House of Stone

by Anthony Shadid

  “I can already sense it,” I told Shibil. “I’m going to finish this house and the war will start. I’m going to finish this house and I’ll end up never setting foot in it again.”

  A small pile of incense, shaped like white crystals, burned slowly on the corner of Shibil’s ujaa. He said he had thought about calling me, to let me know he had nothing to serve me. In the end, as we shared a drink, he fetched an ancient plastic tub of pickles, flavored with thyme, peppers, and “maybe cumin,” that dated to the 2006 war. “Israel was dropping pamphlets from the sky,” he said, “and I was picking cucumbers.” Shibil shared none of my anxiety these days. Though a Christian, he was emphatically on the side of Hezbollah; its adversaries, he insisted, were “fucking Israeli traitors.” He confidently declared that the Shiite Muslim movement, along with its Christian ally, the mercurial former general named Michel Aoun, would prevail.

  “Don’t worry, Anthony,” he said, “the opposition will stop the war.”

  Shibil, as usual these days, was in bad shape. He limped from the door to his chair, slowed by the leg that was hurting him, and the prescription of his self-diagnosis was failing him: He had determined that he simply needed to eat more greens. He looked as though his body was breaking down. Dressed in gray and breathing heavily, he slouched in his chair.

  Physical hardship was only one of Shibil’s problems. “My advice is to stay away from relatives,” he said as he put a wad of lettuce in his mouth and offered me some. “The shittiest thing is your relatives.” Shibil worshiped his older brother, whom he had described to me more than once as a saint. Since the lunch on the river, his resentment of his other brothers had deepened, a bitterness that he spoke of more and more. It came to a head around the time a small tremor struck Lebanon. All in all, it was a pretty insignificant affair. Sitting at the house, I had actually thought it was a truck rumbling down the road beneath me. But soon after, one of Shibil’s brothers called him.

  “Did anything happen to the house?” he had asked Shibil.

  Neither then nor afterward did he inquire how Shibil was.

  “Shibil has a temper, no?” I asked Hikmat after considering my friend and his situation for some days. Ever the host, Hikmat was eager to agree at first. Then his face changed.

  “He doesn’t have a temper. He’s just responding to what he’s getting. It’s a reaction.” Everyone treats Shibil like a loser, he said, like a beggar. Whenever he asks for something, they whisper a proverb: The beggar is setting conditions. Or as Hikmat explained in his own way: “You are a beggar and you want a piece of bread. Come knock on my door, and I give you a loaf, and you say, This is it?”

  It is humiliation, Hikmat said, repeated time and again, on occasion after occasion, in place after place in Marjayoun, that brings out his temper and makes him angry. I nodded, understanding. All this explained his fights with his brothers, which lasted weeks. I saw the condescension he must have sensed from the butcher, who had barred him from his store the other day after Shibil suggested that his scale was calibrated wrong. His flare-ups were a last resort to maintain his dignity. With them, he could try to preserve a little self-respect.

  “He breaks my heart,” Hikmat said. “This man is a lonely man. He has no one.”

  He may have been even lonelier these days. Hikmat told me that Shibil’s oldest brother, the one he adored, had lung cancer, an advanced and inoperable kind that would not leave him much more time. I had seemed to recall Shibil mentioning that he wanted to visit a brother who was sick in Beirut, but it sounded as though the brother had a cold, and I wondered why Shibil had never told me. He was so free about everything else.

  “Al-marad al-khabeeth,” Hikmat told me. The wicked disease.

  The rumors about my clandestine existence as a secret agent continued to circulate. There was, of course, some reason for suspicion. From Kim Philby to Eli Cohen, there were, are, and always will be spies aplenty in the Middle East, with covers never too fantastic. A friend once recounted to me the story of a shaggy, unkempt beggar who plied the streets of west Beirut, as mad as he was poor. No one paid him any attention; most tried to avoid him. And then, when the Israeli army invaded in 1982, there he was, directing the traffic of armored columns. If my friend remembered it right, one of the Israeli officers actually saluted him.

