These days, he was livid at the dust that the reconstruction sent swirling to his property. The dirt prompted a string of requests. Could I hire a maid to clean his house? Could I clean the red tiles of his roof? And while I was at it, could I repair his crumbling stone wall along with mine? All at my expense, of course.
Massoud Samara owned the land behind me. In Marjayoun, there is always tension about property, any kind. So how could I have been surprised by what occurred?
“Where does my land extend to?” Massoud asked his surveyor one day as I stood with them. He asked it repeatedly, and each time I was filled with more dread, worry, and apprehension. Will he encroach on my land? I wondered. Is he going to lay claim to more of it? Will he try to build a wall over land that is not his?
The questions multiplied. Then Massoud and his surveyor suggested I chop down a sprawling fig tree along the edge of my property. I cringed. I told them that I doubted I could, and I repeated it three times. “This is from my grandmother, from her day,” I pleaded. The sentiment was lost on them, but after a few minutes of back-and-forth, they judged it better to delay the inevitable confrontation.
With each day, I saw more of Marjayoun’s quirks, the often forgotten, sometimes maddening, occasionally endearing details of everyday life that revolved around my neighbors in Hayy al-Serail, who alternated between effusive warmth and stony, suspicious silence. Always there was a suggestion that I had money to spend. There was a gamesmanship to it all, the jousting of a town that seemed to relish, even celebrate, such contests against a backdrop where war might lurk.
The Ottoman pashas and beys had faded into a landscape never settled since. Anarchy became bloodshed, uncertainty, insurrection, departures. Old animosities returned to curse each other, augmented by imperial manipulation. Gangs exploiting the new lawlessness were joined by bandits, fired by nationalism, who brought a new incarnation to the Arabic word fawda, or chaos.
In Marjayoun, Isber and his house were small distractions from the troubles.
A way of life born of the Ottomans, a style of living that was never before especially fragile, had broken into pieces jagged and dangerous. With no one stepping in to replace the Ottomans, or allowed to, other than the Europeans, the Middle East was unraveling, especially in the hinterlands. What had given the region its only sense of identity was gone, and there was nothing to fill the vacuum. Order was breaking down.
Yet Hayy al-Serail was lush and still, with no disruptions to trouble the order of the day. Limbs of old trees reached across streets, and in the mornings, fog drifting up from the river pleasingly obscured anything that the distinguished residents of this tranquil enclave preferred to ignore. What would it take to disturb this place? More than Isber Samara, the newcomer, who would never be more than that for those who lived here, families such as the Farhas and the Barakats, whose forebears seem to have arrived with the ancient olive trees.
Upon its unveiling, the Samara residence, envisioned and reenvisioned through all of Isber’s years of waiting, revealed a place that, its owner decreed, with the special pride that accompanies an active imagination, would never be completed. Artisans and craftsmen had done their best work, creating an elegant synthesis of all the signatures of Levantine life. Although for a brief moment the reflections of the candles from Isber’s table stilled fears and brought calm, the house would not remain immune to what was taking place outside. It would change with the landscape that surrounded it as Isber became a different man, a family man, a man less focused on his own ambition and glory. His house was first a display of pride, then a place where he made a home for his wife and children. It would in time become a refuge, and finally a memory we carried, whether we ever stepped through its doors.
That night, I saw Shibil, and over a drink I told him about my encounter at the fig tree. I was speaking to Massoud Samara in Arabic, I said, and I thought my words might have been less diplomatic than they would have been in English. I recounted my plea—leave the tree, it hails from my grandmother’s time—and asked if I was perhaps too aggressive.
“Aggressive?” he barked. “Aggressive?”
He shook his head.
“Here’s aggressive.” Shibil sat up in his chair, bowing his back. “Take your hands off the tree,” he shouted, “you brother of a whore, before I fuck your sister!” He paused.
“You brother of a whore!” he shouted again.
Shibil flashed me a satisfied look, the same one he had given me when he got the salt just right in the olive jars.
