Jasmine and Fire (5 page)

Lebanon has had a major drought this summer, but in my apartment there’s water all right, too much water at the moment, and it’s splashing cold and hard into my bedroom. A slapstick scene, an
I Love Lucy
episode, but I’m not in the mood to find it funny. After I go out onto the balcony to adjust the pipe, I can’t fall back asleep. I’m exhausted and strung out on travel and on ninety-two different emotions, desperately missing New York and feeling my childhood memories rushing back here in my old bedroom. I’m hearing all the old familiar Beirut street noises, the car horns and motorcycle engines and the sidewalk chitchat at all hours, the middle-of-the-night muezzin’s call to prayer from the mosque nearby, a baby crying in a building across the street. A rooster crows and reminds me of the one that used to live on a rooftop on our street during the war and would crow every morning at four. This rooster I’m hearing tonight is farther away, but
not far enough. I sit in bed as the hour turns six, then seven, and listen to cars start their compulsive honking on the already trafficky streets below, and hear shopkeepers clanking open their aluminum shutters.

I’m hungry again, exhausted, sleepless, and sad, and I need serious comfort food. A little after seven, I walk out in search of the breakfast I’m craving, a
man’ouche
. I find it at a tiny old bakery around the corner from my building. This is the seminal Beirut breakfast: doughy flatbread smeared with olive oil and
zaatar
—a spice mix of sumac, thyme, and sesame seeds—and served hot, straight from the oven. I like mine slathered with labneh, the creamy yogurt cheese. My head is a mess, but my mouth, my eyes, my stomach, they’re really enjoying this man’ouche, this warm, life-giving morning bread. I could eat this every single day, forever. No body-sculpting or health expert would ever advise such a thing, and I don’t care—well, maybe just a little, but definitely not today.

After going back to bed until noon post-man’ouche, but failing to make up for the night’s insomnia, I take a long hot shower and decide to spend my first day exploring a little bit instead of napping and crying alone in the apartment, a powerful temptation. I set out on a stroll around the Hamra neighborhood, to get my bearings again, and as I take tentative steps down forgotten blocks and get a little lost, I’m sure I look like a clueless tourist despite my Lebanese olive skin, dark-brown eyes, and long brown hair. I walk along a half-dozen of the crammed side streets shooting off from the main Hamra Street drag, poke into bookstores and record shops and clothing stores old and new, too zoned out to pay much attention to the merchandise as I spacily pick things up and put them back down, just to feel my body moving, feel myself
somehow interacting with city life, even if I’ll need at least a half-night’s sleep, after all the travel, to function at a minimal level.

On my way back to the apartment, I reintroduce myself to the aging grocer and his wife who own the small, cluttered food shop on the ground floor of my building, and to the hunched man who has run the stationery store down the street since my mom was a teenager, and to the tall white-haired man, reportedly a star of Egyptian films in his youth, who opened a flower shop across the street some decades ago. I muster enough pep for a few sputterings of “Hi! I’m back to live here now. It’s been so long, I know. How are things?” They’re all surprised I’m back. Life in Lebanon is not easy; why would I leave America? But they all greet me warmly, give me a cheek kiss or an affectionate pat on the back.
“Ahla w’ sahla!”
Welcome back!

Not much accomplished in one day, but I’m already sapped and it’s only midafternoon. I return to the apartment and field some checking-in phone calls from Josette and from my aunt Nouhad upstairs. She passes by later in the day to sit with me a bit and welcome me back to Beirut and to the building, and smiles when she sees I look drained.

“We’ll get together and catch up properly this week, whenever you like. And just come by or call anytime. So wonderful having you here.” Nouhad hugs me, her pixie-short hair brushing my cheek.

The leftovers from last night are even more welcome right now, and after heating up some dinner, I climb into bed with a copy of Alain de Botton’s tongue-in-cheek self-help book
How Proust Can Change Your Life
, based loosely on the life and writings of Marcel Proust. Each of the five times I’ve read the slim little volume, I’ve felt I’d stumbled into the best head-straightening drug.

