The end of the day arrived, and Abu Jean finished close to 4 P.M. He knocked out a board over which he had poured cement. The concrete held. Remarkably, it appeared to be almost straight. He looked at me and beamed. “Do you want to learn?” he asked me. “Yalla, learn.”
On good days we drove through Qlayaa, and he told me again and again, with the exuberance of novelty, how residents there built their houses. “They put their hands behind a cow’s ass, let the shit fall in them, and then plastered the walls with it! That was Qlayaa,” he insisted. “Then the Israelis came, and with them the hashish, opium, and they made money. Now this is Qlayaa. Ya akhu al-sharmouta! That brother of a whore.” On bad days we argued and shouted until he stormed off. One day my temper got the best of me, and I threw my car keys on the ground. I was completely exasperated. Abu Jean had barraged me, but even as I did it, I knew I was wrong. In the weeks that followed, he mentioned the incident almost every day. He was older than me, after all. And what he meant was that I was too young either to raise my voice to him or to lose my temper. Whatever happened, he was an elder, and with age came respect.
He followed this with what felt like a plea. I was like his son, Jean, to him.
“There’s no difference,” he told me.
I knew he meant it. From that day on, my relationship with Abu Jean changed. I learned never to ask him to do more than one thing at a time. I learned to let him deliver his expositions, from start to finish, without interruption. Most important, I learned the elusive meaning of boukra, Arabic for tomorrow.
“We’ll break this tomorrow,” he declared about a patch of shoddy cement on the front porch. “We’ll pour the concrete tomorrow, too, and there won’t be anything dirty afterward. Tomorrow? You’ll be able to walk barefoot from here,” he pointed to the patio, strewn with trash, “into there,” he said, gesturing toward the house.
“We’ll do that and I’ll hand you the keys!” he shouted. “Does that please you?”
I nodded my head. So much to be done tomorrow, I thought.
“All I want to do is please you. When your head is relaxed, my head is relaxed,” Abu Jean said. Smiling, he went on. “What did I tell you about my son? You and he are one.”
Tomorrow never came, though a revelation did. Soon after, Abu Jean helped me plant seeds of a variety of curly cucumber known as miqta. Along three furrows, he did it with precision, stooped over, dusting each seed with a bit of dirt. Finished, he stood up, stretching his back, with a sense of triumph.
“Tomorrow, the vines will grow all over the place!”
As he said it, I understood perfectly. Finally. Tomorrow was only the future, and what was to come was always ambiguous here.
So began a beautiful friendship.
“Is this right, Abu Jean?” I asked about any one of the house’s hundreds of details.
“Right? Sixty rights, habibi!”
Then, “Put your hand in my arm,” he said, and off we went. Our arms locked, we sauntered ahead. He showed me the balcony, where my great-grandfather had surveyed the beauty of the landscape and where he had watched for marauders. It was finished. Then he moved on to the wall he had completed between the bedroom and bathroom, along with the entrance, its sides tilting toward perfection. As we walked, Abu Jean started singing the song that precedes a wedding: “We brought the groom and we’ve come, mother of the bride, here we’ve come!” It was Abu Jean at his most endearing. He really wasn’t the foreman anymore. He was ammee, my uncle. He never really cared about the house, but he unquestionably liked the friendship. He found my Arabic endearing; it somehow made me clever. Each time I took notes about something, he was convinced I was penning some beautiful line of poetry, and he urged me to read it aloud. He showed up every day to make me happy. Abu Jean cared about me.
Standing with George, Abu Jean offered me a cigarette. I took it. I winked at him and Abu Jean smiled. I nodded my head to the left, in thanks, and Abu Jean smiled again.
“You guys are maghroumeen,” George told us. “Lovers. You two are Romeo and Juliet, right out of the play. You’ve staked out a place in his heart, Abu Jean.”
Abu Jean smiled, not hearing a word.
Yet while we had reconciled, the muted, muttered resentment the rest of the warshe had directed at Abu Jean gave way to perfectly enunciated disdain. Trouble had brewed in the winter, it erupted in the spring, and these days no one had a kind word for him. George took it upon himself to rouse the rabble, in an insurgency that began simply.
