House of Stone

by Anthony Shadid

  Our first meeting, more than a year before, had been memorable. After some hesitation, he had invited me to his house, shrouded in a grove of olive trees and fruit-bearing cactus a little ways from the town’s main road. It was a centuries-old stone family mansion turned chaotic college dormitory. Clothes were draped over every piece of worn furniture; his cabinet was crowded with vitamins and half-empty liquor bottles. Dusty cassette tapes were stacked next to a stereo with a turntable, and an astrology book lay open on the coffee table, with pages dog-eared. “We are good communicators, Geminis,” he told me. It made his marriage to a Sunni Muslim woman difficult, though. “She’s Cancer, I’m Gemini,” he said by way of explaining their divorce.

  Outside sat his white 1971 Mercedes. He always parked it elaborately, pulling in and out, reversing and moving forward, until it was just right.

  “I always park ready to go,” he said, and it was true. His car always faced downhill.

  I asked him why.

  “Escape!” he said, and he laughed hard.

  A few days later, he would offer me a variation of his plan as advice.

  “Coffee without cardamom is like a bride without her gown.” This is a loose translation of the words that my cousin Joumana spoke as we shared coffee at a neighbor’s house. Other visits had made me somewhat familiar to the few faces scattered around town, and during these early days in Marjayoun, invitations for coffee were issued furiously. As was the custom even in Bahija’s day, the bitter drink is served in cups shaped like outsize thimbles. Poured from a blue, long-handled kettle, this batch was delivered on a silver tray with gold trim.

  As far back as 1716, a visitor was said to have found remarkable the amount of this substance consumed by Marjayoun’s people. He attributed it to their Bedouin origins—whether Christian or Muslim, they had retained the generosity and hospitality of a nomadic tribe. “I did not find in Jedeida one single hotel or café, but every house in Jedeida is a hotel,” the visitor recalled. (He was struck, too, that after thirty days as a guest in one of those homes, in perhaps another Bedouin legacy, he never once saw the face of the family’s women.) Nearly three centuries later, coffee in Marjayoun remains ubiquitous. “The most important thing in Jedeida is coffee,” one friend claimed. “If you have a guest without offering coffee, then he is not a guest.”

  As Bahija knew so well.

  In the land of Bahija’s era, there were ways that women had learned to bring peace to the day. At this time, in climates of extremity, there were rituals and contemplations, tea and proverbs; there was the soothing quality of the garden rows, the quiet satisfaction of fabric properly folded, the stirring of sauces long to thicken. Every moment offered something to draw the eye, mind, and heart away from sorrows.

  Each morning after her marriage, Bahija Samara, a dedicated creature of habit who considered herself the finest coffee maker in Marjayoun, woke at 4 A.M., never later than 5, to make Turkish coffee. On the patio she lit charcoal in an oven called a kanoun. Once it was hot, she set down the long-handled kettle, known as a rakwa, and heated the water. Once it boiled, she drew it back, pouring in spoon after spoon of coffee grounds, as if it were a ritual. Then she put the kettle back on the oven and stirred the grounds in the boiling water with a teaspoon. The practice, taking more than an hour, was meditative, and the coffee reached a boil while she stirred. Its foam rose then receded as she pulled the rakwa back, only to rise again, until the taste was perfect, evidenced by the wijh, the thin layer of foam whose consistency and color she knew intuitively.

  Since I was single, friends warned me not to partake of coffee at the home of a single woman more than once; by the second time, the priest would be waiting to marry us. There were dark, somewhat bizarre suggestions of women performing black magic with coffee to lure an eligible man. (One friend blamed the unexplained for his brief marriage.) All had mastered the ritual of serving with hundreds of years of accumulated practice bringing grace to every gesture. According to custom, coffee or tea would appear only after sweets, fruit, or perhaps a mingling of walnuts and raisins. Chocolate usually followed. Guests were served first, family and hosts last. As we sat that day when construction did not begin—Joumana, her husband Fouad, Bishara, and me—I enjoyed a satisfied moment. Bishara was served first, coffee with its cardamom. Then came Fouad, followed by me.

