He said the roof was like a sponge. Water cascaded through the ceiling when it rained. Stairs envisioned as stone turned out to be only plain cement. His nephew’s $8,000 renovation budget ultimately skyrocketed to more than $30,000, twice what Assaad had spent to buy the entire house from his uncle. This talk hit close to home and made me so anxious I actually began to sweat. Good God, what if my house turned into a similar story.
“Because I trusted my nephew, I sent him the money, and look what I got.” Assaad said he almost lost his mind when, back in Marjayoun, seeing the house for the first time, he walked under a wood portico. Overhead, his name was spelled out in English in garish capital letters. That was just the beginning of the bizarre architectural accents he encountered. His expectations may have been so high that even if the house had been redone the way he envisioned, he would have ended up disappointed anyway. Maybe not. Either way, he desperately wanted to beat his nephew.
“I was going to break his neck,” Assaad said. “Luckily someone stopped me.” He looked around the house. “Look at what they’ve done.
“Disgusting.” He shook his head. “Disgusting.”
I couldn’t disagree.
Since his return, Assaad had spent his time watching old videos, drinking, and planning his next meal. All the while he festered and fumed, replaying his nephew’s offenses in his head. “‘He’s from America,’” Assaad cried out, imagining the young man’s thought processes. “‘He’s stupid, let’s rob the son of a bitch.’ And they did. They did a good job on me. They took my money. Thieves!”
He rolled one of his Drum cigarettes, his movements elegant and practiced. “It was all a trap,” he said, “a hyenas’ trap. Hyenas did a trap for me. They have no conscience, no dignity. Very, very, very nasty people.”
A man obsessed, he had begun dreaming about all that had transpired, his relatives haunting him in his fitful sleep. In one, they were snakes, and he was their hapless victim.
Dr. Khairalla, who was a friend of Assaad’s and one of the few people in town Assaad liked, had mentioned that Assaad had come back to Marjayoun to look for a wife, but that people here simply didn’t understand him. His humor, as dry as the red wine he used to serve with venison and elk in Wisconsin, was considered odd. He smiled a lot—not an indicator of intelligence in the town. He even laughed, which added to the impression of silliness. Assaad wasn’t really surprised by the reception; he was a native son, after all. “I lived most of my life away from home. They’re not going to understand me. But I understand them.”
He didn’t speak of seeking matrimony, but I got the sense that Dr. Khairalla may have been right about his dreams of romance. Assaad spoke like a man who had experienced rejection, often.
“Ninety-eight percent of Lebanese women are whores,” he told me, smoking his cigarette. “They go for money and appearance. Bullshit!”
Every few minutes, he lightly spit, trying to force small pieces of tobacco off his tongue. “My cousins, they’re all whores, too.”
When they saw him in Marjayoun’s streets, aware of his anger, his relatives, especially the women, would offer him only curt greetings. “They go like this,” he said, quickly flashing his hand up. “That’s how they say hello as they’re passing by. Like they’re catching a fly.
“I go like this,” he told me, flashing the finger.
No one else was so unrelenting in his opinion of Marjayoun, though Assaad wasn’t the only one to speak this way. Fahima, a woman living upstairs from Hikmat, was another outsider and often an outspoken critic. She was originally from Quneitra, across the border in the Golan Heights, and was known as a gossip, retaining every whisper, every rumor, every fragment of history. She probably knew Marjayoun as well as anyone. She had spent year after year observing, making sense of it, keeping an eye on its follies, and devising her own crazy reasons for the way things were. Fahima always struck me as rather sweet, but lonely. I sometimes thought I spent too much time with her and with Assaad. Their views reinforced my own self-pity and discouragement, but I enjoyed the solidarity when I felt frustrated.
“This is the craziness of the people of Jedeida,” claimed Fatima. “I swear to God, they’re crazy,” she said, nodding and running through the families—the Ablas, Farhas, Jabaras, Haddads, and, to be fair, the Shadids—who in her opinion fit the description. “It’s the water. The water is bad. There’s something in there.”
