House of Stone

by Anthony Shadid

  We sat at his white plastic table on the balcony where we had spent so many hours. The weather was still cool, bringing a sharp breeze to his fifteen dunums of land spilling out in stone terraces beneath his house. Hikmat and the gardener had planted cantaloupe, and he was excited that they were already bearing fist-size fruit.

  “Are your father’s days gone forever, Hikmat?”

  He blinked his eyes, a gesture in the affirmative.

  “Different men, different people, different world, different society, different mentality. The young used to respect the old. Different everything. What is akhlaq in English?” Morals, I said. “Ahh, morals. Now the morals of the people are to be a crook.”

  I had heard the sentiment often, from Malik, Assaad, Shibil, and now Hikmat, a man who had more faith than they. To him morality manifested itself in the trivial. “If I saw a thirty-year-old and I was eighteen,” he said, “I would put my cigarette out in the street.

  “We are proud of what our grandparents did, Anthony.” They were the equivalent of nobles, he told me, men of stature and influence, whose very presence would change the tenor and tone of a conversation. “This house,” he said, pointing next door to the abandoned Farha villa, a palace in its own right, “who can build it from this generation? Each stone of this cost one gold coin. One gold coin! Think of each stone. This is their gold. They left their gold there.”

  As we talked, the wind picked up, blowing louder through the poplar trees. In a white T-shirt and pressed green slacks, Hikmat lit a cigarette from his pack of Gauloises.

  “If I was smoking a cigarette and an old man passed, I would hide it,” he told me again. “It’s impolite to smoke in front of a man older than you.”

  He shook his head. There was nothing more for Hikmat to say.

  22. Coming Home

  As we barreled toward the house’s completion, the days were full of tumult, the kind that could revive any spirit. The prolonged periods of inactivity just weeks before had terrified me, but now things were different. There was action. Brooms swept; crowbars ripped down scaffoldings. Bags of cement were opened. Stacks of tile were unbound. Molding was unsheathed, and pieces of marble were set into place.

  So much was done. A different room was painted each day, though none were yet finished. (The task was made more difficult by a revelation coming rather late: Toama, who was helping paint, was colorblind, which became clear when a room was rendered in three colors.) Tireless and still gruffly intimidating, Malik tiled the rest of the upstairs: salon, kitchen, dining room, bedroom, and balconies. Fadi began cleaning the tile, which would take days and days. At first he simply swept away the dirt, but even then, the change was miraculous. Patterns emerged, in a coy way, flirting and suggestive. They hinted and teased, although their glory still waited to be discovered. Nassib Subhiyya, the blacksmith, began installing the antique darabzin, newly painted black, on the balconies—another vestige, one of the few left, of Bahija’s day.

  A jarring number of tasks remained, with just a few weeks to finish them. There was the mundane—installing the kitchen counter and cabinets—and the exquisite—refitting the arches to match the way they were when Isber Samara built the house. We needed to finish the roof, paint the doors, build a staircase, tile the driveway, fasten the darabzin in the stone molding of the windows, add two more coats of paint to the walls, and repair the ornate vents made of gypsum in the salon. Power cords snaked across marble that had yet to be polished. And that metal barrel—the same metal barrel that had occupied the very same spot since February—sat in the liwan in all its rusted glory, filled with swampy water. Yet for the first time, perhaps, I could see the very end.

  On a day in May, Abu Jean and I drove to Kfar Killa, a few miles away, on a road along the Israeli border that twisted and turned. We had to pick up more tile for Malik, who complained about trying to tile the crooked walls in the kitchen that Abu Jean had built of cinderblock.

  “I should spank his ass,” Abu Jean said, in words that were a little slurred. For a week, he had come to work without his dentures.

  We entered the town of Qlayaa, and he asked me if I knew what its inhabitants once did. I had heard this story countless times, on drive after drive.

  “Ah, Abu Jean,” I said. “They put their hands behind a cow’s ass, let the shit fall in them, and then plastered their walls with it. That’s how they built their houses.”

  Abu Jean clapped and laughed with gusto. It was the happiest I had seen him. In his eyes, I had at last become a Marjayouni: I knew how to insult the neighbors.