I flip to the chapter titled “How to Suffer Successfully”:

But there’s a helpful reminder lurking in all the self-pity. “Proust’s suggestion,” writes de Botton, “is that we become properly inquisitive only when distressed.” Dubiously uplifting, but somehow enough to slide me into a deep sleep. Finally.

The following few days are spent walking along the Hamra streets again, lolling around in bookstores, browsing through Lebanese histories and novels, stocking up on groceries: soft and salty
halloum
cheese, paper-thin bread called
khibz markouk
, deliciously juicy lopsided tomatoes, sweet cucumberlike summer vegetables called
me’te
. I take naps, fight the blues, try to pull myself together by smiling for no reason—a trick I once read about in a newspaper mental health column—and answer more phone calls from aunts, uncles, cousins, and family friends. “So you’re here! How’s it going so far?” “It’s so nice to have you in Beirut.” “Will you come to lunch on Sunday?” “Are you free for dinner on Tuesday?” “Do you have everything you need at home?” “Will you promise to call anytime you need anything?”

Having so much family around, scores of relatives on both sides who either never left Lebanon or moved back after the war, makes me feel instantly embraced in a way I’d forgotten about. How strange to suddenly be surrounded by people who love you for no other reason than that you’re Salma, their niece or cousin, or the daughter of their old friends. But at the moment, I’m too overwhelmed to sound upbeat on the phone, and I’m hoping they don’t hear the sadness in my voice.

In my first couple of weeks, I’m also trying out different cafés every day, hoping to find the perfect environment where I can settle in for hours and work on the freelance editing and writing assignments I brought with me from the States. I have four long-term projects I’m working on right now, and the income from those, plus my free rent in Beirut, means I can get by well enough if not lavishly. This week I have to finish editing some content for a corporate website, and I have to turn in a column I write regularly for a travel magazine, where I interview chefs about their favorite restaurants around the world. As a freelancer, I can technically work from anywhere on the planet. In practice, it’s a little trickier to find a spot where you can work efficiently, avoid procrastinating, and most of all: breathe. Every place I try so far is too smoky—Lebanon has been slow to see the charms of indoor-smoking laws—or else it’s too sterile, too chainy, or too loud.

Socially, I’m off to an even slower start. Since I got here, I’ve been staring guiltily at a list of people I need to call: relatives I haven’t talked to yet, a couple of old Beirut school friends I’m occasionally in touch with by e-mail, friends of friends who happen to be in Beirut right now, sources to meet for possible food or travel magazine assignments. But between my work deadlines and my general sense of listlessness—I’m lonely for my New York
friends and for Richard, and I don’t have much of a life or routine to speak of yet in Beirut—I haven’t mustered the energy to pick up the phone much. A catch-22.

One blue afternoon—clear sky outside, stubborn blues in my head—my aunt Zelfa calls. She lives in London, but this week she’s passing through Beirut with her husband, Randal, her father, Cecil, and her daughter and son, Soumaya and Skandar, the latter better known as Skandar Keynes, the teen heartthrob who played Edmund in the
Narnia
films.

I’m looking forward to seeing them, my witty and tirelessly well-traveled British relatives. It’s been a few years since I last saw Skandar, when Zelfa invited me to hang out on the red carpet at the New York City premiere of
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
. (I’d mostly gawked at Tilda Swinton and was, of course, utterly ignored by the photographers.) Skandar, a serious-minded university student back in England, is also the one person in our family to have somehow stumbled into Hollywood fame, and he’s barely in his twenties.

For the most part, the rest of my clan has never been prone to the glamorous life or been exceptionally good at making money. But a few people in my family are prominent in their fields. Besides Edward Said and the Keynses—Randal, an author, is a descendant of both Charles Darwin and John Maynard Keynes—there’s the late, renowned Oxford historian Albert Hourani, my mother’s uncle. He was the author of a number of scholarly works including
History of the Arab Peoples
, a serendipitous bestseller since it happened to be released just as the first Iraq War kicked off in 1990. A handful of business-savvy, charismatic relatives, both here and abroad, run the international food-production companies Cortas and Clic, which may be where I got the food gene. And a
number of uncles, aunts, and cousins lead low-key lives but are talented historians, political scientists, mathematicians, physicists, and doctors. Many are based in Europe or the States, although a few in my generation have returned to Beirut to raise their kids and pursue their careers in Lebanon.

