Jasmine and Fire (27 page)

Claire buzzes up to my apartment at four o’clock in the afternoon, when I’m back home tidying up. She insisted on taking a cab by herself from the airport to my apartment, to get a better handle on the city; I’ve had that same urge in foreign cities. Because it’s nearly impossible to give directions to visitors without resorting to famous landmarks (there are very few street name signs in Beirut), I told her to instruct the cab to go to the May-flower, a boxy white-brick hotel near my apartment that became famous for housing the international press during the civil war, and the occasional celebrity writer like Graham Greene. It’s not a particularly fancy hotel, but any taxi driver would know it, and from there it’s a short walk to my place.

I run downstairs to meet her, and there she is in my lobby, smiling, her beautiful face and big hazel eyes lit up, curly light-brown
hair catching the sunlight, not looking for a second like she just got through twenty hours in transit. Seeing her here brings me a jolt of comfort, as if my two cities, two worlds, two lives are coming together—sort of like they did when Richard was visiting, but in a more casual, matter-of-fact way this time, almost as if I’ve just run into her on the street, in Hamra by chance, instead of on Spring Street or Third Avenue in Manhattan.

She laughs as she tells me about the cabbie who ripped her off. There’s an instantly relaxed vibe between us. I’m relieved that she seems glad to be here, and I sense her excitement for the trip. We put her stuff down in the apartment, she freshens up, then we head out for a sunset walk along the Corniche, the early-evening city lights along the boulevard’s half-moon curve reflecting on the darkening blue-green sea. From the waterfront, we loop back up through the low Ras Beirut hills and into the Hamra area, and stop for drinks and a bite at a café-bar hangout near my apartment called DePrague. As we start in on a round of drinks and sink into a purple sofa in the dim, low-ceilinged room, it feels like we could be meeting up in the East Village or Brooklyn on any spring night this past decade, or back in the late 1990s when we were first becoming friends.

We can’t stop talking, catching up on all the details we didn’t get a chance to go into over e-mail or on the phone in these past weeks. We order some toasted halloum sandwiches because suddenly we’re starving. The icy beers and crunchy baguettes slathered with the melted salty-white cheese are tasting good, and sitting with Claire feels soothing for me tonight, as it hopefully does for her. We linger for a while, then call it an early night after her long trip.

I take her for a walk around Ras Beirut the next day, after we
take our time making coffee and eating labneh sandwiches, sprinkled with zaatar and olive oil, out on my balcony. Heading downhill from my neighborhood toward the waterfront, we walk past the abandoned Holiday Inn, a twenty-six-story modernist tower built in the 1970s; right around the hotel’s grand opening, the war broke out. The hotel ended up getting used instead as a base for various militias, and all of its floors were bombed out or repurposed as platforms for shelling enemy militias and keeping a watch on goings-on for miles around. The building is now a hollow shell but still standing, a shattered, bullet-ridden museum piece of the war. Claire pulls out her camera to take a picture of the hotel, which has probably been photographed by every visitor to Beirut ever since the war. Immediately two cops materialize from behind the front gate and speak to us in English.

“What are you doing?”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I just took a picture. Is that okay?”

“No. I need to see your photos.”

The policemen grab her camera and look through her pictures. They must have looked through every single one, including shots of her with friends in Brooklyn taken weeks ago, and of her cat Oliver. Finally they decide we’re okay. Claire is panicked. I’m startled, too—I’d never expected to be stopped for doing something just about everyone who has walked past the Holiday Inn has done, many times. Then I realize the officers are probably just bored, flirting with us, nothing better to do on this sleepy Sunday afternoon.

A little later, as we reach downtown, Claire tries to shoot the view from near the Grand Serail, the parliament building, from a spot that turns out to be too close to one of ex–prime minister Hariri’s mansions for the security guards’ taste. We’re stopped
again. Same routine. Two guards emerge from a doorway and ask to see her camera. Again, they look through all the photos. Oliver the cat is becoming an international star. I’ve only been stopped once before, on a summer visit one year while trying to take a picture of my mother’s Ahliah school nearby, also apparently too close to the ex–prime minister’s house. But today armed guards seem to be coming at us from all directions—a big help in my efforts to make my friend feel welcome here.

