Isber told his family that even if war and rebellion were prevented, Lebanon had no future. At least his Lebanon, the swath of territory stretching unbroken from Wadi al-Taym to the Golan Heights and into the Houran. The realization pained him.
For years he had prepared to send his oldest son, Nabeeh, to medical school, a step that would certify his family’s entry into the elite of a town that revered education. But Isber carefully considered the education of all his children. Whenever schools were closed because of strife and violence in the countryside, he managed to bring tutors to the house. (They were much taken by the creativity and talent of his daughter Ratiba, who was already penning poetry in Arabic.) He worried about the children’s educations, their futures. His Lebanon was perched before an abyss, more unpredictable than the Great War, and nothing—not France, not Arab leaders, not the British army across the border, not the potentates of the old order—could pull it back.
As 1920 arrived, Isber seemed to smoke more. He lost weight, his face becoming more drawn and his mustache, in turn, becoming more pronounced. He had spent his life trying to make his own name and achieve wealth and the sort of success admired by others. More recently, though, his goal had become securing a future where his children could realize their ambitions and create their own families without the distractions of fear and conflict. As the lawlessness around Isber grew, it was clear that the finest local schools, including the medical school, were not enough to ensure his children’s safe passage into adulthood. He worried that Nabeeh, his oldest, might be shot by bandits, who killed indiscriminately. He worried that his two older daughters—Nabiha, then sixteen, and Raeefa, then twelve—might be murdered or raped if the violence continued, especially in the event that he and Bahija were killed or maimed.
America offered peace and opportunity, neither of which he expected to see again in the land where he had spent his life. The thought of losing his children to death may have touched an old wound that Isber Samara had carried since he was a young man. His older brother Said had worked with Isber and his other brothers at the beginning of their careers. Said was just twenty-three years old, yet to marry, when the brothers started out to create a business they could share. For months at a time they traveled in the Houran, often sleeping on the fine black dust of the steppe. One night, a horse, spooked by the cries of hyenas and jackals that still roam the Syrian wilderness, trampled and killed Said as he slept. Said was three years older than Isber, and Isber had carried the memory of his brother’s loss ever since. This time, Isber was determined to find a way to cheat death. His children would live safely without constant fear of its approach.
All his children. All their lives.
On a cold November night, Shibil and I sat in chairs, leaning forward, ears to the radio, listening to a speech by Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader. There was no electricity. The radio ran on batteries. The fluorescent light was plugged into the old car battery that he had yet to replace. The words that tumbled from the speaker were vintage Nasrallah, the most charismatic Shiite orator in a generation.
Israel’s scheme in Lebanon is that of sedition and of encouraging the Lebanese to fight each other, the Hezbollah leader told a sprawling rally in Beirut. His words, defending the group’s weapons, what it calls “the resistance,” were stentorian, as he assumed pulpit and stage. Nasrallah had an innate sense of a crowd. He built an argument using formal Arabic vocabulary, then underlined a point in conversational idiom. His most emotional refrains were delivered bluntly, subdued by jokes, a few words in a softer voice, and sometimes a quick aside that his slight lisp did nothing to diminish.
His words echoed the landscape around us, the posters that Hezbollah had put up in parade-like intervals down the road from Shibil’s house. The Time of Defeats Has Passed, read one variation. The Time of Victories Has Arrived, declared another.
Brothers and sisters, Nasrallah said, Israel talks about peace at a time when it beats the drums of war . . . No one should rule out the possibility that the Israelis intend, in cooperation with the Americans, to drag Syria into war and drag the entire region into war, for this was George Bush’s plan in the region. The plan, Nasrallah declared, is not that of peace, but of war.
“It’s pretty strong speech,” I said to Shibil.
“Hmmm,” he answered, nodding, in a tone that conveyed approval and worry.
I returned to Shibil’s the next night, and sitting on the couch, I surveyed the room. Next to his chair was a trash can filled with the red shells of raw pistachios. On the floor was a copy of Mad magazine from September 1999. “16 Pages of Extra-Stupid Movie Spoofs!” it shouted. “18 Things to Do with a Live Lobster (Other Than Boil It Alive!).” He once assured me there was an eight-track tape of Deep Purple’s Made in Japan tucked away somewhere.
