Like the priest, he shrugged. “You spoiled our house,” he said. “Anyhow.”
Their words didn’t matter, though. The house was mine.
Back in 2003 in Baghdad, I told Abu Jean, Saddam Hussein had called the war that the Americans began the maarakit al-hawasim. It meant, roughly, the Decisive Battle, a phrase that soon became ironic.
“Today is our maarakit al-hawasim,” I told Abu Jean.
He nodded, not comprehending.
We had a window of a few hours, maybe less, to finish what we could finish before the movers brought in my furniture. Here is what we had to do: Fadi wanted to put a final polish on the marble; the blacksmith was trying to solder the iron stairs; Camille was supposed to adjust the wood tracery in the arch over the door; Toama had to touch up the paint; Emad was screwing in the light-switch covers; and the rest of us were sweeping the floors, mopping the tile, hauling away the trash, spray-cleaning the stone with water, and, barefoot, with our pants rolled up, shoveling whatever drained off into buckets.
The movers soon arrived, and as I gazed inside the liwan, I realized that for the first time since I had come to Marjayoun, something unusual had happened: Our work was done on time. The floors were barely dry as they hauled in the furniture from my Beirut apartment, where my lease had expired, leaving me without a home there. The marble glistened like a mirror; in its reflection I saw my beard, growing ever grayer.
As the evening ended, I sat on Isber Samara’s balcony. I had prepared a meal with as much as I could harvest from my garden—onions in a dish of lentils and rice, green tomatoes, miqta that I salted just right, and a salad with a pepper, mint, onions, and yet more miqta that I had picked. I took my place at a table whose marble top was taken from part of the kitchen counter on which Abu Elie, the squatter downstairs, had once cut parsley and tomatoes. Beneath my feet was a pattern of more tile that I had bought from Abu Ali. I looked around the house, at the arch, the door, the shutters, and the stone, and I felt something that was always fleeting: satisfaction. With a little more money, I could have bought prettier handles for the windows. With a little more time, I could have saved some of the old doors and arches. But all in all, I had turned an abandoned house, disabled by war, into a place that exuded a kind of peace. Rather than just a channel to the past, or a facsimile of it, it had become new, part of what was and what would and could be. Isber’s home, born of ambition, had been burnished by the sacrifice of two parents who chose safety for their children at the cost of their own loss. It was a place where my family could take what they needed from the past, as I had, seeing in its stories the comfort I sought and the promise I found. Sometimes it is better to imagine the past than to remember it.
The next morning, a sunny one, I stood in the garden looking at the old doors that we had pulled out and discarded months before. I stared at some pieces of marble from an old countertop. I was tempted to throw them out. Then I remembered Raeefa in Oklahoma, hoarding half bricks, saving pennies, holding on, making everything count. I knew I couldn’t throw these things away. I would save all of my family’s lives that I could, every fragment from Isber and his time, every piece of the past, everything my great-grandmother and grandmother had touched. In the house in Marjayoun I could see the past in the present, see the things worth preserving. The Levant is no more, but I had been reminded—by the grace of the triple arches, the dignity and pride of the maalimeen, the music of Dr. Khairalla, and Isber’s sorrow and sacrifice—that behind the politics there were prayers still being said with hope for what draws us together.
There was a Jedeida today. Then there was a Jedeida that we remembered, or imagined, or wanted to imagine, filled with friends and relatives, houses that embodied a forgotten past, glimpses of Mount Hermon, and a reflection of ourselves or what we wanted ourselves to be. My Lebanon was my grandmother’s, a place besieged by war, but my Jedeida was an idea born of Isber’s house. Nothing could wreck it; no war could destroy it. I could always go there. It was always with me.
I promised myself that I would save a jar of olives for my last night, to celebrate with when the house was finally done. Taking it from the cabinet, I put a dozen or so in a white bowl fitting for my ceremony. I tried two or three. They had aged well despite being picked too early by a novice, a newcomer, but they were no longer bitter and the taste of salt had been somehow subdued. As I ate them, I thought of the day when my daughter and I would savor the fruit from her tree, the tree planted the day I began the journey back to Isber’s. There was more life to come in this old house.
