An hour later, he was back, banging loudly on the door. There was no such thing as privacy in Marjayoun, I was learning, nor a call ahead. I had an omelet on the burner, and my expression was slightly harried. No matter. Karim expected to be invited in.
“I just want to stay for a few minutes,” he said. That meant at least an hour.
“Christo Santo,” he said as he entered the apartment, wearing a navy-blue T-shirt with a white neckband and jeans. An array of invective followed, punctuating the latest gossip, as he made his way into the house. “Son of a b,” he said in a high voice. Then he spelled out b-i-t-c-h. Instead of kiss umak, Arabic for fuck you, he shouted, “Kiss me!”
We sat down at the table, and I ate my omelet, overly soaked in olive oil, in front of him. I offered him something to eat, but he declined. Then his interrogation continued as if it had never ended. How much did my stove cost? What about the water heater? What was wrong with it? The thermostat? (He could fix it.) Did I need olive oil? How much was the most recent plant that I bought for the house? Thirty-five thousand lira, I told him. He had heard that I paid thirty thousand, he told me.
I looked at him, shaking my head in disbelief.
“How did you know the price?” I asked.
“Hmm,” Karim answered knowingly, then explained. He had heard that I was seen carrying a plant in the street, so first he narrowed down the possible stores, visiting each. Finding the right one, he asked how much the plant cost and how much I paid, making sure there was no discrepancy. He smiled at me, pleased with himself and his abilities.
A few days later, on a sunny morning, I sat with Hikmat and his wife, Amina, a Lebanese-American woman from Kentucky, who was pregnant with Hikmat’s first child. The second of eight children, Hikmat had three brothers and four sisters. Of them, Hikmat was always bound closest to Marjayoun, where he and his father were born.
“What Marjayoun is, is memories,” he told me. “It’s a dead town but it still has memories.” I understood what he meant. “For everybody it has memories,” he said. “Nobody with those memories would sell his property.”
He invited me for lunch, but when I asked, “Are you serious?” he bristled, marveling out loud at impolite Americans. “Fffff,” he said. He turned to Amina. “I almost told him to fuck off.
“The food comes with you or without you,” he told me.
A few minutes later, Shibil pulled up at the house in his rickety white Mercedes. He and Hikmat had been childhood friends but more recently had suffered through their differences. Shibil still visited anyway, and Hikmat welcomed him properly. We sat on Hikmat’s balcony, and our host was expansive.
“Your life is like smoking a cigarette. You smoke it, you put it out, and it’s over,” he told me. “You have to be happy.” Hikmat looked out at the nearby cemetery, a bad omen, I had learned, in Marjayoun. Even the tall, pencil-like cedars bordering it were said to speak of death. Hikmat wasn’t fazed.
“I like sitting here,” he said, as we ate kebab, balls of minced lamb, and chicken. “It’s a reminder of that. There’s an end. Be happy. Be honest. Believe in God. Be good.”
Shibil nodded. “God give us peace,” he said.
As we talked, the sun hit my face, and the call to prayer began from the Sunni mosque, faint in the predominantly Christian town but still resonant. Its lonesome, plaintive summons reached a crescendo, stopped, then began again with a declaration of the omnipotence of God. For a moment we listened, and Hikmat mentioned a thought I had heard occasionally over the years: There was a part of Islam in every Arab Christian. Shibil agreed. Whatever their beliefs, they acknowledged sharing a culture that bridged faiths, joined by a common notion of custom and tradition and all that it entailed—honor, hospitality, shame, pride, dignity, and a respect for God’s power. For many Muslims and Christians there was even a common origin, a fabled beginning in faraway Yemen.
“If you cut me, you see Lebanon,” Hikmat said, somewhat dramatically. “You see the Prophet Mohammed, you see Imam Ali, you see the cedars.” He refilled our glasses with scotch and grabbed a piece of paper. Three sons had inherited seventeen camels from their father, Hikmat recounted to me, scribbling the numbers in a notebook. The oldest son was to receive half, the second son a third, and the youngest a ninth. The inheritance, though, was indivisible. The sons quarreled, then finally agreed to take their dispute to Imam Ali, the warrior, sage, and seventh-century caliph whom Shiites consider the divinely sanctioned successor to the Prophet. To solve their dispute, Imam Ali gave them one of his own camels, making eighteen. The oldest son then received nine, the second son six, and the youngest two—in all, seventeen camels. “Now give me my camel back,” Imam Ali said.