Other than that, walking around the city with Claire feels mellow and pleasant. We talk sometimes, stay comfortably quiet other times. We stop in at the Virgin shop downtown to look for Arabic music; surprisingly for an international chain store, it has an extensive selection of obscure local bands and musicians. Funny, too, that all the Virgins in the United States have closed, but the Beirut branch lives on. Claire looks through some Fairuz disks, and we ask one of the guys who work there if there are any great new albums from Lebanese or Palestinian bands. At the bar the other night, we’d heard one we liked, and we asked the bartender about it and learned it’s the Palestinian hip-hop band Dam. They don’t have it at Virgin, but she ends up buying a few disks the guy at the store recommends, one by the local group Fareeq al-Atrash (their name a play on a famous singer from the 1930s, Farid al-Atrash), and another by Rayess Bek, a Lebanese rapper.

As we walk out of the store, cross Martyrs’ Square, and keep strolling eastward, to the winding, tree-lined streets of Achrafieh, Claire asks me what’s happening on the Lebanese political scene these days.

“Oof, you really want to know?”

“I’ve been trying to read up, but it gets confusing. Things
sound a little dicey again lately. Could there be another war soon?”

“There could, though probably not right away—the government is stalemated at the moment. But you never know here. Tensions have been brewing off and on. If war eventually breaks out, it would be along different lines than the civil war was: it would likely be more of a Sunni-Shiite divide this time than a Christian-Muslim divide.”

We stop at a bakery to pick up man’ouches, and because Claire wants to know more, especially since the revolts elsewhere in the Arab world have been in the news daily, I give her my two-bit summary as we stroll along. I explain that mass popular revolts are unlikely to happen in Lebanon at this point since we do have elections and a quasi-democracy, and most groups do have some kind of voice in government—even though the system is a mess.

From the quiet Achrafieh side street where we’re wandering around, headed nowhere in particular, we can see the downtown mosques and some nearby church spires. I explain that of Lebanon’s two main political groups right now, the March 14 Party is mostly identified with the Sunni sect and the rival March 8 Party with the Shiite community and Hezbollah, although both parties have some members of other sects, including Christians, mixed in. I mention that the president still always has to be a Christian, and that there hasn’t been a census taken in Lebanon since 1932—the Christians have been blocking one—but it’s clear they’re no longer the majority. She’s curious about the population breakdown, and I say that based on some rough estimates I’ve seen, Shiites are now around a third, Sunnis a quarter, Christians
somewhere in between those two fractions, and the remaining numbers divided among minorities like the Druze.

“It’s unbelievable that the president still always has to be a Christian,” I say as we round a corner and start walking along a downhill street. “But most of the real power now is actually with the prime minister, who is always Sunni. The entire system is ridiculous, and personally I’d just love to be able to elect whoever is going to fix up this place—at least fix the electricity and water and roads, and speed up the Internet so it’s not running like in a fourth-world backwater.”

“Last night I tried sending an e-mail, and it took half an hour to send.”

“Just wait till the power goes out while we’re in an elevator,” I warn her. “People visiting Lebanon usually freak out the first time that happens to them. Then you just get used to it—you count to a hundred and it comes back.”

During Claire’s visit, we don’t spend every single day together, and luckily for her, I don’t subject her to my political soapbox on a daily basis. On some days I suggest a few plans she can do solo, my way of giving her space and letting her explore on her own, especially so she can take her time at art galleries she might want to write about. I could also use a little more time to work on the Beirut essay that’s due the day after she leaves.

One afternoon when Claire goes to see Baalbek, I spend the day working on my article at T-Marbouta, the activist-hangout coffee shop. I can pass hours there at my laptop, drinking strong coffee, snacking on the café’s surprisingly good fattoush salad, and enjoying the laid-back but scholarly vibe. At a nearby table, I overhear a group of guys organizing a meeting of a political activist committee to discuss how they might help the protesters
in Bahrain, who are still being violently attacked by the country’s regime and military. One guy says to his friends, in Arabic: “It’s going to be impossible now to stop this wave in the region. Every regime that tries to stop it is going to fail eventually, like Mubarak, even if it takes way too long for it to fail.”

