Some families in Marjayoun were still known for their now faded loyalties to those parties, withered as they were. Bayt Sukkarieh, Bayt Shammas, and Bayt Shambour were known as Communists. One Mujalli Shammas actually painted his house red. (In later years, the party in Marjayoun would split into two branches, Trotskyist and Stalinist.) Bayt Shadid, Bayt Tayyar, Bayt Khouri, and Bayt Musallam were the Syrian nationalists’ traditional supporters. (Shibil pasted the party emblem on his phone.) Of course, after the civil war, their numbers dwindled, as did ideological fervor; most of the old party cadres passed away or gave up on politics. More and more, people in Marjayoun and elsewhere identified themselves by religion. They were simply Christian, like my family, and for many Christians here, their leader was a brusque former general named Michel Aoun, given to quixotic endeavors. (“When somebody provokes me, I say, ‘Go to hell!’” he once told me.) The identification reinforced their minority status, and I always suspected their specificity probably meant their eventual extinction.
The ideologies in the days of Hikmat’s father were about contesting frontiers—Arab nationalism, pan-Syrian nationalism, and communism, all imagining a broader community on the terms they would establish. Artificial and forced, instruments themselves of repression, the borders were their obstacle, having wiped away what was best about the Arab world. They hewed to no certain logic; a glimpse at any map suggests as much. The lines are too straight, too precise to embrace the ambiguities of geography and history. They are frontiers without frontiers, ignorant of trajectories shaped by centuries, even millennia. Marjayoun suffered with the advent of borders, losing its true hinterland in Palestine and Syria and all the more accessible towns there. Those towns of an older antiquity—Haifa, Acre, Jerusalem, Damascus, and Quneitra, a boomtown nestled in the Golan Heights—shared with it a common geography, history, trade, and culture, unfettered by borders, and for generations that land was the place of opportunity for those who chose to remain in Marjayoun. Now they no longer could.
Gone was what had redeemed that long-ago Ottoman era, a Levant of many ethnicities and faiths that managed to intersect before the vagaries of nationalism. Myths had to be imagined to join a certain people to a certain land that was so long shared. Pasts were created, and destinies claimed. The borders reinforced the particulars of states with no ambition save the preservation of a petty despot’s power, or a people’s chauvinism, or a clan’s fear, and cosmopolitan cities gradually but irrevocably became national ones. In the century that followed the fall of the Ottoman Empire, all those states failed; none would quite capture the ambitions or demarcate the environments of the diverse peoples who had lived there so long.
And, of course, there are no more street fights in Marjayoun.
8. Abu Jean, Does This Please You?
There was a boxy, bedraggled red Renault parked across the street from my apartment. Every morning between 7 and 7:30, its engine was revved. It screeched as the gas pedal was pressed. It squealed and howled, in a squall of obsolete engineering, wretched manners, and questionable judgment of the engine’s needs. I stared at the ceiling over my bed, eyes growing wider.
This meant I woke up early on these chillier mornings in Marjayoun. November was ending, with autumn holding on with tenacity before surrendering. Old men, smoking and chatting in chairs along curbs each evening, retreated inside. Stores closed earlier, as the steps of the few people still walking the streets slowed. A lumbering, ancient blue Mercedes arrived to hawk with honks the dozen carpets tied to its roof. More piled in back were destined for floors with tile often too cold for even the determined to walk on. Around Hikmat’s house, I had faintly smelled the small logs that burned in winter stoves. Smoke unfurled from chimneys, the narrow stovepipes snaking out windows and portals cut through stone. On the horizon, snow tumbled down the crests of Mount Hermon.
By now, the house had started to come to life; I could imagine lives playing out there. I lavished thanks on the men, drawing incredulous stares. To concede that someone’s work is good is to risk a possible bargaining opportunity, though I could no longer accuse them of not doing enough. There were five workers at this point. That is, if you count Abu Jean, who, like all the great divas, was frequently unavailable. Overwhelmed by the pressure, harried by the world’s expectations and, of course, his own, and bewildered by all the clatter, he had no choice but to withdraw occasionally, disappearing into a cloud of dust.
