White Masks (9 page)

I told her how I'd read in a cheap magazine that bar girls drank tea with their customers. But this girl was drinking real whiskey, strong stuff, and the magazines were lying. Musa ordered another bottle.

“But we haven't even finished the first one,” I pointed out.

“Oh, but this is going to be the mother of all nights!
Ya hala wa ya marhaba
-
a warm welcome to all friends -
ya akhi!
You're my friend and I want to celebrate . . .”

I asked the brunette what her name was.

“Anastasia,” she said.

“You're not from here, are you?”

She answered in a strange and lilting Arabic, part Egyptian and part Lebanese, that she was originally Greek, but born in Alexandria. I drank to that and told her that Greek girls were famous in Lebanon, and we talked about Marika Spiridon, the ruling madam of the red-light district. My friend raised his glass and offered a toast to Marika and to all the women of the Third World. Then he leaned towards me and whispered that we should drink to Nadia's health.

“Shame on you, Musa . . . How tasteless!”

“Ah, come on, man! Women are like that . . . they're all whores at heart. There is a whore lurking inside every woman, isn't there?”

“That's just stupid drunken talk!”

“Ah, ‘women, women ... their cunning is great indeed'!”
¹

I asked the brunette what brought her to Beirut. She told me that during the war, she'd moved to Cyprus, but that she preferred Beirut. “Even with all the shelling and the fighting, Beirut is still better than any other place.”

She edged a little closer and laid her hand on my head, but I was watching my friend and beginning to feel really concerned about him: he was so drunk, he was about to keel over, and the girl sitting beside him was taking
absolutely no notice whatsoever; she was busy following the comings and goings of the other patrons-a couple of young thugs in particular who had just walked in with their pistols well-displayed for all to see. We seemed like complete strangers in this world, my friend and I.

As Musa slumped over the tabletop, breathing heavily, the girl looked over the rounded hump of his back and said to me:

“Your friend here, he isn't good for anything.”

“What's that?”

“He's useless. I don't know what his story is, but the poor man's useless. Only yesterday . . .”

“No, no, you're wrong . . . He's just ... tired.”

“Uh-oh, don't tell me you're the same!”

“Shut up, bitch!”

“Listen, yesterday we went together but he couldn't do it. He put on some music, then he started drinking - all night long, he wouldn't do it and kept saying he was tired. Let's leave it till tomorrow, he said. And now here we are tomorrow . . . we were just leaving, he and I, but as soon as he saw you coming, he latched on to you . . . only God knows what's the matter with him. He looks healthy enough.”

Then she turned to a uniformed man hovering next to her, took his hand and lightly shook it, and winked at him. The man left the bar.

“Mmmm . . . God is my witness, there's nothing like an officer - now there's a real man! Not like your lot!”

I strained to see whether my friend was aware of anything that was going on, but he seemed to be in a complete stupor. I grabbed hold of him and pulled him to his feet; just then the waiter came with the check, and
Musa, suddenly appearing to regain consciousness, fished out his wallet and insisted on paying.

We stepped out into the dark and empty streets. Musa staggered and almost fell, and then began to throw up. After wiping his face with a tissue, he teetered alongside me.

“The bitch! . . . Says I'm useless . . . eh? Bitches, all of them ... and now the other one wants to travel!” He told me how Nadia wanted to go to Paris for a fortnight and that he felt obliged to agree. “What the eye doesn't see the heart doesn't grieve over. Let her sleep with dogs if it pleases her!”

We got a cab; Musa was maudlin by now. When we reached my house and I asked him in for a cup of coffee, he was quick to accept my offer. Stepping inside the building, we found a guy asleep and snoring: wrapped up in a winter coat, his head resting on his left arm, eyes shut and mouth hanging open.

“What's this,” Musa said, “you've got a tramp sleeping in the vestibule of your building! Come on now!”

“He's a very odd man,” I replied. “I often see him wandering the streets, fiddling with a bunch of paper, and hovering around the walls of the neighborhood.”

“And you let him? He's disgusting and disease-ridden. And what do you mean, he hovers around the walls? You should throw him out!”

Awoken by my friend's voice, the man jumped to his feet and scuttled away. We went upstairs, and I went straight to the kitchen to make the coffee; when I returned to the living room, I found Musa asleep on the couch. I left him there, tiptoed to my bedroom, and went to sleep. When I woke up the next morning he was gone - he'd probably woken early and left.

As for the late Khalil, I saw him again that afternoon. I was walking down the street when I caught sight of him in his overcoat; he was feverishly shredding posters and trying to erase the graffiti from the wall. A bucket of lime by his side, first he'd strip off whatever was on the wall, then whitewash it. I thought maybe he worked for an advertising firm, taking down old posters and replacing them with new ones. But when I got up close, I was shocked to see he was stuffing the shreds of paper into his mouth and chewing them. I also realized that he wasn't sticking anything new up on the wall: he was just whitewashing it. After brushing the wall with lime, he wiped his palm across the freshly painted surface, leaving traces of his handprints and splashing white drops of paint down onto the sidewalk.

I tried to speak to him, but as soon as he saw me he started, hastily gathered his things, and ran off, as if he had remembered the incident of the night before. When I got back home, I found both Aida and her mother in tears.

“What's going on?” I asked. My wife led me to the bedroom and locked the door behind us. “It's that man,” she said.

“What about him?”

She told me that Aida was frightened by him, that she'd seen his member when he was urinating against the wall, and then he turned in her direction and she saw something black. “I don't know if he took a step toward her or not, the girl won't say, but, damn it, who
is
this man sleeping on our street, and what's he doing there anyway?”