Then the group starts talking about a conference at AUB this week that’s trying to draw attention to the parallels between the political situation in Israel—where Arabs don’t have the same voting or citizenship rights as the Jewish population—and South African–style apartheid. Part of the aim is to support the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, modeled after the divestment efforts that helped bring down the apartheid system in South Africa. I overhear one of the guys mention that this same week in March, ninety-five cities around the world are hosting events to call attention to BDS as a form of nonviolent protest of the inequalities and the ever-expanding settlements. I read later that the list of musicians who have supported BDS and canceled performances in Israel over the past few years has been growing and includes Elvis Costello, Carlos Santana, the Pixies, and Gorillaz. (But a few months later, in July 2011, the Netanyahu administration would outlaw all cultural and economic boycotts in Israel.)

I don’t end up making it to the AUB conference, but the conversation I listen in on as I’m writing my article at the café makes me wonder whether an event like this—which seems a way to bring attention to historical patterns, open a dialogue, and advocate for change through nonviolent means—would get any traction in the United States, where criticism of Israel is more muted. I haven’t been politically active for most of my life, but living in an environment where certain grim realities are inescapable—tensions and miseries around the Middle East have a way of
spilling across borders—is making me feel engaged in new ways. I start wondering how I can be more involved in calls to reform Lebanese politics, for starters, instead of just complaining about the situation. I decide to keep a lookout for activist events or rallies happening around Beirut, in case the Arab Spring inspires any kind of movement here in Lebanon.

Just
as in New York, or in any city or country that’s famous for certain tourist attractions, locals often don’t visit the sites until they have guests to show around. Incredibly, I’ve never been to see the legendary Cedars of Lebanon, which are mentioned again and again in the Bible. I decide to use Claire’s visit as an excuse to finally go to the north and see them. This is my first March in Lebanon since I was nine, and I hear the trees up in the mountains are still snowcapped—supposedly the best way to see them. So I figure
yalla
, let’s go.

We take a bus up the northern coastal highway, veering into the mountains and winding up the twisting roads toward the Cedars, about two hours from Beirut. On our way there, the driver monologues to himself in Arabic about the lame driving skills of everyone around him, alternately making cracks about the too-slow or too-swervy cars on the road, and getting riled up and impatient. The trip is harrowing—he plays chicken with every oncoming car on the narrow mountain roads, to see who gets to stay in their own lane and who has to duck out of the way, and he seems to just barely dodge every vehicle that comes along. He manages to pull this all off with confidence and shocking skill, but my heart is thumping through my sweater. We arrive, finally, to find the Cedars all covered in snow, just like in the tourism posters. The red-roofed houses in the nearby village of Bsharri are
capped in white, the rocky cliffsides plunging down into the forested Kadisha valley.

We get out of the car to walk around the forest, our boots and jeans quickly sinking into the knee-high snow. It’s dead quiet up here. The ski season is winding down, and some resorts are starting to close for the spring and summer. I realize I love off-season tourism in Lebanon: an empty Baalbek with Richard in February, a serene Cedars forest with Claire in mid-March.

The snow-covered Cedars look so much more majestic in real life than in the pictures, their thick trunks rooted firmly into the hillside, their Christmas tree branches feathering out to the horizon, the needle-shaped green leaves covered in frosty white. After we each walk off on our own to stare out at the forest, then come back to take pictures of each other and smile silently at the magic of being here, we finally get our fill of the trees. We head over to see some monasteries in the nearby Kadisha valley, which housed Maronite Christian patriarchs in the Middle Ages. In the fourteenth century, during the Mamluk era, named for the Muslim empire that was based in Egypt and annexed parts of Lebanon, the Maronites and the Muslim rulers at one point had a friendly alliance in the Kadisha valley, as Christians and Muslims also did in other areas in Lebanon at various periods.