House of Stone

by Anthony Shadid

  In a moment, in other words, it had all ended. Many of his friends fled—for Israel or anywhere they could snare a visa. Salaries evaporated. To him, the Christians were dying, soon to be extinct in a country that, in his words, is “the worst state in the world.

  “I have no hope,” he said.

  A friend of mine once recounted a conversation she had with Camille as he drove her to Nabatiyeh. Eighty percent of his friends lived in Israel, he acknowledged. They drove down a winding road next to the Israeli town of Metulla, perched on a hill and facing Marjayoun. He stopped the car to point out a green house. “That’s where one of my friends lives,” he said. “Can you believe how close we are to him? And yet I haven’t seen him for a decade, almost. Aren’t you wondering how I know he lives here? I know because, right after the liberation, we used to go right up to his house and hang out together. We’d hang out and no one would say anything. We can’t do that anymore.”

  Camille was staring at Metulla’s brightly painted houses, only a few steps away, past some shrubbery. “Look how beautiful Israel is,” he said. When she asked if he would live there if he had the opportunity, he jokingly swerved the car off the road toward Metulla. “I’d go there right now if I could,” he said. “Lebanon is beautiful, okay, but we can’t live here. Do you know how they live there? They have jobs, social security. The handicapped have rights there. They’re happy. We just want to live, and over there, you can.”

  An academic study written soon after World War II at Columbia University assessed the “Tentative Formulation of Some Prominent Aspects of Syrian Culture.”

  The study was as forgettable as one passage was memorable, a mix of remarkable chauvinism and perhaps a grain of truth concerning the immigrants’ desire to adapt. “Let us take a Maronite from a small village in Lebanon, and see how he would act in interpersonal relationships,” it said. “In dealing with a religious American Protestant, our Maronite would think of himself and talk of himself as originating from the Holy Land; with an American Catholic, the Maronite would think of himself as a Catholic; with a Maronite, he is a Maronite. Dealing with a Protestant from Beirut, he is a Christian Lebanese, but meeting a person from Aleppo or Damascus, he is a Syrian. Making the acquaintance of a Moslem from Egypt, he thinks of himself as an Arab, while in talking to a sophisticated American, he is a Phoenician. Applying for a job in a Jewish firm, he is a Semite, but if the firm is a religious Christian group of any sect, then evidently he is a Christian. In dealing with governmental and patriotic organizations, he is one hundred per-cent American.”

  Like the Maronite, the Samaras, Shadids, and other Lebanese from Marjayoun were determined to be like their neighbors in Oklahoma. English was one way, but their tongues never quite negotiated it. Names were another way. Some were bestowed quite randomly at Ellis Island by American officials. Other Americanizations of Lebanese names came in other ways. A Lebanese woman named Mary, who arrived in Maine around Christmastime, was frequently greeted with “Merry Christmas.” How kind they are to greet me by name, she thought. The eventual explanation did little to temper her glee. From then on, she decided her name would be Mary Christmas.

  The Shadids looked for names that had at least some resemblance to their Arabic roots. Miqbal became Mack, and Abdullah, Albert. Hana took the Anglicized name of John. Nabeeha reached further. She was known as Nevada, and she called her sister Bee. Last names underwent a transformation as well. Shadid, pronounced in Arabic as Shdeed, only rarely kept its original. Miqbal’s family changed it to SHAY-did. Abdullah’s went by SHA-did. At least those names were spelled the same. Naifehs, by choice or the whim of an uncomprehending immigration official, became Naify, Nayphe, Nayfa, Naffah, or Knafe. There were Kouris, Khourys, Courys, and Elkouris. Harroz became Harris; Barakat, Barkett; and Dabaghi, Debakey. One of the best known of the Marjayounis to arrive in Oklahoma was Adeeb Eid, and he was rare in choosing his own name. As a teenager he had become fascinated with baseball, his idol Babe Ruth. Adeeb became Babe, and Eid became Eddie. In years to come, no one would remember the Arabic, only Babe Eddie.

  On the occasions they adhered to tradition, problems sometimes followed. Isber’s oldest son, Nabeeh, named his son for his father, as was the custom. When he received the birth certificate from the Oklahoma City hospital, it read, “Ester Samara, female.”

