Yalo (7 page)

The tailor sat across from the
cohno
as he had been asked to do – “Come, my son, and sit before me.” He bowed his head, which he dyed with henna, producing a reddish result, and kissed the hand that resembled the branch of a dead tree, then heard a strange request and gave a strange reply.

“You love the girl, right?”

The tailor did not understand the question, or claimed not to understand. “What girl, Abuna?” he asked.

“You love Gabrielle, my daughter Gaby. I know everything.”

The tailor did not know what to say, because if he denied it he would seem vile to this elderly
cohno
, who was watching his only remaining daughter drifting into nothingness in her relationship with this man. But if he said yes, he had no way of guessing what the
cohno
would ask of him. So he just nodded his head downward in order to let the
cohno
understand whatever he wanted.

“So take her.”

“. . .”

“I am telling you take her, what are you waiting for?”

“What?”

“Take her, my son, I will take care of the legal aspect. I will divorce her from her husband, because he has been gone ten years now, and that way you can marry her.”

“But I am married.”

“I'll divorce you too.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you.”

“But that is hard, Abuna, you know these things take time with Greek Orthodox.”

“We'll make you Syriac, and that way I can divorce you in twenty-four hours.”

“Me, Syriac?”

“Why, is there something wrong with the Syriac?”

“I love the Syriac, Abuna, only . . .”

“Only what?”

The
cohno
had told him to take her. The tailor kept his head bowed for a long time before answering.

“Where should I take her, Abuna?”

“Take her home with you and live with her lawfully. You have to find a way to take her. What's going on now is shameful, and a sin.”

The two men did not speak for a long while, and sat immersed in a silence broken by Gabrielle when she came into the living room with a coffee tray.

“Sit down, my girl,” said the
cohno
.

Gabrielle sat down, all her limbs trembling.

“I told him to take you. I told him: If you love her, take her.” He gazed at Elias and asked him, “What do you say, my son?”

“I don't know,” answered Elias, after taking a sip of his rosewater-scented Turkish coffee.

“What don't you know?” asked the
cohno
.

“I don't know, Abuna, why don't you take her yourself.” Elias's reply came like a rattle from deep inside him.

“What did you say?” asked the
cohno
.

“I swear, I don't know what I want to say.”

“No, please repeat what you said. I did not hear you well,” said the
cohno
.

“. . .”

“You said I should take her? Me!”

“I can't,” said Elias.

“You're telling me to take her, my own daughter! What is this, get out, you shit! I thought you were a man but you are shit! Get out and get away from me, and I warn you, if you come near my daughter I'll crack your skull.”

Yalo did not know how the visit ended, or how Elias al-Shami got out of the house, but he imagined that Elias had staggered off.

“He came in a young kid and left an old man,” was how he would have reported it to Shirin, but he has never been able to tell her the story of his mother. When he met up with her she was frightened and in a rush and just wanted to go home. He wanted to tell her that it was up to a man to take the woman he loved. Had Emile dared to demand that he take her, he would have taken her. How could he abandon her? They all told him to take her so how could he not? It was unthinkable. And now if the interrogator told him, take her, he would take her. But the interrogator told him he knew everything, and everything meant that he knew about Madame Randa. No, that one he would not take. He imagined the lawyer Michel Salloum before him. He saw him sitting with him in front of the stove in the villa
and telling him to take Randa, and then Yalo would say, “
Lo.
No, you take her. I don't want to.”

Shirin, she was another story. No one would tell him: Take her. When you are truly in love, that's not the way things go. But there, at the villa, when Monsieur Michel would return from one of his trips to France or elsewhere and ask Yalo to come up to the villa, Yalo was afraid, he felt in his hands the shudders of Elias al-Shami. Yalo would trudge up, his back hunched like Elias al-Shami's, afraid that such a command would escape the lips of his mentor. For he was certain that he could not take her, just as he did not want her. But he went to her when she summoned him, and slept with her when she wanted him. With her, he felt as if he were entering, in moments he had stolen, a world whose essence he did not understand, and when he tried to write about those moments in his cell, with nothing in front of him but a pile of white paper provided by the interrogator, he would never know what to write. Was he supposed to write that he had felt that he was stepping into flames of emotions that were cooking him alive? Or lie and say that he did not like having sex with her? Or what?

Yalo was writhing in the fire of Madame and getting as hard and sharp as a spear, and she was shouting at him to stab her with his spear, and he was swaying, burning and whistling like a wild gale, as she was moaning and telling him to say her name: “Say Randa, say Randa.” He repeated it after her and she kept it up. He even started to call sex randifying. He randified her, randified while he waited for her, randified himself, and randified in the shower.

“Don't look up until I call your name,” she told him.

He came when she called him, and waited when she did not call him, and she came to him whenever she felt like it, and told him that she missed nature.

“I'm in the mood to sleep with your smell,” she told him when she came
to his small house for the first time, and they randified in his bed as they had randified in hers. She told him his smell here enchanted her, and that she loved the smells of thyme and pine mingled together, and he randified and speared her. He told her, “What do you say we trade places? You get down here and I'll get on top.” She laughed and said he was outrageous, and that she loved him because he made her laugh. Then she left, going home to her bathtub filled with hot water and foamy soap, while he stood in the shower, shivering from the cold, in his little house.

“How did you start hunting people?” the interrogator asked.

“I never in my life was a sniper in the war, sir,” Yalo said.

“Don't play innocent! I'm asking you about the forest, the cars, and the women. When did you start going after cars?”

Truly, how had it begun?

How could he answer a question as vague as that?

“It started by chance. I saw a car and I went down.”

“Alone?”

