Elias Khoury - White Masks

Even though I knew he wouldn’t agree, I got up and went to his door. She came with me, and we stood there, together, knocking on the door, over and over again, but he wouldn’t open. She started speaking to him in that throaty voice of hers, begging him to open and let her in just for five minutes, but he wouldn’t. She reminded him that he had once asked her to summon the spirit of our boy, Ahmad, and that she was ready to do so now, provided that he opened the door. Just five minutes, she insisted. There was absolutely no response, we couldn’t even hear him: he was probably sitting up in bed, immobile. We went back to the living room. Sitt Khadijah was clearly disheartened.

“The situation’s desperate,” she said. “Let’s try something else. Although I haven’t ever before come across the particular djinn that’s possessed your husband, we’ll try another way. You know, don’t you, that djinns love to inhabit cats; they prefer cats to people, don’t ask me why, I couldn’t tell you. What do you think of this? I’ll go and buy him a cat, a completely black cat, and I’ll make sure it’s not possessed, and then we’ll slip it into his room… Then, hopefully — there are no guarantees, you understand — the evil djinn will leave your husband and enter the cat, and you’ll be relieved and so will he, poor man.”

I said I agreed, but what if he didn’t?

“Well, at that point only God can help,” she replied.

She sat down and began to fidget, as if she wanted to get up again, and added, “Let me have a hundred lira, dear, and I’ll get the cat.”

“One hundred lira for a cat!” I exclaimed in astonishment.

“If not more,” she said. “But I’m mindful of your circumstances. I’ve got to find a cat that’s not possessed and then I have to make sure that it’s receptive to the djinn. Some cats resist, you know — and that’s all very costly. Well. . it’s as you wish, please yourself. .”

Sitt Khadijah got up as if to leave. I went to the cupboard, got a hundred lira, and gave it to her.

“The cat will be here tomorrow, by the grace of God.”

The next evening, she brought me a little black kitten with shiny eyes and a coat like charcoal, so glossy and lush it practically glowed in the dark. She handed me the cat and left.

I held the poor creature in my arms for a moment, but then it scurried off and hid under the sofa. After a while, I heard some mewing and saw the cat creeping out from its hiding place — and it scared me! It seemed to me that the cat was the djinn! Dear Lord, how was I to sleep that night? I gave him a bit of bread dipped in some leftover labneh , and he ate hungrily, stopping every now and then to look up at me, as though afraid the bread would vanish. Imagine that! The kitten was afraid, when it was me who felt petrified! Anyhow, I left him to eat by himself, and slipped off to Ahmad’s room and went to sleep. Ahmad’s room, with all the memories and grief it brought back, was preferable to me than being in the same room as the black cat.

In the morning I looked for him and when I found him, he came to me; he was strangely docile, so I took him with me when I went in to do my husband’s room. I also took in a cardboard box with some sand in it, and a small carton of labneh . I thought to myself, Khalil would know it was for the cat.

When Khalil came back from the bathroom and locked the door behind him, nothing indicated that he had noticed anything was different. I stood listening behind the door but I didn’t hear any unusual noises — just the cat mewing softly and the sound of Khalil’s footsteps padding across to him, and little murmurs of “puss, puss, here puss,” as if he were trying to beckon the cat. Then, nothing, just silence, and the rustle of paper… nothing out of the ordinary. The next day, I left the bedroom door open while I cleaned inside, and to my great surprise the cat didn’t want to leave the room. Thank God, I thought, soon you’ll be well, Abu Ahmad.

But in fact nothing changed. Except that the room started to smell. I used to clean and change the litter every day, but the smell wouldn’t go away. And then it happened… I don’t know exactly what happened that day, but it was around four o’clock in the afternoon, and I was sitting in the living room by myself, knitting — my daughter Nada was expecting her second child, and it would be a boy with the grace of God. She said she’d call him Ahmad, so that once again I would have a little Ahmad to play with, just as I did with my own little one — so I was knitting, something out of blue wool, in anticipation of his arrival. That’s when I heard these strange noises coming from my husband’s room: things falling on the floor and the cat wailing. Then the mewing became frantic, I heard Khalil shouting and something crashing to the ground. When I put my ear to the door, I could hear him panting and jumping up and down on the bed, so I knocked and told him to open up; I was really frightened, and I fell to my knees, and begged him to open the door, for me, your wife, I told him. But there was no answer, just the sound of his panting and shouting and crashing objects. Dear God, preserve us from your wrath, I said, and then I heard this almighty racket. It must be the chair, I thought, he must have hurled it across the room, I’d better break into the room. I wanted to break down the door, but the noises coming from the room paralyzed me. . He’s going to die, I thought. . it’s the djinn, that’s what it is. And then, just like that, everything went still. There was dead silence, I knocked at the door once again, I heard him coughing, and I went back to the kitchen.

I don’t know exactly what happened that day, but things pretty much went back to how they were, nothing really changed. Well, except for the cat. I could see that he’d changed… how shall I put it, I mean he began changing color. Even though he was a black cat, his blackness began veering to white, it was closer to gray, a dirty sort of gray. The fur on his neck was all puffed up. And he’d stopped mewing — he just sat in a corner of the room and didn’t move. But it was the smell. . That smell became unbearable, even though I did everything under the sun to get rid of it. What was I to do? And him — Khalil, I mean, he seemed oblivious. . he didn’t seem bothered by the cat, or by the fact that it had changed color, or even by the smell. So I still don’t know what exactly happened that night. I asked Khalil, and I asked the cat, did they have a fight? I didn’t think so, the room was just the same as before, there was nothing different about it, and there was no evidence of any fighting. It must be the djinn, I thought. But do djinns make those kinds of noises? I don’t know, I swear to God I no longer understood anything.

And then he died. The cat, I mean. He died without a name — in our preoccupation with Khalil and the djinn, we never gave the cat a name, so he died nameless.

When I went into the room that morning, I found the poor scrawny-necked thing lying on the floor, motionless. I wrapped him in a newspaper and threw him out on the street where we dump the garbage. When I got back, Khalil was sitting on the edge of the bed. I asked him to leave the room so that I could clean. He did, and after I was done I found him sitting in the living room in his usual corner, listening to the radio. Seeing me come in, he smiled and asked me what I was going to cook. I told him I was making macaroni.

“That’s great,” he said.

Al-hamdulillah, it had worked, Sitt Khadijah’s plan had worked! I asked him to come with me and we went into the bathroom, where I got him to change his pajamas. He bathed for the first time in days and then I dressed him in fresh pajamas, sat him in the living room, and went into the kitchen to prepare lunch. Although he went back to his bed, he left the door open. When I went in and sat beside him and asked him if he was hungry, he said yes, and I brought him a plateful of macaroni. He polished it off, eating with his old gusto.