Jasmine and Fire Read Online Free PDF Page A

Hamra Street, one of the main arteries of west Beirut, with all its retail and pedestrian hustle-bustle. As we line up in the bumper-to-bumper traffic, I look out at the strings of shops, the brand-new H&M alongside a few faded clothing boutiques displaying merchandise surely hanging there since the early 1980s, and the two-story Starbucks, and near it a couple of juice stands I remember from my childhood, and then a few feet awaythe wonderfully well-stocked Antoine bookstore, happily still there. Finally we hang a right onto Jeanne D’Arc, my street, my home way back in 1981, and again now.
    The street runs, tight and car-jammed, past a flower shop and a few grocery and stationery stores to the edge of the lush green American University of Beirut campus, a few short blocks down a gently sloping hill. We circle around the block five times looking for parking and finally find a spot near the apartment, which is on the fourth floor of a white-stucco, eight-story building that my great-uncle Bahij Makdisi, a prominent Beirut engineer, built in the 1950s.
    My aunt Marcelle keeps a set of keys that my parents gave her to our Beirut apartment, and when no one is here, she pops in and checks on it every month or so. It’s not a huge place: just a narrow entryway as you walk in, opening out into a dining room and two adjoining living rooms forming an L-shape, with a baby grand piano in the corner and a balcony flanking each of the living rooms; in the back of the apartment are three bedrooms, and down a short corridor leading off the dining room is a sunny kitchen. It’s a comfortable, modestly proportioned apartment for a family of four. But Marcelle and Josette, who live a half-hour drive away in east Beirut, supervise the place the way diligent, wary caretakers would look out for a sprawling estate—even though other relatives live in the building and there’s a concierge on-site. Today Marcelle has stocked the kitchen with tons of food for me, lest I starve to death immediately on arriving in Beirut.
    “Auntie, what’s all this?” I ask her in Arabic, glad at the chance to practice my language skills. I’m still fluent but a littlecreaky, and although my aunt understands English, I want to get into an Arabic habit from the get-go.
    “I thought you might like to have some chicken and rice after your long trip,” she begins, in an accent that mixes Beiruti Arabic with twinges of the mountain accent of Aley, the town where she and my dad, her brother, grew up. “There’s some tabbouleh, too. And just a few different kinds of cheese. I threw in some fruits and vegetables also. Some bags of fresh bread. I think I put some yogurt and mortadella in there, too. Cookies also. Just a few things you might like to snack on.”
    Her worries are, particularly in Beirut, absurd. The apartment is in the middle of the thumping Hamra district, packed as ever with countless restaurants, cafés, and late-night street food stops. You could easily fill up, at any hour of the day or night here, on just a dollar or two, even if the chicest clothes and shoes and hotels and restaurants in Beirut will cost you more than they do in New York. But I’m not complaining about finding shelves and shelves of food in my fridge and pantry tonight. Fantastic luck to have such sweet, perpetually worried relatives.
    Along with the flashing images that make up my mental representation of Beirut, as it looked in the 1970s and early 1980s and as it looks in many ways even now—the wide and crowded Corniche overlooking the Mediterranean, the crumbling war ruins all over the city, the shiny high-rises, the tangled intersections, and everywhere the jasmine bushes and dark pink bougainvilleas—my favorite Lebanese foods also rush like flashcards through my brain. The first thing I’ve always done, just before a visit to Beirut in summers past, or a visit to any city for that matter, is to list all the foods I’m determined to eat while I’m there, even if