Every community needs a miracle, and Saint Elijah’s had its own. In November 1935, rumors spread. The Daily Oklahoman reported that neighbors of the church, Mr. and Mrs. A. S. Bell and Mrs. G. W. Croskery, were awakened late one night by a bell’s toll. Sounding for more than a half hour, it kept them awake. They called Khoury Shukrallah. Please, they asked, don’t ring the church’s bell at midnight. He shook his head, wondering if he had misunderstood their English. Saint Elijah’s has no bell, he told them. Two days later, the priest’s neighbors heard the bell tolling again, and Khoury Shukrallah offered to give them a tour of the church to prove none existed. Both priest and congregation saw it as a sign from their patron saint. “We are going to build a bell,” Khoury Shukrallah told a reporter. “We have received the command.” Less than three months later, the church had a steeple and bell. Raeefa would hear it toll on Sundays, when her brother Nabeeh, who served as a father to her children, would drive to Northwest Tenth Street and take her to church.
21. In the Name of the Father
I was in Beit Meri for the baptism of Hikmat’s daughter, Miana Maria Ruth Farha, at the Mar Elias Church, built amid the Roman and Byzantine ruins of the town and perched over Beirut and the Mediterranean Sea. Sheltered by three olive trees, the church was less remarkable than the view, but still stately, adorned with red Persian carpets and thirteen rows of simple, austere wooden benches. The altar was of hand-carved dark wood with vine and flower designs, arrayed with the icons of Christ, his disciples, and patron saints.
Icons lined the walls of the church, built in 1872. Mar Elias carried a sword in a martial pose. Saint George, the Christian legionary from Roman Palestine who was martyred for refusing to worship the old pagan gods, faced the ubiquitous dragon. Four censers hung low, and a fifth dangled from a cross, bound by three chains meant to symbolize the Trinity. From the time of the Apostles, incense was burned, and here it wafted through the nave. It symbolized prayers lifted to God and the grace of the Holy Spirit embracing them as they ascended.
The smell of the incense took me back to childhood, when once I peered at row after row of candles at the entrance of Saint Elijah’s in Oklahoma. Even there, the rhythm of the chants was Eastern, recalling a distant time and lost home, with its suggestions of Byzantium and Constantinople, and its inflections of Greece, Rome, Persia, and the ebb and flow of Arab tribes moving across the Syrian desert. For a moment, there in Beit Meri, I heard what felt like the echoes of chants sung during Ashura, the holiest time in the Shiite Muslim calendar, as tens of thousands of Iraqis marched under green, black, and red banners, beating their chests as they surged into a shrine of gold-leafed domes and minarets. I was in Karbala again, covering the war, wandering through the mournful air of those laments, staring at flags that bore saints’ names, blood falling from the letters in a symbol of their martyrdom.
Hikmat was dressed in a gray suit with a black and gray tie lined with pink. Amina was in a black, loose-fitting dress. Miana wore a white bib, and as the ceremony began, her expression suggested that she actually understood everything that was transpiring. Like my daughter, she seemed older than the calendar suggested. Father Haris, with a black beard, wore a gold sash with a purple border. The other priest, Father Philippos, was older. “I love him,” Hikmat told me. “You know why? He used to come sit with my father.”
The ceremony was elaborate, as most Orthodox rituals are. The women of Hikmat’s clan were gathered around the baby. Miana was one of theirs, and I could feel the bond between the women and the lovely child. As the baby cried, Father Philippos joined them. His multicolored cross hung low on his chest, his purple robe bordered in gold. He started singing, in a voice that was beautiful and melodic, with a softness that suggested the tolerance of great age.
For a minute, miraculously, Miana stopped crying.
Father Haris rolled up his sleeves, beginning the sacrament of Holy Illumination, little changed in a millennium and a half, to transform the old and sinful into the new and pure. The priest breathed three times on Miana, then made the sign of the cross over her.
In the name of the Father . . .
