House of Stone

by Anthony Shadid

  “Well, you bought it. Why did you leave it behind?” he asked.

  19. Home

  Perched above the Saha was another old house, uninhabited. It was a mansion, bigger than Isber’s place, and if you drove down the Boulevard you couldn’t miss it. I always saw a lesson in it: Here was the fate of Isber’s house had we not begun work on it.

  I had gone to that effaced ruin one late afternoon as the sun started to hint at setting. Once majestic, the mansion was now abandoned. The house’s stones had lost their color; they had none of the blues, grays, or browns that had become so vivid at Isber’s. The shutters were a faded green, the darabzin rusted, though somehow intact. The door had no lock. The house spoke of time’s passing, of neglect and humiliation. There was no sound inside save the noise that poured in, unmediated, from the street. My footsteps were the only ones to have trod the dust gathered over the years. The only gesture to its former occupant, a member of parliament until his death, in the 1990s, was graffiti scrawled on the wall, seemingly long ago.

  Here Sat the Tyrant, it read.

  As I left the house, my old landlord, Michel Fardisi, approached me, leaving his family’s shop across the street. I suspected he was coming to remind me about my last month’s rent, which I still owed him. The reminder was always a pantomime. He never asked for money, just rubbed his fingers together as he passed in his Mercedes, his arm extended out the window.

  “This house was once filled with people,” he said as we stood on the moist gravel of the roadside, near a denuded fig tree that was a few feet from the entrance of the mansion. “They were like ants, like dust settling on the floor.” As late as the 1960s, people still gathered here. The house was especially festive in the weeks before an election, when parties rollicking with drink, song, and dabke tumbled hours past midnight. “Those days were beautiful,” he said. In the intervening years, he understood, twenty-five relatives had inherited it, and no one was close to agreement on what to do with the place, whether to sell it, rebuild it, or leave it to finally fall. “The problems of inheritance,” Michel said. “Who’s going to fix it?”

  When Michel was young, everyone in the area traveled to Marjayoun for most things, old habits not yet broken. It didn’t matter whether it was light fixtures or kitchen appliances, jewelry or car parts, even ice cream. Though it had long before begun its slow decline, Marjayoun remained the nexus of the province, and that made it a destination. Michel began to reminisce about those days when not a house in Marjayoun was empty, when bakeries ran out of bread by lunchtime, and when the stores around the Saha were filled—seven tailors, four or five shoe shops, and more than a dozen barbers. In those days, the priest would visit every family, involved in their everyday struggles. Now, he said, the priest sits in his apartment over the church, divorced from the community. The region’s nub had become Nabatiyeh in one direction, on the road to Beirut, and Hasbaya in another, on a road that more or less led nowhere.

  Marjayoun had been displaced by borders, reduced by time. Most humiliating, perhaps, was the ascent of places past the Boulevard, like Kfar Killa and Qlayaa, forgettable villages that once boasted dirt roads to Marjayoun’s paved streets. Now no one asked directions to Marjayoun. Go past the Saha. After the cemetery. Before the Boulevard. Turn at the Samara house.

  “It’s a shame, Marjayoun,” Michel said.

  Do you like it here? I asked him.

  “It’s my town. How could I not love it? But I have to work here. If I didn’t, I’d leave. What, I’d pull money out from behind the wall? But my son, he won’t work here. There’s no way. Will he come back? No. The majority of the town is like that.” People close their doors, lock them, and leave. “Enough, khalas, let’s go to America. When the men die, who’s going to come and replace them? Not my son, not your sons. After Dr. Khairalla dies—do you know him? He’s getting old—will his children come and live here? Not one of them.”

