Free Jasmine and Fire by Salma Abdelnour Page A

Jeff has e-mailed to tell me his old Berkeley housemate Curtis just moved to Beirut with his wife, Diana, to spend a year. Curtis is an American from southern California, and Diana is British. Both are graduate students at Harvard, and they’re in Beirut this year to work on academic projects. I’ve never met Curtis even though we were both at Berkeley at the same time and had a friend in common. I e-mail them to introduce myself, and it turns out they’re living in an apartment near me. They invite me to a dinner the next week. I wonder if we’ll hit it off.
    On the night of the dinner, I walk up the wide marble stairs of their echoey Ras Beirut building and into their third-floor apartment and am greeted by the tall curly-haired Curtis and Diana, also tall, with long, wispy blond locks. We click instantly—both of them are laid-back and have a dry wit I quickly take to—and they introduce me to their friend Nimco, a Somali-American who lives in Boston but is based this year in Sudan with her husband doing research. Nimco is in Beirut to visit Curtis and Diana, and she’s cooked dinner tonight. Our group of a half-dozen gathers around the table to eat her Somali soup of lemony broth with lamb bones, from which, on her instructions, we suck out the buttery marrow as we laugh at our messy technique, and her fragrant lamb stew over rice, similar to a classic Lebanese stew I’m fond of called a
yakhne
. For dessert, I’ve brought
ashta
ice cream, ultra-rich scoops of cold sweet cream mixed with sahlab, the wild orchid ingredient that creates an elastic texture. When I brought a similar ice cream to Umayma’s Ramadan dinner, everyone there had grown up with it and knew it well. But tonight no one at the dinner has had this style of ice cream before, and I enjoy watching them try to figure out what to make of it, the spoonfuls pullingaway like stretchy strings of chewing gum. After a few puzzled bites: big smiles.
    At the dinner party, I meet an American woman named Wendy, who teaches political science at Northwestern University in Chicago and is here researching Lebanese emigration patterns. After dinner she gives me her business card, and we exchange cell phone numbers, promising to hang out again before she moves back to the States next month. As I look at her full name on the card, I realize it sounds vaguely familiar, but I can’t place it right away.
    Several days after Curtis and Diana’s dinner, I’m home on a Friday evening, and I hear loud booming sounds outside. Fireworks? I’m not sure. They sound like shelling, a visceral memory from the civil war. I wonder if the annual Hamra Street festival I’ve been seeing posters for around the neighborhood has just started, tonight, with a literal bang, an explosive fireworks display. That seems unlikely, though. I didn’t notice any festival preparations on the street earlier, or any vendors setting up food or crafts stands, and I don’t remember what day the fest is supposed to start. I’m slightly panicked by the noise but keeping myself calm—a skill I hope I’ll muster if, god forbid, the political situation in Lebanon blows up again. The sounds go on and get louder, and now I’m even more worried that they’re not fireworks. I rush into the windowless bathroom near my bedroom and crouch on the blue-tiled floor, away from any glass. That’s what we used to do during the war when the nightly shelling raids would start. The sounds continue for another half-hour, me still on the floor in the bathroom, alternately panicking and wondering if I’m being silly. Suddenly everything goes quiet.
    I listen for noise, a reaction, sirens, and don’t hear anything.No sounds of trauma or mayhem out on the streets. So those must have been just fireworks after all. I call my aunt Nouhad upstairs, and she confirms: fireworks for the Hamra festival, but she’s angry because these were much louder and longer-lasting than usual.
    “Isn’t it amazing that we keep