Lebanon was a week of late nights, leisurely lunches (preferrably with a view of the Mediterranean), long car rides and lots and lots o’ family time. Coming back for my third visit in two months to stay with family once more, I realized how familiar the area had become to me so much so that I almost forgot it was a foreign country (I am spoiled). I found it easy to navigate my way back to the house using strategically located advertisements and I suddenly became the person of experience and knowledge in the group, acting as guide to my aunt Marilyn and cousin Marisa as we visited the various sites that I had seen in my first 2 ½ weeks in the Middle East. My aunt hadn’t been to visit the family in 30-ish years, and Marisa (17) had never been before, so it was good for me to see them go through some of the same adjustments that I had to make when I had first arrived, and to appreciate my new level of comfort getting around Lebanon and Syria (only to be further appreciated when my parents arrived).
That week we went back to Beiteddine in the mountains, to the ancient site of Byblos on the northern coast (Nagibe joined us that day for a seafood feast at a restaurant with a prime seaside location), and to Saida and Tyre on the southern coast. Marisa, who is starting next year at UPenn’s Nursing School, was able to fit in a half-day working with Chantal at AUB Hospital while the aunts and I fit in a hair appointment (much needed and I was not going to do it in Syria). There were several trips to the huge ABC mall included, where we learned that a mall is a mall is a mall but at least now I have actually been shopping in Beirut. In the past the shopping was in downtown Beirut on Hamra Street, but after the damage caused by the war it has been unfortunately centralized to ABC.
Throughout the week there were the familiar proddings from the older generation—don’t you and Marisa want to get out and see Beirut nightlife? Don’t you want to call up so-and-so? Marisa was on her spring break from second semester senior year of high school so all she wanted to do was sleep a lot and not think about homework. I was just happy to be hanging out with my aunts and cousins for the week and didn’t really care about maintaining my Beiruti social life, but either way it was arranged for us in the end. Friday night Eli made a dinner reservation for 10 pm at an Italian restaurant with live music for the three of us, himself and Josyan, Chantal Nagibe and Michel, and his close friend/tennis partner his wife and 19 year-old son. It was clear that the only reason that the son was present was to escort us out for the night after dinner so despite our polite “nothankyous” and “youreallydon’thavetos,” our fate was already decided for us. Luckily he was a very nice guy and easy to talk to (not that we had a choice because we were relegated to the kids’ end of the table) and he promised us Oh it’s not a nightclub, it’s just a pub and it’s just around the corner and I’ll bring you home whenever you are ready to go. In my mind I pictured a regular bar with long tables and music in the background and figured it would be worth it just to go and meet his friends, talk to them for a bit, then get our own taxi ride home so he wouldn’t have to leave if we wanted to go home before 3 am, and it would be fun for Marisa to see a bit of the bar scene before heading off to college.
We left around midnight, the music scene at our restaurant was just heating up. The female singer, accompanied by a keyboardist and signing popular ballads of the West, was going around to each table getting people (including a few at our table) to sing for her (unabashedly and with enthusiasm!), which soon led to diners banging on the table with cups and plates, then leaping to their feet and filling the floor space with dancers. Eli’s friends were the most active of them all and brought their son up to dance with them. Marisa and I were shocked to see that he actually danced with them, rather than scowling and running the other way, as we would have done if our parents were accepting vocal solos and tearing up the dance floor.
The so-called ‘pub’ was just down the street—the whole neighborhood was filled with younge people hanging out in atmospheric bars and to be sure the night was just getting started—but as we descended into the dark smoky techno-throbbing room and saw people dancing on tables and found barely enough room to stand still without getting knocked over by others, we realized that ‘pub’ just means that there are tables one could hypothetically sit at, but it is better served to hold coats/purses/drinks or better yet, as the dance floor itself.
Apparently we were there to celebrate someone’s birthday, and we soon joined a large group of our escort’s (I can’t remember his name but he is named after a saint in the Maronite church) friends from his university. It was impossible to see or speak to anyone properly so we nodded and smiled and danced and had a good time (though one of his friends thought we were 16/younger) and eventually we looked at the time and decided to head home as we wanted to get up early for the Saturday morning farmer’s market. I communicated that we were going to head out but that we would take a taxi home. Of course that was not an option so he left his friends and we went out into the rain. Walking by the restaurant that we had eaten at that night, we ran into noneother than Josyan, Eli and their friends who were just leaving. They looked at us in astonishment and we at them. So I remembered that I am in fact in a foreign country, and not only that but also a parallel universe, where the parents stay out later than the kids and the old stay forever young. At least we could get a ride home with Josyan and Eli and our host could go back with his parents so in that sense our meeting was fortuitous. But then Marisa and I had to endure a carride home of “Why did you leave so early? You didn’t have fun?”