  Going to America. The words, spoken reluctantly, struck me. Marjayoun’s relationship with its diaspora was conflicted, and I heard a hint of bitterness in Michel’s voice. Marjayounis took great pride in what their descendants had done—the wealth of the Houranis in the Persian Gulf, and of nearly every family in Kansas and Oklahoma, the Shadids, Naifehs, Samaras, Farhas, Homseys, Rahals, and Shambours. Everyone knew of the exploits of favorite sons, like the late Dr. Michael DeBakey, a world-renowned heart surgeon. Brazil had its Marjayounis, as prosperous as they were numerous. Yet there was a hint of resentment over their abandonment of their homes. No one came back to Marjayoun. When its expatriates did return, the town put on a generous welcome, replete with food and festivities. In Arab fashion, the receptions were lavish. “There was perhaps a little pride, in them and us,” Michel told me. There was hope, too, that the émigrés’ generosity in return might assist Marjayoun. When one of those expatriates beheld the feast he was offered, he shook his head in amazement. Never had he seen such a spread in America. “I had no idea they were so well off!”

  Impressed by their circumstances, he gave nothing to the town.

  A few did return and restore their houses. They might spend twenty days here each summer, when Marjayoun, by its more and more modest standards, flourished.

  But then what? Michel wondered.

  “In the winter, they’re going to come?” he asked. “He’ll visit his house, he’ll stop in, but will he live here? Will he even come every summer? He repaired his house fine, but Jedeida needs people, not renovated houses. Where are the people? We need someone who can come and settle here.”

  I had returned and rescued a home, in a gesture to history and memory, in the name of an ideal, however misunderstood. But in time I would abandon it, leaving a relic, however functional or beautiful. Each time that happened, this community faded.

  Although it had crumbled, someone had resided at Isber’s. However unsavory they were, the squatters were part of a community. I would stay in the house, but I would never live in it, and I would never belong.

  Michel nodded, as if reading what I was thinking.

  “Hajar bala bashar,” he said. Stones without people.

  Years cannot undo centuries. It takes generations to weaken what has been.

  Orthodox rather than Catholic in faith, Marjayoun was always more Anglo-American than French, in education and outlook. American missionaries were influential, founding a Protestant school in 1867. Deemed heretical by the conservative Orthodox clergy, the institution did leave a legacy, the English language—as the Jesuits left an educated class, literate in French, in Beirut and the region known as Mount Lebanon. One of the American missionaries was, for many years, described with the sort of awe reserved for a saint. George E. Post, a Pennsylvanian, was a doctor with a prophet’s beard who taught surgery and botany at the American University of Beirut and visited Marjayoun more than once to operate on villagers too poor or too sick to travel.

  As the British became ensconced in Palestine after World War I, the town’s Anglo-American complexion became, not surprisingly, more pronounced. Ottoman connections and routes shifted to accommodate British borders. Many in Marjayoun remained faithful to the old trails long taken by their forefathers to Palestine and beyond. It was rare to find a family in Marjayoun without at least a peripheral connection to Palestine. Bahija Abla had cousins in Haifa and Bethlehem and a sister in Beisan, where, after 1948, inhabitants were evicted, fled, or in the case of its Christians, forcibly deported to Nazareth by the nascent Israeli state. With its inhabitants went its name. Beisan became Beit She’an, and after Israel was created, the axis of Marjayoun and Palestine was forever broken, ending an era spanning generations, in which the frontier was never closed by borders.

  No one disputed the town’s decline. Palestine was gone, along with the lands that Marjayoun’s families owned in the Hula Valley and the opportunities its hinterland provided in Haifa, Jerusalem, and the Galilee. There were no more jobs with the Iraq Petroleum Company, no teaching posts to fill. Families returned, or ventur
ed onward—to America and Brazil. In 1967, Marjayoun’s other surroundings, the Houran, where Isber Samara roamed, was forever severed, too, when Israel captured the Golan Heights and Quneitra, turning a crossroads into a no man’s land. There was no road there anymore, a passage becoming a barrier. The daily taxis stopped. So did the merchants of fortune. The civil war had yet to begin, though, its onset confined to the chatter in cafés, laced with dark auguries and predictions of gloom. Still to come were its horrors and injustices, crimes as vile as any that had been committed in the modern Middle East, names and dates reverberating: 1982, Sabra and Shatila, Tel al-Zaatar.

