ROCK PAPER SCISSORS: AN EPILOGUE
In the children’s game of outstretched fists and fingers, rock always beats scissors, scissors trump paper, and paper inevitably vanquishes rock—but when it comes to the history of Jerusalem, paper and rock, or in fact, stone, seem locked in a never-ending struggle to determine who’ll be the biggest loser.
Some paper, of course, endures: Luise Mendelsohn held on to nearly every one of the more than three thousand letters she and Erich wrote each other over the years, complete with decades-old pressed flowers; despite all their wanderings, she saved most every sketch he rendered—on notepaper, tracing paper, concert programs—and after he died, she wrote her memoir of their lives together and retained it in multiple drafts. Salman Schocken left Rehavia and Palestine before the Mendelsohns did, but soon after his departure his papers were filed in impeccable, almost parodically Germanic order by various learned Eastern and Central European–born émigrés and are now tended by an equally learned, conscientious Russian émigré; these files remain locked in lemonwood cabinets in the Jerusalem library Erich Mendelsohn built for his patron. While Austen Harrison took pains to burn certain evidence, he stashed away “Some Letters,” and various friends and employers preserved other words in his hand. Yom-Tov Hamon’s archive somehow survived the damp and the dirt of Spyro Houris’s carefully constructed cistern. And the English officials who once ruled Jerusalem made a point of keeping diaries in solidly bound notebooks. They wrote letters and saved copies, or sent them to correspondents who would. Aware of posterity’s gaze, they too wrote memoirs. Although C. R. Ashbee, for instance, lasted only four years in Jerusalem, his impressions of the place live on after almost a century: “The city belongs to us all,” he proclaimed in a cheerful 1920 letter. “Let us focus on the creative present, forget the old Jahweh and Elohim, and the Byzantine Gods who promised this land to so many people. There is no room any more for an exclusive religious nationalism or a chosen race, certainly not in Palestine.”
That was, as he’d later come to acknowledge, wishful thinking. By the time he left in 1922, both political and personal disillusionment had clouded his earlier sunny view, and when the next year he published a scathing account of his time in Jerusalem, A Palestine Notebook, he made clear his belief that “Zionism as understood and as sometimes practiced in Palestine is based upon a fundamental injustice and therefore dangerous both to civilization and to Jewry.” But such dark views about the place didn’t keep him from recording for later generations his shifting thoughts on the subject. If anything, they seemed only to prompt him to fill more pages, and more. Apart from what he called “the reports, plans, new street alignments, the park and garden system, the civic ordinances and by-laws, and the thousands of minutes scattered up and down hundreds of more or less futile files,” his scrapbook-like diaries and letters, watercolors and lantern slides of Jerusalem make up multiple volumes and rest on neat shelves at his Cambridge college, King’s.
When Ashbee fled the Middle East, he took all his journals and jottings with him. But even those Englishmen like Ronald Storrs who stayed on in the region and whose written legacy was subject to local political violence managed to leave behind a prodigious paper trail. After his Jerusalem posting, Storrs was named governor of Cyprus and there, in approximately ten minutes one October night in 1931, rioters burned Government House and all its contents to the ground. That fire claimed much of his correspondence, his journals, his books—along with his by-then substantial collection of art and artifacts, including an especially valuable David Bomberg painting, rendered from Austen Harrison’s garden. But lucky for Storrs, his doting mother had saved all his weekly letters home to England, together with “a few diaries of special missions or journeys during the war,” so that he had enough first-hand documentation to compose the self-serving memoir he had been preparing his whole life to write.
Harrison left, and the Mendelsohns left, as did Ashbee and Storrs. David Ohannessian left in 1948, for Egypt and then for Beirut, where he died a few years later. Richmond left and came back and left again. Not only did he write in exquisite longhand a furious retrospective memoir of his years in Palestine, Mammon in the Holy Land (“a description of how we ‘built up Zion with blood and Jerusalem with iniquity’”), he also kept a scrawled diary for one year of his work as political secretary under High Commissioner Herbert Samuel, 1922, “an important one in the gloomy history of the Holy Land under ‘British’ auspices.” This screed he titled An Administrative Cesspool.
