Little Mountain (15 page)

— Look, she said. Look at the time-honored civilization.

But I saw neither time-honored nor modern civilization. Only forms of things bending. There was everything here: water, sky, her lovely lace, the white stone. Everything dancing in white. There, a hospital sign. No, an ancient Egyptian obelisk. For, during Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign, historians, writers, and philosophers accompanied the soldiers. The soldiers looted and the men of learning studied Egyptian antiquity. Then the men of learning discovered they too could loot. So they started stealing the priceless objects, the Pharaonic mummies. They stole despite the Pharaoh’s curse; they weren’t afraid. And now there’s this pure white obelisk standing in the middle of one of the most beautiful squares in the world. We went up to it: there were all sorts of pictures and signatures on it. Egyptian birds flitting from place to place. Innumerable scenes: looking at them, you can see men and women in ancient Egyptian costumes, words flying from their mouths and nestling in the stone; between one man another, a woman carrying a picture of the Pharaoh-god or her newborn child who would emerge as the builder of the tombs.

— Look, the most beautiful obelisk in the world standing witness to the continuity of civilizations. Civilizations piling on one another like silt at the mouth of a river. The most magnificent ancient civilization standing at the center of the most magnificent modern civilization.

I couldn’t quite grasp the meaning of those words. What I do know is that they stuck the boot into our heads in the name of something very similar. Don’t you read the papers? she exclaimed. They brought the mummy of Rameses II all the way from Egypt so it could be treated in Paris. Fungus had started to grow on his forehead and bacteria to eat away his right hand. That’s why they admitted him here, at the hospital laboratory. He’ll be treated and then he’ll go back to his country, duly honored and revered. Yet another sign of the continuity between civilizations.

I didn’t understand. I stepped forward, looked at the obelisk and saw its tapered, black head. Just as I was about to express amazement at such a unique architectural achievement with its mingled evocations of color, I noticed the black moving. It wasn’t just a color. It was an extraneous body which moved, hanging on the pinnacle of the Egyptian obelisk. Moving right then left, like a weather-vane. I got closer. No use. To see, I’ve got to take a step back. As I did so, I saw a small black body, the body of a man wearing the double crown,
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nodding and smiling at the people gathered round the obelisk to watch this king.

— What’s this? A man at the top of an obelisk!

— I don’t see anything, she said. Just a black speck and you call that a man.

— It’s a real man, I’m sure. It’s a real man sitting at the top of the obelisk, governing the square.

Maybe he is the city’s new governor.

The new city governor looks like Rameses II. He comes over every morning from his shack in the lab, saluting the applauding crowds. Then he ties a rope round his waist, scales up the obelisk, and seats himself on top. So as to go on feeling he’s a king.

The little man who leaves the hospital every morning walks slowly. He’s a sick, frail man, with a slight stoop and short legs, who mumbles incomprehensible words. Some of them come up to him to kiss his hand but he never allows it. He’s a busy man, in charge of governing a vast land. Although he doesn’t understand these new usages in government, he does follow them. He has to scale up a tall obelisk as if he were one of the construction workers. Then he has to sit on something like a stake. There are different kinds, the king thinks to himself: the deadly kind that enters the flesh at the bottom of the spine and comes out at the neck; then, the disfiguring kind which is senseless except that its used as a revenge: here, a naked or almost naked corpse is brought along and impaled; and then this new kind of stake. No, it’s not a stake, the king thinks, it’s the new throne.

The slight pain the king feels gradually recedes before the beauty of the square. He drops down from his throne every evening and walks down a long and winding road. He can deviate from his route somewhat, to please the public, but in the end he has to get to the hospital.

The king enters. His majesty the king, with his short build, habitual stoop, and modern clothes. He bows once more just in case his first bow wasn’t seen by the entire public or maybe as an affirmation of his democratic humility or for any other reason we happen to ignore — though his majesty doesn’t ignore it. He knows everything. And like sovereigns like people, as my father says. While yet corrupting them, kings are sovereign over our cities. For, “kings, when they enter a city, disorder it and make the mighty ones of its inhabitants abased,’’ as Abu Ziad would say when we asked him what he thought of the current situation. Though Abu Ziad knows nothing about politics. He cares only for the little shop we used to go to, rifles slung across our shoulders, to buy what little food he sold, always giving thanks to the Lord. Then, when the rifles vanished and the customers disappeared and new customers came stomping in in their ugly boots, he took to cursing the times and their sovereigns and to repeating this favorite verse of his. And you had to listen were you buying for a thousand pounds’ worth. Or else he wouldn’t sell. The king bows, advances, the applause swells, the square shrinks. It shrinks until it is a small box. The obelisk grows, soars up until it is a stake. I run up to the king, I want to ask him a specific question. I want to ask him about the accuracy of newspaper reports that he is being treated for a fungus growing on his forehead and for bacteria eating away his hand.

—What’s the real story, Your Majesty?

But his majesty doesn’t answer. There’s a cold wind blowing, it’s a huge square and his majesty is in a hurry. He wants to get the ceremonial over with so he can get to work. Though she’s beside me she doesn’t see. Why can’t this woman see my face and the fungus growing on it, and my hand with the bacteria eating it away? Why can she only see civilizations —as though civilizations were sacks of potatoes, all mixed up together, so that you can’t differentiate between them? But she can’t see and the king won’t answer as the wind lashes against his frail body fluttering like a black cloth, an emblem of mourning in a square filling with white and the countless bows of men who have come from every continent.