We sat at her table, and I looked at her with longing as she inhaled a cigarette. (I had quit again.) After a coughing spell, she mentioned to me that her father, Daoud, had died in 1991, three months after a doctor had told him to give up cigarettes. Quitting smoking, Fahima insisted, killed him; it would do the same to her, she assured me. I reached for her pack as Fahima watched the television, filled with images of dissent and struggle, and she shook her head.
The road beyond Marjayoun was cluttered with the memories of martyrs, among them Rafik Hariri, the former prime minister and zaim of the Sunnis, killed in a car bombing in 2005, and Imad Mughniyeh, a shadowy Hezbollah leader accused of planning attacks that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of Americans and Israelis. Long before Osama bin Laden, there was Mughniyeh, whose handiwork in assaults on the Marine barracks and the American embassy in Beirut in 1983 indelibly framed a cauterized image of Lebanon for much of the world. His life ended abruptly while I was in Marjayoun, when a small bomb tore through his car in Damascus with an efficiency he would have appreciated.
In a remarkable way, Hariri and Mughniyeh encapsulated the contest between the two cultures that had defined Lebanon’s crisis. Hariri’s vision of the country basically called for a return to its identity as a Mediterranean entrepôt, prosperous and peaceful though infused with spectacular corruption and cynical dealmaking. Mughniyeh spoke to Hezbollah’s vision of an everlasting confrontation with Israel that, in the words of the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, made Lebanon “a land of resistance.”
Neither culture offered room for compromise. “They will not take our Lebanon,” Hariri’s partisans declared. Our Lebanon. Another slogan read, “The Future of Lebanon,” the words emblazoned on Hariri’s portrait. What future? I wondered every time I drove by the billboard. Dead, Hariri was memory, but his myth and the romanticizing of it were pulling the country toward another civil war. Such was Lebanon’s curse: It always insisted on charting its future by way of its past.
The Mughniyeh iconography was just as ubiquitous and no less incendiary. After a life lived in the shadows, his whereabouts a matter of constant speculation, he was, in death, a public icon, celebrated with Che Guevara–like billboard portraits over the words Herald of the Decisive Victory. Along one stretch of street the posters for his cause became more insistent and urgent: For the Sake of Jerusalem . . . My Blood, one read. They went on: Our One Enemy . . . Israel and My Blood Is Victorious.
On the road beyond Marjayoun, portraits of Hariri and Mughniyeh alternated, as did their visions and their legacies, future and past. The contest between those perspectives was felt everywhere.
“George is scared of the situation, really,” George told me as we sat in Toama’s apartment on a cold, cloudy day when little was happening at the warshe. George talked about politics much more than Toama or Thanaya. “Here, nothing’s going to happen. We’re safe here. But in Beirut? Who knows what that’s going to bring. Our children there are waiting for the rifles and snipers.” Thanaya was flipping through the channels, most of them dominated by news of an upcoming commemoration for Hariri in the capital. I kept refilling my coffee cup, a little compulsively. George said he wanted to lock all the ministers, lawmakers, and heads of political parties together in parliament, without exception. He would then bring a thousand kilograms of TNT, his term. “We’d blow them all up together, and we’d be relaxed.” He smiled. “We’d be relaxed.”
George looked at me scribbling in my notebook. “What are you writing?” he shouted, falling back into his chair. “George didn’t say anything!”
Soon after I had coffee with Fahima, Assaad and I had planned to go fishing for the last time before his threatened departure. He vowed to leave often, during his fits of despondency. My mood had brightened lately, inexplicably, and the trip was, I had hoped, not going to dim my spirits. Assaad’s words could be contagious. I was late, which always upset Assaad. He called me, but hung up before I could answer. I called back to tell him I was on my way. “Okay, bye,” he said curtly. When I arrived he seemed glum. “The same,” he said when I asked him how his day was, an answer that never changed.