As all these archives made their way to safe holding places in libraries or family attics elsewhere, the papers of others who stayed met far dimmer fates. The villa that Spyro Houris built for Is’af al-Nashashibi on the way to Mount Scopus was meant to serve as a home for both the highly learned bachelor intellectual and his enormous library. His collection is estimated to have held between thirty thousand and fifty thousand books as well as hundreds of medieval manuscripts; given what a prolific writer he was, his drafts and letters and scribblings must also have taken up many shelves and drawers throughout the large house. Stories are told of how he’d stay inside his qasr for months on end, content just to read and to write.
Nashashibi’s vast library, copious writings, and personal papers should, in other words, constitute one of the most important Palestinian archives anywhere—except that, after his sudden death on a trip to Cairo in early 1948, looters broke into the mansion and ravaged his possessions, emptying those cavernous rooms of their contents. (The culprits have never been identified, though latter-day rumor has it this wasn’t part of the political violence of that cataclysmic year but a robbery by people who knew that no one was home.) Some of these treasures may have been sold to libraries or book dealers, though one eyewitness later reported that for months after Nashashibi’s death and this wholesale pillaging of the house that Spyro Houris built, certain neighborhood grocers could be seen using pages of Nashashibi’s most valuable books to wrap cones of sugar and salt.
That said, the house itself still stands, gracious and sturdy as ever, the only known building of Spyro Houris’s located in what is now Palestinian East Jerusalem. Though Ohannessian’s original tiles have been replaced with brighter, less distinctive reproductions, the villa—one of Houris’s finest—has recently been restored to its former grandeur with care and intelligence by a Jerusalem-born and raised, British-trained Palestinian civil engineer working for a local charitable organization. After years of mild neglect, its rich pink masonry, black and white marble floors, and point-arched windows have been returned lovingly to their former state. The building now serves as a Palestinian cultural center and library, and the rooms that once held Nashashibi’s books are being slowly filled with other books, carefully cataloged and kept.
This building is, then, part of Spyro Houris’s archive. If he didn’t leave a trove of letters and journals, he built solidly—he meant his creations to last—and he had the foresight to carve those spare words SPYRO G. HOURIS, ARCHITECTE into the cornerstone of the Nashashibi Villa, the Hamon mansion, and one last building, in the Greek Colony.
Directly across the street from the low blocky house in which the Efklides siblings lived rests one of Houris’s most elegantly understated dwellings. Known as the “red house” for the glowing color of its stone (not really red so much as a warm pink), the building boasts no colorful ceramics that announce it as Houris’s, and it doesn’t have a fancy roof like the Hamon or Fraji houses—but it does command the graceful proportions and thoughtful structural details that mark it as one of his designs. And his cornerstone “signature” makes that definitive. According to David Kroyanker, the building was constructed in 1928 as the home of Shauki Sa’ad, an Arab detective in the Criminal Investigation Department of the Palestine Police. But another story is also told by certain contemporary Jerusalemites: that Houris built the house to be his own home. Although the evidence here is strictly circumstantial, I have come to suspect—given its very close proximity to the Efklides house—that in fact he planned it for himself and the girl next door, his bride-to-be, Heleni.
In the late 1920s, Houris was busy with building. As he finished work on the Gelat Villa, he was, it appears, planning and overseeing construction of those various major Jaffa Road structures, as well as designing an impressively tiled commercial and residential building for the Christian Arab Masu family right in the middle of the German Colony, on the Beit Safafa Road (now Emek Refaim Street, where it still stands today, its colored tiles chipping but present); he had also built an elegant home in the neighborhood of Ba’qa—complete with intricate inset ceramic medallions by Ohannessian and a large glass-enclosed porch—for a man named Shukri Dib, the most important car dealer in town. And he was, we know, planning to marry.
But as these various buildings took solid shape, his private life, it seems, began to crumble. As always here, the specifics are sketchy, though we do know that on a Wednesday in mid-October 1930, a rather ominous notice appeared in small print on the last page of The Palestine Bulletin, declaring: “ARCHITECT CLEARED.” The article was short and bittersweet:
We are pleased to learn that Mr. Spiro Houris, the well known Jerusalem architect, was discharged by the Attorney General of the false accusation preferred against him, some fourteen months ago.
The innocence of Mr. Spiro Houris being fully proved, an official letter staying the proceedings has been sent to his counsel …
Another article from around the same time doesn’t mention Houris but offers a tersely sensational account of the extremely messy situation, which involved the bribery trial of “a well-known rich man of Beit Jala village,” accused of paying another man to murder his two brothers who “seduced his wife.” The accused had, it seems, tried to bribe a judge who himself was later charged with subornation. According to another account, Houris was also accused of attempting to bribe the magistrate on behalf of the “well-known rich man,” though he “denied that he had done such thing.”
