House of Stone

by Anthony Shadid

  “People in Jedeida don’t think you’re crazy, Anthony. They think you should be in an insane asylum,” he said. “They think you should be locked up.” Then he added, “Don’t get me wrong, but you’re an American.

  “Moussa Barakat!” Shibil suddenly exclaimed, for no apparent reason, as he began the finger wave with which he signaled announcements of useful instruction. Then he got to the point: Fired by pride and history, Moussa had wanted to renovate his house, and he tried to strike a deal with his cousins. They could take the farms and citrus orchards the family owned in Jordan, he said, and he would assume ownership of the house in Marjayoun. If there was a difference in cost, they could settle up with each other. After he spent $150,000 on the renovation, his cousins said the deal was no longer in force, despite its having been committed to paper. At first, Shibil said, Moussa couldn’t even enter the house, so chagrined was he by the pettiness. Now, he doesn’t like to go there out of anger at what his cousins did.

  “Listen, motherfucker, be careful!” he said. “If I’m wrong, I’ll cut my dick off and eat it.”

  I laughed. “I agree with you, Shibil. It’s a risk, and God knows what’s going to happen. But imagine, I can bring back something that was lost.”

  “It’s better than fucking Kunta Kinte,” he said. Nothing would sway him about the house, though.

  “The people in Jedeida are down-to-earth. They’re very kind and nice. Until it comes to property.” When he repeated the proverb “A sliver of land can wipe out its people,” I felt suddenly at peace, tranquilized by his sentiments and secondhand smoke.

  “Keep it as a reminder,” he said, “that’s all. I’m not joking with you. They’ll come up from nowhere like plants. That family. Like those weeds that grow. You won’t know where they came from.”

  He looked fearsome as his jowls shook. “That’s the mentality of Jedeida.”

  Wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow piled with rubble left my grandmother’s house daily. Abu Jean wielded a crowbar, loosening the cinderblocks of a wall much older than I am. With each exertion, dust—gray and brown—trickled down in rivulets. As the wall shuddered, Faez swung a sledgehammer into what was once a bedroom downstairs. Another worker, Malek—surlier, reminiscent of a street tough in Cairo or a petulant militiaman in Baghdad—stood atop a barrel, chipping away at the plaster in the Cave. He methodically removed each piece, as Faez, more diligent, fluttered from wall to wall in a frenzy of demolition. Their faces were covered in dust, the same color as the stone.

  Four times, Faez struck as I stood there, before the plaster creaked. Then the cinderblocks shifted and buckled. I was torn between exhilaration and dread inspired by watching the work. I waited for the ceiling to collapse, the house to come tumbling down around us. For a moment, for my own safety, I thought about leaving the room.

  “Just one more cinderblock,” Abu Jean told me, reassuring me with a wink—that was all he needed before his wall would give and crumble. It did, spilling across the ground.

  There was meaning to the destruction, an elegance of movement as the house hurtled toward its end and a new beginning. Clouds of dust billowed out of the door, caught in a breeze; in moments, they evaporated. Wind blew through the house, raising a haze that caught the late-afternoon sun. Cigarette smoke danced with dust suspended in the air. Sparks flew as a pickax collided with stone. The lights arced, then were extinguished in dust. The sounds were relentless, like a drum in martial cadence.

  The days passed, and more followed. Rooms that squatters had called their own disappeared, as did the marble kitchen sink, along with the bathroom fixtures, demolished or dismantled. So did the artifacts left behind whose origins I never knew. With each trip of the wheelbarrow, with each swing of the hammer, another decade of the house went with it. It took that much force, brute force, in the midst of what seemed a whirlwind of destruction, to remove what the house had suffered, to detach what stood between now and then. And as each decade passed before me, the house unveiling itself, I began to see into the past.