Abu Jassim and Mohieddin, two workers from Syria, were chiseling old plaster off the inside walls, carting it past the olive trees, and hacking off concrete that covered a stone wall behind the house. Cement was poured to buttress the roof. Still reciting poetry, Abu Salim enlarged the window in the kitchen and made the one in the bathroom smaller. In what was once the garage, a scar on the house and the universe itself, he restored the old walls, all the while considering the play of the shafts of light that had returned to these halls.
Building another wall, Abu Jean hit each cinderblock with a hammer from above, then a lighter tap or two on each side. With a flick of the wrist, timed perfectly, he dropped a scoop of mortar with an accuracy remarkable for his age, then smoothed it with the swift motion of a trowel. He lifted the blocks to where they belonged, hit them first with his fist, then the hammer, then the trowel again, to budge them into place. A yellow string was pulled taut across the wall’s façade as it rose. If it bulged or sagged, Abu Jean knew he had lost his angle.
“See the work?” he told me. “That’s work.”
He shook his head, tired but satisfied.
“What more can I do?” he soon asked, but I had to answer that there was nothing.
“This work, and I’m seventy-four?” he said to me, turning once more to the last block skillfully attacked. A few seconds passed. “No, wait, I’m seventy-six.”
He thought for a moment. “I was born in ’31,” he said, nodding again with a bit of certainty.
“You look fifty,” said Nassib Subhiyya, the blacksmith, but Abu Jean didn’t hear. So I repeated the praise, louder, leaning toward his ear. “Taqbourni,” Abu Jean told me: May you bury me. Then he ran fingers, dusted in gray, over my beard, tenderly, his fingers and thumb coming to a point at my chin.
So little of Marjayoun’s history was gentle. The place is scarred, as is so much of the land around it. But as autumn approached winter, a community had emerged at the warshe. Faces had become familiar; circumstances even I deemed unlikely brought a certain ease that was so foreign in Beirut, prickly as the cast of characters was there. Nearly everyone in the capital ran through a taxi driver’s battery of questions to determine a newcomer’s religious sect. First name? If it was ambiguous—say, in the case of Nabeeh—then the last name was sought as a clue. Often that was not specific enough, as in the case of al-Hajj. So queries turned to the names of relatives, starting with the father and mother. If they were, for instance, Nabil and Nada, an inquiry into one’s hometown would follow. If it was a mixed town, maybe Aley, in the Chouf Mountains beyond Beirut, you might hear the question “How do you see Walid Jumblatt, the leader of the Druze?” or “Are you a partisan of Jumblatt?” There was a relentlessness to it, as a friend once told me, this “categorizing and oversimplifying.”
It was present even at the warshe. Christians sometimes dismissed designs or color patterns as being too Islamic. Trust, especially when it came to money, bore a sectarian stamp. But these days at least, the categorizing felt softer and more remote. Months passed before I knew whether Toama’s family was Sunni or Shiite; adding yet another wrinkle was their habit of putting a simple tree in the corner of their sitting room to mark Christmas. Over breaks for coffee, punctuating the day, everyone knew to steer clear of politics, that badge of sectarian identity. A simple lament for Lebanon usually sufficed.
If it didn’t, George Jaradi would assume the stage.
George had trouble walking, a problem I originally put down to either a long-ago injury or the bottle of arak that he was constantly hitting. Toama�
�s cousin, George was officially a mason, but this was only a title. He was charged with building a stone wall to mark the border with Massoud’s land, sandblasting the house’s stone façade, and repointing the ninety-year-old mortar. It was a remarkable amount of work that he rushed through. George, never a slave to schedule, actually seemed determined to meet our deadline.
“We want movement! We want work!” George shouted one day.
“Haraka is baraka,” I told him. Movement is blessed.
The words provided him a sense of triumph.
“Yalla, Abu Jean! Yalla, shabab!” he shouted. “Let’s go! Let’s go! George wants you guys to wipe your brow and see sweat on your hands.”
