House of Stone

by Anthony Shadid

  August 10, 2007

  It was a hot summer day, and it seemed I had traveled through the ages since the afternoon I discovered the rocket at Isber Samara’s house. I bent down to touch the olive tree I had planted more than a year before. Determined, it had shown itself, yet my pride at its survival was tinged with disappointment: It had grown, but not as much as I had envisioned. All these months later, the little tree still looked inconsequential before the house of stone. The trunk seemed incapable of outlasting a stiff wind and was far from outgrowing its vulnerability.

  When I was younger, I had pictured myself as the sort who plants trees that endure. I wanted to be a family man, a generous man, but there was always work, and like my great-grandfather Isber, I had to make my name. Others, I mistakenly believed, would understand the sanctity of my mission and have no trouble postponing their cocktail parties.

  But there I was, still stunned by war, and shockingly, no longer young, or married, or with my daughter, Laila. I was, as fate would apparently have it, living alone. Not in Washington. Or Baghdad. Or Beirut. I was residing, more than a year after the war of 2006, in Marjayoun, where I planned to rebuild that stone house, Isber’s home, our home.

  There is a place in suburban Maryland where my wife and I had tried to come together, though apparently not as hard as we tried to fall apart. There is a room where a baby slept as I said goodbye, off on another errand of career-building, feeling guilty for leaving, but not sorry enough to stay. I had tried to keep a hand on home, but was a kind of guest star, and sometimes, as wars accelerated, I forgot the plot unfurling back there. On what had, at the outset, seemed a promising summer day, I had returned to our house to find that my wife and daughter had vacated. The lawn was mowed, the flowers were planted, the tomatoes starting to ripen, but inside, precisely half of everything was missing. It was a clean, surgical division, worthy of the woman I had married four years before, a doctor.

  Everywhere these days, all around the world, it seems, there are leftover houses, rooms without warmth. This was not the world that Isber Samara had known when young, before war changed his life.

  Isber and Bahija married in 1899, and the union was considered, with no sense of diminishment, sensible. Bahija’s forebears were from Salt; her face was soft and without schemes. Money was not always on her mind. She had kindness and dignity. Of six sisters, she was known as the prettiest, but this was considered no distinction. All the sisters were passable goods, wives-to-be for regular men, full and proper as a row of birds.

  Bahija made a discipline of truth and was a light to Isber, whose stories tended to serve whatever purpose he had in telling them. He was a man of intentions, not always expressed. She exuded something beyond force or strength—a serenity and equipoise. No syllable was extended frivolously. Without her, her husband might only have overwhelmed. Isber’s eyes, bright blue, demanded; hers, green verging on hazel, requested. Isber was rough and hard to rule. She was Marjayoun, proud and educated, but quiet, basita. She shuddered at outbursts and shunned gossip. Silence, she had been taught, was valued. It could keep anything at bay.

  I am not certain when I decided to move to Marjayoun. For a while I waited for someone to save me from myself, yet—although friends looked stricken when I shared my plans—no one arrived, so I charged ahead, arranging a leave from the Washington Post and signing a lease on an apartment that would house me until Isber’s could take over the task. My temporary landlord, Michel Fardisi, in his bulky red Mercedes, was a predictable image of corruption, with a satisfied belly and thinning hair dyed to a black sheen. He resembled a bandleader in a nightclub with unsavory associations, and his firing up of successive Marlboro Reds came with wheezes too broad for parody. Here was a man conscious of money in a town that, drawing on its mercantile past, took pride in its shatara. The word’s definition, at least the most literal one, goes only so far; it suggests slyness, shrewdness, cunning, or smartness. Popular use, though, has broadened the definition: Shater connotes a hint of wiliness, a few shades of deception. To be shater is to be undoubtedly cleverer than the next person. It is an enviable attribute among those born for the squabbles of the marketplace.

  Michel thought himself quite shater. During the rent negotiations, his first offer, muttered to my friend Shibil, a native here, was that I should pay the full $100 rent, even though the month was well in progress. After all, he said, he had kept the apartment open for me, fending off tenants. (I had, before this meeting, known nothing of the place, but let it pass.)

