Escalation prompted reprisal, and provocation inspired vendetta. Government troops in armored personnel carriers raced through neighborhoods trying to contain the fighting and disperse crowds. They could only shoot in the air. The city was soon paralyzed; trucks and bulldozers dumped heaps of sand on the road to the airport, where nearby rioters streaked through on scooters.
“Those who try to arrest us, we will arrest them. Those who shoot at us, we will shoot at them. The hand raised against us, we will cut it off,” vowed Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah. The government’s decisions, he said, were a declaration of war. “Our response . . . is that whoever declares or starts a war, be it a brother or father, then it is our right to defend ourselves and our existence.”
Hezbollah’s men and allied fighters soon deployed across mainly Muslim west Beirut, routing in just hours militiamen loyal to government figures. Masked men armed with assault rifles roamed shuttered streets amid smashed cars and smoldering buildings. In ammo vests and black baseball hats, they stopped traffic at checkpoints, demanding identity cards. The television and radio stations of government supporters were forced off the air. More barricades were erected on highways and at intersections, closing the airport and the port, and dividing neighbor from neighbor. Even the opposition’s supporters cringed at the sight of militiamen sipping coffee at Starbucks, their rocket-propelled grenades resting in chairs in a distinctly Lebanese vision of globalization.
All the time, I was watching with the clock ticking. A few weeks before, I had promised Laila that I would take her to my mother’s wedding in Washington. She was the flower girl, and she had already picked out a white basket with pink petals, black patent-leather shoes, and a pink skirt with matching ribbon and flowers stitched in the middle. I had disappointed Laila before. How many times had she been betrayed by my career?
Nearly five years before, on December 14, 2003, I had arrived home in Washington from Baghdad, picking Laila up from the house of her mother. The next morning, my daughter and I had sat together on the couch, waiting for the start of a Green Bay Packers game. Then my phone rang. American soldiers had captured a bearded and haggard Saddam Hussein, who had been hiding in a six-foot-deep pit at a farmhouse near Tikrit, not far from his hometown. My editor never asked me to return to Baghdad to cover the story. He didn’t have to. “I’ll leave it up to you,” he said simply, and I knew what I was supposed to do. I returned Laila to her mother’s house and left for Baghdad. I had the awful feeling that I was destined to disappoint her again and again.
This time I was not going to let my daughter down. My flight to Paris was at 4:15 A.M., and after waiting for a few hours at my apartment in Beirut, a colleague came to drive me to Hariri Airport soon after midnight. I had stayed long enough to write a story, and I worried about whether I had given myself enough time to catch the flight. The wedding was on the weekend, and I had a day or so to get to Washington for the ceremony. Beirut was somber and somnolent. Usually rollicking at midnight, my old neighborhood was deserted, all lights dimmed. A few cars passed on the streets, but for the most part it felt like the hour before dawn. The road to the airport was strewn with the roadblocks from the day before. Refuse from overturned trash bins smeared the asphalt. Smoke rose from wood and trash that was still smoldering. From the car I saw a knot of young militiamen on the left side of the street. They chatted idly until they saw our car. Something to do!
One of the men swaggered over to the car with an automatic rifle. Another approached the window. Where are you going? they asked my Lebanese colleague.
“I’m trying to get to the airport,” she said.
“He is traveling?” the man at the window asked. “He can’t travel. You can’t get there.”
“We’re going to try anyway,” she said.
He grew angry. “Why? The airport’s closed and the airport road’s blocked,” he said. “See, you are lying to me.”
“No, I am not lying,” she said, not losing her composure.
“If you tell me you are going home, I will believe you and show you the way. But you are telling me you are going to the airport, which is closed, and the road is blocked.”
“We’re just going to try,” she said.
Growing bored, the militiaman let the car pass. The same scene was repeated at two more checkpoints. At a final roadblock, three pieces of iron scaffolding strewn about, I got out of the car and moved them.
