White Masks (5 page)

“You can't do that,” I shouted. “He's our son, you brute! First they killed him and now you want to wipe him off the face of the earth!”

I don't know what got into me, but I was screaming like a madwoman. He stared at me vacantly, as if he hadn't heard anything, and went back to what he was doing: muttering and “disappearing” the words methodically, holding the poster down with one hand, rubbing with the eraser, and then softly blowing away the debris. Seeing him like this - looking up at me, eyes dilated, still blowing at the paper - just made me angrier, and all of a sudden, I found myself hitting him. As I pummeled his head and face he stood completely still, but when I grabbed the posters and tried to wrench them from him, that's when he began shouting at me to get out of there.

“Give me the posters!” I shouted back, trying to pull them from his grasp, but he held on tight. As I tugged at them again, the posters tore. The sight of them ripped was like an electric shock for him: as if the demons had
vacated his body all at once, as if... how to put it ... He stood there staring at the posters, and as his whole body shook, great big tears rolled down his cheeks, glistening in the white growth coming through his beard. Straightening up, he teetered and made his way over to a corner of the room, where he crouched down with his face in his hands.

I went to him. “Khalil, forgive me,” I said to him.

He did not lift his head, and his body was racked with sobs.

To be honest, at that point I got scared. Dear God, what have I done? I thought. The man is sick and I'm just making him worse. Damn the posters! Let him tear them
all
up if it makes him feel better . . . what's it to me!

No longer knowing what to do, I left the room and didn't go back in for several days after that, leaving him alone to do as he pleased. I would just take in a plate of food, some bread and water, and leave them for him. Even cleaning became impossible: what was there to clean anyway, I was afraid he'd get upset and start crying again if he saw me removing the shreds of torn paper. I left everything just as it was, with him between the corner and the torn posters. The erasers had disappeared, except for a small one lying on a torn poster; and now there were knives scattered over the ground, along with a straight razor and some tiny blades.

And he started all over again, except that now he wasn't erasing anymore, he was shredding the posters. He sliced the paper into tiny shreds that he dipped in water, kneaded into little balls of brownish dough, and then lined up all along the wall as he chuckled quietly to himself.

I tell you, these things happen . . . The man was sick, his nerves had given out and he was at the end of his tether. No, his job had nothing to do with it. Perhaps Imm 'Imad was right after all, maybe she was, but I
wasn't asking for anything, I swear I made no demands on him - sex isn't everything, you know, and anyway what would I want with sex after all that had happened?

Days passed like this, with him holed up inside the room and me going along with whatever he did, so there was no more tension between us. But then he was finished with the newspaper cuttings and the posters, and there was nothing left for him to do. I told him one day that I wanted to remove the little “dough” balls from the room but he wouldn't let me.

“I need them,” he said. So I left them.

Gradually, he stopped spending all his time in the room. He started walking about the house and opening drawers, as if he were searching for something. When I asked him if I could help in any way, he just replied, “No.”

He'd open a drawer, rifle through its contents, close it, and then open another one. I followed him around and found him carting off all our family photographs: pictures of him as a little boy, of his mother and father, pictures of me and of our wedding, and snapshots of the children - Ahmad in his school uniform, Ahmad the boxer, Ahmad in fatigues. He gathered them all up with this almost childish joy, and carried them off to his room. There he laid them on the floor and set them out ever so carefully . . . into, sort of, crescent shapes. He'd make one crescent, then another, and another, until he had a whole array of identical shapes.

Then he sat down and started: using a bottle of white nail polish, he painted the face over in white and then cut off the head with scissors. He worked carefully and methodically to separate the head from the body. Then he gathered up the severed white heads, shuffled them, and combined
each head with one of the decapitated bodies, so he had all these white-headed photographs . . . then he gathered all the heads up again and stacked them next to the crescents of photographs.

“What are those?” I asked him.

“They're everybody's heads,” he said; then he began giving them strange names.

“But they're our heads,” I retorted.

“No, no, you don't understand, these are other people's heads. Look, this is the head of Ahmad al-Houmani, and that's his mother's, and that's Munir al-Kaadi's head.” He was quiet for a moment, and then, looking at me strangely, added: “I killed them. I killed them, I had to ... They're the people . . .”

“But who are they?” I asked him.

“They're people from here,” he replied, “from Beirut, they work with me at the post office, and I caught them making fraudulent phone calls. I don't know what they were saying, they were speaking in French, but I'm sure about it.”

“But they're our heads.”

“No, no, no, woman! I'm sure they're the ones behind the disappearance of Jameel Hamdan.”

“And who is Jameel Hamdan?”

“Oh, you don't know anything. No one does . . . but I know. He's a colleague of ours, the one who disappeared. He's my friend, who was hanged.”

But no one was hanged, what was the man talking about? It was true that Jameel Hamdan had disappeared during the war and his body was never
found - the young men said he'd disappeared at the Aadliyyeh checkpoint. He was executed, for sure, but he wasn't hanged. In any case, no one was hanged during this war, there wasn't ever any time: you were kidnapped, tortured - there was a lot of talk of torture, but I never believed a word of it - and then you were shot. And you know how fast a bullet is. But it had nothing to do with me, or my husband, it wasn't any of our business. So why was he talking like that and cutting off those heads? He always said it had nothing to do with us and he was against killing.

Then he set to the hands: he painted them white, cut them out in small rectangles, and stacked them in a pile. Then it was the thighs, until gradually, all that was left of our family photographs was this huge collection of white photo fragments, stuck to each other with nail polish.

