Yalo (4 page)

“No, he didn't see you, he wanted me to –”

“He wanted you to what?”

“He wanted me to put my head down, and that's when your excellency showed up, and we practically died of fright. I don't know how I held my head up again and how he managed to tidy himself.”

“I'm an idiot!” shouted Yalo. “An idiot! A jackass!”

“Lower your voice,” said Shirin. “Please. The restaurant is full of people. Do me a favor, don't raise your voice.”

Yalo repeated quietly that he was an idiot and a jackass.

Where was the scent of incense?

Why did Yalo not smell the scent of incense when he saw her sitting in the interrogation room?

At the Albert Restaurant he had smelled that scent. Her incense was stronger than the arak, the fried sparrows, than everything. But here, in the white interrogation room, he could smell nothing. His nose picked up a smell like rubber. When the interrogator forced him to write his life story, he would write about the smell of arrest. He would say that the smell of prison was like the smell of damp rubber. The smoking, burning smell of oil, diesel fuel, and tires.

When he saw her in front of the interrogator, he dropped down onto the chair and closed his eyes, searching for the smell of incense. He saw Emile sitting beside her, and saw her slender, naked thighs and short skirt, and her round breasts, and waited for the incense. But the incense did not emerge, and the other smell grew stronger, like the smell of burned rubber
extinguished with water. A sun penetrating everything and making it impossible to see.

Then Shirin spoke.

She spoke and reached out and clasped Yalo's hand, in the restaurant, before withdrawing it and saying, “Please.”

“Please let me leave. I don't want anything from you, I'm sorry, forgive me but let me leave.”

“Where are you going to go?” Yalo asked.

“I want to go home and back to my life,” she replied.

“Go. I'm not keeping you.”

“Yes, you are keeping me, let go of me, and let me go. I'm grateful to you for everything, but you have to understand that this is over, it's all over.”

Yalo wanted to slap her again but didn't. The slap seemed logical when she opened her purse, pulled out a handful of dollars, and offered them to Yalo, asking him to leave her alone.

“Take everything,” she said. “If you want more, I'm ready to pay, but just stay away from me.”

Yalo stood up and slapped her. He heard the sound of footsteps approaching and guessed it was restaurant staff approaching. He put his hand in his pocket and felt his knife, prepared for a fight. But the footsteps grew fainter and faded away. He sat in his place and drained his glass in one swallow. Silence fell, broken only by Shirin's coughing and sobbing.

He gave her a tissue and she put the money back in her purse, and then he fed her a bite of
kibbeh nayeh
. She ate it and they resumed talking.

He described to her the Egyptian movies he loved, because Madame had made him love them. She used to ask him to go down to Beirut once a week so he could bring her Arab movies from the video store in the Sodeco district. She spent her mornings watching the movies, and sometimes asked
him to watch them with her. He did not tell Shirin about the other movies, except that he did not know where Madame got them, but she only watched them at night. Daytime was for the Arab movies and night was for those movies that she only watched with a bottle of Black Label scotch. Yalo did not want to talk about those movies now, because ever since Shirin he had begun to see life through new eyes.

Why did Shirin not believe him?

Why did she insist on thinking that he was robbing her and that his love for her and the songs of Abd al-Halim Hafiz were meaningless?

In the restaurant, when she described her relationship with Emile, he felt a need to slap her again. She said that she had started to believe that Dr. Said did not love her.

“I mean, how can I explain it. I don't know. Only I just felt that he didn't really love me.”

She said that her relationship with the doctor ended after that hellish night. “It was like all the gates of Hell opened up. I went to see him at the clinic as usual, around six o'clock in the evening, because he would go home in an hour. We sat and talked, and he moved closer to me and reached out to unbutton my blouse, and asked me about Emile. At that time I'd go home and then go out with Emile. I was so fed up with life, living with secrecy and lies and missed appointments, and anyway, the only way he slept with me was the way I told you about. I got back together with Emile. I won't tell you how it went when we talked. He said that he felt guilty, and so on and so on, and that he was going to bring his mother and we'd get officially engaged. I didn't tell Dr. Said about Emile, so I don't know how he knew. I guess I told him Emile called, but I didn't tell him I went to the movies with him and that we slept together.”

“You slept with him?” asked Yalo.

“What's wrong with that, when he's going to be my fiancé?”

“You mean you were sleeping with two men at the same time?”

Shirin did not reply. She hung her head and said nothing.

“Why so quiet?”

She said that she no longer understood him. He had taken her and raped her and was now stalking her on the phone, and demanding to meet with her in cafés, waiting for her in front of her home and her job, robbing her, threatening her, and now here he was lecturing her on morality because she had slept with two men.

“What about you – how many women have you slept with in the forest?”

“No, I'm not like that.”

“What are you? Who are you? I swear to God, I have no idea why I got mixed up with you.”

“So, what?” asked Yalo.

“So what, what?” asked Shirin.

“You told him about Emile, and then what?”

“Oh! You're asking me about the doctor.”

She said she was very surprised when she saw Dr. Said's reaction. When he asked her about Emile, Shirin decided that the time had come to tell him the truth. When he heard that they had gone to see the movie
Scarface
, that they went to an Italian restaurant afterwards, and that they then spent the night in his apartment, he did not get angry and throw her out of the clinic as she thought he would. He began to bite his fingernails uncontrollably, and then he came closer to her and grasped her breasts.

“No, no,” she said. “I don't want this.”

