Текст книги "Gate of the Sun"

Автор книги: Elias Khoury

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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

“You’re from Beirut?” Umm Hassan said in amazement.

“Yes, Beirut.”

“How did that happen?”

“What do you mean, how did that happen? I’ve no idea. You’re living in Beirut and you’ve come here to cry? I’m the one who should be crying. Get up, my friend, and go. Send me to Beirut and take this wretched land back.”

Umm Hassan said she talked with the Israeli woman for a long time.

The woman’s name was Ella Dweik. Hers was Nabilah, daughter of al-Khatib from the family of al-Habit – the fallen – wife of Mahmoud al-Qasemi. Al-Habit isn’t the family’s real name, but my grandfather used to spend all day sitting down so they used to call him that. Our real ancestor was Iskandar, and before Iskandar there was al-Khatib.

Nabilah al-Habit talked of al-Kweikat.

Ella Dweik spoke of Beirut.

Ella said then that she’d married an agricultural engineer who worked there, that they’d been given the house, that she hadn’t had any children. Her husband was Iraqi, from the outskirts of Baghdad; she’d always wanted to see Baghdad. She had a brother who worked in Tel Aviv, but she never saw him.

Umm Hassan told her about Beirut. About the sea and the Manara Corniche, the shops on Hamra Street, the wealth and the beauty and the cars. She said the war hadn’t been able to destroy Beirut. It had destroyed a lot, but Beirut was still as it had always been.

Umm Hassan said that there, in al-Kweikat, she saw once again the Beirut that she didn’t know very well. “All I know is Umm Isa’s house on America Street, near the Clémenceau cinema.”

“In al-Kweikat I saw Beirut, but I don’t live in Beirut, I live in the camp. The camp? It’s a grouping of villages piled up one on top of another.”

The Jewish woman stood up.

When someone stands up, it means it’s time for the guest to leave. Umm Hassan didn’t grasp the meaning of the signal, however; when her brother said they had to go, she looked at him in amazement and didn’t respond.

“And now, what can I do for you?” said Ella.

“Nothing, nothing,” said Umm Hassan as she began ponderously to get up.

The Jewish woman took the earthenware jug and gave it to Umm Hassan without a word. Umm Hassan took it without looking and went back with her brother to his house in Abu Sinan.

“The jug is still in its place,” said Sana’.

Umm Hassan said nobody should move it and that she was sorry she’d brought it with her, it should have stayed in its own house.

“Then what?” I asked Sana’.

“‘Then what?’” she said. “She died in the camp, and the Jewish woman is still living in her house.”

Can you imagine, Father, that Umm Hassan would die weeping for the earthenware jug she brought with her from her house? That she’d die because a woman said to her, “Damn al-Kweikat! Take it!” Why didn’t she take it? Why didn’t she tell this woman she was welcome to the whole camp, the whole of Wadi Abu Jmil, the whole world?

Umm Hassan said she wept over what had happened to her. “The Jewish woman bought my silence with the jug and her stories about her mute childhood, and I came back to the misery and poverty of the camp. She has the house and I’m here. What’s the point?”

So the story was turned into a videotape that’s now mine. Rami didn’t film the conversation between the two women. He made the camera roam over the house and around the land and the olive orchard. But it’s a beautiful tape, made up of lots of snapshots joined together. I’d have preferred a panorama, but never mind, we can imagine the scene as we watch. We’ve become a video nation. Should I be watching the tape every night, weeping and eventually dying from it? Or should I be filming you and turning you into a video that can make the rounds of the houses? What should I film though? Should I ask someone to play you as a young man? I might be able to play that role myself, what do you think? Mme. Claire already asked me if I were your son. I’d be able to say that I am and that I might play the role of you as a young man. But I’m not an actor, acting is a difficult profession! I wish I did know how to act, I’d have reenacted Shams’ crime, and the interrogators wouldn’t have laughed at me and humiliated me with their pity.

“Pity is the ugliest thing,” you used to say. “We must not pity ourselves. Once a man pities himself, he’s doomed.”

But I’m very sorry to have to tell you now that I pity you. I swear you stir more pity than Umm Hassan’s earthenware jug or that mute Jewish woman.

The Jewish woman told Umm Hassan she hadn’t forgotten her Arabic and said she’d been struck dumb when she came to Israel.

