House of Stone

by Anthony Shadid

  Najib insisted that Haddad, fluent in Hebrew, had worked with Unit 504, an Israeli military intelligence outfit, and that he had carried a pistol with a silencer, meant for assassinations. In Najib’s telling, Haddad had run a network of three hundred informers, stretching from Jezzine to Kfar Killa and Qlayaa. As part of his payment, the Israelis had given him a white Range Rover, a green Mercedes, and a dark blue Toyota van. Aside from his vicious dogs, the bane of the neighborhood, he had only acquaintances; anything more would have required trust. Married twice, both of his wives had died of cancer, and he himself had escaped assassination in 1995. “He was a very dangerous man,” Najib told me. “Everybody was scared of him.”

  I asked Najib where Haddad, a native of a town near Sidon, lived these days; I had heard he had returned to his birthplace. Some had told me Israel. Another friend said that Haddad was in Kiryat Shemona, the Israeli border town in the Hula Valley and the scene of a massacre by a Palestinian splinter group in 1974.

  “No one really knows,” Najib said.

  When he asked me whether Haddad had damaged the house, I thought of all the scars in the liwan and the garage, the injustices against the arches and wood-paneled roof. I nodded.

  “Don’t worry,” Najib told me. “Many things worse happen in Lebanon.”

  By the time Bahija had turned ninety, her back was disfigured by osteoporosis, and her face and hands bore the years of Marjayoun’s sun and wind. The photograph I gaze at reads El-Marj, Marjayoun’s venerable studio, and in the picture my great-grandmother wears black. At the time she sat for this portrait, Bahija was already changing. New acquaintances had become a blur, consigned to anonymity. She also forgot familiar names. Ali and Hussein had to remind her of requests she had made the previous day. The wanderings of her imagination—of Isber returning from the Houran, of a house still full, of a family still together—seemed to have become more real than her actual existence. Bahija Abla’s house remained hers until only months before she died, in 1965. It was around this time in Oklahoma that Raeefa’s relatives noticed that Bahija’s daughter was looking peaked and wan.

  “Well, I’ve had this flu,” Raeefa explained.

  Her youngest son was a doctor, and Raeefa heeded his advice to get a checkup.

  At the age of fifty-seven, she learned that she had stomach cancer.

  “In those days,” her oldest daughter recalled, “it was a death sentence.”

  Raeefa never accepted it. She had struggled through tragedy, a life that was served rather than enjoyed, to reach this point. Her children’s prosperity continued. Grandchildren crowded her house. She would not die; it was simply out of the question. Not once demanding sympathy, she willed herself on.

  I have a picture of Raeefa dated November 28, 1968. In the photograph, her fourteenth grandchild, just two months old, sits in her lap. Raeefa remains an elegant woman. Twice a week she visited the hairdresser. Yet ravages of the cancer and her surgeries are evident. Clearly, she was suffering. According to her children, she rarely slept well. During the day, she sometimes sat in the corner of an orange sofa, her legs pulled beneath her. She wrapped herself in an afghan then tucked it in the cushions. Rocking back and forth, ever more emaciated, sustained by her will alone, she waited for her youngest son to find someone to save her.

  In those quiet moments, Raeefa recited the nursery rhymes she was taught as a child in Marjayoun.

  Oh Laila, oh Laila.

  She shook her head, her eyes lost in thought. Memories fumbled behind shadows, hinting at what they once were. Again, she was leaving home.

  Oh Laila, there are no eyes like her eyes,

  And the magic in her eyes,

  Oh Laila, oh Laila . . .

  “Why is it that I’m remembering these songs I used to sing when I was a little girl?” Raeefa asked her daughter.

  The children of Bahija who stayed in Lebanon cared for the house in Marjayoun after she died. They checked on it. They visited, especially in the summer. For years it resembled the place that Bahija had so arduously cleaned, even if it was no longer a home.

  Ten years after she died, in April 1975, the first shots were fired in a civil war that would rage for fifteen years in Lebanon. In the south, too far from Beirut and too close to Israel, the Lebanese army splintered. Palestinian factions multiplied, springing forth from their stronghold in the Arqoub. Residents in places like Qlayaa banded together with arms, and Syria and Israel courted their clients. Marjayoun, inevitably, collapsed.

