House of Stone

by Anthony Shadid

  Abu Jean had no time for all this. (With feigned concentration, he at first looked at the diagram upside down.) He would do it his own way, drawing up the plan with chalk, which soon washed away. When he began, weeks after he had promised to do so, each day seeming to bring another false start, he gave no appearance of being daunted.

  None.

  He measured the stair. It was supposed to be 220 centimeters long. It was 217.

  “Mazbut!” he shouted. Correct!

  Then he set the spirit level on the concrete that he had poured, to determine if it was level. The bubble in the liquid migrated to the far left. The surface was horribly slanted.

  “Good!” he cried with pride, more than a little misplaced.

  Fadi showed up to polish the tile we had laid in the salon, dining room, kitchen, and bedroom, but on the third day he declared that he could go no further unless I brought in enough electricity to power his industrial equipment. Busy, I asked him to go to the utility company, please. He deferred. He wasn’t from the town, ibn Marjayoun, he said. Abu Jean didn’t want to go. The house was in my name, after all, he pointed out. So I went, and ten minutes later we had power. Wonderful, Fadi said. But he still wanted to wait until Malik finished laying every piece of tile. Malik shook his head: He was waiting for two doorstops from the neighboring town of Khiam. And by the way, he told me, he needed more sponges. Not surprisingly, Abu Jean was reluctant to proceed with the stairs until Malik finished tiling the sidewalk. Malik wouldn’t start tiling the sidewalk until Abu Jean poured the concrete. After all this time, neither knew what the stairs were supposed to look like.

  A sane man would have admitted the obvious: I couldn’t finish before I had to leave Marjayoun, my sojourn over. But sanity wasn’t figuring in my thinking. We can finish, I kept telling myself, and the only person more insufferable than Abu Jean was me. The phones were abysmal in southern Lebanon; the network was neglected by the phone company and (supposedly) jammed by the Israeli army and United Nations peacekeepers. I tried anyway, making scores of calls on a phone missing its battery cover. I called Marwan to find out when he would take the doors to his workshop and paint them. I called Toama’s cousin to check whether he had the right paint colors for the walls—soft rose, stone, and cream. I called—begged—Nassib to bring the restored darabzin for the balconies and windows. Every day I asked Ramzi when he would finish the wood ceiling. He humored me, repeatedly telling me he would meet a deadline and then always missing it. Camille the carpenter, his delays epic, defying the odds—what were the chances that every deadline would be missed?—told me he couldn’t come because his newborn cousin had died.

  “Allah yirhamu,” I said. God have mercy on him. Then, without pausing, I asked if he could send his Egyptian apprentice, Shawki, instead. We had a lot of work to do.

  I exhorted the company in Beirut to finish the windows, shutters, and wooden tracery of the arches. I begged a company in Sidon to put the parquet in another bedroom. They did, only to complain that Abu Jean’s cement floor was too shoddy. Abu Jean, in turn, erupted in a fit of self-righteousness, running his hand over the floor’s wadis in admiration.

  “It’s smooth as silk,” he insisted.

  Then my Shadid side ruptured.

  Toama and Abu Jean were fighting once again, as usual over money. Abu Jean was zealous in not spending, as he put it, a franc more than he had to. Toama was no less stringent in charging me for any task, no matter how trivial. He even charged me for gas to drive a few minutes away to check whether the stone molding was ready. On this day, they argued about cement. Toama wanted Abu Jean to buy another bag. Abu Jean insisted there was enough left upstairs. We need more, Toama said. We have enough, Abu Jean said. The fight went on. Neither said anything different; only their voices rose. On and on, minute after minute.

  “Enough!” I shouted.

  I took my wallet out of my pocket and threw it to the ground.

  “Take the money,” I said.

  My show of anger made Toama lose his temper. He walked away, shouting. So did Abu Jean. With four words and a dirty billfold, I had inaugurated a procession of hurt feelings, wounded pride, and bruised egos that ended the day’s work. Others tried to mediate. Appeals were delivered to God. Coffee was brewed. To no avail.

  Then George Jaradi drove up in his derelict white Mercedes, which he had named for a prostitute whom he seemed especially fond of. Jameela, he called it.