The day was radiant, as it often is in spring. Weeks before the baptism, Hikmat and I had sat on his porch in the morning, sharing tea. Judging the weather too mild, Hikmat put a thimbleful of scotch in both our mugs. We talked about respect for others, and I realized he had thought a great deal about it. “You have to give respect,” he told me. He offered his code, which I suspected was inherited: Be respectful, don’t be aggressive, help people through your support. “Show them care, show them care,” he said. “And one day, they will return your respect.” He mentioned an Arabic proverb that I had heard him pronounce often: “He will dig up your grandfather’s tomb.” If you cross someone, he won’t relent until he finds the ransom of your family’s secrets. With those secrets, in a town too small, he can ruin you.
“In the end, we’re judged by society,” he said. “Society is God.
“The Farhas in Marjayoun, the exceptional house is ours. Intu Farha moumayazeen. My father and his family are beloved,” he said. “My father was exceptional.” He caught himself, as though he might be bragging. Ask George Abla, he said, or Abu Jean. “I see other good fathers, everyone has a father, but no one is better than my father.”
Father Haris placed his right hand on Miana’s head.
In your name, Lord God of truth, and in the name of your only begotten Son and of your Holy Spirit, I lay my hand on this your handmaid, Miana, who has been found worthy to appeal to your holy name and to seek shelter in the shadow of your wings.
Hikmat’s father, George Mitri Farha, was born in Marjayoun in 1906, the second oldest in a family of seven. Of the siblings, only George had children. “We were raised by all of his brothers and sisters,” Hikmat recalled. “In those days, wealth was food, not money. Property and food.” George Farha named his oldest child Rifaat. Hikmat followed—like his father, the secondborn. “You learn love from your family,” Hikmat told me. “My father loved us. No one dared lay a finger on us because they knew my father would kill them.”
Handsome and taller than Hikmat, George Farha presided over the good years in Marjayoun before the civil war. Back then, Beirut was five hours away by car, giving Marjayoun a greater notion of independence. It took care of itself. As Hikmat’s mother recalled, there were shakhsiyyat and ailat back then, personalities and families who lived large. Everyone went to weddings, and no one hesitated to attend funerals. Across the street from George Farha’s house, Michel Shambour, almost deaf, listened to his radio. His ear hovered near the speaker, turned as loud as it could go. The town was filled with noise.
“We lived good in Marjayoun,” Hikmat said.
During the civil war, the bad years that stood as an epitaph to Marjayoun’s long demise, George Farha helped protect residents from kidnapping by militias. Without bias, he extended aid to Sunni, Shia, Orthodox, and Maronite alike. “My father used to support the weak and the right against the wrong,” Hikmat said. “People used to respect his word. He was a trustworthy man.”
When the civil war started, Hikmat wanted to fight. Impetuous, he went looking for weapons, but his father stopped him. “When two countries fight, hide your head,” he told him. “Ya ibnee, this is not our war.”
In 1976, the family fled the war for Beit Meri. Every night before his father went to sleep, he prayed with his eyes closed, then made a cross in the air for each of the children who had left the house. “Hala in Dubai, Hikmat in Barbados, Rifaat in Switzerland,” he recited. “I believe I’m still living because of his prayers,” Hikmat told me.
George Farha died in 1993 of pneumonia.
“Men were different back then, no?” Hikmat said.
Father Haris began the first of four prayers. Miana began crying, and Hikmat walked away, as if he could not bear to see his daughter in discomfort. The priest spoke again.
The Lord condemns you, Satan.
Hikmat had another role mo
del: his maternal grandfather, from the Obeid family in Wadi Nasara, a predominantly Christian region of rolling hills in western Syria, home to the Crusader-era fortress Krak des Chevaliers. By Hikmat’s account, Hana Obeid was tough, a tall, big man with a grandiose handlebar mustache who never smiled. He had asthma and, Hikmat recalled, “he breathed like a lion.” He had a gang, too, a bunch of menacing ruffians. As the story goes, when a Greek Orthodox bishop in the region insulted the Obeid family, Hana decided to send him a message: “Behave yourself, respect yourself.”
His plea went unheeded, and the insults continued.
