Little Mountain (3 page)

However, Abu George went on, there was perhaps another reason for the bankruptcy. People who knew Nkoula Sioufi —who had become an errand-runner at the Ministry of Finance — said the reason was that he drank and gambled and associated with foreigners. God only knows, Abu George would say. But the decline set in with the beginning of this new-style thieving. And we now have to deal with things we never knew.

Is the mountain slipping?

The big cars advanced, invading, their whine filling the streets. The mountain was being penetrated from all sides. They cut the trees, erected buildings. The concrete mountains machines were everywhere. In every street, there was a machine, Syrian and Kurdish workers swarming around it, throwing sand, gravel and water into its entrails. Rotating on itself, spilling out the cement used to build the tall, indomitable buildings. Buildings shot up as though born here and the thick, warm sandstone tumbled to the ground and was replaced by the hollow, cold cement blocks. And the wheel turned. Hundreds of workers came up here from the tin shacks clustered at the eastern entrance of Beirut —called Qarantina
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—to carry gravel and sand and spread the cement across the squares.

Bulldozers came, flattening the hills to the ground or what was presumed to be the level of the ground. And in front of our house, the palm tree collapsed, locked into the excavators jaws, its roots which bulged above ground, torn out and cast down, in a pool of gravel and sand. Torn like small arteries by a bombshell. The new buildings soared. Mountains of buildings, roads and squares.

Is the mountain slipping?

I walk its side streets, looking for my childhood. Before me on the hill which I call mountain, a gentle slope separating the mountain from Nahr Beirut. The small cars have grown and I have grown. And the tall buildings now hide the sea. I used to think we had stolen the sea. But the smell of reinforced concrete has stolen the smell of the sea.

The mountain isn’t slipping.

The hubbub at its gates, the buildings multiplying and the squares being built. That loud voice is no longer mine. Noise cowering at the gates and frenzy the new sign. This is Little Mountain which isn’t slipping.

Concrete soaring and heads soaring. Heavy music soaring and heads soaring. On my body, I bear from those days an ancient tattoo and I wait, on the brink.

1956: the tripartite attack on Egypt. We were at the poor, small neighborhood school. We were little. We’d listen to
Sawt al-Arab.
^*
We went home and rejoiced when Egypt won.

1958: barricades in the neighborhood. Somber faces. The Muslims want to kill us. My mother didn’t believe it. She always said that’s crazy. They’re very much like us.

The tall buildings have become barricades. Things have changed. The gathering clamor. Things have changed. The cars are growing and we are growing.

Abu George would go on with his story about the furniture factory. He’d never weary of recounting his memories of the neighborhood, considering himself a part of its history. And at every turn, he’d ponder with me the use of living. He’d talk at length of how his brother was a soldier with the French army in Hawran,
^**
of how he rebelled during the Jabal Druze revolt and paid for it by the terrible death he suffered in the dank prison cells. Still, the important thing is that the factory was not torn down after the bankruptcy. The large building stayed there but without machines or workers. We used to go and look at it, enter and find it dark but always clean. Then came the second world war. We didn’t experience the horrors of World War I,
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but we discovered air raids. The French army turned the factory into a military site. A sort of barracks where dozens of French soldiers and others, who I think were Chinese, lived; it was said they came from Indochina: they were short and yellow-skinned and went almost barefoot in rubber shoes that didn’t keep the cold out. They were basically orderlies in the service of the French, cooking the food, brewing the coffee. When off-duty, they’d sing their own songs in a language I couldn’t understand even though I tried to be on good terms with them.

During the air raids, the soldiers would go out into the fields. And those other short ones, their little feet in the rubber shoes, darted about the hills, scattering among the ears of wheat, talking with the speed of their strange language.

Naturally, Lebanon gained its independence after the war and the French soldiers left and those little short soldiers went off to their own country. And I think I saw them, or people like them, when they showed films about the Vietnam war on TV.

