White Masks (28 page)

“Poor Ahmad . . . so young and innocent . . . He'd gone to fight, not to die . . . It was his destiny, that's what it was ... It was written,” he told Nada.

He wanted her to get a grip on herself and come home. But all she did was cry. So Nadeem left her at her parents' and took care of the children; initially, he sent them over to his sister's, in Ras el-Nabeh, but after a while it wasn't feasible to leave them there any longer. The children should come home, he said, and so should she. But she wouldn't.

Nadeem Najjar found her behavior puzzling. There she sat in her parents' house all day, drinking coffee and chatting nonchalantly with visitors as if nothing had happened . . . But no sooner than he said something to her, she started to cry.

One day he yelled at her, saying this really had to stop.

Nada had been sitting beside her mother, next to the blind sheikh who had just reached the end of the Qur'anic recitation, when all of a sudden she burst into tears. Just like that, out of the blue, with the living room full of people. Tears streaming down her face, she got up and went into her brother's room and came out carrying pictures of him, sobbing.

This really had to stop. It was becoming contagious: the mother was starting up, and soon the other women in the room, none of whom Nadeem Najjar had ever seen before, were crying too. Her face puffy and flushed, Nada started keening. One of the women went and fetched a bottle of orange
blossom water, and as she dabbed some across Nada's face to soothe her, Nada's moaning only intensified. A whole week had gone by since the boy had died, and she still wouldn't come home or stop this endless wailing!

All the men in the room had their eyes on Nadeem.

Turning to him, one of them exclaimed, “Poor child!” and another enjoined: “As God is my witness, that's a real sister! She's got a sister's heart. A gem of a sister she is!”

Then another chimed in: “
Ya Allah,
such an emotional girl, she's going to die of grief!”

And a fourth added, “It's all over for the one who's gone.”

Nadeem saw how they were all looking at him. He jumped to his feet, grabbed her by the wrist, and tried to pull her out of the armchair. As she clung on, he began shouting at her.

“Get up! Get up, damn you! Enough of your crying, enough of dying! Come on! Get off this armchair! You're coming home with me, you stupid woman!”

The mother took no notice, she seemed indifferent. The father, Khalil Ahmad Jaber, carried on with a political discussion he was having with two other men. One of the mourners, a friend of Nadeem's, remonstrated with him.

“No Nadeem, don't do that ... Leave her alone. It's her brother . . . come on, man, let her be, let her cry her heart out, it's good for her; it's cleansing.”

“This isn't crying! This is idiocy! Get up, woman, get up! I said we're going!”

“Leave me alone!” she screamed.

All eyes turned to Nada.

“Home, I said. We're going home!”

“Good gracious, he won't let the poor woman cry . . .”

“I have nothing against crying,” Nadeem shouted back, “but brother, this isn't crying. This is a torrent of tears, it's a travesty of grief... This is
haram!
The woman has lost her senses.”

And he yanked her out of her chair.

Dazed, Nada stood up and followed her husband out of the room, as everyone looked on. And so it was that she went home. But ever since, she has felt totally estranged from “that man,” as she now calls him . . .

 

How could he do such a thing, and in front of all those people? What did he expect, that I wouldn't cry over my brother? Since when was crying forbidden? He was my brother, after all! Had it been his brother, I can assure you, the world in its entirety would have heard the crying. But he acted like that because it was
my
brother! And why wouldn't he let me wear black? He says one shouldn't for a martyr, a so-called war hero . . . I'd like to know what that is anyway! What does it mean to be a martyr? Does it mean Ahmad's not dead? Martyr or not, you're dead, regardless. I didn't agree, but he wouldn't let me say what I thought, or anyone else for that matter. How, how could we leave the corpse in the hospital like that and not bring it home? They didn't even wash him, they buried him the way he was! And we were made to feel like strangers. It was Nadeem who spoke with the
shabab,
as if he were Ahmad's family, while my father stood there like a complete stranger. And after all that, he expected me to stop crying! The truth is, he was jealous of Ahmad . . . Imagine, being jealous of a dead man! To think
that I have a husband who is jealous of my dead brother! What a husband! Oh God, what a husband!

