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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.
    â€œYou can’t do that,” I shouted. “He’s our son, you brute! First they killed him and now you want to wipe him off the face of the earth!”
    I don’t know what got into me, but I was screaming like a madwoman. He stared at me vacantly, as if he hadn’t heard anything, and went back to what he was doing: muttering and “disappearing” the words methodically, holding the poster down with one hand, rubbing with the eraser, and then softly blowing away the debris. Seeing him like this - looking up at me, eyes dilated, still blowing at the paper - just made me angrier, and all of a sudden, I found myself hitting him. As I pummeled his head and face he stood completely still, but when I grabbed the posters and tried to wrench them from him, that’s when he began shouting at me to get out of there.
    â€œGive me the posters!” I shouted back, trying to pull them from his grasp, but he held on tight. As I tugged at them again, the posters tore. The sight of them ripped was like an electric shock for him: as if the demons had
vacated his body all at once, as if... how to put it ... He stood there staring at the posters, and as his whole body shook, great big tears rolled down his cheeks, glistening in the white growth coming through his beard. Straightening up, he teetered and made his way over to a corner of the room, where he crouched down with his face in his hands.
    I went to him. “Khalil, forgive me,” I said to him.
    He did not lift his head, and his body was racked with sobs.
    To be honest, at that point I got scared. Dear God, what have I done? I thought. The man is sick and I’m just making him worse. Damn the posters! Let him tear them all up if it makes him feel better . . . what’s it to me!
    No longer knowing what to do, I left the room and didn’t go back in for several days after that, leaving him alone to do as he pleased. I would just take in a plate of food, some bread and water, and leave them for him. Even cleaning became impossible: what was there to clean anyway, I was afraid he’d get upset and start crying again if he saw me removing the shreds of torn paper. I left everything just as