  Weeks had passed since I had last seen my cousin Karim, who was spending most of his time in Beirut. Unfailingly, he would make sure to check in with me, calling at night from a pay phone when the rates were cheaper. “I’m on the corniche doing my fast-paced walking!” he breathlessly declared in one phone call. Again he begged me to water his plants in Marjayoun. “Is that asking too much?” he insisted, already knowing the answer. “Just because you like plants so much,” he said.

  As summer set in, he finally made his way back to Marjayoun, and I waited for him in his small but lovely garden, amid lemon and orange trees, shapely olives, and pomegranates bearing round red fruit that hung like beautiful jewelry.

  Karim greeted me with a requisite complaint about my dearth of calls, but he good-humoredly offered me welcome deliverance. “I know, I know. If I had a cell phone, things would be different,” he assured me. “I am nothing if not flexible.”

  He looked me up and down, narrowing his eyes.

  “Believe it or not,” he said, pursing his lips, “I missed you!”

  He gave me three kisses, a big hug, and asked if I had gained weight.

  “I missed you!” he said again, then hummed in pleasure.

  As usual, Karim brought me gifts: crushed mint that he prepared himself, an empty jar with a yellow lid (“to provide color in your kitchen”), mosquito repellent, and two light green bowls in the shape of either a pear or an eggplant. “For hummus and such stuff,” he said. I, in turn, brought him a bag packed with health products—Lubriderm lotion, Centrum Silver vitamins, and a supplement for stiff joints.

  The conversations that followed our gift-giving were random but fast and furious, undertaken as we walked around the garden. He pointed to his olive trees, some of whose branches had snapped under the weight of forgotten snows. He was very proud of his clementine tree, which was laden with little white buds. “Wait till you see the pomegranate,” he bragged. Then, as was often the case with Karim, the conversation turned to politics. He predicted a war: Israel and the United States on one side, Syria and Iran on the other.

  “Ahh, a third world war!” he blurted out.

  One day Karim came over to the house and marveled at what we had done, and I realized he really meant it. He seemed stunned. My Lebanese origins were emerging, he declared. “The roots are coming out gradually,” Karim said. “You think this is American? This is Lebanese.” He pursed his lips again, his head swiveling as he surveyed every corner. “From the bottom of my heart, I’m so happy for you. And I’m proud of you.”

  He wasn’t so happy, though, as to forgo criticisms.

  Why did I have a patch of gray cement on the wall outside the house? Couldn’t I have found nicer lamps for that room? What about spreading some soil around the garden? Why couldn’t I shine the tile a bit more in the salon? “Oh, please, Anthony, you have to. You have to!” And so on, until he finished with “Really, really I’m so proud of you. You have taste.” And I realized that his criticisms weren’t suggestions; they were pleas to me to see that he had taste, too.

  We sat and had a drink from a bottle of homemade strawberry wine that Dr. Khairalla had given me. We toasted.

  Marjayoun was a different town with Karim in it, and the temperature seemed to rise a few degrees with his arrival. He made the air combustible. Despite his origins, Karim never really fit here. However much he wallowed in the age-old rivalries between Hawarna and baladiya, the truth is that the town was too small for him. He was too educated, too generous in his own way. A sybarite, he had seen too much of the world. (Or, as Karim once put it to me: “I’ve ridden on a Greyhound bus, in a plane, on a train, and I’ve been to an Indian reservation.”) Marjayoun never rose to his expectations. Nor did its inhabitants, who were less educated and sophisticated than he, and never respectful enough.

  His loneliness and iconoclasm drew me to Karim, as did his enthusiasm. His politics didn’t. He seemed to enjoy needling me by stating the most provocative position possible.

  “I can’t stand the Shia,” he said. “I can’t stand Hezbollah. I can’t stand Nabih Berri. I can’t stand Hassan Nasrallah.” Even those Shia who claim they are moderate, he went on, are closet Hezbollah supporters. He turned silent, casting a glance at the next table.

  “Who is this guy?” he asked. “He could be a Shiite.”

  “Karim, don’t you worry about Lebanon?” I asked.

  “Not really,” he answered. “I feel there’s a truce.”

  Karim’s chauvinism seemed to vacillate. At times he was pessimistic, disenchanted with everything going on in the country, speaking in worried and disillusioned tones. “I don’t like the Lebanese people anymore. No, really, I’m fed up with them,” he had told me another time. “I’m fed up. We’re fed up. I belong to the great majority who are overpowered by the situation.” Not on this day, though. It was as if he had thrown down the gauntlet: If no one else would accept him (someone who really never belonged in Lebanon in the first place), then he would accept no one else, and that included Shia, all Muslims, even the Hawarna families in Marjayoun who plotted against the baladiya. I felt as though the life he had lived—as an adult, through the country’s war and peace—had left him unhappy; politics simply seemed a metaphor for his disenchantment. Like many Greek Orthodox of his generation, he had been an Arab nationalist in his youth. And now “I’m Lebanese first and nothing else,” he told me.

  But what of his Marjayoun? “I feel like the place is dying,” I said.

  “No, no, don’t say that,” he begged me, his voice rising. He still seemed confident, or needed to believe, that Marjayoun would survive, that someday, down the road, it would reassume its place as a crossroads. With a past once so great and so blessed, the town deserved to survive. Or so he believed. Marjayoun, he continued, was a meeting place for Palestine, Syria, and Jordan. Marjayounis worked in Haifa, Quneitra, Damascus, and Beirut. In the 1920s, he said, Marjayoun was bigger and more important than Hasbaya and Nabatiyeh. It will be that again, he promised.

  I shook my head. “We’ve been waiting sixty years for that,” I told him.

  “It’s still my hometown,” he said. “My roots, my origin, my identity. In Beirut, I’m not Beiruti.

  “And this is where I will come when I die. I have a big, beautiful grave ready.”

  It was never about what Marjayoun was becoming, or whether there would be peace; it was about what it was—a place of parties, meals, guests, and lunches for forty people on Sundays, where everyone seemed to laugh. Karim had his own Jedeida. And whatever I might say about the town’s demise, he would never let go of that memory. To hell with the people, he seemed to say; he didn’t particularly like them. Yet he loved his Marjayoun.

  “What about the town after you die?” I asked him.

  “Why should I worry?” He laughed. “When I die, to hell with everyone!”

  As the years passed, Abdullah gathered memories that were finally good, the kind worth remembering. His peripatetic existence had come to an end, and he settled in for days that were as relaxed as any he had known since coming to America. He never surrendered his temper, but he spent as much time singing, as friends and relatives gathered at the house over bitter Arabic coffee and bushels of miqta salted just right. He always seemed to have a cigarette in his hand. With his children gathered around him, he offered each a penny for every gray hair of his they wo
uld pluck. He laughed into the night, regaling guests with his voice, sweet and deep.

  Abdullah was never as industrious as his wife, Raeefa. He was as festive as she was serious. He was as temperamental as she was methodical. He would brag about his wife to guests, embarrassing her. Like her father, she preferred silence; too many words were dangerous. The portrait should be posed, revealing only so much. “If you have something good, you don’t talk about it,” she would say. “Other people will talk about it, but you don’t have to talk. Don’t say anything.” Hearing this, Abdullah would wave his hand dismissively. When she worked in the grocery store, he milled about outside, tending the orchard that was his pride and the garden that was his joy. The grapevines prospered. Though the fruit was never sweet, the vines produced leaves that Raeefa stuffed and then served as a delicacy. Sometimes when he smelled the blossoms—cherries, plums, apples, peaches, and apricots—he told his children that he imagined himself again on a Marjayoun hillside, facing Mount Hermon and feeling the breeze on his face.

  20. Worse Times

  I had just a few weeks left to finish the house. And Abu Jean was in charge.

  The task at hand was the stairway to the entrance. It was not uncomplicated. Two sidewalks, running perpendicular and at different heights, would join at the stairs, which would ascend three levels. Circular, each would connect the sidewalks at a forty-five-degree angle. Each was of a different length, and my cousins, an engineer and an architect, had carefully sketched the plans on paper.