“The closer you go to Beirut,” he told me, “the worse people become.” I smiled. But what about the people here? I asked. Were they grateful? “Some appreciate,” he said, “some are indifferent.” To say more would have reflected arrogance, and Dr. Khairalla was unfailingly modest. In a town where swagger was often requisite, deference seen as weakness, and diffidence as stupidity, here was a man who insisted on humility. “In general,” he said, “I think people respect me.”
When another beer arrived, we began talking about his ordeal after the Israeli occupation ended, and he was more forthcoming than I thought he would be. Two or three days after the withdrawal, what he called zoaran—punks with guns—showed up at the hospital. They belonged to Amal, the unruly stepchild of Shiite politics. Turn the facility over to us, they insisted. Dr. Khairalla said he stood his ground. He told them he would accept orders only from the director-general of the Ministry of Health or from the minister himself, a man named Karam Karam, who was born in the neighboring village of Khiam. They relented, still making sense of the landscape that they had just inherited, but the next year proved a disaster for him.
Amal’s enforcers kept returning, insisting that he hire as many as sixty of their own people. They staged inspections every so often. “They tortured me for a year,” he said. Dr. Khairalla recounted the humiliations and disgraces with little emotion, but I could tell he was hurt. In the end, the government decided to privatize the hospital, and in a country where every deal provides for a percentage for some party, Amal seized control. Dr. Khairalla went home, collecting his salary for three more years, until he retired at age sixty-four. He was replaced by a doctor from nearby Blatt, a loyal if opportunistic follower of Nabih Berri, the speaker of parliament and leader of Amal, and the hospital began its slow, painful, and inevitable decline.
That was only the beginning of his ordeal, of course. The charges soon followed. They were ridiculous, he remembered, even by the standards of a kangaroo court. One charge claimed he was a captain in the South Lebanon Army militia, an accusation that bewildered him. Another said he was an adviser to General Antoine Lahad, the man who replaced Saad Haddad as the Israelis’ man in south Lebanon, running the militia that they paid, armed, and trained to do their dirty work. He freely acknowledged that he went to Lahad often to resolve problems between the hospital and Lahad’s men. Lahad was the only authority in town; visiting him was the only recourse. But conversations didn’t make him a traitor.
Dr. Khairalla was eventually summoned to the court in Beirut three times. “For one year, I lived on my nerves,” he told me. In the end he was convicted, but was not given any jail time, and he credited Cecil with helping. A month after the trial, he went with Ivanka to Kazakhstan for his son’s wedding, then returned to Marjayoun, falling into the obscurity of illness and retirement, where I had met him.
I asked him if he was upset that Cecil was the only one to speak up for him during the ordeal. “Of course I’m angry,” he blurted out. He typically hesitated in his answers, but not this time. His face was a grimace, and his words tumbled out. It was the first time I had seen him this aroused. Hoping to blunt his anger, I told him I thought people in Marjayoun were simply afraid. “They’re not afraid,” he said, “they’re cowards. This is their mentality. They look solely after their interests.”
As we drove back to my house, we listened again to Abboud Abdel-Aal. The music filled the car, and again we said hardly a word. His violin sounded like a nay, the Arabic flute—soft, with a hint of melancholy and a suggestion of loneliness. The same song played.
O sleepless one who slumbers and remembers the promise when you wake up,
Know that if a wound begins to recover, another crops up with the memory,
So learn to forget and learn to erase it.
My darling, everything is fated.
It is not by our hands that we make our misfortune.
Halfway to my house, we drove past a sign for the Marjayoun Hospital. I thought only I had noticed it. But as it flitted past the car window, the doctor turned the volume up a little louder.
In time, Raeefa’s aunt had welcomed to their home Jacob Rashid, another wealthy immigrant from Marjayoun living in Fort Madison, Iowa. The visitor was looking for a bride for his seventeen-year-old son, Faris, in part to stop him from marrying an American-born woman in Iowa. Raeefa’s aunt and Jacob negotiated the arrangement, as Raeefa listened; Aunt Khalaya was in charge; she even took the engagement ring to a jeweler to determine the value of the diamond. Married soon, Raeefa left by train for Fort Madison, where Jacob opened a grocery store for his son and new daughter-in-law.