As we chat on the phone, Zelfa asks me to drop by the apartment where she and her family are staying on their Beirut visit. I walk over to catch up with them over tea. They want to know how I’m holding up so far, and I tell them about my somewhat rocky first couple of weeks in Beirut. Skandar tells me about his stint filming another
Narnia
sequel on Australia’s Gold Coast. An hour later his sister, Soumaya, restless with the whole parent-sibling scene, asks me to walk off with her to a café to play backgammon. I’ve only played backgammon, a staple of old-man village life in Lebanon, once in my life. She’s dying for a game. I’m not sure why a recent Cambridge graduate with a posh British accent and a taste for trendy clothes is so addicted to backgammon, but I learn that her grandfather taught her to play. She ends up playing both her and my sides of the board, after we find one on a shelf at a café nearby. I haven’t spent this much time with her since she was much younger, but I already love her sharp wit and glowing smile, peeking out from under a mass of curly brown hair. Alas, she’s headed back to England in a few days.

Spending that time with Soumaya, even just a couple of hours fumbling through a backgammon game and taking a stroll afterward, has an unexpected effect on me. Soumaya spent the entire summer living in Beirut and studying Arabic, and she got to know some great little hangouts around Hamra. One is the café where we’d played backgammon, a cozy little spot with fragrant coffee and classic Arabic music on the sound system, and I’m eager
to try it out as another of my home offices. Another is a well-stocked DVD shop she pointed to as we passed by. And one is a small takeout restaurant and butcher shop called Cheikha, where we’d stopped after backgammon to pick up shawarma sandwiches: warm, packed with freshly rotisseried strips of pink lamb, and oozing with tartar sauce. I have a feeling I’ll be coming back to all of these places. As I fall asleep that night, stuffed with shawarma and feeling happy about the spontaneous hangout session with my relatives and especially Soumaya, I realize that I’d been feeling like a tourist here in these past weeks, but suddenly I feel a little less so. Bit by bit, I’m starting to acclimate, to feel out a rhythm and build a repertoire—crucial in any city if it’s ever going to feel like home.

This
is the hottest August in anyone’s memory, and the city is a sweatbox. But I’m losing myself for hours at a time in air-conditioned cafés, in a fog of deadline work. In between I’ve been accepting more lunch and dinner invitations from my relatives, the only real social life I’ve mustered so far, but it’s a start.

One Sunday afternoon, my dad’s cousin Laure, a gossipy and affectionate woman who always looks put-together in her silk blouses and knee-length skirts, invites me to lunch at a new restaurant called Babel in the posh Christian suburb of Dbayeh. We try out some of the menu’s weird but oddly compelling spins on Lebanese food: sushi-shaped pieces of
kibbeh nayyeh
—a Lebanese lamb tartare—here rolled in sesame seeds and topped with pine nuts. I’d rather eat straight-up kibbeh nayyeh, a mound of soft minced lamb topped with fruity olive oil and scooped up with fresh pita. But this tweaked version is admittedly tasty. As we eat, we watch a huge table of overdressed, Botoxed women and cigar-smoking
men next to us throw a lavish baptism feast for their baby daughter. This particular slice of Beirut, aggressively cushy and willfully insular, disengaged from reality—if I may jump to conclusions about these total strangers here at the restaurant—has always made me feel I’ve landed on a low-oxygen planet far away. Laure whispers to me in Arabic about one woman’s revealing, architecturally complicated dress.

“Shoo labsi hay?”
What is she wearing?

“I’m not sure. A dress, I guess?”

“What’s that strap that wraps around her back and her butt and makes her ass look like a strangled balloon?”

I nearly spit out my wine.

Even as I slowly ease into my new life here, my mornings are still mostly rough going: Almost daily I wake up at seven to the sound of power drills from a construction site down the street—there seems to be a construction site every ten feet in Beirut—and sometimes the sounds rip me out of an anxiety dream about losing everything I know in New York, or failing to make any friends or establish any real home in Beirut. My existence is ultimately lonely and unrooted. I don’t belong anywhere. I will be forgotten. My dreams keep circling around these themes.