Less than a decade after Miqbal’s departure, Abdullah followed, taking his sister Adeeba with him. Carried by donkey, they fumbled across deep valleys bisected by the Litani River, then trekked for days over the mountains before reaching Beirut, where they had barely enough money to buy transit aboard a ship. In France, they found passage on the Latso, which arrived on October 1, 1911, in Boston, where one charitable group declared that “next to the Chinese, who can never in any real sense be American, they, the Syrians, are the most foreign of all foreigners.”
In time, Abdullah would change his name to Albert, and his signature on the legal document was shaky and unsure. His penmanship was like a second-grader’s, the scrawl in a language that he managed to master as an adult, more out of pride than necessity.
After Abdullah got settled in America, both he and Miqbal sent money home to Shawaqa, but during the long years of World War I the mail was interrupted. When at last it resumed, a letter arrived. “To the wife of Ayyash Shadid,” it read, in handwriting Shawaqa recognized, all these years later, as Miqbal’s. “If she’s not alive, then one of her children. If her children are not living, then one of their relatives.” In the package to which the letter was attached, Miqbal had sent clothes and money, neither of which Shawaqa and her children had much of. Make sure to buy candy for the youngest of the children, ten-year-old Nabeeha, he instructed.
At the time, Bedouins, defying French authority, were raiding villages in the Hula Valley and along the Palestinian frontier. They also made repeated raids on Marjayoun, torching the Serail, charring its cream stone, papers fluttering out its windows like confetti at a parade. The raiders eventually reached the Shadids’ road. Ayyash’s house was burned. Gone were the clothes Miqbal had sent; the remains were strewn along the road or piled in charred, coarse clumps in the yard. The brigands shattered jars of food and oil on the rocks, leaving shards of pottery tucked in the grass and encrusted in dirt.
In the wake of the upheaval, the family—which consisted of Shawaqa, her daughters Najiba and Nabeeha, and her son Hana—decided to leave, joining the others in America. Miqbal sent them $1,000, and they became part of one of the largest groups to leave Marjayoun. For three days, they walked to Beirut. Leading them was the Reverend Shukrallah Shadid.
In Beirut, they took the Red Star Line, the children qualifying for half fare in steerage, where one of them would recall that they traveled “like cattle.” Twelve days later, they were in Marseilles, where they stayed a few weeks, trying to find a ship to take them to America. Booking passage in the bottom deck of the LeBlanc, they soon headed for New York City.
On October 5, 1920, his will in hand, Shukrallah Shadid arrived with his family and the others in Oklahoma City, their train pulling into the Santa Fe station. “America is a new country, a free country,” the priest told a sixteen-year-old nephew, who would remember his words long after. “You can be a force for either good or evil, as you choose.”
“They say Lebanon is the Switzerland of the Middle East,” Dr. Khairalla’s wife, Ivanka, told me later when I stopped in at their house. She said it with a hint of sarcasm, although her words were more tender than bitter. “And Cecil says Marjayoun is the queen of Lebanon.” All three of us laughed, though Dr. Khairalla was perhaps a bit embarrassed at the words about his friend. He turned to the window for a glance at the winter light, unusually sunny. Ivanka was decorating their Christmas tree, a splash of color in a house shaded in browns.
Dr. Khairalla was gaunter and paler than when I had seen him last. There was a fatigue about him, too. I did not know him before he had cancer, but friends had told me he was far more outgoing and exuberant, generous with a laugh. I might not have recognized that man. To me, he always seemed meditative, drawing on a weary dignity.
I spent more and more time with him and had promised to come to his basement workshop, where he was building a violin, the instrument his wife had played as a young woman in Bulgaria. After coffee on this December day, we descended the stairs to his shop. On the wall, four lines of poetry were written in Arabic:
The oud’s yearning voice sounds like a penitent’s grief.
Together, people long for it.
Perched on it, a bird warbles,
Longing for the branch that was once its tree.
