There is no doubt however that Nadia and Edmond were married. The documents refer to the wedding, the church where it was celebrated, and the first night they spent in the Khaddouri house. On the morning after their wedding the servants heard Edmond vow to kill Abd al-Rahman.
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That morning Nadia came down from her room feeling agitated and nervous and she pretended to busy herself arranging the flowers. Edmond followed, looking sad, and sat on the sofa facing her. He was disheveled, his beard uncombed, and he smoked nervously. He went to Nadia, held her by the shoulders, and shouted at her, “Liar, liar!” He couldn’t control himself and was barely able to stand upright. He repeated, “Liar! You’re not a virgin!” Nadia kept quiet and turned her face away from him. Edmond wouldn’t stop. “It must have been Abd al-Rahman. He did it to you. It’s him! Say it.” But Nadia vehemently denied the accusation.
Edmond pushed Nadia to the floor; he wanted to crush her fingers with his foot and beat her. She defended herself as best she could, crying. Edmond kept accusing Abd al-Rahman of deflowering her. She denied it, swearing in the name of Christ that Abd al-Rahman was not responsible, but to no avail. Finally she said, “It was not him, but someone else. It was Mayer ben Nassim, when I was a girl.” He didn’t believe her, but she went on explaining and trying to exonerate Abd al-Rahman. “I swear it was Mayer. I wrote a letter to Abd al-Rahman and explained that I was not a virgin, but he ran away to Paris. This is the whole truth.” Edmond was still not convinced.
“I don’t believe you. It is this cowardly existentialist, this base fellow who did it. Just be patient, and I, Edmond son of Adileh, will wash away this dishonor and take my revenge.”
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That evening Faraj, Elias Khaddouri, and Edmond held serious discussions to decide what action must be taken. The servants saw them, and two of them swore to me that they heard the three men talk about killing Abd al-Rahman in an act of vengeance. I met those two servants, Boulos and his sister Malakin, in their house in Camp Sarah near the Zahleh markets. They passed this information on to me, but I couldn’t confirm that this incident was behind the death of one of Iraq’s greatest philosophers of the sixties. Nor did any of the documents I had confirmed this as a possibility. A document provided by Sadek Zadeh maintains that the philosopher committed suicide. A possible scenario can be based on the following reasoning: Abd al-Rahman’s physical and mental condition was deteriorating, which might have led him to have a nervous breakdown, and end his life with a self-inflicted gunshot. I could imagine him thinking about the millions of people who went about their business with vulgar enthusiasm but without seizing the essence of life, and wanting to set an example for them. Before killing himself he would have felt everything around him was nauseating, and that the objects in his room were closing in on him. He took a gun from a drawer and pointed it calmly at his chest. Germaine had just come out of the bathroom when she heard the shot. She ran to his room and shouted from behind the locked door, “What have you done, what have you done?” The servants broke the door down and found him lying on the floor with one red spot on the left side of his chest.
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Naturally, this scenario needed to be verified. It was meant to convince us that nausea and nihilism as an aspect of life — and not its nonexistence (the Iraqi intellectuals of the time did not differentiate between the two) — were the reasons for the philosopher’s suicide. But I had my doubts, because for the al-Sadriya philosopher nausea motivated him to embrace life, not to reject it. It was a way to shout out against the stillness of life, and an incentive for an enthusiastic approach to it, rather than a reason for asceticism and the torture of the body. I had to go beyond this document that Sadeq Zadeh described as the most important.
I had to verify a second theory: the Trotskyite conspiracy. It was suggested as the Khaddouri family sat in their garden, near the fountain one afternoon, together with Edmond and Elain, drinking tea and eating cookies. “Let’s kill him,” said Edmond, biting into his cookie.
“No,” said Elain in her Jewish accent, “we need to do something that won’t leave evidence.” Nadia’s mother wondered how this could be accomplished, and Elain explained, “We need to create a scandal.”
Faraj approved wholeheartedly: “Excellent idea!”
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Ismail went to meet Edmond at his house on Anastas al-Karmali Street. Edmond met him at the door and took him to a table filled with a variety of foods worthy of a banquet: fish, chicken, many kinds of sweets, fruits, flatbread, and plenty of whiskey. The conversation turned around the life of the poor and the revolution that had brought down the bourgeoisie, feudalism, and the Sirkaliya system.
When Ismail left Edmond’s house he was totally drunk and staggering. His eyes twinkled as he examined the boxes of sweets his host had given him.
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Soon after his meeting with Edmond, Ismail started visiting the philosopher’s wife while her husband was absent. A week before his death Abd al-Rahman told his wife that he would not be spending the night at home, but she didn’t seem to care and went on washing her young daughter’s face.
Ismail arrived after midnight, and when he learned that her husband was absent he decided to stay with Germaine until dawn. They ate and drank, and as he was about to leave she asked him to go with her, naked, up to the roof.
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She was elated, and when she reached the roof she lay down on the bed. Ismail did the same. They resumed their lovemaking to the sound of music under the clear summer sky. They felt they were on another planet far from the struggles of daily life.
The minaret of the Siraj al-Din Mosque was close to the house and quite high. Germaine said to Ismail, “Look at the minaret. It’s as if someone is watching us.” He laughed, looked at the minaret and then the empty street, where only a barking dog and the whistle of the guard could be heard, and reassured her, “No, the imam won’t watch us.” Germaine got up, covered herself with a sheet, and looked at the courtyard of the mosque. She saw a tree bearing small fruit hidden from passersby by the high wall. She turned to Ismail, ran her fingers across his body and said, “I want one of these apples.” Ismail was surprised but he complied. He put on his black trousers and went down to the courtyard. As soon as the guard moved away, he climbed the tree and picked as many green apples as he could. When he heard someone coming down the minaret’s steps, he quickly hid the apples in his pants, and clambered down. Two hands grabbed him immediately, one by the neck and the other by his pants. It was the imam, who exulted, “I’ve caught you, sinner.” The guard came over, and by the light of the moon he saw Ismail’s pants filled with the mosque’s apples. Ismail’s pleas for mercy went unheeded. The guard, proud and happy to have finally caught a scofflaw, shouted at him, “You are a thief, and you steal from a mosque!”
The imam added, “He is also an adulterer.”
When Ismail sought to correct him, “Only a thief,” the imam pronounced, “I was watching you from the minaret. You delayed my call to prayer, you sinners.”
Hoping to confound him, Ismail suggested, “Maybe you were watching a porn flick, imam?”
The guard didn’t like Ismail’s rudeness. He told him to take off his pants, leaving him totally naked, and tied him to a tree. Meanwhile the imam had climbed the minaret and invited the inhabitants of al-Sadriya to come and see the adulterer.