“I was on my own, the only child from Lebanon; they all spoke Hebrew. I went for five months without saying a word in class. I didn’t dare talk to anyone, I didn’t answer the teachers’ questions, and I refused to read out loud. Five months. Then I opened my mouth. It was as though I’d tried, in my silence, to become part of these people I didn’t know. French was my first language because at the Ecole Alliance in Beirut we were taught Arabic, like all other school children in Lebanon, but our language in school and at home was French. I knew a little Hebrew because we also studied it at school, though we never liked it. I also learned Hebrew at the Maabarot, but in the classroom, in the midst of all the children, I was struck dumb before I could speak like them.”

She told Umm Hassan how she’d lived in the Maabarot, where they’d sprayed the Sephardic Jews with insecticide, as though they were animals, before admitting them to the stone barracks. She cried when they’d forced her to take off her clothes; a blond woman approached her with the long, cylindrical sprayer and showered every part of her body mercilessly. Her father, a man in his fifties, began howling when they ordered him to remove his red fez and the men started kicking it around like a soccer ball. He chased after it while the soldiers horsed around and laughed. When he could see that his fez was destroyed, he started howling, repeating, “There is no god but God,” so they assumed he was a Muslim and subjected him to a prolonged interrogation before asking him to remove his clothes and spraying him – letting him get used to standing naked, without a fez, forever.

Ella Dweik told Umm Hassan al-Habit her story. And Umm Hassan told everyone that she’d wept.

“May the Lord punish me for how I cried. ‘Take this bleak, dreary land,’ she told me, ‘and send me back to Wadi Abu Jmil, send me back to the Elie Bron building!’”

“And what did you say, Umm Hassan?”

“What could I say? Nothing. I began to weep.”

Did you know, Father, that the medical profession is against pity? You can’t be a doctor and feel pity for your patients. That’s why I’m a failure as a doctor. In fact, I’m not a doctor. I came to the profession by accident. It never occurred to me to be a doctor until the Chinese doctor – a woman – decided for me. It was by her decree. She ordered my military training stopped and enrolled me in medical school. I don’t like medicine. I found myself in China and had to acquiesce. But the way people regarded my new profession won me over. They call you a hakim– a wise man – and think you’re a magician. I think that magic aura was what made Shams love me. Don’t say Shams didn’t love me – she loved me in her own fashion, but she loved me. I’m convinced her death contains a riddle that needs to be solved. The riddle will only be solved after the emotional shock has passed along with my self-imposed imprisonment in this accursed hospital. There’s dirt everywhere. The walls of the room are no longer white, the paint is peeling and yellowed, and something is smeared on them. I scrubbed them with soap, but it made no difference.

What do you say to Denmark?

You know Dr. No‘man al-Natour? I don’t know him, but he wrote an article that made me weep. I didn’t weep for old Acre, which has nearly collapsed, but I wept over the key.

Shall I tell you what happened to No‘man?

He went to Acre – he can visit Israel because he has a Danish passport. He boarded a plane at the Copenhagen airport and got off at Lod. He disembarked like any ordinary passenger, presented his passport to the security man and waited. The man took the passport, examined it closely and asked Dr. No‘man to wait. He waited for about a quarter of an hour, and then a young woman in military uniform arrived. She returned the passport to him and apologized, smiling. He took his passport and went out to the baggage claim, got his suitcase, which he later discovered had been opened and carefully searched, and left the airport.

These formalities had no impact on him because he was already in a dreadful state, everything shaking inside him. He thought he’d have a heart attack the moment he stepped off the airplane but was surprised to find himself behaving like an ordinary traveler, as though this weren’t his own country.

He left the airport and got a taxi, which took him to Jerusalem. He spent the night in a hotel in the Arab quarter and in the morning, instead of touring old Jerusalem as the tourists do, he took a taxi to Acre, where he alighted in the square close to the Jazzar mosque. He walked and walked and walked, lost and alone in his own city. He said he wanted to find his house without help. He was like me – born outside of Palestine with no memories of his country except what his mother had told him. No‘man walked, got lost in the alleys, stopped and scrutinized the houses, and walked some more. At last he found the house. He said he knew it as soon as he saw it. He knocked on the door and was greeted, as Umm Hassan had been, in Arabic, but they weren’t Jews, they were Palestinians.

He went into the house, greeted everyone and sat down.