  “Hell, this is no Ester!” Nabeeh exclaimed. “He is Isber, and he is male!”

  As accommodating as they might have been with their names, they still clung defiantly to the traditions that they believed set them apart.

  For all, food was the mainstay, whether it was the lavish lunch that followed a baptism—usually in a sturdy round tub in the days before the church was built—or the more ordinary sharing figs and miqta, with which salt was always required. Abdullah would even plant a small patch of wheat, that crop first cultivated in the Fertile Crescent, to make a dish called frike, best served with lamb. Their native-born visitors expressed surprise at some of the rituals. At the sumptuous meal that followed one baptism, invariably conducted by the Reverend Shukrallah Shadid, a man named Mr. Maddox watched the Lebanese eat khibiz marqooq, a bread thin as paper and folded in half.

  “My God,” he said to his wife, “they’re eating their napkins!”

  On another occasion, an American couple put the bread in their laps.

  To the immigrants’ American neighbors, weddings were an endless source of amazement, the enthusiasm they inspired often finding its way into the pages of the Daily Oklahoman. An article in 1924, covering one wedding, spoke of a Syrian priest “chanting with nasal intonation peculiar to all worshippers of the East” and of “an almost Bacchanalian feast” that followed the ceremony. Another wedding, in 1913, between a couple from the Samara family, found itself on page two of the newspaper. Hearing “the din and uproar” of the reception, neighbors “within a block of the little shanty” called the police, who themselves feared that a “riot was in full swing.” “We jes’ have a leetle fun, das all,” one of the participants explained, in a reporter’s rendering of his Arabic-accented English. The reporter himself seemed taken by the spectacle of the festivities.

  Socializing was a necessary priority. Visits kept to a village cadence; gossip was often dressed as concern. Conversations sometimes turned into hands of whist and games of poker, with walnuts used as chips. Impromptu parties were convened on any night. All that was needed was the derbake, an hourglass-shaped drum that some say was invented before the chair. Abdullah Shadid liked to cup one hand around his ear as he crooned, his voice redolent of the three packs of cigarettes he smoked each day. The line of dabke soon formed, sometimes performed with such zeal and passion that the weaker would fall into their chairs, their legs still flopping beneath them, hewing to the dance’s rhythm. Never a word of English was spoken. On those nights, they were back in Marjayoun. They were home, together.

  Finally, the day had arrived. In a scene recalling the Dust Bowl exodus from Oklahoma, I packed everything I had in Marjayoun in the back of a small Toyota pickup that belonged to Toama’s brother-in-law. There it all was, the conglomeration of nine months of living in the town—two chairs, a couch, a dining table, its four chairs, a wardrobe, a desk, its chair, a refrigerator, an ujaa and its pipe, a few assorted tables, my clothes, and everything from the kitchen, from the last jars of olives and anise for a wintertime tea to the plates and silverware donated by a journalist who had departed Beirut and left behind what she couldn’t carry. It all threatened to spill out the back of the truck, where Tolama’s son, Ali, sat assuredly. “Two kilos of fish!” he shouted, in his best rendition of the fishmongers who ply Marjayoun’s streets, water sloshing in their pickups turned aquariums. Sultan Ibrahim!

  At Isber’s, we disgorged everything into the Cave, the room that was closest to being completed. Since Camille, predictably, had not finished the doors, we propped the bed over the entrance outside. We grabbed an old door from Abu Jean’s pile of detritus, swept it with a broom, and lodged
it against the entrance inside. One light worked. I had yet to get bulbs for the others. There was no heat, and the April nights were chilly. As dogs barked outside, I wondered at one point how steadfast the doors really were. I quickly shook my head. It didn’t really matter; I was too tired to worry. I put the mattress on the floor, piled as many blankets as I had on top, donned long underwear and a sweater, and crawled underneath.

  For the first time in more than forty years, nearly a century after Isber Samara had begun building his legacy, someone in the family slept again in the house.

