“Stupid cat,” Assaad said finally.
Assaad’s sense of not belonging drew me to him. Like him, I never felt a sense of community here, though I wanted to. After he left, I worried that my solitude was the legacy of families forever doomed to departures. I worried that, like Assaad, I would never really find home, not in Oklahoma, not in Maryland, not in Marjayoun. I suppose it is the curse of a generation always looking for something more, something better—the cost of too much freedom. Yet we search, sometimes without realizing it. I knew I wanted my own sense of bayt, and this is what had drawn me here. As spring settled in, I began to wonder whether I had already found it, as Bahija had.
A widow whose appearance did not betray her fifty years, Bahija was a wealthy woman, keeping the gold that Isber had left her tucked above the stained wood panels that ran the length of her roof. Dutifully, she raised the children who remained—Najib and Hoda. Considered old for a single daughter at twenty-five, Ratiba soon left, traveling overseas with her father’s younger brother, Rashid.
Close in age to Isber, Rashid had always looked up to him. He had built his house next to Isber’s, sharing a wall and chatting with him from their balconies, which opened onto Mount Hermon. After Isber died, Rashid had helped Bahija as much as he could, trying to serve as an authority figure and patriarch to his brother’s children. But as the years passed and he began to feel his age, Rashid decided to join his sons Said and Kaleem, who had migrated to Brazil.
He bid farewell to Faris, his oldest brother, who chose to stay in Marjayoun, as a neighbor of Bahija’s, and he sold his house to the Qurbans, relatives of his wife. As a gesture to his brother, Rashid made the offer to take Ratiba with him to Brazil, where she married the eldest of his sons, Said. She would never return.
In those years, only Nabeeh came back from America, arriving in 1931, more than a decade after he had emigrated with his sister Nabiha. Now in his thirties, he was eager to marry. Nabeeh had thought to stay a few months. He ended up staying nearly three years, his bedroom, next to the liwan, still bearing his name long after he returned to America. Bahija would have never confessed it, but Nabeeh, her oldest, was always her most beloved, and he returned her quiet, unspoken affection with respect that bordered on reverence.
Nabeeh traveled with his widowed mother, who had never ventured more than an hour’s walk from Marjayoun. Their first stop was an obligation, the Convent of Our Lady of Saydnaya, an important site of Christian pilgrimage in the Middle East, perched on a rocky promontory in the mountains beyond Damascus. Renowned for its miracles of healing and renewal of faith, it was built by Emperor Justinian, whose Byzantine troops, fording the desert, struggled with thirst. In the distance, tradition has it, he saw a gazelle and gave chase. As he drew his bow, the gazelle transformed into a brilliant light, the Virgin Mary herself, who ordered that the emperor build a church to her on the spot—by legend, the place where Cain killed Abel. Justinian built the church. When he faced difficulties, Mary returned in his dream, again as a gazelle, with the plans for a convent. Miracles ensued.
As a two-year-old, an ill Nabeeh had faced death, and Bahija had prayed, promising to take her son to Saydnaya if he was healed. It was her own miracle. Thirty years later, she took him. Fresh from Oklahoma, an unruly and untamed frontier, one of whose towns Woody Guthrie would describe as the “shootingest, fist fightingest, bleedingest, gamblingest, gun, club and razor carryingest” places he had known, Nabeeh spent the night at the convent, amid frescoes illuminated by candles and behind stones reputed to have stood thirteen centuries, in a place inhabited since the Stone Age.
From there, they roamed Palestine for two weeks, visiting Nazareth, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, before venturing back to Lebanon and a far more unfamiliar Beirut. Less than two hours by car, they returned again and again to Damascus, a more intimate city. There, a cousin, Kamal, had married. His wife played matchmaker, introducing Nabeeh to the parents of Adeeba al-Rayess, who was half his age. Beautiful, Nabeeh remembered thinking. But, he worried, “she’s too young. What am I gonna do with her?”
Soon persuaded, he married her. At their wedding, on Christmas Eve, 1933, Bahija, never given to festivities, fretted that the dabke they danced late into the night in the liwan would scratch, crack, or break her marble, which she had shined that day. Nabeeh and Adeeba, seven months pregnant with their first child, left in 1934, driven by a chauffeur so full of song that he honked his horn as percussion. Bahija suffered their departure in silence.