A few months later, when Raeefa was pregnant, Faris, too young to marry and too old to be so feckless, deserted her. Alone in the store, Raeefa eventually had to sell it. She was too proud to rely on her husband’s parents, and in the months after giving birth, Raeefa left her baby with her mother-in-law and began peddling on her own to earn money, carrying door-to-door a trunk almost her size filled with linens and threads. She managed to save about $900, a substantial sum then. With it she bought herself a remnant of her gilded life in Marjayoun, a fur coat and hat. “Buy one dress and make it a nice dress,” she would tell her daughter, remembering those days.
The coat wasn’t the only remnant of Marjayoun; Raeefa had inherited the temperament of Isber and Bahija as well. She suffered in silence. She chose her words; nothing was extraneous. Silence sometimes said more. Like them, she let others see what she wanted them to see. In time, others around her did. When Elva was still a baby, Raeefa posed for their portrait and sent the picture to her itinerant husband in hopes of drawing him back home, where his daughter awaited him. Soon, Faris did return. Back in Fort Madison, he and a friend took Raeefa to a club near the Mississippi River, and he presented divorce papers to her. He had married another woman, and bigamy constituted a crime. Still more of Marjayoun than America, Raeefa refused. Divorce was disgraceful, almost unheard of at home, and she would not bring shame on her family.
“If you don’t sign it,” Faris told her, his eyes wild and his friend there to add an intimidating edge, “we’re going to take Elva and throw her in the river.”
Raeefa signed.
Always affectionate toward Raeefa, her mother-in-law, Sadie, soon sat her down. They sipped cups of coffee, brewed as it was in Marjayoun, grounds settling on the bottom.
Raeefa was just nineteen. “You’re young. You’ll get married again. I don’t want you to waste your life,” said Sadie, who had given birth to seventeen children, eleven of whom lived. “Go and stay with your brother.” Her father-in-law, Jacob, agreed, but insisted the child stay in Fort Madison. They would raise her better, as money for them was not a concern. Raeefa refused, and Sadie agreed. “I won’t do that to her,” Sadie told her husband. Raeefa offered a compromise: She would keep Elva and ask for nothing else. Grudgingly, Jacob relented, and Raeefa boarded the train from Fort Madison for the last time, rejoining Nabeeh in Oklahoma City, where the community of their countrymen was still lacking in many ways.
There was no Orthodox church there in those days. The Reverend Shukrallah Shadid, who was married to one of Isber Samara’s sisters and who had traveled with the family of Miqbal and Abdullah Shadid aboard the Red Star Line in 1920, celebrated the divine liturgy from his home. He would do so for eleven years. In that evolving community, the reverend, known by all as Khoury Shukrallah, was the axis around which all revolved.
He soon visited Raeefa with a proposition. He wanted her to marry Abdullah Shadid, who had divorced his first wife. “He has a child and you have a child,” he told her in Arabic. “I know he’s a good man, and I want you to meet him. It would be good for you both to get married.”
Khoury Shukrallah brought Abdullah to Nabeeh’s house, and several weeks later they were married. As a new bride, Raeefa joined the traveling clan of Abdullah Shadid’s family, a house of personalities as strong as hers.
17. Salted Miqta
Did
you see the kanz, the treasure?” George Jaradi asked me on a clear morning days before I was to move in downstairs—or at least hoped to.
“Did you see the gold buried there?”
Next to the house was a cistern, a hole in the ground that, until now, had been concealed by a concrete slab about six inches thick, itself buried beneath dirt that was almost as deep. The cistern’s sides were built of stone, stretching eight feet into the ground. Several inches of water gathered at the bottom. As I peered into it, the cistern looked like a grotto or an excavated tomb. It was big, revelatory, and, more than anything else, a mess.
I had heard stories about Bahija Abla watering her tomatoes from a spring in the garden. Several times a day, from morning to evening, she would fill her watering can with its long spout and douse the tomatoes. It was her routine, ordering the day like the call to prayer in neighboring villages. I had suspected that the cistern had long ago caved in, or was lost when the road beside the house was widened a few years before. Now, as Toama’s son helped me plant a plum tree, here it was, uncovered once again. But it was filled with shit, and Toama, George, and everyone else soon described it as such: jourat al-khara, the shithole. Albert Haddad, that menacing presence in the house for so long, had connected his sewage pipe to the cistern, making it a septic tank.