We drove toward the Litani, and Assaad started to recall the scenery of his childhood. His father, Tannios—a tailor with a scatological sense of humor and a store that sold shoes, scarves, thread, and needles in the Saha—was something of a legend around town, a different place than now. “There were no houses here, none,” Assaad said as he gazed at the horizon, remembering old times. “We used to walk all over and back.” It was a half century before, in a time rare because it was peaceful. Assaad had come of age in an interlude between conflicts, a simple time that he perhaps romanticized. “There used to be six, maybe seven cars,” he said. They were all American—DeSoto, Plymouth, and Buick. As we looked down the valley toward the fortified Israeli border, marked by the tidy town of Metulla, he told me again how he and other children used to walk there to hunt, sometimes with just a slingshot.
“You know what I’m going to miss when I leave Lebanon? The olives, the figs, and the grapes.” He thought about it a little more. “And the almonds.”
Another moment passed. “And the wild herbs.”
I felt—though I did not want to—a bit of a kindred spirit with the embittered man. It was the first time I had heard him say anything generous about either Marjayoun or Lebanon, and it reminded me of the nostalgia that is so often pronounced here, always unprompted: the longing for a peaceful but vibrant past. I wondered whether he was trying to return to a place that no longer existed. Isn’t that always the case when we try to go home again?
We had taken a long road, quite scenic, and Assaad pointed to what used to be a concrete pool, probably fed by a spring, near the cemetery. I had heard about the pool, which had been there since the old days. Isber Samara had played there as a child.
“I learned how to swim there,” Assaad said. “I was ten years old. No clothes back then. We were little kids. This town was very poor.” No one had money for a soccer ball, he said, and only the rich had bicycles. “There were only eight bikes in the whole town,” he said, “and Habib Lahoud would rent them out by the hour.” He pointed to a clump of pine trees. “We used to hunt with slingshots here,” he said. “There were birds everywhere. That was then.” He was silent for a moment. “Things change,” he said. “The birds are far away now.”
Again, as we returned to town, we passed the faded pictures of more martyrs. Only the face of Haitham Subhi Dabuq, fallen on August 18, 1988, caught my eye. The boy’s glasses, probably made for someone older, were too big for his face, and his thin mustache was yet to mature. His sad eyes haunted me. He was probably not all that much older than my grandmother Raeefa had been when Isber lifted her up into the buggy and she left Marjayoun on this road, though this boy’s elders had a different journey in mind for their son.
Before they entered Ellis Island, her aunt Raheeja turned to Raeefa and insisted she turn over the gold and jewelry that had been her parents’ parting gifts. You’re a child, she told Raeefa. You’ll lose it. They might take it from you at customs. You might leave it somewhere and forget it. I’ll keep it with me, she assured her niece. It was more demand than request.
Raeefa’s uncle Mikhail, like all immigrants, was examined at Ellis Island for any sign of illness. The authorities there told him he had trachoma, an infectious eye disease that could lead to blindness. Or, in the words of the Lebanese translator working at customs, “His eyes no good.” The trachoma would prevent his entry into the United States, and his wife and niece, barely uttering a word, were deported from New York with him. Before she left, Raheeja was relieved of the gold and jewelry by an opportunistic inspector. Raised to be generous, Raeefa was penniless. Waiting for deportation, she and her aunt and uncle sat with people barred for a variety of reasons—suspected subversion, other diseases, insanity. A few spoke Arabic and offered their advice: The three could book passage on a ship to Mexico and, from there, smuggle themselves across the border. For the Ablas and their niece, it made sense. So they set out with thoughts of those who would greet them. The Ablas’ children were already in America. So was Raheeja’s sister Khalaya and Raeefa’s brother Nabeeh. After arriving in Mexico, they managed to get to Ciudad Juárez, a frontier town and battlefield of the Mexican revolution. Ellis Abla had been waiting for them, their telegram in hand. Under the cover of darkness, at midnight, they crossed the shallow, muddy river to El Paso.
Dazed from one of the most arduous journeys of anyone they had heard about, they were in America. From El Paso, they made their way to Wilson, on the other side of the Red River, a town then in the throes of an oil boom. Raeefa’s brother Nabeeh was waiting. He had taken the train from Oklahoma City to Ardmore, then a taxi to Wilson.
