Elias Khoury - Little Mountain

She was the point. To hold her was to hold nothing. She would run off, leaving me baffled. I would run after her. That’s how she imprisoned me inside a dream that was hard to abandon. That was in the autumn, when the sky reddened with the leaves and the sweeping branches of the trees. Shed be beside me, looking for me when I was lost and losing me when I found her. Everything amazed her. The trees donning their autumn reds struck her with wonder and when she looked at the sky it was if shed not seen a sky before. Everything that used to be familiar was new. At first, I was enthralled by this new kind of life, then it began to irk me. We can’t live just like that with no reference point whatsoever. I can’t live like this, scattered to the winds. Except that she insisted; she lived her life the way she lived life. I began to discover life through her and plunged into the bewitchment. Once, we were running or walking down a long street lined with red trees. She was beside me, in front of me, behind me. I held her by the hair as we walked peacefully. I tried to talk to her, it wasn’t possible. Talking to this woman was hard. You always had to go over everything from the beginning as if you were getting to know her this very minute. As a result, we spoke only rarely. I stopped her in the middle of the street where the red leaves grew out of her hands.

— This is the revolution, I said. Just like this, living in the constant discovery of everything, in the nothingness of everything. That is revolution.

— Me, I don’t like politics.

— And me, I’m not talking about politics. I’m talking about revolution.

— But revolution is politics. Isn’t revolution politics?

— However it is always beginning in spite of politics or inside of politics. It is the thing that is constantly beginning. Like love, like death, like you. She didn’t answer. Her body was transluscent. No, not a mirror. The other kind of transluscence, where you don’t see yourself but see beyond things as though in a dream.

I grabbed her and threw her to the water. But she wasn’t a fish, she was a woman, so she began to drown. The water flowed across her face, between her breasts. But she wasn’t a fish. I held her and scaled her to the very end but the end wasn’t possible. That is the point.

Everything seems like that, ambiguous and incomprehensible. In the end, however, things intersect and come together to form triangles. You can’t discover things, stripped bare, just like that. They all fit into triangles and triangles are the beginnings of things — or something like beginnings. Triangles fit into circles. Every triangle, whatever its shape, whatever the size of its angles, fits inside a circle. And circles necessarily burst apart. That is how I discovered our story. I couldn’t start with events. Events are ambiguous, they’re distorted and not susceptible to beginnings. We started off as a triangle. That was at the university. We still nurtured a few dreams about the university and were engaged in the struggle for establishing a national institution. We hadn’t yet found out that a university is just an old shoe and that the dreams we coveted would turn us into shoes, if the university wasn’t destroyed. And it was, of course, along with everything else in this city, but in another context. But then many things start with this triangle.

Face one: Dr. Hanna. A man about 45 years old, tall, white hair starting to speckle his head. He’d come into class in a hurry, leave in a hurry, always as if he had an appointment to keep with something. What that thing might have been wasn’t clear. He was supposed to lecture on psychology. But only rarely did he talk about this psychology of his or anything else related to the topic. He always spoke to us about his childhood, about the years of poverty when he worked in a little clothing store in Souq Sursock, about how he was a self-made man, had studied, obtained his doctorate, and joined academic ranks. I don’t know why, but I never believed this business about working in Souq Sursock. I judge that he did something else. He was a waiter maybe, in some cafe. He looked like a waiter, his elegance was reminiscent of those who work in the Hamra Street cafes. Anyhow, that’s not important. The important thing was the book. He’d come into class carrying a rectangular book which he’d wave about in the air and then carefully put away in his bag. That’s where I belong, I belong with the downtrodden, that’s why I carry around their thoughts, their cause. The book, so far as I can remember, was about the relationship between Marxism and Christianity or humanist Marxism or some such gibberish that was fashionable in those days. We admired this professor and his humanist Marxism and his rectangular book that was written in French which we didn’t understand all that well. Even more, we admired the compassion he had for his social class and his strange insistence on twisting his right hand around as he told us about the dialectic. I’m open-minded, I’m not a dogmatic Marxist. I’m a humanist, I understand and I like to be understood, and I’m fully prepared to change my mind if someone convinces me that I’m wrong. That’s what the dialectic is about, it is the key to everything. He spent three years telling us about the dialectic and our delight in the wonderful dialectic grew with every passing year. Until, one day, the police came into the university looking for the radicals who don’t believe in dialogue and insist on stoning them. The dialectic ran out the back door that day and dedicated himself to psychology.

Face two: his name was Yaaqub, we all loved him. He was a student and he resembled the fahlawi character whom Sadeq al-Athm *drove us nuts with after the June defeat — to the extent that we came to believe that there lies some such magical figure behind every defeat. But he wasn’t fahlawi, simply a little lazy and a bon viveur; he loved drinking and good food, chatting and laughing. More important, he loved his friends and we all loved him. He’d come into the cafeteria carrying Aristotle’s Metaphysics, for Yaaqub had chosen philosophy. The book began to fall apart sitting on the cafeteria table, the cover got completely frayed. But Yaaqub never found the time to read owing to his many activities. He never missed a demonstration, he’d be right up there in front, chanting and dancing before the water hoses, getting beaten by the rifle butts. He’d go home in the evening, exhausted, barely finding the time to drink a glass of ’araq, sing a few lines of zajal ** and then sleep. We loved him dearly. And when we went into the fedayeen, he came with us and became a feda’i. Then, he left for Europe to study. He didn’t stay with us long enough to discover the games of death. Had he stayed, he would’ve probably joined our friends who died and we would have forgotten the Aristotle business and remembered him gun in hand, keeling over his dripping blood and dying. But isn’t it better not to die? If were not dead after all this then we might wage new wars which might be better than this one. And maybe Yaaqub would come back then and leave Aristotle behind and bear the feda’i gun with us.

Face three: it was just after April 23, 1969. *The pools of blood then coating the streets of Beirut signaled the onset of the torrent of blood that was later to convulse the city. Salem came to the university and found that half the students had gone into class. He stood in the courtyard of the school and made a speech. It wasn’t a speech so much as a stream of curses against the police, the state, and America. Then the school went on strike. A few fist-fights broke out and everyone went on his way. As Salem was stepping out of the gate on his way home, he discovered there was a car waiting for him which hauled him off to the police station. I sat, with scores of other students, in a dark room as insults were hurled at us.