“How can you not respect such a man?” Hikmat asked me.
Shibil shook his head. “Imam Ali was a great man,” he said, and he quoted two lines from Nahj al-Balagha (The Way of Eloquence), the collection of Imam Ali’s sayings, sermons, and speeches, which has served for centuries as Arabic’s most exalted expression, much the way Cicero’s speeches did for Latin.
“This happened fourteen centuries ago,” Hikmat said.
The wind picked up, breaking the vestiges of summer heat. Shibil soon headed home, reluctant to miss his siesta. I made a gesture to leave as well, but Hikmat insisted I stay. The talk of history had recalled his father, George Farha, who in his lifetime had a reputation as a zaim, a word that can mean village luminary, strongman, or feudal lord. Hikmat still seemed determined to impress him. Seven years before, Hikmat had decided to return here, bringing to a close a peripatetic life that had taken him from Lebanon to Wichita, Kansas, to Saudi Arabia, to the St. James’s Club, a resort on a secluded hundred-acre peninsula on the southeastern coast of Antigua. He rebuilt his house, exhausting what money he had saved. Here, he could be his father’s successor. “I’d never shake your hand and ask you for something,” Hikmat typically said, as his father always had.
As we sat at the table, Hikmat acted the part of the son of George Farha, scion of his family in Marjayoun, inheriting history, identity, and wisdom. In Arabic, the word “proverb” has none of its American connotations; here, hackneyed clichés become accumulated truths, and Hikmat recalled his father’s favorite: “We have a proverb that says a proverb never lies.” Sometimes the proverbs were playful, even witty. “Whoever marries my mother, I call him uncle,” Hikmat said, or as he interpreted it: “If my mother wants to marry someone, what can I do? Khalas, enough. I call him uncle and make it easier on myself.” Other times, proverbs were well intentioned but poorly executed. “I’d rather be a king in my country than a beggar in America,” he told me.
Who wouldn’t? I thought.
“Than the president of America,” he said, eventually correcting himself. That was still mystifying, but better judgment suggested that I let it go.
Most often, a proverb offered a code of life, which was one of those same traditions Shibil had lamented only a few days before. “Msayyar mish mkhayyar,” Hikmat told me. Loosely translated, it meant that life is ordained, not chosen. As the afternoon hours passed, Hikmat confided in me; I was an outsider, after all, and my distance seemed to allow him a vulnerable moment. “Whatever you do, God chooses for you. It’s not up to you,” he explained. “You don’t make choices. You can’t choose your direction.”
Around this time, my cousin Karim had received the intelligence that my car had been seen at Hikmat’s house. Karim had not been happy. Hikmat was conceited, he said sharply, and lacked his education. “He thinks he’s a zaim, and he thinks his father is a zaim,” Karim said. He stared at me a moment, then shook his head in contempt.
So began, in declarative fashion, my introduction to that other side of Marjayoun. Grudges between people gathered the resentments of nations defeated in war.
Both Karim and Hikmat agreed on what had divided them: Karim, it seems, had unsuccessfully run for office in the 2001 municipal election; for reasons too convoluted for me to comprehend, he blamed Hikmat fo
r the loss.
“There will be a day when I return the gesture one thousand times,” Karim said. There was hurt in his voice. “I’m a Christian. I don’t bear a grudge, but he did me harm.”
Hikmat related that for two years, Karim had refused to walk past his family’s building. This seemed quintessentially Karim. He never shook hands with those who had slighted him. At best, depending on the severity of the previous insult, he would place his hand over his heart as a substitute for a shake. Other times, he would just nod—the greater the anger, the smaller the gesture and the quicker the movement.
Not much time had passed before I found out that matters had been made worse when Hikmat decided not to invite Karim to his wedding.
“Imagine,” Karim remarked, still taken aback.
And then there was the matter of Hikmat and Shibil. “I feel sorry for him,” Hikmat said. Although Hikmat was younger in age, he seemed to envision himself as the older brother to a wayward son. Upon the return of Shibil and a friend to Marjayoun after studying in Oklahoma, someone had declared, “They went as donkeys, and they came back as mules.” Hikmat had been pleased by the remark.
