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* 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.
We feared for the mountain and for its plants. It edged to the brink of Beirut, sinking into it. And the prickly-pear bushes that scratched our legs were dying and the palm tree leaning and the mountain edging toward the brink.
They call it Little Mountain. We knew it wasn’t a mountain and we called it Little Mountain.
When I was three, the parish priest came in his long black cassock and handsome beard. He sat in our house and we all gathered around him in a circle. He started telling us anecdotes and stories. Then, he told us about the achievements of Stalin and the Bolsheviks. He turned to me, ruffled my hair, and told my mother that it was time I was dedicated to Saint Anthony and was given his habit to wear (wearing St. Anthonys habit is a tradition among most of the Eastern Christians in our country; it is worn by children in blessed remembrance of the first Christian monk to have left the city and gone to Sinai to start up the church’s first monastic order).
The habit is brown with a white cord dangling from the waist. I walk down the street imitating the gestures of saints. I walk and around me are children who wear or don’t wear the habit. We proceed in a long line to where the golden icons lie and the glass is tinted by the sun. And when I forget that I have become a saint, I run wild, playing in the gravel and the sand. I fall down in the streets. Then, when I go home, my mother looks over the saint’s soiled habit and slaps and scolds me. Then orders me to kneel down and pray. I kneel down and pray so that the saints might forget that I abandoned them and went off to play with the other children.
I walk, proud in my beautiful brown habit, imitating the priest’s gestures. I go to school, vaunting my clothes and put a round halo of leaves on my head.
The parish priest died all of a sudden. I didn’t understand what it meant. I remember crying because my sister wept. Then, about six months later as I recall (maybe I no longer actually remember the event but have it imprinted in my memory because of the dozens of times my mother told me the story), I went to church with my mother and father. It was the custom to take off the monk’s beautiful garment in church, where it was placed at the altar and candles were lit in offering.