Her aunt and uncle were not leaving children behind, but joining them, already in Oklahoma and doing well. And so the buggy plodded toward Qlayaa, a string of mud huts along the ridge of a hill shared with Marjayoun. As that village drifted off, the road bent three times, at its steepest elevation, then flattened as it descended toward the Litani River. Then they saw Beaufort Castle, known in Arabic as Shaqeef. A Crusader fort perched 2,100 feet above the sea, it sat improbably at the valley’s summit. Behind Raeefa was Saint Elijah’s, hugging a rock outcropping that looked as though a flood had swept away everything beneath it. The road tilted and turned, sliding down the valley and its sides of boulders stacked one on top of the other, until they reached the Khardali Bridge. An ancient frontier beneath Beaufort, it opened to a majestic view of the valley, as beautiful as it was lonely, hardly an inhabitant along its irrigated fields of cantaloupe, watermelon, carrots, and corn.
Saint Elijah’s was still visible, like a sentinel. So was Mount Hermon and the frontier of Palestine, the Houran, and Syria beyond it. But Marjayoun had receded behind the hillside. Ahead was Beirut.
Hours passed and Raeefa was quiet, almost certainly scared as she sat next to her aunt Raheeja. The air became cooler as the horse and buggy climbed, the sun casting shadows across the valley, bordered by cliffs that were rounded by time.
The next day, as they left Jezzine, her aunt and uncle pointed out the town’s waterfall. Months until winter, it was no more than a stream. Out of respect for her elders, Raeefa smiled, but was unimpressed. From the town, the road evened out, gradually descending to the sea. The weather became warmer. Soon after Jezzine, Raeefa saw it for the first time—the blue waters of the Mediterranean Sea, tinged with green, almost like a mirage as a mist danced over it. Nothing like a river, like the Litani she knew, it seemed endless. This was beauty, like a dream. She sat staring at it, her eyes wide, as the buggy made its way through Sidon, along the coast and on to Beirut.
12. Citadels
Nature still dictated much of life in Marjayoun. Even more so in winter. Every day a ramshackle car meandered through the streets with a loudspeaker mounted on its roof. “Aluminum, iron, car batteries for sale!” the doleful voice wailed, never wavering from its flat monotone, as it passed the desiccated fruit on pomegranate trees that lined the road. “Aluminum, iron for sale!” Everything around the car was gray, bathed in fog. Farther away, storms rolled in from the Mediterranean coast and on past Jabal Amil. Thunder rumbled through the valley, and then the rains would begin. Water poured through the bedraggled streets, filling every crevice, crack, and pothole.
The availability of electricity dictated everything, regulating the day—when the small, satellite-shaped electric heater that I called the Syrian radar functioned, when the three of five working bulbs dangling on a wire from the ceiling cast light, when the water heater scorched so aggressively that steam hissed through the shower head, when the mini-refrigerator kept what little was inside cool—pickles, yogurt, cheese, tomatoes, along with the fruit of the winter, oranges and clementines. (The dearth of electricity irritated everyone. “Two billion dollars in Iraq, and the Americans lit the place,” Hikmat told me. “A lot more was spent here, and there’s still no electricity in Lebanon?” I thought: You know it’s bad when the Iraq of 2007 becomes the standard by which people measure progress.)
At night I hunched up near the ujaa, the cast-iron heater that had already scalded my finger, branded my wrist, and singed the sleeve of my sweater. It burned on diesel, which I left on the porch in a blue plastic jerry can. When the heater was low, I grabbed an old copy of the Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar and spread it on the ground. Then I gingerly filled the tank of the ujaa from the jerry can, which was left over from the war in 2006, when I had to carry my own gasoline for my car. For more than a year, the can had sat empty in the back, along with another blue tank and a bigger one, in a dreary olive green, a tattered piece of plastic under its red cap to prevent spilling. Now the tank had a use again. Clumsily, inevitably, when I poured fuel into the ujaa, some dripped onto the red Egyptian carpet I had received as a gift in Cairo for my thirtieth birthday, ten years back.