  The cult of the agent had become an obsession in a way, though. It was a lasting image from my first visit to Lebanon in 1991, as I ventured through a downtown that, after fifteen years of war, had become an apocalyptic swath of ruins, dust, and weeds, drearily inhabited by squatters and bored soldiers. Block after block of buildings was reduced to cavernous, skeletal remains, and in the streets stagnant water and sewage filled countless craters, disturbed only by the curious driver peering nervously down the disfigured alleys. The only splashes of color were blue advertisements soliciting business for a billboard company. What do our boards have in common with the CIA? they asked. They’re both all over the place.

  “Keep a low profile,” Samir Abou Jawdeh advised me. The son of an intellectual who once published a newspaper in Marjayoun, Samir visited the town often.

  The words he told me over dinner were discomfiting. Five people, he said, had visited him to disclose that I was an American spy and that the U.S. embassy was paying to rebuild my house. (In another version, President George W. Bush himself provided the funds.) He should be careful what he said to me, they admonished him. He grew angry as he recounted the story.

  “I told them never to speak in such a manner in my house again!” he bellowed. At least, that was what he claimed. I suspected he had probed for details, inquired about my family, friends, and acquaintances, speculated about my activities, suggested other sources for my money, and wondered over just what I was plotting here, in Beirut, and elsewhere.

  “Why would someone with roots in Jedeida be a spy?” Shibil asked me afterward, as we sat near his scorching ujaa, diesel fuel staining its metal drip tray. I was rebuilding the house, he said, and both my parents were Marjayouni. My family had history here, both the Shadids and the Samaras. “It would be someone with a different name,” he insisted—Elias, Cohen, or maybe Johnson. “Shadid, what is that? Unless the CIA has become more sophisticated than we think.” He thought about the idea before discounting it. “If I found out you were a spy,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief, “I would cut my own throat.”

  Shibil’s sense of it: It was the curse of Marjayoun, suffering as it did from a mixture of secrecy and curiosity, with a requisite element of the evil eye. “I think everyone wants to know what you’re doing,” he said. “They’re sticking their noses in something that doesn’t concern them. If you don’t tell them, you fuck them up. They’ll be so bothered, so vexed if you keep knowledge from them.” He told me he sometimes parks fifty meters away from a house he is visiting and walks the rest of the way. Curiosity erupts.

  “That makes them crazy,” he told me.

  It made me crazy. I had come to this town with the best intentions—or at least enough naiveté to claim innocence—only to be reduced, as had many others, including Shibil, to a figure of bizarre speculation and idle whispers.

  Amid the din of recriminations that the crisis in Lebanon was sowing—a headline that week read, “Molotovs, Stones and Bullets in the Streets of Beirut”—there soon emerged another subject of interest to Marjayoun. It had all begun with the same article that I had written long ago for my newspaper, the Washington Post, that had outraged Karim and various other Shadids. I had meant it as a simple reflective piece, with a mention of the olive tree I had planted at the house all those months back. It talked about the furrows of Mount Hermon, then dusted in snow. And it offered a lament, meant tenderly, imbued with the reverence of an exile for an imagined home. “Picturesque as it is, Marjayoun is dying,” I wrote then. Hardly anyone in Marjayoun had read the piece, other than Karim, his omertà-like loyalties piqued. I simply filed it away in my cabinet, in that old green folder, with my grandfather’s natu
ralization papers.

  Two years later, issue number seven of Ayoun al-Marj (The Springs of the Field, a play on the town’s name) was published. The headline on the cover, a portrait of Marjayoun, read, “Dr. Rahal Responds to Anthony Shadid, Page 30.” And there it was. Two full pages by Cecil Hourani and Nabil Rahal, a former teacher in Beirut, offering a lengthy rebuttal to my short reflection that no one had read, or would. They did, however, read Cecil and Rahal.

  “Anthony Shadid’s article that was recently published in the Washington Post deeply saddened me as it was a death notice for our beloved town of Jedeida and a prophecy for the future that, perhaps in a time not too distant, it would become an abandoned town where only the ravens caw,” Rahal wrote. “Do we make Anthony Shadid happy and continue ignoring our birthplace, or do we rise together and unite to return to Jedeida its bygone glory and a hope that is now almost lost?” He went on to make a novel suggestion: The town’s exiles should visit Marjayoun regularly and rebuild their homes.

