Yalo (10 page)

Yalo smiled, flashing his big white teeth. “No – that one, my grandfather the
cohno
killed.”

“Your grandfather, the priest, killed a man?”

“Of course he killed him.”

“A priest who kills?”

“No, you've got me wrong, he didn't kill him like you think, he didn't use a gun or a knife, no, he killed him with talk. He talked with him, and the tailor couldn't take it, and so he died.”

Shirin laughed. “Talk is all you're good at.”

“Give me your hand,” he said, and offered her his hand above the table.

“Not here, please God.”

“Give me your hand – I'm telling you,” he said.

“Fine, but down there.”

Yalo brought his hand under the table and Shirin reached her small white hand out. He held it, and pulled it toward him and put it onto his hip, so that the girl felt a chill from the steel that tingled from her fingertips to her shoulders. She quickly withdrew her hand and asked, “What is that?”

“That's my piece. You want me to take it out and put it on the table? For you I'm willing to do anything.”

Why did she say that when he met her at the Bistrot, he had put his gun on the plate in front of her?

He heard the interrogator reading about the gun and the plate and could not believe his ears.

“He placed the gun under the plate, then lifted up the plate and said, ‘Look.' I almost died of fright, while he was laughing like mad.”

The interrogator read this sentence from the notebook in front of him, then asked Yalo what he had to say.

“How should I know?” asked Yalo.

“Is it true, you put the gun under the plate to frighten her?”

“. . .”

“Is it true you told her you wanted to play the gun-in-the-plate game?”

“. . .”

“What is this game? Tell me so I understand.”

“. . .”

“Is it true you told her she had to get used to the plate?”

“. . .”

“In front of everybody you pulled out your gun, as if there were no laws?”

“I only . . . I mentioned the plate, but not like that.”

What did she say about that plate? Yalo had only said that he would put the gun on the plate in front of everyone, so that she would believe his love for her, and now she was saying that he put the gun on the plate to frighten her, that she begged him to stop, that he burst out into a tremendous belly laugh that rose above the murmuring conversations that mingled Arabic and French of all the diners seated nearby.

“. . .”

“I forced her to speak Arabic with me?” marveled Yalo.

“. . .”

“She said that she loved seeing me so she could speak Arabic, anyway,
what do I have to do with Arabic? Arabic is not my language, sir – we have a dead language. When I speak, I feel something dead on my tongue.”

Yalo did not say this, and would not have even had he been able, in this difficult circumstance, to remember what his grandfather had said, for he was unable to formulate sentences in this way.

His grandfather, at the time the Sultan of Sleep deserted him, used to say that he felt his tongue dying in his mouth. He stood under the icon of the crucified Christ and spoke to Him:

“Your language is dead, O God, how can you let your language die this way? I feel the taste of death upon my tongue. Who after me will recite the Our Father in your language after my death?

“
Abun dbashmayo, netqadash shmokh, tite malkutokh, nehwe Sebiyonokh, aykano dbashmayo of ar'o, hablan laHmo dsunqonan yawmono, washbuq lan Hawbayn waHTohayn, aykano dof Hnan shbatayn lHayobayn. wlo ta'lan lnesyuno elo fasolan men bisho. meTul dilokh-i malkuto wHaylo wteshbuHto l'olam ‘olmin, amen.

“How can we pray, Yishou, when the words are dying? I can sense the worms emerging from them, as if my mouth has become a graveyard. Your language is dying, and You are doing nothing about it. With whom do You wish to speak upon Your second coming? There is no longer anyone in the world left but me who can understand You. And me, the Sultan has abandoned me, and death is approaching. Someday when Your servant Ephraim has died, what will You do?”

Yalo told Shirin that he wanted her to come with him to the beach at Ramlet al-Baida after Christmas. She said no. Yalo got mad, grabbed her by the arms, and made her feel the pistol on his hip. He said that he was prepared to put the gun on the plate, even in front of everyone, just so that she would believe his love for her.

“But no, no, sir,” Yalo said, “I did not force her to come to the beach.”

Yalo called Shirin more than ten times that day, and she repeated over and over that she did not want to go to the beach; she preferred to meet him at the café. In the end, however, he convinced her. He told her that he would show her a miracle, that he would speak to the fish in Syriac. She agreed to come, on the condition that their meeting be short, because she had to be somewhere for dinner. But their meeting lasted until late into the night, not because Yalo forced her to stay and drink wine, as she told the interrogator, but because the miracle indeed occurred.

They walked along the beach at Ramlet al-Baida, then he asked her to go into the water with him.

“It's cold, please just cut it out.”

He left her standing there and plunged into the waves without taking his clothes off, then came back with salt water cupped in his hands and asked her to drink of it before they sat together on the cold damp sand. He pulled from the pocket of his overcoat a bottle of red wine and a loaf of bread. He drank from the bottle and had her drink from it, ate some bread and fed some to her.

“The wine is too sweet. I don't like sweet wine,” she said.

“That is sweet fresh water, not wine.”

Then he stood up, walked to the water, and walked on the water. He left her sitting on the sand, and began to see himself through her eyes. He saw his back draped in the black overcoat, he saw his shadow that stretched to the sky. When he returned to her, dripping wet, his teeth chattering with cold, he saw her sitting with her head down on her pulled-up knees, and when he raised her head to kiss her, he tasted tears.

She wept and said she would die here.

“Please, let me go home before I die.”

Why did she say he had forced her to eat bread and that she had vomited
up the sweet wine mixed with salt water? The water had turned as sweet as honey but she did not understand, and now as he stood in front of the interrogator who appeared to him through blinding sunlight, he discovered all at once the secret of the bread.