“My grandfather called his men. They went to Deir Mar Giryus, an ancient monastery with two churches, one eight hundred years old. You have two roads from the deir. He told his men, go and block the roads and teach the bishop a lesson. Hit him. Break him down.”
The men went, a dozen or so on each road. Eventually the bishop left the monastery, but was stopped by piles of stones blocking the road. Hana’s men grabbed the bishop’s driver and put a pistol to his head. “Don’t move, you son of a bitch,” one of them said. Then they shouted at the bishop, “Come down, you devil’s beard. Come down.”
The bishop did, bowing on his knees. “I swear by Hana Obeid, don’t hurt me,” he pleaded with Hana’s men. Hikmat continued: “One of those men. What was his job? Barber.” Hikmat slapped my knee with an open hand. “He takes the scissors out of his pocket and he cuts the bishop’s beard to make him look like a devil. This was in the days of the French. Nobody dared to do it. He cut the priest’s beard!”
Father Haris again blew on Miana three times.
Expel from her every evil and unclean spirit hiding and lurking in her heart, he said each time, Miana’s eyes transfixed on the priest’s vigorous black beard.
The spirit of falsehood, the spirit of guile, the spirit of idolatry and greed, the spirit of deceit and all impurity prompted by the Evil One.
Endow her with reason, as a sheep of your holy flock, an honorable member of your church, a dedicated vessel, a child of light and heir to your kingdom.
A picture of Hikmat’s father hung in his house in Marjayoun, to the left of the fireplace. A rosary hung from the portrait’s right corner. Hikmat and his father shared the Farha nose.
“Marjayoun is my father’s house,” Hikmat once told me. “Marjayoun is my father.”
Hikmat fostered his father’s legacy as the zaim of the town. Hikmat would be his father, inheriting the respect of the idyllic Marjayoun of his youth. He rebuilt the house, he won a seat on the town council, he spoke in his father’s name.
“Marjayoun,” he said again, “is my father.”
Satan was renounced, and Christ was joined. Father Haris called on all who entered with “faith, reverence, and godly fear” to join him in praying to the Lord.
That she, and we, may be spared from all affliction, wrath, danger, and want.
“I accept what God gave me,” Hikmat told me. “Do you understand what I’m saying, khayee? Do you agree with me?”
He talked about what God gave us, what we can rely on. To Hikmat, it was family, pride, reputation, and dignity. Family, he said, came first, the source of the others.
“A tree without leaves is naked,” he said.
I thought of this as I watched him in the church, crossing himself on the chest.
Indefatigable, Father Haris pressed on as the baptismal water was blessed.
And give to it the grace of redemption, the blessing of Jordan. Make it a fountain of immortality, a gift of sanctification, for the remission of sins, protection against infirmities, destructive to evil forces, inaccessible to opposing power, filled with angelic might.
Father Haris made the sign of the cross over the olive oil, then poured it in the shape of a cross into the baptismal water three times before taking Miana in his hands.
Hikmat and I often talked about what might save Marjayoun. I was never all that hopeful. Like Cecil, Hikmat was. We talked about a windmill farm, exploiting the gusts that barreled through the Litani Valley. He once had an idea of fashioning blocks of wood from the remains of pressed olives, the jift that was plentiful in the region. For years he had wished for a college, even a university, in the town.
“Our values matter, and we can’t lose them,” Hikmat told me over drinks one day. “Marjayoun has lost almost everything, but it still has those values.” Like others in the town, he credited the Bedouin culture that the Hawarna brought from the faraway steppe in Syria. “As Christians, we are basically Bedouins. We know the Muslims. Not only that, we behave like them.” The traditions distinguished Marjayoun and he praised what they represented.
“You cannot ask for a favor or a service unless you spend three nights at someone’s house. You have to eat with them, sleep with them, then you can ask.
“These cultural things, time will not erase them easily. Did I tell you our house in Marjayoun is older than America? Four hundred years. It might sound silly, but I’m proud of it. Get help and give help. Human values, not money values, technological values, machine values. These things are worth something. This culture matters to us.” I poured him another drink as the hour grew late. “Hopefully, they won’t go,” he said.