  Our conversation naturally moved toward the neighborhood and its rather unsettling quiet. Our host, Wadia Dabbaghi, was the wife of the headmaster of the Marjayoun National College. She lived across the street from the Samara house and named for me those who remained on the block: she, her husband Maurice, and a tailor who lived a few doors down and usually summered here. The rest, she had told me earlier, were either studying in Beirut or working abroad—in America or the oil-driven sprawl of places such as Dubai, where women outfit shrieking infants in Versace and all the mirrored surfaces are strictly self-reflective.

  “You are the fourth,” Wadia said, the faint hint of her smile suggesting that such a small number was, for her, not so happy a thing. She had no desire for solitude.

  “I have a bad feeling about it,” said Shibil, who had wandered into the gathering as the topic of rebuilding my grandmother’s house was broached. “I hate to see you screwed,” he continued. “This place doesn’t belong to you.” Why not buy land and build a house? Or buy a house that is yours alone and fix it up? “This house belongs to so many people. It’s not yours.”

  He muttered an old saying in Arabic: “A sliver of land can wipe out its people.” Then he nodded. In the days that followed, I wondered whether Shibil and the other naysayers weren’t perhaps right. Their worry, simply put, was: I did not own the house. It was not legally mine. Disputes among heirs often blocked restorations here. Protracted family squabbles left many relics abandoned, like forgotten imperial outposts. I wasn’t certain how I would fare in battle.

  I was raised with an innocence at odds with the experience of my pragmatic Arab ancestors. To be born in these parts is not only to know loss and rumination, but also to savor the endless pleasures of discord. It is to feel, and often feign, useful rage. Anger diverts attention; as a ruse it can blur the facts of a losing argument or disguise one’s true motives. Theater, at the negotiating table or during a midmorning’s market dustup, is part of the action. Family battles here are freighted. Tales of the choleric House of Shadid do not necessarily inspire aunts and uncles struggling to reform tempers in the air-conditioned Oklahoma suburbs. When I discovered Hayy al-Shadadni, a neighborhood down the road from Shibil’s that once bore our name, I anticipated angry gangs of diminutive men engaged in nighttime vices and excessive fist-shaking.

  Anis Shadid, a mayor of our hometown long ago, knew how to cultivate the appearance of propriety. His tarbush, the once popular Ottoman-style hat, was always precisely placed. His suit was groomed, his leather shoes always bore a shine, and his cane was accented with a glimmering sterling silver handle. Yet nothing concealed the steam rising from his temples, the absolute refusal of any plea to reconsider or impose moderation, particularly when it came to his lusty appreciation of the water pipe.

  One Shadid, frustrated by his schooling, buried his books in the garden to grow a tree of knowledge. In a show of loyalty or affection, another Shadid tried to get a passport for his pet under the name Bobby Shadid (bobby being another way to say dog in Arabic). My altogether more sane grandfather, Abdullah Shadid, soon-to-be-husband of my grandmother Raeefa, arrived in America and roamed the Texas oil fields before heading off to Detroit’s factories and auto plants, where he and other Lebanese—Syrians or Turks, they were called—fought for workers in union battles. Oklahoma, more bucolic than Detroit, was his next destination. Here was respectability, never especially hoped for, arriving in the form of a dry-goods store with dusty shelves. Abdullah bought the business from a man who opened another establishment down the road. Furious at the deception, he and a relative sneaked out at night and, playing by the rules of village vendettas, burned it
down.

  What family in what nation fails to complicate divisions of money, houses, or land? It isn’t just greed that breeds contention; there are also the grievances, hostilities, and rivalries of childhood. Everything, of course, is intensified by the frenetic but pitch-perfect negotiating talents on view in these lands, even among family. Imagine an endless, increasingly infuriated procession of swiftly modifying positions. Imagine the rampant muttering of threats with increasing ardor.