  We arrived in Kfar Killa. I paid for the tile, and an employee offered us coffee. In a gulp, I drank it and got up to leave. Abu Jean looked me in the eye. That was all he had to do to tell me that he was not ready. He sat back in the chair as if he was at his mother’s house. He drank his coffee as though he was savoring every drop. Between each sip, he drew on his Cedar cigarette as if it was his last. The ash grew ever longer, seeming to burn by a different measure of time.

  The leather-covered pocket-size notebook is in remarkable condition. Its cover is wrinkled, as would be expected after fifty years, but it remains otherwise intact. It carries the details of the trip that Raeefa, then fifty-two, her children no longer living in her house, embarked on to Europe and the Middle East.

  A decade before, she had closed the grocery store, having earned enough to ensure that her three sons were on their way to becoming a lawyer, a dentist, and a doctor. She was a wealthy woman with a keen eye for real estate and investments. She lived in Oklahoma City’s best neighborhood. Forty years before, as a scared girl clinging to her father’s gold and her mother’s jewelry, Raeefa had traveled by boat across the world. This time she returned on an airplane, her first experience of flight.

  Her passport still charts her itinerary for that trip: Great Britain, Switzerland, Italy, and France, which she once visited on her way to an unwelcoming New York. From there, the document records her stops across a Levant whose borders were being drawn when she left: Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt. The borders would change again. In 1960, East Jerusalem belonged to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, as did its now closed airport. Egypt and Syria comprised the United Arab Republic; that vision of Gamal Abdel-Nasser would not dissolve for another year.

  Scribbled between her diary’s pages are the names of people she planned to see. Her Arabic sentences are rendered as hesitantly as her English ones. In Saydnaya, she writes, she would visit al-Hajja Maria, head of the convent. Her friends made certain she would be received wherever she chose to go. Zaki Naifeh jotted a note to a merchant in Beirut, Fouad Nasr, who ran his store at 22 Souq Sursock, in the Beirut neighborhood of Ashrafieh. “My dear Fouad,” he wrote, “I’m sending to you our friend Raeefa, the wife of Abdullah Shadid. She is like a dear sister to us. As you treat your brother, you should treat her.”

  With her sister Nabiha, who left Marjayoun with Nabeeh, Raeefa visited their youngest brother, Najib, in Egypt. He was working for the Iraq Petroleum Company in Syria, but his family lived in Cairo. Raeefa had written their address in her notebook: Asma Samara, 17 Kasr El Ali Street, Garden City, Cairo, U.A.R. Najib had been a child when they left; he was approaching his fifties when they returned. The sisters were sitting in his apartment drinking coffee, the American variety, when he walked through the tall, turn-of-the-century doors. For the first time in his life, at least that his children could recall, he cried.

  It was August when Raeefa and her sister took a chauffeur-driven car from Beirut to Marjayoun. When she had left so many years before, Raeefa sat in the horse-drawn buggy, tears shrouding her vision. This time she saw the vistas for which the country was fabled—the turquoise Mediterranean as she approached the port of Sidon; the cliffs of Jezzine, carpeted in pine forests, vineyards, and orchards; the clumps of almond trees that cascaded down the hills of the Litani Valley. She paused at the panorama under the sentry of Beaufort Castle, sheer, inhospitable slopes plunging toward the river’s churning w
aters—a sweeping view beautiful in its severity, like the face of a proud old man bearing the hardship he has endured. The road to Marjayoun was now paved. The town seemed smaller. For a moment, she could claim no part of it.

  Then, as the car turned into Hayy al-Serail, she remembered her neighborhood. When the driver stopped, she and her sister tentatively walked up the hill to what was once their home. It felt familiar but distant, like an old picture in a frame, glanced at but rarely gazed upon. The joy of her return was shadowed by memories, the pain of her departure. Two women stood at the summit. One was Bahija Abla, her head wrapped in a scarf and her back arched like a crescent; the other was Bahija’s sister.

  “Hamdilla ala salaameh, ya banateh!” the two elderly women shouted, sobbing.

  Raeefa rushed ahead, Nabiha behind her. In a moment of hesitation, she stood before them. Then she embraced the woman she thought was her mother. But no, she was her aunt. After an embarrassed pause, they all erupted in laughter and tears.

