This is an excerpt from Maia Tabet’s translation from the Arabic of White Masks by Elias Khoury, which was published by Archipelago Books in 2010. Copyright © 2010 by Elias Khoury. English translation copyright © 2010 by Maia Tabet. All rights reserved.
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Fahd Badreddin, 26, single; a combatant with the Joint Forces, he is also a third-year student at the Arts Faculty of the Lebanese University. He sleeps on the premises of the party office in Wata Mussaytbeh, as he has no relatives in Beirut. His only part in this story is that he once met Khalil Ahmad Jaber, for all of ten minutes. Being neither a family friend nor an acquaintance, he didn’t attend the funeral or make the traditional condolence visit to the house. Whenever we met, he spoke eloquently about the case, but he clearly had some kind of problem with his eyes. He always kept his left eye covered with the palm of his hand as he spoke, and it was obvious that he had a glass eye on the right-hand side. He is very articulate, as might be expected of a student of Arabic literature. He says that he cannot read for long, and that is why he has suspended his studies.
What was Madrid like? Madrid was full of medical words we didn’t understand the meaning of and which our hunchbacked minder made heroic efforts to translate. Madrid was the shafts of light that streamed through my healthy eye; it was the voices of nurses and doctors, the long corridors, the faces with bandaged eyes—we were all eye patients; and the doctor telling the hunchbacked minder that they would operate tomorrow… Tomorrow, he said, they would fit me with a new eye… an eye that wouldn’t cry, because it was a glass eye, and glass doesn’t cry. After the operation, it felt like I had a mountain inside my eye socket! I wanted to rip it out, it felt so leaden and heavy, it was stupid and immobile! Like having another person inside my eye who could see me but whom I couldn’t see. All I wanted was to rip it out. But I got used to it. It stayed put and now I don’t even feel it, it’s as if it weren’t there.
I never saw the Yemeni or Nabeel again. The hunchbacked minder said they’d been sent to a hospital in Barcelona, because their cases were difficult, and I would be returning to Beirut.
Beirut… Beirut seemed an eternity away. I’d spent an entire month amidst the whispers of nurses, the smell of anesthetics and medicines, with one glass eye and one healthy eye, which wept and stung and filled up with fog… Beirut was so far away, it seemed another lifetime…
An entire month had gone by, in which I’d completely forgotten Beirut, and the sound of the shells booming across the city; during which I’d forgotten even the color of my clothes. Here I was, alone in Spain one day and back in Beirut the next! I was going back the following day!
I’d said I’d be back. I’d told Sameer and Aatef, “I’ll be back.” Sameer said I would be a retired fighter.
“No,” I told him, “not retired! I will come back and hold the sky between my fingers!”
Just the way we said we would when we filled the streets with our noisy demonstrations, when we chanted that we would hoe the earth and plough it anew and be the seeds of a new beginning.
And here it was: Beirut, a jumble of buildings, the sun glinting off its cement high-rises and its blue sea. The very same sea that filled with sailors searching the deep… As beautiful as the women, whose shimmering bodies lay on the sand that stretched all the way from Beirut and back, like the midriff of the world.
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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…
When I’d said as much to Comrade Omar, back in the mountains, he’d told me that I was having a rough time. And looking fixedly at my good eye, he said, “You’re a war casualty, and your injury has undoubtedly affected your morale. Go back to Beirut and rest up, Comrade.” And so he sent me back here.
It’s not true I was having a rough time in the mountains. Only once did I say I wanted to give up and go home. It was long before that, and I didn’t leave. I just said it, and went and spent two days in my tent. But then I came out and resumed combat with the others. Why did he say I’d been through a lot and should return to Beirut? I’m just fine…
All I did was that I wanted to know why they killed the boy. I begged Omar to spare him. I was really serious this time, but they executed him anyway. I didn’t even tell them his name. I’m the only person who spoke to him… there was no reason to kill him.
They just shot him in cold blood, right there in front of me. He stared at me with eyes full of terror and reproach; I lowered my gaze, but I saw how they killed him.
I’d been the first one to spot him. He was lost in the mountains, with his rifle slung over his shoulder. He seemed to be searching for something and I just went up to him and grabbed him. He offered no resistance as I led him away.
“You alone?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I lost my way.”
“Where are your people?”
“Over that way.”
“Come on. Walk ahead of me.”
We set off, him stumbling in front, with me behind, holding his rifle, and my comrades bringing up the rear. I noticed his knees were knocking.
“Please, leave him,” I told them. “I’ll carry out the interrogation.”
