House of Stone

by Anthony Shadid

  A long siege of death in progress; bombing prolonged over days or weeks of close battles and losses; fear unbroken: We can’t see the scars from these traumas or how far or where the impacts have penetrated. In the comfort of their living rooms, Americans see pictures of disaster but are routed toward new fronts before sympathies develop or questions become too complicated. Television and the craft I practice show us the drama, not the impact, particularly if the results are subtle and occur or become obvious after the cameras and reporters with their notebooks have left. Our tendency is to consider the resolution of the battle or the war or the conflict, not to take in the tragedies that outlast even the most final sort of conclusion. We never find out, or think to ask, whether the village is rebuilt, or what becomes of the dazed woman who, after one strange, endlessly extended moment, is no longer the mother of children.

  In Isber’s former domain, the ordinary has been, for nearly a century, interrupted by war, occupation, or what they often call in Arabic “the events.” These are circumstances that stop time and postpone or conquer living. Traditions die. Everything normal is interrupted. Life is not lived in wartime, but how long does it take for the breaks in existence to be filled? How many generations? This is a nation in recovery from losses that cannot be remembered or articulated, but which are everywhere—in the head, behind the eyes, in the tears and footsteps and words. After life is bent, torn, exploded, there are shattered pieces that do not heal for years, if at all. What is left are scars and something else—shame, I suppose, shame for letting it all continue. Glances at the past where solace in tradition and myth prevailed only brings more shame over what the present is. We have lost the splendors our ancestors created, and we go elsewhere. People are reminded of that every day here, where an older world, still visible on every corner, fails to hide its superior ways.

  We must go, Bahija told the children, fearful that the marauders might indeed burn the house to the ground. Raeefa must have sensed from the time she woke up that this was a day far from ordinary. Her mother, who cherished order, had broken her routine of rising early to begin the Turkish coffee, and the vegetable garden went without Bahija’s hand. Even the tomatoes in their neat rows, usually treated like living creatures and, by habit, watered five times a day, were ignored.

  Isber’s house, conceived and built in splendid times, had opened its doors to another place and era. In Marjayoun and other towns stricken by famine and unrest, the tumult after the Ottomans’ departure continued into the years that ensued. After the Ottoman garrison fled Marjayoun, villagers from Khiam, Ibl al-Saqi, Blatt, Dibin, and Khirbe had attacked and looted the Serail. In search of wheat, they began to plunder statelier houses. Many who resided in these places, if ambulatory or observant, left their treasures to save their lives.

  At the end of his life, if he looked hard enough, Isber Samara might have been able to stand on his balcony and imagine the route taken up the side of the landmark mountain by Bahija and their children, on the day, in the midst of anarchy and increasing violence, they were forced to leave their new home without him. Of course he had been absent. As usual, Isber was in the Houran, working. Since the completion of the house in Marjayoun, he had grown bored with the town and its provincial snobbery. He had no notion of the danger to his family until the threat had dissipated.

  The Samaras had just moved into their house, but it was not the survival of the place or its contents that concerned Bahija. She knew that she would have to save her children, and she did, not waiting for help from her husband or anyone else. Without delay, Bahija gathered up what they could carry and, before departing, assigned each child a task. Raeefa carried the clothes and was warned not to let them drag. Nabiha, Isber’s oldest daughter, carried Najib, his youngest son, on her back, a memory she would take with her through all her days. Bahija carried her daughter Hoda, the youngest. They fled to Rashaya al-Fukhar, ascending the Arqoub region of Mount Hermon, where they stayed until Bahija deemed it safe.

  Yes, Hikmat was different. He moved a step slower, more tentatively. I could see the stress, the questions darting across his tired red face, the anxieties over what his daughter’s world would be like, about what this place would make of her, if it and she survived. He seemed burdened, and he complained of pains in his leg, hip, and neck.

  I asked him how he felt.

  “A father,” he answered.