  “You’re from Bayt Shadid?” asked a customer at the Marjayoun Bookstore, a stationery shop where I stopped each day to buy my newspaper. Someone else jumped in: “You’re fixing the house that belongs to Bayt Samara?” Samir Razzouk, the shop’s owner, knew me. “He is Anthony Shadid,” he told them. And a knowing look crossed their faces, reflecting a moment of clarity that ran roughly like this: “So you’re the guy who wrote the article insulting Jedeida.”

  And so the uproar began. I heard little else in the weeks that followed. Cecil kept a copy of the piece on the brass table in the salon of his house. Its placement seemed to say: Just so you don’t miss it. My neighbor, who hardly ever said a word to me, expressed interest. “Did you know they’re responding to you in the Marjayoun magazine?” he called out as I hurried through my door. Dr. Khairalla, perhaps out of kindness, gave me his support in typically refined, meditative fashion. “You are right,” he said sadly. “Marjayoun is dying.”

  Even Abu Jean’s wife, as sweet a woman as there was in Marjayoun, but illiterate, had heard about the piece. Rolling stuffed grape leaves for a generous Sunday lunch, she started shouting on her patio, “Of course, Marjayoun is dead!” She gave me the same look as if I had asked her whether it was acceptable to substitute roadkill for the minced lamb of her kibbe. “They don’t come here from Beirut unless they want to be buried,” she said. “We welcome them only so we can shove them in the cemetery!” Even Emile Tayyar, the carpenter who made the coffins of those expatriates, said so, she told me.

  Abu Jean, sitting next to me, nodded dismissively and wailed a string of expletives. Then he stood up, thrusting his saggy, seventy-six-year-old ass in my face. With flair, he reached his hand around to grab it. “You should wipe your ass with their article!” he declared, drawing wild cackles from his wife.

  I no longer had illusions about Marjayoun. It fell short, as had I. The town’s rejection of its history, its lack of interest in itself and in a past no longer deemed important, was not just an indicator of decline but a cause: If Marjayoun’s past was of no concern, how could the place register, to itself or others, as worthy of our scrutiny? The town’s self-image seemed to decline with every decision. And every day left unattended fueled its shame over its diminishment. All the days of disbelief and the afternoons of sloughing off had made action difficult to consider, as the amount of energy required to catch up or change now seemed gargantuan, undoable.

  Where prayers on Good Friday once rang out from the store of Ahmed Akkawi, a Sunni Muslim in Marjayoun, wreckage remained from the Israeli attack on the square more than a year ago. It seemed an important detail in the citizens’ picture of themselves. Two doors, once regularly painted blue, once part of a town with no interest in fading, remained boarded up, there in the very center of town.

  In the 1930s, protests rocked the town, and residents surged into the streets, headed for the Serail. “We want bread! We want wheat!” they chanted. “We want to eat! We are hungry!” Now they ritually watched the newscast at 8 P.M., waiting silently for the inevitable. If there was electricity. Interest was stirred only by meaningless drama and idle chatter. Perhaps that is the world now, but it is, sadly, Marjayoun, drifting out of circulation.

  “We live here,” Dr. Khairalla’s wife, Ivanka, once told me, pointing to the tile floor of her kitchen. “No one lives next to us,” she said, gesturing to the south. She repeated the phrase three times as she pointed in each direction. She mentioned the few other people around. “When we die, who’s going to come here?” she asked. “Cecil thinks it’s a paradise. How can you have a paradise without people? There are houses, but there aren’t any people.”

  Part Two: At Home

  13. Homesick

  No roads, not a single one, lead to the place where we had gotten ourselves.

  I was already spoiled by the beauty of Marjayoun’s hinterland, but the scene here was still moving. I gazed at the water and the quiet landscape as Assaad Maatouk, a chef who had returned to Lebanon from America to find home again, tied his special knot, then rolled a piece of soggy bread over the hook. We were fishing down the road from an Israeli artillery piece transformed by Hezbollah into a shrine. Cliffs formed the sheer walls of the valley, and they seemed to touch the sky. Along the walls were caves, ridges, and ledges furrowed by water passing across the millennia. The Litani River next to us, a murky green, was swift.