  A Christian cleric appraised the situation this way:

  Paralyzed municipality. Electricity and waterlines badly damaged. No telephone. District hospital closed (there are only four nuns/nurses in the hospital). There is only one doctor (old Dr. Shadid, who does not have equipment or medicine). Only one dentist (Dr. Karbis). Only two schools operating on limited, part-time scale. The Marjayoun National College closed. The Serail building closed . . . No courts. No police (the few gendarmes joined the local army). No postal service. Most grocery stores closed. There is a desperate need for commodities as well as for cigarettes and beverages. Need for fair quantity of cement and other building material in order to repair war damages. Bank is closed. There is no commercial activity. Agriculture totally paralyzed. [Quoted in Beate Hamizrachi, The Emergence of the South Lebanon Security Belt]

  Bahija’s house fell victim, too. Looters from the Christian town of Aishiyya plundered the house, taking everything they could carry. The rest they dumped in the garden, near the patch where Bahija once grew tomatoes. Ten pieces of furniture—couches and chairs crafted of walnut wood, mother-of-pearl, and camel bone—were strewn in the dirt. They stayed there, ruined by the sun, wind, and rain, in a garden overgrown with weeds, wild lilies, and the fuchsia blossoms of the four o’clock flower, a motif of old and abandoned houses in Lebanon. Mortars followed, gouging a crater in the roof above the salon. For two years, rain fell on the red carpet, laced with cream and shades of blue, that Nabeeh bought for fifty gold pounds in Damascus. The marble floor that Bahija cleaned each day of her life no longer shined. The purple, green, and yellow patterns of the cemento tiles were lost beneath dust. Pieces began falling from the wooden tracery of the triple arcade. The front door, its finely wrought wood mimicking a ruffled sail, was shut with a rusted padlock. No one lived there anymore.

  It was Shibil’s birthday. He had turned fifty-nine. When I arrived, he met me at the door with an unopened bottle of Glenfiddich wrapped in a black plastic bag.

  “Oh, the good stuff,” I said.

  It was a step up from the Grant’s that Shibil usually served, always generously.

  “Of course,” he answered. “Why not?”

  “It’s a celebration,” I said.

  Without smiling, he said, “The government should declare it a holiday.”

  My eyes locked on his clothes, an outfit I suspected was last glimpsed on an aging 1970s porn star at a California pool party. His short-sleeve shirt had three alternating stripes: dark green, white, and a light green that stretched across his ever-growing girth. His shorts matched the belly-hugging band of green, and his sneakers were another shade of the same color. He was, shall we say, in a festive mood, and as we climbed a steep road in his vintage white Mercedes, both of us spent most of the time laughing.

  “I’m so close to finishing the house,” I told him.

  “Upstairs?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Helter-skelter,” he said.

  The end of my stay in Marjayoun was approaching, and I had invited Shibil to have lunch with me in Shebaa, a town near a disputed, eight-square-mile patch of land at the intersection of the Israeli, Lebanese, and Syrian borders. These days, most people knew the area for its politics: Hezbollah had vowed not to surrender its weapons until Israel withdrew from nearby farms it occupied in the 1967 war. I knew it for its reputation as one of the most beautiful locales in the south, home to some of Lebanon’s best cherries and a stunning spring called Naba al-Jawz. Fond of the
restaurant there since his childhood, Shibil quickly agreed to come along, and, a little wistfully, I realized it might be the last time I would see him for a while. My leave from work at the Post was ending, and though I planned to return often, I wouldn’t be living in Marjayoun for a while.

  “Shibil, can I ask you a question, a personal question?” I asked as he drove. “Are you happy?”

  “What?”

  “I’ll tell you why I’m asking,” I said. “We talked about Assaad being depressed, and you don’t seem depressed to me.”

  “I got a lot of crap going on, you know, in and out, shit like that. I want to get the best I can out of it. I’m not really happy, no.” He sneaked a drink of the Glenfiddich. “Just passing the time. Like that. Being bored also. I don’t seem to be very unhappy, but I’m not happy, either.”