It was the start of a fine day in June. I was standing on Isber’s balcony when my phone rang. It was Dr. Khairalla.
“I’m not doing too well,” he told me after we exchanged greetings. “I’m staying in bed.”
There was a hint of irritation in his voice, anger directed at himself, or perhaps at his body for failing him when he had so much to do. The cancer, he told me, had spread further along his spine, from the L4 to the L5 vertebra.
I felt uneasy, so I changed the subject.
“You wouldn’t believe the passiflora, Doctor,” I said, looking down at the garden. “It’s just thriving.”
He had given me the passionflower, and soon after I planted it, it sprang forth, hungry for life. Its tendrils had soon wound their way up an iron fence. Sometimes it seemed to grow across a stone in the wall in one day.
“You should cut off the top so that it climbs in both directions,” he told me.
I could hear a glimmer of interest in his voice, even excitement. “Has it flowered yet?” he asked. “No,” he added almost immediately. “It’s still too early.”
The next day, I went to see Dr. Khairalla at his house. Ivanka answered the door. He was still in bed, she told me, and couldn’t come down. She suggested I go up; his was the last bedroom on the left. When I saw him, I tried to take in how much he had deteriorated in the two weeks since I had last visited. He was lying in a white wooden bed, swallowed by the blue plaid sheets and white comforter. His face was wan, even sallow. As I entered, he struggled to pull himself up to a pillow that was propped against the headboard and covered in a white towel. On the walls around him were five pictures of his two children and his grandson Jean. Against the mirror on the nightstand was an icon of the Virgin Mary with child. Next to it was a single red rose in a white vase that he had picked for his wife on her birthday, June 19, the same as Laila’s.
As we sat there in silence, the television played in another room. Ivanka was watching the beatification in Beirut of Yaacoub Haddad, a Capuchin priest from Lebanon, and I heard snippets of the ceremony: “Pray to God . . . as a symbol of our faith and love . . . thank Him for what He gave.”
“Have you seen the passiflora’s flower yet?” he asked me again.
I shook my head. He gingerly got out of bed and took a book off a shelf, The Complete Indoor Gardener. He sat down and opened the book to the index, looked up the flower, then turned to the page for me. There was an exquisite picture, and for once I could grasp how Spanish missionaries saw in it the death of Christ—its sepals and petals as disciples, its rows of blue and purple as a halo (or crown of thorns), and its stamens and styles as the wounds and nails of the cross. So subtle and bold, the flower felt animated.
“Next year, yours will look like this,” he told me.
For the first time, he didn’t offer to help prune the trees. He didn’t suggest what we might find in the Jibchit nurseries, and he didn’t propose to bring me cuttings or teach me to graft. On this day, there were no more promises. He lamented that he couldn’t walk in his own garden lately. He had to watch it grow from his window, a spectator. He was full of regret that the cherry season was passing, that he wouldn’t be able to make the thirty bottles of wine he wanted. I volunteered to buy the cherries for him when I next drove up the mountain to Shebaa, but he shook his head.
“I can’t work on them,” he said.
He repeated the words twice, as if apologizing.
Painted in a faded white, the room was sad, and as I stepped through the door I remembered the hospital rooms of a wartime Baghdad, spare and clinical, no personal touches to ease the leavetaking of the dying. There he was, with Ivanka, who sat on a couch in a room whose only color was a band of green that circled the wall. He tried to get out of the bed to stand and greet me, but he couldn’t. Frail, his skin pallid, he finally pulled himself up and wearily sat against the headboard.
“I’m exhausted,” he told me.
He had a fever and a urinary tract infection. His liver was swollen, and he feared the cancer had spread to it.
Even on this day, the last I would see him, I could call him nothing but Doctor. It was fitting.
“I’ll see you in September, Doctor. It’s just a couple months away.”
“I hope,” he said.
“I’m sure I will, Doctor,” though I knew otherwise. So did Dr. Khairalla.
He shrugged his shoulders. “I hope.”
I caught a taxi back to Marjayoun, and the driver read the look on my face.
“Did you know someone there?” he asked.
I managed only to utter his name.
