White Masks (10 page)

On the very rare occasions her father came down from there, her eyes would cloud over as the tears welled up, and he would tell her that he'd be back the following year to take her home. Slowly, however, she forgot. She forgot everything, even her father, so that next time he came, she stared at him vacantly and found nothing to say. He asked her if she was happy, she told him that she was, and she showed him her room and the toys and clothes they'd given her. And then he left.

During all her time in this city, she never seriously thought of going back until she married Mahmud. She told him she wanted to go back there, and he promised she would. Every year he promised. And now where was she to go, with Mahmud dead, and her alone with the children? Where would she go, when she knew nobody? A first cousin on her father's side lives in a building nearby with her husband and children, but they don't pay much attention to her. They came to the funeral and helped out with the expenses and everything, but they still treat her like a stranger . . . and ... they don't feel like family. She feels utterly alone in her predicament . . . And now there's this man, whom she hardly knows and who has brought her nothing but grief...

Her cousin told her that's what you get for marrying Mahmud Fakhro without consulting anyone! But who was she to consult? Her father had stopped coming, most likely he'd passed away. Her cousin told her that he had died working in the fields and that her brothers had gone to Istanbul to
find work. Her mother was long since dead - before she even came to work for Mr. Mitri Helou in Beirut and her father's marriage to that wild-haired shrew! She didn't know anyone to consult.

Mahmud had apparently approached Mr. Mitri, and it was he who told her. The lady of the house came into the kitchen one day and told her that Mr. Mitri wanted to see her in the living room.

She dried her hands, smoothed back her long, flowing hair, and went out to the living room. She remained standing, but Mr. Mitri asked her to sit down in the armchair across from him. Fatimah was surprised: the
khawaja,
or master, had never asked her to sit, nor spoken to her in such a friendly way before.

“Fatimah, my dear, you're like my own daughter,” he began. Then he cleared his throat and looked her straight in the eyes. Fatimah averted her gaze. “And . . . you know . . . well . . . such is the way of the world . . . you know Mahmud, the new caretaker of the building, Mahmud Fakhro. Well, he's come and asked me for your hand in marriage. He's a good boy, I've made inquiries about him - he's a Kurd, like you, and he wants to settle down. You'll remain close by, you know you're like a daughter to us, you'll live with him in the ground-floor quarters . . . and you'll go on working here, nothing will change. Mind you, I didn't make any promises. I said I'd ask you first. So, what do you think?”

Fatimah said nothing. The thing was, that whenever she thought of marriage, she imagined someone like Fadee - tall and fair and soft-spoken, with shy, doe-like eyes . . . But Mahmud . . . well . . . she didn't like him . . . no, it's not that she didn't like him, but he wasn't at all like Fadee . . . He was short and stocky and half-bald, and she could see the thick black hairs
on his legs when he rolled up his trousers to wash the stairs . . . and the way he looked at her and intoned those
mashallahs
whenever she went by! She didn't feel the blood rushing to her ears when she saw him, the way she did when she thought of Fadee.

Fatimah said nothing. Then she burst into tears.

“Listen to me, girl: you're an orphan and this is for the best. You're not a child anymore, you're sixteen, a young woman already . . . And you'll remain right here with us.” Fatimah was crying, and Mr. Mitri got up and patted the shoulder of the weeping Fatimah to comfort her.

 

After that, everything happened very quickly. Mahmud's sister came over and said Fatimah had to wear this white headwrap from now on. Then they took her to his brother's house, which was full of people she didn't know, and Mahmud sat next to her in the middle of the room. There was music, and everybody drank juice and ate sweets. Then everyone left and Fatimah returned to the building with him. When they entered the caretaker's quarters, Fatimah stood expectantly as Mahmud closed the door behind them.

