House of Stone

by Anthony Shadid

  The modern incarnation of Marjayoun began five hundred years ago, and residents insist that at the turn of the nineteenth century, when Beirut remained a provincial capital, Marjayoun rivaled it in size. This statement is a reminder of the town’s grandiosity, its tendency to inflate the past, a habit that one discovers in places more proud than vital. Yet looking back brings shame, or nostalgia no less common. In comparison to the glories of the past, the reality of today in lands where war has never ended creates a kind of tristesse that underlies all and leads to further conflation of what has been. A more sober Ottoman report on the more ancient population, written with a sneer by two curmudgeonly Ottoman men before World War I, put the population in 1912 at 3,752 (2,195 Orthodox, 890 Catholics, 370 Protestants, and 297 Muslims).

  Perhaps 800 people live in Marjayoun now, a shadow of the thousands in residence in its heyday, when nearly every morning, peasants near Ibl al-Saqi, Metulla, and across the Arqoub brought ghee, milk, and labneh to sell in the Saha, paved in black volcanic cobblestone. Most butchers slaughtered on Sunday, and Friday was market day, when vendors threw straw mats on the stone and hawked their goods. Crowds gathered to inhale the roasted nuts and tobacco burning in water pipes. The idle played backgammon near the shoe shiner; others gathered in chairs outside the barbershop, enjoying the breeze on freshly shaven and scented faces. A few sneaked drinks of arak in a store that, properly secluded, was a sort of speakeasy. As they did, they heard the vendors’ cries, their accents diverse.

  “Bateekh, bateekh, bateekh . . . ala al-sikeen ya bateekh,” one yelled. Watermelon, watermelon, watermelon . . . a watermelon ready for the knife!

  The voluble merchant competed with others: “My cucumbers look like a baby’s fingers!” “Tomatoes . . . red and green tomatoes . . . tomatoes from the valley!” “Radish is good for you but makes you fart!”

  Their muffled cries were heard inside the store where a Christian vendor filled prescriptions written by a Shiite sheikh in neighboring Dibin for patients of all faiths. No matter what the disease or complaint, the sheikh, a savvy assessor of a placebo’s worth, prescribed a variation of two remedies: either a compound of tamarind, anise, and fennel, or one made of honey, eggs, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, ginger, liquid styrax, benzoin of Java, and pepper. (Prescribed them, that is, if his elaborate incantation failed.)

  In the Saha, children, unaware of the class consciousness that ruled Marjayoun’s stratified society, played together with pebbles, or balls, or the bones of goats or sheep, which they begged from the butchers in town. Slingshots were just as popular, and were the scourge of birds whose migration patterns brought them through the Hula Valley and along the Great Rift Valley spanning Africa and Asia. On Sunday, they flocked to a small pool where youngsters played. As it happened, the pool was the creation of an enterprising resident who had built it by damming a stream running from one of the springs.

  The young Isber Samara loved to splash around here, especially on summer’s humid days. Perhaps it was where he first glimpsed the lives of others more fortunate than he, children with more than old slingshots to play with, fathers with clothing finer than he had seen before, gentlemen who spoke of history as if they had been granted seats to observe its unfolding.

  Isber Samara, born in 1873, was the son of Suleiman Samara, who was the son of Ibrahim, who was the son of Mikhail, who was born in 1770 to a man named Samara Samara, who had settled in Marjayoun after coming of age in the Houran. Later, it was to that steppe that Isber and his brothers—Faris, Rashid, and Said—returned as young men to toil and push themselves toward the prosperity that was the object of all their hopes. The brothers started out as landlords for sharecroppers (which netted them eighty percent of any wheat harvest); herders of sheep, goats, and camels; and moneylenders who forced clients to guarantee their debts in land. They were also merchants, engaged in a brisk trade in jibneh baida, a kind of cheese, labneh, and samneh, or ghee, wrapped in sheepskin and carried on their horses.

  Ambitious young men, the Samara brothers were aggressive, conscious of pennies. Isber, in fact, was reputed to occasionally put his foot on the scale as the brothers weighed the ghee and wheat that they traded with the Bedouins. The Samaras spoke their own dialect, Badraji, a distinctive vocabulary that cloaked their intentions before those Bedouin counterparts.