The woman went to make coffee. He got up and started to look around, refusing the company of the man of the house. As he went through the rooms, No‘man recalled his mother’s words, and they became his guide. He came to the kitchen and there he saw his mother standing in front of the big saucepan of cracked wheat. No‘man said that in the Yarmouk camp near Damascus, where he’d been born, they ate nothing but cracked wheat. His mother would stand in their small kitchen in front of the saucepan, and No‘man would hold onto the hem of her dress and cry.

But in the spacious kitchen in Acre, it wasn’t his mother he saw, but a solitary child, standing in front of the Palestinian’s wife, who was making coffee. The woman tiptoed out when she saw No’man wiping away his tears.

They drank coffee, and the Palestinian explained to No‘man that he’d been waiting for him for a long time, that he’d rented the house from the official in charge of absentee property after they’d thrown him out of his own house, and that he was ready to leave whenever No‘man’s family wanted.

No‘man listened without uttering a word, as though he’d forgotten how to speak.

The Palestinian tried to explain their circumstances and the difficulties of their life and to reassure No‘man that he didn’t want the house but had been forced to rent it because his own house had been demolished.

No‘man stood up and excused himself.

“Stay for lunch – the house is yours,” said the man.

“No. Thank you,” said No‘man, and left.

No‘man didn’t look back, and he never returned. He wrote that he regretted not having gone back. Before, he’d needed to preserve the image of the house in his head, but now that image had evaporated, and nothing was left but the words of his mother that had engraved it in his memory.

No’man said he walked and walked, and then he heard the Palestinian man shouting, so he turned and saw the man running after him, waving something in his hand.

“The key. I forgot to give you the key to the house. Take it, it’s yours.”

“There’s no need,” said No‘man. “We still have the old key in Damascus.”

Dr. No‘man returned to Denmark, the key is still in Damascus, Umm Isa died muttering about the saucepan of zucchini, and her son, Isa, is in Meknes looking for the keys.

Umm Isa used to talk about her son as though he belonged to a different world, as though he were dead, which is what Umm Hassan thought when she heard Umm Isa talking about her son almost as if she were in mourning. Then she found out that Dr. Isa Safiyyeh wasn’t dead – he was living in Meknes, a faraway city in Morocco, where he taught Arabic literature at the university.

He’d been seduced by a woman from Meknes, said Umm Isa. “He met her in New York, where he was teaching, and fell in love. I saw her once when they visited me in Beirut. Damn her, how beautiful she was! Huge eyes and long, smooth black hair, and with something strange about her. She put a spell on him for sure. I know women, and I know that that one had shown him the fish that talks.”

Umm Hassan agreed, even though she didn’t believe in the existence of a magic fish in a woman’s private parts. Also, she didn’t give a damn about “Dr.” Isa, who did his doctoring in literature instead of becoming a real doctor and helping people. But then again, who knows, “maybe our Christian brothers from Jerusalem have a fish we don’t know about.”

“The woman from Meknes took Isa to her country, and they left me by myself in Beirut. Why don’t they come and live with me here? Isa writes to me, but the letters don’t arrive during wartime, and in the last one he said he was collecting keys. God help us, now we’re collecting the keys of the Andalusians! He said the descendants of the people of Andalusia who were chased out of their country and who migrated to Meknes still keep the keys to their houses in Andalusia, and he’s rounding up keys to put on an exhibition and wants to write a book about them. Here, read it, Umm Hassan.”

Umm Hassan’s sight was failing, and she could no longer read, the words looking to her like little jumbled-up insects. Umm Isa asked if she’d read it, and Umm Hassan nodded her head as though she had.

“What do you make of that? He said he wants to collect their keys and write a book! He says we have to collect the keys of our houses in Jerusalem. What do you make of it? Collect our keys, when the doors are already broken!”

Umm Hassan told me the story of Dr. Isa Safiyyeh’s keys when I asked her where I could find Dr. No‘man, since she knows everybody. I told her I didn’t want to collect keys, I wanted to ask him about emigrating to Denmark, but she didn’t believe me. She thought that I too had been struck by key fever and told me that our house in al-Ghabsiyyeh didn’t have a door and wasn’t even a house anymore because the weeds had devoured it.

I’m not interested in keys. That sort of sentimentality doesn’t concern me. I was only thinking about emigrating, and I said Denmark because lots of the young men from the camp have gone there. And I thought of Dr. No‘man because he was a doctor like me. I thought he might be able to get me a job in one of the hospitals over there. But I forgot about it and stayed here.