  Amina told me he was afraid to hold the baby for fear of breaking her. I remembered that feeling with my little girl. Hikmat shrugged his shoulders and demonstrated how small he imagined his baby to be. “Like this,” he said, holding out his hand.

  We looked at pictures of the baby, whose eyes recalled Hikmat’s, and I remarked at her beauty.

  “The monkey in the eyes of his mother is a gazelle,” Hikmat said. He chuckled. “She’s our daughter. Whatever anyone says, we’re going to say she’s pretty.”

  Conversation drifted from the lunch table—over plates of a lentil dish known as mujadarra, hummus, pickles, olives, bread, French fries, salad, eggplant, and the requisite scotch—to the couch. Hikmat opened the shutters and let a soft light flood the room. Hikmat and Amina lit cigarettes, and Fahima, a friend of Hikmat’s family, brought a tray of bitter Arabic coffee. The light caught the trail of wafting cigarette smoke. I had quit smoking, at least momentarily.

  “I don’t want my baby going through a war,” Amina told me with a slight Kentucky twang. Hikmat shook his head. Resignation and condescension mingled in his voice, and he had a zaim’s way with words, spoken with the authority that declares you more worldly and weary than the next person. “All of us were born in war,” he said.

  Hikmat’s politics were mercurial. He often gave voice to a visceral but inchoate fear of the Christians’ fate in southern Lebanon, where they were a distinct minority. “Sandbags for the West,” he called them on more than one occasion. “It’s bad,” he said. “I am worried about Lebanon, Anthony. I’m really worried.”

  Almost every day, the idea of conflict, of more strife, of the Israelis’ intentions, of Lebanon’s descent into fawda, chaos and anarchy, entered his conversation, as the sonic booms of Israeli jets, illegally flying over the Lebanese border, reverberated. There were threats, warnings, indignation, veiled hints of collaboration and betrayal, all broadcast hour after hour on wildly partisan television channels, as more assassinations and bombings confused Beirut, bringing a kind of social paralysis that precluded any notion of next week, next month, or next year. Leaders seemed to revel in crisis, their casual pronouncements frightening and provoking. There was a sense that Lebanon was condemned. But babies like Hikmat’s still arrived, unknowing.

  “Mufajaat,” Hikmat said, an allusion to the surprises that Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, had promised his foes, Israel in particular. “What mufajaat?”

  Amina spoke bluntly, emotionally, inviting someone to argue with her.

  “If there’s war,” she said, “we have to leave.”

  She turned to another guest, an army officer and friend of Hikmat’s named Elie Deek. “Tell me there’s going to be no war,” she said to him, pleading.

  With his index finger he drew a question mark on his thigh.

  In the town square, as Isber surveyed his family’s future prospects, men debated the merits of America, informed about the country by little more than the letters that had made their way back to Marjayoun from those who had settled there—children and relatives. The letters arrived weeks, months, sometimes years after they were written by the scores of family members who left every year. The envelopes came with money, occasionally no more than a few pennies, and with praise for a miraculous place where streets were lit, buggies moved on iron tracks, and roads unfurled without end. Streets in New York were lined with buildings that climbed higher than anyone could count. The city itself seemed to have more people than all of Lebanon. Few letters ever conceded a moment of failure. Rarely mentioned was the ridicule and abuse some suffered, derided as Greeks, Turks, or
Jews. Klansmen down south burned crosses, and there were many complicated manifestations of racism and populist hatred. (Oddly, no one ever remembered an insult in those days that actually matched their ethnicity. That would await a generation or two.)

  Few in Marjayoun would ever know about the lawlessness of the Texas oil fields or the fortunes lost in the coal mines of Oklahoma’s Choctaw Nation. More often, readers of letters sent home were given a sense of another place, where money came from hard work and brought a life of ease never endangered by distant wars, village vendettas, or the whims of brigands like those who preyed on Marjayoun again and again. The America represented by its new citizens was, like the identity that the nation had carved out for itself, part myth, obviously an ideal.

