A MINOR SCANDAL
619
ishing daughter, takes me aside and advises me not to let him drive me
to Kfar Afca. There's nothing left of Astarte, she says, only a house of
ill-fame and a chapel in honor of the Mother of God! Shall we go to
see the Patriarch, instead? A great, a fantastic man, says Iskandar, who
always covers his eyes in mock-horror at the sight of a priest. At bottom,
he is proud that so many members of his family have taken the robe,
but he insists that there is not a pious man amongst them. . .. We end
by deciding, once again, to drive up into the Mountain.
o
delectable Mountain! Its ancient problem is now all mingled
with mine. Riachy points out monasteries on the hill-tops, so lovingly
terraced, tells an endless series of tales in which Assyrians are confused
with Sumerians, Averroes with Avicenna; and the profoundest continuum
of the Middle East emerges in the ubiquitous sex-cults, still secretly prac–
ticed (he claims) under the cover of Christianity and Islam. There is a
lively tradition of pomography in Arabic literature; the obscene is not
an accident or an outburst but a mode, like the tragic and the comic.
Having recovered this tradition, Riachy is called the Voltaire of the Mid–
dle East. He is a brilliant man, with a taste for juicy language and an
original sensibility. Is it not significant that, after all these weeks, I can
form no clear idea of what this Voltaire thinks?
No matter. Watching the ancient slopes dip and rise, revealing the
blue sea, I tell Iskandar Riachy that the Lebanon does indeed offer a
solution to the Middle East, not in its empty tact but in its Mountain.
The solution, God knows, is a dangerous one; but, having once seen the
ageless misery of the fellah, one cannot think the danger too great.
If
the Lebanese intellectuals are eamest in their desire to transform the
Middle East, they must neither deny the particularism of the Mountain
nor abstract it (as Edde does) from the Arab world; they must use its
example and its enduring strength, deliberately, in order to hasten
th~
disintegration of Islam. Etcetera etcetera. Riachy has fallen asleep.
And I, too, am falling asleep.
We have left Damascus behind, and the Mediterranean coastlands.
There is nothing but the pink suspicion of dawn, under the luminous
clouds. This evening I shall be in Paris, in my thirtieth year, and it is
time to decide who I am. I shall write a letter to my father. Arthur
Koestler is sitting in my studio, denouncing the gratuitous provocation of
my name. What right do I have to bequeath this disease to my children?
That is for my children to decide.... Sartre claims, that we are created
in the eyes of the others. We are
seen
into the situation of the Jew.
Koestler rejoins that there is little, now, for the eye to take hold of. Let
the Jew abolish that little, and the situation disappears.
