He talked amiably about acquaintances in the field, all those designers, engineers, and architects whose paths had crossed his. “I don’t know them all, but they all know me,” he said. “Like they say, Tout le monde connaît de Gaulle, mais de Gaulle ne connaît pas tout le monde. The world knows de Gaulle, but de Gaulle doesn’t know the world.”
On and on, Mr. Chaya chatted with me, devoting perhaps a tenth of the conversation to business. When I finally began to bargain, he charmingly but emphatically refused to do so. The tile would cost $25 a square meter, $1 a tile, the same price as Maalouf’s most expensive version, even though Mr. Chaya’s was new, absent of design, and relatively easy to manufacture. I was shameless, direct: “I’m spending so much on this house, Mr. Chaya. Please.” He would have none of it. His men were taking double in salary, fuel costs up, the sand so expensive.
I begged him. For the sake of bayt Sitti, I said.
“I don’t want to refuse, but I can’t,” he said, never giving a cent. “Wa hayat Allah, believe me. I can’t lose money. Shall I show you a breakdown of the prices?” He reached for his folder.
I shook my head.
He relit his pipe and exhaled slowly through his smile, leaning back in his chair.
How do you spell Edgard? I asked as I wrote the check.
When I returned to Marjayoun a few days later, the tile was already there, transported on flatbed trucks, three shipments in all, and stacked against the stone wall that George Jaradi was building in perfect order. Maalouf’s medley of colors and patterns was mixed with Mr. Chaya’s uniformly, pleasingly brownish style. Then came Abu Ali’s thirty-eight square meters, three more than I bought. Abu Ali never lied. That day, and for more that followed, I gleefully, frenetically lost myself in the tile, as I once had with stories in Beirut, Baghdad, and Cairo.
With a red bucket filled with rainwater, a green brush, and a sponge so laden with grease that I was about to throw it away, I went through every single piece, separated them into their patterns, and each pattern into its respective colors. I created my own categories: most common (the pattern that enchanted me at Abu Ali’s), most beautiful (arabesque wheels of a dozen spokes, in reds, greens, blues, and creams), and most graceful (an eight-pointed star alternatively cast in red and blue or brown and cream). On a free swath of concrete, I arranged a few dozen tiles into a patch of color, with a border forming a square around it. I brushed the tiles, washed them with casual swipes that always revealed something interesting—unexpected colors or swirls that at first seemed random, but when put together revealed some intricate design.
Within days, more stacks spread across the garden, in perfect piles of ten, claiming space between the shingles and a blackened steel barrel. I had counted more than two thousand tiles, but the time passed quickly. My hands were cut and dirty, and my back hurt. My feet were hopelessly muddy. George saw me, shaking his head in fulsome disapproval. “Anthony, you’re going to make your hands rough,” he shouted. “Leave them tender!” I smiled, then surveyed the scene. It felt as though I was lifting history and putting it back in its place.
In the days that followed, I measured each room in the house, twice. I walked the floor, abstracted, in a trance fit for an ecstatic Sufi, trying to imagine the tile that would soon unfurl across it. I designated numbers for the tiles and photographed them three or four times, inscribing each picture with a Sharpie. I sketched corresponding maps, the measurements calculated to the second decimal point. In lists, I accounted for each tile, giving them names—red hex, red star, patio, Cave, brown star, and Abu Ali’s star. I scribbled diagrams on the pages of a reporter’s notebook, making my best guess at how to render an arch on paper and the approximate—exceedingly approximate—place of doors and windows between the lines of a page. I guessed at how a meter of tile would translate to a centimeter of paper.
Early on, I knew I would never have enough tile to imitate the rooms of a Barcelona house or a Beirut villa, cemento from wall to wall. Of the tile I bought, nearly every batch was missing some of its border or one of its corners. Plenty were too damaged to lay—chipped, gouged, chafed at the edges, or worn smooth by foot after foot that had walked over them. I would have to settle for less, placing the tiles of Abu Ali and Maalouf in carpet-size spaces in nearly every room, surrounded by Mr. Chaya’s plainer variety. Like the stone, the design of this so-called bahra was a necessity, a utilitarian use of too little tile. Like the stone, I hoped it would prove elegant as the house grew older. In the end, I envisioned Persian rugs spilling across the floor of Bayt Samara, muffling time.