  I suspected that he was simply gauging my gullibility. My Oklahoma-accented Arabic, sprinkled with Egyptian colloquialisms, perhaps suggested I was dimwitted, as any foreigner here is considered. So I protested, pointing to the apartment and its water-stained walls, rickety door, mossy entrance, and weeds. It was hard to imagine that it was in particular demand; it looked like a crib for a serial killer. In the end, Michel seemed unwilling to invest his time in an argument. He relented with a shrug, a poker player folding a hand never good but boldly played. He tried to suggest I had gotten a bargain, but I could not quite agree.

  Later, early in the evening, watching for the man who was to deliver some furniture I had bought, I felt eyes peering at me from a window behind a fig tree. Soon an elderly woman came toward me. Looking me over, she seemed bent on learning whatever she could. Her face implied that she didn’t much like my intrusion. No smile appeared, no sign of hospitality, none of the rich catalogue of greetings that Arabic boasts.

  “How much rent are you paying?” she asked. “A hundred dollars?”

  I nodded.

  “Are you married?”

  I shook my head.

  “Are you bringing your own furniture?”

  At that I paused, then nodded, squinting, a little unsure of her meaning. Even Shibil seemed baffled by the last question. Then the electricity went out, as it often does in Marjayoun, and she walked away, muttering to herself that the apartment was too small for me, and too expensive. A few minutes later, she returned. She had the same scowl, but in her hand was a candle so that I could light my new home.

  Leaving the apartment one morning a few weeks later, I was planning to start the actual building. I glanced at Shibil’s old shirt, stuffed in a gaping hole in the kitchen wall, but moments later was rumbling past ripening pomegranate trees and panoramas of Mount Hermon. All seemed well. I had decided to quit smoking and, breathing deeply, was pleased at not having lit up that morning. Yet there was something slightly disturbing beneath the surface. Bishara, a friend of Joumana, one of my last remaining cousins in Lebanon, had promised to bring workers to begin the reconstruction—no, that would be too modest: the reimagining of Isber’s house. Not just workers, either. Artisans! Masters! I had been prepared for Olympians of Construction. Bishara, tinged with the ambition of an Albert Speer, had enthused operatically over the plans that they would soon execute. His descriptions were overtures featuring the sounds of walls falling, and unfolding arias devoted to the creation of new bedrooms. (Five, he convinced me, were necessary, as he said coyly, “A man never knows.”)

  Stepping into the spotlight for what would be a lengthy solo, Bishara would harmonize with himself as he led me through imagined hallways, passing new bathrooms with shiny, astonishingly expensive fixtures, a dining room fit for state dinners, a gargantuan kitchen for never-ending meals, and a calming sitting room where I could recover from my nervous breakdown—an event certain to follow my perusal of the bills no one mentioned.

  Upstairs, according to the Master Builder, we would essentially create two new floors where there had been one. A new, somewhat elegant balcony perched over the liwan (entry hall) would majestically open to the triple arcade of windows and the view of snow-capped peaks beyond. In Bishara’s vision, the roof’s red tiles would remain, as would the marble in the liwan. So would the century-old iron railings, or darabzin, on the balconies and over the windows. Perhaps some of the beautiful tiles—that echo of a Levantine past—could be salv
aged, and the stone could be cleaned. But most of everything was to be replaced. Reviewing the plan, I shuddered. The intense precision of the lettering, fit for a ransom note, convinced me that I was dealing with a psychotic.

  And did we really have time for all this?

  I suspected that my year’s furlough from the paper would dwindle to a close before we had finished the installation of a working commode.

  That morning, I walked across Bahija’s overgrown garden, strewn with clumps of dead weeds and the detritus of forgotten gates and walls, knowing that we were starting, or at least hoping we were. Then I headed to the house, expecting to find Bishara’s crew. But the place was almost deserted. Only Fouad Lahoud, our engineer and the husband of Joumana, was laboring, rather unindustriously—quite unindustriously, actually. There he was, chipping away at decades-old plaster with what appeared to be a metal bookend. As unflappable as I was temperamental, he smiled. It was meant to reassure me. It did not.