  And so we begin. Any property in Lebanon—house, land, or those collapsing stretches of splendor that suggest the confluence of both—comprises 2,400 shares. Do not ask where the number came from. Someone will tell you, with utter confidence but no regard for accuracy. And then will come the correction of that figure, and then the voices will grow louder, more aggrieved. Within a half hour’s time, a friendship or a marriage will be threatened with extinction. Documents will be torn or thrown. And then . . . the slam of the door? Not quite. The disputant, having stalked away, will reappear with further affronts. Time, eddying here as it does, is immaterial. Those with particularly effective memories like to tell the story of a man whose father was killed, inciting a vendetta. After forty years passed, his neighbors asked why he had not yet exacted revenge. “It’s still early,” he would tell them, ever so calm, patient.

  This was the situation: The family’s house was still, fittingly and according to the deed, in the name of “the heirs of Isber Samara.” These came to twenty-three far-flung, combustible cousins, spread across Lebanon, Brazil, and five states in America—Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, and Florida. Each of my father’s generation had inherited 104 shares, give or take a few tenths. I could boast no more than 35 shares, and only if my portion of 34.78 was rounded up.

  My ambition to rebuild the house was considered foolish and rash by my new neighbors, not to mention reckless, dangerous, and altogether “American.”

  Despite the anxieties and loud warnings, I remained determined. Joumana and I had agreed to do this for the sake of the family, or some notion of it, a hint of the martyr in our vow. We would leave ownership as it was. I suppose I should have talked to the stateside heirs and sought their blessing and, more correctly, their consent. I admit, though, I never did. My cousins’ distance and long apathy had given me carte blanche.

  I made my way back to Isber’s house as the sun eased itself down toward earth and a soft, hesitant light filled the cracks and crevices of the homes I walked past.

  Isber’s, nearly a century old, was a formidable two stories of redoubtable materials. Once utilitarian and still inescapably elegant, its stones ascended row after symmetrical row, thirty-five in all, ending with the armid, an Arabic word borrowed from Turkish that refers to those red tile shingles of a Levantine and cosmopolitan past. The roof was shored up by wood arches shaped like a sturdy violin’s scroll. The two balconies were girded by finely wrought but rusted iron railings, perched over a burly plum tree. The larger of the balconies framed the most graceful feature of the house, the triple arches, buttressed by two marble columns. There is perhaps no feature that more forcefully evokes the notion of a traditional Lebanese house than the triple arcade, though inspiration for the design dates back nearly three millennia, to Roman antiquity.

  In Bahija’s later years, the downstairs had been rented, sometimes to two families, and in the years that followed, the house did not escape scenes of darkness. When the civil war erupted in Lebanon in 1975, looters plundered the house, tossing delicate furniture into the yard and making way for squatters. During the long years of Israel’s occupation, a man with a strange, insidious air moved in upstairs. Some said Albert Haddad was a run-of-the-mill informer for the Israelis; others believed him a paid agent of the Mossad. He terrified everyone, so much so that stories of this sinister figure made their way to America. The carcass of a dog, still chained up, was found putrefying on the porch when Haddad left with the Israelis in 2000. Intelligence operatives—the sadistic, brutal kind used in Iraq and Syria, where they were known as the Mukhabarat—often work with attack dogs, savage animals used for, among other things, interrogation and torture.

  I walked through the garden past scraggly pink geraniums, struggling without water, planted along the stone wall by a neighbor chagrined at the house’s dilapidation. The door, shackled with a gold-colored lock that read BOXER, was a flimsy contraption of iron, wood, screen, and wire, hinged like a barnyard gate. Like all the entrances, it was battered and missing something: a lock, handle, or pane. At first the key I had been given didn’t work, though I had used it on my previous visits. Then, as the door creaked, a plume of dust rose, and I saw shafts of light falling through the murky, disheveled room. Stretching across the threshold were cobwebs, glowing as they caught the glint of an afternoon sun.

  Most of the downstairs looked looted and reminded me of scenes from Baghdad days after Saddam’s fall. A faded picture of a stout model from an Arabic-language lifestyle magazine, her hairdo a decade old, was stapled to a beam. Wires dangled from the ceiling, as did light fixtures, though most bulbs were missing. The shoe prints of a dozen different feet left their mark in what suggested a hasty exodus. Yet gradually I began to see the underlying structure of the place, the almost hidden touches. There were no sharp angles or dead ends. As I walked toward the smooth stone stairs, I noticed some ornate Italian tile peeking from beneath all the dust. I was immediately drawn for reasons I can’t explain. I am no aesthete, but I knew that the tiles were called cemento (though they were known these days as sajjadeh, Arabic for carpet, a name suggested by their repeating colorful patterns). Through the dirt I could see only black and white, but I suspected other hues lay hidden beneath all those years.