  Perhaps because I had been so long discontented with the world around me, I increasingly turned my attention to Isber’s world, which, while simpler, was no less tumultuous than my own. Isber built this house as his citadel, so sturdy and lasting it seemed to rise from the bedrock itself. It would compensate for his rough edges and offer his family shelter and a future, an inheritance. My family wasn’t here. They had shown little interest in my project. On those occasions when I spoke to Laila, she often asked me what I was doing so far away. “Rebuilding our home,” I told her, but understandably, given her age, she failed to appreciate that this absence was, oddly enough, my attempt to make amends for all the others. If I could: Our lost home in America could not, after all, be restored, and perhaps this project offered only futile compensation, satisfying, finally, only to myself. When the doubting part of me took over, I turned my attention to the work. For some reason, maybe for my family in Oklahoma, growing older and frailer, maybe for something else, I had to go on. It was bayt and the desire to resurrect what once stood for something.

  We all wondered what might turn up as we returned the house to the essentials that Isber Samara had envisioned. Weeks, even days before, it had felt modest, cramped, and dark, some rooms unbearably claustrophobic. In its destruction, the house, liberated, revealed its origins—stone, hewn a century before. Vaults were hitched to the bedrock that served as the foundation. In chaotic geometry, smaller stones climbed over each other in the rugged, disordered perfection of the Cave’s arcade. Greater stones formed wall after wall, perfectly laid by masons from the north of Lebanon. Their angles were designed in strength, their beauty incidental. More stones constructed the two arches, side by side, once the stately entrance to this house that my great-grandfather built. For years they were filled in with stones underneath, their curves becoming the lineaments of a wall. To add insult, they were then buried in concrete. Now they were restored, portals to another time, the era when the Ottomans fell and when Isber Samara became not quite a gentleman.

  The harvest of 1918 was good. Druze, Muslim, and Christian alike sold their products to the warring armies in World War I, Ottoman and British, trying to feed hundreds of thousands of soldiers. Well stocked with gold, the British and their Arab allies bought grain from the Druze. Of their six hundred bushels, Isber and his brothers sold half to the Turks, but hoped to make a bigger profit on the rest. Finally, Isber agreed to sell the remaining stock to the Turks, but refused to take their paper money. Nor would he accept the Ottoman gold pounds. Isber, who had come to believe what no one ever had—that the Ottoman Empire could fall—demanded the British gold sterling in payment. The Turks had no other choice. The gold went to the Samaras.

  On the day of the deal that transformed the Samaras’ lives, there was no thought of what might lie ahead, as the children of the brothers, later separated by thousands of miles, saw a sight they would never forget: There they would be, always in memory, their fathers, running like boys toward them, advancing toward home, free from care. One of the children, long grown, would recall with a bittersweet expression those gold pieces piled as high as a hill in the family’s sitting room, glowing in the light of dusk.

  One morning, taking some time off-site, I met Shibil at around 10 A.M. and we headed to the Friday market in Marjayoun. The village market is an old tradition in the countryside, a legacy of Bedouin culture, and many towns around Marjayoun had them. Qlayaa’s was on Sunday. Monday was Nabatiyeh’s. The most famous was Suq al-Khan, on Tuesday, near Kawkaba. They were really no more than amalgamations of hastily erected tents and rickety stalls, where everything from scarves and screwdrivers to corkscrews and pirated CDs were hawked. “Beautiful prices!” vendors shouted, to no one in particular. However pronounced the tension, and even in times of war, Shiite butchers hung out their meat, willing to cut a slice and grill it, and Druze farmers, in their white knit caps and baggy pants, kept coming to sell pickled wild cucumbers and cauliflower.


  Shibil sometimes called himself Oklahoman, but he was really, inexorably, a son of this town, a belief confirmed as I watched him cringe when a black goat crossed our path. Like the evil eye, it was an omen, and omens mattered. In winter, he would never walk outside without splashing cold water on his face. His superstitions continually announced themselves. “Beware of split teeth and blue eyes,” he warned me as he scanned the market crowd, deadly serious. “Small foreheads, too.”