  The next morning was a Sunday, not a workday in Marjayoun. As I walked around the house, I started to see beauty that I never expected. The tile was restored and rejuvenated. Shades of brown dominated the house, but provided accents of blue and red, always subtle. The paint job, by Joseph Abu Kheir, the son of an itinerant soldier, was quite satisfactory, but the stone, seemingly illuminated, was the centerpiece. I stared at the size of the stones and at their color, noticing imperfections everywhere, beautiful imperfections. The wall was built of row after row of stone, eleven high. It was barricade, foundation, backdrop, and entrance. Monumental in stature, they sprawled, unmovable, a part of the house that could not be changed and could not lose its identity. That wall, I suspected, could never be destroyed. Nor could the pointed arches before it, side by side, like Atlas’s shoulders.

  A truly Levantine innovation, the pointed arch’s origins go back to ancient Mesopotamia, and the design was still commonly built in the Middle East when Muslim conquerors arrived millennia later. They, in turn, spread the pointed arch westward through the Mediterranean. As I stared, I thought back to Abu Salim Haddad, the last of the region’s true stonemasons, who had adored arches. “Look at this arch, you could put all kinds of floors, five more floors on top of this building,” he told me when we started. “The most important thing in a house is the arch. An arch won’t fall down.” I didn’t understand then, but I did now. Survivors, these arches were now bearing something they were never built for. What was once closed had become open, what was utilitarian had become lithe, in an elegance that happened as much by accident as by plan.

  “You could pay a million dollars and you couldn’t build stone like this,” Toama said when he and Abu Jean walked through the house with me.

  Abu Jean nodded in agreement, rare when Toama spoke. “Where are the maalimeen today to build it? None of them are left.”

  As they talked, I opened the shutters. What sun there was came in. It was muted, far softer than it had been when the house had been a warshe, open to the elements. But it bathed the floor and walls gracefully, catching the shades of the stone.

  That afternoon, Cecil came over. In a measured gait, he had walked to my house. He was slightly stooped, and his shoulders were a bit hunched over. Earthy in their colors, his clothes were Jedeidani to the core: faded slacks, a green sweater, and a brownish gray, frayed jacket. I had not talked to Cecil in a couple of weeks, and he was eager to see what the house had become. “My advice to you is not to get involved in the Samara house,” I had remembered him writing all those months ago, and now here it was, finally taking shape.

  “It’s a revelation, this house,” he said. I had never heard him speak that way, his usually measured words taking on a sense of awe. “I never imagined it like this.”

  Cecil entered each room as if preparing a report on the place. In some, he hovered in silence. You could see that old brilliant mind of his still calculating the angles.

  “When you first saw this house, you couldn’t imagine this, could you?” he asked me.

  By the time Raeefa married Abdullah, the number of Lebanese in Oklahoma had grown. There were more than seven hundred in those days—among them the Samaras and Shadids. The exodus from Marjayoun to America that began in the 1890s was now coming to an end, and their settlements in Oklahoma were becoming permanent.

  With that permanence came danger and hardship. The family of Abdullah’s brother Miqbal settled in Brinkman and opened a dry-goods store, cluttered with yellowing signs that declared a sale for “today only.” In their town, no one knew quite what to make of Miqbal’s clan, which soon grew to ten children. The local boys bullied George, their oldest son, who spoke only Arabic when he arrived at school. In church, the Shadid children were harangued by a preacher who deemed them too dark to be Christian. “You’re gonna go to hell if you’re not saved!” he shouted at the girls. They ran home crying, telling their mother, Hafitha, of their fate.

  “Don’t worry,” she told them, her English still too tentative to pronounce r’s and never good enough to distinguish a p from a b. “You’ve already been babtized.”

  Hafitha shook her head, speaking softly. “You’re not going to hell.”

  The Ku Klux Klan had revived in Oklahoma in those days, and violence, from race riots to lynchings, swept across the state like a scythe as the group targeted everyone from wayward Protestants to communities of African Americans, Jews, Native Americans, and Catholics. Their attacks, and those blamed on them, became so pronounced that Jack C. Walton, the state’s progressive governor, declared martial law in two counties, and eventually in all of Oklahoma. (His enmity toward the Klan contributed to his eventual impeachment, after serving just ten months.)

