White Masks (19 page)

The vehicle brakes, everyone jumps out, and the clanging of the shovels begins. Zayn too hops out of the truck.

“It's an even bigger lot than usual.”

Mohammad al-Kharroubi and Saleh Ahmad grab their shovels, and the garbage starts cascading into the truck.

“Boy, what's that smell?” Saleh Ahmad asks.

“Burning,” replies Zayn as he bends down and gestures to the charred contents of the garbage.

“No,” the driver says. “It smells like . . . a dog ... a dead dog.”

Zayn steps closer to the statue of Habib Abi Shahla. Yes, it really does smell like there's a decomposing dog.

“That's not part of our job,” Saleh Ahmad says, tossing his shovel aside.

“Take it easy, man.”

“No! Let them bring in the bulldozer! I'm not about to pick up a contaminated dead dog.”

Mohammad al-Kharroubi hops gingerly across the garbage toward the statue.

“Uh-oh!” the driver says. “He's going back to his filthy old habits. Last time, he picked up a rat by the tail and dangled it under our noses. It was disgusting!” The driver climbs into the truck and rolls up the window.

Al-Kharroubi steps forward and, with his bare hands, pushes the garbage to one side and chuckles loudly. Pushing and toiling, his clothes gradually blacken as the soot from the burnt and charred refuse rubs off onto them.
Then, an almighty exclamation as the man's voice shudders and his face freezes.

“It's a man!”

“What do you mean, a man?”

“The corpse of a man. A man's corpse.”

Mohammad al-Kharroubi lurches back and is violently sick. Hands on his belly, vomiting yellow-green liquid, he backs away towards Zayn 'Alloul.

“I tell you, it's a man . . . the corpse of a man. Dear God in heaven!”

The driver gets out of the truck and stands next to Zayn 'Alloul. Saleh Ahmad approaches cautiously, reaches al-Kharroubi, and then backs away, spitting and cursing. Zayn advances. He can see the corpse: a man lying on his back, his chest completely bare, with traces of burns on the hands, his body pierced with bullets.

“What are we going to do?”

“Listen, fellows,” the driver says, “we should notify the police, or else they'll frame us for it.”

“No, we should just leave; we haven't seen or heard anything, and that's all there is to it,” al-Kharroubi says.

To al-Kharroubi and Ahmad Saleh, Zayn says: “You two stay here. Me and the driver are going to Hobeysh police station.” Zayn's head is spinning. “Goddamn, goddamn this shitty job! Fucking country falling apart ... look at that! Dumping bloody human beings in the garbage! I swear to God, a dog's life is worth more than a human's.” The driver is mumbling under his breath, presumably in prayer. Finally, the truck reaches the police station.

Zayn jumps down, the driver follows. They enter the police station, where the guard on duty questions them.

“We want to see the officer on duty.”

“There's nobody here,” the guard tells them.

“Well, we've got to see someone; we have a crime to report.”

“What crime?”

“A murder.”

The policeman pouts indifferently and gestures them toward a room inside. They go in. A man in military fatigues is sitting at a desk. After exchanging greetings, Zayn speaks.

“We've come about a murder.”

“Sergeant Hassan Fakhreddin,” the man replies, looking from one to the other. He reaches for pen and paper, notes down their names and asks about the circumstances of the crime. Zayn does all the talking as the policeman takes down his statement.

“You are both garbage collectors?”

“Yes Sir.”

“And what does the corpse look like?”

“It's decomposed, Sir. We couldn't see much, but we think it's likely that the death occurred a while ago.”

“Do you know the victim?”

“No, not at all.”

“Had either of you ever seen him before?”

“No, never.”

“OK then. Alright.”

The policeman closes the register in front of him and asks them to sit down.

“But why, Sir?”

“You'll have to stay here until the officer arrives.”

“We can't,” Zayn replies. “We've left Mohammad al-Kharroubi and Saleh Ahmad at the garbage site, we've got to let them know. We'll go get them and come back.”

“No, you'll both stay here. The officer will have to question you.”

“But it has nothing to do with us.”

The police sergeant picks up the phone and dials a number.

“Yes, yes . . . In an hour . . . OK. As you like, Sir . . . At your service ...”

The two men wait a long time.

“But the corpse should be removed,” Zayn says.

“Everything in its own good time,” the sergeant replies.

Some two hours later, the officer strolls in, yawning. He asks them a few questions, and then tells them to follow behind him in the truck. Accompanied by several policemen, he gets into a jeep parked behind the truck. When they reach the garbage mound, they find al-Kharroubi and Ahmad sitting on the sidewalk across the street, smoking. The officer approaches the corpse; he bends down, chalk-marks the road beside the statue, and asks Zayn to remove the garbage covering the corpse. Zayn works alone, without anyone's help. The officer marks out the contours of the corpse.

And then, all of a sudden, the place is swarming with cameras. Journalists and photographers are everywhere. One of them takes a picture of the corpse and then of Zayn, as a man stands nearby taking notes. He asks Zayn
how they discovered the corpse. Zayn repeats what he told the officer, but adds the part about the dog - how they had all assumed that the putrid smell was because of a dead dog. Then it's another journalist's turn, and Zayn goes over his story once again, but includes the detail about al-Kharroubi hopping across the garbage, how he wanted to grab the dog by the tail and frighten the driver.

Then, an ambulance arrives, and three men in white spill out. They cover the corpse with a white sheet and stand there while the photographers click their cameras furiously at the white sheet.

“Why don't you remove the corpse?” Zayn asks.