“You have to put it in the hands of God,” he told me. “All the people there, no medicine will help them. No surgeries, no doctors. Your Lord will bring his health back. Only your Lord.
“A doctor,” he said, “is just the wasila.”
Wasila—an instrument, the means.
As we drove along a bend in the road, I lit a cigarette and remembered Dr. Khairalla pointing to a denuded hillside, long ago ravaged by war.
“You see here, this hill?” he had asked me.
It was once full of almond trees, he had said, their trunks showing their years, the trees planted a generation before him. In the spring they were drenched in flowers impossibly white.
The vision was otherworldly, his Jedeida.
“There are still some remnants of the trees, you see,” he had told me.
Epilogue
In February 2011, seemingly out of nowhere, there came a time of transformation as Egypt reimagined home. It announced itself as a revolution took hold, before a tyrant was toppled, and before a lost people knew they would triumph over all the deaths and detentions, miseries and disappointments, that had characterized life in their nation. Its gathering spirit emerged most palpably in Tahrir Square in Cairo, the faded heart of a city where too many battles had been lost and too many lives humbled. What happened there was born of years of frustration, collective memories of a past some thought forgotten, and the dream of change; it was an act of imagination, of people turning acceptance into action and visions of another day. They were creating a different kind of community, linked to what once was.
Back at work a few years after completing the house in Marjayoun, I walked to the square—its name meant liberation in Arabic—not long before the revolution reached a jubilant climax. It was a few minutes after midnight on a Sunday. Rain washed the hushed streets of a place transformed. Ahmed Abdel-Moneim, draped in a blanket, felt free to talk as we crossed the Kasr el-Nil Bridge. “My vision,” he told me, grinning, “goes a lot farther than what my eyes can see.”
That day, cries of rebellion and, finally, of triumph had reverberated through the teeming square, a space circled by old monuments to a withering authoritarianism. “Welcome to a free Egypt,” men and women had chanted. By nightfall, the scene had grown more subdued as the cheers and cries grew softer and the square became a stage for impromptu poetry readings, performances, and political debates. “What I see here,” Ahmed said as we entered the square, “is what I’ve never seen in my life.” His grin turned to a smile. “Everyone here is awake.”
Canteens prepared cheese sandwiches, and no one had to pay. Volunteers ferried tea to weary guards at the barricades. Pharmacies gave out bandages and lotions, disinfectant and inhalers, intravenous solution and insulin. Artists brought their aesthetic to the asphalt, rendering work that was perhaps more inspired than memorable. As the night unfolded, vendors ambled along peaceful streets, past couples holding hands and men wearing bandages from their fights with thuggish government supporters who dared attempt to suppress their vision of this new home.
“Tea for an Egyptian pound!” one man cried. “Koshary! Koshary! Koshary!” shouted another, offering dishes of rice, lentils, and pasta, simple meals for hungry people. Volunteers handed out bread sticks. “My man, eat it!” shouted one. “We came for you!” There was a sense that victory was near. “Oh time, take a picture of us,” went a song by Abdel-Halim Hafez, an Egyptian icon of another era, blaring from the speakers. “We will grow even closer to each other, and whoever drifts away from the square will never appear in the picture.”
As I walked, I chatted with a doctor, a beautiful woman who had come home to live this moment. “They will adore this square,” she told me near a line of tanks, one of them bearing the graffiti of a protester: Egypt Is Mine. “We’ll clean the square, we’ll cherish the square. It will be a symbol of making something new.”
At a little past 5 A.M., as dawn’s soft glow filtered across the sky, the call to prayer rang out. “Prayer is better than sleep,” the muezzin nearest to me cried. Some men and women began to awaken, as the call rose across a capital known as the City of a Thousand Minarets. I walked with Mohammed Farouq toward the entrance of the bridge. Mohammed looked out at the gathering tumult, then back over his shoulder. “You feel like this is the society you want to live in,” he said, gesturing to the square.
Ibn al-sa’a, goes an old Arabic phrase. The son of the hour, it means. More figuratively, it suggests something fleeting, a lifetime captured in an instant, its fate briefly tangible. So Tahrir Square was.
