Little Mountain (6 page)

—The ship’s been wrecked, Father.

The church had turned into something like an abandoned house. Blankets on the floor, empty bullet cases, the rhythms of our footsteps. In the middle, where the helm and the altar stood, sandbags were being taken to the buildings nearby and echo reigned sovereign over the church.

War destroys everything. But what shall we do with victory?

— We’ll take it to the Jordan River. Imagine victory. Victory means that the poor become the masters and the former masters remain masters but without serfs. The organ will play an eastern mode and our fingerprints will be the flag. Well take Victory to the Jordan River and Johns head will come on a golden platter and they will speak to each other. Then they will go down to the Jordan River together. John will baptize Victory and Victory will carry Johns head before it.

—True, if we’re victorious here in Lebanon, what will happen?

— Israel will come, and after we defeat her, Amer ica will come.

— And after we defeat America, who will come?

—When we defeat America, everyone will go. We will have written the story of the longest and most beautiful war.

— But what?

Talal doesn’t agree. Winning isn’t important. What’s important is something else. What’s important is that we live life as it is, take it as it comes, fight, and die on the mountain top.

The church shook with every shell. The body of Christ was still bent over the ground. And the long censer still awaiting the hand that would hold it, but the hand wouldn’t come. Everything smashed: brass vessels, small silver spoons, silken robes littering the ground. And then, Jihad discovered the treasure. Innumerable candles. Thin, shiny tapers, in special drawers. He took them and threw them up in the air. We ran, gathering them up. This is a fortune. In the evening, we lit up the entire fortune. One hundred tapers, which we stood on the ground, shining into the night. Between the beat of the censer and the beat of the rain. They cast a brilliant glow such as we’d never known. In it, our bodies seemed slight, our movements sha dowless. A hundred tapers flickering in the middle of a ruined church. We’re in a real ship. The ship shimmering in the middle of the sea and inside it strange seamen looking for their new clothes. In the middle of the sea, the drizzle falling on the church’s red tile roof and running off its sides, all around us waves and priests and pirates’ bullets. Father Marcel comes running and smiles when he sees the candles.

— I thought the church was on fire. No problem, do as you please.

—Thank you, Father.

A tribe around the tribal fire. The lights were dancing but we didn’t dance around the fire. We were blowing cigarette smoke into the vast emptiness and looking for the sea.

— What do you think, Father? Why doesn’t the ship sink?

Father Marcel doesn’t answer, sets off for his memories, telling us stories about the saints, then goes back to asking: Why don’t you kill me?

— And why should we kill you, Father? We are to gether, living close to the sea in a wrecked ship. When we reach the sea, the ship will sink and our story will be over.

The sea’s our goal, the commander says, and we are waiting for the sea. We will get there, cast our nets, take off our clothes, and breathe in the smell of the fish. Jihad sits down close to the fire and starts singing. Our voices rise. And from the chorus soars Ahmed’s voice, taut, moaning as he traces the future on the broken wall in front of him.

The sea in our eyes. Between the cordons of fire and the salt of the sea, Jaber fell. He fell like an arrow on the mountain top, so the snow mixed with the sea and the rain with the saltiness from the gunbarrel. The battle for the sea was the most difficult, the roads twisting and turning endlessly. We didn’t surprise them, nor were we surprised, except when we reached the sea. The raining shells mixing with the sky’s own rain, the wind carrying the rifles as much as we did, the battle flowing from balcony to balcony and from trench to trench. The sea was far away, that’s why it surprised me. There was darkness and voices and the movement of feet and the suppleness of bodies and fear for one another. All of them things we’d experienced before. But today we were experiencing surprise. We were running, no longer seeing for the thick darkness: just fire and movement which we shot at, advancing, as across the entire area the others shot and advanced.