I had a vision, flawed and impetuous, and like a Shadid, I wanted to fight for every chaotic angle that I had sketched on that pad.
10. Last Whispers
Abu Jean had called someone to lay the tile, and as we stood outside the house, the bane of my mornings pulled into the driveway. I felt as if someone had thrown a power drill into my bathtub. There before me was the red Renault whose engine I heard being gunned at dawn, day after day, as I lay in bed. Suddenly awakened on endless and ever-colder mornings, I had imagined the driver. Now here he was. He had come to work here.
Labib Haddad plodded toward us, offering his large hand as Abu Jean took care of the formalities, the idle chatter that in Marjayoun had to precede any conversation. Then, after the delay for the sake of manners, came the business at hand. Could Labib lay the cemento piled on the wood pallets outside? The answer was affirmative, but, as usual, the timing was hardly definite.
Labib was one of the few tile layers in town. His occupation brought him attention. Few others could do what he did, with marble, ceramic, or the rarer cemento. But he left little impression on anyone; he rarely spoke, and when he did, his words were often so mumbled as to be indecipherable. That did have its advantages: In the conversation on that first morning and the ones that followed, Labib never said no to me. He never refused to lay my tile. He never asked for more time to finish his job at another warshe. He never asked for understanding.
Yet, in the days to come, he postponed and procrastinated, delayed and dragged his feet, literally. And it was his particular habit to do it all with a maddening shake of his head—as in, This won’t do. I pleaded. To shut me up, he promised to come the next day.
He didn’t. “I waited until four P.M. and the tiler didn’t come,” Abu Jean told me.
“Can you call him, Abu Jean?” I asked.
He started yelling—where is his phone number, whose phone should I use, what if he’s busy? “If this person doesn’t come, if that person doesn’t come, what am I supposed to do? Should I pull them by their ear, drag them, and make them work?”
That’s just what I thought he should do.
“Should I ask God to invite him over? Should I bring God from heaven and make him bring this guy here?”
I shook my head. The tirade had started; the gates were breached; the fleet had left the harbor. Only God in heaven was going to restore harmony, so I looked for my phone. After a few calls, I located our man, then got in my car and drove to a church in Khirbe—a neighboring town whose name means ruins, and was hence renamed, by its image-conscious residents, Borj al-Muluk, or Tower of Kings.
Labib was working there in the basement of the church, whose meek priest, I later learned, had driven the previous night all the way to Labib’s house to berate him for taking so long to finish the floor. With me, Labib was friendly, with no sense of shame or remorse. He would come tomorrow, he told me again, nodding his head in assurance.
On an overcast day soon after, he did show up. Abu Jean had brought the cement. A friend of Toama’s came to help lay the tile. A truck had dumped a load of sand in the driveway.
Labib wandered over to the tile. He ran his hand over the patterns, a finger along the edges. “This won’t do,” he told me, in his best imitation of regret. Before he could begin, each piece of tile would have to be cleaned and polished, he said. As I stood there dumbfounded, I could have sworn I saw a slight smile unfold acros
s his face. “I would have told you if I had known this was the tile you were using,” he said. Labib started walking away, waddling, crouched and hunched over, his back bent from tiling year after year.
“I’m around,” he said.
So appropriate, I thought. He was going to wait for me.
Abu Jean, more than any other person, appreciated the scale of my disappointment.
Fittingly, the sky was lonesome and forlorn, with clouds blowing toward Mount Hermon as they turned dark and rainy. The weather was as mercurial as Labib’s intentions. Rain did come, but gave way to drizzle. Wind sounded like a whisper, then a howl, as it poured through the house. I hoped I wasn’t the only one hearing this.
“Let’s go down to my house and have a cup of coffee,” Abu Jean said. He made this suggestion nearly every day, sometimes two or three times. And nearly every day I politely declined. He changed his pitch this time: cactus fruit, grapes, apples, and coffee. Seeing that he was sensitive to my slight, I guiltily accepted.