  Isber heard the letters read aloud, listened as long as anyone had a story to tell of any of the places where his relatives and neighbors had ventured. He rarely commented. Spoken words were best when rarely uttered, and Isber did not break the tradition. To say too much was unwise, a belief sharpened by his years as a trader in the Houran. He saw the success of those few emigrants who did return, in Western-style hats with steamer trunks packed with tailored suits and gifts for nearly every relative—silk handkerchiefs, embroidered tablecloths, jewelry. Isber heard from his nephew Aref, the oldest son of his brother Faris, who went to New York with his sister Offa. He heard, too, from his oldest sister, Khalaya, who had traveled with her hard-drinking husband, Faris Tannous, winding up in Oklahoma, across the Red River from Texas. No one had died there. No one had failed. No one seemed disappointed by the opportunities they found. No one had to flee their new homes. A few returned, only to complain about what they had left behind.

  A little while after I saw Hikmat and Amina, Karim and I met for lunch, a way for me to thank him for his recent gifts, which included mosquito repellent and a bar of apricot soap in a pink container. “I don’t like people that easily, but we seem to be getting along,” he said with his confident flair, his sunglasses set on his forehead, as we chose a table at a restaurant on the Boulevard. “This is a gift from God.”

  As we sat there, he kept introducing people to me, usually with a reference to their roots in our family. As in: “This man’s grandmother is a Shadid.” Or: “This man’s mother is a Shadid. You would be surprised how many people are Shadids.”

  No conversations in Marjayoun were more common, more authoritatively deliberated, or more steeped in encyclopedic knowledge than those about genealogy. By that I mean the myriad intermarriages here that connected everyone to everyone else. While no one insulted another’s family, at least in their presence, everyone was keenly aware of their own family’s saintly attributes and everyone else’s sinister flaws.

  Tracking one’s surname was a constant activity: Hikmat belonged to Bayt Farha, Isber to Bayt Samara, I to Bayt Shadid. The names themselves were clues to the stories of origins, the points of embarkation to their emigration. The houses whose names ended in vowels—the House of Samara, the House of Farha, the House of Gholmia—traced their origins to the Houran in Syria, where Isber and his brothers worked, even though the Houran was only a stop in a centuries-long emigration that, if we are to believe the stories that survived, began in Yemen, then Jordan. These people were known as Hawarna, the plural of Hourani (itself a last name), essentially meaning someone from the Houran. For the most part, the families whose names ended in consonants—the House of Shadid, the House of Tayyar—are known as baladiya, or local, having been in Marjayoun when the Hawarna began arriving four hundred years ago, in 1613. They, too, were emigrants, though their divergent arrivals in Marjayoun lacked the singular, epic narrative of the Hawarna trek.

  Each family seemed to have its story. The Nayfas were named after a particularly remarkable grandmother. So were the Farhas, from the Arabic for joy, and the Shatiras, meaning intelligence. The Gholmias, an elder in the family maintained, were named for the revenge they took over the killing of their young man, a ghoulam. Ghoulam became Ghalalimah, the plural of the word, then Gholmia. The Deebas, Bayouds, Razzouks, Zghayers, and Salloums are part of the Khereiwish, named for an ancestor, Kharyoush, who had a guesthouse in the Houran, a breadbasket even in Roman times, when it was known as the province of Auranitis.

  Another group of families are known as Labaniya, a name that comes from laban, Arabic for yogurt, with which they traded with Bedouins in the steppe. One family took the nickname of a famously beautiful grandmother, Zeina. The Tayyars, from the Arabic word for bird, earned their name because they were said to have left their village suddenly, without warning, and without telling anyone.

  I never learned the reason for the name Samara, which means tanned in Arabic. Shadid, easier to explore, can mean strong, powerful, severe, hard, violent, intensive, acute, keen, serious, drastic, or great; we can only guess what might have prompted the appellation.