I held her hand. She was flying across the square, and I loved her. But my body hurt. Things grow or they don’t, but it’s more complicated than that as I always like to say to avoid getting trapped into positions I reject or to die confident that my picture hangs on the wall. He looks like an octopus: a featherless king with his tiny face, his limbs growing and coiling around the Egyptian obelisk in order to grab my head and crush it, but I escape. I run in the middle of the square, its surrounded by a long, thick wall. I can’t do anything. I need a knife, to chop off the black extremities. I’m in the corner, my hand gripping a sharp blade. And the blood around my head is like a crown I don’t want to shed. I’m the real king, I told her. But she doesn’t understand. Why won’t this woman understand? And why this wall? And this other king?

The rain drenching my head and clothes began to dry off. That stubborn man was still holding onto my arm, he wouldn’t let me out of the subway passage. A stubborn man that Bergis Nohra. That’s why his mouth was reeking of alcohol and it was driving me to the brink of despair. Still, in spite of everything, I’m willing to be convinced. I can be convinced that all cities are alike, and all squares too. But I cannot be convinced that women are all alike. The question is more complicated than that and needs to be completely re-examined. While we were destroying Beirut we thought we’d destroyed it. We’d run through the devastated squares and the buildings that had collapsed —or almost collapsed— convinced that we’d destroyed the city. In the end, we did destroy it but when they announced the war was over and published pictures of the terrible devastation that had been visited upon Beirut, we discovered that we hadn’t destroyed it. We had made a few breaches in its ramparts but she wasn’t destroyed. New wars are probably needed to do that. Nevertheless, all cities are alike, of that I’m convinced. Although I didn’t know why they built squares in the middle of cities. To aerate them, my father said, so that the houses don’t devour one another and fungus won’t grow on the children’s faces. But Jamal Pasha
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saw otherwise. I remember that after the 1958 disturbances they arrested a man called al-Takmeel and pinned on him all the crimes that had been committed during the civil unrest. Then they told him to pretend he was mad. So he grew his beard and took to sitting around the prison saying he was God and sent the president of the republic letters preaching his new faith and proclaiming his innocence of the crimes attributed to him. He was pretty convincing: it was clear that the lawyer who’d persuaded him to become mad wrote these nice evangelizing letters. Things didn’t go as planned, however. The ropes had to be persuaded and ropes aren’t easily convinced. So they hanged him. In front of the gallows, Takmeel was no longer mad. He confessed and sought forgiveness. I’m not the only criminal, he said, the real criminal is still in his house or in his street or in another city. Although the hangman appeared convinced that day, there wasn’t any time, so he hanged him. The policemen’s consciences were eased; now they could go back to their customary nice duties.

All squares are alike. There are white squares and green squares and gray squares. I prefer white squares, she said.

— But they look like hospitals and smell of a combination of medicine and plasma.

— No, they are the squares of kings.

— But I hate kings, I prefer gray squares. In gray squares, there are prisons and in prison there is rest. There are times when prisons are necessary perhaps: I can rest a little bit there and forget my worries, because prisons generate their own, persuasive worries.

All squares are alike. Even in green squares where there’s grass and flowers and water, you’ll either find a rope dangling or a king, or a stake which looks like complicated artistic things. On closer inspection, you realize that it’s just a very ordinary stake.

The square was empty. The sounds were the voices of hawkers who’d awakened early and carried their loads of fruits and vegetables to the various neighborhoods so that the day might start and things proceed as they should. Like that, in spite of everything, things could go on being the way they should. Actually, to be precise, there were also the sounds of garbage trucks with their load of workers making the rounds of the refined residential quarters to prevent the spread of disease. And still a few pale lights flickering like early morning lights. Standing in the square, with her holding my hand and a short, fat man standing in front of me, his neck thick as a wild boar’s, slightly stooped, clutching a scroll covered in writing of all sorts of letters. Standing exactly opposite me, looking me in the eye. Next to the man, a long rope dangling down as though descended from the sky. The man came up to me and began to read from the scroll he was clutching. I didn’t understand a thing, looked at her. Her face dilated, whitening. It seemed she understood the terrible words the man was uttering.

— What’s he saying?

— What he’s saying is not important. What’s important is that what’s said in books will come true.

— But what’s said in books?

—They’ve written a lot of things in books. And they’ll come true. As for us, we neither like books nor reading them. What’s written in them is of no concern to us because we know exactly what the fate of books is. Our professor knows it too. I met him in the street as the shells flew about the sky over the city. I didn’t recognize him to begin with. He looked wasted, crushed. His mouth pulled slightly to the right, a little more than necessary. Then I realized he must have been ill and it had twisted his lower jaw.

I went to the university, he said, saw unbelievable things. Why did they do that? It’s a crime against future generations. Plundered the place, they have, taking chairs, tables, carpets, blackboards, chalk, the lot. Never mind, those things can always be replaced. But the library. Do you know what they did to it? If only they’d looted it, one could say that they were getting something out of the books at least. I went to the library and found the books —simply torn. A million pounds’ worth of books torn to shreds, trampled, strewn all over the place, the garden, the window sills. I’m on their side, with their cause, but what is the fault of the books!

I pacified him somewhat and went on my way.

He was suffocatingly self-assured and I didn’t understand his utterances. He came closer. I was standing with my back to a thick, impenetrable wall. He put his mouth right up to my face so that I felt he was about to swallow me. I tried stepping back but couldn’t. Then he began to spray spittle as he read faster and faster, the spray coming quicker and quicker at my face until I screamed for him to stop. But he just went on, driven like a blind, uncomprehending machine. Then, slowly, under this foul-smelling spray, it began to dawn on me: he seemed to be speaking about dangerous things, multiple sentences, executions, hangings.