Elias Khoury - White Masks

“No, you’re overstating the case. How can you be a freedom fighter and speak like that?”

“Well, Comrade, I can, and I will continue to be a freedom fighter. But that has nothing to do with what I know to be the truth.”

So that’s it, and I’m still here. What else could I do, where was I to go? Samar’s advice was that I should go back to the university. What for? How could I study with my useless so-called good eye? It becomes inflamed and painful as soon as I start reading. There’s no way I can resume my studies, and I don’t know any other trade or occupation. And anyhow, why should I? Half my friends have been killed in combat, should I simply forget about them, let them rot in their graves and run away, like I did with Sameeh? No, I wouldn’t do that.

I stood up to go and the waiter brought the bill. She insisted on paying.

“I’ve got it,” she said.

“So do I.”

“But I invited you.”

“No, no, really, it’s OK.”

She paid and we walked to her car.

“Where shall I drop you?”

“At the party office.”

We drove in silence, with foreign music playing on the radio; when we arrived, I invited her in.

“Thanks, but not today.”

“Shall we meet again?”

“What for?”

“To continue the discussion.”

“Alright,” she said, and we set a date.

We met like that several times. We always went to the same café, and said almost the same things, but I was never bored. She was pretty and lively, and I wanted to tell her I loved her, but I didn’t dare.

Then, one day, we went to her place. It was in a secluded building, somewhere off Bliss Street, close to the American University of Beirut. We went there because she wanted to read me the draft of a screenplay she was working on with the filmmaker Jalal Abul Huda — the same guy who had tried to “direct” me.

The apartment was nice, with a large living room, bedroom, bathroom, kitchen. .

“You live alone, how odd,” I said. “Rents are so high.”

“This apartment’s been requisitioned,” she said. “Comrade Abu Habib worked his connections and I don’t pay any rent.”

She got the screenplay and began to read aloud. But I wasn’t listening. She was sitting so close to me on the sofa, smoking as she read, I was trying to think of a way to take her hand. Then she stopped to comment on a sequence.

“Isn’t it just lovely here? The scene of the woman toasting the lentils and reminiscing about Palestine. .”

“It’s great. .,” I said, and grabbed her hand, which was lying on a cushion next to me.

She didn’t say anything; she didn’t pull her hand away or object, and just carried on reading. She took her hand from mine to turn the page and did not put it back on the cushion.

“Would you like some coffee?” she asked.

“Yes, please.”

As she went to the kitchen, it occurred to me that I should follow her… I remembered that in all the Arabic novels I had read, the woman goes to make the coffee and the young man follows her, then he catches her from behind and swings her around to face him, and instead of describing what happens between them, the writer gives a detailed description of the coffee boiling over. I got up and followed her into the kitchen. She was standing facing the stove and the coffee was already boiling over. When she turned to face me, instead of doing what they do in novels, I told her about novelists and their descriptions of coffee boiling over.

Shaking her head, she blew on the coffee froth and said: “That’s what comes of a poor imagination and a reactionary attitude to sex.” Then she put the coffee pot down on a tray and we went back to the living room.

We drank our coffee and made small talk. She’d gone to buy a new pair of slacks, she said, but found that everything was made in Hong Kong, and there weren’t any originals on the market anymore.

I got up to leave. She stood and followed me to the front door. I gave her my hand and she shook it. Then I took a step towards her, bent down slightly and kissed her on the cheek, then edged a little closer. “No,” she said, “please don’t.” I kissed her on the lips, she kissed me back, and this time she didn’t say, “No, don’t.” I wrapped my arms around her, but she pushed me away gently.

“Not now. I’m busy now.”

So I left. And I didn’t see her again after that; or, rather, I did, about a week later — in fact, we went to her place, and I slept with her. But she was like a block of ice. She didn’t move or seem aroused, and I felt like I was raping her, so I got up and dressed and I left.

We’d made another date to meet at the café, but she didn’t show up and she never called. I even went to the film institute to ask after her, but they told me she wasn’t coming in that day.

And so, she vanished, just like that! I don’t know why she broke off with me. That day, when I was undressing, and she lay naked on the bed, I felt suffused with love: her brown body glistened against the white sheets as I bent down and kissed her, and as I fondled her breasts I told her I loved her and wanted to marry her immediately. But she turned into a block of ice. When I tried to break the ice, it wouldn’t even chip! And now, I hear she’s married! She never even contacted me, she’s married and living on Verdun Street. She hitched herself to some big merchant, some fat cat in the sugar business!

I wonder why she lied to me like that. She was forever going on about “the system” and “bourgeois hypocrisy” and yet whenever I criticized the situation, she said I was a niggling, narrow-minded petit bourgeois… And now, she’s gone and married a sugar merchant! Get that!

Naturally, I refused that part in the film they were making, but she wasn’t upset; she did try to convince me to change my mind but she wasn’t upset, she said she respected my point of view. And then she disappeared.

So here I sit now…

Actually, before they took him away, I heard them questioning him. What did they want with the poor guy, it was plain he had nothing to do with all this. He seemed like he had a screw loose maybe, or was some kind of a simpleton, but they buzzed around him like bees with no end of questions. I didn’t interfere-I don’t like getting mixed up in that sort of thing. The poor man was standing with his hands up in the air, as if a gun were being pointed at him, and then he began circling around the room, and they around him. I couldn’t figure out why he was going round and round like that, with his hands up in the air. I wanted to tell them to take pity on him, to leave him alone and let him go. I tried to approach him as he circled, and that’s when I noticed his smell. I thought he must not have washed in a long time for him to smell like that. Then he stopped dead in his tracks, and he made this rattling, rasping sound: he was trying to say something, but I couldn’t catch the words because he was muttering, so I got closer. I still couldn’t make out anything he said, he looked like he was chewing his words, then spitting them out, with a rattle from his throat. The others were also trying to make out his words, and one of them was even taking notes. When I asked the officer what he thought the man was saying, he said, I don’t have time for you now, I’m busy, the report needs to be ready soon.

“But what’s he saying?” I repeated. “It’s unintelligible.”

“Comrade, please, I beg you, I beg all of you comrades, just leave me alone with him.”

So I left the room. But that smell followed me, it was — how shall I put it — like the smell of a corpse. I held my nose, I even splashed my face with water, but the smell wouldn’t go away.

My father always said that if you wanted to honor the dead you buried them. Why don’t they ever bury the dead these days? I think that the dead should be buried even smack in the middle of a battle. The fighting should be suspended, and each side should bury its dead. It’s terrible how they just leave them. .