I took him into my tent and he told me about himself, in a trembling voice, over some hot tea. He said he was from Dowaar, that he had been raised by the monks in Bikfaya, and that he had lost his way.
“But why are you fighting?” I asked him.
“I fight just like everyone else.”
He was very young, with a pretty face. I told him not to be frightened.
“You’re going to shoot me!” he said.
“No, we won’t, don’t worry.”
“But you people kill.”
“No, we don’t. We don’t kill wantonly, like you. How many in your unit?”
“Five, we were on a reconnaissance patrol, and all of a sudden I found myself alone.”
“No. How many in the entire unit?”
“Oh, lots.”
“That is?”
“That is… I, I don’t know. A large number.”
“A hundred?”
“More than a hundred. Perhaps… yes, more than a hundred.”
“Weaponry?”
“Same as yours.”
I hit him.
“You’d better talk,” I said, striking him on both cheeks. “This isn’t a joke.” He began to shake.
“I beg you,” he pleaded, “don’t kill me.”
“Weaponry?”
He added up their weapons for me, then added:
“Honestly, that’s all I know. I haven’t been to all our positions; I’m just an ordinary militiaman. Please don’t kill me.”
“We won’t, you don’t understand a thing. Are you hungry?”
“No. Thanks.”
I handed him a Marlboro, which he smoked greedily, in total silence. I heard Comrade Omar asking where the prisoner was. I stepped out of the tent and presented my report.
“That’s great, really great,” he said. “He spilled the beans quickly. Bring him out, I want to see him.”
I went back inside and asked the prisoner to follow me. “Here he is, Comrade Omar.”
“You scum, you fascist bastard, you savage!” And he started to strike him; then, moving in even closer: “You’re frightened… real men aren’t frightened… a combatant doesn’t tremble like a child… Stand up!”
The boy looked so desolate, I had wanted to go to him and reassure him, when I heard the gunshots. It was Omar, with his pistol; the boy keeled over into a sea of blood while the others fired machine guns and revolvers at the twitching body.
Once they had stopped, I went over to where he lay and turned him onto his back. Two glassy eyes stared back at me.
“Take him far away from here,” Omar said.
And they took him away.
“But why,” I asked him, “why did you do that? I promised we wouldn’t kill him.”
“You promised, huh! We did what we had to do.”
“But why? He was just an innocent, young boy! And he was our prisoner.”
“You don’t suppose that if they’d taken you prisoner you would have remained alive, do you?”
“But, even so…”
“Do you think that if he’d captured you, he would have spared your life?”
“Still…”
“Have you forgotten what they did to Saïd when they got him near the Nasra Tower in Ashrafiyyeh? How they roped him to a Land Rover and dragged him alive through the streets, as people gawked? Have you forgotten?”
“But I still…”
“Have you forgotten how they hurled the children off the Nahr Beirut Bridge?”
“But even so…”
“Even so, even so… Just shut up, will you. We have to kill them!”
“But we, too…”
“But we, but they, but this, but that… shut up philosophizing and get off my back!”
“Comrade Omar, I promised him, he was just a boy, without even the first signs of growth on his face. And he had nothing to do with the bridge or the Land Rover!”
“Cut it out, will you? By your logic, no one has anything to do with anything and everyone is innocent. What does it mean to have nothing to do with it? He knew what there was to know and was a fighter like the rest of them, and this is a war. We’re not playing games here, and nor are they. They kill us and we kill them.”
“But…”
“But… nothing.”
I went into my tent and didn’t come out for two days. I tried to forget the whole episode and to convince myself that Comrade Omar was right, that what he said was true and I was just being sentimental. And I managed to put it behind me; until the day I felt the maggots swarming over my arm.
It was dark, and we had left our dugout for more forward positions, engulfed in gunfire and shelling. As great flashes of light punctured the darkness, the very stars seemed to tremble in the sky. I was inching forward, on my belly and firing, when I suddenly collided into something. To begin with I couldn’t tell what it was. My arm had hit something taut, like inflated rubber, and then in an instant there were maggots everywhere, on my hand and up my arm. I drew back quickly, dropped my rifle, got onto my knees and started brushing my arm off frantically: from my forearm, the maggots had reached my waist, just above my cartridge belt. And then the smell exploded in my nostrils, and I froze. I was rooted to the spot, as if paralyzed. I considered retreating and returning to my tent, but I didn’t.
It was only the following morning—when the first sliver of light is still trimmed with darkness—that I saw him. It was the young boy, his body all bloated, with the first stages of decomposition already evident on his face, especially around the lips. I couldn’t help myself, I started howling. Immediately, the gunfire resumed. Still howling, I beat a retreat.
