Little Mountain

Little Mountain Read Online Free PDF Page A

Book: Little Mountain Read Online Free PDF
Author: Elias Khoury
out of a militarylike vehicle. Carrying automatic rifles. They surround the house. The neighbors come out to watch. One of them smiles, she makes the victory sign. They come up to the house. Knock on the door; my mother opens, surprised. Their leader asks about me. He’s out. —Where did he go? — I don’t know.—Come in, have a cup of coffee.
    They enter. They search for me in the house. I wasn’t there. They search the books and the papers. I wasn’t there. They find a book with a picture of Abdel-Nasser on the back cover. I wasn’t there. They overturn the papers and the furniture. They curse the Palestinians. They rip my bed up. They insult my mother and this corrupt generation. I wasn’t there. Their leader stood, an automatic rifle across his shoulder, in his hand a pistol, threatening.
    — He’d better not come back here.
    I wasn’t there. My mother was there. Trembling with distress and resentment, pacing up and down the house angrily. She stopped answering their questions and left them. She sat on a chair in the entrance, guarding her house as they, inside, looked for the Palestinians and Abdel-Nasser and international communism. She sat on a chair in the entrance, guarding her house. And they, inside, tore up papers and memories. She sat on a chair. And they made the sign of the cross, in hatred or in joy.
    They went out into the street, their hands held high in gestures of victory. And some people watched and made the victory sign.

    The big cars stream in, filling the streets. Militarylike vehicles, painted black, horns blaring as they go by. Men with automatic rifles jump out. One of them looks through the binoculars dangling from his neck, darting from one corner of the street to the other. They shout at people and tremble with hatred. Their leader looks through the binoculars dangling from his neck, stops to answer the questions of passers-by. He tells them about the siege of Qarantina. We’ll mop up every last bit of it and throw them out of Lebanon. We’ll defeat them and all the beggars trying to plunder our country.
    He gets into his military-like Chevrolet and speeds off. The men scuttle in all directions at once. They march down the streets in step. Han-doy, han-doy (a military expression meaning one-two * which the militiamen in our neighborhood used. I don’t know why, but it was current practice).
    Cars roaming the streets. The cars gnaw at the streets with their teeth. The big cars blast their sirens. I stand in front of them: their tires are huge, high, and thick.
    Black metal devouring me: roadblocks, they say. I see my face tumbling to the ground. Black metal devouring me: my voice slips down alone and stretches to where the corpses of my friends lie buried in mass graves. Black metal devouring me: the raised hands do not wave banners, they clutch death. Metal on the street, terror and empty gas-bottles, corpses and smuggled cigarette cartons. The moment of victory has come. The moment of death has come. War has come. And my mother shakes her head and tells me about the poor.

    They call it Little Mountain. And we called it Little Mountain. We’d carry pebbles, draw faces and look for a puddle of water to wash off the sand, or fill with sand, then cry. We’d run through the fields — or something like fields — pick up a tortoise and carry it to where green leaves littered the ground. We made up things we’d say or wouldn’t say. They call it Little Mountain, we knew it wasn’t a mountain and we called it Little Mountain.
    One hill, several hills, I no longer remember and no one remembers anymore. A hill on Beirut’s eastern flank which we called mountain because the mountains were far away. We sat on its slopes and stole the sea. The sun rose in the East and we’d come out of the wheatfields from the East. We’d pluck off the ears of wheat, one by one, to amuse ourselves. The poor—or what might have been the poor— skipped through the fields on the hills, like children
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