  Brinkman, on the Texas border, was not spared. At first, the threats to Miqbal and his family were communicated by whispers, the small talk of customers warning the gentle, amiable storekeeper, who made a point of speaking to customers in their own language—German, Spanish, Arabic, or English. Then they were conveyed more forcefully by townspeople who, in principle, refused to frequent the store. Occasionally, the police, whose ranks were filled with men who belonged to the Ku Klux Klan or sympathized with it, bluntly delivered the warning: They should leave. Miqbal’s oldest child, Gladys, would never forget one night in 1923. In their front yard, near a small vegetable patch, a wooden cross was doused in gasoline and burned, its flames pricking the night air for hours. Since this was America, Miqbal insisted, he would ask the governor to act. Indeed, he dialed Walton’s office, pleading for him to intervene. His office did. Miqbal’s family never knew quite what happened—who was called, who was summoned, or who was warned. But no cross was seen again, nor was a threat whispered.

  For insurance, Miqbal bought a pit bull he kept at the store. Rex, he named it.

  Miqbal’s charm seemed to court hardship, a circumstance perhaps attributable to the presence of the rather difficult Rahija, Miqbal’s mother-in-law, who thrived on discord and chaos. With her daughter, Rahija would encourage fights with her son-in-law, then sit back to enjoy the spectacle, a sadistic smile spreading across her face. Births, in the event the baby was a girl, were disappointments. She raged at the coming of Gladys. Because she had wanted a boy, she poured acid on the breast of her daughter, making it impossible for her to nurse. When Rahija was away, Hafitha put sugar balls in her baby’s mouth. It was not enough, and Gladys withered. Her chest burned, her spirit broken, Hafitha finally asked her sister Martha to nurse her infant daughter.

  “Don’t tell our mother,” Hafitha begged her sister.

  When Rahija died, her daughter’s words were remembered.

  “Don’t cry for her,” Hafitha said.

  No one did. Rahija’s son Frank, abandoned by his mother at six months in Lebanon, assumed her place as head of the family. To his sisters, as timid as they were gentle, Frank acted the way a son of Marjayoun would. Imperious, with a severe face and a scar over his left temple, his word was final. To his sick nephew, George, lying in bed and attended by a doctor, Frank arrived to prescribe his own treatment: horse urine. (Somehow, it worked.) When another of Miqbal’s sons, Junior, was stricken with pneumonia, Frank dismissed the doctor and applied his own mustard plasters—mustard powder mixed with flour and water, thought to help bronchial problems—to the boy’s chest. Just two years old, Junior died anyway, as Frank hovered over his frail body, shouting orders to Miqbal and his wife and treating without kno
wledge. As others watched, Frank put his hands over the boy’s eyelids, closing them for the last time.

  “He’s gone,” Frank said, without emotion.

  With her golden brown hair, Pauline was the most beautiful of Miqbal and Hafitha’s children, inheriting her father’s charm. She was the fourth of ten siblings and had an independent streak. At twenty-one, she fell in love. It was not an adolescent crush. Both were adults, and both wanted to spend their lives together. Frank fulminated and fumed, raved and ranted. He insisted that his niece marry a Lebanese man. Pauline was told that she could not date her neighbor in Brinkman.

  Hafitha toiled long hours in the kitchen; to her children it seemed she was always cooking. There, she had a bottle of carbolic acid, used to disinfect chickens raised in a shed beside the house. Soon after Frank delivered his order, Pauline drank the acid, a foul, corrosive liquid that causes stupor, deadens sensation, slows the pulse, then causes death. Pauline passed away before anyone knew what she had done.

  Six weeks later, her admirer visited her brother David. He wanted to take a drive, anywhere, past the flat farms stretching to the horizon. David agreed out of sympathy, and the men piled into the family’s 1935 blue Buick. After an hour or so they stopped the car and got out to survey the vista. While David’s head was turned, Pauline’s admirer walked from the door to the fender of the car. As David idly stared into the distance, the other man pulled out his own bottle of carbolic acid. He drank as she had. As was his wish, he died as she did.