When I got back, I was raging.
“Why couldn’t you have buried him?” I screamed at Comrade Omar. I threw my rifle to the ground and went into my tent, cursing.
He followed me and said he thought I was no longer fit for combat and should return to Beirut. It wasn’t true, I was perfectly fit for combat—it was just that he couldn’t accept what I was saying. My request was simple enough: I was only asking for the boy to be buried. I didn’t see what the problem was—God alone knows how unbearable those maggots and that smell were! So I returned to Beirut and set myself up in this office—and I have never left it since. I’m always combat-ready, but no one ever calls me up anymore; even when Israel invaded the South in 1978, I wasn’t asked to go to the front.
But what I want to know is where the maggots come from. People say they come from inside you, but I think they come from the smell. I remember the feeling to this day—it was as if I’d plunged my hand into a rubber pillow of writhing, wriggling maggots; they crawled up my chest, reached my neck and then my nostrils, and then they exploded into that smell.
It was the same smell, when they brought in Khalil Ahmad Jaber. Why didn’t they wash him—after all, he could’ve been infested too—before they questioned him? That interrogation was such a sham!
And now, here I am, I can’t say anything or go anywhere, I just can’t.
They might be able to, but I can’t.
There was this guy… I don’t know his real name, Issam we called him, that’s what he said his name was when we were in the mountains together. Anyway, I ran into him here in Beirut one day and people were calling him Ibrahim. I wonder what became of him. I saw him on the street once and he walked right past me, as if he’d never laid eyes on me before! As if we’d never been comrades-in-arms and shared those times together!
He was one of those guys who spent the length and breadth of the day talking politics. He was our political cadre, actually, and we used to gather around for hours listening to him tell us about Mao Tse-tung and about Pol Pot, who abolished the cities and liberated the imagination; he would talk to us about the people’s war, about guerrilla warfare, revolution and liberation. I’d never met someone like him before: he was a university lecturer and a fighter! I used to think that all academics were just armchair revolutionaries, you know, bespectacled and potbellied, sitting in their offices, full of hot air and flamboyant gestures. Ibrahim wasn’t like that at all, you should have seen him that time he was injured. He’d been hit in the foot and he didn’t even flinch.
I wasn’t far off and I shouted over to him, “Comrade, you’re wounded!”
“I know,” he said.
“Retreat, I’ll cover you.”
“No, we must get Talal.”
“Talal? Where is he?”
“He’s over there. He was hit in the head, I think he’s dead.”
His voice was steady as a rock even though Talal lay there dead! He suggested we belly-crawl towards the body and drag it back.
“Be careful,” he went on, “the attack’s going to be vicious, but if we don’t retrieve his body now we’ll lose him.”
I tried crawling on my belly but found I didn’t know how to. “What’s with you?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
“Go on, I’ll cover you.”
“No, you go back and I’ll get Talal. You’re wounded, leave me.”
But he wouldn’t, and we retrieved Talal together—Talal, handsome as a rain-filled cloud in spring, Talal for whom every girl in Arabia would have given her eyes, Talal who now lay beside us, his face drained of life. Issam, at my side and still bleeding profusely, said:
“Don’t cry… we die so that life may go on. Men don’t mourn martyrs.”
That was Ibrahim.
He asked me what I was up to these days.
“Oh, I’m just around,” I told him, “and what about you?”
“Me? Nothing much,” he answered. “I’m back at the university, teaching.”
“What about the revolution?”
“Well, what about it… Everything’s fallen apart… hasn’t it? It’s finished. It’s all over.”
“Ibrahim, no, how can you say that! What of Talal, then? Have you forgotten?”
“Talal is a martyr. And we suffer.”
We went to his office, and there he started talking religion, telling me about praying and fasting.
“Is that you, Ibrahim, talking like this? Where have all our revolutionary ideas gone?”
He said he thought that a return to religion was the only solution. “But, but there’s a war out there, Sir, what should we do?” I asked him.
“Nothing. It isn’t our war.”
“Where is our war then?”
“It has yet to start.”
“You mean to say that when this war’s over, you expect us to start fighting all over again?”
“Yeah, you got it! Once this war’s over, then the real war will start.”
“Well, don’t count on me. This war has just about exhausted us. One war is enough, Sir. Please, no more.”
He said I should come and visit him at home and gave me his address. I told him I was much obliged.
“No, really, come over tomorrow evening at seven. We’ll be doing some religious study.”
“You’re really serious?”
“Really, Fahd, come on. It’s over, man, don’t you realize?”
“What is there to realize?”
He just raised a finger skywards and walked away, limping. Remembering his injury, I wanted to ask him about that foot of his, but he was already gone.
