House of Stone

by Anthony Shadid

  “Wait for the first rain to pick, even the second,” I was told time and again when I spoke of harvesting olives from the two trees at Isber’s house. Shibil and others repeatedly hammered home the point, but I had no patience; I was, after all, American. And there was something admittedly romantic about a harvest that, from afar at least, seemed a soothing ritual, full of renewal and healing. I had sat under these same trees at the end of war, and now I could pick their fruit in peace (a relative term here, admittedly). Olives were already littering the ground by October, and each one that fell felt like a loss to me. Impulsively, I began scooping up the best-preserved fruit from the dirt each day. I put a few in my pocket every so often, then collected them in a black plastic bag.

  There is something intrinsically aggressive in a harvest. The tree is pillaged, the crop destroyed, the vines stripped. A tarp is set on the ground, and the branches of the trees are beaten with a stick until the trees relent and surrender their fruit. Perhaps I am too sentimental, but I couldn’t do that to the two century-old trees that my grandmother once gazed upon, so I handpicked the olives instead, one by one. I purchased a ladder and a light blue tarp, brought a lunch of chicken, grilled tomatoes, cole slaw, and pickles. Then it was time to begin. Early, yes, but who is counting? (Given my neighbors’ inquisitiveness, I am certain there were many, actually.) Engrossed in the colors, I tangled myself in branches. The purple hues of the more mature brown olives melded with the tree’s bark, their shadows enveloping others. The green of the younger fruit fluttered against the silver tint of the leaves. At every turn, I stretched, trying to grab the olive at the end of a branch bowing gracefully over the street.

  The harvest soon took on a meditative quality. Afternoon was the most peaceful part of the day in Marjayoun: Families napped after their traditionally substantial lunches; I hardly heard a sound around me. There were no birds or bugs, no chatter—only the silence of a small place and the wind whispering. I twisted the ladder in every direction, ascending higher into the first tree, dropping olive after olive in the plastic bag tied to my waist. The ladder teetered as I reached for the fruit. The bag eventually bulged. Within a few hours, just a few last olives remained. They were reachable only if I climbed the tree. I did, clambering up branches that were deceptively strong. I leaned and stretched, holding my breath and squinting, then pulled branches toward me, before surrendering and calling a truce of sorts. I told myself again, not everything would be mine. The rest of the olives would wither on the tree as they had for so many years before, dusty and bare, dangling from branches I couldn’t reach.

  “Those are my aunt’s trees!” George Abla, well into his nineties, shouted at me as I relented. He was my great-grandmother’s nephew. Wearing a frayed suit jacket and a woven blue hat with what resembled a cotton ball on top, he had stopped to admire the trees from the street, leaning on his wooden cane. I smiled at him.

  By dusk I was finished, and I sat under the trees. My forearms, shoulders, and back were scratched by the coy branches near the tree’s crown. Dust clung to my beard. The village remained quiet, and the house felt empty and haunted. The diminishing light angled from the west, casting a shadow that unveiled the house’s desolation and abandonment, spilling forth everywhere. The reconstruction already felt overwhelming, a feeling exacerbated by Abu Jean’s tendency to turn every minor job or adjustment into an adventure or calamity, along with a litany of promises by workers who failed to show up. The house was still a remnant of another time, an artifact in a way. But sitting here, after an impetuously early harvest, I felt a simple connection, even if it was merely picking olive trees that belonged to the past.

  “I have 100 kilograms of olives,” I messaged Shibil. It was a joke, of course, but, apparently alarmed, he soon pulled up at the house in his Mercedes, parked in his usual erratic fashion, and repeated what everyone else had already said: Only after two rains, at minimum, should I pick the olives. He said it over and over, shaking his head.

  I have an obsession with Arabic that comes, I suppose, from learning it as a second language. Words are imbued with both elegance and logic, chiseled by their sense of having moved through time, history, and generations. A beauty ensues, as words slowly unfurl their mysteries, shifting their meanings ever so gradually. A richer language than English, Arabic boasts a vocabulary that can convey any description in a single word. Arabic also has a far greater facility to communicate sarcasm, and it can be employed precisely, or with pitch-perfect irony. Overqualification, pronounced emphatically, deflates an ego in Cairo, as in addressing someone with an undeserved Ottoman honorific—basha, bey, or, my favorite, bashmohandis, the Pasha Engineer. I called Shibil ustaz, a word that can range from “mister” and “lawyer” to “teacher” and “professor.” He heard the sarcasm and threw it back at me. I became sir, lord, and beloved, all at once. “Ya ustaz, ya khwaja, ya habibi, if you had waited one rain, one time, they would have looked like this,” he said, holding out his index finger, marked off by his thumb, the same way he measured hashish. “If you had just waited.”