Well, of course I love him . . . can a woman not love her husband? And he used to be such a fine husband, too; he was hard-working and life was good,
al-hamdulillah!
My mother had had her doubts, though. She thought a pinball arcade was basically gambling. “I'm not marrying my daughter off to a gambler,” she said. But it was Father who settled it - “He's a good boy,” he told her, “from a decent family, and he's also from the neighborhood.” I agreed with Father. Nadeem was a handsome young man, he was full of life. I'd see him driving about in his little car, and when he offered me a ride to school one day, he looked at me in that very special way, all smiles and charm. So I agreed. He was better than my father, a civil servant. Civil servants have such an insufferable life! All Father ever did was tell us about telephone exchanges and the new electronic systems the new minister had ordered. He was obsessed with telephones! And then there was no more work for him during the war. Whereas with Nadeem, business went right on, people didn't stop playing pinball. Even when there was no electricity, business carried on-I don't know how, we had no electricity for six months! He told me he'd bought an electric generator, and that he was also selling ice cream on the side. Things were even better than before, he said.

He was rarely home though. And when he came back late at night, he reeked of araq ... and something else . . . the Lord alone knows what! He was different somehow. I knew what he was like when he drank araq, but this smell that was on his breath, this was different. But I didn't dare ask.

The truth is he was smoking hashish. When people said he was passing joints around with “the boys,” I didn't want to know. According to him,
business had improved, things were good, and he wasn't going to be scared off by the war and the shells falling on our heads.

It was Ahmad who told me. He was back from the frontlines, he'd come home to a hero's welcome.

“War is war,” he said “and it is our duty to fight.”

I told him I didn't agree and that Nadeem was right. Why was it our duty to fight? We're not fighting a war, we're rushing to our deaths. I wanted to say something else too but he cut me off and gave me this little lecture . . . I don't know how he came up with it.

“That was true a long time ago,” he said, “in the days of our forebears, under the Ottomans, when Father's uncles all perished in Safarbarlek - they died of hunger and squalor, not from the fighting. But all that's over now, we're no longer led to our death like sheep to slaughter. We are the masters of our destinies, we are fashioning our own future.”

So I said to him, “You know how it is, Nadeem being a family man and all ...”

That really set him off. “Your husband's no man!” he ranted. “He's just using the kids as an excuse not to join up. If that's what it really is, why is he spending all his time hanging out with those guys?”

“Which guys?” I asked.

“Forget it, forget I ever said anything.”

I asked again, and he said the same thing.

“I want to know,” I insisted.

So he began telling me about this bunch of so-called combatants who were nothing but hooligans and gangsters and who hung out in Nadeem's shop smoking dope. “They're the ones who do the looting,” he said, “during
the fighting.” Nadeem didn't accompany them, he added, but he had opened his doors to them, and the shop had become a den of iniquity and vice.

“Not only is that wrong,” he said, “but it's shameful. Once we take over, they'll all go to jail.”

“Including Nadeem?” I asked.

“He'll be the first to go.”

Now I understood why Ahmad rarely visited us anymore, and why he and Nadeem had fallen out, but as a woman what could I do? I had tried, once, to tell him . . .

It was the middle of the night, and I wasn't able to sleep. I was sitting up in the hallway, I'd settled our little boy there, the shelling was so bad that night . . . It was two in the morning, I thought the shelling was never going to end ... I was so afraid . . . Every time I heard a shell ripping through the sky with that high-pitched whistle and then landing with a wailing thud nearby, I would huddle over my little boy to try and protect him with my body. Nadeem wasn't home, and I was really worried about him that night. I was sure he'd been hit. But there was nothing I could do except wait, and weep. As I lay huddled against my little boy, crying, he finally arrived. He opened the front door and walked in humming, as if nothing was wrong, as if all those shells were nothing at all. He refused to lie down with us in the hallway and said I should come to bed as usual.

“And what about the boy?” I asked.

“Leave him there if you like.”

