Fathi Al-Abdali
A crowd of people, driven by curiosity, gathered around a frail body lying on the sidewalk, covered with old newspapers. A cold corpse from which death had stolen the warmth of life… The poor man was wearing worn-out clothes, damp with sea spray from the crashing waves against the rocky cliff. He died with a smile on his face as if mocking the Angel of Death at the moment of his arrival… This is what one of them said, and another added: As if he was tired of the misery of the world and welcomed death with joy.
The picture becomes clearer. He appears to be a man in his mid-fifties, with thinning hair, a thick beard, and a slender body. His glasses were lying next to him, and some of his papers were scattered by the wind. A simple pencil lay beside an addressed envelope waiting for a hand to carry it. While trying to identify him, they found a piece of stale bread and some coins in his coat pocket. On his wrist was an old rusty watch that had stopped working long ago… Did it choose to commit suicide before him, silently ending its merciful minutes? Or how could it endure counting the time of its owner’s suffering? Or was it he who no longer cared about the futile rotation of its hands, which never brought good news, only sorrow? So he decided not to look at it anymore, as it consumed his days and years…
Among the folds of the cardboard he was lying on, they found an expired Arab passport, two decades old, with his picture on it from when he was a young man… when he was full of youth and vitality, with no hint of his final fate. Among his tattered papers was a picture of a small child in the arms of a woman wearing a cloak… her face overflowing with maternal tenderness.
The poor man was finally carried on a stretcher after walking exhausted him and his steps faltered. He has stopped at last, his feet no longer able to carry the burdens of his head… They no longer tread any path… How many times did the poor man stop in front of shop windows, staring at what they held, only to continue his journey with the dejection of one who has nothing but a humiliating retreat, buying disappointment with it? How many times did he sigh in despair as he saw intertwined hands and moments of embrace on warm evenings? How many times did he search nearby for someone to talk to, to tell his misery… for a companion to whisper to, hoping to be heard? He would take out a picture of his mother and weep in her presence, and her hand would reach out from afar, driven by his sorrow… She would stroke his head, patting his broken spirit as if to say: Don’t worry, my son, the world is no longer worth it.