White Masks (31 page)

And he got up and left.

And the visits started. To start with, he told me they had decided to give my mother a stipend of 1,000 lira a month, as a sort of living allowance. Then on the seventh-day memorial, he came in carrying big red and blue posters.

“They're even bigger than the ones they made for Ahmad,” my mother remarked.

“Yeah, we've changed the format,” he said. “We're making them larger now.”

And he started telling us how he had plastered the walls of the city with them.

“Everybody must see the martyr's picture - especially a martyr as unique as Khalil Ahmad Jaber. It's not every day that a fifty-year-old man is killed
in such a barbaric way - God forbid! Everyone must see his picture. We've hung it everywhere. The walls of Beirut are plastered with his picture.”

My mother smiled. It was the first time since my father's disappearance that I had seen her smile. She picked up the posters and as she gazed into his face with tears in her eyes, she murmured: “Dear, dear Abu Ahmad, you deserve far more than this.”

Then she hung one in the living room, another one in the bedroom and put away the rest of them in her wardrobe. He'd brought a lot of posters with him, around two hundred of them.

Then he left.

After that, my mother started going to the party office frequently. When I asked her why, she said she was following up with them about the marble gravestone.

“They're going to erect a big marble gravestone. It's going to be the biggest one in the whole of the Martyrs' Cemetery. It's going to be really beautiful! And I've asked them to change the marble on Ahmad's grave. They said they'd consider it. It's not easy, the man in charge told me, because they can't give him preferential treatment. They have to treat him the same as all the others. But he said he'd think about it. So I keep going to see what they've decided. They promised that Abu Ahmad's tombstone would be ready in two weeks.”

“But, Mother, that doesn't make sense,” I told her.

“What do you mean? Anyway, what do you know? You don't understand anything and your husband's just a dope-head.”

I told her Nadeem had changed. She didn't believe me.

“Don't be fooled,” she said, “I know him. I know what men are like. Just
you wait and see, he'll be gambling and smoking again in no time. But watch those children of yours, young lady, you've got a baby now. Goddamn that husband of yours, why did he have to name him Hassan?”

I had told Nadeem I wanted to name the baby Ahmad, but he wouldn't hear of it.

“We're going to call him Hassan,” he said, “after Abu Saïd, God rest his soul in peace.”

“So you prefer Abu Saïd to my brother, eh?”

“Abu Saïd was my friend.”

And so we called the baby Hassan, and Nadeem even nicknamed him Abu Saïd. “I'll do as I please,” he says.

Well, let him, and I'll do the same. But, still, I call the baby Hassan. It doesn't make any sense for me to call him Ahmad and for Nadeem to call him Hassan. And since that's his name, I call him Hassan.

But my mother . . . I really worry about her. She frightens me. She's not herself anymore. Whenever I go and visit her, I find her sitting in Father's room, staring at the posters all laid out on the bed. She sits there for hours on end. When I yell at her and tell her it's enough, she jumps up, gathers them together carefully, and puts them back in the wardrobe. As if they constituted her entire worldly wealth! I don't understand how she can think that! It makes no sense: she gets a martyr's stipend of 1,500 lira now. And I slip money her way too, I don't dare tell Nadeem though. He never asks how I spend the housekeeping money, poor dear, that's his one quality - he's generous to a fault. He always gives me whatever I ask him for.

What I want to know is what she does with all that money she's getting. Once I asked her, but she wouldn't tell me. She started saying that life had
become very expensive and the
sheikha
charged a lot. What
sheikha,
I said, but she wouldn't answer.

Then, one day she said that Father had asked her to hang his posters throughout our neighborhood, and she wondered whether Nadeem would do it. I questioned how it was possible for Father to speak to her since he was dead. She said it had been his spirit.

“What spirit?”

“Oh, I had his spirit summoned. And he, his spirit I mean, asked me to do it.”