  Shibil was a perpetual skeptic, and he delivered the same doubts about the harvest of my two olive trees as he did about the rebuilding of the house they adorned. “What, are you going to hire twenty Syrian workers to harvest your olives?” he had asked as the season approached. The absurd followed the absurd: “What, do you have a million trees? Do you have twenty thousand acres?” As he continued, he seemed to grow more cynical. “Did you call the Syrian president and ask him to send ten thousand Syrian workers?” He laughed boisterously. “Each one will pick one olive!”

  His disapproval was probably less ridicule and more an attempt to assert his expertise. In a town where he had little to buck him up, here was something he knew—how to cure olives (and pickle a vast assortment of vegetables, which went well with scotch). He lectured, for what seemed like hours, on the proper cucumber for pickling (small but not too small), the optimum mix of spices (a great many, according to Shibil), and the ratio of salt to water to make brine (enough salt so that an egg will float in the water). My unwillingness to treat him as an ustaz, even in curing olives, was an insult, and his ridicule had the same defensive pride I had detected in him during almost every encounter in Marjayoun. He was an expert.

  That night, I brought the harvest to Shibil and, not surprisingly, the simple process became far more complicated. Indeed, the dynamics seemed intangible, arcane, and decipherable only by him. In Shibil’s disquisition on the art of curing olives, I was left with a mix of nuclear engineering and Sufi mysticism. The sheer mystery of the procedure prompted more questions, which led him to offer more esoteric answers. Despite his moments of lunacy, Shibil was endearing, especially given his stoned demeanor. But whatever I did, he corrected me, again and again, in withering fashion.

  Washing: I had mistakenly left in the rotted olives I had picked off the ground, imperiling the entire batch.

  Curing: I had ignored the fact that there were two processes, one for green, one for black, both of which were harvested from my trees.

  Mixing: I had yet to comprehend the subtleties of tosht al-bayda, by which you measure the amount of rock salt to put in the water (again, enough so that an egg will float).

  And other details: In instructions conflicting, colliding, and contradicting, I was told (corrected) about everything from where I should set the olives to dry to how long they should soak in water before curing. This dialogue went on for days.

  Unexpectedly, we finished the olives after finding the orange, lemon, and bay leaves we would put in the jars. We cut slices of lemon for some, red pepper for others. We would add the olive oil along the rim later. “Why wait for the oil?” Shibil asked me pedagogically, as we worked a week later in my tiny kitchen, standing on a weathered brown Persian carpet I had bought at an auction in Baghdad years before. “To let the salt and water penetrate the olives.”

  With that, we were done at last. My kitchen countertop was crowded with fourteen pickle jar
s full of olives. They didn’t seem too small an amount despite my early harvest. I kept glancing at them, holding them up to the light, seeing if I could notice any change after a few minutes, a few hours, a few days. Through the looking glass, the slice of lemon drifted to the bottom. The salt crystals, reflecting the light, sat on the fruit, as if hoping their presence would be ignored. I marveled when I noticed the perfect olive, and there were only a few in the jars—an oval with none of the ravines, gullies, and valleys of the more weathered ones. I wondered what it would taste like, as my tongue rolled around the pit.

  “The first batch from Bayt Shadid in generations,” I said proudly.

  “With more than a little help,” Shibil answered. “Maakul al-hanna,” he said. “Eaten gracefully.” Then, skipping across languages, he added, “Bon appétit.”

  I was lonely in Marjayoun, yet despite all the discussion of Lebanon’s internal strife, the longer I stayed there, the farther away war seemed. I often pictured my daughter Laila walking past the stone wall, up the buckling driveway, and toward the antique front door I was determined to save. I thought of the day I would bring her here, to a house she could call hers. Fog began to roll in these nights, and as the haze erased any definite sense of time, I thought of Isber, too, a determined man nodding his farewells at the houses of his youth and the mountains above as he made his way through a town once as prosperous as he was.