--
The next morning it was still raining which dampened our hopes of making it to the farmer’s market. I woke up early, showered, dressed and ate breakfast and was greeted by a sleepy Eli who emerged from his room to get his morning coffee. Oh you know the market will not be open in the rain, don’t bother going, there will be no one there. Even if they have tents? Yes it’s not worth it. I called Chantal who had taken me the first time to ask her opinion, she had no idea, so I called Nagibe’s house and spoke to my aunt Marilyn who had just woken up and we decided to let Marisa sleep and forgo the morning excursion. Around 1030 Chantal called back, said she had just driven by the square and saw tents up, so clearly it was in fact open. Josyan and Eli agreed we should go. I called Marisa, woke her up and said I would be there in half an hour to pick her up. But then came the complications of logistics: calling a cab to pick me up, take me to get Marisa, take us to the market, wait for us, take us back to Nagibe’s in time to leave for lunch (we had all been invited out to lunch by Eli’s brother). By now it was getting late, J & E now said we wouldn’t have time, but the taxi was already called, and by the way it’s going to cost $25 just for the car and don’t be late for lunch!
By the time the taxi arrived (1130) I felt like the morning was snowballing into a disaster that couldn’t be stopped. We would spend a ridiculous amount of money getting to the market, have about 10 minutes to spend there and then have to come back or else make everyone late to the big family lunch. But the car was there, Marisa was waiting and whatever. It was, of course, completely worth it. The rain stopped, we bought fresh maneesh with zaatar cheese and vegetables, tasted sweets olives breads from the different stalls, bought meringues, fresh squeezed orange juices…most of the shoppers were students and if I lived in Beirut I would spend all my food money there—it reminded me of a smaller version of the market in Dupont.
We even made it home again without making anyone wait for us. Lunch, in honor of Josyan’s birthday, was at a country club in Jounieh, a big port city 15 minutes north of Beirut, with views of the mountainside behind the marina filled with yachts and sailboats. By the time we rolled ourselves out of the restaurant, I began to feel the cumulated effects of a week spent eating in restaurants and sitting in cars…
That night my mom arrived at the airport and we went to pick her up with Chantal. Unfortunately Chantal was leaving the next morning for Berlin and was in a frenzy to pack and organize her life before she left, so my mom saw her for a total of about an hour. Even still, how lucky we were that the four of us all ended up in Beirut with the family at the same place at the same time, given how long it had taken us Americans to get there in the first place (Marilyn, 30 years, my mom 12, Marisa, her life). And how lucky that I was living only a few hours away when this all came together, and was the reason that my mom came through Beirut in the first place.
--
The next day we had hoped that we would make it to the Mazara’a, the family’s summer house in the mountains, even though it was not yet the season for visiting. Unfortunately Chantal was leaving, the roads were muddy or snowy and not fit for driving, there was no one to show us the way, and the house was too much connected to Sr Agnes for Nagibe to want to visit it so soon after her death (Sr Agnes was the main caretaker of the house and the family’s farms). Instead we made a day trip to Tripoli and spent the day eating sweets and walking around the city’s old markets and back up to the citadel on a hill.
Monday Marisa and Marilyn left for Paris, where they spent a few days before returning to the US, and my mom and I went to visit the archbishop and Sr Julienne. We took them out to lunch and tried to learn more about our family’s Armenian history. I had met a few Armenians at Georgetown who were shocked to know that my family was Armenian Catholic but we didn’t know if we actually had Armenian heritage. To them, being from a nation that has survived an attempt to be wiped off the face of the earth, being connected to one’s history language and culture is vital to keeping it alive in the next generation. So we asked and were surprised to get a fairly straightforward answer (at least in the beginning). Yes, my grandfather’s mother was Armenian, her name meaning “prince” in Armenian, but the family had emigrated a few centuries before so there was no direct connection. So what about my grandfather’s father? Coussa is not an Armenian name. And where does the Armenian Catholic come from—the mother or the father? And why has no one ever talked about this before?
The most surprising thing to me about my grandfather’s family is that 1) there is no one left living in Syria and 2) my grandfather was the only one of 9 ? kids to have children. 3 became nuns, 1 became an archbishop, 2 married without children, and 2 died young. My grandfather was born in 1903 and didn’t marry and have children until his mid-forties, after he had emigrated to New York (alone, at the age of 17 and without speaking English) and built up a successful import-export business, American Pistachio Corporation. What a life he must have left behind, compared to the one he built for himself and his family—Syria at the turn of the century!
So from Lebanon, my mom and I travelled to northern Syria to Aleppo, to visit the birthplace of the Coussas.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment