House of Stone

by Anthony Shadid

  “My identity is being reformulated,” said George Dabbaghi, the son of my neighbor Maurice, the principal of Marjayoun National College. I didn’t understand what he meant, so I asked him to explain. “The question is, do you keep living in the past, or do you look somewhere else? And if it’s somewhere else, where is it?”

  George and I had taken advantage of the spring weather to go on what we both termed a field trip. As garrulous as he was interesting, George acted as a guide of sorts. “There’s a tremendous amount of history here,” George said as we embarked in a rental car. “You have history under your eyes.” He looked out at the landscape, as did I. There was the valley, then Mount Hermon, just fingers of snow remaining, barely tracing the mountain’s contours, an escarpment over which he said invaders had been coming for four thousand years.

  We drove through the marj below the town. I had never taken the route we chose, and the beauty and age of the place struck me. The British had fought the Vichy French here in World War II, and along a cratered road we crept past barriers of stone the British had built to block the passage of tanks. But what was so remarkable was the natural landscape. Olive trees grew over and around the old trenches. The fields of wheat were verdant. Where there had been figs, now olives and flowers grew. One flower was known as showk al-jamal, thorns of the camel, named for the animals that consumed it. As we climbed to the top of a flat hill, a possible Canaanite or Jewish burial ground, we surveyed the land, broken by borders on each side—Israel to the south, Jordan to the southeast, Syria to the east—none of which existed in Isber Samara’s time.

  As we stood there an elderly farmer came over, Abu Ali Wansa, from Dibin. He confessed that he had spent six months in a Lebanese prison after the liberation, presumably for collaborating with Israel, but he was more interested in regaling George and me with stories about how the various peoples in the region once got along well. They had intermarried, they were all tied to the land, and they had stuck to principles of coexistence rather than dogmatism in faith. I asked him what had happened. He pushed his cane forward, tapping the weedy ground, and spoke with a sense of the obvious.

  “Wars,” he said succinctly.

  I thought about politics much the way George did, and as we stood there, we started talking about Arab Christendom. He was no chauvinist. There was none of Camille the carpenter’s hostility. But like me, he was filled with a sense of fear and loss over what was happening to the Christians in Marjayoun, as the town withered. “I don’t have the guts,” George said, “to say goodbye and go.” Thoughts of my grandparents flashed through my mind, their courage to leave. “We’re never going to be in a position of making power in Lebanon,” he said.

  I had to agree with him. As Christians, we faced marginalization. We were not included in decision-making. To persist in that identity, we faced our own extinction. It reminded me of words that Assem Salam, an architect and friend of Cecil’s in Beirut, had uttered during the war in 2006. What each community lacks, he said, are “the guarantees of its survival.”

  Power meant survival; without power, nothing endured. That was the arithmetic of the Middle East that had evolved from my Levant. A lack of power meant obsolescence, communities that were too small. Take the fate of Christians in Iraq: “They’re finished. They’re gone,” George said. He pointed at the hill where we stood with Abu Ali, the farmer. “That guy said we’re all one people, but nobody is going to listen to you,” he said. “You have to find identity somewhere else.” And by identity, I thought he meant a notion of emotional or mental sovereignty. By identity, I thought he meant survival, or the power to imagine something more, something broader, another kind of community. “We’re not as attached to the land as someone else might be.”

  We had lunch at his father’s house afterward, and as conversation often did, it turned to the history of Marjayoun. The ideas echoed Cecil’s talks with me, the way that Marjayoun once brought together religious communities. It was in part nostalgia, of course, but there was a truth in it, too. The notion spoke of power and confidence. It denoted identity that was less rigid. It took place in a land freer of borders, and there might even have been guarantees.

  All this was gone now, my neighbor Maurice Dabbaghi said.

  “The lost past,” he called it.

  18. Passing Danger

  I was waiting for Hikmat to visit on a spring night. For a week or so I had spent most of every evening outside, eating fresh almonds, sipping scotch, and feeling a peace that I had not felt in a long time. The house was utterly tranquil but for the sound of the wind blowing through the trees. The fragrance of jasmine enveloped me.