“Take off your clothes,” he ordered, and he turned out the lights and started to undress. Fatimah felt so scared her joints ached. He came up to her, clapped his hand over her mouth and started hitting her. Then he started circling around her, bobbing up and down on his feet and striking her. She tried to scream but his hand was still clamped over her mouth. She was ready to get down on her knees and kiss his hands, why was he hitting her so hard, and with that stick? Then he threw her to the ground, and began ripping off her clothes ... she wanted to tell him not to tear them . . . she would undress by herself, she knew what a man and a woman did when
they were married! But he just tore them off, raised her up toward him and, grunting and moaning, pushed in his thing. Despite the searing pain she felt, she didn't utter a cry - how could she, anyway, with his hand over her mouth - but she wanted to tell him to let go, so she could breathe. But he didn't. And that thing, oh God, the pain, the unbearable pain, it hurt so much . . . then slowly, gradually, his hand let go of her mouth, and he started stroking her, first her body, then her face. And the pain changed . . . she began to feel something similar to when Fadee held her hand once . . . except that it burst. The feeling she'd had then was bursting in her now . . . and Mahmud seemed to be spinning around, it felt like everything was spinning around her. She closed her eyes at this sensation she had never experienced before, and when she opened them again she could make out his darkened face in the shadows. At that moment, she wanted to glue herself to him, to keep the thing inside her throbbing - she really wanted him now - but he pulled out.

Sitting up in bed beside her, he lit a cigarette and started to hum. Now she felt embarrassed, so she got up and asked him to get off the sheet. But when she tried to take a step, the soreness spread all the way down to her feet. Still, she took the sheet into the bathroom and came back to the bare bed.

He was still humming . . . But then he threw his cigarette to the floor, gathered her into his arms and started over again. This time she didn't feel any pain: it was different, he was different. This man, Mahmud, was tender now, kissing her face and neck . . . she wanted to kiss him back, but she felt shy . . . afraid somehow . . . and so she lay in his arms, lips closed and teeth clenched . . . And when he climbed off her for the second time, he didn't light a cigarette, he just rolled over and went to sleep.

And that is how she became Mahmud's wife, and her name became Fatimah Fakhro. And even though he was no different than before the wedding, now she found him attractive - she wanted him to come to her in bed, and longed for the darkness to fall.

Why then did she begin to dread the nights and loathe the man when he climbed off her? Why did the pain return - she didn't dare tell anyone about it - and her belly start to swell? Children, that's why. Sitt Huda always said: “Why do you people have so many children?” And Fatimah wouldn't know what to say. Sitt Huda had only two children, Fadee and Marie, who was studying in Paris, but she, Fatimah, had five of them, and she was pregnant again.

Mahmud would sit outside the entrance of the building all day, while she cooked both upstairs and downstairs. He just sat there, chatting to the shopkeepers, doing nothing - even washing the stairs was her job now, and she didn't dare ask for his help. He only ever took care of her during her confinements. He spent all his time with little Ali - of course, Fatimah loved Ali, she loved all her children - but all Mahmud ever did was sit there playing with Ali in front of the building. All day. Every day.

And Fadee had stopped casting those sideways glances at her, maybe because she'd aged. “I look older than Sitt Huda,” she'd say to Mahmud. But he'd ignore her and keep humming. He'd say the lady wasn't a real woman, anyway.

“Real women bear children . . . But this Sitt Huda, she does nothing all day, while her poor husband toils away.”

Fadee wouldn't even glance at her when he came into the kitchen. Perhaps it was because he was older now, but he was still fair-skinned and had
those doe-like eyes of his that rekindled in her the memory of that strange sensation . . .

She'd been sitting on the bed in her small room darning socks, and Fadee - who was the same age as her, as Sitt Huda liked to point out - had come in one day. He entered her little room just off the kitchen and asked her to make him a cup of coffee. She got to her feet.

“But you never drink coffee.”

“I do now,” he replied, as he puffed on an American cigarette.

She assumed that he was brazen enough to smoke and to drink coffee because no one was home. In any case, she got up. As she filled the coffee pot with water from the tap at the kitchen sink, she felt his hand tremblingly reach for hers. How soft his fingers were under the water! . . . Fatimah felt the blood rushing to her eyes. He stood so close behind her that she could feel his warm breath on her neck, but she didn't dare turn around. She felt him draw closer and the burning sensation in her eyes sharpened. Not even realizing how or why, she drew her hand away and spun around, dropping the coffee pot into the sink. A shudder ran through his body as he stepped back.

