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the habit at the door, and I went home miserable. No candles were lit the following week.

    They came.
    Five men, jumping out of a military-like jeep, carrying automatic rifles. Five men wearing big black hats with big black crosses dangling from their necks. They surround the house. They ring the church bells and bang on the door.
    Five long black crosses dangling before my mother as she opens the door. She mutters unintelligible phrases. She slams the door shut in their faces and cries.
    Five men break down the door and ask for me. I wasn’t there. They find a book with a picture of Abdel-Nasser on the back cover. I wasn’t there. My mother was there, trembling with distress, resentment, and fear. My mother was there. 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 as they, inside, tore up papers and memories.
    My mother was there.
    I wasn’t there.
    I was in the East, searching with short, almost barefoot men in rubber shoes that didn’t keep the cold out. I was in the East, looking for Little Mountain stretched across the frames of men, the sea surging out of their beautiful eyes.
    * The popular name for the Ashrafiyyeh area of Beirut.
     
    ** That is, a feast day, festival, or holiday of religious origin or significance.
     
    †
Burghul
is the crushed wheat used in two major national dishes in Lebanon; it is known in the West as bulgar.
’Araq,
the national drink, is a distilled grape alcohol, aromatized with anis.
     
    * The president of Egypt from 1954 to 1970 and the most revered leader of Arab Nationalism.
     
    ** That is, the Beirut River and Olive Grove roads, respectively.
     
    * In the Eastern church, Palm Sunday is an important festival especially for children.
     
    * As-Sagheer means the little one in Arabic.
     
    * The area known as Qarantina was the site of a military quarantine hospital under the French Mandate. Later, it became Beirut’s principal garbage dump and part of the urban slum area that constituted the city’s “belt of misery.’’ (See note on p. 28.)
     
    * The Cairo-based pan-Arab radio listened to extensively throughout the Arab world in the headier days of Arab Nationalism.
     
    ** A region of Syria which is part of the larger
Jabal Druze,
i.e., Druze Mountain, area that led a famous revolt in the mid-1920s against the French Mandate. See Chapter 2.
     
    * There was famine in Lebanon during World War I owing to the requisitioning of grain for the soldiers by the Ottoman authorities and to hoarding by grain merchants.
     
    * A corruption of the French “un-deux,” obviously meant ironically by the author.

Chapter 2
The
CHURCH
SCENE ONE
    Nine p.m. Drizzle and the sound of gunfire getting closer with every step. We run cautiously, clutching rifles and dreams. We leap across a very long street, called France Street, to take up a new position at the end of it: the church. The voice of the unit commander is resolute and clipped. Go in carefully. Don’t shoot unless absolutely necessary and only at a visible enemy. According to our reconnaissance information, they’ve abandoned the church and set up their fortified positions on Hwoyek Street. We race down the middle of France Street. We can see the church ahead but we can’t see anything in the dense darkness, broken only by flashes of the Doushka * up there close to the sky where the Murr Tower silences the Holiday Inn keeping Wadi Abu Jameel ** out of range of the isolationists’ * gun-fire. If they want a battle, they’ll have to fight in the streets, for the tall safe building is no longer of any use. We rule the streets, Sameer says. I run, the thin rain trickling between my hand and the rifle butt. The church —I see it, don’t see it. Our dreams are right there in the street, and the shells fly and crash into the small, low buildings. ’Atef greets us. Fighting comrades