  Raeefa shouted, “Am I crazy?”

  As a young woman in America, Raeefa had declared a vow: If she ever saw her mother again, she would visit the Convent of Our Lady of Saydnaya, perched in the mountains beyond Damascus and renowned for its miracles. On that trip in 1960, after leaving Marjayoun, she fulfilled it. With a smile, she handed a donation to al-Hajja Maria, whose name Raeefa had scribbled in Arabic in her notebook before she left Oklahoma.

  I went to Shibil’s house on a Tuesday, the day we had planned to visit Suq al-Khan, the nearby market that convened on this day every week. Once inside, Shibil was typically askew. I had recently had lunch with Dr. Khairalla, and Shibil asked me where we had eaten. The Road Runner, I told him.

  “What did you have?” he asked. “Coyote?”

  He brought up the subject of women in Marjayoun.

  “They don’t have pretty eyes in Jedeida,” he told me. “Like the eyes of wild cats.”

  What was really on his mind, though, was the hopeless congestion in his head. He showed me, tapping his forehead with his index finger. When he eats, he said, it echoes.

  “Crunch, crunch,” he said, moving his mouth in exaggerated bites.

  Like any market, Suq al-Khan took its name from the lodging it once provided for caravans plying the roads that tied together Hasbaya, Rashaya, Kawkaba, and Marjayoun. The souk was most hectic in the morning. Shiite butchers shared space with Christian salesmen from surrounding towns. There was a charity box for Hezbollah, painted blue and yellow. On the windshield of a yellow van, a poster hailed the military: Salute to the Heroic Lebanese Army. On one table were cheap gold-colored ashtrays emblazoned with the imagery of every sect: Mohammed, Allah, bismallah al-rahman al-raheem, and pictures of Mary, Joseph, and Jesus, along with the Last Supper. Reflecting the region’s demographics, the majority of the merchants were Druze, the only sect in Lebanon distinctive in their dress, at least in more rural, traditional places like Suq al-Khan. Their baggy pants hung loosely at the thigh, narrowed at the knee and shin, then came to a tight band around the ankle. They usually wore a white knit cap or white headscarf. Druze women also wore scarves that covered the lower half of their faces.

  The market was popular, bereft of any of Beirut’s glitz, and distinctions between people blurred for the sake of commerce. The market’s pride came from its wide selection of goods. Druze gardeners sold trees—plums, apricots, olives, pines, oranges, and lemons—planted in empty suet tins. Clothes dangled from the rickety frames of stalls. Others were displayed on tables, usually wrapped in the plastic that bore the mark of their origin—China or Syria.

  Down the stair-like arcade, socks were sprawled across a red plastic table. Underwear was displayed on a blue plastic table with one leg made of wood, like a prosthesis. Stockings hung from green plastic twine; the most distinctive pair had candy-cane stripes. There was the utilitarian—gardening tools. And there was the tacky—one table overflowing with cheap jewelry, perfume, and cosmetics. At the top of the hill were two falafel stands, the scalding-hot cooking oil swelling in a black vat. The ingredients sat in bowls spread along the counter: tomatoes, turnips, lettuce, cabbage, onions, parsley, and French fries.

  “Beautiful prices! Beautiful prices!” vendors cried out. Amid a jumble of black military boots, another merchant shouted at passersby. “Come over! I’ll be honored!”

  Shibil bought a half kilo of pumpkin seeds for 3,000 lira, about $2. I didn’t buy anything. I simply stood there in appreciation, as if witnessing a world in its passing. Nothing threatened Suq al-Khan, a place that seemed as prosperous as any I saw in southern Lebanon. Baptisms, like Miana’s, would last as long as the faith. But on that morning I wondered whether the communities that gave rise to these rituals would endure. In some ways, they were remnants of a culture that was being extinguished, of a town that was dying but had somehow managed to survive until now, even without its milieu.

  It reminded me of what Shibil had told me when we visited the market in Marjayoun: “They bring people here to bury them.”

  Only the ritual was left.

  From the start, Shibil had disapproved of my decision to renovate the house. All these months later, he seemed no more impressed now that I was living there.