The airport was a grim scene—empty but brightly lit. There was one other passenger in the terminal, and I could only guess how he had arrived. I looked up at the television screen. I was determined to get back to Washington. But no: Canceled was written next to every flight. I stared at the screen for a few minutes, hoping for change, then lay down on a steel bench and propped my head on my computer bag. Every half hour or so, speakers carried a recording played, in succession, in Arabic, English, and French: “Welcome to Beirut’s Rafik Hariri International Airport. We are pleased and honored to have you in our city.”
At 7:30 A.M., I woke up to thick black smoke billowing over the airport. Within an hour, protesters had ignited two more piles of tires at its entrances, and the acrid smoke left a fine black gauze on every surface. Everywhere there was a panicked sense of siege. By midmorning, my spirits low, I gave up. I decided to cut my losses and return to my apartment.
Text messages kept arriving. Exchange of gunfire taking place in al-Madina al-Reyadeya area in Beirut . . . Beirut port closed . . . Saudi Arabia urges a conference of Arab foreign ministers . . . Heavy gunfire near Beirut Arab University and Cola in Beirut.
I didn’t want to pay attention anymore. Numbly, I walked from the airport entrance down the street as the bright sun baked the ocher-colored landscape. Pulling my duffel bag behind me, my computer bag over my right shoulder, I arrived at a roadblock, interrupting what looked to be a party for a group of young men. Some wore masks; others had tied scarves around their faces. A few darted around on mopeds, omnipresent in wartime.
Flames poured out of a nearby trash canister, pushing smoke skyward where it mixed with more smoke. Idling taxis charged 10,000 lira (nearly $7) to go from the roadblock to the airport, a drive of a few minutes. Boys demanded 1,000 or 2,000 lira to help carry anyone’s bags down the road. As I finally moved through the barricade, someone called to tell me a Middle East Airlines plane would be taking off. Someone else phoned to say I could get a connecting flight to the Persian Gulf and Europe, including one to Paris at 4 P.M.
I turned around and headed back.
My shirt was soaked with sweat, from nerves and exhaustion. My shoulder, the one shot six years before, hurt. As I walked to the airline terminal, toughs loitering in the street kept approaching, most of them harmless. Clambering over a dirt pile, still dragging my duffel bag behind me, I stumbled, then caught my footing. Rivulets of water trickled down the street, the asphalt cracked and worn. Smoke made my eyes water, just as I glimpsed the tranquil Mediterranean in the distance.
One plane managed to leave the airport that afternoon.
I was on it.
By the time I returned to Lebanon, scores had died in the paroxysm of violence, the worst fighting since the end of the civil war. Each side had its martyrs, whose memories would be manipulated by the so-called leaders who had stage-managed the bloodshed. It was probably only the decisiveness of Hezbollah’s victory that stopped more from dying. Somewhat cynically, the country’s lords soon came together to deliberate, as the government rescinded decisions that Hezbollah had found so threatening. Arab mediators then invited the factions to meet in the Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar, an announcement delayed several times as the politicians haggled over words of the communiqué that announced the dialogue, which took place almost completely on Hezbollah’s terms. After five days of negotiations, which repeatedly verged on collapse, a deal was struck to end the crisis and choose a president. To me this finale seemed more respite than resolution. Nothing ever seemed to be resolved here. Lebanon’s dramas, I thou
ght, were simply too big for its small stage.
On a sunny morning, the curious and the committed came to see the end of an eighteen-month sit-in in downtown Beirut that the Hezbollah-led opposition had organized, paralyzing part of the capital.
Workers directed by Hezbollah cadres carrying walkie-talkies—no doubt the same marauding gunmen who had fought only weeks before—began removing worn mattresses, soiled pillows, small butane stoves, leather couches, pots, pans, rusted tent poles, and cheap Syrian-made heaters. Wearing yellow caps, the movement’s men planted roses, bushes, and trees in the once manicured gardens. Call it a cosmetic touch on a scarred city.
As I walked around Beirut that day, I passed an electronic billboard that read 1,193, the number of days since the former prime minister Rafik Hariri was assassinated in 2005. It was his death that had initiated the crisis—at least this latest one—and I felt the same anger that I had heard so many people convey to me. It had been three years, three months, and eight days of crisis, tension, apprehension, anxiety, and unease. People had died. Lives were shattered and ruined, for nothing.