  Isber Samara was becoming an acquaintance in a way. We shared something, I suppose, perhaps more than ambition, and I marveled at the fact that he built this house that was an artifact of a Middle East gone but for its power of inspiration. I felt more at home in his town, where I imagined Bahija in the kitchen, spreading sugar and butter on fresh bread for her children. During those autumn weeks, I often thought of a line that Shibil had told me: “Be with folks for forty days, and either you’ll be a part of them or you’ll leave.” More than forty days had passed.

  I was learning the basics of getting by, the rules and traditions of living among the townspeople. A rule: I should never tell anyone how much I paid for anything. If I did, I should discount it fifty percent. Nevertheless, whatever the sum, I was greeted with the inevitable harram, “what a pity,” always spoken with the greatest sympathy at my naiveté. The manipulation of guilt, in matters of family and friends, was an art form. Or so I learned. In Marjayoun, I was subjected to an aggressive variety; no matter how distant the relative, I was always being pummeled. Why haven’t you visited this month? the question went. If I had, it became: Why haven’t you visited this week? If I had gone that week, it became: Why didn’t you come earlier today? Or: Why are you leaving so soon?

  Karim had his own variation. Anything short of making his house the first stop on any return from Beirut or elsewhere was simply unacceptable, particularly if any time had passed without contact by telephone. “You haven’t called,” he would tell me reflexively. “Are you cross with me?” The question—why did you beat me as a child?—could not have been uttered with more poignancy or desperation. It turned out that he had called, four times—twice from his house in Beirut, twice from a kiosk on the corniche along the Mediterranean, where he did his fast walking. When I saw Shibil at my rented apartment, after a couple of days of no contact, I tapped my forty days of knowledge, courtesy of Karim and others. I was determined to turn the tables.

  “Where have you been, ya ustazi al-aziz?” I asked indignantly, with a look of disbelief. He fumbled for an answer. It was my first Jedeidani guilt trip, entirely satisfying.

  Abu Jean and I had very different notions of the job and the work it entailed. I saw him as the foreman, who would commandeer the project and wrestle it, through force of will, to fruition. Abu Jean thought that by taking on the project he was doing a favor for Hikmat. I realized that if we ever finished the house, Abu Jean and I would have to become some other sort of team. We got on most of the time. I wrote phone numbers down for him in the ancient notebook he kept in his back pocket. Then Abu Jean would call, asking me to read the digits out loud and slowly. Every few days, he would pile in my car and we would rumble over the potholed roads to Qlayaa and Kfar Killa in search of a carpenter, to Bwaida for a cement maker, to Khiam for stone, tiles, and other supplies. The blacksmith, electrician, and tiler were in Marjayoun. So was the plumber, hanging out at his cousin’s shop, smoking cigarettes, as if he was still in high school.

  Abu Jean had a car, a 1960 gray Peugeot, but he never drove it. He was either afraid to or employing a bit of shatara, or cunning: Why pay for gas when Anthony will drive?

  On bad days, Abu Jean and I fought. Mostly, I tried to walk away, cognizant of the insult it was for a younger man to quarrel with someone older. (Hikmat told me that young men on Marjayoun’s streets used to put out their cigarettes if an elderly man happened to walk past.) The curse of Bayt Shadid lingered, though.

  When I lost my temper, and I did every couple of weeks, Abu Jean would storm off, usually coming back the next day, indignant and describing to me the aggravation he had endured the night before, as he sat at home replaying the events in his head. I would apologize. Bayt Shadid, I would say, by way of explanation. He would nod knowingly. It was a language that he understood. After one apology, he confided that his family, Bayt Abu Kassem, had a reputation for craziness as well. I didn’t dispute the possibility. Bayt Shadid and Bayt Abu Kassem, both mad, would manage an impossible project together. I hoped.

  “I trust Abu Jean one hundred and ten percent,” Hikmat told me.

  To Hikmat, Abu Jean was a paragon of honesty, and his loyalty ran far deeper to him than to me.

