Jasmine and Fire Read Online Free PDF Page B

here?
self-laceration tonight, as I’m opening my suitcase and taking out a nightshirt to sleep in.
    The regrets come crashing in:
What am I doing? I’m leaving behind my close friends, and a New York life I love, and a relationship that might have a future, and I’m turning my entire reality upside down for—what? To relive my childhood, to recapture a life that was interrupted so long ago? Shouldn’t my childhood be over already, damn it? Beirut was just an early, long-gone chapter of my life. The New York life I’ve worked so hard to build is the now, the present, the reality. Isn’t it?
    But if that’s true, then why is my relationship with Beirut, which sometimes feels like yet another one of the volatile on-again off-again romances in my life, still unresolved? Why do I crave a final reckoning with this place?
    I need to do this, I remind myself, and I need to do it now. Before I make any firmer commitments in New York, or to Richard if we make it that far, and before I potentially have kids (I’m thirty-eight, so I’m not breaking any speed records on that front), I need to make sure I’m living in the right place and that my head, on this one issue anyway, is straight.
    Despite my smooth journey from New York, and a loving cousin and aunt who filled my fridge and drove me home from the airport and kept me company over dinner, my first night in Beirut sucks. I wake up at five o’clock to the sound of water crashing down on my dresser. It’s cold water from the air-conditioning system backing up through the pipes into my bedroom—a problemmy mother had warned me about. Before I went to bed, I was supposed to check on a pipe on the balcony and make sure it wasn’t dislodged, so I’d avoid a middle-of-the-night leak. But I’d forgotten.
    I’d also forgotten that in this building, as in pretty much every building in Beirut that I know of, the basic utilities are always breaking down. When I’d had no water in my New York apartment the morning I left, that was a fluke. Here? Just another day in Beirut. The electricity goes out for a few hours every single day across the city, early morning or midday or evening, depending on what neighborhood you’re in. There’s frequently no Internet signal, and often it’s excruciatingly slow. On past visits to Beirut, the elevator in our building has broken down. Now the latest meltdown is happening just inches from my bed. My new digital video camera happens to be sitting directly under the leak from the air-conditioner—but is thankfully still in its case.
    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, butnot 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