  As I sat there, the porch lights highlighted the virile green of the plum tree and the silvery green of the two olives. I could see the faint outlines of the plants in the garden itself—the basil, the rozana, and the passiflora that Dr. Khairalla had given me. The breeze was warm. I had finally escaped from war. The reverberations of explosions and the noise of helicopters were all but gone. Since the death of Imad Mughniyeh in February, Lebanon’s crisis had settled into the grimmest of stalemates. No one was fighting but, of course, no one was compromising, either. The specter of bloodshed continued to haunt the country. Television ads appealed for dialogue: “If not for us, then for our children: Talk to each other.” Signs in stores declared that it was forbidden to talk politics inside. Yet in the streets, where knots of soldiers were deployed at intersections, there was fear.

  To Mohammed Heidar, a Shiite from neighboring Dibin, Hikmat had once warned, “If anything happens, collect your children and leave Dibin on the spot. This time there’s going to be no joke with you Shiites and Hezbollah.” He meant the next war was going to be a showdown. To his wife, still afraid for her daughter, he was more reassuring. Wars happen in the summer, he said confidently, and it was still spring. “You don’t want to send a soldier to die in the mud and the cold.” Even if there was a war, we both insisted, Hezbollah could never be defeated. Nearly everyone seemed to agree on this point. The government, claiming itself the heir of Rafik Hariri, enjoyed the support of probably half the country, and importantly, the United States. But Hezbollah represented most of the Shia, and they were Lebanon’s single largest group. Besides, its patrons, Iran and Syria, knew the country far better than the Americans.

  Hikmat soon arrived, his first visit since I had moved in downstairs. Like a maalim, he walked through the house, shoulders thrown back, head cocked, nodding in approval. Perhaps more than anyone else in the town, Hikmat understood what the house meant to me.

  “Now you have a relationship with this house,” he told me. “Those pieces of shit in the States have nothing. Everything, everything, the door, the tile, the stone,” he said, pointing. “You have ties with it. You know what it was. The simple act of discovering the arch, you did it. The simplest thing in the house, you have a relationship with it.

  “It’s part of your body now. It’s the womb of your body. It’s you, khalas,” Hikmat said.

  He looked at me seriously, like a father. Laila should come here, he instructed, and she should feel the house is hers. She should understand her relationship to the town, and yours. The line of continuity, from generation to generation, should not be broken again.

  I poured him a scotch from the decanter he had given me, and we sat on the art deco furniture, upholstered in a wine-red fabric, that I had bought at a used-furniture market in the Beirut neighborhood of Basta. As he drank, he grew more reflective and personal.

  “You can see into someone’s heart when they’re sleeping,” he told me. He peered into his daughter’s heart when she slept in her crib, he said. He saw into the heart of his wife, Amina, and sensed that she was good. For both, he said, he felt that God had set him on this earth to take care of them and protect them. “What’s written on your forehead you’ll see with your eyes,” he told me, a saying I had heard often in Baghdad, meant to explain the inevitability of fate.

  I could see the bond growing between Hikm
at and his daughter, Miana, and part of me felt that it was the last element of his persona as a zaim—a father and protector—to emerge. He was sincere, too. “From now on, when I’m away from her, it kills me. I miss holding her. She loves me holding her.” He sipped more scotch. “I was never scared of death,” he said. “But now I don’t want to die.”

  Khalil Abou Mrad, a friend of Dr. Khairalla’s, had once told me a story. He was visiting a store selling roasted nuts when the vendor asked him how many children he had. “A daughter,” Khalil replied. “Fuck that!” the guy shouted, a voice from the old world. “Is it worth all those years of marriage for one daughter?” To Hikmat’s credit, I never heard him express regret at not having a son, and the way he talked about Miana made me jealous of not having my own daughter with me. I called her almost every day. I saw her for a few weeks every couple of months. But it wasn’t enough, and I felt ashamed at not being with her more often. I told Hikmat that.