16. Sitara
Like Isber’s house, Marjayoun had its own secrets. So did every family. Mastourin was a word I had learned soon after I had arrived, at a lunch with Karim and his friends along the Hasbani River. Visiting was Bassima Eid, a lovely woman in her seventies, still strikingly beautiful, who mentioned the word to me. She was an expatriate now, living mostly in New York with her daughter and disdainful of convention. Even among fervent Christians, for whom devotion was a sign of social standing, she freely proclaimed that while she respected Christ, she had little time for talk of his divinity or the possibility of his miracles. She was no less contrarian about the civil war. “I miss it,” she told me without irony. “I’m glad I went through it. It enriched us. We’ve seen things that people in the States would never dream of seeing.”
The Americans who had become her neighbors lacked other familiar qualities. They were anything but mastourin, Bassima said. The word translated best as private, but it meant far more. Its root in Arabic means to cover, veil, hide, conceal, or disguise. With an apt pronoun, it can mean to shield, guard, or protect. There is a hint of pride in the description, perhaps ambition too. If someone is stuck in a bad marriage, she told me, no one else would know about it. No one complained about money, or confessed to failings, or admitted setbacks. To do so would reveal too much. They would remain mastourin. Interred in the earth or whispered behind a curtain, secrets were kept hidden.
So it was with those who participated in the diaspora of Marjayoun, settling in Oklahoma and Texas. Like old pictures stained with water, or wrinkled like the palm of a child’s hand, they revealed only so much to the world. They spoke little of the past. There was always a sitara, a curtain, as they kept secrets buried in the customs and traditions they brought with them—all those Bedouin qualities of shame and honor.
By the time Raeefa arrived in America, a community had already gathered there. Stories of these immigrants have proliferated through the years. One Lebanese was put on the wrong ship in Marseilles. It was two years before he realized he was in Australia, not the United States. Nearly 6,000 came to America in 1907, and more than 9,000 in 1913 and 1914. The numbers dropped during World War I amid the ravages of the seferberlik, the forced conscription, but then grew again, reaching a peak of 5,105 in 1921, the year after Raeefa and her siblings immigrated. Heeding a mood of hostility, infused with the xenophobia that haunts American history, restrictive legislation followed. The Quota Limit Act of May 1921 would allow only 882 Syrians to enter the United States. The Immigration Act of 1924 reduced the number to 100.
Eid al-Khoury had been the first to leave Marjayoun, peddling his way from New York to Oklahoma, then as much a frontier as any locale in America. For many settlers, that meant promise, drawn in part by the lure of inexpensive land and the booming coal fields of the Choctaw Nation, where mining peaked around World War I, leaving behind a slew of towns named for the mine’s owners and operators: Haileyville, Dow, Wilburton, Adamson, Alderson, and Phillips. Inaugurated by a well named the Nellie Johnson, with its iconic image of a black plume dwarfing its wooden scaffold, oil fueled communities in Oklahoma that boomed as quickly as they collapsed, leaving their inhabitants—in the words of Woody Guthrie, who lived in one such town—“busted, disgusted, and not to be trusted.” Only a few of those Lebanese immigrants in those days were miners and oil workers; most turned to business, opening groceries and dry-goods stores that stitched the mercantile tapestry of the fledgling t
owns for as long as they lasted. On arrival, George Shahdy even became a postmaster, and in 1898, in a nostalgic gesture, he named the post office Syria, Oklahoma Territory. Itinerant as those immigrants were, Syria closed on July 31, 1907.
Marjayoun gradually faded into memory.
Cecil had returned to Marjayoun in April for the first time since his rebuttal to my Washington Post piece was published in the town’s magazine. By now, I had learned not to bring up the subject. Not that Cecil would have been bashful about it or, God forbid, embarrassed. Indeed, he seemed to take delight in mentioning to others in my presence how much he disliked my essay on the town. It would forever haunt me, he once declared, savoring his words.