Father Haris submerged a crying Miana three times in the water. She stopped crying, and the women of Bayt Farha cast a look of horror; several thought she had stopped breathing. The priest reassured them. “No one has ever died from a baptism,” he said. Miana started crying again, but less so, still shaken.
He anointed her with oil and she was soon dressed in her baptismal gown.
The Lord is my light and my salvation, went the chant as the ceremony approached its end. Whom shall I fear? The Lord is the protector of my life. Of whom shall I be afraid?
One day in the late afternoon we were sitting on Hikmat’s porch, snacking on stuffed grape leaves and pastries filled with thyme and cheese. Fahima, who lived upstairs from Hikmat, brought salt-cured black olives that she had prepared.
As she set them out in a bowl behind him, Hikmat turned toward her.
“Was my father good?” he asked.
Tears welled up in her eyes.
“You’ll never be your father,” Fahima told him. There was no cruelty, no venom in her words. “You’re a good man, but you’ll never be the man your father was.”
“Life changes,” Hikmat said, not disagreeing. “I’m fifty-five years old. Forty years ago, I would say a word and I’d close the market. If somebody did this to me,” he said, gesturing as though he was being slapped, “I’d kill him or I’d die. Not only me. My brothers, too. What are these men here?”
Soon after the baptism, I noticed an envelope pasted to my door addressed to Najib and Nabeeh Samara, my grandmother’s two brothers. It was a water bill, listing the charges from 2002 to 2008, a total of $1,030. I joked with Shibil that I should have written across the top, Ahlan wa Sahlan, Welcome to Marjayoun.
Shibil was blunter. “It’s a fuck-you for coming to fix your house.”
In matters like this, I always needed help, and I went to ask Hikmat if he would join me at the water company, near my old apartment. Surprisingly, he hesitated for a moment, then agreed. He had never been there, and a little meekly we walked around the old villa that housed it until we found the entrance. A knot of employees sat outside, drinking bitter coffee under the sun, near a sign that read, Don’t enter unless you have business here.
Sounding gracious and warm, Hikmat sought a person to talk to. Most stared at their coffee cups, and some looked away. One of them tossed his hand, pointing him inside. There, a man, made lazy by boredom, was sitting behind a rickety desk.
Hikmat said the right things. Why should he pay when his house was wrecked and abandoned? Why should he bear responsibility for his ancestors? Why should he pay a bill that was not in his name? Younger than Hikmat, the bureaucrat sat behind the desk, shaking his head in the passive-aggressiveness so familiar in any government office. To provide help is to lose pow
er.
Every transaction in these parts requires a bit of subtlety. After finding out the man was from Taibe, which meant he was Shiite, Hikmat suspected that the bureaucrat’s politics mirrored his sect. He was almost certainly a supporter of Hezbollah, he guessed, probably putting him in opposition to the government. Nodding, Hikmat started criticizing the state, all the thieving ministers and, most of all, that wretched prime minister, Fouad Siniora. All the while, he hoped he had read his interlocutor right. Torpid, nearly lifeless, the unsmiling man simply nodded.
Weary of the conversation, the employee finally wrote a letter that we needed to have signed by the mayor. He weighed each word he wrote; he squinted after finishing each sentence; he spent fifteen minutes on a half-dozen lines of text, rendered in tiny, precise handwriting. Hikmat could leave without having been humiliated, or could claim as much. But I knew as well as he did that the paper was just that, paper. I would have to pay.
We sat at his house afterward, drinking bitter Turkish coffee.
“A small piece of shit in the government, and I can’t control him?” Hikmat asked angrily. “You think if it was in the days of my father we’d have to pay a thousand dollars?”
“What would your father have done, Hikmat?”
“My father would have gone about it a different way. He wouldn’t have paid. He would have contacted a minister. He wouldn’t talk,” Hikmat shook his hand, “haik.” It meant like so. It meant the way Hikmat had talked.
House of Stone Page 29