  The desert ways, customs, and attitudes of the Houran felt familiar to them; of course, it was part of their legacy. The Samaras lived by standards disavowed by Marjayoun’s gentlemen, forms and practices that marked existence in the desert and the Houran. The Samaras grew up speaking an Arabic more Bedouin than the pronounced Lebanese dialect spoken by the older families, like the Shadids in Marjayoun. They shared those Bedouins’ words: “South” was never janoub, but rather ibli, the direction of Mecca in a nomad’s mind.

  They shared as well the Bedouins’ keen sense of hospitality and honor, those conventions that had regulated existence for millennia in the desert, where survival might depend on a neighbor’s goodwill. Like those nomads, they had contempt for the peasants whom they catered to, and for the blacksmiths, grocers, and other shopkeepers, with their regular hours and routines, whom they relied on. Isber and his brothers embraced a desert code versatile but unambiguous, the product of its creators’ keen understanding of life’s dangerous caprice.

  At the center of the Saha in the days of prosperity was the manara, an Ottoman-era lamppost that, in popular lore, served at least once as an imperial gallows. It was built in 1908 by Hamdi Bek, a middling Ottoman potentate called the qaimaqam, who also installed the town’s first gas lamp. Around the square he embellished was the mosque, the provincial headquarters, and perhaps eighty stores drawing their distant customers—shops for hardware and groceries, fruit and vegetable sellers, sweetshops, bakeries, barbers, and butchers. The marketplace was loud with confusing greetings, shouts of dissent in disparate dialects, outrageous obscenities alternating with clattering backgammon stones, and the cries of vendors’ offerings.

  The most famous of the Saha’s buildings was undoubtedly the restaurant owned by the Akkawis, a Sunni family. Pots and flowers surrounded an atrium fountain around which tables and chairs ascended in tiers. The Akkawis’ fresh fruit sorbets were famous; the ice to make them was brought daily from the highest peaks of Mount Hermon. On Good Friday, prayers would play from the speakers of the Muslim-owned restaurant. A young Hana Shadid, extolling God, would repay the favor.

  Every year, diners in the atrium would see Hana, a Greek Orthodox Christian, climb the minaret with dignity, turn to Mecca, and begin to recite the Muslim call to prayer, touching each word with care. Many years later, in Oklahoma, relatives would smile at the mention of this scene. They would recall Hana, whose singing voice was not unremarkable, yet more meaningful was the statement that he and the town were making together. For more than a hundred years Hana’s call would be remembered by Marjayounis, separated from families and scattered across the world, when they encountered each other. In other times, less peaceful, they would marvel at the Muslims’ acceptance of a Christian man addressing their God as their intermediary.

  In a grocery store on the outskirts of Oklahoma City, my aunts—Najiba and Nabeeha—would recall the faces watching, unified by what Hana was saying for the town, which existed as it did because its people had learned tolerance. Here was Hana Shadid seeking God for everyone in the Saha, for everyone in the town. Here was a statement that would be heard around the world for decades. Here was Hana Shadid seeking God for all kinds, for all men and women. Here was a gesture that would say, “This is Marjayoun.”

  Michael Shadid, the twelfth child of a distant cousin, had been raised by a mother who could neither read nor write. In Marjayoun—a place he would one day chasten for its “little regard for vital statistics as for sanitation”—nine of his older brothers and sisters died in childhood, too sick for saving by a doctor whose only resources, Michael remembered, were “mustard poultices, and quinine, and calomel.” His father had l
eft his mother, Khishfeh, a one-room house, two mules, and a modest sum of money, which would sustain them for years. Determined to make it last longer, she appealed to God, burned incense before icons, and knelt to pray every evening. To earn more, she baked, washed clothes, scrubbed houses. Always, when shopping for clothing or food, she remained the model of parsimony. Her three children, always without shoes, ate a pastry once a year, at Easter. At mealtime, they had little more than rice, cracked wheat, dried figs, olives, bread, or honey.