  When I’m with her, I went on, she tells me after we read a bedtime story that I am “the best daddy in the whole wide world. There is no one better, ever.” She means it, and she wants to hug me after she says it. My confession seemed to fill Hikmat with emotion. Maybe it was pity; maybe he sensed how much I needed, after all my absences, Laila’s reassurances. But I suspect it was also his understanding of the bond between parent and child. As I talked, Hikmat’s eyes welled up, and a tear fell down his cheek. He did nothing to remove it—either he didn’t care or he was too embarrassed to draw attention to it. We were two fathers, both insecure, both worried about what would happen when our daughters became more aware, both terrified of the ways of the world and the future.

  As we talked, Amina called. She asked Hikmat when he was coming home.

  We had planned to finish the bottom floor of the house in January. We did it in April, and I shuddered at all that was left to be done. We had two months to complete the rest, and it seemed impossible.

  One afternoon, after everyone headed home for lunch, I wandered up to the veranda above the stairs, known in Arabic as the istayha. From one corner, past a stone wall, a thicket of pomegranates, towering pine trees, and squat figs that spilled beyond them, I had a mesmerizing view of Mount Hermon. Cousins had told me that Bahija used to sit in the same corner doing needlework on her pillows and blankets. As I stood in that spot, I wondered what she would think of the house where she had presided for half a century.

  An old piece of marble from the kitchen leaned against a stack of tiles on the veranda, along with fragments of a bygone doorstop. Two old windows were stacked against the dining room wall. Next to them was a resilient shutter whose color, the original green of the house’s windows, I had always found so lovely. Remnants of Bahija’s house were everywhere.

  Bahija’s autumn was Marjayoun’s. No one disputed the town’s decline, but she would have had little to say about the changes. As an elderly woman, she hardly ever left the house. Why would she? It had become her world. The cushions everywhere she had made, as she had made the drapes. She was partial to white; it seemed clean, for her the cardinal virtue. But for accents she sometimes dipped fabrics in tea, creating a beige, never too brown.

  The outside world held few attractions for Bahija. Everyone she knew best remained inside the rooms of Isber’s house. In its favored spot, the cherished portrait of Archbishop Elia Diab still hung, a lonely artifact of times gone by. Isber had often gazed at the image of his friend with fondness. The clergyman, one of the many who had fled, had bestowed that meaningful farewell before leaving town. “Remember me,” read the inscription. Perhaps these were the words that Bahija lived by, as Isber was everywhere—on the balcony, or at his desk, or smoking his nargileh in the liwan. Bahija’s children were everywhere, too. She could, she once told one of her daughters, still hear their voices in the halls. Did she hear the rhymes she had taught them as children?

  Oh Laila, oh Laila

  Oh Laila, there are no eyes like her eyes

  And the magic in her eyes,

  Oh Laila, oh Laila.

  Once the days had begun with her waiting for the Bedouin women to bring the bread. So many times she had promised Raeefa and Ratiba sandwiches of butter and sugar when the bread arrived. Now they were gone across the world, their lives echoed in letters alone.

  Though she sometimes forgot whether she had put lemon leaves in the jars of olives she prepared in the fall, Bahija was still of sound mind during the years of World War II and after. She was respected in the town as a kind and dignified woman. She got up at 5 A.M. and brewed coffee, enjoying it on the istayha, looking out at the hydrangeas flowering in white, blue, and purple. Sitting there, observed by her neighbors, she seemed younger than her years. Often she would take a break from her morning cleaning to chat with her nieces Laurinda and Wadad Abla, who lived downstairs with their husbands, or to talk to one of the soldiers from the nearby base. The house was always spotless. Like Isber, she was thrifty, sparing with the money that her husband left and that Raeefa and Nabeeh would send her. But she spent generously on her home. Like her husband, she would ask question after question until she settled on the best purchase. She stared at items for minutes as impatient vendors looked on.

  During the day, Halim Sukarieh would bring Bahija vegetables, fruit, and meat. Her gardener, Ali, would show up in the late morning, assisting her with the plants, tending her pomegranates and olives, helping her pick the parsley and mint, watering her vegetables as she grew older. He was a striking man—one eye a lighter blue than the other. Hussein, in his black kaffiyeh, would bring her coal and work as a handyman, promptly fixing whatever was broken. She cooked elaborate lunches for all who came. By late afternoon she sat down to crochet, knit, and embroider. She had created almost everything around her, even the tablecloths, exquisitely rendered. For Christmas she would knit blouses for the children of her favorite relatives.

