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, questioning Nature about Her things. What we called a ’eid**was a day like any other, but it was laced with the smell of the burghul and ’araq† that we ate in Nature’s world, telling it about our world which subsists in our memory like a dream.