George, who surely was once handsome, his tall and dark features evoking an Egyptian movie star, was weathered now, his face lined and sagging in the way of lifetime drinkers stoked for years on Marlboro Reds. Worn day in and day out, his sweater and pants never quite fit. Most noticeable, though, was his propensity to refer to himself in the third person. Then there was his walk. While working construction in Sidon during the civil war, he had fallen off the third story of a six-story building when a bomb detonated nearby, hurling him to the ground.
“It sent George flying,” he told me. He broke his left leg, both wrists, and his back. “George was conscious. George never lost consciousness. George said, ‘Don’t move me! Don’t move me!’”
Of course, no one listened, and none of the bones healed as they should have, but by now his limp was a signature gait, as he sauntered awkwardly, like a street-smart ne’er-do-well in Cairo, with a bit of Gene Kelly, managing to head somewhere fast without showing that he was in a hurry.
One day, after the weather had turned cold in November, I was standing downstairs with the increasingly indolent Abu Jean, trying to figure out what he was doing besides smoking, waiting for more coffee, and jabbing useless tips down to Toama. “George has been here since the morning!” George declared. “Where were you, Abu Jean?”
“I was here, too,” he improvised, a bit more embarrassed than he ever got.
George was in rare form this day, and nothing was sacred, not even the coffee that arrived, yet again, in a red kettle atop a battered silver tray, with four small white cups.
“Fuck the coffee!” he shouted, three times in a row. “A little movement and we’d be done. There’s no time for coffee today. There’s only time for work.” George saw me smiling at his theatrics. “The work’s got to be like this!” he told me, thrusting his fist forward like a boxer’s jab. “We’ve got to finish!”
Abu Jean smiled. Abu Aaajah, he had taken to calling George. Mr. Loudmouth might be the best translation.
George shook his head. “Abu Jean, George just wants movement!” he told him, words that were meant for me. “Yalla ya shabab. Yalla!” He said it twice more, followed by “ya akhu al-sharmouta,” that brother of a whore—apropos of nothing.
Throughout the morning, it was all theater and swagger, as if a parody of what work should be like at a warshe. For George, silence was only a reluctant pause to ponder his next string of expletives.
The next day, George’s stone wall was rising behind the house row by row, a piece of thick fishing line stretched across it to keep the sum of its parts at the right angle. George, manic as usual, wore his uniform of gray knit cap, frowsy sweater, and white gloves encrusted with cement. A cigarette hung from his mouth, as it tended to most of the time.
Abu Jean’s blocks, suggested George, were merely orderly, piled one on top of the other, but his own walls, intention evident, suggested a maze. George had found the stone, but then had to craft it, as all depended on the façade and tricky angles. “This is its face,” he said, lecturing his apprentice, Haytham, and pointing to the front of the stone. The word was feminine, as was his meaning. It would look beautiful. “This is its ass,” he said, turning the stone around. It took ten blows to shape everything but its ass, which no one would see. He tried to intimidate it, pummeling and bludgeoning, drubbing and flogging it. Next he reverted to persuasion, tapping and patting it, the equivalent of a caress.
“Brother of a whore!” he shouted. “It doesn’t want to break.”
It finally did, cracking along the wrong fissure, the latest confirmation, for George, of an angry universe. He threw the mutilated chips behind the wall with the pebbles, sand, and rocks. Then, always resilient, he began again with another lover—wrestling, cajoling, pleading, intimidating.
“Shou, Abu Jean, this, does it please you?” George demanded to know after a labyrinthine search for another stone.
Abu Jean muttered something.
“Yalla, ya Toama!” George shouted. Get a move on!
Toama, as was his habit, ignored him, and George started another search as, miffed by Abu Jean’s dismissal, he roused himself for further debate. Abu Jean was responsible for acquiring the stones, and George, to needle him, diminished the lot with a hasty but impressive contempt.
“They’re all good,” Abu Jean countered.
George began kicking them as he walked down the path. “Fuck this! What’s so good about this one?” He kicked another rock. “And this one?” On it went, down the line, repeated again and again. “Fuck them all!” he declared. “Toama,” he said sternly, “your and Abu Jean’s work today doesn’t please George at all. Not at all.”