Shelves were crowded with dish after plastic dish filled with nails, drill bits, tape, and glue. Paper templates, models for his musical instruments, were spread across the floor, mingled with scraps of wood, kindling for heating down here. On the table, over the workbench, and against the walls, the models were strewn. The workbench, he said, pointing at it, was more than a hundred years old, and its scars guaranteed that.
Five or so ouds hung from the ceiling, along with four dangling bouzoukis. A finished oud leaned against the wall. Since I heard it as a boy, the oud has moved me. No instrument evokes such soulfulness as the pear-shaped oud. The sounds of its strings, brittle but rounded, suggest the accompaniment to a lament. By legend, the instrument dates to the start of history, when it was invented by Lamech, the sixth grandson of Adam. Lamech’s only child died at just five, and the father used parts of his son’s skeleton as the model to build the instrument that could convey his grief. Weeping, he played it until he went blind.
Dr. Khairalla built these instruments even better than he played them. How long did it take him to complete one oud? I kept asking. He didn’t measure the time, he kept saying. It was a hobby; the harvest, not the bounty, was what mattered. “Sometimes one year, sometimes one month, sometimes two months.” His answers were not vague or dismissive. If anything, they were modest and quietly precise.
The instruments were the doctor’s passion. Fashioned in a medley of wood and glue and varnish, their shades were determined by the fir, mulberry, basswood, lemon, or other local timber he used. His wood of choice was fir, scraps of which he had collected over the years from the backs of old wardrobes. Each of the beloved instruments bore a nameplate in Arabic: Made by Dr. Khairalla Mady, Marjayoun, Lebanon.
Dr. Khairalla showed me a two-stringed bouzouki beautiful even by his standards. Its lower part was chiseled from a single piece of wood. “This takes time,” he said, pointing out what he considered his masterpiece, an oud whose rounded bottom was crafted entirely of matchsticks, thousands arrayed in the most stringent of longitudes. He had worked on it at night, over two or three months, “during the first war in Iraq.”
Time, for the doctor, was often refracted through traumas: He became a doctor before the civil war, returning to Marjayoun as it raged. He began at the Marjayoun Hospital during the Israeli occupation, and he left it after the occupation ended. He had a plan, but thinking everything out beforehand doesn’t work with wood, where craft is guided by intuition. Dr. Khairalla never apprenticed as a maker of instruments. He relied on inspiration.
“What you see now is what I imagine,” he said, not the sort to elaborate much.
When a woman asked him to sell her one of his bouzoukis, so that she could give it as a gift to her son in the Persian Gulf, she offered a thousand dollars.
“If you pay me ten thousand, I will not do it,” he told her.
As we walked upstairs, I saw more instruments crowded on a bench in the stairwell—nine in all, I think. Five were ouds, and he pulled them gingerly forward to reveal a peculiar bouzouki made of three gourds. Its wild, unkempt look suggested the adventurous. He stared at it as if he had only just noticed it. “Interesting,” he said. “During the summer, I’ll make something here to collect all of these.”
He cradled that feral bouzouki, tuning it for a few minutes, then strummed a song of passion. It belonged to Fairuz, a Lebanese diva, and he sung these words:
O Laure, your love seared the heart
After I had given you my love and affection.
Remember the fields of youth
And the pledge we made there to stay loyal . . .
He whistled the tune, still strumming, then set the bouzouki down.
&n
bsp; “Next summer,” he said again, “I’ll find a place for it,” and the tone of his whistling became almost plaintive, like a goodbye.
The Shadids who left on the Red Star Line were Isber’s neighbors, their house a five-minute walk past the Gholmias and other Samaras. As children, Nabeeha and Najiba had played with Isber’s daughter Raeefa, and Isber was reluctantly, grudgingly assured that they were making the same journey that his two eldest children already had. Perhaps Raeefa could go as well, Isber thought.
