White Masks (4 page)

“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.

“I want to sleep, leave me now,” he said.

So I did, but the door remained open all that day and all night. I didn't dare sleep by his side, I was afraid, no, not of him, but ... oh! I don't know, I was just afraid . . . But I thanked God that the djinn had departed and Khalil was himself again.

In the morning, my husband got up, dressed, and said he was going to work. I can't describe to you how happy I was. But then he switched on the radio and sat in the living room.

“What about work?” I asked.

“I'm just going to listen to the news before I go,” he replied.

I rushed over to Sitt Khadijah. I told her the whole story and kissed both her hands. Khalil's cured, I told her, and asked if there was anything else I should do. She advised me to burn incense in the room. She gave me some - only after I'd paid a pretty penny for it, mind you - and I went back home.

When I got there, I found him in the room, sitting on the edge of the bed, staring into space . . . I spoke to him, but he didn't even turn around . . .
so I started on the incantations and the incense-burning. His face was furrowed with wrinkles, and he seemed totally absent. Oh Lord, Lord, what is going on, what is happening to us, I said to myself... his face . . . that's not a face ... so thin and wrinkled, and with those big dark rings under his eyes. He gestured for me to leave the room, so I did, and I heard the key turn in the lock.

He went back to his old ways, and nothing did any good anymore. To tell the truth, I'm not one to believe in djinns and demons, this cat business was all stuff and nonsense, as far as I could tell, sheer superstition, just a ploy to make people part with their money! Still, what is it, I thought, what is he doing to himself acting like that, I really didn't understand . . . and what made it worse was that I didn't know what I could do to help him. Honestly, it's wretched being a woman, putting up with a man's every whim! I couldn't go on like this much longer, with no one to turn to - it's as if there weren't a soul in the city left! Where were my neighbors! Where was everybody? Why had they left me all alone with a sick man and just abandoned me?

What can I tell you, we'd become a story, a mirror. We'd become . . . Oh, Lord, I thought, preserve us from prying eyes . . . People looked at me and recoiled, as if I had the plague. It was all Khadijah's fault, she was the one who spread rumors about the djinn, and no one would come to visit us anymore.

And him?

Well, he lied when he said he was going to work. I'm telling you, before my very eyes, he stood there and told a barefaced lie: he didn't go to work at all. He went somewhere and bought these useless things, these erasers . . . All sorts of erasers, little ones and big ones, yellow ones and white ones and
gray ones. There were erasers everywhere . . . what for? I found them scattered around his bed one day, and when he came into the bedroom and saw me looking them over, he swept them all up and cradled them in his arms like you would an infant, shaking his head back and forth. He leaned down to pick up some erasers that had dropped to the ground, and dropped a few more; I bent down to help him, and then when he had them all securely in his grip, he laughed, and these great big yellowed teeth filled his face - it was the first time I noticed that he had such large teeth - and I felt afraid all of a sudden. He could attack me, I thought. Imagine, feeling afraid of my own husband, after a lifetime spent together . . . but, there it is, I was afraid.

“Khalil, what are all these for?” I asked. “Please answer me, and let's be done with all this.”

But answer me he wouldn't . . . He just laughed . . . No eating that day, no leaving the room, just laughing . . . My goodness, even his teeth laughed!

He stopped locking the door - so I could go in whenever I felt like it - and started doing these strange things: he'd take an eraser and pull it hard over the skin of his hand, as if he were trying to erase something written there. He just muttered at me when I asked what he was doing, he'd taken to muttering constantly. Sometimes he played with the erasers: he'd line them up along one side of the bed, or gather them all together and hurl them against the wall.

Then I discovered that this eraser business wasn't a joke, it was serious. I found him one day working on the newspaper cuttings about Ahmad. Naturally, like any other family, we'd kept all the news reports about our dead son
and put them in a big manila envelope - we never looked at them, though, just kept them as mementos. He had pulled out the envelope and, seated on the floor, spread all the clippings around him. He erased tirelessly.

“What are you doing?” I asked him.

“Working,” he answered, looking up.

Not another word. Just “working” ...

He worked, let's call it that, all day long. I couldn't bear to be in the same room with him anymore, I was really fed up, and I just let him be. Initially, I had tried to steal the cuttings away from him, but that had driven him wild, and he'd thrown himself over them on the ground and refused to move. I could always go out and buy another lot, so I relented.

Erasing, that's what he did: at first, it was just the pictures, photos of Ahmad. He'd start with the eyes, go down to the chin, and then work his way up to the nose - even when the paper tore, he just carried on. All day long, he worked feverishly, constantly muttering, as if possessed, or something...

I didn't tell anybody. I certainly wasn't going back to Khadijah, and he flatly refused to see the doctor. At least he was eating now, even if it was only once a day; and I could visit with him whenever I wanted.

Then he began erasing the newsprint. He'd rub out Ahmad's name: first the surname, Jaber, then the word Khalil, then Ahmad, then the word martyr, and then everything written about him.

All day long, he erased, and then at night, I guess he was having trouble sleeping because he'd sit up in bed absolutely still. He didn't turn on the lights, but he wasn't asleep either - he just sat up against the headboard, eyes wide open.

Once he was done with the newspaper cuttings, he moved on to the
posters. He had stashed away about ten of them in the wardrobe, after he had stopped pasting them up all over the neighborhood following the rejection of his request for reprints from the local party cadre. There was just the one hanging on our bedroom wall, and he never again brought up the subject of the posters.

Now the posters were scattered all over the room, and he was kneeling over them on the floor. When I asked him what he was doing, it wasn't so much a question as a hysterical outburst. “I'm working, this is work,” he said. His “work” consisted of erasing the blown-up images of Ahmad's face: first the eyes, then the chin, and then, when nothing but gray was left and the paper started to tear from all the rubbing, he moved on to the print. I lost my temper.