House of Stone

by Anthony Shadid

  The sun was going down by the time Dr. Khairalla arrived in his gray Mercedes. Everyone greeted him as hakim, doctor, and there was almost a reverence in the way they said hello. Dr. Khairalla walked slowly toward us wearing a gray Irish hat, gray slacks, and black leather shoes, too formal for gardening. He always carried a saw and two shears in his hands. Abu Jean hurried to help us. Ten years older than Dr. Khairalla, he was still stronger. We started with a plum tree that bore some of the smoothest, sweetest fruit I had ever tasted, however biased I was.

  “The aim is to evacuate the interior, to make it like a cup,” Dr. Khairalla said. He walked around the tree, looking at each branch on its own, then from another perspective, as he might gaze at a portrait in a gallery. “This one I want,” he said, pointing at a bigger branch. “This one I could take,” he said. He paused and shook his head. “Maybe next year.”

  Dr. Khairalla never seemed to see himself as dying. His words always suggested that there was life ahead. He went about the work trying, I felt, to impart knowledge. He wanted to do it right. He wanted me to do it right. Doing it right was important, a kind of morality, a proper exercise of spirit. I asked him how he learned, and as usual he would take no credit. “It’s practice,” he said.

  For seven or eight years he had watched gardeners prune his trees and others’, and now he possessed a feel for it. With the small branches, he took action. For the bigger ones, he studied them—their angle, their placement, and how they related to the other branches. “This is going downward, so I’ll take from it,” he told me. He pointed at another one. “This will not bear,” he said.

  “Now I’m the engineer and you’re the worker,” he said, smiling, and offering a proverb: “Don’t teach your son. Let him learn through life.”

  At the beginning of the wall, near an electrical pylon, there was a bush, which I had occasionally watered but largely ignored. The doctor instantly recognized it as a rozana. He picked a leaf and let me sample it; the smell was wonderful. I shook my head at the scent’s strength, like perfume, so sharp some brewed it in tea. He knelt down, his shoes anchored in dirt, and began clipping. The movements were quick but meditative, and before long he was whistling a folk song of the same name, then he offered a verse. “Oh Rozana,” it went, “she is full of beauty.”

  In the weeks that followed, Dr. Khairalla visited the garden often. After he had pruned the plums, he helped me with new fruit trees I had planted. Once, when he came back from a cancer treatment in Beirut, he seemed tired. His steps were a bit slower, and he was hesitant to climb hills or any stairs. He was reluctant to greet people, but surveyed the trees and bushes like an artist. Each time he arrived, he brought something new for the garden, and another idea for the coming seasons. My favorites were the crape myrtle, its colors changing with the seasons, and a passiflora, or passionflower, named by sixteenth-century Spanish missionaries in South America who thought they saw the crucifixion of Christ in its blossom. The corona, at the top of the flower, was a halo or crown of thorns, the anthers were his wounds, the styles were the nails, and the five petals and five sepals were the Apostles, minus Judas and Peter.

  On another visit, he brought asparagus from his garden and two bottles of sweet strawberry wine that he had made the year before. Soon after, he gave me various cactuses, which filled a greenhouse he kept at home. He was already at work, he said, on building a planter to grow strawberries next winter. In the months ahead, he wanted to make wine from the renowned cherries grown in Shebaa.

  With Dr. Khairalla and sometimes alone, I found myself spending a lot of time in the garden. Each day, I probably walked around the plants four or five times, watching roses coming out, plums and peaches appearing on trees I had planted only weeks before, flowers blooming from a clump of wild tulips I transplanted, and buds emerging on grapevines that once seemed lifeless. The petunias had taken root. So had the honeysuckle. The rhododendron bore gorgeous purple flowers, and the jasmine yielded white and pink blossoms with a scent as powerful as the rozana. The olive trees were full of buds, and two of the three pomegranates that Cecil had given me managed to survive, sprouting a few leaves. I learned to respect the garden, where rituals and right actions prevailed. Patience was requisite. There was redemption in silence. Seasons were restorative. A garden, I realized, heals.