Just twelve, Raeefa was too young to have the same conversation with her father that her brother Nabeeh had. This time Isber would decide, and as he sat with Bahija, whispering, exchanging as few words as possible, they pondered whether or not she should leave. Raeefa, whose name means kind and compassionate, was the oldest still in the house, but vulnerable. Destined to be small as an adult, she was nevertheless tall for her years, making her look older. This worried Isber; she was no longer a child who might pass untroubled or untouched in the countryside. But Isber could not send Raeefa off by herself, whatever happened in the town. She was just too young. He would try to cheat death again, he thought, as he had in the Houran, as he had with the Ottoman draft, and as he had with World War I. He would wait.
His period of indecision proved brief. One day, his sister Raheeja visited, joining him as he sat smoking on his balcony above the liwan. Five years older than Isber, Raheeja was married to a relative of his wife’s, Mikhail Abla. She had come to say they were leaving to join their children in America. Their daughter Edna had traveled with Nabeeh and Nabiha. Their son Ellis was already there, settling in Oklahoma.
Could they take Raeefa with them? Isber asked.
In Marjayoun, in Isber’s house, Raeefa had been raised, in the Ottoman style, to marry a gentleman of distinction and take her place in the quiet of women’s lives. But this would not be her fate. She was leaving. Later, Raeefa’s passage through Isber’s rooms must have seemed only days or hours to the older woman whom I saw in Kodak shots.
What did Raeefa remember from that stretch of time called home, when there was, in her father’s house, the feeling of no harm possible, the sense that nothing could touch her? Did she remember flashes of faces, the embroidered dresses stitched by her mother, the shine of everything Bahija could buff or polish, the balcony where her father ruminated through nights of fires blazing on the mountains? Eddies of smoke from his cigarettes curled and drifted by day into the clear air of the valley where the Litani River released its currents.
From her window on the morning she was to go off to America, Raeefa might have looked out, noticed the fine buggy, almost certainly shiny, that her father had hired to carry her away from him forever. But she had no idea she would ride away that day. She was just twelve. The buggy was the last gift her father could offer.
Whatever Isber said to his daughter on the day of her departure, I will wager that he said it not with words, but with that shiny ride, a message she might not have heard on a day of things fast and barely taken in. Such a surprise it must have been to learn that she had slept her last night in her parents’ house. Such a shift in life on a morning that started out safe.
Whatever it was that Bahija said to her daughter, I would wager she said it with things stitched and embroidered, soft or warm, for a future she had no way to imagine. What mother could explain or acknowledge to herself that these things, so beautifully laundered and folded, would likely be the last of her things to carry her touch?
A few days after my visit to the basement workshop, I joined Dr. Khairalla in his kitchen. He had offered to teach me how to make awarma, cooked mutton mixed with the preservative of melted fat and salt. Awarma is a Turkish word, he told me, and the dish was prepared before winter, when neither butchers nor meat was available, especially in more remote locales like Marjayoun. Even without a refrigerator, the dish can last for months. Often it is cooked with eggs or kishk, a powdery cereal of cracked wheat known as burghul that is fermented with milk and yogurt and prepared in the fall after the wheat is harvested. It is a centuries-old tradition. “Nowadays,” the doctor told me, “it’s a delicacy.”
Dr. Khairalla unsheathed a knife whose oak handle he had crafted. The blade came from a garage lever, a hint of ingenuity that I could tell made him proud.
The three kilograms of meat, a glistening red, were the shade of cooked beets. He dumped the sheep’s fat into a pot, which Ivanka thought was the wrong size. She was assertive and ironic, and he was still charmed by her, finding humor in her needling. Not enough, though, to heed her advice. “He thinks everything he does is perfect, but there’s nothing perfect. There’s no perfection except God,” she said, smiling.
“Now we start,” he announced, and ignited the flame of the stove.
“I think there will be war in the region,” he said abruptly, as the fat heated. Perched on a nearby window, his cats, Pussy and Pokhto (Bulgarian for a small bushy beard), nibbled on meat scraps. “It’s very depressing. We manage to finish with one war, and we always end up starting another.” There was no pity in his voice. His words were sincere, spoken by someone whose life had been shaped by war and the flight from it.
Ivanka interrupted. “It will take a little while still,” she said, her voice certain. “That’s my experience with war. The weather has to get a little warmer first.”