The smell of salt and fish sprang to my nostrils. We’re there, I shouted. I gripped my clothes, unbelieving. The hours of pain vanished. But I wasn’t seeing the sea, or hearing anything save the sound of the waves. I breathed in its smell. The smell of the sea spreading through the pores of my body and penetrating the joints that had soaked up the decay of the swamps and hugged sand and dust while looking for the arc stretching from Mount Sanneen
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to the shore. The sea was entering our eyes. Searing them, the smell of salt smothered in fishy things flooded our eyes. We were advancing and the sea was ours.

Talal tore off his clothes and threw himself naked into the waves.

— But we’re still in the middle of the battle!

—This is the battle.

He swam like someone making love to a woman. Diving in and coming up. He scooped up the water, throwing it to the sky. Embracing the cold and the drizzle and the salt. And when he got out he was shivering like a bird.

— You’ll get sick and have to leave the battle.

But Talal didn’t get sick and didn’t leave the battle. From shipwreck to shipwreck, he carried the battle on his shoulders and when he had safely delivered his trust to the sea, he died on the mountain top.

—Jaber’s fallen, said Sameer. He was beside me; he was hit in the head and just keeled over. I carried him and ran to the back. Some comrades took him. And now they’ve come and told me he’s dead.

— Death is a bird, Jaber says. It circles above the water, in search of fish, then drops and the fish eat it.

— Death is a sign, butterflies and horses. Death is us, then Butros falls silent. The sea was bleeding salt into his eyes and he wouldn’t cry. He was laid out, his head covered with his red
keffieh,
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his eyes half-shut, his clothes spattered with blood and mud. Jaber, graceful as a spear, fallen between church spire and mountain top. He lay there, covered, surrounded by voices and the Palestinian flag. He knew he was going to die, that’s why his laugh welled up with every shot. He’d hold his rifle tight, fire and laugh like children holding their toys.

— We’ll drape him in the Palestinian flag.

—This isn’t the Palestinian flag. Palestine isn’t a country for it to have a flag. Palestine is a condition. Every Arab is a Palestinian. Every poor man who carries a gun is a Palestinian. Palestine is the condition of us all.

Palestine used to be a map, but has become the sea. Some day, I’ll make a film about the sea, Talal said. Ill sew the sea into a dress and Jaber will give it to his mother as a present.

He was laid out. Surrounded by voices, in his head a single shot, and his laugh ringing through the courtyard. We brought over an empty coffin, put him inside and set off, with him held aloft the upraised palms, the chanting voices, the unbending rifles. A long wooden coffin, inside it, a boy sleeping, surrendering to the hands carrying him.

Look, Butros pointed. The coffin is like a ship. A long wooden ship floating in the sea. The ship sways on the uplifted hands. In front, on the mast a tall flag. And behind, people and fighters, comrades who have come to bear the ship to sea. Inside, Jaber playing captain for the last time, leading us on his new sea voyage through the empty streets.

The priest stood. We put the ship down in front of the altar, and from the pews there rose a soft moaning like the sound of the sea before the breaking of the storm.

This is a
real
church, whispered Salem.

The priest stood, censer in hand, intoning his Byzantine chant. It was a sunny day, color-tinted lights reflected on his long, black clothes and his shining beard. Jaber, inside his ship, couldn’t find the words. The voice of the sole chanter in the Ras Beirut
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church rose next to the priests robe. Standing before the wide-eyed icons, listening to the prayer, watching the priests gestures as he spoke in raised voice about the meaning of martyrdom.

The church a ship, and Jaber in his ship and we inside the vast ship. Outside, the sound of shooting growing louder and the advancing commotion.

We carried him once more and set off. Our footsteps on the asphalt like the oars of ancient mariners steering their boat to shore. Voices subsiding, the sun shining, the upraised hands carrying the wooden rectangle and the ship swaying.

In front of the gaping hole, we came to a stop. We took the ship and placed it inside the sand and earth.

—The ship has sunk.

— No, it hasn’t sunk.

The ship was going into the earth, coming to rest, amid our shooting, the loud chanting, and the priests voice intoning the last words: from dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return.