  As we walked, he regaled me with stories of the town’s citizens. There was Farid Maalouf. His fingers, Shibil told me, had four joints rather than three. With his massive hand, Farid once knocked a horse to the ground. Shibil’s eyes grew wide in recognition: Nabih Abu Kassem, he remembered; there was a man. “God have mercy on his soul,” Shibil said, genuine sorrow in his voice. A decade or so ago, Nabih and his friends were drinking in the morning when they got hungry. Without missing a beat, Nabih got up from his chair, grabbed a knife, and ambled outside. He found a sheep and, from the flap of flesh behind the animal’s buttocks, he sliced off a marble-colored slab. The sheep’s cries followed him as he returned inside. He skinned the slab of fat, sliced it, and salted it, sharing with his friends, who kept to their drinking, impervious to the wails of the wounded sheep.

  He was no less steeped in the culture and traditions of Marjayoun, which despite the town’s decline retained some of the features of Isber’s day: Slights here became grievances, and grievances became grudges lasting months, years, sometimes decades. Shibil’s latest was directed at the local grocer, Saad Barakat. It had begun when Shibil walked into Barakat’s establishment and sampled two almonds.

  “Should I open a beer for you, too?” the grocer asked. Then Shibil took a Kleenex from the counter and wiped the top of a soft drink can he had just bought. “Am I Caritas?” Barakat asked.

  “What are these shit people?” Shibil asked as we walked.

  Hospitality was a memory, he insisted. Nothing was being honored anymore. Only the elderly, Shibil groused, still went by the old tradition of taking the name of their oldest children: Abu Ghassan (Father of Ghassan), Abu Jean (Father of Jean), and so on. The accent of the place was also disappearing. For centuries, Bedouin-inflected Arabic had been spoken here. But just as English was colonizing the world, the accent of Beirut was displacing Marjayoun’s colorful, distinctive dialect. Shibil loathed it. Instead of baarafsh (I don’t know), he declared, as we walked through the market, “they are saying ma baarif.” “Nothing” is now ma fee instead of feesh. “I don’t want” had become ma badee, not badeesh. Soon, he suspected, we would start losing words that belonged specifically to the town, such as kooz (a small water pitcher) and dashak (a seat under which you can hide something).

  To Shibil, it wasn’t simply a loss of accent, not just a flattening of the diversity and integrity of the history bequeathed to the town. It was all part of the loss of identity and the loss of the influences that had made Marjayoun what it was. The desert dialect had arrived from the steppe of the Houran; the Palestinian inflections were brought by the tradespeople who had crossed the Hula Valley and beyond. In a way, Shibil suspected, the loss of the dialect was the loss of the last relics of the town’s glory.

  “The only time people arrive here is when they’re dead,” he said. His voice was tinged with helplessness, perhaps surrender. “They bring people here to bury them.”

  World War I ended soon after the Samara brothers closed their grain deal, the Ottoman Empire vanquished for the last time. In April 1919, Isber made his way home from the Houran as a blustery wind blew his baggy pants and camelhair cape. Spring had declared itself; the shaqaiq noaman, with its ground-hugging, deep red petals, washed up against the soft whites of daisies weaving across rocky hillsides of an otherworldly gray.

  Toward the end of that valley Isber crossed was the Jewish town of Metulla, its land purchased by Baron Edmond de Rothschild in 1896. The French and British victors of World War I were already imagining along Metulla’s outskirts the border that would, in time, divide Lebanon and Israel, and even then the imperious French authority loomed over the distant Houran. The lands beyond Marjayoun were seething. In the spring of 1919, six months after the war’s end, the landscape of the Samaras was still not yet Lebanon (it remained Syria, or bilad al-Sham to some), but had lost track of anything it was. The space left by the Ottoman rulers, once considered eternal, was showing itself deep and wide.

  First to arrive was an army of Arab nationalists, one of the groups vying to take over parts of the Ottoman lands. It was led, in name, by an Arabian chieftain, Sherif Hussein; in reputation by T. E. Lawrence; and in action by Hussein’s third and most popular son, Emir Feisal. Leery of French and British intentions, Feisal had instructed his men to declare an Arab government as soon as the Ottomans left and before the Europeans arrived. A proclamation announcing the new leadership reached the town, carried by 120 weary but resolute horsemen.

  Mourad Gholmia, a former deputy in the Ottoman Assembly of 1909, a partisan of Feisal and a resident of Marjayoun, would recall scrambling with his compatriots the night before the proclamation to find fabric for the flag they would raise at the Serail. Gholmia himself proclaimed the government to the bewildered crowd that had gathered, a speech punctuated by the firing of twenty-one rounds.