Hamdilla ala salaameh, he said to her, still a stranger himself. Thank God for your safety.
His sister’s eyes welled up. She was awkward, not sure how to act. She looked down.
Allah yissalmak, ya khayee, she said. God keep you safe, brother.
14. A Bush Called Rozana
Abu Jean looked as he had every day. He was a man of a certain age; there was no disputing that. But I saw a sudden change: the intensity of his strength now seemed as powerful as his desire for a cigarette. His face was ruddy, but I noticed that his hair was as black as his mustache. He looked like a younger man, taut as a bowstring. In his gold-rimmed glasses he seemed to me not just some old baggage craving attention and throwing fits, but the picture of industriousness. I had to admit, grudgingly, that he had become as much a part of the house as the stone and the tile. The brown pants that he wore every day were faded and drab, but the red plaid of a shirt recently added to his wardrobe seemed to signal a new attitude. Perhaps because it was spring.
The new season was quickly gathering around Marjayoun. People had said it would be like this; they had spoken with anticipation and growing relief, though there were definitely pauses in the transition. One day would bring cold rain, the next a warm breeze that seemed out of place so early. Cows with black and white patches ambled up the road beside the house, wandering in empty fields and lazily grazing on the neighbor’s land. I watched the buds gradually open. There were the white petals of the oqhowan, their hearts yellow. The colors of the shaqaiq al-noaman fell across fields. Snow remained on Mount Hermon, slowly receding and ready to surrender.
For the first time I grasped the literalness of the town’s name; never had I imagined water so abundant. There were springs underneath the house, near the stone wall that ran along the house, against my neighbor’s house, and toward the wall we had built with Massoud Samara, behind the house. Along the curb the water seeped. Behind the wall it trickled. Anywhere we dug, it soon bubbled, sometimes from a small passage no bigger than an ant hole.
The weather had rekindled in Abu Jean an old man’s confidence in the world and in his own survival. “Whenever I say a word,” he declared to me, narrowing his eyes, “everyone should say that’s exactly right.” He wore black leather combat boots stamped with what appeared to be some kind of date—02 12 02 1997. The boots themselves were worn to their soft brown interior. He was working with wood used on the balcony, which he estimated to be forty or forty-five years old, but that seemed an exaggeration. As he nailed the boards into place, creating the framework to pour concrete, he cursed the wood.
“Ya akrout. You bastard! This is tough wood!”
Abu Jean had the ways of a villager. Everyone was habibi (my dear friend), maalim (craftsman), khayee (my brother), or ainee (my precious friend). “Here, at this ang
le, ainee,” he told his apprentice. The nails Abu Jean pounded looked like the wood—worn, crooked, too mangled to be useful. “The wood is tough!” he shouted again. “The nails won’t go down.” But they finally did. After he had one part of the frame done, he gave it a tug. As for me, I was an interloper, someone in the way of his work. It reminded me of something a colleague once told me: I was as welcome as a prostitute staying for breakfast. With each step, I seemed to irritate Abu Jean more. “Watch your head,” he told me authoritatively.
What he meant was: Don’t you have something else to do?
Each time I saw Abu Jean work in this fashion, my respect, for a moment at least, and however grudging, grew. With a cigarette hanging from his mouth, that long ash not daring to fall, he straddled two wood beams, twenty feet off the ground, that sagged with each step he took. Just below him was the rickety iron ladder he had ascended. He seemed at home trotting back and forth. With a hint of admiration, Toama looked at him. “Abu Jean is bent on falling today,” he said, but Abu Jean knew where and how to place everything. There was precision to his work, and he labored with confidence. With an iron vise, thoroughly rusted and stained with concrete, he fastened more wood, then hammered it into place.
“Beautiful, Abu Jean, but what happens if we have another earthquake?” I asked him, joking. “If there’s an earthquake,” he replied, “I’ll hold up the wall like this.” Like an abaday, that tough guy of Lebanese lore, he hoisted his hands above his head, posing as Atlas. As he did, part of me thought he might try.
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