  An old photograph of Isber Samara, taken in the winter of 1926 in what, at this faraway juncture, is blurred and faded. It resembles an image from a dream, not the product of a camera. Staring ahead, Isber is dressed in his finest clothes. He fits the part of a zaim al-hara—a country gentleman—in his dishdasha, stitched of wool from the Syrian steppe and flowing to his ankles. An abaya would have been too provincial, unsuitable for the man Isber fancied himself to be. His suit jacket is Western, a mark of his engagement with a larger world, encountered through business or the construction of his house: the men who brought his samneh, or ghee, from the Houran and harvested its wheat; the merchants from Marseilles who sold the red tile for his roof; the Italians who sold the marble for the floor of his liwan.

  In the photo, Bahija sits in a chair next to him, and the distance between husband and wife suggests the emotional reserve that marked their interactions in public and maybe in private. Bahija’s clothes were as simple as one might expect; not a stitch called attention to itself. Her dress falls respectably to her ankles and covers her wrists. Her jacket, finely knitted wool, appears to be high-quality merchandise of the sort favored these days by powerful, conservative women—devoid of ornamentation or frills. The only flourish she allowed herself was the mandeel that she wears loosely over her head. Its tiny flowers are gathered together in a lively string of blossoms that thread along its trim. They are purple, like the spring flowers on the hillsides of the land where she spent her life. Her hands, which had accomplished so much work, are crossed properly in her lap, probably grateful for a moment to rest.

  Was this a farewell picture? No. This was all the family that was left after the three children had departed. Nabeeh is missing. Only the younger Samara children surround their parents. There is Najib, the youngest son—junior to Nabeeh by twelve years—standing behind Isber and Bahija, looking timorous but smiling. His ill-fitting suit hangs over his shoulders, and his white shirt is buttoned to the collar. Already his eyes are brooding, but despite their melancholy, he will become known as one of the town’s handsomest men.

  Nabiha is missing. Perhaps the most gifted of Isber and Bahija’s children, Ratiba stands next to Isber with her hand on her father’s left shoulder. There is something protective about her gesture, as if she knows who is on her father’s mind as the photographer does his job. In some ways, this young girl seems what is expected. Ratiba embodies her mother’s style. She wears a simple skirt and blouse and a woolen jacket, but there are a few flourishes: A ribbon is draped over her pocket. Her long string of pearls declares an unabashed wealth that Bahija would never have been comfortable with. Her lipstick and eyeliner suggest not just a coming of age, but perhaps a hint of rebellion in the years ahead. If her spirit holds. Perhaps she would be the one to break the silence of the Samara women. Raeefa is missing.

  Hoda, the youngest child, sits on a stool next to her father’s knee. Her face echoes Isber’s stare and her mother’s eyes. Her hair, tied in a ribbon that seems somehow halfhearted, is the fairest in the family. Dressed in a coat with a floppy white collar, she holds a bouquet of white flowers that falls almost to her laced shoes. Together, the Samaras look into the camera, an instrument slightly intimidating for its subjects.

  This is a family who now knows that nothing today is promised to appear tomorrow. This is a family who has learned that the unexpected can occur at any moment.

  What did Isber Samara believe he had learned in the world? What was he proud of—the house with the red-tile roof and the hallways that traveled back to better days? The children gathered around him? Or the other children, leading their lives in another, safer place? He had given them lives in America, a
country that Isber Samara himself might have dreamed of conquering if his days of effort and travel had not passed.

  Isber Samara did not visit America. A year after the picture was taken, on January 29, 1928, my great-grandfather died, at the age of fifty-four. They blamed his pneumonia on the wind, especially fierce that winter in Marjayoun. It must have been, as Isber had traveled many times in gales that tossed the wheat around on his way to and from a Houran that was no longer his.

  15. Stupid Cat

  At the end of February, the USS Cole arrived off Lebanon’s coast, staying for more than two months, in what the American government described as a show of support for a government whose legitimacy Hezbollah and its allies questioned. Whatever the ostensible occasion, its deployment unleashed a fury of speculation, pronounced with authority, a favorite pastime here. “The USS Cole Is Heading to Lebanon; the Worst Is Looming,” read a newspaper headline. An act of terror, an opposition newspaper described it. In the days and weeks that followed, everyone seemed to brace for the unexpected.

