Little Mountain Read Online Free Page B

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.
    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