“Sister” is better, he assured me.
“I wouldn’t want to bring in the mothers at this stage.”
My problems didn’t stop with the neighbors. To much of Marjayoun, I was unhinged, at best: The work at the house translated into my being considered certifiable. Some suspected that I was fabulously wealthy. Others deemed me truly, even dangerously insane. A substantial portion seemed convinced that I was a spy, my cover brilliant. According to one rumor, the American embassy in Beirut was paying for me to rebuild my house. It turned out that the more forceful proponents of my clandestine life were Karim’s elderly women friends and the Deeba brothers, who owned two grocery stores on the Boulevard.
The unsightly, ogreish, eldest Deeba brother had refused to speak with me, on principle. He would often scurry into the back room when I entered his store. Any word, he probably feared, would find its way into my cables to the embassy. I eventually quit going to his store, settling on the smaller, more modest one owned by the loquacious youngest brother. He was George Deeba, failing merchant and failed politician, who bore a striking resemblance to Humpty Dumpty on a strict diet.
As I entered, he invariably shouted a nickname: “Ustaz Shibil!” (remembering me as Shibil’s friend) or “Washington Post!” (remembering that I worked at a newspaper). It was all a cover, of course. Like his brothers, he was firmly convinced of my role as an agent and determined to discern my mission. He would show off a few words of English, which he last spoke as a schoolboy thirty years ago, now unintelligible, then offer a thought, prompted by nothing. “You’ve come to study our climate!” he said one day, a gesture either to that evergreen of conversation or to his latest conjecture of my task in Marjayoun.
We chatted about what I was looking for—rock salt, which he had, and bay leaves, which he didn’t. He took my number, suggesting he would call me if he found them. He soon played his hand, though. Could I put an announcement about his political ambitions in the newspaper?
That would cost thousands of dollars, I told him.
“Oh!” he shouted. “Not for free? Could you do it for free for me?”
He said he just wanted two lines in the paper, nominating himself for the presidency of the Lebanese republic—the candidates would be chosen in a few weeks. “Why not?” he asked me. “If swindlers and con men can be president, why can’t an ordinary guy?
“I have a beautiful program,” he declared. “Twenty-five points, and there might be more, but these are ready.” They were scrawled on both sides of a memo pad embossed with the logo for Winston cigarettes. “This is called a program,” he said, shuffling through the four pages, quickly scanning the points.
I asked him the most important of them.
“The most important point?” He kept looking through the pages, turning them over and over a little obsessively. He wrinkled his brow, growing confused.
“They’re all important, all twenty-five are important.” He kept reading, stopping on one point. “Well, this isn’t that important,” he admitted. “And this one,” he went on, “really matters only for Lebanon.” His finger went down the list. “This is important internationally.” He paused. “This one probably just for the region.”
He shrugged his shoulders, tucking the papers back under the counter.
As I left, I said, “Thank you, ustaz George.”
“George W!” he shouted back at me.
As time passed, my collaboration with Abu Jean bore fruit, though there
was no specific breakthrough. Everything happened by default, and eventually we stumbled on the maalimeen, the contractors, who could work on the house. Before long, they became a community, the fractious, divided, and dysfunctional sort that finds itself susceptible to civil war.
The mainstay was Toamallah al-Qadri, better known as Toama. With his wife, Thanaya, he lived next door in my cousin Wissam’s house, paying $100 a month for a modest three rooms that faced the warshe, or workshop, which had by now become the nickname of Isber’s house.
Fleshy, with an ambling gait, Toama would do anything. But everything—including the cost of gas for his decrepit red Mercedes when he went to check for replacement stones—came at a price. (The gas for the errand cost about $16.) He was a hustler, good and bad, and Abu Jean kept a wary eye on him.
Emad Deeba, the electrician, a proud man rare to smile, was the next to join the crew, followed by Fouad Abla, the plumber made weary by war, and, most memorably, Kamil Haddad. No one called this man of bounteous gray hair and pale blue eyes, limpid and almost transparent, by his first name. He was simply Abu Salim, one of the last true stonemasons left, a handsome man whose face was as chiseled as the stone he worked with for six decades.