“I’m not a fanatic Christian. I don’t go to church. I respect all religions,” he said, as if about to offer an unpleasant diagnosis. “But from what I see now, in thirty years, there won’t be any Christians left here.”
The television was on. The news bar scrolled with reports of more clashes between rival factions in Beirut. I was so tired of the anticipation, the dread of yet another conflict.
“It’s not in our hands to stop it,” Dr. Khairalla told me.
The fat had begun to melt. Dr. Khairalla took a spoon of it and put it in a wire mesh strainer placed over another pot, then pressed until the liquefied fat dripped into the pot. The smell was pungent, meaty, but staler, a bit distasteful.
He told me an Arabic maxim: “The poet can do what others can’t.” It was a gesture to the place that poets had in the culture of Arabs, as dissidents and polemicists, foretellers and historians, provocateurs and hagiographers. To Dr. Khairalla, it was also an insight into the arbitrary. Those with power set their own rules, he said, be it war or peace, and the powerless, with no poetic license, must make do.
“There will always be wars in Lebanon,” the doctor said, looking down at the fat in the pot. “If you read history here, we’ve always had wars. And we may not have peace from now until eternity. I was born in war, and I grew up in war, and my children did, too.”
Two days after the Israelis arrived in Marjayoun in 2006, Dr. Khairalla fled in a convoy of hundreds of vehicles, carrying as many as three thousand people. By afternoon they were crawling along a road that had been plowed for four weeks by Israeli fire. At Hasbaya, the United Nations forces ended their escort, unauthorized to go farther. Already disorganized, the convoy, in time, split up, clumps of cars moving through the Bekaa Valley toward Beirut. Confusion melted into fear. Then disaster struck.
At 10 P.M., the sky lit with a moon almost full, a flat boom resonated as the smaller convoy meandered up a slope near Kefraya, a town celebrated for its wine in more peaceful times. Pandemonium erupted, as the second car in the procession exploded in flames. Israeli forces had fired a dozen missiles at the defenseless convoy. Seven people were killed, two of them from Marjayoun—Elie Salameh, the baker, and Colett Rashed, the wife of a mukhtar. The next day, the Israeli military said the column was attacked because of suspicions—later acknowledged as baseless—that the cars were smuggling arms for Hezbollah fighters. Never, it said, was the convoy authorized to leave Marjayoun, although the United Nations denied this. Dr. Khairalla saw only malice in an attack more than thirty miles from the front line.
“This is war,” he said again.
It was 1920—the Year of the Twenty,
it was called. No one in Marjayoun would ever have imagined what had transpired. Perhaps Isber and Bahija believed their daughter could or would forget them. Maybe that was what they hoped for her.
In his daughter’s bag, Isber put the sack, tied even more tightly than Nabeeh’s, filled with the gold pieces he still had from selling wheat in the Houran during the war. Bahija gave her yet more gold jewelry, knowing that she could sell it any time. “Take care of yourself,” they said to her, over and over.
She could not speak or say goodbye. She cried, but could not say the words she felt to her parents. She was leaving home, the olive trees that she had played near, the fig tree that she had eaten from, the stone wall that she had climbed.
Bahija said, “God be with you.” She repeated it one last time as the horse and buggy departed the house with the olive trees, carrying her daughter, the girl who would become my grandmother. “God be with you.”
So many had said goodbye to Lebanon and Marjayoun by this day in 1920. Who would notice that Raeefa Samara, attempting not to show her feelings, found herself, though tall for a twelve-year-old, not up to the attempt. As the buggy she shared with her aunt and uncle pulled away from her parents, as Raeefa left the home of Isber and Bahija for perhaps the last time, the young girl proved herself unpracticed at composure. No glance at Aunt Raheeja or Uncle Mikhail was necessary to see their discomfort as they left Marjayoun for, first, Beirut, then Marseilles, and then America. But their sternness was not unpredictable. Emotional displays unsettled the world. Restraint, like proper clothing, concealed and silenced vanity. Eyes of girls were not to gaze directly, but to take in, briefly, what was expected.
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