Constellations

Back at the theater in Tripoli, it was the year 1885, the first theater in the Middle East.
The vendor woman, an old Alawite, told us that once they had rolled the red carpet all the
way from the harbor to the theater for Oum Kalthoum to perform at the glorious Ottoman building.
There was nothing but rubble to be seen now, and the sound of diggers and hammers.
The Ingea Theater was no more. Now I recalled, it was Rabih Mroué who had asked Catherine Deneuve
in that film, "You wanted to see, I also want to see but I can't seem to. Do you see that?"
And the truth is that neither of us would see anything, but diggers, hammers and rubble.
It wasn't only the theater, but the city and the whole country, there was nothing to see but rubble.
At some point I wanted to ask him if maybe the whole world was made of rubble now.
As we drove away, he told me: "You know, we, the Lebanese and the Jews, we are perhaps the first
peoples to have advanced from the idea of nationalism." I nodded and woke up from the still quiet of
the highway and heard at last the delicate voice.

"Do you see that?" He asked me. "The constellations on the sky stood steeply on their heads,
all the stars had made an about-turn, but the moon, buried under the featherbed of clouds
which were lit by its unseen presence, seemed still to have before her an endless journey and,
absorbed in her complicated heavenly procedures, did not think of dawn."
Does the sky look the same everywhere? I didn't ask that question, if only because my vague
knowledge of science provided the answer. "Do you remember when I first saw you?" I asked him.
And he was thinking the same thing I was thinking. "I shall never forget that luminous journey
on that brightest of winter nights. The colored map of the heavens expanded into an immense dome,
on which there loomed fantastic lands, oceans and seas, marked with the lines of stellar currents
and eddies, with the brilliant steaks of heavenly geography." He didn't answer my question and
insisted on driving into the village that suddenly carved itself out before the entrance of Batroun.