Little Mountain Read Online Free

open hilltop, run through it and always be afraid of falling off onto one of the three roads.
    He stood perched on the high hill. Holding his big father by the right hand, he’d watch the cars far away on the road below and marvel at how small they were. They weren’t like the car he rode to his uncle’s distant house. Very small cars, one behind the other, like the small car that his father bought him and set in motion by singing to it. There’s not a sound to these metal cars going by. Soundless, they move along regularly, one behind the other, in a straight line. They don’t stop. Inside are miniature-like people. They aren’t children of my age —he’d think to himself—and once, when he asked his father about the secret of the small cars, his father answered in the overtones of a diviner that the reason was that Ashrafiyyeh being a mountain, the Beirutis went and spent the summer there. And compared with Beirut, the mountain is high. The distance between us and the Nahr Beirut is high, like that between us and the Karm al-Zeytoun road. And the farther you are, the smaller things get. Later, when you grow up, you’ll see that the cars are very small. Because vision is also related to the size of the viewer. I would nod, feigning comprehension, not understanding a thing. Generally, I’d let my father tell me his story, which he always retold, about distances and cars and distract myself by chasing a golden cicada flitting among the green grasses or perched between the branches of the olive trees.
    A long line of small soundless cars. We’d sit on the edge of the hill and watch them go by, waiting for the day when we’d grow up and see that they were very small really, or go down to the road and see that they were very big. They trickled by like colored drops of water of varying size. Trucks, petrol tankers, all sorts of small cars. We could tell the difference between them although we couldn’t name them or say what they were for. They were far away and small and wed hold each other by the hand waiting to grow up so they’d grow even smaller, wed hold each other by the hand and wait to understand the secret. And I always used to wonder how come cars were small just because they were far away and I would daydream about the stories of dwarfs they told us at school or of the man whom the devil turned into a dwarf, which my grandmother always told me.
    Little Mountain where it was, the vegetation that covered its handsome mound was giving way to roads and we rejoiced at the opening of the first cinema in Sioufi. But surprises awaited me. We were growing and what we had been waiting for, so long now, didn’t happen. We were getting bigger, wed go to Sioufi to watch the cars—and see that they’d gotten bigger. We got bigger and the cars got bigger. Hemmed in by the gathering clamor and frenzy. We were getting bigger and the once-straight lines were curving, the clamor getting closer and the spaces narrower. I walk alone, Little Mountain twists and turns. I search for memories of when Palm Sunday * was a ’
eid
and we came out of the church to the sound of Eastern chants: I find only a small, neglected picture in my pocket.
    Cars growing, closing in on me. Trees shrinking, disappearing. I was growing bigger and so were the cars, around my neck were their sounds, their colors, their sizes. Now, we can tell the difference between them but we don’t understand.
    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