So here I am, alone… and I’ve had it up to the eyeballs with the murder of Khalil Ahmad Jaber! It was just one of those senseless, meaningless incidents: they brought him in for questioning, I saw him, then he left, and then nothing. I don’t know why Abu Jassem—our unit captain, his real name is Sameer Amro—is making such a song and dance about it. We’re sick and tired of his endless investigation, of him making a mountain out of a molehill! I’m sure the boys didn’t do anything to him, it was just a straightforward interrogation and then they let him go. Could it be that they…? No, they couldn’t have killed him. Then who did it? Could it be…? No, no, it’s not possible…
As for that Fatimah Fakhro woman, she’s just witless! He had no such thing as a bucket or brush when they brought him in. Why she’s been saying that he trudged around whitewashing walls and tearing down posters, I honestly don’t know! I’m convinced he was just an ordinary guy, a poor soul… maybe he was a refugee. Perhaps he’d lost all his family and he just liked to wander about, isn’t that what tourists do? Surely, there’s nothing wrong with that!
Who killed him? Some kind of gang, maybe… Abu Jassem says that’s impossible, that he’s got the place sewn up and no one can move a muscle without his knowledge. And it’s true. He’s been able to track down the people involved in most of the crimes being committed—it was him that uncovered the murder of the Armenian doctor and his wife. At least that’s what he says. And if it’s true, then why can’t he find Khalil Ahmad Jaber’s murderer? In any case, I don’t think it merits this huge fuss, and the interminable talking, and Khalil’s wife coming here constantly for never-ending meetings with Abu Jassem.
And why was Fatimah Fakhro dragged in here and threatened? She had nothing to do with this! Her husband divorced the other woman and stole the bracelets—well, maybe he did and maybe he didn’t—and then they killed him. What’s the point of interrogating her, of threatening her and beating her like that? I really don’t understand anymore, why we’re getting sidetracked by all these petty incidents! And, in any case, why shouldn’t people be allowed to whitewash the walls and remove posters if they like? Ya akhi, we human beings are born free, and the walls don’t belong to us!
Personally, I don’t think that he was doing anything suspect around those walls. There’s this engineer, Ali Kalakesh, who came in here all high and mighty, complaining about it in connection with his daughter. What could that poor man do to his daughter? In any case, at the end of the day, it’s none of my business and Khalil Jaber is dead. He’s found his rest, what more could anyone want? Though not before he was tortured… He was badly beaten up, that’s for sure, but he’s dead and gone, and it’s over! In a country like ours, where such a staggering number of people have died, is the death of Khalil Ahmad Jaber really an issue?
People say he was the father of a martyr… Don’t ask me why, but there are martyrs sprouting everywhere these days: as far as I can see, everyone’s become a martyr, or belongs to the family of a martyr. Where did the son die? He wasn’t killed in combat, I’m sure, so how could he be a martyr?
And now Khalil Jaber’s a martyr too. I bet I’ll be the only one that gets killed without anyone calling me a martyr. And anyway, what difference does it make? Does it matter once you’re dead, whether or not they produce a poster of you?
Poor Khalil Jaber, honestly, I feel so sorry for him, nobody should have to die like that. They just dumped him there, like some piece of trash or bit of flotsam… Is that any way to treat a person? I don’t like to meddle in things that aren’t any of my business, but it’s because of that smell… I smell it on myself all the time, I carry it around on my own body now. Even though I wash and shower and use soap and shampoo, I still come out smelling like that! Tell me, how can I get rid of this maggot smell?
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Elias Khoury (1948-2024) was one of Lebanon’s foremost public intellectuals, as well as the author of numerous novels, essays and reportage. Born into a Greek Orthodox family in Beirut, after high school Khoury was active in the Palestinian Liberation Organization and advocated for the Palestinian cause for the rest of his life, culminating in his most famous novel, Gate of the Sun (2000), about Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. His earlier novels take the Lebanese Civil War as their subject and starting point; he wrote fiction and journalism as the war unfolded, including the 1981 novel White Masks, from which this excerpt is drawn. Often understood as an allegory for Lebanon during the civil war, Khoury himself resisted this interpretation. “White Masks is a novel about social fragmentation. It’s about disintegration rather than construction. And the mode of storytelling isn’t symbolic, it’s realistic,” he said in the Paris Review in 2017. “It’s also a story that resists any attempt to make meaning out of it. The protagonist is killed for no reason that we know.”
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Art credit: Marwan George Khoury, The Innocent, 2013. © Marwan George Khoury. Courtesy of the artist.
