Elias Khoury - White Masks

So Moeen went to the cafeteria to get a cup of coffee, which he drank standing at the counter. And then it happened. He really didn’t know how, but it happened.

Someone asked him a question, and he turned towards the speaker and got into a long conversation with him about the dangers of flying. He realized it was time to pay for his coffee and go and get the white boarding pass from the Scandinavian airlines desk. When he turned to pick up his pouch, he couldn’t find it. He looked around, bent down and searched on the ground, he questioned the waiter, he asked everyone there if they’d seen his leather pouch. Maybe he’d left it in the restroom. He raced there, going into every stall, looked all over. But he hadn’t even gone to the restroom!

Moeen went back to the cafeteria looking for the man he’d been chatting with. There was no one there. So he searched again.

“Maybe I left it in the camp.” So, he got into a taxi and went back there. He ran into the mosque like a lunatic, searching frantically everywhere. “I know I had it. The security officer examined the passport at the airport. Where could it be?”

Moeen sank into the corner of the mosque, completely stupefied. “I’ve got to go back to the airport and look again. It can’t be. . It must. .” He hopped into another taxi, went back to the airport and ran into the lounge. He was like a man crazed, searching under tables, questioning people, making strange grunting noises. Finally, an airport security officer stopped him. Moeen told him his tale. It was clear from the officer’s expression that he did not believe a word of it. Moeen was just about to resume his search when he saw the officer’s hand reaching for the scruff of his neck.

“You’re just a conman, aren’t you? Let me see your ID.”

Moeen had no ID, he had no papers. He repeated his story, although he didn’t dare admit that the passport was a fake. The officer just gave him a verbal warning and told him to leave the airport building — immediately.

Moeen Abbas couldn’t go back to the camp, no one would believe him. They wouldn’t believe that he’d lost the passport, and the ticket and the money, at the airport.

So he went into one of the bathroom stalls, took off the leather belt he’d bought the previous day, hooked it to the ceiling somehow, climbed onto a toilet seat, put his head through the noose, and hanged himself.

His body was found the next day when the early-morning cleaner came in and couldn’t open the locked door. She broke the lock to find Moeen Abbas’ now-livid corpse dangling from the ceiling, his neck shriveled to the size of a child’s, his body rigid: a hanging stiff, like the ones you see pictures of in the papers.

But how did he manage to hang himself? He must have suffered terribly! Usually, when someone is hanged, the executioner pulls away whatever the victim is standing on so that he hangs. And usually, simply by instinct, the victim’s feet reach for the ground — that is why the victim’s feet thrash in that terrible way — and then the body is stuffed into a white sack and the victim is left there, a pale object dangling from the gibbet.

Moeen Abbas, however, must have cast himself aloft deliberately. He most certainly tried to reach the toilet seat cover with his feet, for that is a matter of instinct, it has nothing to do with one’s will. And his feet must have slipped, either because the cover was wet or, more likely, because of the new leather shoes he’d bought at the souq — the soles weren’t yet worn, and everybody knows how slippery new soles can be. That would also explain the expression of utter horror on Moeen Abbas’ face — he must have reached for the toilet seat cover and grown increasingly desperate as his shoes slipped repeatedly; thus, we could say that he “slipped to his death,” with the belt tightening around his neck until he expired.

The people of Yarmouk camp could not fathom why he should have wanted to kill himself. Some of the people who’d said good-bye to him earlier in the day had seen him returning to the mosque, but no one knew why. And when his photo appeared in the Beirut papers, the reporter who filed the story quoted a woman passenger as saying she had seen him looking for his little pouch. “But no one knew the secret of the pouch.”

I recounted this story to my friend, Dr. Ajjaj Abu Suleyman, just to make him feel better — him being the sort of person who always thinks that his troubles are worse than anyone else’s. “So as you see, Doctor, what happened to you is nothing, nothing at all compared to this. You should thank the Lord, Dr. Ajjaj, truly you should be thankful,” I told him.

My friend Dr. Ajjaj Abu Suleyman is a strange man, he’s a dentist by profession, but as long as I’ve known him he’s never actually practiced dentistry. He says it’s because he hates the job. “Imagine,” he says, “an old woman coming along to have her teeth pulled out, there’s all this blood and then you have to make her a complete set of false teeth. She opens her mouth so wide it’s like a cave full of djinns . . and the smell. .! What’s more, some teeth are white but some are a nasty yellow. . Also, whenever a patient opens his mouth wide, I think he’s going to bite. You know how it is, I am leaning down over a patient’s wide-open mouth, poking all these strange instruments inside his mouth, and then suddenly I am sure he’s going to bite my nose off, so I stop and pull back… the poor patient is totally bewildered!

“Granted, I have a large nose. When I was little, my brother Imad always teased me about it, repeating Ibn Rumi’s famous verse to me. But after I realized that the size of one’s nose bears a direct relationship to one’s sexual prowess, I got over my hang-up about it.

“It was Imm Shikri who told me; she was a forty-something prostitute that many of us frequented when we were dental students. She lived in a little house on the Rue de Damas, 13right across from the medical faculty at Saint Joseph University. She was impressed that I was so well-endowed, and always attributed this to the size of my nose — she claimed there was a direct correlation between it and my organ; she was always saying I was the best dentist she’d ever had, with an excellent bedside manner!

“Anyway, back to my story. . scared as I was of all those white teeth and cavernous mouths that gave me the feeling my patient was going to jump up from the chair, rip my nose off my face, and devour it, I closed the clinic. I just closed it down and became a journalist.

“Journalism isn’t easy, but at least I’m not frightened of anything. Editors are a mediocre lot by and large, and you can get away with pretty much anything. You know how it is these days, with all those Arab petrodollars, editors are a dime a dozen. All you have to do is praise an article — which someone else wrote but the editor signed — and his rancid little face will break into this big smile. . yes, rancid, that’s what their faces are. . and then he’ll leave you alone!”

The truth is I’ve had my doubts about some of the things this strange friend of mine says. I mean, how is it that a dentist, a high and mighty doctor, can close his clinic and become a journalist overnight? What’s more his nose isn’t that big… mine is larger, and I feel neither ashamed of it, nor endowed with unusual sexual potency.

I eventually found out that my friend, Dr. Ajjaj Abu Suleyman, does indeed work for a newspaper, but he’s in the archives section. I went to see him one evening — the first time ever that I paid him a visit at work. When I got there, the watchman told me the doctor came in only in the mornings only, as he worked in the archives. Later, at the café, I chided him.

“You’re putting me on, Doctor.”