Three years, three months, and eight days.
The day before my return to Marjayoun, I called Cecil’s friend the eighty-three-year-old architect Assem Salam and drove over to see him at his grand villa in the Beirut neighborhood of Zqaq al-Blatt.
Assem was simply tired of crisis. Like me, he felt frustration at a country blessed with talent and resources that seemed forever inclined to civil war, occupation, and force of arms, the reflexive instruments of change since the darkest days of World War I. I mentioned how I felt, that Lebanon was too big to be small, overwhelmed by conflicts that perhaps deserved a domain bigger than the country itself. He shook his head. It was too small to be big, he insisted, and the traumas were of its own making, forever stunting its ambitions of becoming something greater.
“Is Lebanon really viable?” Assem asked.
I shrugged. “There has been a question mark since the inception of Lebanon,” Assem told me, “and that question mark remains.”
We sat for a moment in silence, and he puffed on his cigar. Light reflected faintly from stained-glass windows of red and blue, under graceful Levantine arches built 176 years before, when frontiers stretched much farther. Everywhere were vestiges of a more confident age.
“I wish I had been born in Syria,” Assem said. “Or in Egypt. Can you imagine living in a country that has gone through thirty years of this? What kind of country is this?”
He shook his head, his anger giving way to dejection.
“There’s something wrong here,” he said, “something wrong. You have to ask yourself.”
The next morning, I left my apartment in Beirut and returned to the house in Marjayoun.
Ya maalimeh! Fadi shouted at me.
I smiled. Nearly a year after starting, I, too, was addressed as a maalim.
“The floor’s going to be the mirror you use to shave,” Fadi told me as he rolled his hulking cleaner over the marble of Bahija’s liwan.
I nodded in approval. For months, the marble had been buried in wood, dirt, sand, and stacks of tile, the rusted barrel, with swampy water, its sentry. Who would have recalled all those days of Bahija’s scrubbing on hands and knees. Now, after four decades, the floor shined as it once had. One more scrub and Fadi promised that I could go ahead and put the razor to my beard.
“Enough talk,” Abu Jean barked at him. “You should work as much as you talk.”
“You could use a scrub, too, Abu Jean,” he said.
With only a week before my leave ended, the drive to finish the house hurtled forward as quickly as the culmination of the crisis I had left behind. For perhaps the first day since the project started, everyone was at the house, working away in a scene that was remarkable for all its interlocking parts. Fadi continued in the liwan. Ramzi was finishing the roof, finally. Toama reworked the gypsum of the salon’s old ventilation system, those hand-wrought designs that in summer brought cool air into the house’s largest rooms. Paint was applied to the steel beam holding aloft the balconies, still bearing the inscription of the French company that delivered it nearly a century before: Senelle PN 180. Even the itinerant blacksmith stopped by to take measurements. Parquet went down on the floor, shutters went up on the windows. Charming but fickle, Cesar, in charge of the windows, promised absolutely, without question, that his work would be finished Sunday. “Monday at the very latest,” he added. Malik and I professed our affection for each other. Even if I was still intimidated, I could offer praise. “Your father is the best maalim in Jedeida,” I told his son, Nicola, who joined him at work. Malik beamed, declaring he was here only in fealty to me. “I’m working for Anthony from the heart,” he said.
These days, even crises were resolved. Malik had sent measurements of the black granite for the kitchen counters to a workshop in Khiam. That evening, the head of the workshop came by, somewhat furtively, and took his own measurements. They were predictably wrong. When the granite arrived, I knew this solely by the shouts that echoed loudly from the kitchen.
“Who dared change my measurements?” Malik cried to no one in particular. “Who would dare do that? I’ve been a maalim for twenty-eight years and someone is going to question me?” He said it over and over: “I’ve been a maalim for twenty-eight years.”
