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| Adventures
in Beirut |
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May 03, 2004
16:25
Hadi was a good natured Beiruti who seemed excited at the prospect of playing tour guide for an American visitor. Over the next few days, he would tirelessly drag me from one attraction to another.
The city was filled with the shells of what had once been beautiful architecture and as if the sight of this decay wasn’t unnerving enough, Hadi and I would spend a good portion of our time actually entering this bombed out buildings to eat lunch. Structures that had been hollowed out and left to collapse often had fully preserved ground floors converted into elegant restaurants with live music and international cuisine. One minute we’d be driving through a maze of traffic, surrounded by the remnants of destruction and swirling dust and the next we’d enter a spotless café, where a white-suited waiter would accompany us to a table with a smile and a menu.
"Where’s the no-smoking section?" I asked Hadi, the first time we went out to lunch, surrounded by a cloud of black haze.
"That would be East Beirut."
I had initially assumed that religion was what separated the two sectors of the city, but talking to Hadi, I began to understand that it was more a matter of vices. In Christian East Beirut, drinking was the pastime of choice. However, in West Beirut, where devout Muslims heeded the advice of Mohammed instead of the Surgeon General’s (the Koran had issued strict admonitions against the dangers of wine, tequila and peach schnapps though it had neglected to insert that little warning about birth defects, reproductive harm and so forth), everyone went about smoking anything they could set fire to.
I had never heard of a hookah (this was before they became trendy) so the first time I saw one, I was convinced that we had walked into an opium den. I tried to be as self-possessed as possible and ignore the fact that nearly every table was equipped with a sophisticated looking bong adding smoke to the black haze that already engulfed the room.
"Do you want to try?" Hadi asked, as I tried to make myself comfortable at the table.
Hell, I’d been to college. "Sure," I said.
Hadi called the waiter over to the table and ordered something in Arabic that sounded horribly menacing. I wasn’t sure I really wanted to know what it was, but I timidly asked him anyway.
"Strawberry," he replied.
This sounded like what you’d order at an ice cream parlor instead of an opium den. "No, I meant the bong thing."
"The narguileh."
"Yeah. Did you order us one of those?"
"Yes. Strawberry."
This had to be code for something.
"Hadi, strawberry opium?"
"It’s not opium. Whoever heard of strawberry opium? This is normal, everyday strawberry-flavored tobacco."
I felt rather foolish at my mistake, but things only got worse when the waiter returned with our order. He was carrying the narguileh, a vase-shaped glass filled with water and equipped with a three-foot-long hose. He skillfully plugged the upper end of the gadget with a metal tray, added a chunk of tobacco, strawberry-flavored, and placed a disk of red-hot charcoal on top. The tobacco began to burn and Hadi handed me the hose, gallantly insisting that I begin.
I wasn’t sure exactly how to maneuver this apparatus. Normally, whenever I found myself in any awkward social situation, I watched the other people at my table to figure out which fork I was supposed to be wielding, but here I was in the land of Lebanese hospitality, where they graciously waited for you to start, insisting that guests always go first.
My friend Pete had already told me about the difficult situation that this same custom had once placed him in, recalling the time that he was at an elegant party in Beirut, when the hostess bounded upon him with a tray full of roasted pigeon. Pete was not really in the mood for roasted pigeon and never had been, but a refusal would have been seen as a grave insult to the woman of the house, who had devoted hours to basting and cooking the birds, not to mention the amount of time she must have spent rounding them up at the park. He was going to have to eat one and what was worse, he was the center of attention; they were all waiting for the guest to begin, and he didn’t know whether you picked pigeon up with your fingers chicken-style or used a fork. He timidly reached for a small bird and plopped it into his mouth, crunching on the tiny bones and trying to swallow it out of his life as quickly as possible.
Now I was in a similar situation. I had never smoked out of a hose before but I sportingly placed the tube to my lips and took a deep breath, as self-conscious as an adolescent Arabic girl taking her first inhale of narguileh in her high school bathroom.
Other than the fact that there was a tube in my mouth, it was like smoking a cigarette — a berry-flavored one. Nicotine flooded my brain, sped up my heart rate and made my head spin. But this was just the beginning. Lebanese tradition demanded that smoking narguileh go on for an entire afternoon. I passed Hadi the hose, took a sip of my coffee and decided it wasn’t such a bad country after all. |
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