Thus to my earliest memories in Manchester, where my three sisters and two brothers were born before me, there were two faces: the one Near Eastern, Lebanese, full of poetry, politics and business, the other partly Scottish Presbyterian, full of Sunday churchgoing and Sunday school, partly English through an English nanny and a succession of English and Irish cooks and maids. Nothing epitomized this dichotomy more than the diet on which we were raised: on Saturdays, when my father lunched at home with his Lebanese and Syrian fellow businessmen and clients from abroad, we ate the food of the Lebanese villages—kibbe, and the traditional dish of Saturday, mujaddara, or Esau’s pottage: on Sundays there was an English roast, followed by an apple pie or a milk pudding.
His British birth and distinctly British education at Oxford aside, Cecil wholeheartedly adopted the eclectic preferences of his ancestors. Soon after World War II broke out, he ventured east. Still fixed in his mind is the unbridled chaos on the quays of Alexandria as Egyptian porters fought to unload passengers’ goods. In Marjayoun, where he stopped next, he met his father’s sisters. “Taqbourni” (May you bury me), they said to him over and over. It was, Cecil said, one of the few Arabic words he understood at the time. Next he traveled to wartime Cairo, serving in the British army, then as a diplomat with an office the newly formed Arab League set up in Washington, in the decisive years around Israel’s creation. After a stint as a professor, he became an adviser of fortune—to Tunisia’s president, then to Prince Hassan of Jordan. Well past retirement age, he undertook, of all things, a campaign to help restore the Albanian monarchy, claimed by King Leka I, in a referendum in 1997. (He was unsuccessful, and the restoration was rejected.)
By the time I met him, his official career was coming to an end. These days he spent weeks at a time, sometimes longer, in Marjayoun, at his ancestral home, with its blue shutters and antique doors and magnificent garden.
Cecil was what might be called a Marjayouni nationalist, someone who devoted great attention and energy to a town he adored but found difficult to fathom. He visited far more than most of the town’s expatriates. With Hikmat, he was elected to the town council, and in the aftermath of the war in 2006, he searched for ways to revive Marjayoun, from starting a campaign of solidarity with neighboring villages more damaged in the war to the renewal of a movie theater, the founding of a farmers’ market on Fridays, and the reopening in the Saha of the Akkawi Restaurant. The war, he declared in a letter to the less enthusiastic, was an opportunity.
He wrote: “I suggest we take these events as a challenge to our will: to assert our determination to demonstrate that Jedeidet is not ‘withering away,’ but very much alive, and able to surmount our problems. It is now our opportunity to re-assert Jedeidet’s historical role as the center of our area.”
He seemed to speak with authority about anything, and he had done everything.
“You lived a Levantine life,” I told him, “that you couldn’t live today.” Cecil was old and his movements were slow, but I could see him slightly turn his head, his eyes flashing a hint of acknowledgment and agreement. He did not agree all that often; at his age, he said, he could say what he wanted. But I could tell the comment struck him. His was a Levantine passage, and the Levant, his Levant, no longer existed. “This is a society which has now vanished,” he said. “Those whispers of the Ottoman Empire have finally expired everywhere.”
The range of Cecil’s career and interests was Levantine; his family seems almost a portrait of its qualities. And the Houranis, scattered around the globe, shared a culture that transcended borders and simple, often artificial, notions of a nationality. They were not an anomaly: Families of earlier days often had branches in Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, and Palestine, when they were not yet countries but shared a borderless, sophisticated culture.
I asked Cecil if he missed those days. He shrugged, not one to reminisce. They lingered. All the might of Europe’s imperial powers could not completely extinguish the connections, routes, and trajectories of the Ottoman era. But generations had passed. Cecil told me he still had a few friends who might be called Levantine, dispersed as they were.
“But these families are fast disappearing,” he said.
“I try not to regret the past,” he added, stubbornly. “The past is past.”