Confusing as the case was—and innocent as Spyro Houris appears to have been—the charge and its frequent mention in the press can’t have been good for his mood, or his impending marriage. Once again, the emotional details have long since disappeared from view, but certain dryer facts are a matter of record, as, on the very first day of January 1933, a tiny notice appeared in The Palestine Post announcing the wedding of Miss H. Photios Efklides and one Mr. L. Caumeau.
Heleni Efklides was—it’s said by those who remember her as an old woman—extremely concerned with appearances, especially her own. And though we will never know for sure why she turned her back on Spyro Houris and chose instead to marry Lucien Caumeau, assistant to the French consul general, we can at least suspect that she preferred a life of evening gowns and canapés to one lived with even the hint of criminal suspicion, no matter how gravely mistaken. And for a brief period, M. and Mme. Caumeau’s names surfaced regularly in the society pages of The Palestine Post: now they were giving a dinner at the King David Hotel in honor of the acting French high commissioner in Syria and the Lebanon; now they were dining with His Excellency the high commissioner at Government House, together with the mayor, his wife, and various other dignitaries …
Heleni seems to have been quite fickle. Within a few years she’d divorced the French diplomat and returned to live with her sister and brother in the small house that Spyro Houris built, where the three remained into very old age. None of them married; there were no children. Clio and Heleni shared a bedroom, and Alexander was forced by his rather spoiled sisters to sleep in the fancy white-tiled sauna that then took up one of the house’s three small rooms. “Heleni liked,” I am told, “fine things.” The sauna was one of those fine things.
As Anastas Damianos and I sit on heavy stuffed chairs in the Efklides family’s refurbished living room, he tells me in a low voice about the siblings’ final days. Clio and Alexander died first, and then Heleni. They had no one but each other, and the West Jerusalem Greek community was already too small and poor to own a hearse, so, in each instance, Anastas himself had been forced to perform the grim task of loading their bodies into his car and driving them to the Greek Orthodox cemetery on Mount Zion.
Besides Heleni’s pretty painted sewing chest—filled to this day with her thread and lace and needles—none of the furniture that’s here now belonged to them, since this house, too, was broken into and pillaged after its owners were gone. When the community decided to turn the place into a museum, Anastas and a few others came to clean up the mess, and one day as he was sweeping, he found, he says, Dr. Photios Efklides’s firman from the sultan crumpled on the floor. Now it hangs here alongside several ghostly pictures of the lovely young Heleni Efklides, still dressed up for some long-forgotten party.
Next to her, in his own frame but on the same wall, Spyro Houris is still sitting in that elaborately carved throne of a chair, silently staring out.
* * *
As things seem to end, though, they’re also beginning.
One morning, I open my e-mail: “Here are some links regarding Houris.” The message comes from Silvia K., the big-hearted Argentinean Israeli archivist responsible for bringing the bulk of Austen St. Barbe Harrison’s papers from Athens to Jerusalem. In the course of my work with his letters and sketch pads, his photographs and gardening notebooks at the Rockefeller Museum, she and I have become friends of a strangely single-minded sort. It’s as if “Austen,” as she calls him, were a mutual friend who’d introduced us and whose architectural and personal exploits still provide the fodder for most of our conversation. That said, I’ve told her about my search for Spyro Houris and, unbeknownst to me, she has asked for help on my behalf from an Israeli conservation architect she thought might know something of the elusive Jerusalem builder. He doesn’t, but he has found these links, two of which I’ve already discovered, while one is unfamiliar. Under pictures of an Israeli flag and an architect’s golden square and compass, it provides page 12 of a quirky, bare-bones twenty-four-page French-language history of La Franc Maçonnerie en Israel, the Freemasons in Israel, and lists the dignitaries and officers elected to the newly formed Grand Lodge of Palestine at a special meeting on December 1, 1932. A scramble of Jewish and Arab names follows (Gorodissky, Nazha, Sandberg, Khouri, Bouzaglou, Tamari, Yellin, El Far, etc.), including the grand secrétaire—none other than Spyro G. Houris.
