Yalo (3 page)

Yalo guided the girl to his house after asking her to remove her high heels. He held her by the hand and stopped her and then walked with her, and when he realized she was stumbling because of the high heels, he looked at them and she understood, so she removed them without being asked. She carried her shoes in her right hand and walked beside him. Still, she kept stumbling and also fell down at one point. She bent over as if about to fall, and he bent over her, but she regained her balance and stood up.
He grasped her left hand and led her to where he had smelled the radiating scent of incense from her beautiful white arms.

Why had she lied to the interrogator, telling him that she had been with her fiancé?

Yalo did not remember that he had told her that her arms were like rice pudding, but there in the restaurant, after he had slapped her, and they had finished eating, Yalo ordered rice pudding. Shirin had smiled because she remembered that he had told her that her arms were sweeter than rice pudding.

No, he had not slapped her because of the sparrows as she claimed to the interrogator, but because she had offered him money and he despised money. He ate a dozen fried sparrows and drank half a bottle of local arak before slapping her for insulting his honor.

No, what she said was not true. He had not ordered her to kneel, she and her fiancé. She had knelt down after the gray-haired man left. Nor had she been with her fiancé. The young man who sat in the interrogation room had not been with her there in the forest.

She told the interrogator that he had ordered them to kneel and then pointed his rifle at them, intending to kill her fiancé, Emile Shahin, but she implored him to spare him, and he did.

“You are Emile?” asked the interrogator.

“Yes, yes, Emile Shahin,” replied the young man.

“Do you have anything to add?”

“Shirin said it all,” said Emile.

She said that he had ordered Emile to say his prayers before he was killed in front of his lover. “Then I began to plead with him, and I cried, but he was still stubborn, with his gun aimed at my fiancé's head, so I screamed, I don't know where I found the strength. Emile jumped up and ran to the car
and escaped, thank God, my fiancé was able to escape, but I was trapped with this bandit.”

“Daniel, what do you have to say in response?” the interrogator asked.

Yalo felt tongue-tied, he fell mute. The pebble came back. His mother used to put a small pebble under his tongue so that he could learn to speak without stuttering. Then he forgot the stutter when he saw the blood, that is what he would have written had he been able to see his life in the mirror of days, but he was standing here, feeling his mother's pebble under his tongue, and found no words to speak.

“Why didn't your fiancé report this incident immediately?” he would have said.

“How was he a man of fifty, who became a young man today?” he would have asked.

“Why did you run away and escape?” he would have asked.

But he said nothing, and the interrogator did not press him for a response. He considered his silence to be a response, and a confession.

“Is this the man who raped you, robbed you, and continues to stalk you?” asked the interrogator.

Shirin nodded in reply.

Emile looked at his watch and asked the interrogator if they might leave now.

“Of course, of course,” said the interrogator, and escorted them to the door of the guard desk.

But at the Albert Restaurant, no.

He slapped her and she shut up. Then when he ordered rice pudding she smiled, and he told her that he loved her.

“I'm engaged, Yalo,” she said.

“I love you,” he said.

“Please,” she said.

The waiter appeared with the bill, but Yalo asked him for another glass of arak. He took a sip and looked into the girl's eyes before closing his eyes for a long time.

“Please don't fall asleep,” she said.

“Shut up,” he said. “Leave me alone. I'm talking to God.”

The girl began to talk, and Yalo listened to her with his eyes closed.

“I respect your feelings, but as you can see, I'm engaged, so I can't,” she said.

“That's the shit who abandoned you in the forest and ran away?” he asked.

“No, no, I left him, my fiancé is someone else.”

The girl talked, and Yalo listened.

“It's like an Egyptian movie,” he said. “It's like I'm sitting in a Ustaz Wahid movie.”

She said that she would listen to Arab songs only to please him, and that she respected him. She said that she cherished him, and apologized and said that he was free to slap her because she had hurt his feelings when she had offered him money.

“Stop it!” shouted Yalo.

He got up and mimed the scene in “Daughter of the Nile” where Farid Shawqi slaps Hind Rostom and how the actress falls to her knees and says, “I love you – you beast!” “That's how you should be,” he said. “You have to love a real man, not these shits, one geezer your father's age, the other one afraid of his mother.”

“You're right,” Shirin said, “but what can I do? I love him. He was my classmate at the American University, and we slept together. I took birth control pills, but one day I forgot, I don't know why, and when I told him I was pregnant and we had to get married, he ran away and said he was afraid of his mother. So I took care of myself. I had such a
dépression
and one of my
girlfriends took me to Dr. Said, who made me a
courtage
, and who loved me. He told me he loved me because I'd cried so much. I got to his place, to the clinic, and I started crying. I couldn't speak. I sat on the chair and placed my head between my hands, and I started gasping, and the tears just ran from my eyes, and the doctor didn't say anything. He let me cry and sat there watching me. He told me later that he sat and watched, and that he became infatuated with me ‘for my tears' – that is exactly what he said, in Classical Arabic, ‘for your tears,' then he took me in his arms. I don't know how long I stood there crying before he said, ‘Come on, let's go to the room next door.' Then he said, ‘Get undressed.' I took off my skirt and stood there. But he said no, and motioned with his hands that he meant everything. So I took everything off, and he stared at my breasts, and I felt, I don't know why, his gaze penetrating my breasts like pins, and I heard him say: ‘Very nice.' But I didn't respond. I was shaking with fear, and I told him, ‘Doctor, I'm cold,' and he said, ‘Stretch out there,' and I stretched out on that strange bed, sort of a half-bed. I was on my back, with my legs dangling, and the nurse approached me with a needle, while he looked down below, and he had a strange look on his face, I don't know, I was afraid I was in trouble and I tried to speak, but my tongue was heavy in my mouth, like rubber, and after that I don't remember anything. No, before I passed out, I told him, ‘I'm cold, please give me a cover,' I was so cold and ashamed, and his eyes were like, they could see everything, and then when I opened my eyes, it was all over. I heard the nurse saying, ‘Thank God, get dressed and go see the doctor.'”