I looked at Salem hiding his grief behind the elongated face and the wan smile. He asked me about the war, how will the war end?

—This war won’t end, Sameer answered, for death has begun and war has just begun.

There was the silence, the sea, and the ship; but Father Marcel’s ship wouldn’t sink, it just got wrecked. And Jaber in his ship swaying like a princess, then falling, descending little by little until the earth was level with the ground again and nothing was left but the writing on the walls, the voices and the gunfire.

— What’s the difference between a priest and a cop, Father Andrea?

— Why didn’t you kill me? asks Father Marcel.

— What’s the difference between war and civil war? says Salem.

Death is a bird, says Jaber. And Talal dreams of a sea long as his lover’s hair and, carrying camera and rifle, leaps between the waves.

*
Heavy machine-gun of Eastern European origin, usually mounted on a tripod on the back of a pick-up truck. Like Kalashnikov, it has become a generic name for anything of that description in the military parlance of Lebanon’s war.

**
The Murr Tower is an unfinished concrete high-rise, adjacent to Beirut’s Hotel Sector over which a famous battle was fought in 1976. The tower was then, and has been ever since, a strategic vantage-point, commanding the whole of Beirut, for the succession of militias that have been able to capture it. The Holiday Inn Hotel was the site of fierce fighting in the battle for the whole sector. Wadi Abu Jameel is an area of mainly narrow streets just off the Hotel Sector.

*
A term used by leftists, Palestinians, and nationalists to designate the Phalangists.

*
Another machine-gun of Eastern European origin.

*
That is a Roman Catholic chant, not one in the Latin language.

**
These refer to the so-called tracer bullets which give off colored (usually red and green) sparks in the night sky and are often used in Lebanon for shooting on joyful occasions like a feast or a wedding, sometimes even a ceasefire.

*
The Arabic term for Phalangists.

*
A reference to the large, round studs across a street which formerly were used to designate a pedestrian crossing, what in French is known as a
passage cloutà.

*
That is, God is great, the Muslim incantation uttered at every call to prayer and often used to express surprise, admiration, or encouragement; it is also used in battle charges as a rallying cry.

*
Maslakh, abattoir in Arabic, was an area adjacent and similar to Qarantina (see note, p. 10) and also the site of the government-controlled slaughterhouse. The two areas were fiercely bombed and finally razed to the ground during late 1975 through January 1976 in notorious atrocities that culminated in scenes of hysterical rejoicing by Phalangist militiamen uncorking bottles of champagne amid corpses heaped on the ground.

**
The joint forces
(al-quwwāt al-mushtaraka)
refer to the loose coalition of anti-Phalangist Lebanese organizations and parties (ranging from the Communists to Islamic groupings) allied with and fighting alongside the PLO in the period 1975-1982.

*
It was as a result of the battle of Maysaloun in July 1920 that the French army defeated King Faisal’s Arab forces and was able to occupy Damascus and impose France’s mandate over Syria.

*
A reference to sectarian killings, one’s religion very often being evident from one’s name. For an Arab, Ahmed would obviously be a Muslim and Butros (Peter in English) a Christian.

*
The largest organization within the PLO.

*
The snow-capped peak of Mount Sanneen, one of the highest along the Lebanon range, is visible from most vantage-points in Beirut for many months of the year; it is a potent symbol of Lebanon and used widely in its “mythology.”

*
The traditional red-and-white checkered Arab head-dress, now the hallmark of the Palestinian fighter.

*
In Arabic,
ras
means head or cape. Thus, Ras Beirut is the headland of the city that juts out into the sea and the name by which that whole area is known.

What is it you were doing

In the ancient gardens

Three hundred years ago.

In two instants, your life will end

The Chinese seer told you,

The Chinese seer

The corner.

The fish breathe through your green eyes

And your body washes away the travails of music

And the pain from the silence of the gilded sepulchres.

My heart has been weary ever since I beheld you

Somewhere in Asia,

Where the Chinese seer

Played your death song

And danced,

Before he died.