I had returned in January after a couple of weeks in the States, and Abu Jean was at the house to greet me when I trudged through the mud and made my way inside the windswept first floor I had naïvely hoped would be ready for occupancy a month before. More bluff than ire, Abu Jean began with a question.
Why had I not brought him anything from America?
“He brought himself,” Toama told him, earning a smile.
Everyone was at the house. Emad Deeba, the electrician, sheathed in overalls, was working on the wiring, embedding some of it in the mortar between stones. Ramzi al-Bahri, charged with the completion of the false ceiling, fastened an aluminum carcass to the concrete roof. Toama, my neighbor and a jack of all trades—from cleaning the edges of tiles to painting the darabzin, or iron railing, black—was working, as usual. George Jaradi was with him. Setting hope against experience, I was inspired. Even the code of the maalim could not sway me.
Maalim, the Arabic word for expert or master, was perhaps uttered more than any other at the warshe. It was used to demonstrate pride, to convey respect, to intimidate, to end an argument, to charge more, to justify delays, and to rebuff criticism. It was both feather and club, meant to tempt and to bludgeon. “Kiss ukhtak, wahid maalim. Maalim, maalim, maalim,” Hikmat put it to me, perhaps a little uncharitably. “Fuck them. All I hear is maalim, maalim, maalim.”
“I’m a maalim,” any one of them would usually say to me when I questioned a decision. “I understand,” I would answer, argue in vain a little more, then, once I grasped the stony facial expression, simply give up. Who was I to question a maalim? I suspect the look would have been no different had I asked to sleep with his wife.
“I’m a maalim,” Abu Jean told me as we stood staring at a pillar of crumbling concrete. The pillar’s sudden obsolescence was a stroke of rare genius on the part of Abu Jean. His answer to any problem—a water leak, a crack, a crevice, a hole in the wall, roof, or floor—was invariably, “Pour cement!” And he would. On one occasion, though, he poured cement into a new bridge that buttressed the ceiling, meaning that we could remove the pillar. With it gone, the arches would assume a graceful symmetry along the entrance, an elegance that was impossible with the crumbling, honeycombed pillar in place. Abu Jean alone understood that. “The arch is like a beautiful woman,” he told me, drawing his hand out as if tracing the lines of an elephant’s trunk dangling from his face, “with this huge, ugly nose.”
He promised to remove it. “Tomorrow,” he told me.
Abu Jean was a source of fascination for me, even enthrallment. Had he simply been incompetent, I would have understood. But he only rarely was. More often, he procrastinated, offered excuses, served as his own notion of a native informant, and exhibited the most remarkable streak of passive-aggressiveness that I had encountered. My asking whether he had phoned someone who didn’t show up often unleashed a philosophical diatribe. There was no point in trying to hurry them along. There was no reason to get frustrated. There was no justification for getting angry. The work would eventually get done, Abu Jean explained, whatever I did. Besides, the maalimeen would work when they wanted to work, whatever Abu Jean might do.
I usually stayed quiet through all this, smoldering, growing more resentful and more eager for him to leave for the day. Stay calm, I counseled myself. There was nothing menacing about Abu Jean, after all, despite his being breathtakingly stingy and unnecessarily rude to Abu Jassim and the other Syrian workers.
The other maalimeen at the house seemed to like Abu Jean, though their respect was sparing, then grudging.
When the rain stopped for a few days, I sat outside with George Jaradi, Toama, and Toama’s wife, Thanaya. I started apologizing to George for lighting a cigarette in front of him. Always cheerful, he would have none of it. “Sit! Sit! Don’t worry, Anthony.” George used to smoke tw
o packs a day, he told me. After a recent health scare, however, he quit. The same went for coffee. At first, George declared that he used to drink forty cups a day. When I looked at him in disbelief, he changed his estimate to twenty or twenty-five. Either way, he was now down to a cup or two a day. “George liked coffee with cigarettes. They go with each other, like Abu Jean and the house. Now George doesn’t drink coffee, so George doesn’t smoke.”
It was just after 1 P.M., and Abu Jean was heading home.