Once he was finished with the family photos, he again had nothing to do - so he just sat silently, and hardly walked around the house even. I tried to clean up the white fragments strewn across the room, and to tidy up a bit, but he wouldn't let me. I suggested that he shave, since he hadn't in ages, and after hesitating for a long time, he agreed. I heated up some water for him and laid out his razor, shaving cream, and brush. When he went into the bathroom, however, he was holding the scissors.

“What are the scissors for?” I asked.

He stood in front of the mirror and began snipping at his beard. As the hairs fell into the washbasin his face was slowly transformed, but he didn't seem to notice. In fact, he barely glanced at the mirror.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Working, working.”

He carried on trimming his beard like this, with the tap turned on all
the way; the hairs cascaded down, while he sprinkled the sides of the wash basin from the cup of hot water he held in the other hand. Then he took the brush, smeared on some shaving cream, and started shaving with the razor, while whistling a Fayrouz tune. I stood watching him.

He finished, and dabbed some aftershave on his cheeks. Then he coated the brush with more shaving cream and began smearing the mirror. As he covered the mirror with foam, little gaps would form, so he kept going over them again and again to make sure everything was covered in white, all the while whistling that little ditty
Ya Dara Douri Fina,
if I remember well.

He was at it for two hours, and still the gaps kept on appearing, while I stood there watching him without knowing what to do.

“It's over, everything is over,” I thought I heard him say.

“What's over?” I asked.

“Nothing, nothing ... I'm working,” he replied.

Then he grabbed a red towel and, after drying his face with it, wiped the mirror clean. He covered it with the towel and then just stood there, as though looking at his reflection.

Then he went to his room and began to rearrange all the bits of paper, the dough, and the severed limbs that were scattered over the floor. After laying them all out neatly in a corner of the room, he opened the wardrobe, took out his suit, got dressed, knotted his tie, and went out.

No, before he left he told me he was hungry. He stood in the doorway of the kitchen in his suit and tie and said, “I'm hungry.” I noticed how thin he'd grown, and that he looked older. So I sat him down in the kitchen to a plate of fried eggs, which he ate in complete silence.

“I'm going,” he said, getting to his feet.

“Where to?”

“Work.”

“But it's three o'clock in the afternoon. You'll go tomorrow.”

He stepped out of the kitchen, got his overcoat from the wardrobe, opened the front door, and hurried down the stairs. I never saw him again.

Initially, we thought he'd been kidnapped. I was really scared-I knew the man was at the end of his rope and might even harm himself. But there was nothing I could do but wait, he never came home, until that day when they showed up with him inside a wooden coffin and that overpowering smell . . . Dear God, may we be delivered from evil ... The Day of Judgment was upon us, the final reckoning . . .

Actually, I didn't do a thing with his belongings. While I was waiting for him I didn't do a thing with them. I left everything - the shredded paper and the whitened heads and limbs - just as it was. I thought he'd be back and might get upset.

And now, I don't know why, but I don't dare enter the room. It smells of blood . . . blood and cat! Maybe the blood is from the pictures . . . Oh, Lord . . . I don't know what's happening to me . . . But it smells of blood.

After he died, I threw everything away. I scrubbed the room with soap and water and had it whitewashed. But it still smells, and that frightens me. No, I don't go in now. You can go in if you like, but I won't.

CHAPTER II

Perforated Bodies

 

What is happening to us is very strange . . . One wonders if it is the result of unexplained mental disorders . . . No one is able to control all the crime . . .
It's grown into an epidemic, a plague devouring us from within . . . I suppose that is what is meant by social fragmentation in civil conflicts - I've read about it, but somehow this seems different ... you'd think they positively savored murder, like a sip of Coke. Poor Khalil Jaber! But it's not just him . . . he, at least, has found his rest . . . what about the rest of us, the Lord only knows how we will die . . .

Imagine, that Armenian doctor, Dr. Khatchadourian, a seventy-year-old man with nothing, or very little, to his name . . . You can't be a doctor and have nothing . . . but, as I was saying, nothing of any consequence. They broke into his house . . . What for? . . . Probably to rob him, which they did, but listen to what else they did . . . Apparently, he had heard them, he heard their footsteps and the sound of their voices, and he decided to pretend that he was asleep, since there wasn't much he could do anyway. But he was afraid of his wife, she wouldn't stand for it. It had been that way ever since he'd married her, she wouldn't stand for anything. And now, if she heard their voices she was sure to get up and start wailing. So Dr. Harout Khatchadourian lay there in bed shivering with fear, not just because of them, but because of her. She had already caused trouble with them at the beginning of the war, strange woman that she was.

She was lying beside him in bed, breathing rhythmically, as he tried to peer into the dark. But he couldn't see a thing; all he could distinguish was their voices. He tried shifting his position slightly, but his limbs felt leaden. Then he turned to her - she was sure to wake up, she could hear a pin drop in her sleep. Her hearing was acute, as indeed were all her senses. He used to tell her that she was all senses, nothing but a bundle of nerves. But she slept on peacefully and everything was alright.

Dr. Harout closed his eyes ... they were getting closer, they were bound to find something to take in the living room; now they were in the other bedroom. He could hear them, why were they talking so loud? Usually, robbers speak softly and wear rubber shoes so no one can hear them, but this was a reckless bunch. And then they switched on a light! He could see it, filtering in through the crack in the door from the room across the hallway . . . She's going to wake up . . . she's waking up now . . . and she'll do what she's always done during this war. I told the woman to keep quiet, but all she said was, “This is our home, they're robbing our home.” So what? Doesn't she understand that our home means nothing when our lives are in danger!