He wanted to tell the interrogator that he was sorry. He had suddenly discovered the secret of the bread, and this whole story with Shirin appeared ridiculous to him, not even worth discussing. Yalo burst into laughter, much to the interrogator's consternation, and after this hearty laughter he sank into thoughtful silence and stopped responding to the questions. What could he say? That the bread – that everything except for the bread was nonsense.

“Don't tell me the world has changed, my boy,” said his grandfather. “Whatever has happened or is going to happen, nothing changes. The real thing that mankind has discovered is bread. Apart from food, show me one single invention and I'd be willing to believe that the world has changed. The world does not change, it is round, like a loaf of bread. Everything, my boy, is the same as it was except for the unpleasant taste in my mouth, but I continue to chew incense or pine sap every day. And all because the Sultan has left me. My boy, there are only two things in life, sleep and bread. That is our faith. Christ is a grain of wheat, that died in order to rise, and transformed death into sleep. A man sleeps every night in order to get used to death. When the Sultan of Sleep starts to abandon you, and you start to lose your craving for bread, that is when real death is drawing near. Only what's the difference? There is no difference, it's like sleeping. In sleep we dream, and in death we'll dream.”

Yalo wanted to tell her, he wanted to inform her, but she was crying. How could he tell her about his mother's hair, gleaming with gold, amid the white sand, when Shirin was bent over her knees weeping, not daring to look up.

“Please let me go home,” she said.

“Did you see the miracle?” he asked her.

“I saw everything, but I want to go.”

“When will I see you?”

“Call me tomorrow and we'll set something up, but let me go.”

He saw her disappear into the night. She took off her high heels and ran on the sand until the shadows swallowed her. Yalo remained alone on the beach with an empty red wine bottle and what was left of the bread.

He had not told Shirin about his mother. He had wanted to tell her how his mother drank seawater, how she opened her eyes, how she let her hair down. He wanted to tell her that he saw dozens of women on the beach, standing beneath flowing hair, intoxicated with the gold wrought by the small moon that swung between the clouds, swallowed up by one cloud which then cast it out to another. The light dimmed and then reemerged, and the long hair covered the boy trembling with cold, huddled up on the woolen blanket.

Why did she say that he had made her eat the bread and drink the wine and then stole all the contents of her handbag? Why did she say that when she met him, she made sure not to put more than one hundred American dollars in her handbag? Why did she say that every time they met he took a one-hundred-dollar bill?

“But she did not tell the whole truth, sir.”

“And what is the truth? Please tell me.”

“The truth is that no one but God knows the truth.”

Yalo was no longer sure of anything, but in those encounters he felt that Shirin was dissolving under his gaze, as if she wanted him to pull her to him, but something prevented her from speaking her feelings, as if she were connected by a hidden wire to another world, which she could not leave. Yalo's gazes reached out to her to come to him.

“Come to my place,” he said.

“Where?” she asked.

“My heart.”

“Yes, yes,” she answered.

She was afraid. Now Yalo understood that she had been afraid. Fear was a deceiver, it inspired fear of things that did not even exist. Now – that is, in a torture chamber – Yalo understood. Confessions under torture were like lovers' confessions. Suddenly a lover loses control of his tongue and says things that destroy love.

Now Yalo was convinced that he had made a mistake. He should not have told Shirin the truth about what he had experienced, yet he did. When he told her about Madame Randa, and how he randified her, and about her daughter, Ghada, and how her eyes flashed with jealousy as she told him about her friend in college who had moved to Canada, and that she would follow him there soon, and how when he told her about his adventures in the forest and his compassion for Monsieur Michel Salloum, he had fallen into a word trap. His trick had been discovered.

Had he not told her that he was sure Madame would report him to the police, this nameless girl would never have dared go to the police station to lodge a complaint against him.

It was the disease of truth that he came down with when he fell in love.

He told her that he did not know why he felt that way, or why he was no longer able to lie. He told her everything, and when the love flowed off his tongue he found himself in the police station, where he saw her, in her short skirt with her slender white thighs, pointing him out as a criminal.

Yalo told the interrogator, he wanted to tell him, but he suddenly fell mute. He recalled how he had fallen into the abyss and fallen from her favor. As he fell in love, he wasn't able to hide the truth, even if meant losing her esteem. He was telling her about his mother's relationship with the
tailor Elias al-Shami when he sensed the sinking, he could see his own image crumbling in her eyes, and there was nothing he could do.

How could he save a fallen image?

Instead of ceasing to speak, and repairing his image anew, he saw his speech become the mirror of his fall. He saw as in a mirror how he had fallen to earth, with his image shattered into small pieces. He felt he was drowning, and all a drowned man can do is struggle to continue his journey into the depths that have swallowed him.

So, exposed by love, Yalo drowned, and when he spoke, he fell to earth.

“I swear I did not kill her, sir.”

Why did the interrogator ask him about a cousin he had not killed?

Yalo had lied to Shirin when he told her about a crime that existed only in his imagination. He tried to salvage his image, which was sinking and drowning, so he invented a lie about a crime, and now this lie was being used against him as a fact as the interrogator described it.

Why did he say that he would send an interrogation team to Al-Qamishli to look for the Jal'u family?

“There is no such person as Maria Jal'u, sir, I swear there isn't. The whole story is that I was fibbing to Shirin. I don't have a cousin, because I have no uncles on either side. Well, it's true that I have an aunt Sara on my mother's side, but she left for Sweden a long time ago. I don't know her. My mother told me that she got married and left, and became a Swedish citizen. Then the war came and we heard nothing more from her. That's what my mother said.”