  The more fortunate in Marjayoun during these earlier days had land, a profession, or a trade; no one wanted to look the part of a peasant. Tilling the soil was looked down on. Pride in their education, Marjayounis called it; arrogance, said their neighbors. Men walking in the street kept pens in their pockets and newspapers under their arms. (When Hajj Assad al-Basit, from neighboring Rashaya al-Fukhar, met the French high commissioner in Marjayoun after World War I, he introduced himself as a subscriber of the newspaper Al-Ahrar.) Literacy and learning were things to be proud of and displayed. The town had three schools, Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant—the last of which was considered by the more traditional to be heretical. The Russian Empire, as the most powerful Orthodox state, supported the town’s Orthodox school, the Madrasa Moscawiya, literally the Muscovite School, and its four hundred or so students. For years, some of the elderly could still muster a few words of the Russian taught there.

  Four newspapers were once published here, each with its own bent: Sada al-Janoub (Echo of the South) leaned toward the liberal, Al-Marj (named after the town) was inclined to a vision of a Greater Syria, Al-Qalam al-Sareeh (The Forthright Pen) was vaguely Arab nationalist, and Al-Nahda (The Renaissance) adhered to a narrower definition of nationalism. Societies dedicated to that nahda sprung up in a confident town that deemed itself cosmopolitan, a capital in its own right of the hinterland beyond.

  Marjayoun was divided into two neighborhoods, bisected by the main road that came to be known simply as the Boulevard. In the west, climbing the plateau, was Hayy al-Qalaa, the neighborhood of the citadel; below was Hayy al-Serail, the neighborhood of the headquarters. The wealthiest families here—the Farhas, Barakats, and Gholmias—had homes of stone and red tile equal to those found anywhere in historic Syria.

  To houses of the rich and poor in Marjayoun, priests once visited twice a year, at Eastertime and again on the day commemorating the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan River. They carried pails of water already blessed and sprinkled it on the walls of the houses. Unpaid, they relied on charity from those blessings, as well as the fees they expected for performing marriages and baptisms, conducting funerals, and locating brides or grooms.

  Then as now, religion was everywhere, beneath the cadence of life. Oaths were taken on the life of the Virgin, the Messiah, or the cross. Thanks offered to the Almighty produced strength for labor, extended life, and cleared the way for any traveler. For unfinished vendettas with the dead, God was implored to bury them yet deeper.

  But God was not the only authority. The Serail, the stately building of columns and arches built as the local outpost of the Ottoman Empire, was the symbol of power and order. It was here, in an earlier time, that a bureaucrat, perhaps considering lunchtime and a glass of arak, mistook the year of Isber Samara’s birth and drafted him, at age forty-three, into the Ottoman army. Three years later, Isber would be sentenced to death.

  The drafting of Isber Samara was almost certainly a clerical error, but more pressing duties than paperwork preoccupied Ottoman officials allied with Germany in World War I. Short-handed and suffering, the Ottomans drafted young men from towns that had for centuries been spared from military service. Scores of eligible males fled for America or Brazil, spending whatever they had to board the last Italian steamers departing Beirut before the port was closed by blockade in 1915. Those who remained hid, anywhere. One man was said to have walked the streets disguised as a woman.

  Isber’s birth certificate stated that he was ten years younger than he really was, but in his opinion, the errors of clerks did not merit response. The Ottomans, it seems, were of a different mind. Upon his return to Marjayoun, where the Turks kept a small garrison, he was arrested and sentenced to death. For weeks he awaited execution in Marjeh Square, the Ottoman administrative and commercial center in Damascus, which was known for its glistening bronze colonnade, erected nearly ten years earlier by Sultan Abdelhamid II.

  Bahija was told little about her husband’s imprisonment, but she surmised all. She had six children to care for and, unlike her husband, did not see danger as something to be courted. She did not imagine the events of a day as things that bowed to her. As Bahija practiced patience, Rashid—the youngest of the remaining Samara brothers—who had none, pleaded with Faris to act. As the date of execution neared, Faris—sixteen years Isber’s senior and as boisterous as his brother was taciturn—gathered all the family’s gold, traveled to Damascus, and began disbursing bribes, to no apparent effect. As time dragged on, Faris feared the worst, but before Isber was to perish, his brother succeeded, though the payoffs had taken nearly all they had saved over the years.