I really lost it then. I told her that if she carried on with all that superstitious mumbo jumbo, it would be the end of us. But I regretted it when I got home. Maybe she was right, maybe . . . who knows? Everyone says the
sheikha
has miraculous powers. Maybe she really could summon spirits.

So I went back to my mother's. I found her staring at the posters again.

“Didn't you ask him who killed him?” I said.

“I've asked him several times, but every time we ask, the coffee cup stops moving. The
sheikha
says it means he doesn't want to answer.”

“More likely it means that he doesn't know,” I said.

“No,” she replied. “The
sheikha
told me that when the cup is still, it means that the spirit doesn't want to answer. When it doesn't know, it says so, but when it doesn't want to answer, then the cup stops moving across the table.”

I thought I might go and visit the
sheikha
myself one day and have her summon my father's spirit. I'd ask him to tell me about the murderer. I know he'd answer me, I'm sure he would. He wouldn't tell my mother because he knows how she is.

But then I got scared. Even though I don't believe in all that stuff, it still scares me. Spirits are spooky and Nadeem would kill me if he found out. So I didn't go.

And now, you know what's happening to her? Someone told me they saw my mother on the street one day with Abu Khalil, the neighbor. They had all these posters with them, she'd hand him one and he'd plaster it on the wall. When I told her this had to stop, she denied it all. But I know that Abu Khalil is always over at her place, whenever I go he's there. And as soon I arrive, he leaves.

People are gossiping about him spending all his time visiting her. He's alone now, his wife's been dead a long time, and after his son died, his daughter-in-law took their little boy and went back to her parents'.

It really scares me. Nadeem thinks Mother has lost her senses, that she cares only about Abu Khalil and those posters and not her grandchildren.

And I'm scared.

CHAPTER VII

Provisional Epilogue

This is no tale.

The fate of Khalil Ahmad Jaber was indeed a tragic one.

But the greater problem remains: the murderer remains unidentified. We have a mystery murderer.

The people I questioned during the course of my investigation felt they could not identify the murderer. Some said they simply didn't know. Anyway, had they known, they wouldn't have told me, and had they told me, I wouldn't have divulged anything. And even assuming I had - or could have done so-I certainly wouldn't have dared to put it down in writing.

But is
that
the problem?

Is the identification of the murderer the problem? Would it help us understand the motives for the crime?

I don't think so.

No. Even assuming the murderer
was
identified, and the motives of the crime
were
known, even if, finally, the murderer
were
put to death, it wouldn't change anything. People say that putting murderers to death serves as a deterrent to others but, in reality, no one is being deterred. Murderers are executed and nothing changes. Take for example, the two men hanged for the murder of the Ibrahim family-a man, his wife, and their daughter - whose bodies were buried in a fallow field near the village of Maghdousheh. The ripple effect was nil. Witness the murder of Khalil Ahmad Jaber.

I find myself completely baffled: this author feels he really doesn't know what happened in his story and that he's not in full possession of the facts - whereas normally, an author is supposed to know all the details of his story, especially the ending. He's supposed to let the ending unfold gradually and slowly, so that the reader can draw his own conclusions.

But in the case of this story, the author doesn't know anything, and he also hasn't been able to present the facts in the gradual and slow manner necessary to both convince and entertain the reader. And when the author's in the dark, the plot really does thicken. It could have been Ali Kalakesh who did it, or Fatimah Fakhro, or Sameer Amro, or Fahd Badreddin, or Zayn'Alloul, or maybe Abu Saïd, or even Nadeem Najjar, or even, why not, Elias Khoury, or yet another?

Let us turn the enigma on its head and view it from a slightly different angle: in whose interest was it to kill Khalil Ahmad Jaber? Logically, nobody's, for Khalil Ahmad Jaber had no enemies, nor was he involved in anything remotely shady. He was a most transparent man.