We finished lunch and took inside what was left of the food and arak. Next Cecil wanted to show me more of the garden, itself an expression of older values. With a barely perceptible enthusiasm, he grabbed his cane and we began slowly walking. As I looked around, I marveled at the garden’s size, sprawling past what the eye could see, step after step of terraced land bringing an even greater sense of distance. There were figs, pomegranates, and olives, five or six of them planted by him, thirty-five planted by his grandmother from Ibl al-Saqi, Um Fadlo, who died in 1926 at the age of ninety-nine. The trees themselves represented more than a century.
Cecil’s gardener, Ali, picked the olives and kept half the harvest. “He’s quite happy,” he said. Orange trees abounded, of so many varieties I lost track, their fruit ripening in the winter—Valencias, navels, and mughrabis, resembling blood oranges. Lemons, too. We walked on, and he navigated the buckling stones with his cane, dressed in his tweed jacket, gray pants, and black leather shoes. “Imagine,” he said. “Someone who has grown up in England to have a garden with lemons.” He laughed, a low chuckle.
Along the wall stood enormous cactuses, the branches so old that their smooth green textures had been replaced by the hard, desiccated bark of ancient trees. A Palestinian friend had told me that the same sort of cactus served as reminders of some of the hundreds of Palestinian villages that Israel had destroyed in the 1948 war and after. Those villages had been bulldozed, their names erased from the map, and their memories consigned to family histories. But the cactus roots ran deep, and year after year, generations after the exile of their caretakers, they would reappear, summoning long-lost fields, gardens, and homes. They were remnants of dispossession, testimonies to survival, just as Cecil’s trees and flowers were statements of grace and cultivation in the midst of turmoil.
When we returned to his house, Cecil brought out a piece of darabzin, or iron railing, the kind that girds balconies and windows. Its black paint was worn away, and a few joints had pried apart, bending the rods like a hanger. It was still intact, though, and given its age, it remained in remarkable shape. In an understated way, almost as an afterthought, Cecil mentioned that Kalim Qurban had given it to him as a gift in the late 1970s. I shook my head, trying to recall the name. Finally, smiling, I nodded. Decades ago, Kalim Qurban had bought the house from Isber’s brother Rashid, whose home adjoined his, sharing a wall. They had been neighbors.
The darabzin had come from Rashid’s house, and its design was identical to the balustrade that still hung precariously off the balconies at Isber’s house. Cecil wanted me to have it.
“This is my present to your forefathers,” he said.
There was little emotion in February when Nabeeh and his sister Nabiha left. Bahija put in his pocket gold coins she had taken down from the attic, adding to the money stashed in a sack, tied tightly with string, that Isber had already given him. Isber spoke to the driver of the horse and buggy, urging him to be careful.
Riding in a horse and buggy as a boy, Nabeeh had thought he stood atop the world. Now, as the horse plodded down the dirt road, brother and sister looked back at the house’s cream-colored stone and green shutters. Nabeeh would not see the house again for more than ten years. For Nabiha, it would be forty years.
Three days later, they were in Beirut, and on February 18, they left the port in a ship named the Lotus for Marseilles. There, they trekked the same way other Lebanese had, riding the train to Le Havre, their port to America. They boarded another ship, the 580-foot French steamer and veteran of World War I named La Savoie, for New York. Nabeeh and Nabiha were numbers 29 and 30 on the ship’s manifest.
On the deck, many of the passengers seasick, Nabiha played w
ith her first cousin Edna Abla, the only two girls to make the trip. Nabeeh sat with the men, twenty-two of them in all, bound for America. In three weeks, they arrived. On March 24, 1920, a date Nabeeh would recall effortlessly from that moment on, he disembarked in New York.
When the ship had passed the Statue of Liberty, her arm hoisted confidently, her torch, crown, and stola still colored a smoky copper that had yet to give way to its green patina, Nabeeh, scion of the Samara family and exile of Marjayoun, uttered words he would forever remember.
“This is God’s country. This is home.”
