Elias Khoury - White Masks

“Careful, that’s not tea you’re drinking!”

“No, it’s whiskey.”

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.