To fellow guests, he insisted that I had visited in the middle of winter, when Marjayoun slumbered, and that I had talked to too few people, and those I talked to were ill informed. I had closed my eyes to the potential and promise of the town, whose renaissance merely awaited a true peace. I never confronted Cecil, someone I considered a friend. I knew enough about respect these days to choose my battles. Cecil liked to say he was old enough to speak in whatever way he wanted. I was young enough not to.
That month, I joined him on a Sunday for dinner at a place we had nicknamed the Swiss Chalet, given its rustic look. At dinner, Cecil grew irritated that the waiter had failed to bring the silverware right away. “We’re not Bedouins,” he told the owner’s wife, a buxom woman whose beauty resisted age.
At times I lost track of our conversation: memories of his time in Tunisia, the opening of his grandson’s film in New York that Cecil planned to attend, his daughter’s very British husband, and the crisis—that ever-present crisis—in Lebanon, gathering more momentum each day. “I call it the theater of the absurd,” he told me.
All that was preamble, though, to a revelation about Dr. Khairalla, who, as mentioned earlier, had run the Marjayoun Hospital. Everyone in southern Lebanon, including Hezbollah’s foes, describes as the Liberation the moment that the Israeli occupation ended in May 2000. With the Israelis gone, Hezbollah soon took over the hospital in Bint Jbeil. Amal, another Shiite movement, of far less discipline and far more corruption, seized Dr. Khairalla’s hospital in Marjayoun. Soon after Amal’s assumption of authority, Dr. Khairalla was formally accused of collaborating with the Israelis, and since he was still nominally an employee of the Lebanese Ministry of Health, he had to face a trial. (Cecil thought the entire episode was ludicrous. The Israelis had actually helped the hospital immensely; he thought they had probably spent $2 million a year or more on it. They had built a new maternity ward, another building, and a helicopter pad.)
The trial began in 2003, and Cecil discovered, undoubtedly surreptitiously, that the judge was Druze. The inveterate insider, Cecil went straight to the head of the Druze community, the mercurial Walid Jumblatt. “Walid was helpful,” Cecil said simply. He still had that secretiveness of a government adviser—understanding that when knowledge is power, fewer words are better. “I was the only person who made any show of support for Dr. Khairalla,” he told me. “He was extremely disappointed in the people of Jedeida. They did nothing for him. And he did so much.” Cecil shook his head, in the tentative way that was by now familiar, as we both finished our beers, a local brand called Almaza. “He was treated very badly,” he said again. “That’s why he keeps to himself.”
At night in Marjayoun, I gazed again and again at the old photos of those who had lived in or left Isber’s house. One looks more like a painting, a fin-de-siècle rendering of Raeefa as a beautiful seventeen-year-old woman, seated in a carved wooden chair. Her short hair is a soft brown with reddish tones, the legacy of her father, Isber, memorable for the shade of his tossed locks. Her lips are folded into an expression that is less smile and more tenacity, at odds with her tiny, five-foot frame. Raeefa’s pale features melt into her genteel clothes, a white dress and shawl that drape lazily over her body. There is an angelic quality to this portrait, painted in grays that threaten to blur. Though still a teenager, my grandmother appears dignified, serious. Life, in this moment, captured so fleetingly, seems calm.
Not as it had been.
After fording the Red River with her aunt and uncle, Raeefa, still just twelve years old, had met her brother Nabeeh in Wilson, Oklahoma, a town named for Charles Wilson, secretary to the circus magnate John Ringling, who helped build a railroad envisioned as stretching to the West Coast; it went no farther than Wilson.
Nabeeh had already left New York, where he worked at a dry-goods store, and as a peddler, and then, six days a week, at the Edison factory in New Jersey, building a product whose purpose he never knew. Tiring of the routine, Nabeeh had heard that his father’s sister Khalaya was living in Oklahoma City, where her husband, Faris Tannous, had settled after peddling across the country. He decided to go, suspecting he would be even more welcome, since they had no children. In September 1920, six months after disembarking at Ellis Island, he arrived at 5 P.M. by train at the Santa Fe station, where fifty friends and relatives from Marjayoun had gathered to greet him. “Before I seen the people and before I knew what I am going to do,” Nabeeh remembered thinking, “I just liked the looks of the city.” With a loan of $200 from his aunt, Nabeeh and Faris, fond of drink and illiterate, opened a grocery store in Oklahoma City. For more than a year they ran it together, delivering goods to their customers by horseback before buying a car for $500.