I raced downstairs to find him, and decided to go and ask Comrade Ayyash to put a stop to this. But then I remembered that he wasn't in charge of our neighborhood anymore, and as I retraced my steps to the house,
there was the man again: sitting on the sidewalk by himself, looking frightened. He didn't stir when I approached, as if he hadn't even noticed me. I asked him what his name was. He didn't answer. I raised my voice.

“Can't you hear?”

He looked up at me, wide-eyed.

“What are you doing here?”

He shrugged.

“Why do you rip the posters from the walls? Is it your job? You're nothing but a pervert, aren't you? Why did you frighten my daughter? . . . You know, I could-I could have you locked up . . . I'm going to tell the militiamen about you and you'll see ... You don't believe me? Come on, get out of here, brother . . . just leave us alone.”

I watched him get up slowly, he seemed not to have heard me: he just stood up, gathered his belongings together - the paintbrush, the bucket of lime, the torn papers - and walked away. And I never saw him again.

Poor Khalil Jaber! I swear I didn't know he'd end up being murdered. I'm sure he meant no harm, either to me or to Aida. I just happened to tell Comrade Ayyash about it . . . I ran into him on the street one day and told him. I was trying to be funny, but Ayyash took it seriously and said he'd let the officer in charge of our neighborhood know. He also asked me about the car. I told him it had never come back but that I'd begun to get used to living without it.

When I told my friend Musa Kanj that the man had disappeared, he seemed relieved and said we shouldn't allow beggars like him to “deface our city.” I told him he wasn't a beggar.

“Khalil Ahmad Jaber is no beggar,” I said. “I tried to give him money once and he refused. He's just a man of strange ways.”

Musa, who wasn't really interested in what I was saying, related that his wife had come back from abroad and that everything was going according to plan. And he thanked me for my good taste in refurbishing his new house.

“Excellent job, my friend . . . Even nicer than what one finds in Europe ...!”

Poor Khalil Jaber, I wonder who killed him? I can't imagine that anyone had anything to gain by his murder. He was just a poor guy, looking like one of those beggars, he had nothing - and he wouldn't hurt a fly!

It's true we found him annoying, but these days one's annoyed with one's own self. Such dreadful times we live in . . . all we hear about are crimes and stories of murder ... Is there no end to this?

My wife says the only solution is praying and so I pray. But praying isn't everything. There are other things, real problems I mean, and I don't know the solution to those.

And the poor martyr, Khalil . . . I swear he's a martyr . . . I feel ashamed of myself . . . but I didn't know that he was
the
Khalil Ahmad Jaber who would be murdered and whose picture would be in all the papers. I swear, had I known, I would've taken him in and cared for him . . . What can we do? It was God's will!

CHAPTER III

White Walls

 

Following the discovery of Khalil Ahmad Jaber's body, Fatimah was repeatedly detained for questioning, and, while she eventually admitted to her
relationship with the deceased, she denied any involvement in his murder. Given the lack of solid evidence against her, and also because of her genuinely cooperative attitude, the strongmen in charge of the local party office concluded she was innocent.

 

“Now what! . . . If it's not one thing, it's another . . . nothing but trouble, from the day we are born!”

Fatimah Fakhro doesn't understand what is happening to her . . . This man had nothing to do with her, nothing whatsoever ... First her eldest, Ali, had fallen down outside and pierced his skull with a nail, then her old man's grizzly death, and the hullabaloo over Professor Nabeel's intercession on her behalf, and now this . . . It was just one calamity after another! When she asks them why they've dragged her here, her question is met with scowls and a barrage of questions.

But how did they find out? She didn't tell anyone, she didn't even know anything about the man's death until Sitt Elham, the landlord's wife, told her the body had been found; then it turned out that their neighbor, the engineer Ali Kalakesh, also knew the dead man - he'd seen him around the neighborhood, she said.

That was the day she told her. Sitt Elham was standing in the doorway of the kitchen, puffing on a cigarette and gossiping, as Fatimah cooked. She told the lady that she too had seen him around the neighborhood, and that she had even spoken to him. Sitt Elham said that was a rash thing to have done.

“Yes, and I wept, even though I didn't know him.”

The men in the party office glower at her. One is smoking; he exhales right into her face and says: “We know everything, every single thing that goes on around here. Nothing escapes us.”

So she confesses. She feels that since they know everything there's no point in lying. She tells them how she'd noticed him sitting on the sidewalk and asked him what he was doing in their neighborhood; and how he had asked for a piece of bread, and she'd given it to him. She is frightened, these men know everything . . . still, she doesn't tell them every last little thing. And they believe her! So they don't know everything after all, and she can get away with a fib!

Fatimah tells them that she saw him sitting on the sidewalk and told him to go away. Then she winds up her testimony by saying that she never saw him again, that this man surely had nothing to do with her husband's murder. And besides, she'd never seen him before.

Then they set about beating her; one of them, however, the tall one, after raising his hand as if to strike her, caresses her face. She sobs for a long time; then, after threatening her, they set her free.

Misery had trailed her ever since he'd brought her here . . . Leading her by the hand, he'd brought her to Beirut, and she's never been back since. Her husband promised her she'd go back for a visit, but he never kept his promise. He said life was nasty and disgusting over there, that it was better here. And so she lived here - where it was better . . .

She was just a child - she couldn't have been more than twelve - when her father took her to Mr. Mitri Helou's house in Ashrafiyyeh. She'd never seen such buildings before, nor lived anywhere else, nor met people who drank and danced with women! And such an abundance of food, and a
mistress who slept till noon! At first she cried all the time and dreamed of running away, but then, she'd forget for a while, she'd watch TV and forget; she'd see people, Mr. Mitri, his beautiful wife, and their children, she loved them all, and she'd forget.