Jasmine and Fire (30 page)

When he cringed at the word
apartheid
tonight, I thought of how Middle East issues are usually framed in the United States, and how certain questions are silenced before they even have a chance. I need to be able to talk about sensitive subjects with Richard, and vice versa, but I wonder if we’re coming up against the usual boundaries now. Can’t we discuss tangled Middle East issues like these together—fearlessly, and also empathetically?—or will one of us always feel misunderstood or attacked? For us these debates aren’t just intellectual swordplay; we have personal ties to the region, and the emotions run deep.

He and I often do break through the walls when we talk about these subjects, but right now we’re just slamming into them. I’m sad, flustered, wondering if we’re destined for a life of doomed fights about the Middle East.

I hear myself muttering, “We should just break up now.”

Is it the cocktails talking? I’m too upset and confused to think straight.

Richard’s Beirut visit last month had been a success, and none of the anxieties I’d had about it beforehand—will identity issues get in the way? will we have a big meltdown?—had come true.

I guess the train wreck was bound to happen sooner or later.

Richard glares at me and storms off.

APRIL

A few
days ago all these thoughts were skipping through my head: the baby, a clandestine New York visit, northern California in spring. A break from Beirut. The hard-earned end of winter, and a celebration not just of my birthday but of the general okayness, the bliss even, of life when happy events unfold one after the other and you’re feeling tuned in, grateful, ready to enjoy them.

Now my birthday’s been ruined, and my relationship is on life support. I’m heading to California in a couple of days, and I’m going to be a mess meeting my niece for the first time. She’ll be only a few days old, but surely it won’t escape her notice that her auntie is a wreck. It’s not so easy to hide emotional chaos even from babies, I’d imagine.

After all the hard work trying to make this relationship last from across the planet and for so many months, it’s amazing how easily things fell apart. In barely a few minutes. Roadkill from a badly timed spat about—what?—politics, damn it!

The next day I text Richard while he’s at work.

“Bummer the night ended the way it did. Drunk debating—not good.”

“Yeah. Let’s talk.”

When he gets home from work, I smile, mumble “Hi,” but he shakes his head. My “We should just break up” comment from last night is hanging in the air. Last night after our sidewalk fight, we’d both ended up back at his place; all my luggage was there, and it was too late to try crashing anywhere else. We’d gone to bed without a word. Tonight we’re standing in his living room, silent again, staring out the window onto the brick-red townhouses across the street.

“I want to talk,” I say.

Richard shrugs. “There’s nothing to talk about anymore.”

I walk away, pace around the apartment, and head into the kitchen. I open a bottle of wine, pour out two glasses, and set them down on the coffee table in the living room. We both keep standing there, neither of us sitting down, or touching the wine, or saying anything.

True, I’d been wondering ever since we started dating if politics would wreck this relationship eventually. But even when we’ve had huge arguments, we’ve managed to recover from them, our mutual affection and respect winning out. Then, last night, I’d hurled that break-up comment. As angry as I was, that was an unfortunate and sudden outburst. It was hurtful to him, as I’d intended it to be right at that moment.

Apparently he hadn’t just forgotten about it during his busy workday. Now he’s looking distant and worn-out as we stand there in his living room, still quiet, not knowing what to say or do. If he’s decided we should in fact break up, I’ll have to change my return ticket and leave New York early, or stay with a friend for my last few days here. I don’t want to. But I wonder if we’ve pushed things too far this time.

Eventually I venture this:

“Listen, we’re not always going to agree. Not about politics, and not about a lot of things. The way we argue about certain issues drives me nuts sometimes, but we’ve always found our way back. I feel about you the way I want to feel about someone. It’s going to get politically dicey between us sometimes, but I’m pretty sure we can handle it.”

He doesn’t answer. For half an hour, neither of us says anything. I leave the kitchen and go to his room, shut the door, and lie down on the bed.

An eternity goes by. An hour, maybe two.

Then a rap on the door.

“So, want to watch the end of the Celtics game?” It’s his voice. I can hear it behind the door.

Yeah. I do.

The
morning after, he gives me a hug and a kiss before he heads to work. We both crashed hard as soon as the game ended. Although I hardly ever watch sports, this was a badly needed distraction, and I guess we’d spent our frustration and anger and were determined to move on without rehashing the whole nasty night. The game showed up just in time. Good thing, too—not only because an hour of raucous cheering helped melt the frost
and get us back on track but also because I have to do my taxes today, and I need every positive vibe I can scrounge up.

Before I leave for California that Sunday—my taxes all done and mailed off, stress level ratcheted back down—Richard and I decide to have a Saturday adventure. We take the train to the huge Chinatown in Flushing, Queens. The plan is to gorge ourselves on Szechuan food and explore a neighborhood we both want to get to know better. It’s a tank-top day, with a warm breeze, spring hitting early. We arrive in Flushing at midday and join the sidewalk fray along Main Street and Roosevelt Avenue—masses of the old and young, Chinese mostly but other ethnicities mixed in, too, street vendors lined up in front of buildings, pedestrian and car and stroller and wheelbarrow traffic fighting for space. Smells of roast duck, hot soy tea, and spices are everywhere. We peer at the tiny map on my cell phone screen and make our way to a Szechuan restaurant I’ve been wanting to visit called Spicy and Tasty. The small square dining room is lit up in fluorescent bulbs, not the most atmospheric, but based on the dishes I’m spying on the tables around us, I can’t wait to start eating.

