Elias Khoury - Little Mountain

* Thyme. In Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine, it is dried and crushed then mixed with other herbs and spices, such as sumac, sesame seed, salt, and cumin, and is eaten in a paste made from adding olive oil to the mixture. It is widely used as a breakfast or dinner condiment with bread and tea.

** Kaak, singular kaaka, is a generic term used for a variety of slightly sweet or savory, always dry, baked goods in the shape of a bracelet, similar to pretzels.

* That is, there is no God but God, part of the shahada, the Muslim creed. Often used as an incantation to ward off evil in circumstances of misfortune or to express jubilation.

* Because a loaf of Lebanese bread is completely flat and round, it is possible to cover one’s face with it.

* A corruption of company, the word used by the native Palestinians to designate the early Zionist settlements. The small colonies were assimilated to some kind of compound which might have belonged to a company.

** Also known as the Army of Deliverance (jaysh al-inqādh), it was the ill-fitted, poorly trained, army of Arab volunteers formed in 1948 in the last-minute pan-Arab response to what was becoming the inexorable ascendancy of the Zionists in Palestine. It was the first pan-Arab effort to face the Zionist challenge and is a subject of both sadness and derision.

* A village or town headman or mayor.

* The former was a run-down area for poor migrant workers who constituted Beirut’s lumpen-proletariat in the “boom’’ years of the ’60s and ’70s; it was situated on the outskirts of what is now East Beirut, not far from Qarantina and Maslakh. Tall al-Zaatar was a Palestinian refugee camp, also in an outlying area of East Beirut, which was besieged for months in the first year of the war in Lebanon; it finally fell in a fierce battle in the summer of 1976.

The woman drops down from the ceiling. My eyes cling to the feet. A woman dangling from the ceiling. I no longer understand anything. Really, I no longer understand a thing. I’ve been afraid of the ceiling for years. The ceiling is low. Buildings are high and ceilings are low. I used to tell my wife I was afraid of low ceilings. But she’s a modern woman; she likes modern buildings and won’t live in the village. And what will happen to our children, I tell her. Nothing, she answers. They’ll live in nice modern houses, not like this house, mangy as your bald patch. But they’ll live in even more run-down houses and become like rats. A modern woman is right. And I too am a modern man and am right. I bought the car and used to drive it the way other men do, my wife by my side and the children, looking like domesticated animals, in the back. And then we all like modern things. Beyond that, I don’t know. But the woman’s dangling from the ceiling as if she were falling. No, she’s not falling. I’m standing still, I can hear voices, I’m trying to make out the meanings of the words. But I can’t. Yet, we should understand things precisely. I no longer understand this “precisely” in spite of the fact that I’m a law-and-order man and all for the police. Crazy Hani, what’s he doing now in the grave? At least, he’s not asking questions and his eyes don’t wander off when he’s talking. His eyes were remote as two drops of water. The physics teacher always talked about the drop of water and I never understood what he meant until I looked at this man’s eyes. Two, circular, depthless drops of water. He would disappear into his eyes when he talked and stay there, transformed into two drops of water, and curse the police and the state. I’d stand beside him and say nothing. What would I say? There’s no police now, Hani’s dead and the situation isn’t any better. And this woman’s dangling from the ceiling. Her leg is white and her thigh is white. No, not white. Something like white. And her foot’s as big as a man stuck to the wall. I go up to the wall and press my body to it. But the man is moving, he’s shaking. The whole room’s shaking. My hand is shaking and the white liquid spilling onto the ground. I put a bit of water in my mouth but don’t swallow; I hold it, letting my right cheek swell. I go up to the chair and try to lean against it. But the shadows, the shadows are swaying as if we were inside a city made of thick cardboard. Colors dark and things receding. My hand drops but I try. I’m really trying. I stand in front of the woman who looks like a thick rope. I extend my hand toward the rope. I hear a scream, step back a little. I brace my back against the wall. The wall shakes. I feel the wall is about to fall on my face, it can’t stand upright. I see the cupboard and smile. You can’t but smile when you see the cupboard. My aunt loved that cupboard. When she died, the first thing I did was to go to the cupboard and weep in front of its doors. What can a woman do? A woman who spent her life in her brother’s house, sweeping, washing dishes, and feeling like an outsider. She used to cry. She’d tell me about the young suitor whom my father rejected because he was crazy and didn’t love her. I know the truth, my aunt would say. He was a drunkard, played around with chicks, and then got drunk out of his mind. Your father was always getting drunk. When the suitor visited him to ask for my hand in marriage, he was drunk, and he advised him not to marry me because I’m ugly. When the man insisted, my brother cursed him and told him not to marry because marriage is a calamity and threw him out of the house. And then he came to me, told me, apologized and started to cry. I said nothing. My aunt would cry and look at the cupboard. The best thing’s the cupboard. It doesn’t feel anything, she’d hit it, my aunt would hit the cupboard violently, but it wouldn’t cry because it didn’t feel anything. My aunt would cry. I want to become a cupboard. I’d sit beside her and cry. Then I thought of becoming a cupboard. The woman dangling from the ceiling contorts herself like a circus woman. I met my wife many years ago. A million years ago. When I got married, I told my father that the first woman resembles the last. He laughed then looked at his wife; she smiled. It was the first time I felt that my mother was the wife of this loathsome man. They fool around in bed together, then he beats her while making love to her to heighten his pleasure. I used to think that I couldn’t lie next to a woman on the same bed without making love to her the whole night long. How could I fall asleep while a woman, a complete woman slept beside me. My eyelids wouldn’t so much as blink when I used to put a picture of a naked woman next to me in bed. I’d stay wide awake, me and the picture and other things. Then I’d get out of bed, fold the picture carefully, put it inside the book and sleep. But now, a million years later, I sleep with her beside me without folding her away or putting her into a book. Of course, I don’t know. My father’s laugh, and his glance at his wife, are still in rny mind. I know nothing about women save the last woman who’s called my wife and who loves me the way she loves cake. As for the first woman, and the second and the third, they’re still in the magazines that I started to buy on the sly and looked at or read at the office. Until a colleague caught me. He stole the magazine from my drawer and went around to the secretaries with it. I was so embarrassed my bald patch blushed. I felt my head ablaze with blood. From that day on, I became shy of the secretaries and their impertinent looks and laughs. As for the men, they would whisper among themselves.