This is an excerpt from Maia Tabet’s translation from the Arabic of White Masks by Elias Khoury, which was published by Archipelago Books in 2010. Copyright © 2010 by Elias Khoury. English translation copyright © 2010 by Maia Tabet. All rights reserved.
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Fahd Badreddin, 26, single; a combatant with the Joint Forces, he is also a third-year student at the Arts Faculty of the Lebanese University. He sleeps on the premises of the party office in Wata Mussaytbeh, as he has no relatives in Beirut. His only part in this story is that he once met Khalil Ahmad Jaber, for all of ten minutes. Being neither a family friend nor an acquaintance, he didn’t attend the funeral or make the traditional condolence visit to the house. Whenever we met, he spoke eloquently about the case, but he clearly had some kind of problem with his eyes. He always kept his left eye covered with the palm of his hand as he spoke, and it was obvious that he had a glass eye on the right-hand side. He is very articulate, as might be expected of a student of Arabic literature. He says that he cannot read for long, and that is why he has suspended his studies.
What was Madrid like? Madrid was full of medical words we didn’t understand the meaning of and which our hunchbacked minder made heroic efforts to translate. Madrid was the shafts of light that streamed through my healthy eye; it was the voices of nurses and doctors, the long corridors, the faces with bandaged eyes—we were all eye patients; and the doctor telling the hunchbacked minder that they would operate tomorrow… Tomorrow, he said, they would fit me with a new eye… an eye that wouldn’t cry, because it was a glass eye, and glass doesn’t cry. After the operation, it felt like I had a mountain inside my eye socket! I wanted to rip it out, it felt so leaden and heavy, it was stupid and immobile! Like having another person inside my eye who could see me but whom I couldn’t see. All I wanted was to rip it out. But I got used to it. It stayed put and now I don’t even feel it, it’s as if it weren’t there.
I never saw the Yemeni or Nabeel again. The hunchbacked minder said they’d been sent to a hospital in Barcelona, because their cases were difficult, and I would be returning to Beirut.
Beirut… Beirut seemed an eternity away. I’d spent an entire month amidst the whispers of nurses, the smell of anesthetics and medicines, with one glass eye and one healthy eye, which wept and stung and filled up with fog… Beirut was so far away, it seemed another lifetime…
An entire month had gone by, in which I’d completely forgotten Beirut, and the sound of the shells booming across the city; during which I’d forgotten even the color of my clothes. Here I was, alone in Spain one day and back in Beirut the next! I was going back the following day!
I’d said I’d be back. I’d told Sameer and Aatef, “I’ll be back.” Sameer said I would be a retired fighter.
“No,” I told him, “not retired! I will come back and hold the sky between my fingers!”
Just the way we said we would when we filled the streets with our noisy demonstrations, when we chanted that we would hoe the earth and plough it anew and be the seeds of a new beginning.
And here it was: Beirut, a jumble of buildings, the sun glinting off its cement high-rises and its blue sea. The very same sea that filled with sailors searching the deep… As beautiful as the women, whose shimmering bodies lay on the sand that stretched all the way from Beirut and back, like the midriff of the world.
●
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…
When I’d said as much to Comrade Omar, back in the mountains, he’d told me that I was having a rough time. And looking fixedly at my good eye, he said, “You’re a war casualty, and your injury has undoubtedly affected your morale. Go back to Beirut and rest up, Comrade.” And so he sent me back here.
It’s not true I was having a rough time in the mountains. Only once did I say I wanted to give up and go home. It was long before that, and I didn’t leave. I just said it, and went and spent two days in my tent. But then I came out and resumed combat with the others. Why did he say I’d been through a lot and should return to Beirut? I’m just fine…
All I did was that I wanted to know why they killed the boy. I begged Omar to spare him. I was really serious this time, but they executed him anyway. I didn’t even tell them his name. I’m the only person who spoke to him… there was no reason to kill him.
They just shot him in cold blood, right there in front of me. He stared at me with eyes full of terror and reproach; I lowered my gaze, but I saw how they killed him.
I’d been the first one to spot him. He was lost in the mountains, with his rifle slung over his shoulder. He seemed to be searching for something and I just went up to him and grabbed him. He offered no resistance as I led him away.
“You alone?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I lost my way.”
“Where are your people?”
“Over that way.”
“Come on. Walk ahead of me.”
We set off, him stumbling in front, with me behind, holding his rifle, and my comrades bringing up the rear. I noticed his knees were knocking.
“Please, leave him,” I told them. “I’ll carry out the interrogation.”