  I fumbled with my fishing pole. Then, casting, I threw the reel into the water. Once recovered, the line snapped and I had to restring the hook, which eventually snagged a nearby tree. Then I kicked over the tackle box, emptying it of its contents. Standing a few feet away, Assaad didn’t seem to notice my celebration of slapstick.

  Assaad was preoccupied with his own routine. He had gravitated from place to place, trying to catch fish from the flat bank, from a jumble of concrete, from a bend along rapids, from a steep hill, and from a pile of rocks. Each time, he delivered one of his many verdicts, all essentially the same: The water in the river was too low. When he looked into it, he couldn’t see the silver flash that meant fish were there. There used to be more fish, and he used to catch more, he said. It’s not the way it was, not the home he recalled.

  Only ten minutes had passed when Assaad decided to give up.

  “I hate Lebanon,” Assaad had told me, minutes after we had met for the first time at his house and before offering me a cigarette and a drink. “I wish I had never come.” He had traveled back to his homeland only to find disappointment, now hardened into the bitterest of contempt.

  Short, with a thick mustache and heavy eyes, Assaad bore a distant resemblance to a smaller Saddam Hussein, whom he apparently imitated in lighter moments at his restaurant back in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Describing the place, he spoke of his 1942 Casablanca poster, his water pipes, his arabesque lamps, his hanging beads, his tapestries, and his embroidered tablecloths from Lebanon—in other words, the restaurant was a Wisconsin interpretation of a Middle East he had hoped to find again, a place now missing, if it ever existed. In Marjayoun, the table at his house reflected his day: Drum tobacco, rolling paper, a plastic container filled with white watermelon seeds, a bottle of J&B scotch, three packs of Winston Reds and a pack of Winston Lights, along with a letter from his friend Dede, with a red lipstick kiss, Rolling Stones style, planted next to her signature. In his DVD player were four clips, advertisements or stories about his restaurant. A video called “A Day in the Life of Assaad Maatouk” lay among them. It was that, literally—an actual day in Assaad’s life in America. There he was, toiling in his garden planting vegetables for his restaurant or sitting on a couch, sometimes with his girlfriend, the two of them eating a dish of raw meat known as kibbe nayye and drinking arak. I ended up having to watch it with him not once but twice. The interplay was almost philosophical: Assaad, doing nothing, watching himself do nothing.

  The other videos were, luckily, a little more eventful, especially the one-minute cooking shows we watched the day we met. In one, he was in fu
ll Arab regalia, complete with headdress and robes, looking rather kitschy.

  I tried not to grin as he began to speak of the Marjayoun he remembered and the one where he was living, though just for now. “The only good memories I have of Jedeida are of the old days when I used to walk around the countryside—the pine trees, the olive trees—with my slingshot and my friends. That’s about it. No other good memories.” When was that? I asked. “Until I was eighteen, sixteen probably. Sixteen, yeah.” He lit a cigarette, the ash casting a glow on his face.

  “Now I respect my cats and dogs more than I respect the natives of Jedeida.”

  Assaad said that he had returned home for family. “I was expecting—” he began, then stopped, searching for words before going on: His parents had passed away, but he still had two brothers and two sisters in Lebanon.

  “I needed to get back a little to a family life.” He paused. “To be with them. I felt kind of homesick”—a feeling I understood. His relatives offered to help him rebuild his house, a simple stone affair of a few rooms where his grandmother had lived. “I was so excited,” he told me.

  From his nephew, who undertook the renovation before Assaad arrived from America, the ensuing promises came fast and furious: There was talk of cleaned stone, beautiful tile, central heating, solar panels, and painted wood, “the very best of wood.”

  “And he put the cheapest wood, no paint,” Assaad said, beginning his litany of wrongs trespassed against him.

  Now even his nephew’s name brought a look of disgust; he drew out each syllable for dramatic effect. “Everything he bought was left over from other building projects. Dirty. Cheap quality.” Assaad pointed to the metal guard across the windows. “See that metal?” he said. “I could rip it out with my hand.”