Returning after lunch to Isber’s house, I was greeted by disorder as far as the eye could see, and probably farther: the indentation of the corners or closets was enough to send me to the nearest bottle of arak. The sunlight, rarely an ally, revealed unbelievable accumulations of dust which, if inhaled, seemed capable of creating serious lung damage, leading to protracted hospitalizations and legal actions involving aggrieved family members and packs of attorneys summoned by 800 numbers. I winced as I surveyed the odd assortment of things that would, one day soon, have to be packed off: window frames, a white marble sink, some metal shutters, piles of cedar planks, scraps of corrugated iron, and pieces of plastic as jagged as broken glass. A pile of sticks had mysteriously appeared, suggesting the possibility of future campfires gone out of control.
A huge rock lodged in the corner of the kitchen summed up all my frustration. Since August, Abu Jean had promised to remove it.
“Tomorrow,” he told me each day.
Hassles aside, the house at certain moments held out promise. The red clay shingles now descended over part of the roof that, for eighty years, had no more than a flat concrete ceiling. George’s stone wall behind the house neared its completion, rising six rows and more and showing no signs of arak-induced swaying. Inspired, he had also cleaned the stone of the house’s façade and etched out the old mortar, some of it crumbling like drought-stricken soil. But then there was the tile. After word of the priest’s anger at Labib Haddad—even under the threat of a vengeful God’s wrath, Labib had yet to finish the church—I knew we had to find another tile layer if we were ever to start downstairs. The next day, Abu Jean, always the team player, produced Malik Nicola Jawish, taxi driver, hunter, butcher, fisherman, refugee, enthusiast of the water pipe, and maalim of tile, plumbing, heating, and air conditioning.
“The one who knows workmanship owns the castle,” Malik told me. Or, less literally, wherever you throw him, he’ll land on his feet. The proverb captured the man, and that was the best description of Malik—a man. It was as if his every sentence—mundane, peripheral, incisive—was rendered with an exclamation point. “I don’t lie! I say four o’clock, and I’m there at four o’clock!” he thundered. “There are a lot of people in this work who have stopped, given up. Twenty-eight years ago until today, I have not stopped working for one day. Not a single day! I work for the best people. First of all, I’m honest, and my work is proper. That’s the thing! That’s the thing!”
After Malik finished a pattern of four interlocking tiles, he swept them with a frayed hand broom. “The most important thing is the tiles’ cleanliness,” he said. Cleanliness, it seemed, was part of the code of a maalim. Everything had to be kept in perfect condition, with smooth edges and sharp angles. Corners were always precise, lines accurate. This part of the project ran with efficiency. Abu Jean and I carried in the tile, Malik’s assistant mixed and brought the cement. Malik barreled forward like a steam engine, row after row.
“You’re an artist, Malik,” I told him, and as he grunted in approval, I heard, in some corner of my brain, an imp of an observer silently mouthing the words I am honest, too.
At the end of one fairly productive day, a board propped against the entrance by Abu Jean fell and I looked inside at the progress of the room now revealed: The tile was laid, and it looked great. I stood at another entrance, for another perspective.
As I stared at the Cave, I had the same feeling of descending toward the Litani River, overwhelmed by the valley’s view. I still saw sand everywhere; cracked tiles were stacked in two piles in the corner. Broken pieces lay here and there, their shapes indeterminate, since we had electricity but no lights. But the house—at least a very small part of it—finally approached the unique place that it would become. I felt a sense of triumph, albeit small.
There was one concern: It had taken us four months to finish one room.
Soon after, I heard from a friend that Labib had found out Malik was finishing the tile. He was angry, apparently inflamed with the kind of resentment that comes from betrayal. “He fucks ants and milks them,” Labib had said of me.
These charges had not been leveled at me before.
11. Khairalla’s Oud
On a foggy night in December, I sat with a friend at a bar in Ibl al-Saqi, snacking on peanuts, slices of red apple, and pumpkin seeds. We were hovering near an ujaa that was burning jift, crushed olive pits, though the flames felt Sisyphean in their struggle with the cold outside. In the corner, the television went on, as it always seemed to, blaring agitprop and trash talk. I heard only snippets, words that said impasse—mentioned were the United States, Syria, Iran, and Israel, crises and elections. Rumors somersaulted across the country. There was talk of protesters preparing to fire on police and soldiers; of a stalemate lasting months, maybe longer; of the possibility of civil strife. Leaders in Beirut speculated that a civil war had already begun. That day, a parliamentary session called to choose a president was delayed for the seventh time. The office had been unfilled for months, an absence paralyzing the state. The French foreign minister assured everyone that a deal was within reach. But all knew that any agreement remained far away.
