Elias Khoury - Little Mountain

— Listen, brother, listen carefully. It’s a complicated question. I was down and out, I didn’t have a residence permit in Paris. The police arrested me and gave me a choice of prison or the Foreign Legion. What would you have had me choose?

— To go back to Lebanon.

— That wasn’t possible. Lebanon wasn’t in the cards then. Prison or Vietnam, so I went to Vietnam. We fought a great deal but that isn’t the point. The point is that we knew our defeat to be inevitable. Yet we stayed on to fight. We’d committed ourselves to the war and we were going to honor our commitment. I’m a stubborn Maronite, I don’t pull out. I knew that the Foreign Legion and all the French army units would be defeated. Yet, I stayed on with them and fought because I’m a stubborn man. Then he began to laugh. Don’t believe this stubborn-man story, I’m only telling it because I’ve drunk a lot. I tried to escape several times or, rather, to be honest with you, I thought of escaping. But it wasn’t possible. War is a meticulously organized thing and the only way out of it is to stay with it. Aside from the fact that I fell in love with a Vietnamese woman and married her. Honestly, I’m not lying. I would go back to the mud hut in the evening and find her there waiting for me with the barrel. She’d put me inside and water would start to flow over me. I’d climb out, practically naked, gobble down my food with some rice wine, then gradually get drunk and just sit there. And I’d sleep with her sitting up, because standing or lying down are out of the question for anyone who drinks that wine. She was a beautiful woman. She stayed beautiful to her dying day. I believe she died when the French artillery was “combing’’ the Vietminh areas before the defeat at Dhien Bien Phu. Defeat was inevitable, despite my wife’s death and that of thousands of others. Though they carried the cannons on bicycles and climbed up the mountains strapping them to their shoulders, surrender was unavoidable. But best of all was the barrel. My relationship to the war was two-sided: a relationship with a beautiful woman on the one hand and with a barrel, on the other.

This conversation took place five years ago and though I don’t remember much, that’s when Borgis Nohra became my friend. As far as I’m concerned, friendship is something quite specific, it means we get drunk once a month. For him, it was an opportunity to oust his French wife from the house and to speak Arabic. Still, when I came over this year I didn’t want to see him. The civil war hasn’t left a relationship unscarred and the news that the fedayeen had entered Bdadoun on one of those war nights had surely reached him. That’s why I didn’t want to see him. But there he was, standing in front of me, the personification of strange coincidence.

— Why don’t you come and visit me. Come over right now. I want to hear your news and news of the war in Lebanon. Impossible to convince him otherwise. I’m busy now, my good Bergis. Let’s get together tomorrow. As you wish. We’ll talk about everything. Just when he seemed to have yielded, he started up again, as though delirious.

— Look at the metro. Look at these tunnels. What it means is that civil war is inevitable. A civil war in the passages and tunnels of the metro, it’d be mythical. Every expectation would be confounded and the earth would revert to its entrails. Something amazing!

— Even when you come to visit me, you’ve got to come with me to the metro. I know you’ve seen it. But look, look! The city penetrated by metro tunnels is shaking, it is going to cave in. Civil war here is inevitable. I’ve been on the metro a great deal and have visited a lot of cities but I’ve never uncovered the relationship between metros and tunnels and between tunnels and civil war. Cities, all cities, are alike: Some traversed by a metro, others not. But all that has nothing to do with war. In Cairo, there’s a metro but it’s above ground. People dart back and forth between the metro cars, the buses, and the narrow alleys. They burn tires or stop burning them. In Beirut, there’s no metro and there are no tunnels. In Milan, demonstrators overturned the metro cars and the police had to close off the subway entrances to prevent people from joining the demonstrations. In Damascus, there are no such things as metro tunnels but Qassioun *is being dug up and destroyed so that they can turn it into pretty — or ugly — villas. That is the point. Cities above ground and cities under ground. After Ottoman Beirut was destroyed, they started looking for Roman Beirut under the rubble. In a nutshell, all change is geological, like earthquakes, like volcanoes. They bore through the bowels of a city to install means of communication and means of residence. But all these means serve but one end — war and death.

There we were in the middle of the metro passages, Bergis’s voice soaring and me standing still, unable to do anything. That is the point, he was telling me. The point is that this city will be destroyed in a civil war. All cities will be destroyed. I was trying to say something. The point was something else but I’d started to feel frightened and said nothing. This time, I, as well as Bergis and the sound of the metro, the metro itself, all seemed ridiculous. I wasn’t able to do anything not to. True enough, I’m sick. But this man just won’t stop hallucinating.

— Do you see? Civil war is inevitable. People will annihilate one another. Cities will collapse. Its inevitable and I see it as clearly as I saw the pictures of the war in Beirut.

— But Bergis …

— Just imagine what might happen in these endlessly ramified passages with modern destructive weapons. The civil war will be the metro war. You agree, of course you do.

I don’t know why I began to agree with him. It’s not that the words were convincing. Nor was it the sight of Bergis ranting on feverishly, rapturously about war. His constant turning to me and taking me by the hand lest I run away were not convincing either. The truth of the matter is that I wasn’t the least bit convinced by Bergis’s argument, but I began to be convinced nonetheless. A man in his forties, his clothes stinking of alcohol, standing in a cacophonous jungle. People rushing about as if they were late for some appointment and I looking at my watch for fear of being late. And this man completely indifferent. Just talking on, with his hands, with his voice, with his stocky little body, swaying to and fro, prophesying devastation. And those others, rushing about, they’ll rush again but for different reasons, because life cannot go on like this. Everything’ll turn topsy-turvy — guns, cannons, war. Bergis rambled on and I was trying, one last time, not to appear ridiculous. But that isn’t the point.

The point was over there. A woman, glowing. I held her hand and we went to the smallest room in the world. Terra-cotta tiles, white wood, yellow curtains. And she, in the center of the room, naked, laughing. Slipping from my hands to the bed, from the bed to the floor and from the floor back into my hands. A woman, glowing. Milky white. Her two eyes small, but elongated, like the eyes of the Chinese. I was holding her by her hair and drowning in the place where the pain flowed from her shoulders. I was holding her, she was falling. But not breaking. She was folding in two, I was her third half and her voice rang like a tropical garden.

I approached her, my feet dragging on the floor, grating against the wooden floor-boards. I was swaying, cleaving, getting closer. The rubescence, and her smell, spreading across the floor. I was not saying anything but was not quiet either. The apogee of sadness. She cried, sitting at the edge of the room, holding her breasts. I went toward her, frightened. No, I wasn’t frightened. I was looking for something or other, for a word. But she remained on the edge of the room. Then stood up, came toward me. I held her, she dropped to the floor and broke, and the room filled with pieces of shrapnel. I bent down to pick them up, blood began to flow and the walls were covered in mud and trees. I was going up the stairs, my foothold quite firm. I could go no farther. I held her. Lights colored the sky and her body was as a dough of constantly changing tints. She took me. My body quivered as though feverish, then I fell. And it was a very long way.