Summary
Karim and Maha spend the day headed toward Mount Lebanon’s snowy mountain peaks. At nightfall, they pass quickly by two small villages. They stumble across a lunar landscape of Roman ruins. Karim finds it beautiful and is fascinated by the idea that people used to live and pray in that spot. Maha points out how old ruins are beautiful while young ruins in Beirut are horrible, even though just as much blood was shed at the old ruins. She wonders if Karim doesn’t think it’s strange that all the old dead are forgotten so easily; that all they see is the peaceful, romantic side of the conflict that led to the ruins. Karim doesn’t want to think about it.
They set up camp in the moonscape ruins of Qalat Fakra and eat the usual dinner of canned tuna, dehydrated minestrone, dates, and instant coffee. Before sleep they get into an argument. Maha admits she often breaks rules just for the sake of getting into trouble. She also admits she would read Nada’s diary, and that’s how she knows about Karim. Karim accuses her of being a liar, and she accuses him of being too perfect.
In the morning Maha appears outside the tent with a black goat on a rope. The goat’s udders are swollen so Maha gets Karim to milk them; he is embarrassed by the vaguely sexual connotations of the action but succeeds in extracting the goat’s milk. He is covered in sweat when they finish. The two laugh uncontrollably afterward. It’s been a long time since Karim has been so idiotically happy.
After drinking the goat’s milk, they set off hiking again, stopping to wash themselves in a cold, rushing stream. They hike all day and set up camp again to sleep another night. They worry that Black Beard, their goat, will be attacked by wolves in the night, but she’s safe in the morning. They walk all day. Karim estimates that if they reach the Roman road before nightfall, they’ll be able to reach Chlifa by the next evening.
The terrain becomes more uneven but they hurry. Karim trips on a route, scraping his hands but protecting Jad in the fall. Rather than stopping there, they feed Jad and push on to find the Roman road, lighting the way with a flashlight. They reach a valley and descend to the bottom. As Maha adjusts Jad’s carrier on her torso, the goat runs off. Maha runs after the goat. Karim hears an explosion and runs too.
Karim is relieved to spot Maha running, but she says the goat blew up. Maha is panicked and distraught. She bites Karim’s hand and he slaps her. She says she has to find and bury the goat but Karim says it could be a minefield and the goat’s just an animal. Maha goes quiet and follows Karim’s lead. Suddenly she begins talking about when she saw Nada’s dead and twisted body. She was jealous of her sister’s magnificent breasts, even though she was dead. Maha says that for her whole life she was jealous of her sister’s beauty and the attention it garnered. Seeing her dead, she couldn’t believe all that beauty was for nothing, while she, a monster full of spite, is still alive. Maha says he would rather be on this journey with Nada. While Karim can’t deny that he would, he tries to console Maha: he says it isn’t a choice between the two, and that Maha is sensitive and good to her brother and challenges Karim to be better. He says everyone has dark thoughts, and it isn’t her fault that Nada died.
Karim holds her crying body and feels like crying himself. He wakes to discover that he is cupping Maha’s tiny breast. He is filled with shame; he feels like a dirty old man taking advantage of a sleeping child. He looks at her face to see Maha is awake. He apologizes and tells her not to look at him like that. She finally speaks, but Karim is horrified when she asks why he pulled away so suddenly: would he have preferred Nada’s breasts? Karim has had enough of her jealousy: he cries out that she doesn’t even have breasts. Maha’s face turns cold and hard. She retaliates by saying that Nada wrote that Karim’s kiss wasn’t as exciting as Rachad’s. The full line about him being perfect read: “To tell the truth, Karim is perfect but a bit boring. Too bad, he does have nice eyes.”
They follow the old Roman road in silence, passing between snow-capped massifs (i.e. grouped mountain ranges). Karim wonders if Maha invented Nada’s hurtful diary entry. They stop for a break; Karim leaves Maha and Jad to climb to a higher point to get a sweeping view of the whole country, just as his father wrote about his travels with Antoine. As he climbs past the dense foliage and encounters ice and compacted snow, Karim relives the embarrassing events of the morning. He got mad at Maha when really he was mad at himself. He suddenly can’t wait to see her again to clear things up.
Karim hears a cry. He races down the slope, twisting his ankle as he goes. At the boulder where he left them, Jad is lying on the rock. Karim finds Maha lying half-naked behind a boulder. A stream of blood is pouring from her slit throat and from her vagina.
Analysis
The section begins with Maha’s meditation on what she sees as a hypocritical attitude toward the moon-like ruins she and Karim stumble upon. While Karim can’t believe how beautiful the ruined and time-worn Roman ruins look in the moonlight, Maha points out that the more recent ruins of Beirut are horrible. The only difference she sees is that time has passed and the lives lost in the spot are forgotten and the site romanticized. In this way, the ruins stand as a symbol for history’s tendency to elide tragedy in favor of more palatable narratives.
The motif of Maha’s duplicitous nature arises when she admits that she would do things simply to get in trouble. This attention-seeking behavior likely resulted from being made to feel invisible in contrast to her beautiful older sister. Maha also admits that she knows about Karim because she was secretly reading Nada’s diary. The revelation explains how she knows so much about Karim while simultaneously setting up the book’s climactic scene.
As a joyful reprieve from the tension that built between Karim and Maha the night before, they find they cannot stop laughing at the process of milking Black Beard, the goat Maha found. Foreshadowing the sexual tension building between the two characters, Karim jumps on Maha and pretends to be a monster; in the tent that night, Karim pulls Maha’s braid playfully.
The atmosphere of happiness is undermined by the sudden loss of Black Beard, who presumably trod on a landmine and exploded. The incident triggers Maha’s trauma of losing her family and she finally opens up about what it was like to see Nada’s dead body. Even in death she was beautiful, her breasts were perfect, and Maha felt envious. Maha reveals that she feels guilty for having wanted bad things to happen to her sister before she died; she doesn’t understand why perfect Nada would die while Maha, a monster, would survive. Karim tries to console her and disabuse her of her survivor’s guilt, but he is unable to tell her that he wouldn’t rather be with Nada.
The sexual tension that has been building between Karim and Maha erupts when Karim wakes to find that he is groping her breast. The difference between the pleasure he felt in his dream and the reality of cupping her tiny, child’s chest leaves him disgusted with himself for having been aroused by a child. His horror is compounded when Maha feels rejected by his repulsion. The motif of Nada’s breasts arises for the last time when Maha suggests that he would prefer her breasts to Maha’s. When Karim says she doesn’t even have breasts, Maha knows how best to wound him back: giving the full context of the line in which Nada wrote that Karim was perfect, Maha reveals that Nada qualified the statement by saying that she preferred another boy.
However, Maha’s tendency to lie leads Karim to wonder if Nada had really written what Maha said. Ultimately, Karim’s brief separation from Maha leads him to see how he was in the wrong for insulting her. Really it was his own guilt that caused him to push her away; he acknowledges the hypocrisy of saying she doesn’t have breasts when a moment earlier he had found her breasts arousing. Karim’s change of heart comes too late though; the cry he hears foreshadows the novel’s tragic climax. He runs down the hill to discover that Maha has been raped and killed.