As we sat in his house, I felt a wave of sadness as I watched him. Shibil—ailing from an arthritic hand and creaking joints—was suffering, deserted by his friends and family. Of his four brothers, only the oldest maintained a relationship with him. The others found Shibil an embarrassment, a failure in a family—like most in Marjayoun—that still prided itself on education and wealth. The brother closest to him in age sometimes did not even greet him when he visited Marjayoun, a rather remarkable feat, given that they stayed in the very same house (albeit with separate entrances).
It was not a matter that was kept inside the family, either. A few weeks before, I had joined Shibil and two of his brothers at a restaurant on the Litani River. It was a charming spot, a simply built patio nestled in orange and lemon groves on a verdant bend of the river, where children swam and fished in water that cascaded over shallow stones. The rapids skipped along on a wind that barreled down the valley, past the pine trees that represented the sole demarcation of a vanished palace. There was no better fish served anywhere—trout stuffed with garlic and lemon peel. The radishes were inexplicably delectable.
During the meal, neither brother much acknowledged Shibil, who never looked up from his glass of scotch. I wondered if he was conscious of the slight, or lost in some private screening of an American movie, trying to catch mistranslations in the Arabic subtitles, through the smoke of marijuana and inebriation of drink.
Hesitating, I asked him about it afterward.
Families always have conflict, he told me, reluctant to say too much. “From the outside it looks okay, but from inside the family, from inside the house, you don’t know.” He seemed to be hiding his pain; if he ignored it, it might hurt less. “In any family, there are always feuds. They don’t pass in peace all the time. It’s a general rule, yaani. Could you find a family that’s so peaceful no shout comes out? I doubt it.” He stopped, and I thought it better not to press.
One night, I called Shibil to see whether he wanted to visit a friend, Assaad Maatouk, a former chef in America who had returned to Lebanon to find a wife, but he was still sleeping off a lunchtime scotch. I waited for a while and then, bored, went over to Shibil’s anyway.
When I arrived he was in his usual lackadaisical mood, but the tragedy was that it had not always been so. After returning from Oklahoma for the last time, just months before the Israeli invasion of 1982, Shibil worked for four years teaching English at the prestigious Marjayoun National College. He was an ustaz, a teacher, and while it did not make him wealthy, the job itself demanded respect. Next he taught at the Greek Orthodox school in town, followed by five years at schools in Khiam, across a valley and a short drive away, before returning to the Orthodox school for three more years, until 2000.
“Ever since that day, I haven’t taught,” he said, never quite explaining why.
Yet he insisted that his former students address him as ustaz. They didn’t. By now Shibil had lost their respect. Beyond memories, he no longer counted anyone as a friend. Day after day, Shibil rarely left the house other than to buy water; it was as if he was dying a slow death of the sort claiming this place: Having lost its mercantile prowess, the no longer thriving Marjayoun survive
d on the aid, remittances, and generosity of its expatriate children. As with Shibil, who saw no shame in accepting money, and even expected it, the town waited for charity, no longer expecting anything from itself.
“I’m fed up with the whole shit,” Shibil told me.
A movie was playing in the background. He glanced down at his chair, sagging from the years and draped in a once colorful sheet now indistinguishable from the furniture. “This is shameful,” he said, pointing to the bedraggled seat. “This is my ass. It eroded it.”
He sank deeper into the chair, smoking more as the night wore on.
“This is fate. Que sera, sera.” We started talking idly about how to render the phrase in Arabic: Allah yikhaleek, God keep you; Allah yihadi al-bal, God give you peace of mind; Allah yitawil omrak, God give you more years, and its equivalent, Allah yaateek al-omr. Then he mentioned Bi-sahtak, Take care of yourself.