  “It was the first Arab flag to be raised in Beirut, Syria, Aleppo and Palestine,” he later wrote proudly. For years, Gholmia would entertain anyone interested in hearing the story, though his moment of fame was almost as brief as Feisal’s state which followed.

  These were not likely to have been matters that concerned Isber. Not yet. Flush with wealth and heedless of the tumult, he was determined to take his place among the families that had looked down on his own. But even in the upper reaches of his own clan, his wealth had not changed his status. Distant cousins—haughty, and his only “significant” kin—refused to sell their stately villa to him, so he and his brothers decided to build their own houses next to each other, all drawing from an aesthetic more Roman than Greek. Before the war, they had purchased the land from the Gholmia family, one of Marjayoun’s more prominent, in Hayy al-Serail. Isber chose a plot of land above the villa he had coveted, near a spring called Kharrar, for a house that he hoped would last hundreds of years, just as the homes of the other prestigious families of Marjayoun had. He had begun the house years before. Back from the Houran, World War I over, he would finish his task.

  As Shibil, whose house was also, in more eccentric ways, his signature, talked in the Friday market, a tall man in sunglasses approached. Jutting his chin forward, he walked with purpose, as though posing for a photo shoot. Karim, as he liked to make clear, was a Shadid (though his family had adopted the name of his great-great-great-grandfather).

  My cousin was alternately—as was immediately apparent—engaging and suffocating. (Shibil once said that Karim could speak for three or four hours with hardly a pause.) He had a bone to pick with me. It had all begun with an article I had written for the Washington Post. Sentimental, perhaps generously so, it celebrated olive trees, Mount Hermon, history, and family. “Lebanon, My Lebanon” was its title, admittedly grandiose. One sentence, penned as an afterthought, concerned the reputation of the Shadids: “Crazy, they would say, more so as they got older.” I had thought little of it, especially after it was published. Karim, it appeared, had thought about little else.

  “You were misinformed,” he told me, his eyebrows arched in scorn.

  He cast a glance at Shibil, then gestured at me to be silent. We would discuss the matter at lunch, alone. “As cousins.”

  As with many people here, Karim was reluctant to divulge his age. Fifties, he said vaguely, leaving it at that, though his hair was dyed the same deep black as my landlord’s. Well shaven and manicured, he chose his subtle barbs with the same precision with which he pressed his clothes. His sunglasses recalled Anna Wintour’s, and he tossed his head slightly but often. Karim, I have to say, was dramatic.

  Like his
siblings, Karim was an educated man, having studied at the International College, a prestigious high school in Beirut, then at the American University of Beirut, where he eventually received a master’s degree in political science and economics. He earned his law degree, concurrently, at the Lebanese University. His French was good, as was his English, which bore the inflection of his time studying at the London School of Economics. He practiced as a lawyer, though work seemed intermittent.

  Karim’s story was of a sort not unfamiliar in the years of civil war. His father, an accountant and manager at the Iraqi Petroleum Company, died young, at fifty-one, of a heart attack in his sleep. Karim was just seventeen. Sadly, he recounted the fact that his father had built a new home in Marjayoun without ever sleeping a single night in it.

  Karim went on to tell me of his sister’s equally regrettable end. A doctor specializing in pediatric hematology, she had taught at the American University of Beirut, and died at thirty-four, on June 12, 1976, which he called “the worst day in the history of Beirut.” There had been no electricity. Fighting between Syrians and Lebanese leftists allied with Palestinians, coalitions mercurial and agendas opportunistic, had paralyzed the streets. Another sister had been lost at fifty-four to breast cancer.

  “We had too many of those evil eyes around us,” he always said, by way of explaining why he occasionally burned incense in the house and garden. “I pray and I ask God Almighty to keep the evil eye and the envious eye away from us.”

  The next day, I saw a note stuffed in the door of my apartment, scrawled on tissue paper: “Toni: Passed by to see you but unfortunately you were not in. Karim.”