Mohammad Shbaro

The last option is me, I told her as we walked along the shoreline, our feet in the sand. She, in her brown skin and laughing African boy’s cropped hair, mocks me: you’re a romantic, she says and then falls silent and lets me talk on and on endlessly. I talk, dangling about inside the words, pick up some pebbles, put them in my mouth and carry on talking. Then, when I grab her, she escapes to the sand, puts some on her head and swings it in the air. Then she shouts: stop. And I stop, for I’m not able to. Every night, I go back home, broken, and decide to keep silent from now on. I must walk alongside the lithe young African boy without opening my mouth. Then, she will fall into the trap of language and talk endlessly, the way all women do. And I will nod my head, smile a little, then pronounce my judgment: you’re a romantic. But when I’m with her again, my resolve fails and I remain the only romantic. Her neck rises. I don’t understand: a lean face and short-cropped hair mingling with the wind and a neck that extends endlessly. When I try to take hold of the neck and rise up to it, I fall down on the sand. You must understand, she would say. My mother understands, I would say. She’s waiting for me when I come back, exhausted. She thinks that I don’t talk so she doesn’t ask. She just gives me a little food but of course I don’t eat. My mother is saddened, I grow sad and the long neck that I climb extends endlessly. I stop asking questions and walk beside her, head to the ground. What are those shoes you’re wearing, she says. They’re
fedayeen’s
shoes, I answer her, then we are silent. Her name is Mariam. Of course, I can’t run any farther. I follow her, she runs then bends over. Puts sand on her head, as she always does. Go. Why
fedayeen’s
shoes? Her laughter rings out and I sink into my shoes, slithering about inside as if they were small ships on a long shore.

— I’m
a feda’i.

—And why are you a
feda’i?

— Because I became one.

—And why did you become one?

— Because, I don’t know. Because I love you.

— You’re a romantic.

— I’m a prince.

—You’re a dog.

-I’m a hero.

—You’re a
feda’i.

She laughed. It rang like a bow. The man grasped his bow and let fly. The arrow glanced. It plunged into the sea and began to sink.

— Why are you beyond the sand?

She said she didn’t like answering any of my questions.

— Do you know my father?

— I don’t know him.

— Do you like my father?

— How can I like someone I don’t know.

—You must like him because he’s my father.

— I don’t like him, I don’t like any fathers.

— But my father died. —All fathers die.

— But he burned alive.

— All fathers burn alive.

I lifted the camera to my shoulder and stood up. I want to film you. Holding the camera, I traced the lithe young African boy against the wall, then drew a circle. Stand in the circle. She stands in the circle. I rotate her and she rotates. She stretches her arms forward, then bends over, becomes a circle.

— Why do you wear trousers? She laughs. She rotates inside herself then falls into the middle of the circle.She stretches her arms to their utmost and her face quivers slightly. I leave her on the ground and raise her to the ceiling of the room. Sand fills up the ceiling, then the face collapses. I get some straw and put it on her head. You’re a chicken, I say. Why is there this war? she asks. I’m holding the camera and giving the orders. I’m the director; one actress, the sea, and the sand.

—And how was your father whom I don’t like burned alive?

She gets up, brushes the straw off her head, steps out of the circle. I don’t like the circle or the cinema.

— But how did your father burn?

— I want to go home. In any case, I don’t read the papers and don’t like reading them either.

— Where did your father die?

— I’ve been in Beirut for a long time. Yesterday, my mother said she wanted us to go to Amman. I don’t want to go to Amman. I don’t like Amman. Do you like Amman?