  At sunset she lit the kerosene lamps, whose glass covers she scrubbed each morning. By 7 P.M., sometimes earlier, she prepared for sleep. She had moved into Nabeeh’s room, reluctantly admitting to herself that he would never return. Her old bedroom she rented out to officers from the Marjayoun base. Most stayed for a year or two before they were transferred elsewhere. The soldiers became her helpers and guardians as she aged. But still, she lived alone. As the lamp cooled before sleep, she was no longer lulled by the whispers of children or her husband’s footsteps in another room as she protected his family from danger.

  Finally, the danger had passed, along with so much of Bahija’s life.

  Of the men who gathered at the warshe all those months, Abu Jassim was one of my favorites, even before I learned his name.

  Curly-haired and stocky, with a smile that suggested grief, Abu Jassim loved to parade his English vocabulary, comprising about ten words, constantly rearranged and delivered in nonsensical combinations. “Here, three, door, mish good,” he would tell me. I smiled, then spoke to him in Arabic: “How are you?” “Good,” he would reply.

  He was a perpetual skeptic, and often I caught a knowing glint in his eye as he watched the bravado of the Lebanese maalimeen in the warshe. Nevertheless, one day in May he surprised me by suggesting that we might just possibly finish the rest of the house. His optimism buoyed me, since at the moment the upstairs looked like a disassembled car, with its hundreds of engine parts spread out on the driveway. No one appeared interested in putting them back together. “Clutter” suggests untidiness. This was chaos, and it started at the foot of the driveway, where chunks of tar, remnants of window frames, and chipped and hammered stone gathered as a welcome.

  But even I had to admit that Abu Jassim was right: much had been done here. Despite my perpetual frustration at the looming deadline, I imagined Isber pacing through this old house. I thought of all the original stonemasons and maalimeen hoisting the boulders, laying the tile, and buttressing the balconies, girded in rusted but exquisite darabzin. I wondered whether Isber shared my exasperation over the delays and disappointme
nts. I looked at the stones throughout the house, now cleaned, with new mortar of the softest cream between them. We had decided to reveal the stones in the dining room and the liwan rather than covering them in cement. It was an innovation of sorts, my innovation: The stones were never meant to be exposed, but they felt warm to me, bringing forth a beauty as grand as the marble floor or the triple arches. Isber would have appreciated the touch. As I walked through the liwan and the dining room, I knew the pride he must have felt. My grandmother, only twelve when she left, would never have felt this way about the house. How could she, after all? She built her home elsewhere.

  There is something uniform about the pictures of the dry-goods stores that Raeefa, Abdullah, their relatives, and other Lebanese ran in Oklahoma outposts like Texola, Lindsay, Brinkman, Snyder, and Sayre, some of them soon to wither into ghost towns. Gray backgrounds turning to yellow, one picture is almost indistinguishable from the next. The floors of the stores are always wood or concrete, and the counters, at least one row fashioned of glass, invariably run along the walls. Stacked on shelves near the ceiling are suitcases, and below them are bolts of fabric, tidily bundled textiles, boxes of shoes, cosmetics, thread, needles, and so on. Ready-to-wear clothing hangs from racks, and coats with fur collars are draped over a table. The store that Abdullah’s brother Miqbal ran was adorned with advertisements only he could fashion, each bearing the lettering he was so proud of. These Prices Fairly Yell, read one.

  Nearly every one of those immigrants was imbued with confidence. It was the cunning, the shatara, of Marjayoun, honed by the determination of a person who has surrendered everything—family and home—for the unknown. Nothing was given, nothing was assured. The immigrants would work longer hours and prove to be more clever, even if it sometimes came with a sly wink. One enterprising Lebanese merchant was said to have left a broom by the counter. He charged each customer for it. If the customer returned angry, the cashier pointed to the broom.