When I go to restaurants with Richard, I usually skip the meat right along with him—even though he always says “Don’t!” But I like to order so we can share everything and maximize the dishes we can sample, unless there’s a meat dish I can’t resist. Today we easily find enough nonmeat dishes to fill our table and order enough for five (in true Lebanese style): cold noodles with red chili sauce, sesame yam balls with red bean paste, squid with peanuts and hot peppers, shrimp and pickled turnip in spicy sauce. Bright bold flavors, spiciness, crunch, heaven.

Stuffed after our gluttony, we head for the 7 train out of Flushing, and on the way we wander into a Chinese bookstore. We end
up in the language section, reading to each other from an educational handbook that attempts to teach American conversational phrases.

“ ‘The pork chop was tender and large, yet tasteless.’ ”

“ ‘I don’t like my wedlock.’ ”

“ ‘Many people crave politics.’ ”

That was our last day together for a while. Plans for the next few months are up in the air. I’ll be in Lebanon. He likely won’t be able to take enough days off from work to visit me in Beirut again this spring or summer. So it’s back to the long-distance life. It hurts to leave, stings badly every single time. We’ve been building up that muscle, the two of us, but it’s still tough, no doubt about it.

And I’m off to California.

When I first see my baby niece Marlena’s face, in Laila’s lap, in their home on a lush green Oakland street, all I can think of is a phrase from one of the English handbooks in Flushing:
“You are the cat’s pajamas.”

It’s such a joy to look into Marlena’s pink marshmallow face, her enormous dark eyes and soft brown hair, one minute an exact duplicate of Samir, and then instantly like a mini-Laila. I hold her and stare at her while she sleeps, and I have this strange feeling that I’m holding part of myself. Marlena is not even my own daughter, but the feeling that comes over me when I hold her catches me off guard.

Over the next three days, I get lots of time to hold her and stare into her small blush-cheeked face, while Samir is at work and Laila takes occasional breaks to shower and return phone calls and do things you can’t always do as a brand-new mom when you’re responsible for the survival of a tiny living thing. I can’t get enough of rocking Marlena in my arms, singing her lullabies (terribly out
of tune, I’m sure she can tell), and jangling the colorful mobiles I dangle above her chocolate-brown eyes and raspberry mouth. I realize how much I already love being an aunt. She’s snagged my heart completely, this miniature thing.

My time in California flies by too fast, and soon I’m back in Beirut. My acquaintance Joumana, the one I’d met at the book event in October and who lives in Dubai, is in Beirut helping organize an event called TEDxRamallah. It’s a spinoff of the annual TED conference in California, which brings together speakers to give brief talks on various “ideas worth spreading.” I’d promised her over e-mail that I’d be there. The Middle East edition that Joumana is helping put together will invite a variety of speakers from around the Arab world to give short talks about innovative entrepreneurial, cultural, and activist ideas coming out of the region. It will take place live in the Occupied Territories, with a simulcast at a Beirut theater.

This is the first time a spinoff TED conference is happening in the Arab world, and another of its goals, besides creating a forum for progressive ideas from around the region, is to bring in speakers from the Palestinian refugee camps. The hope is to spread the message that despite the bleak conditions of the camps, plenty of ambitious, creative thinkers and entrepreneurs are living there and undertaking projects the rest of the world rarely gets to hear about.

The Beirut simulcast kicks off on an April morning in a bare-bones auditorium called the Sunflower Theater on the city’s southeast side. It’s early on a Saturday—the event is scheduled for eight thirty, but as always in Beirut, nothing starts on time. I wander in at ten to find I’ve missed only the first few minutes, and I sit down to hear an American woman named Gisel Kordestani, Google’s
director of new business development for Latin America and Asia-Pacific, give a charismatic talk about the possibilities of Internet activism. She’s followed soon afterward by Fadi Ghandour, the founder and CEO of the Jordan-based shipping company Aramex, who pioneered a program called Ruwwad for Development that teaches entrepreneurialism to disadvantaged Arab youth.

Over the next couple of hours, I also hear Palestinian writer Raja Shehadeh, author of a lyrical book called
Palestinian Walks
—well reviewed in
The New Yorker
and
The Economist—
talk about the rural landscapes he grew up with in Palestine in the early twentieth century, and Lebanese Brazilian director Julia Bacha discuss her recent documentary
Budrus
, about Palestinian villagers’ nonviolent efforts to resist the takeover of their land. Alice Walker, the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, speaks after the lunch break and tells funny stories about her hard time getting past the Israeli checkpoints to make it to the event. An activist named Amal Shahabi, who lives in a Palestinian refugee camp in Sidon, tells of the challenges she faced in opening a center for the elderly and creating educational and social resources for her disabled son and others like him in the camp. Suad Amiry, an architect and a Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiator, closes out the day on a lighter note when she reads excerpts from her hilarious and moving memoir
Sharon and My Mother-in-Law: Ramallah Diaries
, about the years she spent juggling the stress of life in the Occupied Territories under Ariel Sharon with the challenges of living with her ninety-two-year-old mother-in-law.

On this day in April, there’s been a sudden heat wave—it’s eighty-five degrees and brutally humid, for spring anyway, much too soon to start in on a long sweltering season. After the event, I look for a taxi outside, and as I walk past condo tower after strip
mall after condo tower in this monotonous neighborhood on the east side, I think about the idea of home for refugees—that at some point life in the camps, especially for the second generation, becomes itself a home, if just potentially, ideally, a way station to a more permanent and life-affirming kind of home. But I can see how waiting endlessly until a seemingly hopeless situation improves, until a temporary home is replaced by another refuge, can feel like a waste of a life or at least of years. And here today, as I sat and watched the speakers, some of them from the camps, I saw people who are engaging in their life as it stands now and making a home, even if—with any luck—a temporary one, in conditions the rest of the world might pity or even scorn.