“Bye,” Abu Jean said curtly, trudging down the driveway, dressed for a wedding, a funeral, or a visit to Hikmat’s, the occasions that prompted his Sunday best.
“It’s still early, Abu Jean,” Toama yelled at him.
“I’m going to eat lunch,” Abu Jean replied.
“But you ate lunch yesterday!” Toama said.
That ignited Abu Jean’s customary string of expletives—always disconcerting, since they came from someone my grandfather’s age. He shouted, “Motherfucker, brother of a whore!”
George soon joined in. “Why so angry, Abu Jean? You look like a groom today! Where’s the bride?”
Wandering in a wintry silence, Abu Jean didn’t hear him.
That jovial goodwill seemed to start fraying in the ensuing days of winter. Abu Aajeh, Mr. Loudmouth, Abu Jean had called George for weeks, often the retort to anything Abu Jean heard—or didn’t hear—George say. Now Abu Jean added another putdown. He said, “His ass is jiggly.” Like so much Jell-O, it meant—or, less literally, that George was lazy.
After that, George grew less charitable. He had been sandblasting the stone walls upstairs. Finished, he went into the yard and turned the blower on himself, as if he was taking a shower. Clouds of dust billowed from his pinkish red shirt, the same sweater he always wore, and his jeans. He turned around, propped his leg up like a urinating dog, and in another performance, scrubbed his underarms. The sand gave way cartoonishly—from his ears and nose, from his eyebrows and mustache, from his hair and arms. He stomped the sand off his shoes.
From there, we went to Toama’s house and drank coffee next to a wood-burning ujaa. George finished his recital declaratively. “George is going to put a big portrait of Abu Jean above the entrance of your house, Anthony.” On a tattered couch, Toama’s daughter was doing her schoolwork, afflicted by that age of adolescence so awkward that she was reluctant to make eye contact. Thanaya was in the kitchen, dispatching the scent of onions throughout the house. George and I sipped yet more coffee, calling into question his abstinence, and he declared to me that he was worried.
“There is no time to waste, Anthony,” he said, turning serious. “If you stick with Abu Jean, it’s going to be two years before you finish.”
I nodded in grudging acknowledgment. “I know, I know,” I told him.
“Abu Jean simply wants money,” George went on, not really listening to me. “To get more money, he needs the work to last longer.” He paused. “But don’t tell Abu Jean that George said that.”
He pointed inside the house. Behind a wall, around the corner from another, over a pile of sand and in front of the arch, the column I had been trying to get removed was still standing. After all these weeks, it was still there, taunting me, that huge, ugly nose obscuring one of the house’s most elegant features. “Fouad has told Abu Jean to take the column out for two months. Two months! If he told George to do it, it’s gone in fifteen minutes.” George seemed obsessed, fixated on the column. “The column is still standing,” he said, shaking his head. “Fuck the column! George is angry at the column, Anthony. George, himself, is angry at the column! It’s still standing and it’s giving you the finger.” He made the gesture with his hand, his face twisted in anger.
“Ten dollars,” Toama said, jumping in. That would be the cost of tearing it down.
I had hoped to move into the house over these days of winter, at least into the bottom floor, where we had focused the work. Since I had not, anything short of completion felt like a disappointment to me. The column was a sad metaphor for all that had not been done. Weeks had passed, and progress was visible only to the nearsighted. From a distance, the house still looked maskun, haunted, awaiting salvation.
Then, a few days later, the column was gone. No one had said a word the day before. Nothing had prompted Abu Jean’s decision, at least that I knew about. The task adhered to a maalim’s sense of time, driven by its own indecipherable inertia. One morning, wielding a sledgehammer, Abu Jean simply knocked down the column and poured cement over it—pour cement!—to fashion a new floor under an arch uncluttered for the first time in generations. He had buried the eyesore in the house itself. For a moment, I thought, the house was sovereign.