His house was modest, yet blessed with a spectacular view of the valley and Mount Hermon. As we parked, he told me about his grandfather’s sale of the family land for arak, the anise-flavored liquor that is celebrated and cursed. All that was left was this tiny plot, with its beautiful peach tree planted at the bottom. He said he tried to buy a small piece of land next to his, but the owner wanted far more than he could afford.
“Money,” Abu Jean blurted out. “Curse its religion, that son of a whore.”
We ate the cactus fruit, and Abu Jean lamented fate. Gone, he said, were the fig trees that once carpeted the valley, lush and green. When the people left, the figs began to disappear. Olive trees took their place—less demanding and more gentle—but they, too, were ignored. Olives were trees of peace, and there was no peace here.
“Twelve,” Abu Jean kept repeating, growing angry and wagging his finger.
Quickly I learned that Abu Jean was twelve when he had to flee to Nabatiyeh, during World War II. Twelve years old. “That’s war,” he said. “We’ve had a hundred years of war here, son of a whore.” The number meant nothing, but Abu Jean had become attached to it. It felt properly grand, even epic. “A hundred years of war,” he repeated.
It was January 1920, and the rains had begun. At higher altitudes, along the mountain’s peak, the rain turned to snow, which tumbled down the slopes of Mount Hermon.
Isber sat back in a chair that had come from Syria, bearing its damascene design. Another piece from the set bore the shades of wood—walnut, apricot, rose, olive, and lemon trees rendered in different shapes and sizes. Most of it was walnut, crafted in a technique that stretched back a thousand years, its mother-of-pearl from the sea, bahri, and from the river, nahri, inlaid then accented with ivory. When Nabeeh came into the room, father and son sat under a portrait of Archbishop Elia Diab, which Diab himself had given them before leaving the town to minister in Chile. Remember me was written at the bottom in Arabic.
There, among cushions that Bahija had stitched, Isber fretted. He wanted his eldest son to make his own decision, but behind those eyes that never revealed anything, there had to be emotion. Was his son going to say that he wanted to leave home? Would Nabeeh be the first of his children to say farewell, the beginning of his family’s breakup?
The weather was cold, gloomy, and gray. The marble floor was frigid to the touch. Even in winter, Bahija could not bear to throw rugs over it, depriving the room of its glow, at its softest when the sun was at its most retiring. Such houses drew their heat from an ujaa burning wood and sometimes jift, the crushed pits of olives they had pressed in October. Here, it was charcoal that glowed in the evenings.
Now nineteen, Nabeeh had not returned to the Protestant school since World War I ended. Everything seemed too precarious for medical school, especially in faraway Beirut. Outlaws and rebels plied routes from the Chouf Mountains toward Hasbaya, Marjayoun, and on to the Houran. Predictable bloodshed began a series of raids and reprisals, vendettas and score-settling, flickering across the landscape for months. The worst episode erupted in Ain Ebel, a Maronite and Greek Catholic village far from Marjayoun but still in the south, along the present-day border of Israel. Residents of neighboring Shiite villages—along with the armed bands growing angrier at the French—had heard its townspeople were collaborating. Rumors spread that the French were arming them. Other stories followed: A rock was set up, declared the Prophet Mohammed, and used as target practice; Christians harassed a woman selling yogurt and tore off her head scarf. They soon attacked again, killing dozens, among them women and children, and burning the town.
The French, predictably, exacted revenge. All the strife and fear was too much. Isber wanted his oldest son to go abroad. It was the trek the family had made before—in their own myths, from Yemen, and in memories still tethered to their family names, from the Houran. This was another exodus, prompted for the same reasons, perhaps. But Isber was a father, and a father could not tell his son, especially his eldest, to leave, with the knowledge that he might never come back.
Nabeeh would have to decide.
Isber asked the question simply. “What would you like to do?”
Nabeeh had made his decision. Leave.
To Isber, there were two possible destinations: Brazil, where his nephew, the son of his brother Rashid, had gone. Or America, where his other relatives sought a future.
Nabeeh chose America. He knew of a man from the Fayad family who was going back. Maybe twenty others were going with him, Nabeeh said.