  “How are we?” he asked.

  Even in the most despondent times, George made me smile. I patted his ever-growing gut. “When’s the due date?” I asked him, drawing a cry of glee.

  Briefed by all, George would be mediator.

  “What has George told you every day, Anthony? George is working here in Marjayoun, at a warshe up there,” he said, pointing toward the Boulevard. “When there’s a problem, call George, and George will fix it for you. Didn’t George tell you that? Don’t get angry, don’t let your head hurt, Anthony.”

  We sat under the olive tree, its branches laden with fruit.

  “George wants to talk straight. Neither left, neither right, but straight. George will come and finish it for you without pay. Just call George,” he said. “George will do it.”

  I knew he wouldn’t, but I appreciated the offer. Like my grandfather, I cooled as quickly as I got angry. We talked a little longer, and I promised I wasn’t mad at anyone.

  “The yogurt’s pure?” he asked in Arabic.

  It meant there were no more grudges.

  I nodded my head: The yogurt is pure.

  When George left, Abu Jean muttered into my ear, “Fuck him!”

  But the next day, neither Toama nor I nor Abu Jean mentioned a word about the bag of cement.

  It was May when I visited Dr. Khairalla. I had made a CD of songs by Rahim Alhaj, the virtuoso Iraqi oud player, to give him as a gesture of thanks. When I asked him how he was feeling, his first urge was to tell me he felt fine, but more than a suggestion of doubt passed his face, and he spoke more honestly.

  “Not so good.”

  The cancer had spread to his lower spine (or, as he put it, L4, the fourth lumbar vertebra). The pain was excruciating, and he seemed changed. His thick gray hair was still combed back from each side of the part, like an actor from the silent-film era or a dapper socialite in 1920s New York. But his face was darker, more drawn, and I could see he was weaker. He hesitated in his step, and his reactions, the quick movements I remembered as he pruned the plum trees at my house, were more subdued.

  He was sitting with Ali, a Shiite friend of the family, from a neighboring village, who had brought his son for a medical exam. Ali turned to me. “There is no one like him,” he said, nodding toward Dr. Khairalla. As they left, without a suggestion of payment, Dr. Khairalla slapped the boy on his butt, the first time I had seen him being playful or energetic since we had met.

  Ivanka served coffee and brought out a plate of deep red plums that tasted like sugar. Dr. Khairalla showed me a picture of the bouzouki he had made for his grandson, Jean, who would turn four this year. Crafted of wild plum wood, the handle was dark. The face was made of a light, more fragile wood. The base was a gourd. “From Grandpa to Jean,” he had inscribed on it in Arabic.

  My phone rang, with another message about the crisis in Lebanon, the stalemate having given way to a new bout of tension. There were rumors that a strike the opposition had called might turn violent in the capital. Dr. Khairalla had heard the same, and he was bitter about it.

  “We’ve become the stage of the theater where they act,” he said.

  “Will there be a civil war, Dr. Khairalla?”

  “It’s not in the hands of the Lebanese. The decision is outside,” he said. “We’re the instruments of war, the means. They use us.”

  For weeks I had asked Dr. Khairalla if I could see his bonsai collection, which he had begun in 1990. Finally he broke down and gave me a look, beginning with the cotoneaster he had bought with me in Jibchit. He had already p
runed it and was beginning to train it, wrapping aluminum wire around certain branches to give it the shape he wanted. He went from plant to plant, describing them as if for a catalogue, much the way he did the garden. There was a satisfaction in his words, a sense of achievement; he talked about the small plants the way he talked about the ouds he had built. He had a two-year-old wisteria he was trying to train. There was an acacia, a fig, and an apricot tree, a jasmine and a rose without thorns. “Look,” he said when I seemed distracted by phone messages about the crisis. He pointed at a wild plum, and a magnificent olive tree no bigger than a beer mug, and the oldest of his plants, a ten-year-old cherry tree. The way he talked about them all, it seemed he still saw himself as a beginner. A real bonsai, he said, would take at least ten years to perfect.

  Ten years, I thought. He had just started on the cotoneaster a couple of weeks ago.