Soon the word ightiyal joined the drumbeat. Assassination, it meant. Dead was a general, François al-Hajj, killed by a remote-controlled car bomb that ripped through a busy street overlooking Beirut. Broken glass sprinkled across the pavement caught the morning sun. To the culprits, shrouded in anonymity, killing was part of the country’s political calculus, the cheapest way to reach the audience. So that night in December, as on so many others, the voices thundered on and on.
For so long, Lebanon had wrestled with the rudimentary questions of identity: whether its inhabitants were Arabs first or Lebanese above all, whether they belonged to East or West, whether they were bound to a destiny that stretched far beyond its borders—the Muslim world, for instance—or were part of a legacy as particular as the history of ancient Phoenicia. A generation or so ago, there was left and right, atheist and devout, radical and reformist, unreconstructed Maoist and millenarian Salafist, sometimes sharing a table along Hamra Street in Beirut. All this combustibility ended in civil war in 1975, though for a brief moment that preceded it, Lebanon, always terribly small, had become a grander stage for ideas and struggles. For years, it was sanctuary to Arab dissidents, Palestinian exiles, and Lebanese of all sects and tendencies, who in turn delivered a cadence to Arab politics in an environment that, while ridden with strife, oppression, and poverty, was relatively free and unencumbered.
These days, grander struggles had given way to narrow ones, and Lebanon had become much smaller than it ever was. Now it stood mired in the confrontation that began after the 2006 war. The conflict never really changed, so much about it static, except the sense that it always seemed to be hurtling toward some precipice. Tired clichés reappeared again and again, month after month, in a discourse too inflexible for the inclusion of possibilities not already tiresomely rehearsed. And besides the pettiness, it all seemed a sad confirmation of Lebanon’s loss of intellectual boldness. Only the most devout were imbued with any sense of real politics, if politics is to mean changing societies and the political orders they have given rise to. Lost these days was any notion of collective action. Bonding around principles or ideals seemed a kind of romantic memory, the stuff of archived posters with their dated haircuts, images of Kalashnikovs, and clarion anthems that seemed nostalgic
yet relevant. Even as tectonic shifts seemed to rumble in the Arab world around it, an imagined spring after the longest of winters, Lebanon had little notion of belonging to heal or inspire, save religion and its burden of the sacred. Dialogue became weakness, and empathy the stuff of craven apologists. There was no debate in fundamentalisms, save the squabble over trivia or abstractions until the guns moved in. All too often, as on this night in December, we were left with spectacle.
Tension gripped a little tighter as the year ended, and though swaths of the country were being rebuilt after the losses of the 2006 war, the hammers, bulldozers, saws, and drills of the construction in progress seemed almost drowned out by the cynical, dramatically extolled invective of sectarian leaders. These old warhorses knew their parasitic relevance depended on conflict, which of course concealed the real questions. On television, a Christian-owned station introduced broadcasts with the ominous phrase “the silence before the storm.” That sense of premonition, of things still reluctant to reveal themselves, was familiar now and then.
In 1911, nine years before Nabeeh and Nabiha Samara left Lebanon, Ayyash Shadid died, leaving his wife, Shawaqa, and their children in a simple stone house with a mud roof near the Serail. The oldest child, Miqbal, had departed Marjayoun some years before all the others. He fled, like so many, because his mother could not bear to see him die for the Ottomans on a faraway battlefield, be it the arid climes of the Sahara or the plains of Thrace, in the conflicts of a fading empire. Miqbal escaped the draft, but his mother lived in fear that her second-oldest son, Abdullah (who would become my grandfather and was then nearing eighteen), would not. Shawaqa insisted that Abdullah act quickly and join his brother in America.
House of Stone Page 16