  Preparing myself, I realized I was not quitting smoking that day. Nor probably the next. Bishara, Fouad explained, the man of lofty visions, was still working on a project in the Bekaa Valley, a few hours away. As for his crew, they had returned to Syria, fearful of the deepening political crisis that pitted the government against Hezbollah, its opposition. It was paralyzing the state. In the capital, there was deadlock over the choice of the next president. Rival television stations derided each other’s supporters as militiamen and hired guns. No one seemed to think resolution would come without some sort of violence, somewhere.

  We’ll never start, I thought. What would Isber have done? I lit a cigarette.

  I had left for Marjayoun about a month before that day when construction did not begin, driving from Beirut in my green Jeep Cherokee. My provisions included a loaf of bread that Lebanese call toast, five cans of tuna, cheese, bags of roasted peanuts known as kri-kri, almonds, two bottles of water, asparagus, hearts of palm, pickled okra, and coffee, along with a mug. A bottle of Glenfiddich gurgled in my bag, along with clothes and sandals.

  There was no address; Lebanon lacks the precise Zip Code sense of the United States. Directions tend to be anecdotal, even in peacetime: Pass a crumbling lighthouse, turn right at a revolutionary’s portrait, left at a pasha-like statue, near a rock-studded wadi no one knows the name of. Roads tell a story, and though some details were new, the landscape was the same as my family had seen years back as, leaving Marjayoun, they headed to Beirut and America.

  The Shadids were among the first to leave Marjayoun, joining others who fled, starting around 1894. After the murder of a sheikh from Metulla almost led to an attack on Marjayoun by Druze tribesmen, Ibrahim Shadid, a short, wiry man with a remarkable handlebar mustache, decided he had had enough of vendettas in a land too often filled with them. He left, making the monthlong journey to the United States by donkey, boat, train, and finally on foot—from Beirut, via France, to New York, and then to a town along the Red River and the border of Oklahoma. He ended up in Sherman, Texas, a prairie town named for a hero of the Texas revolution and best known for hosting Jesse James for part of his honeymoon.

  His brother Ayyash stayed behind. Yet when Ibrahim’s other brother, Shehadeh, decided to join Ibrahim in Texas, Ayyash sent along his oldest son, Miqbal. Fourteen years old, with a round face on narrow shoulders and a cross tattooed on his wrist to ward off the evil eye, Miqbal heeded his father’s wishes. He would never see his father again, although his relatives, trickling into the new country, would bring occasional word of his family, including the trials of Ottoman conscription and World War I. Together, Miqbal and his uncle Shehadeh began working as peddlers, migrating to Oklahoma, a territory that had just won statehood. Flush with oil, it was exuberant and lawless, as much a frontier as Texas.

  Along the wadis I passed the day I drove to Marjayoun, empires had collided—Hittites, Arameans, Assyrians, Babylonians, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Seljuks, and Crusaders. With those empires came kings: Nebuchadnezzar, Tiglat-Pileser, Benhadad. More followed, from Amr ibn al-As to Saladin, the Kurdish nemesis of those Crusaders. Their heirs were the Ottoman beys and pashas, British field marshals, and French high commissioners.

  The Ottoman state had begun as a negligible emirate led by a chieftain named Osman in the fourteenth century, but the Ottomans’ sway over what would become Lebanon commenced later, under Selim I, whose feared janissaries conquered Egypt and Syria. At its apogee, under his successor, the immodestly named Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottomans’ empire was the most invincible, the wealthiest, and perhaps the most advanced domain on earth. It called itself the Eternal State. Spanning three continents and more than six centuries, it was Islam’s equivalent of Rome, reigning over much of the Middle East, North Africa, and the Balkans.

  These days, no one would long for the Ottoman imperium. Cited often—if the era is recalled at all—are the massacres perpetrated and the discrimination faced by Jews and Christians in taxation and commerce. Equality was unknown. Yet across those centuries, the Ottoman Empire bound together a remarkable tapestry of ethnicities, religions, nationalities, and languages that, unencumbered by borders, comprised a culture far greater than its individual parts. It survived as it did because of its pluralism and its own notion of tolerance. Albanians and Greeks, Armenians and Serbs, Arabs and Hungarians served the government; Christians filled the ranks of its janissaries; Muslims and Christians, Jews and Samaritans, Circassians and Arabs, Armenians and Kurds inhabited lands not too distant from Marjayoun.