  Cheating the executioner seemed to have changed Isber, or at least furthered his sense of himself as special, even chosen. He had confidence. More and more, Isber seemed to believe that life would follow in the direction he pointed. I am not unfamiliar with the relief of cheating death. But one victory does not, obviously, cancel the fact that many others were not so lucky. Some are haunted by being spared, never feeling deserving of their discrimination. Others see their luck as an act of affirmation, the bow of destiny to their far from ordinary distinctions. Isber was one of those. I hope that I was not, but I was younger when I was lucky enough to survive a bullet. I did not always understand or distinguish things that I hope I would today. I am Isber’s great-grandson, after all. So I have learned.

  4. Our Last Gentleman

  I had met Shibil before the war in 2006. Twenty years my senior, he had dark hair cut short like a teenager’s and a swath of mustache trimmed with a precision he seemed to direct at almost nothing else. His eyes often flashed heightened surprise, and his ever-expanding gut seemed to grow in proportion to the angst it caused him. We had in common Oklahoma City, where I was born and where Shibil, in the 1970s, going by the name Sam, worked, occasionally studied, and regularly consumed a vast amount of drugs. All these years later, marijuana was still his staple, and he remained its proponent. He had the bemused detachment of a perpetual stoner; nothing was ever wrong or urgent.

  On the day I recall, I was taking a break from work on the house and found Shibil at home, standing on his balcony in boxers, no shirt, a scotch in progress. His Persian carpet was draped over the railing, after a rare cleaning.

  “Keef sahtak? Mashi al-hal?” he asked in a hearty voice.

  I walked in, and Shibil poured me a drink.

  “Kasak,” I said to him.

  “Sahtein, sahtein,” he replied.

  Then he added in English, “Cheers, man.”

  Shibil was always hospitable, far more so than others here. Like those of earlier generations, he took pride in his manners, which were strictly old family. Marjayounis, according to one of Shibil’s friends, always insist, “Next time you’re here, come have lunch.” Yet when the next visit arrives, they do not extend an actual invitation, but repeat the previous suggestion. “Next time . . .” Some lacked even that grudging formality. I had already come to dread the cackling voice of an elderly neighbor echoing off the pavement outside the place I rented, as she shouted at her husband or daughters or both. She would traipse through the street, her hair uncombed. Once she had ventured over to pick flowers on my porch, meeting my look of surprise with a stare that I thought suggested satisfaction. Shibil’s hospitality, conversely, was unstinting and gracious. After my first scotch, he brought a glass of ice and set the bottle of Grant’s on the floor. “Hutt whiskey!” he bellowed. Pour whiskey!

  Next to the glass were
pickles and an array of snacks—cashews, pumpkin seeds, peanuts, and pistachios. Things got a little awkward when Shibil, unexpectedly and casually, tuned the TV to Spice Premium, a porn station. To the backdrop of an especially vigorous sexual interlude, we talked cooking—he suggested wrapping cucumbers in grape leaves to make them pickle faster—then eased into politics.

  He declared that 1973 was the last good year in Lebanon whose wars and crises had apparently exhausted him. He seemed to grow more fatigued as he spoke of 2006. The war that had brought me here had ended, but its aftermath embroiled virtually all in Lebanon as the government tried to contain Hezbollah. Israel, of course, was watching carefully in the background.

  “A big surprise,” Hezbollah’s leader promised Israel, if it dared attack again. No one seemed reassured.

  “Fuck this shitty country,” Shibil offered.

  His health was a matter of unceasing concern. As our visit continued, Shibil began a complete report on his upset stomach. Then he advanced with accumulating detail to an operation he’d had to seal a fissure in his rectum, then on to a bout with diverticulitis. He had almost died. Attempting to lift the shirt stretched taut across his ample belly, he tried to show me his scars. Soon, though, the conversation returned to the house. He would not let up, again demanding that I not rebuild.