Amman was a city when I went there. No, it wasn’t a city. It was a cluster of hills. I went, the army was readying itself and we were preparing. That’s why I didn’t get around the city. I would stand in a dugout beside men with brown foreheads, but I no longer remember their names. The gunfire exploded in the air above our heads. But the clash didn’t happen. The objective conditions weren’t ripe. That’s what they told me. Naturally, I was convinced. When objective conditions come into it, you can’t but be convinced. And convincing conditions need to be objective. I walked through the streets of Amman alone. I didn’t know anybody. The military training course was over and I should have been getting back to Beirut. Amman didn’t mean anything except that it was full
of fedayeen’s
shoes, pictures of martyrs, guns and memories of the homeland, and the 1967 defeat. That’s why I don’t know Amman. I remember it being white. During the September massacres, even the blood seemed white to me. Of course, I don’t like that city. None of my friends like it. It’s like nothing at all. Maybe it’s like the night. My friends died in Amman but that doesn’t change anything.

She dances on the ceiling, then slides to the wall. The first city was a clump of sand, stone, and rubble. The lithe young boy is on the ceiling. He bends, rotates upon himself, breaks in two. He falls from the ceiling to the floor. The camera carries him to my hands. I switch on the electricity. Did you like the film? Next time, I’ll carry the sand and the salt within a rhythm I haven’t yet discovered. When a woman bends down inside it, the circle grows more beautiful. It becomes like bread or like an orange.

— But you don’t know Amman.

— Name.

—Talal. Talal Saleh.

— Occupation.

— Student at the Engineering School. —Why are you demonstrating?

—All the students are demonstrating and I’m demonstrating like them.

The police, red-faced, carrying white truncheons, white shields, and tear-gas. Weeping, we attack them. Some of them have gas masks and some are crying without their masks. They’re shaking. And we run in the middle of the streets, ripping down powerlines and road signs. We attack Beshara al-Khoury’s statue,
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gird it with metallic wire. The truncheons are white, the shields are white, the cops cry and we cry. The officer: you, and he points to me. You’re the one responsible for this. My hand sinks into my pocket, my shirt falls out and hangs over my trousers. I don’t answer. Scores of policemen are wounded. The officer shouts: you are responsible. I slide to the corner. The king is the one who’s responsible. Then I go home, as usual.

“What is it you were doing in the ancient gardens three hundred years ago.”

My father knows Amman. And my mother insists on going there. She’s scared of the shells. I also hate wars. I know what you’re going to say. She put her finger to her lips to silence me. But I hate war, and especially just wars. I love my father. When he went away the last time, he never came back. Even his shoes didn’t come back. I asked the officer—he was a friend of my father’s —to give me his clothes or his shoes or any other thing. There was nothing left. When we went to the cemetery, he was inside the coffin. And he descended into the earth in the coffin. He burned alive. I didn’t understand anything. We never grasp the fundamental things in life, that’s why we stop at details. That day, I discovered Amman. It’s a cluster of mountains, that’s what people always say. But it’s a succession of impenetrable circles; broad streets and hollow slogans running through them, but a succession of circles nevertheless; with the blood oozing out all around turning into circular blotches. The city cannot become an orange. The tanks came while we were there. My father wasn’t there because he’d died before that. He died in the shelling, when the planes did whatever they pleased. Everybody scattered. My father scattered. He raised his head and the gun in his hand fired shots you couldn’t hear because the sound of the planes was the only thing you could hear. Then the shell came. It was the tanks which divided the city into circles. We survived. The thirst, and my mother cursing them all and my fathers picture hanging on the wall.

The lithe young African boy stretches his neck, laughing. Those are old memories. But he died. Death is far off, she said. That’s why rituals were created. Crying and wailing and dancing and standing for a long time in front of the grave. Death approaches, hand and bald head. The city we call white fills up with pictures and corpses and posters. Serhan Beshara Serhan’s face
^*
leaps out in front of the American revolutionary tourist.

— What’s that?

— A poster. We consider Serhan a hero. “I killed for my country.”

— But he’s a terrorist and an enemy of democracy.

— And I’m a terrorist, I said to the American tourist. But I can hold you and kiss you and laugh. She laughed a white laugh.

