly for cruelty and repression instead of for their ancient heritage or their artistic and intellectual contributions to civilization. But since Mubarak finally fell in mid-February, and before him Ben-Ali in Tunisia, the revolutionary wave has picked up momentum in nearly every country in the Arab world.

One afternoon in March, a few weeks after Mubarak’s fall, I sit in at a talk at AUB by Rashid Khalidi, a historian and professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia
University. He’s in town this week from New York to speak about the Arab revolutions—what everyone is calling the Arab Spring, even though it’s still technically winter—and I’m curious to get some perspective about what’s going on around the region from Khalidi, a Palestinian American and something of a celebrity academic both in the States and here.

What’s different about these uprisings, Khalidi tells the crowd gathered in the university auditorium, is that for the first time in history, Arab populations are rising up not against a colonial occupation—which they’ve repeatedly done in the past—but against their own internal regimes, which have failed to deliver any kind of stability or economic growth or, perhaps most important of all, dignity.

Khalidi gets some cheers when he tells the packed room that for the first time in recent history, and maybe ever, Arabs are looking pretty good in the international media: “The way these revolutions are changing the American public image of the Arab world is astounding. It’s a good thing, for the first time, to be an Arab in the United States.”

Although he’s a rousing speaker, he strikes some sober notes in his talk. He cautions against overoptimism, since it’s not yet clear what will come next, if and when the other corrupt Arab regimes fall, and how the realities of postrevolutionary Egypt and Tunisia will play out.

And what about Lebanon? Khalidi doesn’t say much. Even though the political stalemate here continues, nothing else is really happening at the moment. There’s no dictatorship to overthrow; it’s just the usual seesaw of inertia and instability. But the irony that Lebanon is now the quietest country in the Middle East escapes no one. How’d that happen?!

It’s a relief that at the moment we’re not on the verge, at least not the razor’s-edge verge, of another civil war. Meanwhile, despite how inspiring it’s been to watch the revolutions around the region, things are getting even more horrendous for the protesters in some countries, particularly in Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, and now Syria—each of the regimes crushing protests ever more violently and ruthlessly.

But the ground in the Arab world is indeed shifting in a way it never has before. Of all the years to move back to the Middle East, I’ve lucked into this one, if
luck
is the right word. Even if I’ve never been one of those journalists who run to a war scene for the adrenaline high—I’m more likely to just run—living in the Arab world as the entire region goes through dramatic changes is an undeniable rush.

During his talk, Khalidi quotes Wordsworth: “Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.” An optimistic flourish for these heady, dangerous times.

No one knows yet if a new Arab world really is about to spring to life. But something else, also miraculous, will be born this month: my brother Samir’s first baby. She’s actually due on my birthday, in late March, and with luck I’ll be meeting her as a newborn when I visit Samir and his wife, Laila, in California in early April. Our parents are, needless to say, excited that one of their kids is finally procreating.

Before I head to the States to meet my niece, I have to write an essay about my Beirut experience for
ForbesLife
magazine and host my friend Claire from New York. She’s been one of my best friends ever since we worked together at
The Village Voice
in the late 1990s, and she’ll be here staying with me for a week and a half this month. Claire has been going through a breakup over the past
few weeks, as well as apartment-moving hassles in New York, and she’s eager for some Mediterranean-style eating, drinking, hanging out, and forgetting. She’s a magazine journalist, too, writing mostly about art and pop culture, and hopes to find some inspiration during her visit. I’m hoping this trip will come through for her on all counts.

I’ve planned a full week of adventures for us, and I’ve also set aside a couple of days when Claire can be off to explore on her own while I work on my
ForbesLife
assignment. I’m looking forward to writing this piece, the first substantial article I’ve been assigned on Lebanon—and incredibly, it’s neither about Beirut’s wild nightlife nor about the catastrophic political scene, but just a meditation on what my life here is like now.

I’ve been excited to see Claire and get lots of catch-up time with her, but I’ve also been wondering if there’s still any lingering tension between us from an argument we had when I was in New York around Christmas. It was nothing major—just confusion around a dinner plan we’d made for one of the handful of nights I was in town. We’d both been looking forward to spending time together but were crazed with tight schedules that week, and we’d ended up feeling rushed during our dinner. Hurt feelings and miscommunication ignited into a little fight, although we’d resolved it that night. But this will be the first time I’m seeing her since then.

My relationships with friends have been on my mind more than usual in these months in Beirut. As I’ve been cultivating some promising new friendships here and rekindling old ones, I’ve also been missing everyone I’m close to back in the States. But I’ve been noticing that with Lebanese friends, not just ones I’ve known since childhood but also people I’ve met more recently, I tend to have an easier time feeling confident and more like myself right
away. My insecurities about seeming approachable, being trusted and valued, don’t seem to kick in as powerfully here, and my fears of rejection somehow aren’t as persistent or pronounced.

This can’t have anything to do with the Lebanese being more easygoing or down-to-earth as a rule. There can be lots of artifice in social interactions in Lebanon, more so in some circles than others. Some friends of mine in Beirut complain about being fed up with superficial, status-obsessed Lebanese types, a common breed here. Years ago the wife of one of my cousins tried moving back to Lebanon from the States, before they got married, but didn’t last long. She quickly got tired of the phoniness that’s rampant in certain Beirut social scenes, and in the art world where she was working. Eventually, after they met and got married, they moved back here, and she gradually found ways to cope with the one-upmanship and snobbery when it came her way.

I think I’ve been lucky in the people I’ve met so far. Those whom I can’t relate to I manage to weed out instantly. But between my new and old friends here, and my cousins, too, I feel surrounded by a wonderful bunch of unpretentious, creative, fun-to-be-around types—who remind me of my friends in New York—and oddly enough, I’ve felt comfortable and accepted right off the bat. No need to break each other in too much, no need to overcome my insecurities and look for reassurance in quite the same way as I’ve often needed to in the States. It occurs to me that the friends I’ve been clicking with here are versions of myself, pieces of who I might have been had my family never left Beirut. Spending time with them is, in a way, like reassembling a jigsaw puzzle, its pieces scattered everywhere—but, as I’m discovering, not scattered so far away.

Claire
arrives in Beirut on a gorgeous, sunlit Saturday afternoon in early March. It feels like the first real day of spring, even though spring hasn’t officially started according to the calendar. I walk down to the Corniche in the late morning and sit on a bench there for a while, staring out at the sea, at the snowy mountaintops in the distance, at fishermen and scattered groups of sunbathers in swimsuits on the seaweedy rocks below the Corniche, and at cyclists on the sidewalk. It’s still ski season in the nearby mountain resort of Faraya and farther up in the Cedars, but down here along the Corniche, some brave Beirutis are already swimming. I guess it’s true that in Lebanon you can ski in the morning and swim in the afternoon—one of the tourism ministry’s favorite PR slogans and a longtime cliché in Lebanon. I’d always thought that claim was total BS, but on an early spring day like today, it appears to be no lie.