Jasmine and Fire (9 page)

Leaving the bar, Wendy and I stroll along Hamra Street, past the stands that are being set up now for the first night of the Hamra festival—some to sell labneh sandwiches or shawarma, others coffee or lemonade or Arabic pastries, or all kinds of jewelry and handicrafts. The scene reminds me of the ubiquitous New York street fairs that I’ve tended to avoid since they cause so much annoying pedestrian gridlock. But a local rock band is playing
on a makeshift stage, there’s an upbeat vibe in the air, and we’re enjoying our stroll. As we chat and get to know each other, it comes up that, a few years ago, Wendy published a collection of essays by Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories. And suddenly it hits me: this Wendy is the Wendy Pearlman whose book, called
Occupied Voices
, has been on the shelf in my Manhattan apartment for a few years. I’d bought it once while browsing at the Barnes & Noble at Union Square—this book, by a Jewish author compiling essays on Palestinians’ experiences under occupation, had caught my eye—and after she’d given me her card at the dinner party, I’d thought her name was familiar.

“Small world” is an even bigger cliché in Lebanon than everywhere else. The country is fairly compact—the population is roughly 4 million, about 1.5 million of that in Beirut—and social and family circles collide and overlap constantly. You can chat up the cashier at the grocery store, or the manager of your local bank, or your taxi driver, or your orthopedist, in Beirut and discover you know a few people in common or even that you’re related. Happens all the time here. I’m stunned by the Wendy coincidence, but I have a feeling this won’t be the last time something like that happens to me here.

Sure enough, it’s not long before it does again. One night later in the month, I hear that a Lebanese singer named Ghada Ghanem is performing a free show in downtown Beirut. I’d randomly met Ghada last year in New York, at a party at the home of my Lebanese friend Ahmad, and she’d sung a few a cappella Arabic songs that night. I was enchanted by her voice. Now here she is again, a not-yet-famous singer but this time with a gig at an outdoor theater in the newly rebuilt shopping district downtown, and luckily I’m in Beirut to hear her sing in her hometown. I invite my aunt
Nouhad, a music lover, to come with me. The concert isn’t until ten thirty, but the late-night start makes it all the more dramatic.

When Ghada comes out onstage, under the night sky, the crowd hushes, and it’s instant magic. She performs a series of old Arabic songs, a genre called
tarab
, her voice soaring out over the darkened city. An older woman, a brave audience member, gets up by herself and does a Middle Eastern dance called the
dabke
, right in front of the stage. The audience is clapping, cheering, singing along, the older members maybe feeling this is a déjà vu of the prewar Beirut that’s lost, or was lost and is now
“inshallah,”
hopefully, on its way back, but you can never be sure. Ghada has that iconic Lebanese voice: mournful and hopeful at once. When she sang at that party in New York last year, a guest had called out to her, “Your voice is more beautiful than Fairuz’s.”

At the end of the show, Ghada says she’s glad to see Beirutis coming together over pleasure instead of suffering. She’s referring to the meaning of tarab, a musical style that’s mournful at times but ultimately about the pleasure and even the ecstasy of a profound musical experience. And she’s also making a dig at the seemingly eternal Lebanese tendency to accentuate and fight over differences. My mind drifts to an old Fairuz song, melodramatic but stinging: “To Beirut … peace to Beirut … From the soul of her people she makes wine … From their sweat, she makes bread and jasmine. So how did it come to taste of smoke and fire?”

The political situation here is, by most accounts, looking dicey yet again. There’s a sense that another civil war may be on the way. The long-anticipated results of the UN Special Tribunal investigating the killing of the former prime minister are looking more and more like they may set off another round of sectarian violence in the coming months—likely between Hezbollah
and the opposing March 14 Party, launched by ex-premier Rafik Hariri’s son, Saad Hariri; Israel and Syria and Iran, all with allegedly vested interests in the proceedings, could get dragged in, too. All parties are speaking ominously about what’s to come if the various sides don’t settle their conflicts over the tribunal and other matters with all due speed: possibly not just another civil war but the biggest regional war the Middle East has ever seen.

But for now it’s a beautiful September night, and Beirut is sparkling, from the window lights in distant buildings, to the yellow lanterns glowing in the dark along the downtown streets, to the flickering lights from ships pulling out to sea, and Ghada’s voice is gorgeous, and we’re happy to be here and to be alive. We’re caught up in the magic of the tarab and the haunting minor-key string music of the oud, and life is sweet. You hang on to that feeling when it hits, and you hang on to it with all your strength, especially in Lebanon. You never know how long it will last.

OCTOBER

On some
days, New York feels like another planet in the distant past. Other days it’s as if I just left minutes ago. I’ll be heading to New York for a short visit later this month, but in the meantime I’ve decided to throw a belated Beirut housewarming dinner for myself. I’ve been making some progress in feeling comfortable and settled into my Beirut life, and I want to bring a few people into a room together to eat, drink, and make my life here feel more real, my presence more official somehow, and my apartment a little noisier for a night.

I decide to invite Curtis and Diana, along with a few cousins and their spouses who teach at the nearby American University of Beirut, figuring surely they’ll all know people in common and might have lots to talk about. It’ll
just be a casual evening, a way to bring people into my home—a particularly key gesture in Lebanon and in traditional Arab culture. The Middle East balances its famous penchant for political disaster and war with a somewhat more flattering reputation for hospitality. Ever since most of the region was made up of nomadic tribes living in tents, it’s been considered important to bring in guests, even total strangers, make them feel at home, and ply them with food and coffee, even if you have barely enough to feed your own family.