While Emad the electrician lamented the amount of work—“it’s a big job,” he told me gloomily—and Fouad the plumber warned me that other projects would take precedence, Abu Salim strolled around the house with the authority that came with swinging a sledgehammer and still one-arming a stone equal to his weight. Did I mention he was seventy-six, as old as Abu Jean? For $1,100, he would build a stone wall over the garage entrance, turning it into a room, enclose a window with stone, shrink three others, enlarge a fourth into a door, and repair the Cave. I agreed; I dared not bargain. The next morning, he was at work, arriving at 6 A.M., the sheen of dew on the cars yet to dry.
“Be careful, be careful,” Abu Salim told his apprentice as they pulled on a window frame. “Treat it like a bride.” Soon Abu Jean ambled into the warshe. “Whatever you need, Abu Salim, I’m at your service.” Abu Salim answered him, with the grace that is so entrenched in Arabic, “I want your peace and safety and nothing else.”
In time, all three men were working on the wall, with a pickax, a crowbar, and a sledgehammer, removing the stone below the window to make way for the door.
Abu Salim began shouting as he bludgeoned the wall. “This is the foundation of building!” he cried out gleefully. “The stone won’t go anywhere!” He was jubilant at his lack of success. Building, after all, is an art, and he was appreciating a masterpiece. “This is the old style of building! This is the way homes were built!” he said.
“Building is the most important art of life on earth,” Abu Salim told me solemnly.
“This type of building is going to soon become extinct, and it’s a shame,” he went on. “It’s a shame because it’s from the earth, it’s the earth’s yeast.”
Abu Salim told me the names of the tools he used. “Each one has a specific function,” he said, a little didactically. “You can’t use them interchangeably.”
There was the tartabeek (a kind of pickax), mahadda (a big sledgehammer), makhal (crowbar), fas (ax), mankoush (another pickax), shauuf (a kind of mallet or chisel), and a shaqoul—a graceful way to measure whether a stone is level, a sort of plumb bob. His was a green rope with wood on one side, a brass weight on the other.
He looked at the plumb bob, again with that sense of appreciation. “This is hundreds of years old. This was inherited from my father.” I asked him if it was his most important tool. He laughed, then looked at me as though I was either a fool or too young to comprehend such things. “The hands are the most important tool!” he shouted.
“Look, ammi, you want to know the truth?” Abu Salim asked me a little later, as we sat outside the house under a warming morning sun. “Back then was purer than today. The atmosphere, the aura of people. There wasn’t this hatred, this revenge that we have today. People lived honorably, simply. There was no electricity. They lived on candlelight, by the oil lamp, and that’s it. They’d have each other over for dinner, and enjoy their evenings together. They’d offer one another figs, roasted chickpeas, and raisins. You’d wake up at seven A.M. to go to work, and you wouldn’t come home until nighttime. There were no worries, no wars, no fear for your children. It was simply another time.”
Abu Salim worked with the rock’s very nature, understanding that he could never use the brute force of a machine to force it to submit to his will. It is stone, after all, earth’s yeast. Instead of doing battle with it, he would coax it, persuade it, nudge it. The more experience, the more perfect his knowledge of the stone, the more innate his sense of what would follow—where the stone would splinter, how it would splinter, and when it would splinter. As I watched him, it reminded me of something I once read about the most practiced surgeons—how they could so quickly predict the consequences of their hands’ every move. It was the same for Abu Salim.
He went to work removing another stone, a foot at a time, probably fifty pounds or more. Both he and Abu Jean appreciated the mortar and how tough it was.
“See how this is?” Abu Jean said. “This is the old cement.”
“Shou lakan,” Abu Salim answered. Of course.
They were two men near the end of both life and career, interchangeable here. They knew their work, the angles and foundations.