So then, it could have been suicide. While that is a distinct possibility, it has been set aside on two counts: first, the forensic pathologist's report, which clearly demonstrates that the victim could not have shot himself, given the position of the corpse when it was found. Even assuming that Khalil Ahmad Jaber
had
discovered some novel and unprecedented way of killing himself, it is impossible that he would have mutilated himself in that cruel way. The forensic pathologist's report is quite unequivocal: the martyr was clearly tortured; his body bore the telltale marks.

Second, the rarity of suicides in Beirut: I don't know of a single Arab writer who has committed suicide, aside from Tayseer Subool. Oh, they despair alright, their writings are full of ranting and angst, but they don't commit suicide . . . even though the suicide of a writer might have a huge impact. Anyhow, I shouldn't be going off on tangents: Khalil Ahmad Jaber was not a writer, I mean he didn't have that particular sensibility that writers and artists possess, and if writers aren't committing suicide, surely ordinary law-abiding citizens - without any of the writer's heightened sensibility - aren't about to do so.

That said, I knew a man who committed suicide. But he wasn't a writer, he was a tailor. I barely remember the story, I was six years old then. I was out playing on the street with the kids from my neighborhood. We were playing
shalleek,
a somewhat complicated game where you start by throwing a sharpened pole, like a stake, right into the middle of a circle drawn on the ground with a stick. The one who succeeds in doing that goes first; he has to hit the stake hard enough with a stick to make it catapult into the air and fall as far away as possible. My father forbade me playing this game because it was dangerous, especially for our eyes. Anyway, there we were playing
shalleek,
when all of a sudden we heard all this screaming and carrying-on coming from the tailor's house. Everyone ran - the entire street, including us children, ran to see what was happening.

As I stepped into the house, I saw, in the middle of a crowd of men and women in tears, my father holding the tailor's wife by the hand. As soon as he caught sight of me, he let go of her hand and came towards me.

“Go home,” he said.

When I asked him what was happening, he replied that the neighbor had committed suicide.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“That means he committed suicide, that he's dead. Now, go on home!”

Later, I heard him tell my mother that the tailor had committed suicide in Rawsheh - he'd plunged off the waterfront road and his bloated corpse was found floating off Ouza'ï.

What did he mean, “committed suicide in Rawsheh”? I thought people went there to swim, around and under Pigeon Rock - the way I did many years later, with my beautiful girlfriend, Surayya. We would paddle together on a
hasakeh
to swim around the Rock. Poor Surayya, she's married and fat now, nothing like she used to be. When I ran into her outside the American University Hospital, I hardly recognized her.

The tailor committed suicide in Rawsheh, where everyone swam! I used to imagine my swimming there one day and bumping into a corpse, but when I eventually did, there were no corpses. There was just Surayya. Surayya was everywhere: beside me, around me, with me. She would plunge underwater and swim away, and though I chased her, over and over again, I could
never catch her - although, Mr. Nohad, the barber, did. He came along and caught her alright, and he transformed her into another woman.

Anyway, getting back to the point, Khalil Ahmad Jaber did not commit suicide: ergo, he was killed. But we don't know who killed him. And if, to this day, we do not know who killed the political strongman and powerful leader, Kamal Jumblatt,
¹¹
how will we ever find out who killed Khalil Ahmad Jaber?

It wasn't for lack of trying, either. I spent months investigating and reading to try and establish the facts. I must have smoked thousands of cigarettes sitting at my desk, with an aching back, trying to figure out what happened ... to no effect.

So now, dear reader, you too may feel as bewildered as I do. Faced with the impossibility of discovering the truth, you must doubt, as I do, the reported incident itself, as well as people's accounts. I'm sure one of those clever literary critics is going to say that I'm making a mountain out of a molehill. I can just hear him saying, but surely Beirut is just like any other city, full of ordinary people leading ordinary lives, going to work, eating, sleeping, having sex, having children, dying, celebrating festivals, buying chocolate eggs, sugared almonds, and
maa'moul.
While all of that is true, I don't know how one can reconcile that assertion with my story.