“Tomorrow, when George sandblasts the darabzin, he’s going to stand Abu Jean right here, and he’s going to sandblast him,” George said as Abu Jean stood next to me.
Soon the tension forced me to become a reluctant mediator. No one talked to anyone else, and I was left to carry messages.
To Abu Jean, ever frugal, anyone who spent money, any money, whatever the occasion, was a little decadent and a tad irresponsible. (He never drove his car; he always paid on credit.) The less he spent, Abu Jean’s thinking went, the better the job he did. His frugality was an asset, even if it reached excess, as when he refused to pay the Syrian workers or tried to shave 2,000 Lebanese liras—$1.33—off the price of renting a truck. It became an obsession, too. In his eyes, the breadth of my victimization had become epic, a modern tragedy, my suffering endless.
“Everyone lies to you,” Abu Jean told me, making an exception of himself, as we drove to a small factory for tile in neighboring Khiam. “But there’s a God above. Twenty-five has to be twenty-five, a thousand is a thousand, and one is one.”
“Their greed,” he called it, never mentioning George’s and Toama’s names.
“Fuck the money,” he said.
When I was gone, the disputes and fights paralyzed work, each party trying to collect evidence of malfeasance and rapacity in an onslaught of suspicion and shatara, wiliness. Nothing seemed to get done. Soon, George and Abu Jean weren’t talking. Toama tried to avoid Abu Jean, as did the electrician, plumber, painter, and maalim of ceilings. Abu Jean yelled every few minutes, ever combustible, if uncomprehending. I was never sure whether he was feeling the pressure (doubtful) or playing the part of a foreman (more likely). These days, only Malik, the fearsome tiler, as stocky as a drill sergeant, engaged Abu Jean, and even then, only on the sidelines.
“Did you bring me Viagra?” Abu Jean asked when I returned from Beirut.
“Abu Jean! You don’t need Viagra!” Malik shouted. “Just eat peanuts. That’s all you need, Abu Jean. Just eat handfuls of peanuts! Every day!”
Abu Jean shook his head and said, “The tire is out of air.”
Malik had become a force, working with a relentlessness not always shared by the others. His Elmer Fudd hat, buckled under his chin, was a whimsical touch, though he still intimidated me. I rehearsed several times how I would ask him to change the pattern of the tile in the salon downstairs. In the end, I figured a tough request would be best. This is how I want it. It’s my house, after all. But when the moment arrived to ask him, I couldn’t bring myself to act tough.
Maalim Malik, I said sheepishly, I’m going to ask you something that’s going to upset you. It’s the only request I’ll make, I’m sorry to even ask, but if at all possible, can I add a few tiles here, here, here, and here? I braced myself for the answer, my jaw clenched. Do you have enough of those tiles? he asked me. I nodded hesitantly, as if I was a child being scolded by my mother. No problem, he said. He nodded. I exhaled ever so slightly, relieved.
His gruffness aside, though, Malik was, to me, the man at the warshe who truly deserved to be addressed as a maalim, and I always did. Malik demanded it. His pride was fierce, as was his dignity. “If I say Tuesday, it’s going to be Tuesday. If I say Wednesday, it’s Wednesday.” And it was.
Like Dr. Khairalla, Malik appreciated craftsmanship as an expression of grace, and as a maalim in its truest sense, he had a respect for the material that went into the labor. I asked him how long the tiles would last after we set them down.
Much remained to be done in the most traditional presentation of Bayt Samara: the upstairs with its liwan, triple arches, and marble floors. But with Malik working as he did, the first half of the house had already come together.
As Malik worked upstairs, maalim Fadi Ghabar cleaned the tile below with a bulky machine. Columbus, the machine’s label read. With it, passing back and forth in a circular motion, he drove away the dirt of generations, throwing up a mist of dust in the Cave and elsewhere. Again I discovered the brilliance of the tile’s patterns and colors. In each incarnation, the tile unfurled itself—first when Malik laid it, then when Fadi cleaned it—underneath the two stone arches that served as a portal to the house’s future.