  Silence followed, and eventually I said something to break it. “I think I like Marjayoun now. Maybe not the town itself. But my friends, the house, the setting.”

  “You don’t think I have the same feeling?” he said.

  “When do you think you were happiest?” I asked.

  “In college.”

  “When do you think you were happiest in Jedeida?” There was a long pause, maybe a minute or so, as I smoked a cigarette. He never answered.

  Shibil treated his car almost like a child. His only possession in the world, it figured into most conversations. As we continued on and the gas gauge neared empty, we pulled into a station to fill up. After that, we stopped at three more stations to find the transmission fluid he wanted. (Of course, we didn’t find it.) Along the road, he inquired about a tire. Then, while chugging up a hill, we drove past a black goat that alarmed him. As always, he was superstitious.

  I mentioned Dr. Khairalla to him. He had seemed really sick when I saw him earlier in the day. “The cancer has spread to his back,” I said.

  “No shit? From the prostate? Can he cure it?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I pray for him,” Shibil said. “Wallah al-azeem, every time I go up to Mar Elias I pray for him. I pray for my brother, I pray for Dr. Khairalla. Because I love this man, wallah. He’s a good man, a good man. If there’s another like him in Jedeida, great. We’d become a good town. But there isn’t. He’s one of those people who are very scarce.”

  Shibil pulled his Mercedes into a street crowded with families, their cars parked at the curb on both sides. Even before he turned off the engine at the restaurant, I could see it in his face. He was disappointed. The music was awful Arabic pop, performed live at deafening volume. We sat under a walnut tree, a jawz, which gave its name to the spring.

  “A bunch of fucking kids, man,” Shibil said. “I thought it was completely different. When we used to sit here, you could smoke a joint. I don’t know what happened.” He paused. “I wish I could see some of my old friends.”

  The waiters brought us three plastic cups and a metal container of ice with tongs. Shibil had a black plastic bag full of raw almonds, whose shells he threw over the wall of a garden. He filled my glass with ice. “Shou, ya ammee,” he barked. “Hutt whiskey!”

  “I’m going to miss you, Shibil,” I said.

  Shibil often grew excited when someone showed him kindness. “I’m going to miss you, too!” he shouted. “For Christ’s sake! When are you going to be back?”

  We toasted as we drank. “Cheers!” We clinked glasses. Then, cheers to my daughter Laila, and our glasses banged again. And cheers to Abu Laila, the father of Laila, and more toasts followed. I smiled. Shibil said he was still determined to buy me a blue eye “to repel jinxes and shit,” which he had first mentioned back in January 2006.

  The grilled chicken and lamb arrived, and Shibil started reminiscing about his days in Oklahoma working at Sears. He told me the first time he got high was in 1973, at a party with his friends from work at the Skirvin Plaza. “I loved it,” he said. At work he was popular, if lazy; “King Skate” was his nickname. His college transcript read “Sam.” So did his social security card. I started thinking that Sam was, in fact, another person, even to Shibil himself.

  “I have all the phone numbers of the girls I used to date. Well, most of them.”

  “Where do you keep them?” I asked.

  “On a card with other papers. I once counted how many I dated.”

  “How many?”

  “About one hundred fifty-four.”

  “No, you didn’t. Really?”

  “Yessiree, maybe even more.”

  I asked Shibil why he hadn’t stayed in Oklahoma.

  It was 1975, he said, and on his nightstand he had a portrait of his parents and a picture of Karen Chase, from Jones, Oklahoma—“the only girl I loved in the States.” One morning, he woke up and her picture had fallen down. “I decided to go back to Lebanon.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m superstitious,” Shibil said. “If my parents’ picture had fallen, I probably would have stayed in Oklahoma. I don’t know. They are just signs.” He returned on March 18, and the civil war started on April 13. “Tell me how lucky you can be,” he said.

  “Do you regret it?”

  “No,” he said. Then, in that peculiarly Shibil way, he changed direction. “I do, but I don’t want to put it in my mind.”