  “There are bonsai one hundred, one hundred fifty years old,” he said. “You have to be patient. This is the principle.” When he told other people about his collection of thirty plants, they dismissed the idea of spending so long on something. “They want everything quickly,” he told me. He understood the investment; he had spent two or three years just deciding whether to begin in the first place. “I was afraid of spoiling the plant,” he said.

  We stood in silence, staring at their delicate precision.

  “It is a kind of meditation,” he said, then laughed. “I deal with plants like living creatures. I feel pity for each one. Especially if you grow it yourself and it reaches a certain age and it dies, you feel like you’re losing something that interacts with you. It’s not a nice feeling to have.”

  My phone rang once more. Another world intruded again, and I had to leave.

  I could tell he was growing tired. He said his doctor had urged him to take morphine, and he had refused. “It’s not wise to take morphine now,” he told me a little clinically. A doctor attending to his own condition, he knew his prognosis. “If I take morphine now, what will I take later? I’ll need something else.” He paused as if thinking about what lay ahead.

  “There will come a worse time.”

  The picture reads Wingfield’s Studio, Oklahoma City. The inscription is written in cursive in the bottom right-hand corner. The portrait features Raeefa, in her thirties now. She remains attractive, though she has lost some of her youthful features. Her hair is shorter, styled and swept back. Her face is heavier, as are her shoulders and arms, which were once so delicate. One feature in the more recent picture haunts: her eyes. Shimmering, they have a faraway look, a distance that speaks of hardship. There is an emotion familiar to me from the eyes of people of war, victims of violence and loss, witnesses to simply too much. Still young, five children hers, Raeefa had already seen what she rarely cared to recall.

  It was January 1942, and for the first time since they left Lebanon, Raeefa and Abdullah had settled in Oklahoma City, which was booming thanks to the stockyards and the discovery of oil, a share of it underneath the state capitol itself. Their modest contribution was the construction of a building that housed a grocery store. Next door they rented rooms to Doc Roe, a pharmacist who established a drugstore. In back was the orchard, Abdullah’s pride. Next to it was the house, modest, simple, and luxurious by the standards of their years of wandering.

  Lately Abdullah had been complaining about his health. Just three weeks before, he had gone to the Veterans Hospital in Shawnee, Oklahoma, for a checkup, and some nights he would lie in bed singing lonesome songs in the Arabic of his youth, his own plea to stop the pain. Nothing bothered him on this day in January, however. He sang and he laughed. He joked in the store. He was filled with euphoria, trotting through his orchard, even though the trees’ branches were like barren webs, colored gray. He was at ease, conversation effortless, whether it was with Raeefa, the children, or their customers.

  Nightfall ended his respite, and he woke up suddenly. He felt as if he had indigestion, and there was a gnawing ache in his chest, the kind that makes you hold your breath, hoping the pain will recede. Things got worse. “I’m hurting,” he told Raeefa. “My chest is hurting.”

  Grimacing, Abdullah got out of bed. He walked slowly, almost a shuffle, to the next room. He sat down on the carpet beside a brown gas stove, then lay on his back. Raeefa followed, staring into the darkness, crouching next to him.

  “Come back to bed,” she said to him in Arabic.

  There was no answer. Not a moment more passed before she knew.

  “Abdullah!” she shouted. “Abdullah!”

  The children awoke and ran into the room. The youngest son lifted his father’s eyelid, having seen the same gesture in movies. Just thirteen, the oldest son tried to resuscitate him, his attempt more desperate than effective. Raeefa rubbed Abdullah’s hand, even then losing its warmth. An ambulance eventually made its way to Northwest Tenth Street, but it was too late. At forty-nine, Abdullah Ayyash Shadid, immigrant, soldier, oil worker, grocer, gardener, and wanderer, was dead.

  “He was in my arms when he passed away,” Raeefa would always remember.

  Weeks later, at midnight, Raeefa lay in bed, unable to sleep. One thought after another unfurled—money, her children, a solitary future. She walked outside, leaving the front door open. It must have felt as though the house was suffocating her. Under the stars, her voice could be heard. For fifteen minutes she looked toward a cloudless and moonless winter sky, in an unrequited stare, searching. As fate loomed, her arms were outstretched.