He turned to me, still shouting, as if expecting me to both confess and console. “I can’t install this. It’s impossible. I can’t do it,” he declared before throwing up his hands.
It meant that we would have to recut the half dozen or so slabs. The granite in hand, Malik piled in the car with me and Abu Jean in an ordeal that I was sure would take days, which of course I didn’t have. I would beg, appealing to their sympathy. They would demur, citing their backlog. Our order would fall to the end of the queue, and the kitchen I had hoped to finish this evening might get done next week but probably would take much longer. In a sense of the preordained, the stonecutter was sleeping when we arrived at the workshop in Khiam.
“Get your ass out of bed!” Malik shouted at him.
He did, his eyes still half shut, and Malik gave no opportunity for hesitation. In a stupor, he stumbled to the saw, and Malik barked out orders, measurements, and recriminations. “Twenty-eight years!” Malik yelled.
The saw drowned out any other noise, as water, keeping the granite cool, flew into the air. “That’s right, that’s right,” maalim Malik said, pleased as the stone was cut to his specifications.
One by one, Abu Jean and I carried the newly cut slabs to the car. Fifteen minutes later, we were driving back to Marjayoun. An hour more and the kitchen would finally be finished.
Over these days, I stepped back to appreciate what we had accomplished in a year. The detritus of the house’s construction no longer bothered me. I looked past the cardboard on the floor, the buckets filled with tools next to the windows, the empty packet of tile emblazoned with Ceramic Cleopatra, the empty liter bottle of Pepsi, the five plastic cups, a Fig Newtons wrapper, and a scrap of newspaper from 2003 pinned under the cinderblock. I ignored the three ladders, the garden hose that snaked across the marble floor, the three buckets of paint, the six cardboard boxes, the tube of caulk, the hammer, the masking tape, and the piece of dismantled scaffolding. The entrance was yet open, letting ants and mosquitoes amble through the house as they had for years; the same breeze still ventured through the rooms unhindered. Yet I saw what had become a home, and its audacious beauty had emerged. We were almost done.
A few days later, it was, or as close to being completed as it could be before I left.
I walked up the stairs, their chips and cracks recounting their age, the stones speaking of time and endurance. Everywhere the utilitarian had become elegant. I entered the nearly century-old door, its façade like a billowing sail, and walked inside the liwan, bathed in light pouring through three arches. Beneath my feet was the marble Bahija had cleaned, bordered in black. Four small squares in the center were
the same color, a suggestion of delicacy. The tile that Isber Samara had purchased after World War I mixed with the tile over which I had tepidly bargained for with Abu Ali. In form, the ceiling was the same as it was when Bahija lived here alone.
On the balconies, which looked out at the world, the iron railing remained part of the house. Built in the traditional Eastern way, the darabzin had not a nail in it. And no welding. Each piece was fastened with another piece of iron, small and wound like a clasp. In a way, they were built for age and perseverance. A welded piece would snap someday, pulling the balustrade itself apart. With the clasp, the grill could age more gracefully, pulling and bending as it gathered years, without breaking. I saved old cemento tiles and returned them to the house’s entrance. Their array of shapes and colors made them three-dimensional.
As I walked through it all, I had a sense of belonging, and I felt an affinity. A year ago, when I came with my cousins, we whispered, fearful of raising our voices in a house estranged from us. Now I was alone, and it was quiet. The silence felt to me like acceptance.
One afternoon, as I prepared for my departure, the priest came by. I had never met him before, and after he left, I forgot his name. Burly, with a black beard, and dressed in black, he was known in town for making mosaics. He had a few suggestions, he said.
Could I make the stairs of wood instead of iron? Could I change the cords from which the lamps were hung? Why didn’t I use wood for the shutters?
“The work is nice, but harram, what a shame, it could have been better,” he said.
He shrugged his shoulders, humorless, as he sauntered off, offering no blessing.
I walked outside afterward and my neighbor approached, the house heaving toward its completion. Why, he asked, didn’t I make the shutters green, the same as those on the house next door, where his brother-in-law lived? I liked brown better, I told him.
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