Then came March, when I found myself in a town in Libya whose name I had never previously bothered to remember. Soldiers for a government crumbling but still forceful had taken me and three fellow reporters captive at a makeshift checkpoint. Bullets ricocheted around us. The soft dirt popped as they entered the earth. I had run, then stumbled on a sand berm, every muscle in my body taut. Minutes passed, and I found myself on my knees next to a simple one-room house where a woman clutched her infant child. Both cried uncontrollably. Soldiers trained their guns on us, beat us, stripped us of everything in our pockets, forced us to lie face-down. One, slighter than the others, surged toward me. “You’re the translator!” he screamed. “You’re the spy!” Seconds went by, but it felt far longer, and another soldier approached. Rage flared from his eyes. He shoved my face in the dirt.
“Shoot them,” the soldier said calmly in Arabic.
As I lay motionless on the ground, I sensed something familiar, a feeling I recalled from Ramallah where, years before, I had lain under a cemetery-gray sky, waiting to die from the bullet wound in my back. I recalled it from Qana in 2006, where the people had cried, “Slowly, slowly!” as Lebanese soldiers, Red Cross workers, and volunteers dug with hoes, shovels, and their bare hands, searching for pieces of lost lives. I had felt it in Baghdad in 2003, when the mother of Lava Jamal, whose mauled torso was pulled from the wreckage of an American bombing, vomited at the sight of her daughter’s severed head. I remembered it from Marjayoun, where I came upon a house on a hill whose grandeur had given way to insult. It was emptiness, aridity, hopelessness, the antithesis of creation, imagination.
We ended up in jail the next day, in a city called Sirte, on the Mediterranean. I suppose there are worse prisons in the Arab world. This one was relatively cheerful, painted yellow. My colleagues and I were handcuffed and left in a basement cell on ratty mattresses with a bottle to urinate in, a jug of water, and a bag of sticky dates. Tahrir Square seemed far away. Graffiti of devout prisoners were scratched into the wall. “God bring us relief,” one line read in a plea to the Almig
hty. Scrawled next to it in tiny letters was a more intimate aside: “My beloved Firdaus.”
By morning, we had been transferred to a military airport, where the beatings were worst. Blindfolded and bound with plastic handcuffs, I was hit by the butt of a gun to the head. I staggered and waited for the next blow, and the next, and wondered how many there might be. As I sat in the plane that took us to the capital, Tripoli, I panicked as the restraints dug into my wrists and numbed my swollen hands. When a man approached me, hearing my cries for help over the drone of the cargo plane’s engines, I turned my head, waiting for another fist to land. I couldn’t see his face, but as he leaned toward me, I could feel his breath on my ear. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.
The next day, in Tripoli, shortly before Turkish diplomats negotiated our release and drove us from Libya, we sat in a lavish office as an urbane Foreign Ministry official chatted with us. His small talk suggested embarrassment, and I forgot everything he said, save a few words he quoted to my colleague in idiomatic British English.
They were two lines from a poem by William Butler Yeats: “Those that I fight I do not hate, / Those that I guard I do not love.”
I hated him, though. I hated the billboards I saw as I left the country after a week in captivity, the propaganda of a regime that did not deserve to be mourned. Forty-one Years of Permanent Joy, read one slogan superimposed over a sunburst. Democracy Is Popular Rule, Not Popular Expression, read another. I hated what this had cost. I wanted to go home, and so I went to Marjayoun with my new wife and infant son. There had been no question of where we would go after my release from Libya.
When they arrived in Marjayoun, the forefathers of Isber Samara carried with them the nomadic ways of the Houran and its Bedouin residents. Their possessions were few, but each family was said to have brought the wooden mihbaj, to prepare their coffee, and the iron saj, to bake their bread. The very sound of grinding coffee was considered an invitation to anyone and everyone to come. Stay, it suggested. Seek shelter. I thought of this as I returned to Marjayoun; I thought of what was lost and what might, somehow, return. I envisioned desert wanderers of different faiths and creeds offering aid and succor to each other as they crossed the steppe. I recalled the silent respect of the women in Tyre mourning in black before eighty-six numbered coffins, destined for a single grave. I remembered Tahrir Square and what had once more, for a moment, been imagined.
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