“With just a hint of sugar, please.”

And he left the kitchen.

She refilled the coffee pot, lit the gas burner and stood watching over it: first, the bubbles rising to the surface as the water came to the boil, and then the coffee cascading down, mingling with the water, and finally dissolving. She stood there expectantly - with an almost liquid sensation of fear seeping from her belly - and waited for him, expecting him to come back. But he didn't.

She poured the coffee, set the cup on a brass tray, placed beside it a glass which she filled with water, and then carried the tray into the living room. He was sitting, one leg crossed over the other, reading the paper. He neither looked up nor turned to her. He did not say a word. She put the tray down on the table in front of him and stood there.

“Your coffee, Khawaja Fadee.”

He set the paper down very slowly, tapped a cigarette out of the white box of Kents, stood up, and came toward her.

“Cigarette . . . ?”

He drew closer, placed the cigarette between her lips, his hand brushing against her face. He had stepped back and bent down to pick up the matches from the table when the telephone rang. Fadee dashed to answer. Fatimah put the cigarette down on the table and went back to her room to finish the darning.

He didn't come back. He was on the phone a long time: she could hear him, laughing and speaking in French. No, he didn't come back. Then everyone came home, the master, the mistress, and the house filled with the din of the TV ...

And now he stood there, looking away, as though he had forgotten, or as if he were afraid of meeting her gaze.

Gradually, Fatimah forgot how that burning sensation felt. Even with Mahmud it had gone, and it never came back . . . and anyhow, by then she'd become burdened with Ali. Fadee was always gone, Mr. Mitri had become practically an invalid since falling out of bed and dislocating his hip, and Sitt Huda constantly went on about her cholesterol, as she grew fatter by the day.

It was Fadee who had escorted them out of the neighborhood. He came in with Mahmud one day and told them they had to leave. He'd take them as far as the Museum Crossing, he said, and there they'd be able to make their way to West Beirut in a
servees
taxi. Fatimah was instantly overcome by the same feeling she had when Ali fell-a stabbing pain in her gut, and nausea. She was sure that Ali hadn't actually fallen off the roof, but her lips were paralyzed and she cried soundlessly. Looking at him, you'd think that nothing had happened - it was as if Ali weren't his son. A monster, that's what Mahmud was: a monster who had killed Ali! That's what she said to herself whenever she looked over towards Ali's photograph sitting in its black frame on top of the TV.

Anyhow, that day, the day they left, Fadee looked exactly the same as on that other fateful day: trembling from head to foot, his voice shaking as he told them they had to leave, while Mahmud stood by his side, blood gushing from the wounds on his face . . .

Mahmud had told her he was going up to the roof to repair the TV antenna, and the boy had gone up with him. When Mahmud reappeared without him, she thought the boy was playing outside, but she felt uneasy nonetheless: she had worried about him ever since the day he'd come home, blood dripping from his head, telling her he'd fallen on the street and a nail had pierced his skull. And when she'd taken him to the clinic, the doctor had ridiculed her. “A nail, you say? No, that's not possible . . . he does have some abrasions though.” That's what the doctor had said.

But the boy wasn't the same anymore. She couldn't pinpoint when exactly, but he had changed. His father had taken to hitting him over the head, and the shopkeeper for whom Ali worked got so exasperated he
called Mahmud in to tell him about the boy's behavior. The shopkeeper told Mahmud that, one day, when he had asked the boy to make him a cup of coffee, Ali made a brew of salt and pepper instead of coffee and sugar. And then Ali started eating pepper all the time and he stopped going over to the shop to work. He also hit his brothers and sisters, as well as other children from the neighborhood.

Sitt Huda told her she should take him to the doctor because the boy wasn't normal. But Fatimah wouldn't hear of it - it's just because of the nail, she thought. Even though one day, Ali had grabbed little George and fondled him. Mahmud told her all boys went through this, and there was no need to make such a fuss about it. Fatimah tried everything: she prayed for him, she gave him a talking-to, she even dragged him with her whenever she went to market. She'd hold his hand like a small child, but he'd break free and run wild in the street, beating up the neighborhood kids and refusing to go to work ...