When I first consider it, Houris’s affiliation with the world’s most famous secret society seems an elaborate inside joke. Not only was he a builder in actual stone and mortar, he built in the very city that provides the Masons the hub of their complex mythological system. According to Masonic lore, King Solomon gathered stoneworkers of all races together to build his Temple in Jerusalem, and this act gave rise to the founding of the fraternity which, in the words of one nineteenth-century manual for initiates, “unites men of every country, sect and opinion; and conciliates true friendship among those who might otherwise have remained at a perpetual distance.” In this architectural and geographical force field, Houris’s ties to Ohannessian and the Dome of the Rock potters—whose ceramics were initially meant to adorn the mysterious Islamic shrine that occupies the space where it seems that Temple once stood—also seems too absurdly appropriate to be true. Across the globe, Masonic lodges are modeled on Solomon’s Temple, which members of the guild venerate as a symbol of loss, as well as an ideal. And when the Masons were still hands-on, practicing masons, special honor was paid to the workmen who completed a lodge by covering it with, yes, tiles. Now, more metaphorically, the “tilers” are those appointed to guard the door during meetings, keep the guild’s secrets, and prevent the entry of intruders.
On second thought, however, and once I begin to investigate just what being a Freemason might have meant to Spyro Houris, I realize the serious cultural and historical implications of this discovery. The legends surrounding the Masons may be shadowy and even slightly sinister, with the suggestion of weird initiation rites, secret handshakes, and plots to rebuild the Temple hovering in the conspiracy theory–charged Palestinian air. (In their notoriously ranting charter, Hamas, for example, denounces as their enemies those who were “behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about” as well as those who used their money to form “secret societies, such as Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, the Lions and others … for the purpose of sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist interests.”) But in actuality, the organization has existed in the Middle East as a rather matter-of-fact men’s club since sometime in the early 1700s. With Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, it spread widely throughout the region, and by the late nineteenth century, it had evolved into a well-established philanthropic and communal entity, “one of the most influential social institutions in the Ottoman Empire,” according to the American historian Michelle Campos, who’s written extensively about the Masons in this context. During this period, nearly every city and large town in the empire had a lodge or lodges, and despite the suspicions surrounding their motives and rituals, these lodges proved strong social magnets. As Campos explains, the society promoted modern Enlightenment ideals while also providing its members a powerful economic and political network—access to a formidable subterranean who’s who. French revolutionary principles had indeed been central to the beliefs of Ottoman masons, and (lunatic as their charter sounds, Hamas isn’t entirely wrong) various progressive social movements had used the underground society as an organizing base. The 1882 anticolonialist Egyptian revolution had been propelled by Masons, as were the sultan-toppling Young Turks of 1908. In early twentieth-century Palestine, Masonic lodges drew young professional men of the middle and upper classes from all the different communities, with Muslims and Christians, Sephardi Jews and Ashkenazi Jews, Armenians, Greeks, Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Americans all calling themselves brothers.
And what of Spyro Houris? If he was elected to such a lofty office as grand secrétaire in 1932, he must have been a Mason for much longer—maybe even under Ottoman rule. Although we’ve never met, Campos happens to be the friend of a friend, which gives me an excuse to write her an e-mail and ask if by any chance she’s heard of him. By now I’ve bumped into a footnote in one of her scholarly articles that mentions Yom-Tov Amon (aka Hamon) as having been a member of Jerusalem’s Moriah Lodge in 1913. Could it be that Houris met the Jewish judge through the Masons? Were other “brothers” his clients?
“Happily,” this generous stranger writes me, from a University of Florida e-mail address, “I can tell you that Spyro Houris was indeed a Mason before World War I.” Based on records she has examined at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris—where she wasn’t looking for Houris at all but for a whole range of material about Ottoman Palestine’s many Masons—she knows the answers to various riddles I’ve spent months trying to solve. And now I, too, know that Spyro Houris was born on December 25, 1883, in Alexandria.
Before I have a chance to fully absorb the implications of this discovery or to consider the irony of the fact that these details have been lying for years in something like plain sight within the open files of an ostensibly secret society, Campos offers more information. Houris pledged as an apprentice, she writes, at the Italia lodge in that Egyptian city in April 1910, and graduated to the second level, a companion, in September 1910. On April 29, 1914, he was promoted to the third level—master mason—at the Moriah lodge in Jerusalem, which is to say that he had apparently left Alexandria and arrived in Palestine sometime in the course of those three and a half years. She relates, too, the intriguing if perplexing fact that his Jerusalem lodge records describe his professional affiliation as an “architect of the Imperial Russian Society.” I’ve found no hint of his relationship to this charitable Russian organization, or, for that matter, to anything or anyone Russian at all. During these years—at least as the history books tell it—the tensions between the Greek and Russian Orthodox in Jerusalem were extremely high. Given Houris’s clear connection to the Greek patriarchate, this detail is confusing.