“We're waiting for the forensic expert,” the fat one replies. “He has to examine the corpse before we remove it.”

“To the graveyard?”

“No, to the hospital, for the autopsy . . . Then we'll hand it over to the relatives, if there are any.”

The officer asks the crowd of bystanders to disperse. Then he turns to Zayn and his colleagues and tells them irately that they need to leave. Zayn is puzzled by the officer's behavior, but they all get into the truck and drive off.

“But we're the ones who found the corpse,” Zayn says to the driver. “It's ours. And he won't let us watch? He's watching alright. Despicable, that's what he is. I can't stand police officers.”

The truck reaches Shuwayfat. With the engine running, it tips its load onto the garbage mound and continues on its way.

Dr. Marwan Bitar, a sixty-five-year-old surgeon, was head of Surgery at the German Hospital in Beirut for the longest time. He stopped practicing in 1973 after his hands grew unsteady, and now he's a forensic pathologist-a semi-retirement of sorts, and a lucrative one. He doesn't like this work: handling corpses and conducting autopsies, and then having to write up his findings. Still, Dr. Bitar has convinced himself that it makes no difference whether it's a corpse or not, it's just the same as performing a surgical operation. After all, a patient under general anesthesia is like a corpse, he feels nothing. The difference though is the blood. In an operation, the scalpel is for real, but here, it's like nothing; there's no blood, no responsibility, you can cut a corpse up any which way you like, and mistakes are not an issue.

“I have a fail-safe job,” Dr. Bitar tells his son, Ghassan, who became a gynecologist. Dr. Bitar advised him against that specialization, but the boy went ahead and did as he pleased.

“Son, how can you sleep with a woman after that?”

“I manage. Work is one thing and sex is another.”

The boy has become well-known and wealthy. After only eight years in practice, he owns an entire apartment block in Ramlet al-Bayda, while he, Dr. Bitar, who's been working for over thirty years now, has no more to show for it than that lousy old building in Kantari, which is full of refugees. There are rumors that Ghassan has come by all that wealth in a rather unsavory manner, doing abortions. They say he does them on request: the woman comes to the clinic, asks him to do it, and he goes right ahead without the slightest hesitation - nor the slightest bit of shame or fear of the Good Lord! Of course, Dr. Bitar hasn't ascertained any of this for himself, he'd rather not know whether his son is an abortionist or not - as far as he's
concerned, Ghassan's free to do as he pleases and may God forgive him. Still, the boy hasn't married. And it's got to be due to his line of work.

“You haven't married because you feel nothing but disgust for women,” the old man tells his son, reminding him that he'd warned him, but Ghassan just laughs.

“I sleep with the whole of womankind! After I give her the anesthetic, I have sex with the woman before carrying out the operation. Medically speaking, it's helpful - having sex with a pregnant woman before an abortion is helpful. I sleep with her and she feels nothing, I operate and she pays. Instead of having to pay for it, I do what I feel like and get paid for it. So why get married?”

“God forbid!” Dr. Marwan Bitar can't believe his ears. “You're not serious?”

“Sure I am. Why not? Look at it this way: she's asleep and feels nothing, so it's not like she's being unfaithful to her husband. And anyhow, most of them aren't married. Sex is like food, father, it's of little consequence!”

“God forbid!” Dr. Bitar exclaims once more. “You're making it all up.”

But Ghassan just laughs.

He's got to be lying, though. It's just not possible. Medicine is a sacred calling; a medical practitioner takes an oath to honor his profession. In ancient times, priests were the medical practitioners, treating both the body and the spirit. And that's the way it should be. Medicine wasn't debased until it became just another job. But it's a sacred mission, and Dr. Bitar simply can't believe that his son does those things. No, no, it can't be possible. He must be making it up, look how he just laughs. But why hasn't he married?
I'll find you a girl, Dr. Bitar tells him, time and again. But Ghassan just makes fun of him.

“Those days are over, Dad,” he says.

He's right, of course. But why doesn't he marry the way people do now, for love? Go out with a girl and then marry her. He doesn't have a girlfriend and he's never brought a girl home with him when he visits. And besides, why won't he live at home? He says he prefers living alone, but a bachelor's house is like a devil's den, Dr. Bitar is sure of that. Not much he can do about it but offer his advice, which the boy disregards in any case.

As for this revolting job of his, dissecting corpses, that is . . . well ... What to say, but
al-hamdulillah
that the war broke out as it's more or less spared him from having to continue with it. Forensic pathologists aren't needed these days: everything's fallen apart, people are killed and tossed into their graves just like that, no autopsy, no nothing. No more phone calls in the middle of the night, no more officers requesting his presence. So he sits at home doing nothing.

Once in a while, Dr. Bitar goes over to the American University Hospital to visit his former student, Dr. Saleem Idreess, now head of Surgery. Dr. Bitar trained him personally and he's become an excellent surgeon. Whenever he goes to see him though, Saleem grumbles about the chronic shortage of doctors.

“They've all left! Sometimes a surgeon will perform ten operations in one day! Occasionally more than that; the doctors are exhausted!”

And when he asks Dr. Bitar about his new line of work, the old surgeon tells him there's not much to do nowadays.

“Forensic pathologists don't have much of a role to play anymore. The courts are closed and no one needs us.”

Once Dr. Bitar put a proposal to him. He suggested that dissections could be carried out on some of the corpses that are brought into the hospital from the fighting.

“It would certainly be better than working on corpses that have been preserved in formaldehyde, the way we used to when you were still a student. It would allow the medical students to see for themselves spinal cord injuries, cranial traumas, liver ailments, all manner of things.”