Abu Jean smiled when he saw me. He always smiled when I smiled. There was a sense of triumph about him, too. “We’re together till the end,” he told me. That gave me pause, the prospect of being with Abu Jean for eternity. He took pride in what he had done, oblivious to all the frustration. “I built this,” he said, cigarette perched between his lips, jabbing his finger toward the wall of the dining room. “I built this,” he said, gesturing toward the bedroom. “And I built this,” he said, motioning toward the bathroom. “Who’s the maalim here?” he asked, tapping his chest. “I am!”
“I have complete trust in you, Abu Jean,” I told him.
He repeated his words: “We’re together till the end.”
As the day ended, I tried to appreciate how much had actually transpired since we started: not a lot, but more than I might admit. By now, each room had its own tentative character. The Cave was the first room to be finished, if finished meant that the work was done. It was still in a builder’s disarray. Water dripped from the balcony overhead, and a blue-and-white bag of cement sat in the middle of the room on a patch of cemento tile. But nothing else remained from a few months before—not the plastered walls, not the cement floor, not even the lights. The rooms were rooms coming to a stumbling fruition, and I occasionally caught myself staring at the cemento, imagining myself somewhere else, as the designs of the tiles washed across old spaces in the house where walls once stood.
I noted proudly that the space through which Abu Jean often paraded had been reinterpreted. Gone were the rooms for Bahija’s tenants, her nieces who lived for decades beneath her. Vanished was the garage where Albert Haddad, the Israeli informer, tinkered with old American cars on a floor smeared in blood and oil. The bathroom had disappeared, as had the kitchen. With walls gone, five rooms now counted three. The arches of the old days had returned, now the arcade of an entryway. The stone was restored, harvesting its grays, blues, and creams, its mortar the softest of browns. The house was slowly being re-created, defining itself anew.
As the work progressed, I found myself wanting more and more to live there. This house, Isber’s dream of security and luxury, was really the only idea I had for a home, and on more days than not, it had seemed it would never be quite complete enough for me to move in and bring my daughter here. I sometimes considered my grandmother Raeefa, still a young girl, during her long trip to New York, suspended between places, crossing the world with acquaintances but without her parents or brothers and sisters, alone, wondering who she was. Like my grandmother, I understood questions of identity, how being torn in two often leaves something less than one.
Raeefa had followed the path of her brother and sister to Beirut, where they were met by the same eager steamship merchants and retinue of hucksters who could bribe officials for a passport and serve as middlemen for the short ride aboard a dinghy to the steamer. Bribes were necessary: half a Turkish majidi to the customs official, more to the inspector of the boat ferrying between the wharf and the steamship, and yet more to the inspector posted at the steamer’s gangplank. Isber had entrusted Raeefa with enough money for all, and she managed to avoid steerage and buy second-class passage aboard the ship.
She and her aunt and uncle arrived less than a week later in Marseilles, where the opportunistic sold everything from cl
othes to women and a few plucky Syrians had set up hostelries for their newly arriving cousins. She stared blankly, awestruck at the electric lights, the trains, the streetcars, and the tall buildings. “Everything Turkish had vanished,” one of her relatives would write. They quickly made their way by train to Paris, then Le Havre, where they booked tickets to New York, the city already alive in all their imaginations. The journey so far had been exhausting, and this boat ride was grueling. Raeefa was racked with nausea throughout the journey.
She couldn’t stomach the food. Only the apples and oranges kept her healthy. The voyage to New York was no less arduous than the trip from Marjayoun. For Raeefa, they were crises filled with tears, shouts, and desperation. To each, she had her refrain: She only wished to go back home. It was a desire I could understand, the desire of those whose place had been taken away.
Images flitted across the television screen, an untethered collage of pictures that were familiar yet worrisome. Messages carrying headlines declared themselves from my cell phone, blaring Lebanon’s feuding leaders. The Syrian regime is pushing the Lebanese resistance toward civil war, said one. It is impossible to coexist with a totalitarian party like Hezbollah, and we don’t want Lebanon to be an arena for conflicts with Israel, declared another. More clashes erupted, in Beirut and villages that sat along the country’s fault lines of sect, affiliation, and ideology. The situation reminded me of words a friend once told me in Baghdad. “We’re part of a play on a stage,” she said. “Life’s not good, it’s not bad. It’s just a play.”
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