Umm Hassan said, “Stay in your own house here and forget about keys.”

Can we call these wretched shacks in the camp houses?

Everything here is collapsing, wouldn’t you agree, dear Abu Salem?

DO YOU know, master, where you are now?

You think you’re in the hospital, but you’re mistaken. This isn’t a hospital, it just resembles a hospital. Everything here isn’t itself but a simulacrum of itself. We say housebut we don’t live in houses, we live in places that resemble houses. We say Beirutbut we aren’t really in Beirut, we’re in a semblance of Beirut. I say doctorbut I’m not a doctor, I’m just pretending to be one. Even the camp itself – we say we’re in the Shatila camp, but after the War of the Camps and the destruction of eighty percent of Shatila’s houses, it’s no longer a camp, it’s just a semblance of a camp – you get the idea, the boring semblances go on and on.

You don’t like what I’m saying?

Look around you. It shouldn’t take long to convince you that it’s true.

Let me walk you around the place.

This is a hospital. You are in the Galilee Hospital. But it’s – what can I say? It’s better I don’t say. Come on, let’s start with this room.

A tiny room, four meters by three, with an iron bed next to which is a bedside table on which are a box of Kleenex and a mucus extractor (a round glass instrument connected to a tube). To the left, opposite the bed, is a white metal cupboard. You think everything is white in this room, but in fact nothing is white. Things were white, but now they’ve taken on other colors – yellowish white, flaking walls, a cupboard discolored with rust, a ceiling covered in stains where the paint has blistered and burst because of damp, neglect, and shelling.

A white stained with yellow and gray, a yellow stained with gray, a gray stained with white or. .

You don’t care, but I’m disgusted by the sight. You’ll say I worked here for years and never let on at all that it bothered me, so what has changed?

Nothing has changed except that I’ve become like a patient myself, and a patient can’t put up with such things. As you can see, when a doctor starts to feel like a patient, it’s the end for medicine. And medicine has come to an end, dear Mr. Yunes, Izz al-Din, Abu Salem, or I-don’t-know-what. In the past you were content with all the names people had for you, you’d shrug it off. And when I asked you your real name, you gestured broadly and said, “Forget all that, call me whatever you like.” And when I insisted, you told me your name was Adam: “We’re all children of Adam, so why should we be called by any other name?”

I found out the truth without your telling me. I found it out by chance. You were telling the story when I came to visit and your relatives from Ain al-Hilweh were there. When I saw them I tried to leave, but you told me to sit down, saying that Dr. Khalil was family, and went on with your story.

You said your father had first wanted to call you Asad. Lion. So you would have been Asad al-Asadi, Lion of the Lions, and everybody would have been terrified of you. He did name you Asad but changed his mind after a couple of days because he was scared of his cousin Asad al-Asadi, a village notable who’d indicated displeasure at his name being given to the poorest of the poor in the family. So he named you Yunes. Jonah. He chose Yunes to protect you from death in the belly of the whale, but your mother didn’t like the name, so she chose Izz al-Din and your father agreed. Or so the woman thought, and she started calling you Izz al-Din while your father was still calling you Yunes. Then he decided to put an end to the litany and said that the name Abd al-Wahid was better. He started calling you Abd al-Wahid, and you and everybody else got confused. In the end, the teacher at the primary school didn’t know what to do, so he went to the blind sheikh to clarify matters, on which occasion the sheikh pronounced his theory on names: “All names are pseudonyms – the only true name is Adam. God gave this name to man because the name and the thing named were one. He was called Adam because he was taken from the adeem– the skin – of the earth, and the earth is one just as man is one. Even after his fall from Paradise, Adam, peace be upon him, gave no thought to the matter of names. He called his first son Adam and his second Adam and so on until the fatal day, until the day of the first murder. When Cain killed his brother, Abel, Adam had to resort to pseudonyms to distinguish between the murderer and the murdered. So Gabriel inspired him with the names he gave to every Adam in his line so things wouldn’t get mixed up and the names get lost.”

“All our names are pseudonyms,” the sheikh told the schoolteacher. “They have no value, and you may therefore call my son whatever you like, but knowing that his name and your name and the names of everyone else are one. Call him Adam if you like, or Yunes or Izz al-Din or Abd al-Wahid or Wolf. . Why don’t we call him Wolf? Now there’s a name that never came to mind before!”