  “Urgent,” a message on my cell phone read, as I sat with Assaad, Shibil, and a friend of his, Simon Diab. “Saudi Arabian embassy in Beirut asks its citizens, especially families, to evacuate Lebanon.”

  An hour later, while we ate a dinner of silver bream cooked by Assaad, another message arrived: “Kuwaiti embassy in Beirut asks its citizens to evacuate Lebanon as soon as possible.” Simon, a fabulist of remarkable creativity, always claiming to be privy to the secrets of Hezbollah, Israel, the United Nations, the United States, and France, warned that Hezbollah was digging a tunnel of pharaonic proportions to Israel under Mount Hermon. It was literally the path to war, he whispered.

  “Two or three months more, the situation will be fucked,” Simon said.

  As evidence, he told me, the Spanish U.N. troops near Marjayoun had told him they were wearing their boots to bed, ready for imminent battle.

  “We’re living on our nerves,” he said.

  As kindred spirits, Shibil and Assaad were fellow travelers and foils for each other. Together, they roamed across memories, imagined and otherwise. From then on, almost any evening I visited Assaad, Shibil was there. In time, it helped. Assaad was overwhelmed with feelings of vengeance, plotting vendettas as he did. He would hear none of my platitudes about turning the other cheek. He tired of my suggestions that we go fishing. (We never once caught anything.) He wanted something else: sympathy.

  Shibil understood this. On a night soon after our dinner with Simon, Assaad returned to the saga of his swindle, rendered like a Greek tragedy, punctuated by riffs about the thieving ways of his family. Exhausted, I had nothing to add. Shibil did. “God willing, you’ll fuck them, Assaad.” It was uttered in the most compassionate, caring voice. It was a call to arms, pronounced tenderly and sweetly, like pillow talk. Shibil said it again, softer. “God willing, you’ll fuck them.”

  Assaad nodded, savoring the thought.

  They were perhaps too much alike, though, and before long the pettiness of the town infected even their friendship. So did Assaad’s foibles—namely, his unrelenting resentment of his family and pretty much everyone else. “I hope he doesn’t talk about me that way,” Shibil said to me. “If he talks about his cousin, that she’s a whore, that means my back is not protected.”

  We were sitting in Shibil’s house, passing the time. No one’s back was protected, he told me, not his, not mine. Assaad had, in fact, complained that I was always late. I shook my head. “We’re in Jedeida!” I said. “How can you be late in a town where there’s nothing to do and nowhere to go?”

  “I’m not in Jedeida,” Shibil said in his typically disconnected fashion. “You know what I fucking mean? I lived twenty-five years here and I’m still not in Jedeida.”

  He had filled my glass with ice and set it on the rickety tin table in front of the sofa. He went into his bedroom and brought out a bottle of Grant’s, about a fifth full. “Pour whiskey,” he said in Arabic. We talked a few minutes more. “Hutt, hutt whiskey!”

  “I don’t know about Assaad,” I said to him.

  A few days before, I had treated Assaad, who was still postponing his departure, to lunch at Abu Charbel’s, a simple place on a pretty bend of the Litani River.

  He complained about the flies, informed me that the quail some guy ate at the next table was better than all the food he was served, picked at his fish with a disgusted look, and bemoaned the lack of cleanliness around him. Only the cleanliness merited my concern. As we ate, a mouse scurried by. Abu Charbel’s wife chased it across the yard, and in a paroxysm of agility, stomped it to death. She picked up its tiny, mutilated carcass with the same tongs she had used to flip our trout on the grill. I turned away before I saw where she returned the tongs. Better not to know, I thought. This encounter would become the centerpiece of Assaad’s conversation for days, and Shibil would hear the story several times.

  “Whenever you eat with him, he talks about khara, crap and shit,” Shibil said. “Skid marks, toe jam, fucking shit.”

  “Some of those conversations are disgusting,” I said.

  “I said to him once, Why do you mention all those things while we eat? I actually thought he was funnier than that. But he’s not. He’s more depressing. I have enough depression to give away for, like, a thousand years. I don’t need more.”