“Yes, I was alone.”

“And then?”

“After that I was still alone.”

When Yalo tried to remember, he saw himself alone, he saw the night. How had the night begun? How was it possible for anyone to ask the night how it became night?

He wanted to tell the interrogator that the hunting he was asking about was like the night. But his throat was dry and he couldn't find the words. There he was, lacking words when he wanted to speak. His mother said her son had a heavy tongue, but he did not find his tongue heavy. The words were hanging in his throat, but instead of spitting them out as other people did, he swallowed them, and prayers, pledges, and pebbles were of no avail.

When Yalo remembered those days, he saw a different person. He saw a child enveloped in his mother's words, they glided over him, yet he was unable to speak. The words began forming in his mouth and he felt them to be whole, then he tried to utter them but they slipped down his gullet and would not emerge. He strained until the veins in his neck stood out, and his mother guided his words with her eyes, then saw how they slipped inside and would only emerge broken. So she'd start the lesson over again:

“Isn't it clear, darling, isn't it clear? I explained to you how you have to get it out. Try to spit. Come on, spit, you see how it all comes out at once? That's how words are, they should come out like spit. Go ahead, try.”

He tried, swallowing his words and his saliva, feeling that he would be a mute when he grew up.

But one day he overcame it. At the barracks near the museum, when he shouted out that he had become a billy goat like the others, Tony had told him to spit it out, so he spat it out and learned how to spit.

The war was us spitting, that is what he would say, if he were asked to define the war.

But he did not know how to say or write these big words. He knew how to spit. When he spat, the words would no longer hang in his throat; he spat and became a billy goat, in other words, a hero. It was true that after that he went back to swallowing his words, but he knew why, so he did not fear turning mute. His stammer came back after he and Tony stole the barracks' money and fled to Paris. There Yalo tasted banishment and homelessness, and yearned to be the animal he had been. Yalo would not agree that war was animalistic work; it was basically heroism, but heroism was impossible without a certain animal component. Military training was not complete without awakening the wolf inside you.

“You are wolves,” the trainer had said.

“No, we're billy goats,” shouted Tony, standing in the first row of the
training formation. And they became billy goats. It was not Tony who had nicknamed their battalion based near the museum. Yalo did not know why, but people started calling them billy goats, and they became the Billy Goats.

Yalo felt that there was something like the spear awakening within him. But Madame Randa had not understood him, or did not care, and when she asked him about his spear, that thing that never left him awoke within, and he became a goat or a wolf. He speared her, and when M. Michel Salloum found him in the Paris Métro and brought him to his home in the Sixteenth Arrondissement, he told him not to be a sheep. “That's not right. You're a young man. Why are you behaving like this, like a sheep?” But Yalo was not acting like a sheep; he felt that he had actually become one, and that he had lost his inner spear. Suddenly he found himself in a strange country; Tony, who knew French, stole their money and disappeared from the hotel in Montparnasse where they were staying. Yalo found himself to be like a lone sheep. He did not speak the language and had no money. Suddenly he was a beggar and a mute, how could he not be a sheep? His grandfather had told him that animals were brutes, that was why the Arabs called those who did not speak their languages brutes, or mutes.

In that faraway country Yalo felt as mute as a brute animal and was no longer able to spit out words as he'd learned during the war, and even after M. Michel Salloum took him home to Lebanon and gave him a job as guard of his villa in Ballouna, Yalo remained practically unable to speak. Words came to him only with the help of a flashlight that would light up his night with desire.

Yalo saw his mother, Gabrielle, only here in prison. She came to visit him after he had been detained for two years, but instead of bringing him cigarettes and food as the other prisoners' families did, she stood on the other side of the iron bars and wept, then told him about the room she had
rented, and her poverty and fear of hunger. She extracted a little mirror from her handbag and told him, “Look at what's left of me, I can't see myself in the mirror anymore, is that possible? The mirror has begun to consume my image and suck out its essence – can you believe that, son? Look in the mirror and tell me what you see.”

When Gaby opened her little handbag, Yalo thought she'd take out a packet of cigarettes, and his mouth watered at the thought that he would get to smoke like the other prisoners instead of waiting for one of them to offer him half a cigarette, or for one of the cigarettes of the lame beggar who specialized in collecting the cigarette butts and sifting them only to reroll them into small cigarettes, which he called recycled cigarettes.

Gaby did not pull out a pack of American cigarettes from her handbag; instead she extracted a small white mirror and began to talk in a way that made Yalo want to escape.

Yalo tried to explain to the interrogator that he had gone to France to escape his mother, but the interrogator didn't seem to understand.

He said that he went to France because he had become afraid, so the interrogator thought that the suspect had fled Lebanon from fear of prison. Many such youths had left after the end of the war; Yalo was only one of them. More likely than not, thought the interrogator, he had been implicated in some crime.

The interrogator asked him who he was afraid of, but Yalo did not reply, since he could not think of any way to tell him about his fear of the mirror. Should he talk about that? And what would he say?

It was nighttime and the power was cut. The woman lit the house with three candles. How old was she? How old is my mother? Yalo never asked himself this question because mothers are ageless. When his grandfather spoke of his mother, and of the red eyes spread through her hair where
blood had frozen, he became like a little boy; his shoulders reared up just as children straighten their shoulders when they try to appear taller than they actually are. Now, when Yalo remembered his mother, he squared his shoulders and saw a woman full of life, carrying a candle in her hand, approaching the room of her only son. She was wearing a long blue nightdress, her hair down to her shoulders. Yalo opened his eyes and saw the long chestnut hair, curly and shoulder-length, and asked her about her chignon.