  He pointed out what I had done wrong and what I should have done differently. Unlike Karim, who had tried to impress me with his taste, Shibil suggested that I had been foolish. “Why didn’t you get Grohe?” he asked when he looked at the bathroom fixtures. Why didn’t you make the entrance to the Cave bigger? Why aren’t the doors finished yet? He pointed to chipped paint in the salon. He worried about the echo that bounced off the tile.

  He nodded, then said, with a little malice in his voice, “You paid for it.”

  It wasn’t praise.

  “What day is it?” he asked when I visited after he returned from Beirut, where he saw his brother. Shibil was pretty high, which he readily acknowledged. He had smoked two joints, and after I sat down, he began rolling another. “I’m not into time, man.”

  The last time I had asked him about his brother, he said, “Better, alhamdilla.”

  This time, he didn’t go that far.

  “Okay,” he said, staring blankly at the television.

  He blamed the cancer on his brother’s wife, a heavy smoker who had quit only recently. When she smoked, he said, she never opened the window. When he visited them these days in the house where he grew up, he could barely force himself to greet her.

  “No, no, I didn’t say hello to her,” he said. “Well, I said hi, but she didn’t reply. She just stared at the TV. Why should I bother, then?”

  “Really?”

  “Even if she said hi, I’m not going to say any more. Fuck her,” he said. “My brother and I talked. I never did talk to her. My other brother came. She said hello to him. She turned off the TV.” He shook his head. “That’s her, man.”

  The older brother was the only one of his siblings who treated him well. That was according to Hikmat. “He’s an angel,” Shibil said. “He’s more than an angel. He doesn’t bullshit. He’s down-to-earth. If he does something good, he doesn’t talk about it. He used to shell out money to me since I was in eighth grade. He paid for everything for me. And he doesn’t say it. If he helps someone, he wouldn’t say.”

  His brother’s illness was weighing heavily on him, I could tell.

  As we sat in his house, Shibil seemed even lonelier than before. For so long, he had his mother and his older brother, but one was already dead, and the other would die too soon.

  The television flickered in the background. The images were all bleak: tedious meetings of politicians bent on war, a shooting at a school in Jerusalem. It was the Hezbollah station, and the programming had a martial air: fighters saying goodbye to their families, recruits training, and, of course, dying. A song by a leftist Lebanese Christian, Marcel Khalife, accompanied the video: “In our heart, the branch of loyalty. We will remain steadfast here.”

  “If there’s a war, do yo
u think it will be war tahina?” Shibil asked. “Do you know what tahina means?”

  “Total war,” I told him.

  He shook his head.

  The next night, I sat in Cecil’s house, in a room with a low-slung roof of wood beams. I looked out his window. The weather had grown quiet, but not tranquil.

  “I don’t know, Cecil,” I said, “I really worry about what’s ahead.”

  He agreed, but anxiety seemed to him to be pointless, even a diversion. “I won’t worry about it because I’ve been there so many times. I don’t have to worry about it anymore.” He had grown so tired of the news that he avoided watching it on television, a routine that nearly everyone else in Marjayoun followed with religious ardor. I told him about the rumors I had heard—of protesters preparing to fire on police and soldiers, of an impasse lasting months, maybe longer, of the possibility of civil strife. Some leaders in Beirut were speculating that the civil war had already begun.

  “I like life here in Lebanon, but I’ve never felt so hopeless,” I said.

  Cecil nodded. We agreed more often than not. I wondered if he was mellowing, hoping this was not the case. “At the moment,” he said, “it is the worst situation.”

  23. Oh Laila

  One day in May, a visitor arrived. His face was vaguely familiar, but as he approached, on a morning as clear as its predecessor was not, I recognized him; it was Najib, the brother of Abu Salim, the stonemason. As I showed him the house, he brought up the frightening story of Albert Haddad, the collaborator who had lived upstairs during the Israeli occupation.

  By now I had heard plenty of stories about Haddad. Najib seemed to have the most authoritative account of him, and as the workers went about what I hoped were their final tasks, he laid out the details of what was almost certainly the darkest chapter of the history of Isber’s home.