Whenever I wandered through these days, I felt solitude, the same feeling as when I first entered the house so many months before, as a stranger. It was quiet, perhaps even more so lately. As the spring rains fell, I returned to the past, walking across designs that were whispers of a culture now gone. The patterns were a miscellany of lives I never knew. The survivors of so many cataclysms were in the resilient colors, or in the gullies and outcroppings running through the tiles that mapped the geography of another epoch. They were footnotes of what we had lost.
On July 19, 1925, Druze farmers in the Houran shot down a French airplane, beginning a revolt against the French, led by the iconic figure of Sultan Pasha al-Atrash. The conflict would last two years, ebbing and flowing across Syria and Lebanon, and would prove a pivotal moment for Marjayoun and the Middle East. Throughout the region, inflation had wrecked savings since World War I. For at least three years, drought had immiserated the Houran and elsewhere, devastating a breadbasket stretching to Damascus, Marjayoun, and beyond. Springs and wells dried up. Entire villages in the Houran were abandoned. Harvests had plummeted, taxes rose, and nature itself appeared conspiratorial. The winter was especially severe. In that climate, the heavy hand of French colonial rule soon inspired the kind of outraged nationalist resentment that confronts almost any foreign occupation, however benign. France’s was not.
After the downing of the plane, the formidable Sultan Pasha marched through the Houran. Men rallied to this charismatic chieftain. Within weeks, he created an army of as many as ten thousand men, in a region of no more than fifty thousand people. The Druze, his religious brethren, were not the only converts. Bedouins, peasants, deserters from the Syrian Legion, and the unemployed joined the raids. One of Marjayoun’s chroniclers enthusiastically estimated that Sultan Pasha had in fact raised an army of one million. “Every village he entered, he was greeted with cheers,” the writer recounted. The French answered by burning and plundering sympathetic villages, providing more recruits to the nationalist cause.
Men of one sect—say, Muslim Bedouins—took orders from Druze villagers. Christians offered their backing, though the support was more pronounced among the Orthodox than the Catholics. Some Christians even took up arms and fought on the side of Sultan Pasha.
Then, in a moment, the arithmetic somehow changed. As the revolt spread, the rebels dispatched a force of three hundred men under the command of Hamza al-Darwish. From the Houran, they journeyed across an already snowcapped Mount Hermon and into Wadi al-Taym, where they entered Hasbaya in November 1925. One chronicler said they then received an invitation for lunch in Ibl al-Saqi, a mixed village of Druze and Christians down the road from Hasbaya and only a short distance from Marjayoun. On the way there, a slight provoked a war. One of the rebels told a Christian resident of Kawkaba to turn over his weapon.
“It does not suit you,” the rebel was remembered saying.
A fight ensued, and a revolt that, in the chronicler’s eyes at least, had been national became all too sectarian, pitting Christian against Druze. When it ended, the Druze had massacred Maronite Catholic villagers in Kawkaba, indelibly shaping relations between the communities.
Before year’s end, French airplanes bombed Hasbaya, recapturing the town in December. The next year, the revolt was crushed with staggering losses. Having cast their Ottoman predecessors as brutish Oriental philistines and their insurgent foes as brigands and hopelessly warlike, feudal mountaineers, the French ended up doing irreparable damage to their own reputation. Their forces, a motley mix of Foreign Legionnaires, Moroccan spahis, and Circassian irregulars, ransacked and demolished villages. The French shelled Damascus indiscriminately with artillery and planes. Altogether, according to some accounts, 6,000 rebels were killed and more than 100,000 people were left homeless. Famine was a perpetual threat. And, as the war ground to a halt, Greater Syria remained under the occupation of 50,000 French troops.
The Levant known by Isber Samara and his generation was fading like a diminishing breeze.
“When was the best time in Jedeida?” I asked Dr. Khairalla.
“Before 1975,” he answered, with barely a pause.
He laughed. “Since then it’s never been good.”