Some had experienced better luck. Shibil and my landlord, Michel Fardisi, had told me that during World War I and World War II, many fleeing villagers hid what money they had in their houses and yards. One such villager was Elie Bayoud, a relative of Shibil’s by marriage. Repairing Bayoud’s house, workers stumbled on three jars of gold coins behind a wall. With little discussion, they took it all. Or as Shibil put it, “They fled and never came back.” It sounded apocryphal to me—who saw them find the gold?—but Shibil insisted it was true.
I, on the other hand, was left to dig shit out of the cistern. The plum tree planted, I begged two workers to help me and, at the right price, they agreed. We spread the stuff in the garden like peat moss. I had already started envisioning what I would plant in it—the squash and peppers that reminded me of my grandfather’s garden on the harsh plains of the Texas Panhandle.
Soon after he had arrived in Texas, Raeefa’s future husband, Abdullah Shadid, had become a peddler, traveling the roads of a sunburned countryside that smelled of cattle. Gold, his countrymen in Marjayoun predicted he would find in America. But fortunes were accumulated, not found, and many were built through his new trade. If there was one occupation familiar to every Lebanese family, it was peddling, a trade suitable for a country as yet unfamiliar with cars and buses and outlet malls. For those who worked hard, profits were good, far better than a factory worker’s wage. Arab immigrants set out across America and to small towns in Mexico with suitcases filled with ready-to-wear clothes and bolts of cloth. They were a familiar sight in remote reaches of Brazil.
They sold everything from collar buttons, shoelaces, ribbons, handkerchiefs, lace, garters, and suspenders to exotic stuff from the Orient: handicrafts of olive wood and mother-of-pearl, embroidery from Syria, crucifixes, rosaries, and Orthodox icons that took on an air of authenticity when marketed by people from the Holy Land, even if the goods themselves were manufactured in New York. Most of the peddlers dragged trunks, a fortunate few had a horse and wagon, different from Isber Samara only in their goods and climes. They had traded the Houran for towns with names like Whitehorse, Driftwood, and Cherokee, all no more than a few miles from Syria, Oklahoma Territory.
Abdullah and his brother Miqbal lacked some of their countrymen’s single-mindedness. Work was a means to enjoy life, and with a certain zest, humor, and volatility, both of them had, filling their evenings with song and dance, playfully pitting one brother’s voice against the other’s. Being younger, Abdullah was the more restless. Peddling gave him freedom, as he plodded down the roads with his sleeves rolled up and offered wives and their daughters pins, needles, and thread. He often flirted more than he sold. He soon sought work in the Texas oil fields before he was called up by the military, after which he brought his wife, Vera, a woman as tempestuous as he was temperamental, to Oklahoma. The marriage was volatile, their nights spent fighting then reconciling with an energetic dance to the scratchy records on a gramophone.
It didn’t last. Vera soon left him, with their son Abdullah had named for his father, Ayyash, the friend of Isber Samara’s in the Houran. Each moved on. The family never saw Vera again; she died a young woman, in her fifties. Abdullah wandered more, eventually joining the rest of his family—his mother Shawaqa, his sisters Nabeeha and Najiba, and his brother Hana—all of whom had left Beirut in 1920 on the Red Star Line with the Reverend Shukrallah Shadid.
“Is this the America you brought me to?” Shawaqa yelled at her son.
After his family arrived, Miqbal found them work on a farm owned by a Lebanese family near the western Oklahoma town of Brinkman, a prospering locale. At night, Abdullah and his newly arrived mother and siblings huddled in a wooden shack smaller than their stone home in Lebanon, itself modest. During the day they picked cotton. Bent at the waist, moving down row after irrigated row, they plucked one boll at a time, depositing them in a long and narrow sack stitched of white denim, bought from a nearby dry-goods store and slung over their shoulders with a wide strap. By sunset, their fingers bled, pricked by the sharp prongs that held the fluffy cotton snugly in the boll. Shawaqa’s anger grew through the humid summer of the Oklahoma plains, where the horizon ended only when eyesight surrendered.