  “Allah yisaidnee,” she said. “God help me. Guide me. Help me carry on.”

  Her oldest daughter found her and helped her back inside.

  When she woke up the next morning, she said, “I’m going to open the store.”

  So much of the house was what you might call memories of what I had imagined over many years. I spent hours at a time walking through the garden in Marjayoun. Sometimes I thought back to the lazy evenings of a humid summer in suburban Maryland with Laila, my wife at the time, and my mother sitting idly on the brick porch of our old home. Next to me were the miqta that never bore fruit but battled their way through the garden. Amid them were the tomatoes that grew taller than me, their fruit-laden branches propped up by wire, string, and stick, as fireflies flashed in the dark.

  By now, there were dozens of miqta snaking along the ground in my Marjayoun garden. Tomatoes that Malik gave me were bearing flowers. Thanaya had planted patches with parsley, coriander, onion, and garlic. The oranges—the clementine and the Abu Surra—had white buds, which dared themselves to become flowers. Abu Jean had set down a stone stair at the garden’s edge, and as might be predicted, it was askew. As I stepped down on it from the sidewalk, I heard the muezzin in the distance. His voice was lonesome, barely audible. The only hint of the outside world was the U.N. helicopter that rumbled above, its rotors making a sound that was more vibration than noise. I thought of the day, nearly two years before, when I had arrived at Isber’s house to find the damage wrought by the solitary rocket. I remembered the sound of helicopter rotors then as I sat on the step and tried to take in the scene.

  Between the two olive trees, inherited from Isber and remembered by Raeefa, I set up a table. For a top, I used a slab of marble from the counter of Abu Elie’s old kitchen that we had dismantled long ago. I bought three plastic white chairs from a shop down the street. On this evening, I sat there and stared into the distance, not wanting to be anywhere else.

  After the death of Abdullah, life for my grandmother continued as it had been in many ways, simple and otherwise. At the store, most of the customers used credit, and after Abdullah’s death, many of them paid off their debts, a gesture of sympathy for the widow and her five children. Raeefa’s brother Nabeeh came each night to the store, modest even for its day—twenty, maybe twenty-five feet by sixty feet, far smaller than a modern convenience store, but built to last. Like her father building his legacy in Marjayoun, Raeefa let nothing be discarded when it was time for repairs or remodeling.
Half bricks were reused and the walls still stand seventy years later. In time, Nabeeh taught Raeefa’s oldest son to work as a butcher, and he assumed some of Abdullah’s duties, taking a hindquarter or a full side and cutting it into round steaks, T-bones, sirloins, and roasts, which were stored or displayed. On Saturdays a customer brought chickens, usually twenty or thirty. With a knife or by hand, the young man slit or wrung their necks. The second-oldest son worked with the produce. Nothing was wasted: Carrots, radishes, and celery were cut back then rebagged, and lettuce was peeled then resold.

  No prices were posted. Ringing up the goods, one of the two sons would shout to Raeefa, “How much is a can of beans?” or “How much is toilet paper?” She would shout back the price; she knew them all. At night the three of them would sit around the black potbellied stove, responsible for scorching the coats of endless customers. They talked back and forth until 8 P.M., or whenever the last customer left. Then they huddled around a radio, listening to Amos ’n’ Andy before going to bed. For a time, Raeefa passed a Bible around, and each child took turns reading a verse.

  For years they had no car, and Raeefa’s only social life was when people came to visit. In the summer many did, sharing the miqta that always seemed abundant. On those hot nights, the air still, the children dragged a wine-red Persian carpet and their bedsheets outside to sleep on the grass. By this time, the Lebanese community in Oklahoma had taken shape. The services that Khoury Shukrallah performed in his house for eleven years soon attracted so many of the devout and devoted that a church had to be built. It was originally envisioned as Saint George’s, named after the venerable Orthodox church in Marjayoun, built the century before. But the Greeks of Oklahoma City had already claimed the name, so Saint Elijah’s was chosen instead. Dedicated on September 14, 1931, the small frame structure was thirty feet by forty feet. It cost $2,000. The building contained two icons, Saint Elijah and Saint George, the patron saint of the Marjayoun church.