For my small gathering, I’m going to make fattoush salad and some meze dishes like baba ghanoush, hummus, and maybe another kind of salad, too, since the summer produce is still abundant in this unseasonably hot October. Usually after the summer heat starts burning off in September, the thermostat inches down to around sixty degrees Fahrenheit by October, heading south another twenty or so degrees in midwinter. But the temperature is still hovering around eighty. I’m hoping to find some fat red summery tomatoes at one of the produce stands along Makdisi Street, near my apartment and named after my mother’s ancestors, the Makdisis, who settled in this part of the city in the early twentieth century and built homes on what were then grassy open fields. I’m also going to pick up some Lebanese-style grilled chicken, called
shish taouk
, from the butcher shop and restaurant Cheikha, where I’d had an excellent shawarma sandwich with my cousin Soumaya back in August; later I went back alone to try their shish taouk and became an addict. My oven isn’t heating up so well—only the stovetop seems to work, and a small countertop convection oven my parents had bought last year—so I’m not in any position to compete with the neighborhood grilled-chicken specialists, who can do shish taouk better anyway.

For three days before the dinner, I run around doing party errands: I find some tall-stemmed, Japanese-looking flowers shaped like green balloons and buy two dozen. I pick up extra wineglasses since I notice I have only three uncracked ones, and I make a hip-hop and R&B playlist with lots of Outkast and Curtis Mayfield and Betty Davis, the powerfully soulful former wife of the late Miles Davis, which I have on a CD Richard made for me a while back. I hire an aunt’s housekeeper to clean the apartment the day before the dinner party. I feel like a harried Lebanese version of Mrs. Dalloway, except I’m having only six people over.

On the day of the dinner, I pick up a tray of shish taouk, smelling lusciously of lemon and garlic, and also some small triangular pies called
fatayer
, stuffed with spinach and onion and spiced with sumac. I buy the juicy lamb meatballs called kibbeh from a little bakery called La Cigale around the corner from me, where the air always smells of hot butter, and where I used to beg my mom for the chocolate meringue pastries called
succès
when I was little and the shop had the more alluring name Candy. I make a big bowl of fattoush, mixing chunks of tomato and cucumber with fresh mint, parsley, scallions, and purslane—the slightly peppery herb found all over here—along with small pieces of pita bread that I fry on the stove, and I toss the salad in a dressing of lemon juice, olive oil, and sumac. To make baba ghanoush, I roast eggplants on the stovetop flame, peel off the skins, and mix the pulpy insides with tahini, garlic, and lemon juice, then I make some hummus—extra-lemony, my favorite style—and quickly throw together one of my favorite easy hors d’oeuvres: toothpick-size skewers of red grapes, basil leaves, and chunks of halloum cheese, a riff on a
caprese
salad. I’ve made this in New York before for friends’ parties, using tiny mozzarella balls instead of halloum, but here all the
flavors pop more, thanks to Lebanon’s late-season juice-bomb grapes and the just-salty-enough white halloum cheese.

I want the dinner party to feel very relaxed, as if I threw it together effortlessly, no big deal, but of course even after spending a couple of days chasing down and preparing the food, wine, glassware, flowers, and music, in the two hours before my guests arrive, I’m still running around like mad. I have barely time to shower and get dressed, and I smash a wineglass or two frantically trying to get everything clean and ready before they all get here.

In New York, my apartment and kitchen are small and I don’t own a dining table, so I don’t throw full-on dinner parties. But sometimes a few old college friends who love to cook come over, and we all make dinner together in the tight space, or cobble up something like a potluck, since my downtown Manhattan apartment is the easiest one for our far-flung crew to reach and no one minds sitting on floor cushions, bohemian-style. And I have, oddly enough, always been pretty relaxed and Zen when people come over, never really the nervous hostess in the moment—probably because I obsess about the details ahead of time, no matter how small and casual the gathering, and partly because I lubricate myself with a glass of wine before anyone rings the bell. I’m not quite sure how this Beirut housewarming dinner party will go: if my frantic efforts to pull it all together will make it look as easy as instant Jell-O, or if my hi-I’m-new-here awkwardness will flash like a Broadway billboard.

On the fateful night, two couples coincidentally arrive at my building at the same time, and I open my door to find them standing there, holding flowers and chocolates. My cousin Karim and his wife, Hala, are already chatting with Curtis and Diana, having discovered they have some AUB-affiliated friends in common.
We sit around the living room snacking on the fatayer and kibbeh balls and grape-halloumi hors d’oeuvres, and the conversation—about life in Beirut, and the political scene, and what it’s like raising kids here (they all have small children)—flows naturally and cheerfully. The other two guests I’d invited, my cousin Kamal and his wife, Nour, call at the last minute, apologetic; they’re ensnared by their seven-year-old son’s bad earache. With just five of us, it’s still fun though, and we press on.

“What’s your take on the political situation now?” Curtis asks Karim, a political scientist and Middle East specialist, as he sips an Almaza beer.

“It’s pretty atrocious. I’m not optimistic at all.”

I duck into the kitchen to refill the platters of kibbeh and fatayer and hear the two erupt in laughter about something—somehow grim political conversations in Beirut often lead to laughs. Gallows humor; what else can you do?