Summary
"Part II: The Mountain that is Lebanon" begins in Beirut, Lebanon in June 1989, the summer before the events of Part I. Karim’s experience is narrated from a third-person limited omniscient perspective. In a lull between shellings that leave smoking ruins, Karim goes out for the first time in three days, hurrying to the Mazraa district where Nada lives. For three months of bombing, he has been going between an empty apartment and a cellar.
He can’t remember what Lebanon was like before the war, which started officially on April 3, 1975. Karim was three: his father, a journalist for An Nahar, got a call that violence had broken out between Christians and Palestinians. People who had lived peacefully began fighting in the streets after that day: all Karim knew were barricades, shootings, overturned cars, hatred and destruction. The conflict is complex, and includes several belligerents: Christians, Sunnite and Shiite Muslims, Druzes, Palestinians, Syrians, and Israelis, each with an armed militia that controls an area of Beirut. The “Green Line” divides the city: to the east are Christians, to the west, where Karim lives, Muslims. By now, there is no government, electricity, or running water. But residents get used to living in these conditions; they use generators and dig wells.
However, the frantic bombing of the past three months has seen people leave Beirut like never before. Karim’s parents and younger brothers, Walid and Tarek, happened to fly to Montreal before the bombing started; Karim’s grandmother lives there, and was scheduled for an operation. Karim, almost seventeen, stayed alone to focus on his baccalaureate exam. Ironically, the lycée closed March 14. Karim stayed with Béchir’s family.
To pass time, the boys played chess and talked about girls. Karim had recently noticed Nada’s maturing body after having known her since he was three. After spotting the curve of her breasts one day last summer, he became tormented with thoughts of her naked body. On Karim’s seventeenth birthday in April, he and Béchir visited Nada; Karim kissed her on the lips, causing her to blush. They continued to visit her until Béchir’s family left for Paris. Karim decided to stay, claiming it was cowardly to leave. Béchir said he’d be back with an engineering degree, and he’d help rebuild the country. He jokes that Karim wants to stay because of Nada. Karim is indignant, but the two make up before parting.
Cutting back to the present, as Karim makes his way to Nada’s, he thinks that his friend was correct; he thinks about Nada constantly. Karim turns a corner and sees Nada’s building has been destroyed. Karim screams her name and searches amid the rubble for the entrance to the cellar. Nada’s little sister Maha sees Karim and recognizes him as “Nada’s sweetheart.” She says they took Nada away; she’s dead. It happened two days earlier. Maha is holding Jad, her baby brother. Bluntly, she explains that she took Jad to the cellar while Nada and their parents were helping her obese aunt Leila when the building collapsed.
He follows Maha into the shelter. An old woman mutters about Maha trying to pick up a boy while her family’s bodies aren’t even cold yet. Maha feeds Jad and tells Karim to ignore the woman. Karim falls asleep crying, thinking how he will never hold Nada’s naked body. He wakes to thirty people in the shelter, playing backgammon and chatting. Mrs. Farhat, the old woman with the grudge against Maha, says the Red Cross is coming to send Maha and Jad to an orphanage in France. Hours go by. Karim sleeps. He wakes to the sound of Maha stealing from the shelter’s supply of food provisions. He follows her outside and asks what she’s doing: she says she’s going to Chlifa and he can join if he wants.
Maha begins walking. It’s the middle of the night; Karim thinks she’s crazy and tries to get her to stay. But she insists on going and pulls out a map. Karim says her route goes straight through a Christian stronghold. And even if she found a safe route for the eighty kilometers, the Syrians wouldn’t let a twelve-year-old girl and a baby through. She says she’d rather die with Jad than be separated from him in France, as Mrs. Farhat said they would. She sets off again. After hesitating, Karim says he’ll join her; they can trade off carrying Jad. Karim realizes that to take this journey is the opposite of living in fear and hiding the way he has been.
Maha says she’s going to Chlifa to stay with a couple who were friends with her parents. Their names are Elias and Zahra. The narrator comments that Chlifa is on the east slope of Mount Lebanon, a range that runs north to south down the center of the country and from which the country’s name is derived. Lebanon comes from the Arabic word for milk, referring to the white snowy peaks of the range. First, they must cross the Green Line to East Beirut. The name comes from the greenery that has grown amid the ruins in the buffer zone. However, it is dangerous to cross, as snipers will pick off anything that moves.
A militiaman asks them the reason for crossing; they lie about being siblings and say they’re visiting their mother’s uncle. Karim gives the name of a journalist friend of his father’s. The militiaman makes them wait. They fall asleep and wake up to see Antoine Milad before them. He plays along and pretends to be Karim’s uncle, and feigns surprise to hear that Salim and Agnes, Karim’s parents, are dead.
Analysis
To explain the mystery surrounding Karim in Part I, the novel’s second part moves back in time to the previous summer, set in Lebanon, when Karim traveled from Beirut to Chlifa. The section’s opening pages establish the theme of the banality of war while simultaneously informing the reader about the complex history of the Lebanese Civil War. Karim, at seventeen, has lived his entire life living in a war zone. Like most other residents, he is used to periodic bombings. However, the bombings intensified in the last three months, and more people than ever before have been fleeing war-torn Beirut.
Marineau introduces the theme of adolescent development and the motif of Nada’s breasts by explaining how Karim came to be in love with Nada. Though they had been friends all their lives, he took notice of her developing body after seeing the curve of her full breasts one afternoon the previous summer. Karim, undergoing his own sexual awakening, grows obsessed with the thought of her naked body. His desire for her is so strong that he stays in Beirut even when Béchir leaves for Paris.
Karim’s trauma begins with the first of his personal devastations: after thinking about nothing but Nada, putting the idea of her above his own safety, he arrives at Nada’s building to see that it has been reduced to rubble. Faced with the ruins, he learns from Maha that Nada died. Karim is confused by Maha’s sangfroid attitude to having lost her entire family in the building’s collapse. Maha’s seeming indifference suggests that she is grappling with survivor’s guilt and trauma-based denial.
Maha and Karim set off on their journey to Chlifa because Maha is frightened that she and Jad will be separated if sent to France. Though Karim is resistant, he follows her into the night: she is his last connection to Nada, and she seems to know how Nada felt about Karim. Karim also reasons that he is sick of living in fear, like a rat, scurrying from an empty apartment to a shelter. Setting off for Chlifa is the opposite of the narrow and dispiriting way of living he has become used to.
However, the journey will not be easy, as the city and country are divided up and controlled by different factions’ militias. The first obstacle they face is crossing the Green Line buffer zone that divides East and West Beirut. As Muslims from West Beirut, they must convince a Christian militiaman to let them through. Luckily, Karim remembers the name of a friend of his father’s. The moment is fortuitous: it will turn out that Antoine Milad is vital not only for crossing the Green Line, but for setting Karim, Maha, and Jad up for the next leg of their journey.