“But I'm afraid.”

“There's no need to be.”

So I followed him into the bedroom. He undressed, put on his pajamas,
and lay down. The room reeked of that strange smell. I snapped, I felt I couldn't take any more - what kind of a life was this, by God, my mother was right!

“I won't have it,” I told him. I swear that's all I said. I didn't say anything bad; all I said was that he was smoking dope, that the shop had become a hashish den, and that he wasn't looking after us properly. Honestly, I didn't say anything.

He went ballistic! He hurled himself against me and started hitting me with his fists and gnashing his teeth like a madman. How dare he . . . He'd never done that before . . . this was the first time . . . I couldn't cry out, I was afraid to wake the little one. He just kept hitting me and hitting me, and, in the end, I couldn't hold out any longer, I bit down on the pillow and began to sob. The blows kept coming as he screamed and cursed and carried on, saying things I would be ashamed to remember, let alone repeat!

Now, honestly, do I look like a whore to you? He told me, his wife, that I was a whore! He said all women were whores, and he could do as he pleased. And, then, he took me, you understand what I mean, he had sex with me! Can you imagine? I didn't want to, I told him, but he just did as he pleased. He slept with me, and then he sat up in bed and told me to make him a cup of coffee!

“Coffee now ... At three in the morning . . . ?”

“Yes, now. I want a coffee, now.”

Going to the kitchen, I thought I would collapse . . . my legs felt like jelly and my eyes were stinging. But I made him his coffee. He lit a cigarette and started talking-I could hardly understand what he was saying, though, because he was slurring all his words. He rambled on and on, and I told him
I agreed with everything he said, even though none of it made any sense to me. I had to force myself to listen to him and was having a hard time keeping my eyes open.

“This is the beautifulest war!” That's what he said. And then: “It's shit! Yes, war is shit. But it's beautiful. Oh my, the women out there! And the guys, you should see those young guys, may God protect them all! Such a war, praise the Lord, such a beautiful war! . . . I'm all in favor of it now . . . I'm into the big time . . . you know what I mean . . . the kingpin! Yes,
me!
You understand? . . .

“Bah! You understand nothing! No one understands anything! Those guys are real tough, they're brutes. You know the butcher, Abu Saïd, yes, our butcher? Well, listen to what he just did . . . He closed the shop, rounded up a few of the guys, and with his assistants from the shop, they all set off together. His is a nice, tight little operation, those guys only go where the going is good, they only fight where there is the really good stuff, you know, fridges, couches, stoves, gold, silver . . . Now, there's this guy, his name is Sami al-Kurdi, and - and, if it weren't for your dear brother, the son of a ... they call themselves honorable men, he and those boys of his! Honorable, my eye! Me, I'd like to know what that means! . . . Honorable! . . . Like a dog . . . or a donkey, perhaps? It's honorable, is it, that they do the dying and others rake it all in! Well, let me tell you, with Abu Saïd it's like this: he rakes it in
and
he doesn't die. Here's to you Abu Saïd!” And raising his cup, Nadeem slurps some of his coffee and asks: “And you, Madam, what do you think of that? I haven't heard your view on the matter, Sitt Nada.”

Me? I wanted to go to sleep, that was my view.

So, back to Sami al-Kurdi . . . Tonight was Sami's night. God knows where he gets his stuff from . . . He walked into the arcade and asked me where Abu Saïd was. I told him he hadn't arrived yet, so he sat and waited for him. He poured himself a glass of araq and said Abu Saïd was late.

“He must be on his way, where's he gonna go?” I told him.

“You sure he's coming?”

“Of course I'm sure. He was probably just held up somewhere. He's bound to come. Where's he gonna go?”

An hour later, Abu Saïd shows up, with four of his best boys in tow. Some of the finest he has. The best, I swear, the very best . . . they pay up and get to do as they please! Not like your idiot brother. You heard me, milady, yes that idiot who pontificates about principles! I'd like to know where he picks them up, those principles of his . . . I'll tell you where he gets them from . . . from the open sewers on our streets! Principles, my eye!