Shibil tilted his head back, as if surrendering. In a few minutes his eyes were half closed. The movie played on, the sound turned low but audible as it washed over his face. Toward the end, one of the characters, bitter and hating himself, declared, “I’m a garbage man of the human condition.”
9. Mr. Chaya Appears
I suspect it is not at all surprising that my quest to find the most alluring elements of the house’s return to grace would become, in my mind at least, a small odyssey. Would I have wanted it otherwise? Wasn’t this the sort of meaningful search I had hoped for when I took on the project of revamping the old house? All I can say is that one destination led, almost magically, to the next, with the characters best able to ensure my satisfaction appearing right on time, as if someone, somewhere, had the inclination to guide me on my rather quixotic mission.
The Maalouf Trading Company in Beirut felt like a door to another epoch where haunting discoveries lingered amid a deep, rich silence. No street voices filtered in here and every utterance seemed an awed, respectful whisper. Maalouf’s was a pocket of entrancing stillness and impressive dignity set apart from the loud, tumultuous world. The smells were antique: dust, mildew, and the salt of the sea, just a short walk away. The Levantine tile of old houses spilled across the sloping floors. Vessels and artifacts stood before me in quiet repose. Old and delicate, they seemed beyond contact and certainly far from utility. They waited in peace, reminders of what seemed less troubled times but perhaps were not.
After the fall of the Ottomans, Britain and France remained entwined in the Middle East. The former had made promises, freely but casually, to the family of Feisal and to its rivals in Arabia, to Zionists bent on founding a Jewish state in Palestine, and to the French themselves. The two imperial powers were bound by the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, which staked each country’s claim to Ottoman spoils after the war ended. There were too many promises, too few specific, considered intentions. With a sense of inevitability, the French and British reached a deal in Italy in 1920, and the French were soon lording over their new domain.
The government of Mourad Gholmia, partisan of Feisal, fell two months after it was proclaimed in Marjayoun, when two hundred French horsemen rode in to take control. Entering the Serail, they removed Gholmia’s hastily stitched flag. Feisal’s government was crushed at the battle of Maysalun on July 24, 1920. In a story apocryphal but telling, the French commander, General Henri Gouraud, rode into Feisal’s capital the next day, proceeded to the tomb of Saladin, and kicked it. With words obviously chosen for history, Gouraud declared, “Awake, Saladin, we have returned. My presence here consecrates the victory of the Cross over the Crescent.”
France soon created a country where none existed. Lands once joined by history, tradition, clan, and commerce were divided by imperial borders put forth by the loudest voices. In Lebanon, these were the Maronite Catholics, a Christian sect long united with the Roman Catholic Church. Ties between France and the Maronites stretched far back, and in more modern times France had played guardian to the Maronites, who had enjoyed a certain autonomy under the Ottomans. The Maronites’ leadership—religious and political—had long pushed for enlarging their homeland, and after the Ottomans’ fall they saw the opportunity to create a greater state. The French, albeit with reservations, complied. To the Maronites’ relatively small sanjak, or district, the French added the coastal towns of Tripoli, Beirut, Sidon, and Tyre, all of which had belonged to the Ottoman province of Beirut. From the Ottoman province of Damascus, they added the fertile Bekaa Valley, which included territory that encompassed Marjayoun.
The Maalouf Trading Company was a vestige of Isber Samara’s age. Composed of what Americans might call a showroom, filled with unexpected alcoves and secret spaces—the family villa, a warehouse, and other unseen sections—the building hid itself in the shadows around the corner from the Café of Glass, a defiantly unfashionable locale set amid the booming nightlife of the neighborhood. Facing Maalouf’s was a store lacking its mysteries, a place seemingly attempting to compensate for its quotidian presence with aromas of cumin, pepper, and cinnamon, which scented the entire street in this venerable quarter of Beirut.
At Maalouf’s, one room flowed into the next, beginning with the chamber just beyond the entrance, with its stone vases and urns, stacks of tiles, and exquisite lamps. The walls were unpainted, pale as fallen leaves transformed by time. Crumbling, peeling, and falling, the plaster concealed dark stone underneath.