  Back in the car, both of us a bit drunk, Shibil shifted into first, grinding the gears, and we chugged forward.

  “I wish I had a small vacuum cleaner to suck on my nose and drain all the mucus out,” he said, pointing to his head, his congestion still dogging him.

  Then, tipsy, he told me a joke as we barreled along. “What’s better, Three Musketeers or Milky Way?” I shook my head. “Chocolate,” he said, laughing heartily.

  Only Shibil understood.

  24. My Jedeida

  It felt as if summer had arrived, bringing not just the deadline for my finishing the house but the end of my time away from the newspaper. It was May, and I was slated to return to work by the end of June. I was trying to forget these imminent events, spreading dirt in the garden that we had brought from the valley. As always, the work was meditative, though Abu Jean was not.

  Sitting in a white plastic chair that he had conveniently pulled near me, he slowly smoked his Cedar cigarette and gave me orders.

  “The dirt’s low over there,” he shouted, pointing. “Put more!”

  And so it went, so reflexive I suspect he knew not what he was doing: There’s too much dirt on that mound. Turn the wheelbarrow around while you fill it. Why don’t I wait until the dirt is drier so I can break the clods easier? Add some dirt over this pipe.

  “Ya ammee, that’s good enough,” he said. “There’s no need to work too hard.”

  “I work, Abu Jean, and you sit,” I said, laughing. “How is that?”

  He shook his head, his reflex when he didn’t hear something.

  Across the valley, over the town of Khiam, clouds gathered on the horizon, the gray muting a sunlight that had felt especially soft for the spring. Hardly a car passed that afternoon, making the neighborhood quieter than usual. Down the lonely street, Joseph Abu Kheir, the painter, approached. “There might be rain,” he told me, smiling. “It’s going to be good for your plants.” It was the day when I began to feel the end of things. I knew I was bracing to return to a different world.

  Reality intruded, even in this small town. Text messages burst onto my cell phone as clashes reminiscent of the civil war erupted in Beirut. Over lunch at Toama’s house, the television delivered a barrage of news. Toama’s son, Alaa, was studying in Beirut, and twice Toama called him to see if he was in danger. Everyone in Marjayoun seemed to be watching TV; it was as if the clashes had broken out next door. The fighting that punctuated Beirut began every conversation. Voices expressed worry, and the scenes of burned cars in streets raked by gunfire replayed again and again in my head. War was coming. Again the lull was over.

  For an hour or so I fought the guilt—or perhaps a renewal of the old ambition. I should be i
n Beirut, I thought, working as a journalist, but another part of me was so wary of that old life of guns and misery. I did not want to see Tyre again, or Qana, or Baghdad. I wanted to do nothing more than move dirt from one place to another.

  And then I left.

  “Intabih, intabih. Beirut kharbaneh,” Abu Jean said over and over. Be careful, Beirut’s a complete mess.

  I took the same road I had taken scores of times, though on the day of my return to reporting the late dusk caught an especially beautiful light. Along the coast, it changed. Knots of soldiers parked their generation-old green tanks on the curbs. Their helmets were vintage, though an occasional gunner behind a turret wore the more stylish green beret. White and red barricades were tossed haphazardly in the streets, and the acrid smell of burning tires had drifted from roadblocks still far away. I passed a bridge destroyed in the 2006 war, the crisscrossed steel that reinforced it spilling out. Pieces of cement dangled. From half an hour away I could see Beirut, filled with fears and whispers of impending civil war, but always with the look of a picture postcard.

  The opposition, led by Hezbollah, had called a strike, ostensibly to protest the deteriorating economy. But it was really a raw show of force directed at a government that Hezbollah believed threatened its armed wing, what it called the Islamic Resistance.

  As I drove into Beirut, things had already taken a turn for the worse, with hundreds of supporters of Hezbollah and its allies blocking the roads. Clashes erupted in stages; neighborhoods flared like torches, their flames igniting streets with both Sunni and Shiite residents. “God is with the Sunnis,” backers of the government cried. “The Shiite blood is boiling,” their opponents shouted from across the road.