“Is this America?” she shouted again.
Soon they would pack up their belongings and go to Detroit, though Miqbal, who stayed behind, was leery. “Oh, you don’t want to go to a big town, it’s dangerous,” Nabeeha remembered him telling them. “But we didn’t listen to him, and we went anyway,” she said. In the 1920s, Detroit was booming, and anything was better than picking cotton. Hundreds of men from historic Syria were already toiling in the automobile plants, where they were known as Syrians or Turks, and Hana soon joined them. Abdullah worked at a produce firm. Nabeeha and Najiba were hired at the National Biscuit Company and wore white uniforms. All of them lived together in a wood-frame two-story house with their ailing mother, Shawaqa, who loathed the long midwestern winters. The family lasted three years in Detroit. The end came on a cold, snowy, blustery night in 1924, with too little heat in the house and not enough money to keep them there.
Abdullah’s words were simple. “Let’s go back to Oklahoma,” he said.
They did, to the same place Raeefa had found refuge. And they never left again.
Camille Salameh, the carpenter from neighboring Qlayaa and a man so utterly lacking in punctuality that he measured time in seasons, worked at the warshe for three days fastening doors to the frames of four entrances. Fadi Ghabar, a Druze from Ibl al-Saqi, joined him, cleaning more tile with his lumbering machine. But Camille didn’t want to finish until Fadi did. And Fadi didn’t want to finish until Camille did. I wanted to clean the downstairs, but Toama wanted me to wait on Camille (and Fadi). Emad Deeba came to install the water heater, but told me to wait a day for the rest of the deliveries. The day arrived, and they didn’t. I learned some old Arabic words by necessity. Bortash was one; it meant, effectively, a small slab of stone or marble that serves as a doorstop. I came to know bortash only because I didn’t have one.
One decision prompted another, which brought another holdup, which demanded another decision, which delayed us more. So I did what I could. In the rooms Fadi had finished, I spent hours scrubbing the tile, still marked with paint, sometimes scraping it with a table knife. I cleaned the downstairs kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom—washing the fixtures, the floors, finding dirt in every corner and every crevice. I swept, mopped, then got on my hands and knees and took a cloth to the tile, roaming back and forth. I scrubbed the windows and shutters, fighting a losing battle against the dust and accumulated dirt of construction.
Every so often, Camille would leave his work on the d
oors, so behind schedule that the schedule meant nothing anymore, and come over to chat while I was on my hands and knees.
Camille loved conversation, be it about his prospects of obtaining an American visa or about how much better life in the south was under the Israeli occupation. The latter was a favorite refrain of Camille’s. For most in these parts, the fondness was rarely for the Israelis themselves, but rather for the money they brought to Marjayoun. Even Shibil, the most militant of anyone I knew in his views of Israel, acknowledged the point. “You’re still in a big habis, a big prison, but when the Jews were here, we lived better,” he once told me. “They had money, and we had money. I was working. Electricity was free, water was free, no bills were paid, and you were making money. Raah al-shekel wa ijit al-mashakil,” he said, recalling a saying. “The shekel went, and the problems came.” He paused. “Still, I wouldn’t trade money for the Jews. I wouldn’t trade occupation for my well-being. Definitely, I wouldn’t.”
Camille was less conflicted. “I look back on it as the best time Marjayoun has ever lived,” he said.
A Maronite Catholic, Camille was the most vehement of the Christian workers when it came to Muslims. He didn’t want me to hire them. In all the time since the occupation ended in 2000, what even he called the liberation, not one Muslim had offered him a job. So why should we hire them? he asked.
I usually listened to Camille’s screeds whether I agreed with him or not. His politics were so far from mine as to sound like another language. But I also understood that Camille was a product of his environment: a village, Qlayaa, that prospered as it had never imagined under Israel’s watch. Money was plentiful, residents had work, a sense of security reigned, and the Christians still acted as if they ran the place. Take the houses, he told me. Before the liberation, between ten and fifteen were built every year. In the seven years since, “only six houses were built—and they’re not even finished.”
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