Taciturn, but given to wry attempts at smiles that only slightly qualify as such, Michel Maalouf was a trader of proud expertise, and anyone who challenged his confidence had surely failed to take in the import of the store’s vast, impressive inventory—the harvest of pillaged houses and a lost Levant. The display of his goods was comparable to the antiquities on exhibit at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, where sarcophagi and scarabs emptied themselves amidst the clutter of history. Doors were stacked twelve deep, propped against a wall, some engraved with grapevines snaking together. Others, embossed with the traditional three squares, like the oldest doors at Isber’s house, revealed their touches of artistry with great reluctance. Everything spoke of subtlety. Stones, decorative in intention, crowded the floor and ornamented gates. Windows, vases, and urns were offered in every shape—squares, rectangles, circles, and ovals. Calligraphy complemented the designs. Toward the back I glimpsed wooden tracery pulled from the triple arcades of residences once exquisite but now almost certainly demolished, faded into memory. As many as a hundred pieces of tracery were stacked on top of each other, their slender forms and fine woods too tender and fragile to withstand customers less than completely careful.
Only when I had become hostage to the place and lost sight of my actual mission did I finally make it to the courtyard for a close inspection of the cemento tiles. Laid before me were pieces containing stories and scenes, distilled images, and moody skies of places and eras so long gone that the words of any witness to them had faded before time. There they all were, in the autumn sun, wrapped in dusty plastic, stacked on wooden pallets, waiting. I wanted to use them in Isber’s house but was anxious about the expense.
“Twenty-five dollars a square meter,” Maalouf told me with firm assurance.
That translated to a dollar a tile, a tidy sum, considering that even a modest room of the house in Marjayoun required hundreds of squares. An entire floor of the house would require thousands of tiles. Maalouf acknowledged my shock with no more than the suggestion of a shrugged shoulder.
“What is it you were thinking?” his eyes seemed to say. A bargain, clearly, was not the intention; such would be neither appropriate nor respectful. It would, in fact, be an insult.
No one is absolutely certain of the origin of the tiles that I coveted at Maalouf’s store. The mystery of the cemento’s past added to the allure; no place or time could claim it. Some say Italian craftsmen, inspired by the natural colors of granite and marble dust, were the creators. Others claim the tiles were first produced in France, at Viviers, at the edge of the Rhone, around 1850, alongside the first cementworks the
re. Workshops, it is said, soon became common from Lyon to Marseilles. But not everyone believes this theory. Some say that the tile was first mentioned in Barcelona in 1857, and that from there, it flourished throughout Spain.
Before World War I, the tile was considered the epitome of what was splendid, and covered the floors of tsars’ palaces, mansions of the Côte d’Azur, and offices of great import in Berlin. Cemento is also present in Barcelona, in the work of the architect Antonio Gaudí, who designed some tiles himself. Colonists took the tile to the imperial possessions of France, Spain, and Portugal. Along with its high commissioners and chasseurs, France brought the tile to the countries of the Levant; it became so commonly associated with things Levantine that it seemed to stand for that lost era. Before its fall from fashion in the 1950s, when cheaper, drearier alternatives arose, cemento appeared in the Philippines, Brazil, Chile, and Algeria.
In the Middle East, the tiles came to be known as sajjadeh, one of the Arabic words for carpet. But there were myriad other labels: Cuban tile, mosaicos hidraulicos, mission tile, encaustic tile, hydraulic tile, carreaux de ciment, redondo tile, ladrilhos hidraulicos, impasta, Barcelona tile, Portuguese tegels, rusticos, and so on. The language was the metropole, from where the tile emanated. The designations were the periphery, the far-flung locales to where they were destined.
The designs ranged from utter simplicity—a pattern of lines in black or gray—to three, four, or more colors arranged in intricate geometric, stylized floral, or other patterns. Rarely, animals or human figures were represented. Styles spanned cultures and times, blending and fusing: Influences included art deco, art nouveau, neo-Islamic, and so on. Some patterns defied category; some especially unusual ones seemed like watercolors.
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