Old expectations and distant memories are merely expectations and memories. At night, the cars climb the three roads to the high hilltop. Bruising my eyes, their lights encircle me. The whine of the engines walling me in as they approach my face. The cars are big, they have huge eyes extending filaments of fire that don’t burn. They leave the traces of terror, of questions and answers, on my face.
The cars were growing — and we were growing. The broad streets were growing and the trees bent low on Little Mountain. What has become of my father’s explanations as he told me stories of distance and height and size?
You stand alone amid the flood of lights that blinds you and robs you of your memory. You go looking for your house, alone, memoryless.
Abu George told me the story of the names. Abu George has been my friend since the time I wandered around Little Mountain, alone among the lights, looking for my father’s explanations. He’d find me alone, sitting on the edge of a hill overlooking the railroad tracks of the slow train that stands out in my memory, and would tell me his stories of the French and the world war.
He’d relate how Sioufi used to be a huge property owned by a man called Yusef as-Sagheer.* That is why Ash-rafiyyeh was called Little Mountain. Then, the brothers Elias and Nkoula Sioufi bought it up dirt-cheap and, after World War I, they built a furniture factory on it. The neighborhood came to be known by their name.
The factory, in reality a large workshop, was an event in itself. It had about fifty workers. They built themselves some shacks nearby, and a small cafe serving coffee and ’araq opened next door. The factory was a novel sort of undertaking and people began getting used to a novel way of life, for the first time. Modern machines. European-style furniture. They knew neither where it went nor how it would be sold. They collected their wage — or something like a wage — at the end of the month, gave some of it to their women, and drank ’araq with the rest.
As the neighborhood got used to this new kind of life, there arose a new kind of theft. Instead of the old kind of robberies — like those of a man called Nadra who lived at the eastern end of the neighborhood and who, in the ancient Arab tradition of chivalry, extorted money from the rich to give it to the poor — there was now organized robbery. Gang robbery, premeditated and merciless; without a touch of chivalry or any other kind of principle. The most important event which established this new-style thieving was the robbery of the Sioufi factory itself. At the end of each month, the accountant would go to Beirut to fetch the workers’ money and come back to the factory to distribute it to them. Once, at a crossroads, some thieves ambushed him; they took the money and left him there, hollering. Alerted by his screams, the workers gathered around. Men, women, and children rushed out and chased the thieves. The thieves ran and people ran behind them, popping out of the dirt roads and alleys. Before anyone had caught up with them, the thieves stopped running, threw the coins to the ground and resumed their race. At that point, bodies doubled up over coins and hands started snatching. People forgot the thieves and let them get away, snatching up the coins from the ground helter-skelter. It was no chivalrous kind of theft, Abu George would say. Why? Because they all forgot their honor and made for the coins. They were lenient with the thieves and took the factory’s money. That is when the decline set it. And the story has it, the factory started going bankrupt then, Abu George would continue. Elias Sioufi died of a broken heart and his brother, Nkoula, sold off the property to the people of the neighborhood. And it was split into small holdings.
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* —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,* 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.