“This is construction!” Abu Salim shouted again. “What you give, it will give. What you take, it will take.” The old man seemed triumphant, even euphoric. “The strength of the old buildings was neither iron nor cement. It was stone. And the strength of the men back then came from honey and the fat of the goat.”
The work went on through the morning. He rained a hundred more blows on the stone, from the level of his waist and crashing down from above his head. He was a marvel to watch, one hammer blow after the other, without break, machine-like. As he toiled, he recited poetry: “The artist never rests. The stars of the sky sing to him. My son, don’t blame the old one. In the past, there was nothing like him.”
“Look,” he said later. He shook his head in forced modesty at his own mastery. “The beauty of work is in its perfection.”
One day, after a trip to Beirut for supplies, I had gone straight to Shibil’s for a drink. I asked how he was. “Zift,” he told me, using a word that can mean asphalt or shitty. In Shibil’s case, it meant the latter. “Everything is zift in Lebanon,” he said, “except for the streets.”
When I wasn’t at Isber’s house, I was spending most of my time with Hikmat, Karim, and Shibil, whose relationships were growing more complicated. They had hardly talked of late, but when Hikmat’s daughter, Miana, was born, Shibil called him in Beirut.
“I said to Hikmat, ‘Congratulations. Say hi to Amina. I’ll see you when you come.’ Bas. That’s it. Very friendly.” Shibil paused. “We don’t have anything between us, but Hikmat doesn’t care about anyone. He doesn’t ask about anyone. I have no grudge, but why does Hikmat’s head have to grow?”
After Shibil served me a scotch, the conversation returned to Hikmat, as it tended to. “I was thinking about visiting him,” Shibil said. He had wanted to congratulate Hikmat in person and bring a gift for his daughter, but he’d overslept, his nap stretching from 3 P.M. until 9:30. A shirt that read In Oklahoma, Nothing Tips Like a Cow was stretched taut across his belly.
When I told him Hikmat had gone back to Beirut, he let out a string of expletives. “Maybe I’ll end up visiting Hikmat’s daughter when she’s engaged,” Shibil said, and I laughed.
Karim, for his part, was never satisfied. Why hadn’t I called, he would ask every time we spoke. He had sat alone, going over the reasons. Was it that he had asked me to water his plants? Had he said something wrong to me? Was Hikmat poisoning me with falsehoods?
He gave me yet more presents, in two white plastic bags with pink polkadots: Calvin Klein body moisturizer (Escape for Men), shave gel (Men, Carolina Herrera), shower gel
(212, Carolina Herrera), and a black alarm clock, already set to the right time. Stuffed in the other bag were mosquito tablets, a yellow ashtray, a brush to scrub the sink, and a small strainer to steep tea leaves. It was either a housewarming gift or an attempt at apology, since last time I saw him we had argued about his relentless criticism of Hikmat.
In his eyes, I had lost my cool.
“This is the Shadid in you,” he said knowingly. “The temper.”
Karim was a sensitive, obsessive soul.
“This fucking town is a mess when the gossip starts,” Hikmat told me soon after. “It’s not your business to take sides. You’re a guest in Marjayoun.”
All this, Hikmat added, also applied to politics, which ended countless friendships here. Just a generation or two before, the town had been disposed to hosting movements, ideologies, and caudillos who claimed to represent them. The time was heady, as the Middle East emerged from Ottoman rule and colonial hegemony. The newspapers in Marjayoun favored either the Arab nationalists or liberals. Then there were the Communists, who flourished in the 1930s, and the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, founded in secret, in 1932, by Antoun Saadeh.
In the days of Hikmat’s father, the town was beholden to those Syrian nationalists and the Communists, who organized among Marjayounis of modest means. The two factions despised each other. After a few drinks, loyalists of each party would pour out of a bar on the Boulevard and slug it out, with fists rather than guns, well into the 1960s. Little joined the two except for their espousal of a universal standard of citizenship, unusual in Lebanese politics until today.
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