You told your relatives you only discovered the wisdom of your father’s words during the revolution. You were the only sacred warrior, and later the only fedayeen fighter, who wasn’t obliged to take an assumed name. You used all your names, and they were all real and all assumed at the same time.

I brushed against the essence of your secret, master, and understood that truth isn’t real, it’s just a matter of convention; names are conventions, truth’s a convention, and so is everything else.

When your relatives left your house, I asked you for the truth and you said you’d been telling the truth. Listening to you, I’d thought you’d been making the story up as you went along, perhaps to make yourself even more mysterious, but you assured me you’d told them the truth and that to this day you still didn’t know your real name. Then you told me the men were your relatives from Ain al-Zaitoun and lived in the Ain al-Hilweh camp and had come to invite you to be the head of an Asadi clan association they’d decided to form, and that the business of the names was the only thing you could think of to make them drop the idea. “Names and families and sects have no meaning. Go back to Adam,” you told them as they left. So they left with gloomy faces. They’d wanted you to be head of the association because you were the family’s only hero, but as you were pouring the tea and stirring in the sugar you said, “There are no heroes. We all come from Adam, and Adam was made of mud.”

Come with me then, Adam, to your hospital room. There’s only one small window, which is covered with a metal grille like in a prison cell. The yellow – or sometime-yellow – door opens onto the corridor, from which comes the sharp smell of ammonia. Why the smell? Zainab says it’s to kill germs, but I’m convinced there are germs nesting in every cranny here. That’s why I bought us some cleaning supplies and clean your room every day. I wipe it down with soap and water, making sure that the smell of the soap gets into every corner. But no matter what I do, the smell of ammonia seeps back in and threatens to choke us. I thought of washing the corridor at night but gave up on the idea since it would be impossible to clean the hospital on my own, and everyone else seems to be used to the smell.

We’re leaving your room now for the corridor, where you can see rooms just like yours on both sides. But you are the only patient with a private room. Why this special treatment? That’s something I won’t go into. You think you’re here because they respect your history, and that’s what I tell myself too so I can put up with the situation. The truth, however, is very different.

When they brought you here, Dr. Amjad threw up his hands and said, “There is no power and no strength but with God.” Everyone dealt with you as though you were dead so they didn’t allocate you a room. Zainab understood you were to be left in the emergency room until you died – they left you lying there and went away. When I saw you in that state, with the flies hovering around you as though you were a corpse, I rushed to the doctors’ room, put on a white gown and ordered Zainab to follow me. She didn’t. Zainab, who throughout the war used to tremble at my orders, looked at me with contempt when I told her to prepare a room for you.

“No, Khalil. Dr. Amjad said to leave him.”

“I’m the doctor and I’m telling you. .”

The bitch! She left my sentence hanging in the air and turned her back and went off. So I stayed with you on my own.

You were primed for death – lying on the ground on a yellow foam pad and shivering. And the flies. I started shooing the flies away and yelling. I left you and went in search of Zainab, ordered her to follow me, and went back to you. Even Amin, the young man in charge of the emergency room, had disappeared. I became obsessed with finding Amin. Where was Amin? I started yelling for him, and then a hand came from behind and covered my mouth.

“Shush, shush. Snap out of it, Khalil.”

Dr. Amjad covered my mouth with his hand and dragged me to his examining room on the first floor, where he explained to me that Amin had disappeared and started telling me a strange story about the killing of Kayed, the Fatah official in Beirut, and the Kurdish woman, and the car, going into an exhaustive analysis of the political assassinations that had taken place recently in Beirut.

You remember Kayed.

He was quiet and gentle and brave – you don’t know that he’s dead. No, you should know – Kayed died two weeks before your stroke. He was the last to be killed. Is it true he married a Kurdish woman before he died? And if he did marry her, why did he make a date to meet her at Talet al-Khayyat near the television building? Who makes an appointment with his own wife to meet on the road? And where did his new Japanese car vanish to?

“They buy luxury cars instead of spending money on equipping the hospitals,” said Dr. Amjad. “The Kurdish woman stole the car. She was a spy and inveigled him into meeting her and they assassinated him. And it seems Amin had something to do with the affair.”

Amjad was speaking, and I was trembling.

Amjad was telling his stories, and you’re prostrate down below.