  In the weeks that followed, Assaad became glummer. He had decided to keep his house, as unhappy as it made him, but he could no longer stay in Marjayoun. This time, he meant it.

  Weeks to go, he told me.

  Why so soon? I asked.

  “I have to,” he said. “I feel old, I feel tired, I feel pissed off, I feel disgusted.”

  Assaad spent the little time he had left in Marjayoun fantasizing about the friends who awaited him in America. Dede Mraz and Larry Dahl, he would say. He dragged out the vowel in Dahl—Daaahl. He said the last time they talked, Larry told him that everyone in Wisconsin missed him. “Every day, he said, someone asks, Where is Assaad, where is Assaad?”

  But he was already savoring what was to come—they would cook dinner on the grill and watch the deer scamper by. “It’s going to be very exciting when I get to America. Very, very exciting. There’s going to be a huge party, maybe a hundred and fifty people. On the lake. West Salem, a big lake.”

  At this point, I had kind of had it, and I asked Assaad why he had ever left. I hoped he would give me an answer that made sense. It never did. He was a man caught between two places, one where he would always be a stranger, one where he was no longer a native. Time and change had made him a perpetual traveler, never comfortable again, like many who had lost their homes or those who had traveled across the world, always searching for them. He was like those sisters in Chekhov, dreaming of Moscow, looking for a place that might contain his great longing, never finding what had never been or what he imagined. Sometimes, it seemed to me, I saw Assaad’s displacement everywhere I looked.

  The evening arrived, the day before Assaad’s departure. I got to his house as the sun was setting, and he seemed a little out of sorts. He was standing on his porch drinking scotch out of an oversize shot glass used for arak. “This is my second,” he told me. From inside, Spanish elevator music blared from a red cassette player. The windows were open, as was the door. His cat was sitting with a small blanket in a bed Assaad had built from a milk crate. On a diet of milk, sardines, and scraps of meat, the animal had grown quite fat.

  “Remembering the good times,” he told me as I walked up the cement steps. “Music from my restaurant. I get homesick.” I always wondered what he meant by that word. “Midnight music,” he said. He played it at night when the customers, in an alcohol-induced haze, started a party. He said the words again: “I get homesick.”

  We walked inside, and he told me, to my surprise, that he was getting nervous about going back to America. “I’m puzzled, really puzzled, about what I’m going to do. Last night I stayed awake thinking about it. I have a house here. I have no
house in America, I have no restaurant there anymore. I wish I wouldn’t have sold it. I’m going blind. This trip isn’t easy for me.”

  I didn’t know whether to feel sorry for him or get angry. All he could talk about since I had met him were his friends in America, about the good times there, parties late into the night, every weekend without fail. Now he was wondering whether it was such a good idea to return. The snow worried him—six months a year, he kept saying. He was already planning his trip back to Marjayoun when the bird hunting would be good. “I might come back in December to escape the snow. I’ll see what I do. I might start a catering business. That’s a possibility.”

  “Are you sad, Assaad?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. Part of me believed him, part of me didn’t. I almost sensed a denial as we spoke. “Nervous about leaving the house,” he said. “That’s about it.”

  “What about the cat?” I asked, smiling.

  It was still there, walking around—feral, a little tentative, seemingly more obese each time I glanced at it. It circled an empty tuna can that Assaad had set on the patio. “Nobody will take care of it,” he told me. It was a typical line from Assaad, frustrated, discouraged, always about to give up. He lit a Winston and looked at the cat again. “I wish I had a wife like my cat.”

  He exhaled loudly and sat back in his chair.

  “The only people I’m going to miss are you and Dr. Khairalla.”

  “That’s it?” I asked.

  He thought for a moment. “And the fat-tailed sheep, because we don’t have fat-tailed sheep in the States.”

  He dangled his set of keys over the cat’s head, jingling them. The cigarette hung from his mouth. He tried to get the cat to react, snapping his fingers, then shouting, “Come here!” The cat stayed still. I thought it might be irritated. Its back arched in a show of wariness and suspicion, it seemed only to want Assaad to leave it alone.