Dr. Khairalla had volunteered to help with the landscaping of the house. On our trips across the Litani River to the town of Jibchit and its array of nurseries, we always left Marjayoun early, around 7:30 A.M. It was on these errands to buy plants that Dr. Khairalla and I grew to be friends. Since we had met, I was daunted by him. Simply put, he was the kind of man I wanted to be, but worried I would never become—gentle and kind, principled, ever curious. Choices didn’t seem to disturb him; in the fullest of lives, the way forward was easier to discern. I felt shy around him. I was too eager to impress, too reluctant to offend. I suppose I admired him too much. Our trips were slow; far from the house’s deadlines, time lost its relentlessness. Our conversations wandered across landscapes, flitting past flowers and music, Assaad and Iran, and the masters of Arab strings, from Mohammed al-Kasabji to Abboud Abdel-Aal.
The landscape was bursting with colors only hinted at weeks before, and Dr. Khairalla surveyed the bounty of his favorite season. There was the yellow of endol, soon to be followed by the more rugged yellow of the wazzal. The shaqaiq al-noaman were everywhere, softly shaded in reds and purples, along with the untainted whites of the oqhowan—none of which he could smell, having lost that sense a few years before. No longer edible, the wild spinach unfurled red blooms. We rounded a corner, navigating the river below us.
“You see here, this hill? Before the war it was so nice. Full of almond trees. By this time, everything would have been blooming, and there would have been white everywhere,” he said. He looked closer. “There are some remnants of the trees, you see.” At first, I didn’t. Then, as I stared, they revealed themselves—trunks, no more than a foot above the ground, seemingly still charred.
“All this hill was almonds,” he said. “Before the war, yaani.”
The nurseries, some of the best in Lebanon, were set around a hill, past a disheveled mess of concrete where rural and urban were indistinguishable. As was his way, Dr. Khairalla was judicious in what he bought. His biggest purchase was probably a cotoneaster he wanted to turn into a bonsai plant. Predictably, I was less restrained. On this trip and others, I bought citrus trees—clementine, lemon, and an orange known as Abu Surra (Father of the Belly Button)—and what they call lawziyyat—a plum, apricot, and peach. Along with those came hibiscus and rhododendrons, roses and gardenias, wisterias, bougainvilleas, and honeysuckle. I found three kinds of jasmine. There was a pine tree and a plant from Indonesia called ash al-nahl, along with a slew of other plants whose names I never learned.
There are two words (and probably many more) for a garden in Arabic. A jeneineh is bigger, sometimes employing a gardener, with a requisite need of water, pruning, and money. A smaller version, really a plot of land, sometimes overgrown, is a haqoura. Despite my pretensions otherwise, I had a haqoura—my ambitions for it always surpassing its potential. When it came to the ha
qoura, everyone spoke with certainty, except Dr. Khairalla.
“You have to plant this week!” George told me, an urgency to his shout. There was no room for flexibility, no question of this stonemason’s authority. Either I planted this week or the plants were doomed to die. It was fate. Everyone had his suggestion. Toama said I should put the olives close to the house so their fruit wouldn’t fall in the street. George wanted me to leave room for tomatoes. Toama’s wife, Thanaya, was worried about where she could plant parsley. Only on the saroo would they manage consensus.
The saroo is a tall, thin pine, like a cypress. I had envisioned it being planted along the stone wall, imagining a postcard of an Italian villa. Stately, I thought. Sacrilege, they replied. I soon learned that in Lebanon the saroo was commonly found around graveyards, and each protest I heard grew in intensity. My cousins were first to shudder at the idea of adding them. I pleaded, and they said plant one if you must, but donate the rest to the church. George said the same—you should plant them only near a cemetery—as did everyone else at the house, from the plumber to Malik. Even Abu Jean had his advice. “The old ones,” he said, “say that if you cut a saroo, you’ll bring your own death. Or you can’t have kids. Harram. No one plants that around the house.” Nevertheless, there was a saroo across the driveway, in my neighbor’s yard. I pointed this out, a little meekly.
“He’s backward for doing it,” Abu Jean told me gruffly.
The garden itself, though, was never a work by jury. It was a creation of Dr. Khairalla, the only person I really listened to as I got busy. Any time I told the men at the warshe that Dr. Khairalla was coming to visit, as the haqoura became a garden, there was the quietest of responses. Someone might straighten his back. Someone else might tuck in his shirt. Abu Jean would put out his cigarette, then lament Dr. Khairalla’s cancer.
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