The young boy bent over the sand, plunged his hand into a damp spot, and sat. You talk a lot, he’d say. My mother says I don’t talk. And wonders to herself why she has lived to know such dark days. Then she tells me the story for the hundredth time, and I listen to it for the hundredth time. She always forgets the madman’s story. Be quiet, you’re mad. There’s no madman’s story, you’re just an intelligent boy. All those who saw you said, Imm Ahmed you must perfume him with incense and take him to Hajjeh Fatmeh.
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I used to perfume you with incense, feed you sugar and almonds, and give you money. But you were a clever child.Instead of buying balloons and sweets, you used to go to the shop and buy a little bit of everything, then stand in front of the house and open up a store. And the children of the neighborhood would come and buy from your shop, God be blessed. A half pound would become three pounds. Of course, I contributed to your brisk trade because Id give my sisters children money to go and buy things from your shop. But you made the profit. I told myself, Imm Ahmed, this boy will become a merchant, he will open shops and build buildings. But look at what you’re doing with yourself now. Joining political parties and the
fedayeen,
you’re not going to become a merchant.

But my mother wont tell me the madman’s story. And I have forgotten it.

I didn’t understand and I think Salem, the tall one, doesn’t understand it either. Shots and cries and explosions everywhere. The ground catching fire. We run, sit aside panting. He’s holding the B-7 rocket-launcher firm on his shoulder. You’ve got to cover me, he says. I move up and open fire. He shoots his rocket. The blasts, the smell, the flame. Shop doors are smashed, so let everything burn. Tomorrow, the women will come along in their long
abayahs
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to sort the smell of gunpowder from things and go. The shops must burn down.

The brown African boy bending over. Amman was a succession of white circles. I grab her and throw her to the ceiling. Look. She looks at her body stretching upward.

— Why are you doing this to me?

— Cinema is cinema, I tell her. Life is a deception. Her laugh rings out between her bare ankles. Look at the color of the sea, she says. The sea isn’t blue, the sky isn’t blue. That is the real deception, you see.

— I see that the sky’s blue and the sea’s blue. That’s what I see, I told her.

— Can you see green? Can you see light blue? Of course, you can’t see white. You’re sand. We all walk on the sand, then we become sand. I want to plunge in there between the green and the purple. In the dividing instant. There I want to build a house or a tent or a clump of stones, or drown. That’s what drowning is. Total surrender. It is objects which bend. Have you seen objects when they bend? But I can’t. Nobody can. No one can separate colors, we can only mix them. And when colors start to intermingle, they never stop. Even blending is impossible. Colors have their own temperaments and histories. One color goes into another, then becomes a hint of something and enters into objects; colors dissolve in colors. White doesn’t exist, she said. The young African boy took an apple, bit into it, put it on his head and began to run. The apple fell. Where’s the apple, she said. The apple mixes with the sand and the sand blends into the water. Mud. That’s straw, she said. The color of the apple changes. But it’s still on my head. It’s on the ground, I told her, and bent down to pick it up. Leave it, she screamed. The apple’s on my head. You don’t see anything, she said. No one sees. But its on my head. And I have to travel tomorrow. I can’t leave my mother on her own. Could you leave your mother?

— I don’t know, but I always leave her.

— I never leave my mother. She wants to go to Amman, I’ll go with her.

— And me?

—You! What do you want from me?

— Well get married, like everybody else.

The lithe young African boy laughed. I’m not going to get married. And if I do get married, it won’t be to you. I’m not going to marry a man who’s going to die.

— All men die.

— But you’re
a feda’i.
I like the
fedayeen
but I would never marry one because they die quickly.

—
All fedayeen
get married.

Colors nearing. Talal sat alone on the sand. He took off his glasses, wiped them carefully, and put them back on. The shore welcomed the gentle waves and sent them off again. In the damp place on the edge of the sea the circles multiplied. That’s the difference. He went up to the shore. These are colors. Colors only take on their color the moment they sink. The sea unraveled into endless circles. He took some sand and threw it to the sea. Everything sinks in water. Talal bent down. Where are you, lithe young African boy?