  During my many visits to the Middle East, I had paid little attention to the cemento I had walked on countless times. It was there, I am nearly certain, on the floor of the Feisal Hostel—across from Bab al-Amoud, the Damascus Gate, in Jerusalem—where I stayed for some months as an angry eighteen-year-old student, working at an English-language Palestinian weekly during the first Intifada. I seemed to remember the tile later, when I was reporting in Cairo, in Midan Talaat Harb, on the floors of Groppi, Café Riche, or the Greek Club, landmarks of a downtown of Parisian ambition and Egyptian nostalgia. I remembered designs and colors on the floors of houses, shops, and restaurants I visited in faded quarters of Beirut and Nablus, Damascus and Aleppo, always wanting to lay claim to something that was never mine to take.

  But it was the cemento here in Isber’s house that drew me. At the foot of the stairs to the entrance, next to a slab of stone, there were twenty tiles, probably no more than an afterthought, as the space where they were laid was quite small—not much more than a few feet across, even fewer feet wide. The tiles had neither symmetry nor design (especially compared to the much larger, more carefully ordered displays I would discover on the floor above). Always frugal, my great-grandfather was never one to waste tile, and he had probably used leftovers here as a kind of accent. I could not stop staring. I was taken with their intricacy and the richness of the hues they promised. As I swept the dirt with my boot, I glimpsed colors that had resisted a century of wear—soft yellows, purples, and greens I had not previously encountered.

  A week after learning that Bishara was still busy in the Bekaa Valley, Fouad dropped by my apartment on a Saturday morning. With a gentleman’s sense of reassurance and an unexcitable, distinctly Lebanese confidence, he convinced me that all was not lost. He had, he proudly announced, been cogitating. There was a way forward after all—namely, with his brother Armando. Together, they would straighten out the design problems and rescue me. It seemed that Armando was also an architect and that Fouad, determined not to raise false hopes, had already taken Armando by the house so he could survey what needed to be done. Armando, thank the Lord and everyone else, had not been put off.

  Here was their idea: They would take over the project, as engineer and architect. We would scale back Bishara’s too elaborate, too time-
consuming, too expensive plan and hire local labor. We would do what we could do, given the limits of time (a year) and money (never enough). As this was the first time I had heard anyone besides myself show the slightest concern for the financial outlay, I was ready to sign.

  “It is going to be full of surprises,” Fouad said as I lit another cigarette.

  Fouad and Armando would come once a week, but we would also need a foreman to oversee the day-to-day work, unsnarling complications that inevitably tangled up construction jobs. Maybe our neighbor, Fouad said, knew of a potential candidate. I thought for a moment, then remembered Hikmat, a proud, strapping man who lived in a manor-like house down the road. Hikmat Farha was among the first men I had met in the town, perhaps because he was hard to miss—broad-shouldered with the obligatory mustache, a handsome hawkish nose, and thinning hair combed back. “You must be the tallest man in Marjayoun,” I had told him then.

  “The second-tallest,” he corrected me. Apart he stood, and I trusted him.

  Luckily, Hikmat did have a prospect for the job, a friend of his family’s who, before the civil war began in 1975, had built the Farha family’s gas station, a behemoth of concrete, at the edge of town. Hikmat called the man’s son and asked him to send his father, who was called Abu Jean, but an hour brought no one. When I called again, Hikmat said that Abu Jean had come, waited an hour, given up, and returned home for coffee. The idea that he couldn’t find us, right outside the house, in view of the street, was disconcerting. I set out to fetch him anyway, as nothing is too far away in Marjayoun. As it happened, Abu Jean recognized me before I did him, since I was that rarity in this town, a stranger. He waved from his balcony like a ship’s captain sighting some long-lost compatriot and inviting him aboard his vessel.