Nabeeh brought Raeefa with him to Khalaya and Faris’s house, and she soon enrolled in school. Everyone worked in those days, and Raeefa found herself spending afternoons at a cookie processing plant along Western Avenue. Diminutive as she was, she stood on a box so that she could pack the cookies in cartons. By nightfall, when she came home, Khalaya had left dirty clothes for her to wash. Whenever Raeefa was late, her aunt scolded her. “What were you doing?” she barked. “On the corner, looking for boys?”
Raeefa had been pampered, living a life befitting the daughter of an Ottoman country gentleman. No need went unanswered; no one but Isber had to work. In Oklahoma, her aunt forced Raeefa to stop school in eighth grade. She had learned enough. A gentle and encouraging character, the principal, impressed with the girl’s mind, tried to keep her. “If you would just let her stay, I’ll pay all of her expenses,” he offered the aunt. In a fit of old-world pride, a furious Khalaya scoffed at the offer and the gall of his intervention. Raeefa had learned enough, her aunt said again.
The conversation ended, as did communication with the earnest principal.
A few days later, Dr. Khairalla returned again from Beirut, where he was receiving treatment for his cancer. His face was tanned a rugged brown from spending hours in his garden, making for a vigorous contrast to his groomed gray hair. I felt he looked more vibrant, even revived, though I knew he wasn’t. We were meeting for lunch, but as was his habit, he first sauntered through my garden, hardly acknowledging my presence, and inspected the plants we had bought together in Jibchit and the ones he had given me—a squat cactus, a passiflora, an emerging crape myrtle. I needed iron for the wisteria and fertilizer for the rest—nitrates for foliage, he said, “to grow more,” and phosphates for roots, “to make them stronger.” Potassium would help everything bloom, flower, and have bigger fruit. He grimaced as he glanced at a jasmine he had given me. It was little more than a sprig, and I had yet to plant it, looking for a place that I thought would properly acknowledge it as a gift from Dr. Khairalla. I was too embarrassed to tell him that, and in the time I had waited, it had withered into an autumnal auburn, its leaves shriveling in neglect.
Put it in the ground immediately, he told me, and water it every day. His voice was urgent. To almost everything he did he brought a doggedness, whether it was fashioning grafts of pear trees and coaxing an olive bonsai or building a wall for a reservoir and hoisting stones into a staircase that ran his garden’s length. Each task was meditated upon and measured and plotted and figured and reconsidered, imbued with a respect that should define life. He could do nothing a
bout his own dying body, decaying within, but he could master his garden in the spring, enticing all those timid roots, persuading the pruned branches, cajoling the many blossoms. The fate of the jasmine had hurt him; I was careless in leaving it unattended, blasé about planting it. I had failed to appreciate what I could do.
We got in his car, and he told me he wanted me to hear a Lebanese violinist of Palestinian origin, whom he considered the best in the Arab world. His name was Abboud Abdel-Aal. “It’s as if his violin is talking,” Dr. Khairalla said to me. Abdel-Aal was playing “Al-Atlal,” the ode by Oum Kalthoum that had made me understand why the price of hashish always went up in Cairo before she performed for hours, defying stamina. (Her voice possessed glass-shattering power; microphones were kept a half meter away from her mouth.) Dr. Khairalla looked through the windshield, lost in the lonesome chords that joined us, somehow plaintive yet bold. To this day, I don’t remember our saying anything. Words would have intruded.
We sat at a table in a restaurant on the Boulevard called Road Runner. Both of us ordered pepper steak and Almaza beer. Cecil had told me that when Dr. Khairalla first learned he had cancer, three years before, he didn’t tell his son and daughter. Burdened by a father’s pride, he would not inflict his children with his worries. Perhaps shame played a part, too. As a doctor, he had always urged his patients to have a prostate exam, and he had not. I wanted to ask him at lunch about what Cecil had told me, that no one stood up for him after he was accused of collaboration. I knew I couldn’t ask him directly, so we started talking about his long career in medicine. The path was never his choice, though I think he ultimately liked being a country doctor.
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