As Shirin told her story, her tongue had a life of its own as she talked, cried, and blew her nose, as Yalo gave her tissues and burned, everything within him was inflamed. The half-bed inflamed him, and the doctor's motion for her to take off her clothes inflamed him, and the sight of the nurse as she gave her the shot of anesthesia inflamed him.

She said she had taken off all her clothes, and drew what seemed to be
circles around her small breasts. He smelled the fragrance, the fragrance of nakedness, but he was like a paralyzed man. She talked and he listened, and his eyes felt as heavy as if he were on the verge of sleep. She spoke of the bleeding she suffered two days after her abortion, and how Dr. Said al-Halabi took her to his private clinic, where she spent three days until she was better, and how she had fallen in love with him by the third day.

“I let him sleep with me without feeling any real desire. No, he didn't really sleep with me.” She said that on the third day, at about six o'clock in the evening, when she was alone in the room, overcome with sleepiness and craving a cigarette, she saw him coming in the twilight that obscured the room with gray, making everything uniform. He sat by her on the bed, and said, “It's done. Thank God you made it through. Now you're able to go home.” He pulled the blanket off her so she could get up, and took her hand.

“When he held my hand, I felt that I loved him.”

She said that she loved him for his hands. His long fingers, like those of a piano player, were interlaced with hers, when she fell in love with him.

“He put his right hand on mine and ran the other through his white hair, and I fell in love.” She said that she loved him, and was hoping he would pull her against his chest.

“I told him, ‘I don't want to go – I'm so comfortable with you, Doctor.'”

Describing that evening, Shirin said that night crept up on them and she had no idea what happened after that.

“I don't know what happened, I don't remember. You know, I never remember these kinds of things, not just with Dr. Said, but, like, with anyone, with you I don't remember either, and I don't remember with Emile. Of course, I remember the room and the doctor beside me, and I did sleep with him, but I don't remember the details. Why does this happen? Do you know?”

“How do I know?” said Yalo.

“That's strange. I don't remember a thing,” she said.

“You mean now you don't remember how you slept with me?” asked Yalo.

“. . .”

“You don't remember the second time, when you said that you could smell pine, as if there were pine trees in the room?”

“I said that?”

“Of course!”

“No way.”

“You were talking about the pine smell, and I felt as if my spinal column were coming apart.”

“I never said a thing,” said Shirin. “It is just not possible. When I was with you I was dying of fright, anyway, please God, let us forget.”

Why did she forget everything?

She had forgotten how she had told him, in the Albert Restaurant, about Dr. Said and her new old fiancé, Emile. She sat like a stranger, and from her small eyes gleamed something like the savagery of youth on that day that Yalo had decided to forget, and had indeed forgotten. They dragged the three men to the cemetery, and crucified them on the ground under the cypress trees in the cemetery of St. Demetrius. They crucified them before shooting them, then they began to curse them and spit on them. Terror haunted their eyes. That day, Yalo vomited, then started to cry, then went home, then . . . No, he did not want to remember now. He closed his eyes.

She said that she had kissed the doctor, she lifted her head a little for her lips to meet his, and she fell in love with him.

“I let him sleep with me but with no desire, but he didn't . . .” she said.

The doctor told her that the complete sexual act was forbidden, for now.

“So he slept with my breasts,” she said, crying and blowing her nose.

“Like how?” quavered Yalo.

“Like this,” she said, tracing with her fingers a line between her breasts.

“And I didn't feel anything,” she said, “except, of course, I felt hot.”

She said that she started a long-term relationship with the doctor, that he had strange ways, and that he “always slept with her that way.”

“What do you mean ‘that way'?” Yalo asked.

“I mean, here,” she said, and traced an invisible line between her breasts.

“Always like that?”

“Pretty much,” she said. “He said he liked my tits.”

“Don't say that word,” said Yalo. “It's not nice for women to use words like that.”

“Fine, so what am I supposed to say? I'm talking facts.”

“Say s
ahro
.”

“What does
sahro
mean?”

“It means ‘moon.' You've forgotten? I taught you that word when you were at my house, that night.”

“I told you, I don't remember anything.”

“At the time, you asked me what it meant and I explained it.”

“Fine, explain it to me now.”

“Now, no,” Yalo said. “Just don't use that word.”

She said that the doctor never slept with her, even once. He was content with just playing around, and with “those.” “He said he was afraid of really sleeping with me because we were in the clinic, and I told him, Fine, let's go to a hotel. He said everybody knows him, and he's a married man, so we spent the evening in either the clinic or the car, there in Ballouna, where you raped me.”

“I raped you? What's that supposed to mean?”

“I mean, when you took me to your place and slept with me. We were in the car, and he told me to put my head down.”

“Maybe he saw me.”