Little Mountain (14 page)

She was the point. To hold her was to hold nothing. She would run off, leaving me baffled. I would run after her. That’s how she imprisoned me inside a dream that was hard to abandon. That was in the autumn, when the sky reddened with the leaves and the sweeping branches of the trees. Shed be beside me, looking for me when I was lost and losing me when I found her. Everything amazed her. The trees donning their autumn reds struck her with wonder and when she looked at the sky it was if shed not seen a sky before. Everything that used to be familiar was new. At first, I was enthralled by this new kind of life, then it began to irk me. We can’t live just like that with no reference point whatsoever. I can’t live like this, scattered to the winds. Except that she insisted; she lived her life the way she lived life. I began to discover life through her and plunged into the bewitchment. Once, we were running or walking down a long street lined with red trees. She was beside me, in front of me, behind me. I held her by the hair as we walked peacefully. I tried to talk to her, it wasn’t possible. Talking to this woman was hard. You always had to go over everything from the beginning as if you were getting to know her this very minute. As a result, we spoke only rarely. I stopped her in the middle of the street where the red leaves grew out of her hands.

—This is the revolution, I said. Just like this, living in the constant discovery of everything, in the nothingness of everything. That is revolution.

— Me, I don’t like politics.

— And me, I’m not talking about politics. I’m talking about revolution.

— But revolution is politics. Isn’t revolution politics?

— However it is always beginning in spite of politics or inside of politics. It is the thing that is constantly beginning. Like love, like death, like you. She didn’t answer. Her body was transluscent. No, not a mirror. The other kind of transluscence, where you don’t see yourself but see beyond things as though in a dream.

I grabbed her and threw her to the water. But she wasn’t a fish, she was a woman, so she began to drown. The water flowed across her face, between her breasts. But she wasn’t a fish. I held her and scaled her to the very end but the end wasn’t possible. That is the point.

Everything seems like that, ambiguous and incomprehensible. In the end, however, things intersect and come together to form triangles. You can’t discover things, stripped bare, just like that. They all fit into triangles and triangles are the beginnings of things —or something like beginnings. Triangles fit into circles. Every triangle, whatever its shape, whatever the size of its angles, fits inside a circle. And circles necessarily burst apart. That is how I discovered our story. I couldn’t start with events. Events are ambiguous, they’re distorted and not susceptible to beginnings. We started off as a triangle. That was at the university. We still nurtured a few dreams about the university and were engaged in the struggle for establishing a national institution. We hadn’t yet found out that a university is just an old shoe and that the dreams we coveted would turn us into shoes, if the university wasn’t destroyed. And it was, of course, along with everything else in this city, but in another context. But then many things start with this triangle.

Face one: Dr. Hanna. A man about 45 years old, tall, white hair starting to speckle his head. He’d come into class in a hurry, leave in a hurry, always as if he had an appointment to keep with something. What that thing might have been wasn’t clear. He was supposed to lecture on psychology. But only rarely did he talk about this psychology of his or anything else related to the topic. He always spoke to us about his childhood, about the years of poverty when he worked in a little clothing store in Souq Sursock, about how he was a self-made man, had studied, obtained his doctorate, and joined academic ranks. I don’t know why, but I never believed this business about working in Souq Sursock. I judge that he did something else. He was a waiter maybe, in some cafe. He looked like a waiter, his elegance was reminiscent of those who work in the Hamra Street cafes. Anyhow, that’s not important. The important thing was the book. He’d come into class carrying a rectangular book which he’d wave about in the air and then carefully put away in his bag. That’s where I belong, I belong with the downtrodden, that’s why I carry around their thoughts, their cause. The book, so far as I can remember, was about the relationship between Marxism and Christianity or humanist Marxism or some such gibberish that was fashionable in those days. We admired this professor and his humanist Marxism and his rectangular book that was written in French which we didn’t understand all that well. Even more, we admired the compassion he had for his social class and his strange insistence on twisting his right hand around as he told us about the dialectic. I’m open-minded, I’m not a dogmatic Marxist. I’m a humanist, I understand and I like to be understood, and I’m fully prepared to change my mind if someone convinces me that I’m wrong. That’s what the dialectic is about, it is the key to everything. He spent three years telling us about the dialectic and our delight in the wonderful dialectic grew with every passing year. Until, one day, the police came into the university looking for the radicals who don’t believe in dialogue and insist on stoning them. The dialectic ran out the back door that day and dedicated himself to psychology.

Face two: his name was Yaaqub, we all loved him. He was a student and he resembled the
fahlawi
character whom Sadeq al-Athm
^*
drove us nuts with after the June defeat—to the extent that we came to believe that there lies some such magical figure behind every defeat. But he wasn’t
fahlawi,
simply a little lazy and a
bon viveur;
he loved drinking and good food, chatting and laughing. More important, he loved his friends and we all loved him. He’d come into the cafeteria carrying Aristotle’s
Metaphysics,
for Yaaqub had chosen philosophy. The book began to fall apart sitting on the cafeteria table, the cover got completely frayed. But Yaaqub never found the time to read owing to his many activities. He never missed a demonstration, he’d be right up there in front, chanting and dancing before the water hoses, getting beaten by the rifle butts. He’d go home in the evening, exhausted, barely finding the time to drink a glass of
’araq,
sing a few lines of
zajal
^**
and then sleep. We loved him dearly. And when we went into the
fedayeen,
he came with us and became
a feda’i.
Then, he left for Europe to study. He didn’t stay with us long enough to discover the games of death. Had he stayed, he would’ve probably joined our friends who died and we would have forgotten the Aristotle business and remembered him gun in hand, keeling over his dripping blood and dying. But isn’t it better not to die? If were not dead after all this then we might wage new wars which might be better than this one. And maybe Yaaqub would come back then and leave Aristotle behind and bear the
feda’i
gun with us.