With unmitigated assurance, one maalim, a carpenter, had told me that Isber Samara had built our house 112 years ago. Absolutely. Wrong, I countered. It was not yet a century old, I claimed, as he shook his head with the vigor of a desert hermit ordered to live in the city. The carpenter was so convincing, I wondered if I was wrong.
Nothing about the house was really certain. Most fact-gathering led to bewilderment, and once again I was overwhelmed by futility. At times, my mood turned dark and stormy. I had resumed smoking, returning to form with the acceptance of an existentialist and the gestures of a madman. On clearer days, I would try to grasp what sort of odd mishap we were perpetuating—an insult to architecture seemed likely. I slipped toward the abyss as, without my realizing it, the project sputtered toward something not finished but not in immediate danger of collapse.
George and Toama had cleaned every stone outside, along with the walls and arches downstairs. The stones themselves were revelatory. With the new mortar, the angles of the structure pulled things back to order and precision. Colors were wrestled from time, as shadows gave over to shades of cream infused with many hues bordering on blue. Downstairs, electricity had been restored, wires buried in rivulets of concrete running along the floor. Doors and windows came off as sunlight filtered into corners unknown since the house’s infancy.
The house was a painting gradually emerging from my endlessly deliberated yet haphazard choices. Occasionally, I feared that we had too radically eviscerated the original, though later I would beg for alterations more transforming than any previously imagined.
I was hesitant, unsure, and equivocal in decision after decision, read by maalimeen like Abu Jean as weakness and vulnerability. Whenever Abu Jean sensed it, he became a taxi driver in Cairo, predatory in his knowledge. We walked through the house, and I suggested to him that we refashion into tables the old doors that were salvaged from downstairs and seemingly beyond repair. Maybe, I said.
“What kind of talk is this?” he shouted at me, the cigarette in his mouth rising and falling with the hectoring words. “People will start laughing at you.”
As with Massoud Samara and the fig tree, I harked back to my ancestors.
“This is from the days of your grandmother. This is from the days of your grandfather,” Abu Jean said sarcastically, pointing at the arches, windows, and marble, one by one. “God have mercy on your grandparents!” It was part joke, part respect, and part weariness from having heard my line too often.
The threat of war or violence is as common in Lebanon as the wind, and just as unpredictable. Isber Samara lived with it, although he seemed, for a time, as his house rose, to di
stance himself from it. As his family became accustomed to its splendor, he no longer could. The future was unresolved and full of danger. Around him and his family, Bedouins and gangs were pillaging the countryside. New boundaries, marked by stakes hammered into the ground, began to divide what had not been truly united but had never been separated. The French and British negotiated the future of their imperial possessions. Bab al-Tniah, Tal al-Nahas, and other new customs posts promised to sever Marjayoun from the Houran, an expanse that men like Isber seemed to need in order to breathe.
Two codes of justice, old imperial and new colonial, clashed and confused. Economies changed, currencies multiplied in the wake of the Ottoman Empire’s collapse. First came the Egyptian pound, pegged to the British sterling, then the Syrian pound, fixed to the French franc. Sectarianism and nationalism, the dangerous kinds, reared their heads in spectacles of horror and cruelty. The Ottoman influence remained, but its old connections and routes buffeted the new borders and were redirected and skewed into something artificial and awkward, like broken legs miscast.
Isber knew the debates. He had heard his neighbors consider and name their loyalties—to Arab nationalists, to the French, to a Russia mired in revolutionary turmoil and ceding leadership of the Orthodox Christian world for the vanguard of the Communist International. He had heard of the American investigators of the King-Crane Commission, who in 1919 toured Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, and Anatolia. As France and Britain cynically divvied up the spoils of the Ottoman Empire, securing oil for their citizens, the United States dispatched the commission to ask, rather than tell, Arabs what form of government they wanted. Predictably, its findings were ignored. (It was said that Marjayounis favored Arab independence, then some kind of American control.)
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