I took him into my tent and he told me about himself, in a trembling voice, over some hot tea. He said he was from Dowaar, that he had been raised by the monks in Bikfaya, and that he had lost his way.
“But why are you fighting?” I asked him.
“I fight just like everyone else.”
He was very young, with a pretty face. I told him not to be frightened.
“You’re going to shoot me!” he said.
“No, we won’t, don’t worry.”
“But you people kill.”
“No, we don’t. We don’t kill wantonly, like you. How many in your unit?”
“Five, we were on a reconnaissance patrol, and all of a sudden I found myself alone.”
“No. How many in the entire unit?”
“Oh, lots.”
“That is?”
“That is… I, I don’t know. A large number.”
“A hundred?”
“More than a hundred. Perhaps… yes, more than a hundred.”
“Weaponry?”
“Same as yours.”
I hit him.
“You’d better talk,” I said, striking him on both cheeks. “This isn’t a joke.” He began to shake.
“I beg you,” he pleaded, “don’t kill me.”
“Weaponry?”
He added up their weapons for me, then added:
“Honestly, that’s all I know. I haven’t been to all our positions; I’m just an ordinary militiaman. Please don’t kill me.”
“We won’t, you don’t understand a thing. Are you hungry?”
“No. Thanks.”
I handed him a Marlboro, which he smoked greedily, in total silence. I heard Comrade Omar asking where the prisoner was. I stepped out of the tent and presented my report.
“That’s great, really great,” he said. “He spilled the beans quickly. Bring him out, I want to see him.”
I went back inside and asked the prisoner to follow me. “Here he is, Comrade Omar.”
“You scum, you fascist bastard, you savage!” And he started to strike him; then, moving in even closer: “You’re frightened… real men aren’t frightened… a combatant doesn’t tremble like a child… Stand up!”
The boy looked so desolate, I had wanted to go to him and reassure him, when I heard the gunshots. It was Omar, with his pistol; the boy keeled over into a sea of blood while the others fired machine guns and revolvers at the twitching body.
Once they had stopped, I went over to where he lay and turned him onto his back. Two glassy eyes stared back at me.
“Take him far away from here,” Omar said.
And they took him away.
“But why,” I asked him, “why did you do that? I promised we wouldn’t kill him.”
“You promised, huh! We did what we had to do.”
“But why? He was just an innocent, young boy! And he was our prisoner.”
“You don’t suppose that if they’d taken you prisoner you would have remained alive, do you?”
“But, even so…”
“Do you think that if he’d captured you, he would have spared your life?”
“Still…”
“Have you forgotten what they did to Saïd when they got him near the Nasra Tower in Ashrafiyyeh? How they roped him to a Land Rover and dragged him alive through the streets, as people gawked? Have you forgotten?”
“But I still…”
“Have you forgotten how they hurled the children off the Nahr Beirut Bridge?”
“But even so…”
“Even so, even so… Just shut up, will you. We have to kill them!”
“But we, too…”
“But we, but they, but this, but that… shut up philosophizing and get off my back!”
“Comrade Omar, I promised him, he was just a boy, without even the first signs of growth on his face. And he had nothing to do with the bridge or the Land Rover!”
“Cut it out, will you? By your logic, no one has anything to do with anything and everyone is innocent. What does it mean to have nothing to do with it? He knew what there was to know and was a fighter like the rest of them, and this is a war. We’re not playing games here, and nor are they. They kill us and we kill them.”
“But…”
“But… nothing.”
I went into my tent and didn’t come out for two days. I tried to forget the whole episode and to convince myself that Comrade Omar was right, that what he said was true and I was just being sentimental. And I managed to put it behind me; until the day I felt the maggots swarming over my arm.
It was dark, and we had left our dugout for more forward positions, engulfed in gunfire and shelling. As great flashes of light punctured the darkness, the very stars seemed to tremble in the sky. I was inching forward, on my belly and firing, when I suddenly collided into something. To begin with I couldn’t tell what it was. My arm had hit something taut, like inflated rubber, and then in an instant there were maggots everywhere, on my hand and up my arm. I drew back quickly, dropped my rifle, got onto my knees and started brushing my arm off frantically: from my forearm, the maggots had reached my waist, just above my cartridge belt. And then the smell exploded in my nostrils, and I froze. I was rooted to the spot, as if paralyzed. I considered retreating and returning to my tent, but I didn’t.
It was only the following morning—when the first sliver of light is still trimmed with darkness—that I saw him. It was the young boy, his body all bloated, with the first stages of decomposition already evident on his face, especially around the lips. I couldn’t help myself, I started howling. Immediately, the gunfire resumed. Still howling, I beat a retreat.