  Don’t mess with a Shadid, Hikmat warned me, whispering in strict confidence. There were, of course, variations. “Don’t tell me the Shadids aren’t smart,” Shibil had insisted, formulating a notion of the family’s mad genius. “The akhwat doesn’t come from nothing. It comes from thinking too much. That’s what genius is. An akhwat is a smart person. He doesn’t have no brains. He has too many! He thinks too much!”

  All these age-old reputations and disputes still colored the town, particularly the divide between Hawarna and baladiya. Until recently, intermarriage was not encouraged. Some quarters continue to belong to one clan or another. Remarkably, hints of the older dialects persist. No one took those enduring differences more seriously than Karim. They were a paradigm to him, a way to view the world, and everyone’s character could be explained by delving into his or her origin, Hawarna or baladiya. At lunch, he was especially chagrined at Shibil’s and Hikmat’s talk of Shadid craziness, though in fairness they weren’t the only ones to tell me the stories. His voice rising, Karim answered them with a vehemence that swirled like an Oklahoma tornado.

  “They claim a Shadid is crazy? You know the Farhas are almost all crazy. And the Jabaras. Oh! Almost all of them. The Ablas. They have either twisted legs,” he said, jumping out of his chair to demonstrate a limp, “or twisted minds.”

  We went through the other families, Karim dispensing opinions. By this point, I was enjoying his utter assurance. He was like a soloist, flamboyant, dramatic, and invigorated by his renditions. In a town that had not bestowed on him the respect he deserved, he was finally having his vengeance, as our food, sitting in the dishes served before us, got cold.

  6. Early Harvest

  I had left the olives I had harvested at Shibil’s house, and when I returned, I found them covered in a layer of mold. Shibil said it was salt. It wasn’t.

  Then he claimed it was the product of salt. It wasn’t.

  Then he said, “Don’t worry,” the same thing happened to his olives the year before. So why was he making himself out to be such an expert on olives? It wasn’t reassuring, but more advice followed. Leave them in salt longer, he told me in the tone of a teacher more weary than exasperated, put less water in the pot, don’t wash the jars again. At his most maddening, I asked him how long I should wait to eat them.

  “Three weeks, maybe a month,” he said with glazed certainty. “If you had crushed them, ten days, but you sliced them.” He lit another joint. “You have to wait two months at least,” he said, unwittingly changing his advice. “At least. At least two months.” I should wait till Christmas? I asked him. “At least,” he answered, extending the deadline further.

  “Sliced, not crushed,” he said, sounding wiser and more authoritative, like Sean Connery, in tuxedo, ordering a drink before baccarat. “You see, sliced, not crushed,” he said again, before falling back in his chair and drifting away.

  But I am starting at the end of the story.

  Olive trees are ubiquitous in Marjayoun, with forests scattered throughout the plain near Deir Mimas, on the way to the Litani River. Glowing in the pink light of dusk, the trees are as lonely as t
hey are rugged, centuries sometimes interred in their gnarled trunks. “This tree is a blessed tree,” Shibil told me once as we sat under the two aristocratic olive trees that stood at the entrance of Isber’s house, their leaves carpeting the ground in a light brown, like a fine silk rug thrown over the dirt. He paused and shrugged his shoulders, at a loss for words, as if he was asked what faith means. It seems appropriate that these eccentric-looking trees produce the odd, delicious product called the olive. Olives may be the subtlest of fruits, though I had never really considered them until I arrived in Marjayoun, where they are requisite at every meal and often inspire spirited conversations over their origins and attributes (sometimes fantastical). The olive is malak al-sufra, after all, the king of the table, and its disposition and appearance must be kept under constant scrutiny as harvest approaches.

  Timing, I learned, is everything.

  Bayn tishrin wa tishrin, fee sayf tani, it is said here. Between October and November, there is a brief second summer, it means, when autumn sets in and Marjayoun, now emptied of expatriates who had come back to their homes here to flee Beirut’s swelter, begins to slumber. The streets are uncrowded, and the town slows down, though the difference is not radical. Gradually the light becomes softer, more hesitant, as the olive harvest—running from the end of October through November—begins along a stretch of land that once ran as far as the roads did.