Campos also sends along a list of the other members of his Jerusalem lodge, which was mostly made up of Sephardi Jews and both local and foreign Christians, Arab and otherwise. (The Moriah lodge held its meetings in French and caused something of a scandal when in 1913 it broke away from the other Jerusalem lodge, the Arabic-speaking Temple of Solomon.) Moriah’s Masons included bankers, merchants, teachers, clerks, a doctor, a soldier, a dentist, two railroad employees, a souvenir merchant, an accountant, the Christian Arab head of the railway station, the Jewish director of the liberal Alliance Israélite Universelle school, one Greek member of the holy synod, a French electrician, the director of the Italian post office, and the Latvian-born Jewish painter Abel Pann, listed simply as a “teacher at the Bezalel School.” Besides Hamon, no names associated with Houris’s buildings surface in these records, but the range of people and professions there does indicate whole complex webs—if not of conspiracy, then of connection, which seem to have persisted well into the Mandate period, when Houris was elected to that grand secretarial post in the national lodge, whose emblem was a crown of laurel leaves encircling the usual masonic compass, along with a Star of David, a cross, and a Muslim crescent.
But all of this has, it seems to me, far less to do with Freemasonry than with Jerusalem itself, as it confirms what I’ve already come to see—that Spyro Houris lived and built in a time and place where one’s own identity could be multiple, and where the bonds that stretched across what are now considered nearly impassable ethnic, national, and religious borders were not only conceivable, they were critical to what made the city the city. Whether or not its twenty-first-century residents care to admit it, that multiplicity and those bonds—imperfect and often tense as they may sometimes have been—created modern Jerusalem. The dynamic “eclecticism” that distinguishes Houris’s buildings was an expression of the city’s own dynamic eclecticism, which still lingers, though these days it’s severely endangered. In a way the discovery that Houris was a son of that other quintessentially polyglot and polymorphous Levantine town, Alexandria, is also a confirmation of something I’ve unconsciously been circling around for some time now. (Long before I learned where Spyro Houris’s life began, I chose as this book’s epigraph those lines from “The City” by Constantine Cavafy, the great modern Greek poet of Alexandria.) It also seems a kind of warning. Once the epitome of the most vibrant sort of pluralism and cosmopolitanism, Alexandria is for all intents and purposes now a monolingual, monocultural, monoreligious city, and one that’s far less for that. If Jerusalem’s rulers have their way, this city faces a similar grimly monolithic future. The near-disappearance of Spyro Houris’s traces—to say nothing of the scenes I witnessed the cruel summer of 2014 in Zion Square—makes clear that this process is well under way.
For now, though, I’m still trying to follow out the traces that do exist, and, at Campos’s suggestion, I contact a Greek historian named Angelos Dalachanis whom she’s met only once but who she thinks may know something more about Spyro Houris. He, too, responds quickly and warmly by e-mail, and—wonder of archival wonders—he forwards a digital photograph of a handwritten Greek-language document dated January 19, 1925. Under the seal of the Jerusalem patriarchate, this is a marriage certificate that just happens to exist in his computer’s hard drive and that lists Spyridon Houris, architect, as the best man at the Jerusalem wedding of one Maria Houris, age thirty-five, to Nikephoros Petassis, age forty-five, architect, Jerusalem. Spyridon is Maria’s older brother (he is forty-two at the time of the wedding), Petassis his sometime architectural partner. Spyro and Maria’s father Gavriil (or Gabriel) is deceased, their mother, Amalia, a housewife. The ceremony is registered as taking place at the Grand New Hotel, the elegant, column-fronted structure that the archimandrite Efthimios built in 1882, just inside the Jaffa Gate.
I ask Dalachanis how he understands the name “Spyro Houris,” and he muses on the fluidity and meaning of names in this setting. He suggests that perhaps the architect’s father had been a Christian Arab from Jerusalem who moved to Alexandria and married there, Hellenizing the spelling of an Arabic surname. The father’s own name—Gavriil—sounds to him more appropriate for a Christian Arab than for a Greek, though he can’t say for sure and wonders if Gavriil, too, had been born a Houris. Amalia was the Bavarian first queen of Greece, and in the nineteenth century, this German name was common for Greek women; among Alexandrians, it often indicated a “connection to the motherland.” Greek boys of the time were, he says, usually named for their grandfathers, though he points out that Spyro Houris’s December 25 birthday wasn’t Christmas for the Orthodox but the name day of Saint Spyridon, for whom it seems Amalia and Gavriil chose to name their firstborn.