Face three: it was just after April 23, 1969.
^*
The pools of blood then coating the streets of Beirut signaled the onset of the torrent of blood that was later to convulse the city. Salem came to the university and found that half the students had gone into class. He stood in the courtyard of the school and made a speech. It wasn’t a speech so much as a stream of curses against the police, the state, and America. Then the school went on strike. A few fist-fights broke out and everyone went on his way. As Salem was stepping out of the gate on his way home, he discovered there was a car waiting for him which hauled him off to the police station. I sat, with scores of other students, in a dark room as insults were hurled at us.

— I’m thirsty,
effendi.
^**

But the
effendi
wouldn’t answer.

— God keep you,
effendi,
please, a drink.

The
effendi
got a pitcher of water, stood it in front of the metal bars, told us to stand up and drink from behind the bars.

— Ya
effendi,
what’s going on? Surely … this isn’t Israel. What have we done?

The
effendi
took the pitcher away and no one drank. Then he came back with three bullyboys, unlocked the door and took us out one by one, lashed us brutally, kicking us around with his boots. We lay thrown to the ground then he climbed onto my body, trampled and trampled, to his hearts content, and until the blood started oozing out of my ears. Then they grouped us in rows of three, the officer stood before us and made a speech about Lebanon and how we should love our country, then ordered us to chant “long live Lebanon.” We chanted, left the police station, and wiped away the traces of our injuries. What we didn’t realize then was that the war had begun. Then, it spread to Ghandour, to the killings.
^*
Then it was ablaze and it stayed that way.

The triangle fits inside the circle. But we didn’t know that the war had started. We thought it would just be a question of reordering the givens of the triangle, of modifying its premises. However, when the triangle blew up, the bloodshed was interminable. It went on until the whole circle collapsed. Every circle is bound to collapse, that is the rule; and when it does, the three faces of the triangle shatter. And we sit under the rain looking for new triangles.

I was all alone. The only horseman. Surrounded by the night with a woman saying she loved me and a circle waiting for me.

— But Bergis, we’re here, not in Beirut or Barcelona or Madrid. Paris is a solid, stable city. Talking about civil war here is quite uncalled for. The National Assembly elections are due in a few months’ time and the left’s victory is not certain. Even if it is victorious, developments a la Chile are not inevitable. Giscard d’Estaing can dissolve the assembly, dollars will come pouring in to shore up the spirit of the Helsinki conference, the Socialists—half of whom are Zionists and the other half favorable to NATO — will be split and France will have averted a civil war. Of course, Paris will be destroyed eventually—like any other city—but not that quickly. Or at any rate, not by civil war. A world war is perhaps the only way to achieve such destruction.

But Bergis wouldn’t answer, he just stood there in the middle of the subway passages, then led me to a big map of the metro routes hanging on the wall and started up his monologue. Look, look, he’d say.

— But why? Are you on the verge of bankruptcy or something?

— Not at all, quite the contrary. Haven’t you seen the new restaurant?

Tomorrow you’ll come and visit the restaurant. —Are you feeling depressed? Do you want a divorce?

— Why are you asking me such silly questions? I’m a measured, civilized man, I’m a businessman.

—Then why are you chasing after a civil war?

— Me? Chasing after? No, no. I’m against civil wars. But I’m frightened. When I see what happened in Leba non, I’m overcome with dread that similar devastation is going to engulf the world. And I’m frightened of devastation. Three times already I’ve started all over again, from scratch. The first time was in Vietnam and that was de stroyed. Then I went to Algeria and opened up a shop for household appliances. I believed de Gaulle when he said we wouldn’t leave Algeria. I really believed him. And expanded the business since we were staying. That whole war there didn’t concern me: I was on good terms with the French as a French national; and on good terms with the NLF people as a Lebanese. Then de Gaulle went and left, he fled. Though in a reasonable way, this time; but he made me lose my business —and my mind. I abandoned the shop and came to Paris to start all over again from scratch. It seems things always lead nowhere in these damned times.

—And if there’s a civil war, on whose side will you be?

— I won’t be. I’m a practical man, a resilient Lebanese. My head belongs in my pocket. I put my mind in my pocket and let it lead the way. Be there civil war or a victory of the left, my head will lead me some place else. I’ll go to Latin America. This time, however, not with nothing but with my fortune. I’ve got everything ready.

Poor Bergis. Standing before the metro board, gesticulating. Like the traffic policeman who insisted on doing his duty in Beirut: gunmen came and took his pistol; still, he stood in the middle of the street, signaling to the few cars that dared to move about; then it got to be he was signaling to the shells: he just stayed there, standing in the middle of the empty avenue signaling to anything until a shell hit him and he died.

— Look how this city intertwines inside this damned metro, it’s crazy. Here, you come out in the Algerian immigrants’ quarter. Here, the Champs-Elysàes. Here, the Place de la Concorde. What would stop the in habitants of those Arab neighborhoods from reaching the Place de la Concorde? Things are both open and interlocking, they can destroy one another at any time. Didn’t I tell you? Civil war is inevitable. Tell me, tell me how the civil war started in Lebanon.

I didn’t tell him. I was standing with her beside me. We came out at the Place de la Concorde and saw the sky. A vast square and above it the sky. The sky wasn’t just an extension of the square, but a dome. Standing on the ground I could feel a dome above my head. Blue or gray or white. The cobblestones and vast open spaces for horse-drawn carriages. A piece of sky, a slice of earth and me in between. Look, she said, look at civilization! But I couldn’t see any civilization, just vast open spaces and eyes. I don’t know where this business of the eyes came from, all I could see were eyes and spaces and residues of sky.