Never one to express emotion and never one to speak too much, Isber simply nodded. Then he made a request. Take Nabiha, his oldest daughter. Nabeeh agreed. What about Raeefa? Isber then asked. She was his second-oldest daughter, maturing herself.
“Let’s wait,” Nabeeh said, “and not take two girls with me at the same time.”
The whispers of Isber’s age were everywhere in Marjayoun. They spoke of a time in which I never lived but had envisioned so often that, to me, it was almost more familiar than the present. It was the era whose fragments and civilities—the remnants of the Ottomans and the Levant—had originally drawn me to the Middle East. I often wondered whether Isber, whose life was altered so unexpectedly by the events of his era, felt as dispirited as I did about the fate of his homeland. How deeply had he felt the loss that led me to his house? Undoubtedly his sorrow was considerable. Isber, the poor boy, had wanted to grow up to be an Ottoman gentleman; his house represented his claim to that status, to those values. But everything shifted under his feet. Ottoman gentlemen were no longer what one could strive to become. The world had made them anachronistic. As his days grew more difficult, Isber must have longed for and been haunted by what he had barely touched but not had the chance to savor. Perhaps he might have been relieved, or at least surprised, to discover that, all these decades later, at least one true Ottoman gentleman survived. “I lived the last whispers of the Ottoman Empire,” Cecil Hourani told me.
When I had informed Cecil of my impending journey to Marjayoun, he was delighted that I, a grandson of Marjayounis, was planning to restore one of the town’s anthology of houses—as long as it was not Isber’s. Sharing Shibil’s wariness of mixing real estate with family, he spoke against my decision without reserve. He had, in fact, been adamant about this, and for months had tried to find another house, any other house, anywhere in Marjayoun, for me to buy and renovate. He had even contacted relatives in the United States to gauge their interest in selling theirs, abandoned for years.
“In the meanwhile,” he wrote, “my advice to you is not to get involved in the Samara house which we visited together. It will cost you a lot of money, and in the end it still won’t be yours, and anyway it is not really very attractive, although it has some good features—but I think its repair would be a headache. So be patient, there are other possibilities.” Trying to change my mind was one thing—many certainly agreed with him, and I could argue only out of pride—but “not really very attractive” ho
use? This was unforgivable.
Now, at his house, the wisdom, my wisdom, in rebuilding my family’s home came up not once. This was a good sign, I thought. Not that Cecil had changed his mind. He simply accepted my decision as a fait accompli. I was surprised. I had expected a reprimand. Often brilliant, always sharp, and occasionally curmudgeonly, as befits a British-born man in his nineties, Cecil was not only an Ottoman gentleman, he was Marjayoun.
After a few moments of hesitation at the start of our encounter—in which we both seemed to have decided not to bring up anything ticklish—Cecil brought me outside to the garden, to share tabouli, garnished with lettuce, and an eggplant dish known as moutabal, which we had picked up together. A green-tinted jug of homemade arak, with two small glasses, awaited on a stone table, along with olives, oil-drenched balls of labneh, and bread.
Near our bench were red aloe cactuses. Jasmine, white blossoms skipping along the vine, seemed to prop up the stone wall. From his balcony, the mountain and the towns of the Arqoub unfolded beyond us. It was a lovely setting, basking in a sun that eventually let me take off my scarf.
It is the shades of green that make the valley so lovely, he told me. I nodded in appreciation. In a few words, he had captured what I had long tried to understand about this landscape. The hues contrast with the cream colors of the stone, he said, and the feminine cadence of the topography. “I call this a lost valley. In a good way,” Cecil said. “It’s undiscovered, and I hope it will survive.”
Slight and frail, with a prominent nose and narrow eyes that seemed calculating, Cecil had lived a picaresque life in a family whose exploits, pedigree, and accomplishments refused comparison. He was born in Manchester, England, to Fadlo Hourani, a prominent merchant who emigrated there in 1891 but who never lost ties with his birthplace, eventually helping found perhaps its most prestigious institution, the Marjayoun National College. His mother, Soumaya Rassi, was from a prominent family in the neighboring town of Ibl al-Saqi. Their children were raised in two worlds, which Cecil captured in a memoir written nearly twenty-five years before.
House of Stone Page 15