The glass was swaying in my hand as if it wanted to fall. The white liquid had a pungent smell and darkness was falling slowly. That’s the way darkness comes. You think it’s coming down slow, then suddenly without you feeling a thing you fall into darkness and turn on the lights. But in these black days, there’s neither electricity nor anyone who turns lights on for that matter. Everything was quivering. Even the stars are only seen quivering in this cursed city called Beirut. The heat is stifling. The sound of gunfire coming over distantly. How can they fight in such heat? How can they not just sleep on top of the sandbags? It’s impossible. The noise heats the air even further. And of course, the dust from the shells fills the air with clouds. So it’s raining in summer. Yesterday there was rain. Hot air with rain. Like in miracles. The sky’s sweating, my wife said, thinking she was being witty. But it’s God’s wrath. How can they? I don’t know. These new shells that howl like wolves. But best of all is this yarn about Vietnam. They want a new Vietnam! There’ll only be wars afterward. War means Vietnam and to have Vietnam you need a war. And Hani is content. I don’t understand this man. Poor thing, he died. My wife cried, as all women do, when he died. But me, I didn’t cry. I couldn’t cry over that man. Then they told me he died by mistake. No, I figured as much. They said he was out getting supplies when this shell came and killed him. That’s a mistake in my view. He shouldn’t have been getting supplies. Even in war, we don’t know how to arrange death. But he held the stick by the end. He’d say: you can’t hold a stick by the middle. Anyone who holds a stick by the middle can’t fight. If you held the stick by the middle … here, his face would go red as a tomato and his eyes would wander off, and you discovered that this man had turned into two drops of water … and the enemy attacked, how would you fight? The stick would then be against you. You’d have to put the stick up your arse and surrender or get killed. He went and held it by the end, but he died. He, too, died. Whichever way we hold the stick we’re going to die. That is the wisdom I have arrived at. And then, there are things one can’t hold by the end. How do you make love to a woman? You’ve got to hold her by the middle, to hold her tight, then you do it to her. The middle is sex and sex is life. So where’s the wrong and where’s the right and where’s life?