By the time I arrived in Marjayoun, the bitterness had grown, perhaps beyond soothing. The latest slight seemed mundane. Shibil and a female guest were visiting Hikmat. Hikmat had momentarily left the room, and when he returned, he saw the guest squeeze Shibil’s hand or pat him on the leg. (Hikmat didn’t recall which.) He surmised that the two were speaking about him behind his back, though Shibil denied this.
“How dare they disrespect me in my own house?” Hikmat asked as he recounted the story. “You cannot help a person who’s an enemy of himself.”
In the days that followed, he would return again and again to the latest episode. That woman had whispered something in Shibil’s ear!
“This son of a bitch. I come to your house and I talk behind your back? Fuck you. In my house? Small things sometimes cause big problems in life.”
Sometimes, it seemed, drama nurtured the spirit.
5. Gold
The evening skies grew clearer and crisper, offering vistas of Mount Hermon that I had yet to see.
I had plenty of time to assess the state of the mountains because there was no progress to measure at Isber’s. After the satisfying paroxysm of destruction that initiated the project, the labor had returned to a village-like tempo. Meaning, very little was done. Days would go by, and I would find no one there. The house felt more desolate than ever, as the wind blew up eddies of dust in a pristine quiet. If I did find someone there, it was Abu Jean, with perhaps one other worker. Abu Jean would hire someone for the day, then stand and watch for hours, a Cedar cigarette dangling from his mouth, while the worker chipped away at the cement, plaster, and accumulated dirt that encased the house. I’m in charge! (Kind of.)
There were no other workers in town, Abu Jean insisted with papal certainty. We had yet to speak to a plumber. At the mention of an electrician, Abu Jean shrugged his shoulders. A neighbor suggested that at this pace it would take five years to finish. Grimly, I nodded in agreement. Abu Jean was aware of the frustrations; hardly a conversation went by without us discussing them. The answer was invariably the same.
In the first version, Abu Jean would put his thumb to his fingers, turn his hand upside down, and bob it. “Ruq shwaya,” he would say. Take it easy. In the other version, he would look at me quizzically, then ask, “Shou baddi aamel?” What am I supposed to do?
So our conversations went, as days turned to weeks and the weeks dragged on through October. As in: Did we ask about an electrician in Hasbaya? Is the blacksmith coming today? The plumber? Did we tell the maalim for the roof shingles to come meet my cousin the engineer? What did the mason say about the stone wall behind the house? “Ruq shwaya,” Abu Jean answered as the questions piled up. My protest followed—I suspected he didn’t even hear me—as did his refrain: Shou baddi aamel?
“Abu Jean,” I pleaded this time, exasperated, as we sat on the patio of his house, where his wife brought out a banana, grapes, and coffee. “I have no alternative. I have to finish this house, and I don’t have a lot of time. If I need to pay more, I’ll pay more. But we have to find people and we have to start working. Now.” I had practiced the speech, delivering it in my head a dozen times. Abu Jean’s answer was no less practiced: “Do you want me to do it myself? What can I do? I’m doing everything I can.”
And, of course, “Shou baddi aamel?”
Like a Greek chorus, his wife shouted out the same excuses.
“It’s the Eid!” she yelled, a Muslim holiday.
Abu Jean looked at the grapes, untouched as we sat on his patio, and became indignant. “Why are you always in a hurry?” he asked. “Where do you have to go?” Abu Jean pushed the plate across the table and peeled the banana for me. More coffee followed, and this, a ten-minute visit, turned into an hour.
“I’m taking care of you better than I’d take care of my own children,” he insisted.
And, at that, I surrendered. Isber Samara had envisioned something lasting in Hayy al-Serail, something worthy of the stockpile of gold that helped him buy his land. For a time, my vision was ambitious, as I conjured up pictures of cemento tile shaded in royal variations of yellows, purples, and greens, colors determined to preserve their elegance while they inexorably faded into time’s dreariness. Now here I was, eating a banana while begging an old man for a plumber.