  When Muslims and Sephardic Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, the emperor of the Turks sent his fleet across the Mediterranean to save them and settle them in imperial domains where Islam was never too orthodox, influenced as it was by tradition, mysticism, and even the Christians with whom it lived. No one was ever really Ottoman, a fact that some connect to the eventual failing of the empire. But since its fall after World War I, never has such a mosaic of cultures existed over such a breadth of land.

  The war would be the end and the beginning. Even now, the most elderly recall stories of those last breaths of the empire—the seferberlik. It was the Ottoman name for the draft, but it came to mean something more: all the famine, terror, and disease that took lives and drained spirits in those years. Mere normalcy seemed disinclined to return. In Marjayoun, the only stories going around in these harsh days were grim tales of neighbors clawing through manure and chicken droppings in search of a morsel of food. At night, mothers and fathers sneaked into fields, cutting the tops of wheat, grinding the raw grain into an almost inedible sustenance for their children to eat. Others tried to eat grass. In the old Ottoman strongholds, people raided warehouses, looting them of loose kernels, olive oil, ghee, sugar, and onions. Cries of juaan—I am hungry—rang through the squares of Beirut at night. Epidemics of typhus and malaria preyed on the weak. Locusts attacked a countryside beset by plague. The dead were found in gutters, in clothes that barely concealed paper-like skin. Stories of insanity were routine.

  The French declared Lebanon itself in 1920, fitting within its newly decreed frontiers eighteen religious sects—among them Shiite and Sunni Muslims, Greek Orthodox and Maronite Catholics, Druze, Armenians, and a handful of Jews. None agreed, or ever would, on what the country should become. So began the crises, which deepened after 1948, when Israel was created. The civil war raged from 1975 to 1990, and other conflicts have since inflamed rivalries and bloodied lives.

  The old road to Marjayoun now passes through land demarcated with the colors, banners, and portraits of those conflicts, all of them abbreviations of reason. Yellow stands for Hezbollah and the territory of Shiite Muslims, the largest of Lebanon’s sects. Portraits of an assassinated leader, killed in a spasm of flame and force on a bend of Beirut’s corniche, denote the turf of Sunni Muslims, second only to the Shia in number. Flashes of green, red, and orange announce the irreconcilable Christians, their schisms myriad. Some retain deluded notions of supremacy, church and nation falling impossibly together. E
ach of their leaders has his title—the sayyid, the doctor, the general, the professor, the sheikh, the teacher, or the bek. In its labyrinth of contests, every community faces a future it deems existential. None has a guarantee of survival.

  When I had arrived in Marjayoun that first night, I had accepted my friend Shibil’s scotch and spare bed. Shibil is loquacious even if miserable; talk is his juggling act and he uses it to divert attention away from what he doesn’t want to show. From his windows, the Israeli frontier is visible. Israeli checkpoints run along the ridge of Mount Hermon, part of it occupied by Israel since 1967. Beyond is Syria and ridges descending into Jordan.

  Metulla, with its bold and steady illumination, taunted us as Marjayoun’s lights flickered on and off while we drank. Marjayoun’s power is rarely continuous. Accustomed to Baghdad, where lights reveal mountains of garbage and rivers of martial concrete (but only for twelve hours a day), I am taken aback by persistent utilities. The current that night was almost flirtatious, promising electricity then threatening to disappear in blackouts that lasted for hours.

  Before I could point this out, Shibil interrupted: “The prostitute has gone,” he proclaimed rather drunkenly as the lights failed once more. Darkness reigned, longer this time. When we were able to see again, Shibil exclaimed, “The prostitute has come.”

  Shibil cannot be extricated from Marjayoun, where his family, who once counted, is no longer recalled. In uncertain health, he tosses sleeplessly most nights, enraging and then reenraging himself as he sorts through his pile of grudges, imagined slights, and never-ending quarrels. They are what he has to prove his life is going on. He lives in a ghost town that survives mainly in memory, but to him it is the world.