They came. Five men, jumping out of a militarylike vehicle. Carrying automatic rifles. They surround the house. The neighbors come out to watch. One of them smiles, she makes the victory sign. They come up to the house. Knock on the door; my mother opens, surprised. Their leader asks about me. He’s out. —Where did he go? — I don’t know.—Come in, have a cup of coffee.

They enter. They search for me in the house. I wasn’t there. They search the books and the papers. I wasn’t there. They find a book with a picture of Abdel-Nasser on the back cover. I wasn’t there. They overturn the papers and the furniture. They curse the Palestinians. They rip my bed up. They insult my mother and this corrupt generation. I wasn’t there. Their leader stood, an automatic rifle across his shoulder, in his hand a pistol, threatening.

— He’d better not come back here.

I wasn’t there. My mother was there. Trembling with distress and resentment, pacing up and down the house angrily. She stopped answering their questions and left them. She sat on a chair in the entrance, guarding her house as they, inside, looked for the Palestinians and Abdel-Nasser and international communism. She sat on a chair in the entrance, guarding her house. And they, inside, tore up papers and memories. She sat on a chair. And they made the sign of the cross, in hatred or in joy.

They went out into the street, their hands held high in gestures of victory. And some people watched and made the victory sign.

The big cars stream in, filling the streets. Militarylike vehicles, painted black, horns blaring as they go by. Men with automatic rifles jump out. One of them looks through the binoculars dangling from his neck, darting from one corner of the street to the other. They shout at people and tremble with hatred. Their leader looks through the binoculars dangling from his neck, stops to answer the questions of passers-by. He tells them about the siege of Qarantina. We’ll mop up every last bit of it and throw them out of Lebanon. We’ll defeat them and all the beggars trying to plunder our country.

He gets into his military-like Chevrolet and speeds off. The men scuttle in all directions at once. They march down the streets in step. Han-doy, han-doy (a military expression meaning one-two
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which the militiamen in our neighborhood used. I don’t know why, but it was current practice).

Cars roaming the streets. The cars gnaw at the streets with their teeth. The big cars blast their sirens. I stand in front of them: their tires are huge, high, and thick.

Black metal devouring me: roadblocks, they say. I see my face tumbling to the ground. Black metal devouring me: my voice slips down alone and stretches to where the corpses of my friends lie buried in mass graves. Black metal devouring me: the raised hands do not wave banners, they clutch death. Metal on the street, terror and empty gas-bottles, corpses and smuggled cigarette cartons. The moment of victory has come. The moment of death has come. War has come. And my mother shakes her head and tells me about the poor.

They call it Little Mountain. And we called it Little Mountain. We’d carry pebbles, draw faces and look for a puddle of water to wash off the sand, or fill with sand, then cry. We’d run through the fields — or something like fields — pick up a tortoise and carry it to where green leaves littered the ground. We made up things we’d say or wouldn’t say. They call it Little Mountain, we knew it wasn’t a mountain and we called it Little Mountain.

One hill, several hills, I no longer remember and no one remembers anymore. A hill on Beirut’s eastern flank which we called mountain because the mountains were far away. We sat on its slopes and stole the sea. The sun rose in the East and we’d come out of the wheatfields from the East. We’d pluck off the ears of wheat, one by one, to amuse ourselves. The poor—or what might have been the poor— skipped through the fields on the hills, like children questioning Nature about Her things. What we called a
’eid
was a day like any other, but it was laced with the smell of the
burghul
and
’araq
that we ate in Nature’s world, telling it about our world which subsists in our memory like a dream. Little Mountain was just a tip of rock we’d steal into, wonderous and proud. We’d spin yarns about our miseries awaiting the moments of joy or death, dallying with our feelings to break the monotony of the days.

They call it Little Mountain. It stretched across the vast fields dotted with prickly-pear bushes. The palm tree in front of our house was bent under the weight of its own trunk. We were afraid it would brush the ground, crash down to it, so we suggested tying it with silken rope to the window of our house. But the house itself, with its thick sandstone and wooden ceilings, was caving in and we got frightened the palm tree would bring the house down with it. So we let it lean farther day by day. And every day I’d embrace its fissured trunk and draw pictures of my face on it.