The Samaras, wealthy enough to be despised by those who were richer and poorer, built their homes along a dirt street curved like a bow beneath the Boulevard. There was nothing adventurous or unorthodox, save perhaps the designs for the cemento. Their favored architecture was meant to convey permanence and the status of the householder, and only fine materials would do.
Marjayoun’s stonemasons came in the 1860s from Dhour al-Shweir—a town known for the craft—and from Khanshara and Btighrin. With them came the ideas, styles, and forms of Mount Lebanon, with its array of monasteries and palaces of feudal lords. The aesthetic of the masons was never subtle; they embraced volume, rough-hewn blocks of browns, yellows, and grays. Isber’s house, though still dwarfed by the grandest villas in Marjayoun, would be a structure to be reckoned with.
According to his own accounts of construction, Isber loved to watch the masons work. As was his habit, he spoke rarely, but undoubtedly watched carefully to make certain that the work continued at a steady pace. Those who labored around him knew where, when, and how to chisel in order to create the smooth face of the home’s façade; they knew where to set the stone to coax out the ancient genius of the arch. Each block was a different size and color. Each had its own story. Fragments and shards of the cut stone littered the hard brown clay of the land.
No house in Marjayoun could lay claim to grandeur without the triple arcade, woven together with a delicate wooden tracery, brought in by builders from the mountains. A debate over what had inspired the arches’ design had long continued. Some suggested that the style came from the architecture of Venice, an influence born of a trade stretching back centuries, to when Venice sent salt, wood, linen, wool, velvet, Baltic amber, and Italian coral across the Mediterranean to Egypt, Anatolia, the Levant, and Persia. The East shipped silk, spices, carpets, ceramics, pearls, and precious metals. But the arches were as much a local innovation, as cultures made influences their character.
The grand room behind the arches, the most formal quarter of the house, meant for dining and to receive guests, would be floored in marble imported by ship from Italy, each tile two feet by two feet, white and bordered in black. The work was delicate. In the center of the room was an almost imperceptible design of four pieces of black marble. Overhead was cedar-colored wood, quite expensive in a country that had lost its forests in antiquity. In the other rooms, those meant for family, Isber put the cemento, a mainstay in Europe for a half century but only then coming into fashion in Lebanon. The tiles’ geometric patterns, richly rendered, were inlaid into the body of the
tile. Produced by skilled workers using a cast-iron mold and hydraulic press, the cemento came in colors brought to life with ground marble dust, fine white Portland cement, and natural earth pigment. The patterns were typically imported from Europe.
Because Isber had traditional taste, many of the tiles drew on a simple design of black stripes, arranged diagonally or along the border. Yet he allowed himself an indulgence. Another design featured in the house was more ornate and included rectangles arranged side by side which resulted in a three-dimensional effect. The use of two patterns was unusual, but the combination converged to create an effect almost dizzying. The design seemed alive, with the pattern seeming to rise from the surface or band together like latticework. A small flower adorned each corner. Overall there was the suggestion of an inverted fleur-de-lis in four colors, the dominant color being deep purple, evoking Tyrian dye and antique royalty.
Miana Maria Ruth Farha was born on Tuesday, August 21. Hikmat and Amina had returned from Beirut, where they and the newborn had stayed with Hikmat’s mother for a few weeks. As soon as I saw Hikmat, I knew he was different, unnerved by the birth in that lull between wars that often haunts the country. During these tense days, two countries that had coexisted, uneasily, inside Lebanon since the assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri, on Valentine’s Day in February 2005, were colliding, and the messy aftermath was playing out in Beirut.
Between the two sides was almost no common ground, snarled as they were in suspicion and anger, entrenched in a terrain crisscrossed by ideology, sectarian affiliation, and, most important, contending perspectives. Hezbollah celebrated a culture of resistance to Israel; its foes, who ostensibly controlled the government, promoted accommodation, or at least disengagement. Hezbollah’s patrons were in Iran and Syria; the government looked to France and a fickle United States as its allies. When it was all tallied, the country was split down the middle, and no one knew how to bridge the divide. Lebanon was being drawn closer and closer to another crisis, as Israel waited and civil war between Hezbollah and the government loomed in the background, like a television turned low. The prospect of further combat left most Lebanese grim but not surprised.
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