Amjad was analyzing Kayed’s killing, and when I tried to get in a word his hand would come and cover my mouth.

When we’re puzzled we always say, “ Cherchez la femme!” and the problem is soon resolved. I’m convinced this Kurdish woman doesn’t exist but is a figment of the young Iraqi who calls himself Kazem.

Do you know Kazem? He was Kayed’s personal bodyguard. He came by twice to see you, claiming he wanted to see how you were doing. But he didn’t know you. He came to clear his conscience; I’m sure he was involved in the assassination. But why would he come to visit me? I have nothing to do with all that. It’s true, Kayed was my friend, but I wasn’t his only friend, why choose me to tell the story of the Kurdish girl to? Did he want to get me involved? Or maybe he’s part of the plot against my life. Does he know Shams’ family? Did he come to check the place out? I don’t want my imagination to gallop out of control because it has nothing to do with me, and Kazem has immigrated to Sweden. He said he was waiting to get refugee status but I didn’t sympathize, and I made sure he understood that. Then he stopped coming to see me and we were finally free of him.

I know, but I haven’t told anyone. The girl that Kayed loved wasn’t Kurdish, she was a Jordanian from Karak, a student at the American University in Beirut studying engineering. Kayed did love her. I met her with him a number of times. She was tall and fair and had mesmerizing eyes. They weren’t large like the eyes we usually describe as beautiful, but they were mesmerizing. And her name was Afifa.

She smiled as she introduced herself to me: “An old name that isn’t used much now.” She said her father, who’d been living in Beirut for twenty years, had named her Afifa after her mother, who was living alone in Ma’daba, and that she’d discovered that her uncle on her mother’s side was a priest named Nasri who lived in Deir al-Seidnaya near Damascus and painted beautiful icons. Her eyes watered – no, they didn’t water, but they had something of that watery blue in them. Kayed loved her and said she bossed him around: “People from Karak are always bossy.”

There was no Kurdish woman. Kayed was in love with a girl from Karak and all his friends knew about it, but that wasn’t why he was killed. It’s true that after falling for Afifa he abandoned many of the security precautions that Fatah officials in Beirut had to take in the wake of the decision to liquidate the Palestinian political presence in the city, but his death had nothing to do with love. It was connected with something else, and I don’t think the Israelis had anything to do with it.

But where did the car pass?

This Dr. Amjad rubbed me the wrong way. Where did he get all this information? Is it true the so-called Kurdish woman stole the car? She suggested they meet in front of the television building and, when he arrived, asked him to get out of the car so she could tell him something. He was killed getting out of the car. A man fired five bullets at him from a silenced revolver, and the Kurdish woman disappeared, with the car.

Was the whole thing just a car theft?

But why did he get out?

Didn’t he know his life was in danger?

If we are to believe our Dr. Amjad’s version, Kayed was supposed to drive just past the television building, and the Kurdish woman should have gotten into the car beside him.

How could that be? He stops his car, gets out and dies? Where was his Iraqi bodyguard, Kazem, and what did Amin have to do with it?

Kazem told me with a wink that he didn’t make it to the rendezvous: “You know, meetings of that sort require privacy.”

Privacy! What privacy is there in the street at eleven in the morning? They’re all lying, and Kazem has disappeared. He came to say goodbye because he was traveling and to “see how Uncle Yuneswas doing”!

I never heard anyone else use this Uncle. You’re Brother, Abu Salem, Yunes, or Izz al-Din – you’re only Uncleto people who don’t know you. The easiest trick in the book to get close to someone. Uncleand Hajjare titles we give to men over fifty when we don’t know what we’re supposed to call them. Out of laziness. Our language is a very lazy language. We don’t dig deep for the names of things; we name them on the run, and it’s up to the listener to figure things out, he is supposed to know what you mean so he can understand you; otherwise misunderstandings abound.

That’s the word I was looking for. What happened between Dr. Amjad and me was a misunderstanding.

Dr. Amjad was talking about the disappearance of Amin after Kayed’s killing and presented an exhaustive analysis to prove that Amin had a relationship with the Kurdish woman, as though I cared.

“She would come here to visit him and I think. . I think the last time she came in the Japanese car, so Amin killed him and not Kazem. He killed him for the woman and the car. It’s an expensive car as you know – Mazda, full automatic. I’m sure it was the car, but I don’t know anymore.”