“I know what you want,” he answered, as he began tearing at her clothes and leading her to his couch. She took off all her clothes and helped him take off his, and Hell commenced.

Shirin said that she didn't know what happened, whether he slept with her or not. She said that he had an erection, and that she held it, and that
he entered her, but she did not know, perhaps he ejaculated quickly, but there was no sign, so perhaps he had suddenly gone soft and claimed he had finished, and began to try again. He was up against her the whole time, as if he were sleeping with her, but he did not . . . then he said he wasn't able to, because she had castrated him. “You are a woman who castrates men.”

Shirin looked at Yalo and asked him, “What do you think?”

Yalo said that he did not understand exactly what happened.

“Neither do I,” said Shirin.

“God doesn't test us,” laughed Yalo.

“So it's true that I'm a castrator?” asked Shirin.

“With other guys I don't know, but with me, I'd be glad to prove that you're not, right now.”

“That's all you ever think about!”

“What do you want me to think about?” said Yalo, sipping from his glass of arak.

Shirin went back to her story, saying that the doctor got up then, put his clothes on, and left, leaving her alone in the clinic.

“I dressed quickly, without washing. I was afraid he had locked the door and left me stranded there, but when I tried the door it opened. I got myself out of there and went home, and that's it.”

“That's it?”

“Well, then there was the whole story in Ballouna. He begged me, and I went out with him in his car. And you know the rest.”

“What about Emile?” asked Yalo.

“No, no, Emile knew nothing about my relationship with Dr. Said. Anyway, what kind of a relationship is it when it's no fun?”

She said that even with Emile she did not feel the pleasure of things, but she was going to marry him. She slept with him without any real desire, though she felt affection for him, especially since he was so weighed down
by his feelings of guilt. As if he were afraid for her. Shirin said she would marry Emile and wanted Yalo to understand her situation, and to stop harrassing her with his phone calls, because the official engagement would be announced soon.

“Engagement? What engagement?”

“My engagement to Emile,” said Shirin. “We decided to get engaged. So please, that's it.”

“N
ow the truth is out!” shouted the interrogator.

Why did the interrogator say that the truth was out? Because Shirin had shown up with Emile and lied? Was that how the truth came out?

The interrogator said that the truth was out, “So it's no use lying anymore.”

“Yes, sir,” said Yalo. He wanted to confess. He bowed his head, closed his eyes, and sensed his confession, and heard the hoarse voice of his grandfather the
cohno
, deep in his throat, “Confess.” Yalo was afraid when he heard his mother say that her father had “swallowed his voice,” he was afraid and even stopped swallowing entirely, in order not to swallow his voice and become like his grandfather.

“Confess, boy,” shouted the
cohno
.

Yalo saw nothing but a white beard with an odd smell around it.

“That's the smell of incense,” his mother said. “Your grandfather is a
cohno
, my boy, he chews frankincense and musk before starting prayers. You too, someday when you're grown, God willing, you'll be a
cohno
like your grandfather.”

“I hate all the
cohnos
,” said Daniel.

But his grandfather, Abuna Ephraim, as he became known once he entered the priesthood, forgot everything. He forgot his first name, which
was Abel, and his second name, which the Kurdish mullah had given him, and forgot his work as a layer of tile in construction projects all over Beirut. He forgot his mother, who had died in a faraway village called Ain Ward, and he forgot his first wife, who died after a long illness.

All Cohno Ephraim remembered of his mother was her long black hair, with spots of congealed blood over it like open eyes. Ephraim chewed the resin of the pine tree and perfumed his beard with incense, and was afraid of the open eyes.

“Close your eyes, boy, and confess.”

“This lad's eyes frighten me. Why are they so big and his eyelashes so long? Where did he get these eyes from? We don't have big eyes like this in our family.”

Yalo did not know how to answer his
cohno
grandfather's questions, but he closed his eyes and confessed that he had lied or stolen an apple, or not studied, or anything that came into his head. When the
cohno
listened to his confessions, he was transformed from a
cohno
who heard the sacrament of confession into a grandfather, and instead of preaching to the lad who confessed before him with bowed head and closed eyes, he would beat him with a bamboo stick.

“I don't want to confess to you, Grandpa.”

“I am not Grandpa, I am Abuna Ephraim, and if you don't confess, you won't eat tomorrow.”

He forced him to confess, then would beat him, and the boy became afraid of the hoarse voice which heralded the whack of the bamboo stick on his bare feet.

Yalo did not cry. He held back, and trembled with misery before his grandfather.

He called him Black Grandfather – that stocky, honey-eyed, big-nosed man whose white beard occupied his whole face, and spilled over his chest,
he was the master of this little family made up of Yalo and his mother, Gaby. Yalo was fatherless. His father had long since emigrated to Sweden and had never been heard from again; nor was there a brother or sister.

“There are just three of us,” is what Yalo told the interrogator when he was asked about his family.

“We are a family of just three persons: Abo, Bro, and Ruho Qadisho. I'm Bro.”

“What are you talking about? Do you think I'm joking?” shouted the interrogator.

“No, sir, but my Black Grandfather talked that way. He's Syriac, even though I think he's really Kurdish, but I don't know which is his strange mix. That's what we are, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. My mother is the Holy Spirit, that's what I learned when I was little, but my grandfather stopped calling me Bro, he said I was not a good Bro, because the Bro is the Christ, and I was growing up like Judas, a crook, a good-for-nothing, and that's why he started calling me Yalo, and when he heard my mother calling me Bro, he shouted at her and told her to stop it.”