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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.
    â€œKhalil, 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.
    â€œWhat are you doing?” I asked him.
    â€œWorking,” 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.