When I got back, I was raging.
“Why couldn’t you have buried him?” I screamed at Comrade Omar. I threw my rifle to the ground and went into my tent, cursing.
He followed me and said he thought I was no longer fit for combat and should return to Beirut. It wasn’t true, I was perfectly fit for combat—it was just that he couldn’t accept what I was saying. My request was simple enough: I was only asking for the boy to be buried. I didn’t see what the problem was—God alone knows how unbearable those maggots and that smell were! So I returned to Beirut and set myself up in this office—and I have never left it since. I’m always combat-ready, but no one ever calls me up anymore; even when Israel invaded the South in 1978, I wasn’t asked to go to the front.
But what I want to know is where the maggots come from. People say they come from inside you, but I think they come from the smell. I remember the feeling to this day—it was as if I’d plunged my hand into a rubber pillow of writhing, wriggling maggots; they crawled up my chest, reached my neck and then my nostrils, and then they exploded into that smell.
It was the same smell, when they brought in Khalil Ahmad Jaber. Why didn’t they wash him—after all, he could’ve been infested too—before they questioned him? That interrogation was such a sham!
And now, here I am, I can’t say anything or go anywhere, I just can’t.
They might be able to, but I can’t.
There was this guy… I don’t know his real name, Issam we called him, that’s what he said his name was when we were in the mountains together. Anyway, I ran into him here in Beirut one day and people were calling him Ibrahim. I wonder what became of him. I saw him on the street once and he walked right past me, as if he’d never laid eyes on me before! As if we’d never been comrades-in-arms and shared those times together!
He was one of those guys who spent the length and breadth of the day talking politics. He was our political cadre, actually, and we used to gather around for hours listening to him tell us about Mao Tse-tung and about Pol Pot, who abolished the cities and liberated the imagination; he would talk to us about the people’s war, about guerrilla warfare, revolution and liberation. I’d never met someone like him before: he was a university lecturer and a fighter! I used to think that all academics were just armchair revolutionaries, you know, bespectacled and potbellied, sitting in their offices, full of hot air and flamboyant gestures. Ibrahim wasn’t like that at all, you should have seen him that time he was injured. He’d been hit in the foot and he didn’t even flinch.
I wasn’t far off and I shouted over to him, “Comrade, you’re wounded!”
“I know,” he said.
“Retreat, I’ll cover you.”
“No, we must get Talal.”
“Talal? Where is he?”
“He’s over there. He was hit in the head, I think he’s dead.”
His voice was steady as a rock even though Talal lay there dead! He suggested we belly-crawl towards the body and drag it back.
“Be careful,” he went on, “the attack’s going to be vicious, but if we don’t retrieve his body now we’ll lose him.”
I tried crawling on my belly but found I didn’t know how to. “What’s with you?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
“Go on, I’ll cover you.”
“No, you go back and I’ll get Talal. You’re wounded, leave me.”
But he wouldn’t, and we retrieved Talal together—Talal, handsome as a rain-filled cloud in spring, Talal for whom every girl in Arabia would have given her eyes, Talal who now lay beside us, his face drained of life. Issam, at my side and still bleeding profusely, said:
“Don’t cry… we die so that life may go on. Men don’t mourn martyrs.”
That was Ibrahim.
He asked me what I was up to these days.
“Oh, I’m just around,” I told him, “and what about you?”
“Me? Nothing much,” he answered. “I’m back at the university, teaching.”
“What about the revolution?”
“Well, what about it… Everything’s fallen apart… hasn’t it? It’s finished. It’s all over.”
“Ibrahim, no, how can you say that! What of Talal, then? Have you forgotten?”
“Talal is a martyr. And we suffer.”
We went to his office, and there he started talking religion, telling me about praying and fasting.
“Is that you, Ibrahim, talking like this? Where have all our revolutionary ideas gone?”
He said he thought that a return to religion was the only solution. “But, but there’s a war out there, Sir, what should we do?” I asked him.
“Nothing. It isn’t our war.”
“Where is our war then?”
“It has yet to start.”
“You mean to say that when this war’s over, you expect us to start fighting all over again?”
“Yeah, you got it! Once this war’s over, then the real war will start.”
“Well, don’t count on me. This war has just about exhausted us. One war is enough, Sir. Please, no more.”
He said I should come and visit him at home and gave me his address. I told him I was much obliged.
“No, really, come over tomorrow evening at seven. We’ll be doing some religious study.”
“You’re really serious?”
“Really, Fahd, come on. It’s over, man, don’t you realize?”
“What is there to realize?”
He just raised a finger skywards and walked away, limping. Remembering his injury, I wanted to ask him about that foot of his, but he was already gone.