  “From the days of my father, there’s a bond with his family,” he said. “His kind of people are no more. They don’t know evil yet. They have virgin spirits. You think there are a lot of people like Abu Jean in Lebanon? Everyone in Lebanon is a Mafioso man. Unfortunately we have in Lebanon only Abu Jean. Or maybe two or three Abu Jeans.”

  Hikmat was an authority on construction, or at least saw himself as such, having rebuilt his house years before.

  “Everyone has an opinion,” said Hikmat, who still bore the scars of his own reconstruction, speaking not only of workmen but also of neighbors, acquaintances, distant cousins, and passersby. “It will kill you. You’ll be like an idiot, sitting between them, and they’ll be throwing opinions at you.” From the time the workers started pouring the cement, people came to watch. “Do it this way, do it that way,” he recalled.

  Finally, the foreman shouted at all the hangers-on, “You sons of bitches! Out! Out! And shut your mouths, too.”

  A day after lamenting the way people yelled in his ears, judging him an idiot, Hikmat joined me at the house, where he proceeded to treat me like an idiot. With Abu Jean and Amina, we ambled past the old garage gate, rusted, mangled, and ripped from the wall, then gingerly made our way into the house, past menacing piles of dirt and masonry. A pool of dark gray cement gathered on one floor, with a shovel sticking out of it at a forty-five-degree angle. Near it were three bags of cement—one untouched, the other two torn open—and a white plastic bucket filled with water. The Baghdadi—an ancient amalgam of mud and straw that was once on the walls—was piled elsewhere. It was mixed with wood, plaster, pieces of roof shingles, even an old chair. Rickety but resilient, the chair seemed as if it might last forever.

  Hikmat turned to me.

  “I thought it was going to be worse,” he declared, looking serious.

  I laughed, cocking my eyebrow.

  Amina sensed Hikmat’s ploy, a brazen attempt to instill confidence in me through sheer denial. “I thought it was going to be better,” she said, with a little more concern.

  Hikmat ignored her.

  “This is easy,” he said assuredly. “If you know what you’re doing, it’s easy.”

  He looked around at the stone walls, moving toward the dining room. “Tell Fouad and his brother, this is easy.” He paused. “Tell Fouad, it’s a very easy job.”

  Amina kept bringing him ba
ck to the reality that he was determined to subvert.

  “You’ve got your work cut out for you,” she told me.

  Hikmat roamed the house, all the time haughtily seeming to consider himself the one in charge. “Don’t get rid of the metal,” he said, pointing to the grills that spanned the windows, then moving to the dining room. “Put the bathroom here,” he said. Despite his bossiness, I believed he was sincerely attempting to be of help. “Don’t close the window in the kitchen,” he ordered, stretching his head into another room, and ruling, “You don’t need any more light. That’s plenty.” Later he reappeared, still in take-charge mode, his certainty inspiring to my flagging spirits. “Put parquet in the Cave,” he advised. “Fuck everyone else and their opinions.”

  As we walked to his car, Hikmat again put the blame on Fouad, my cousin by marriage and the engineer. “Fouad, my ass,” he said. “Tell Fouad, any delay, it’s because of him.” With those words, an epiphany came. I now understood the relentless logic underpinning everything that had transpired as Hikmat sauntered through the house, the drama of the exposition. Given: Hikmat recommended Abu Jean, a friend of his family, for the job. Thus: Abu Jean’s failure reflected poorly on Hikmat, indicting his judgment. Given: Fouad is from outside the town. As such, Hikmat could care less what Fouad thinks about him. Thus: Put the blame for any failure on Fouad, one of the most decent, kind, and generous men I had met in Lebanon.

  The thinking was linear, precise, and unforgiving.

  Fouad, my ass.

  7. Don’t Tell the Neighbors

  As it turned out, Isber’s house, by virtue of his genealogy and its geography, was susceptible to prying. My neighbor Wissam was a relative whose home was built by Isber’s brother Faris. His mother was my grandmother’s first cousin, another tangled tie of blood, but that meant little to Wissam. An unfriendly, bald, pipe-smoking sort, usually gruff and monosyllabic, he had greeted my arrival by making off with purple plums from a tree near the house’s entrance. When he had glimpsed me staring in disbelief, he brought them to me, still chilled from his refrigerator. His excuse: He had taken them only to wash them. There was an awkward moment as he waited for thanks. I offered none, and his dislike for me intensified.