Now that Houris’s Alexandrian origins have been established, the question of his alleged time in Athens also suddenly cracks wide open. While Kroyanker writes that the architect studied there, no solid evidence of this exists. Kindly offering to make enquiries on this front, Dalachanis asks the chief librarian of the National Technical University of Athens to check the records of the local institutions granting architectural degrees during this period. She obliges, and combing through the rosters of all the graduates from 1890 to 1949, she finds no sign of a Spyro Houris—or, in fact, any Houris at all. I wonder if he might have obtained Greek citizenship in Egypt, without ever setting foot in Greece, which was possible during these years. But where, then, did he study architecture? Did he study it at all? Perhaps he’d learned on the job. Where? In Alexandria? In Jerusalem? Elsewhere? And why, in fact, did he set forth from his hometown? What did he hope to find in Jerusalem? Did he find it? The various documents that Silvia K. and the Israeli conservation architect and Campos and Dalachanis and I have unearthed provide answers to certain questions, though each answer only prompts more questions.
There is, however, one further mystery that I’ve managed to solve with the help of yellowing paper, the Internet, and a generous stranger.
When N. at the State Archive had made various suggestions of where I might follow the trail of Houris after we hadn’t found him in the Books of Souls, he’d mentioned The Palestine Gazette, the official record of Mandate laws and declarations, where he thought architects needed to register their licenses. I find no sign of such a license there, but a single telling entry surfaces just a few seconds after I type his name into the digitized searchable version of the heavy Mandatory tome:
IN THE DISTRICT COURT OF JERUSALEM
In the matter of the succession of SPYRO GABRIEL HOURIS, deceased.
Petitioner: MRS. MARICA PETASSIS (née HOURIS).
Let all persons take notice that MRS. MARICA PETASSIS (née HOURIS) of Jerusalem, the only sister and heir of the said deceased SPYRO HOURIS, has applied to the District Court of Jerusalem for an order declaring the succession to SPYRO HOURIS, deceased, who died at Jerusalem on the 17th February 1936 and that the said application will be heard at the District Court, Jerusalem, on the 19th day of February, 1937.
All persons claiming any interest must appear at the said place and time, otherwise such order will be made as to the Court seems right.
Dated this 23rd day of January, 1937.
D. SHAMI
Chief Clerk, District Court, Jerusalem
With no other heirs, with no wife and no children, Spyro Houris had, in other words, very good reason to carve his name into those Jerusalem cornerstones. He wanted both to announce his pride and his presence as his buildings went up, and for the memory of his pride and his presence to linger on the sides of those buildings long after his colleagues and patrons, his friends and his enemies, his “brothers” and his sister were gone, after his city had evolved into another. How else would we know he was here?
All summer long—before I learn of Houris’s birth in one profoundly mixed Middle Eastern city and his premature death in another—I’ve made my way repeatedly not just past the revenge-demanding protestors in Zion Square but also onto Mount Zion itself, where the Greek Orthodox cemetery abuts the Armenian, the Protestant, the Roman Catholic, and where, nearby, Jewish and Muslim graves spill steeply down the city’s slopes. In a death-filled season, it may seem perverse to go hunting for yet another grave, but as the war has raged, I’ve been looking for Spyro Houris’s—returning again and again to this oddly hushed, somehow peaceful enclosure.
Munir, the wiry, tattooed, chain-smoking Greek- and Arabic-speaking keeper of the cemetery, has been helping me, but as we wander out in different directions across the chaotic plot of crowded, cracked, and jumbled tombs, we find no sign of him or of his grave. So many of these stones, though, are shattered or faded or covered with lichen, we could well be walking right past, or over, him. Who knows? Jerusalem is an almost endless set of buried layers, and there are whole cities here of the forgotten dead. Dr. Photios Efklides’s gravestone once stood inside this compound but now is nowhere to be found; Sultana Sakakini, beloved wife of Khalil, who died in 1939 and was laid to rest within these walls, has also disappeared. Where are Alexander and Clio and Heleni? Where is Spyro Houris? Now fall has come, bringing the first rains, and as I pick my way among the thistles, the trash, and the broken stones, I’m still looking.