So here I am, alone… and I’ve had it up to the eyeballs with the murder of Khalil Ahmad Jaber! It was just one of those senseless, meaningless incidents: they brought him in for questioning, I saw him, then he left, and then nothing. I don’t know why Abu Jassem—our unit captain, his real name is Sameer Amro—is making such a song and dance about it. We’re sick and tired of his endless investigation, of him making a mountain out of a molehill! I’m sure the boys didn’t do anything to him, it was just a straightforward interrogation and then they let him go. Could it be that they…? No, they couldn’t have killed him. Then who did it? Could it be…? No, no, it’s not possible…
As for that Fatimah Fakhro woman, she’s just witless! He had no such thing as a bucket or brush when they brought him in. Why she’s been saying that he trudged around whitewashing walls and tearing down posters, I honestly don’t know! I’m convinced he was just an ordinary guy, a poor soul… maybe he was a refugee. Perhaps he’d lost all his family and he just liked to wander about, isn’t that what tourists do? Surely, there’s nothing wrong with that!
Who killed him? Some kind of gang, maybe… Abu Jassem says that’s impossible, that he’s got the place sewn up and no one can move a muscle without his knowledge. And it’s true. He’s been able to track down the people involved in most of the crimes being committed—it was him that uncovered the murder of the Armenian doctor and his wife. At least that’s what he says. And if it’s true, then why can’t he find Khalil Ahmad Jaber’s murderer? In any case, I don’t think it merits this huge fuss, and the interminable talking, and Khalil’s wife coming here constantly for never-ending meetings with Abu Jassem.
And why was Fatimah Fakhro dragged in here and threatened? She had nothing to do with this! Her husband divorced the other woman and stole the bracelets—well, maybe he did and maybe he didn’t—and then they killed him. What’s the point of interrogating her, of threatening her and beating her like that? I really don’t understand anymore, why we’re getting sidetracked by all these petty incidents! And, in any case, why shouldn’t people be allowed to whitewash the walls and remove posters if they like? Ya akhi, we human beings are born free, and the walls don’t belong to us!
Personally, I don’t think that he was doing anything suspect around those walls. There’s this engineer, Ali Kalakesh, who came in here all high and mighty, complaining about it in connection with his daughter. What could that poor man do to his daughter? In any case, at the end of the day, it’s none of my business and Khalil Jaber is dead. He’s found his rest, what more could anyone want? Though not before he was tortured… He was badly beaten up, that’s for sure, but he’s dead and gone, and it’s over! In a country like ours, where such a staggering number of people have died, is the death of Khalil Ahmad Jaber really an issue?
People say he was the father of a martyr… Don’t ask me why, but there are martyrs sprouting everywhere these days: as far as I can see, everyone’s become a martyr, or belongs to the family of a martyr. Where did the son die? He wasn’t killed in combat, I’m sure, so how could he be a martyr?
And now Khalil Jaber’s a martyr too. I bet I’ll be the only one that gets killed without anyone calling me a martyr. And anyway, what difference does it make? Does it matter once you’re dead, whether or not they produce a poster of you?
Poor Khalil Jaber, honestly, I feel so sorry for him, nobody should have to die like that. They just dumped him there, like some piece of trash or bit of flotsam… Is that any way to treat a person? I don’t like to meddle in things that aren’t any of my business, but it’s because of that smell… I smell it on myself all the time, I carry it around on my own body now. Even though I wash and shower and use soap and shampoo, I still come out smelling like that! Tell me, how can I get rid of this maggot smell?
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Elias Khoury (1948-2024) was one of Lebanon’s foremost public intellectuals, as well as the author of numerous novels, essays and reportage. Born into a Greek Orthodox family in Beirut, after high school Khoury was active in the Palestinian Liberation Organization and advocated for the Palestinian cause for the rest of his life, culminating in his most famous novel, Gate of the Sun (2000), about Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. His earlier novels take the Lebanese Civil War as their subject and starting point; he wrote fiction and journalism as the war unfolded, including the 1981 novel White Masks, from which this excerpt is drawn. Often understood as an allegory for Lebanon during the civil war, Khoury himself resisted this interpretation. “White Masks is a novel about social fragmentation. It’s about disintegration rather than construction. And the mode of storytelling isn’t symbolic, it’s realistic,” he said in the Paris Review in 2017. “It’s also a story that resists any attempt to make meaning out of it. The protagonist is killed for no reason that we know.”
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Art credit: Marwan George Khoury, The Innocent, 2013. © Marwan George Khoury. Courtesy of the artist.
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