Yalo (11 page)

“What about your father? I'm asking you about an uncle on your father's side.”

“I don't know, I swear I don't know. He might have brothers or sisters, but I don't know them. I don't know my father. I've never even seen his
picture, I asked to see one once, but my grandfather didn't want me to talk about that.”

Why did the interrogator not believe Yalo, who stood before him with his long eyelashes, his hands shaking, his back bent, his stammering, and the words that hardly made it out of his mouth?

Yalo had known that no one would believe him. That's why he said whatever he wanted, because in the war no one believed anyone. But now the war was over, as he told Shirin. He told her he hated the war because of all its lies, and that when he met her he was sure the war was over because he had stopped lying; he wanted to start his life all over again, he loved her.

No, before the war ended, Yalo decided to emigrate. It was his friend Tony Atiq's idea. Yalo did not know whether Atiq was Tony's actual family name, or a nickname he had acquired, as people tended to acquire nicknames in the war which took the place of their real names.

Tony said he was
atiq
– old.

“I'm an
atiq
Syriac,” he said, and told so many stories about his heroic deeds that Yalo did not believe. “How can I believe what you say when your eyes are lying?” But the words were eyes. He tried to explain to his friend that words were like eyes, but Tony was blind when it came to words. He said whatever he pleased, and bragged all the time. No one believed him, but he did not care, he kept talking, because talk leads to more talk.

“Words are eyes,” the
cohno
told his grandson as he opened a book, in order to teach him the basics of reading the Syriac alphabet.

“Look closely at the words, my boy. Do you know why mankind is so absorbed with reading? You understand, it is the words, they watch us, because they can see and breathe.”

But the war taught Yalo to believe his own eyes, not the eyes of words, and he would make his peace with words only in prison, where the interrogator
would force him to write his whole life story, from beginning to end, several times over. That was when he would discover that his grandfather was right, that when speech was written down, it looked up at the writer and carried on a discussion with him, forcing him to write what needed to be written.

In the war, however, words flowed just as blood flowed. Blood flowed and speech flowed, and people no longer believed a thing, neither blood nor words.

Yalo believed Tony Atiq only once, when he convinced him to rob the safe of the Georges Aramouni Barracks so that they could flee with the money to France, where they would start a new life.

Yalo broke into the safe and robbed it, and Tony got hold of tickets for the boat to Larnaca in Cyprus, and from there, plane tickets to Paris.

In the luxury hotel in Paris, Tony disappeared with the money, leaving Yalo alone, with nowhere to go except the Métro tunnel at Montparnasse, where he found some warmth in the bitter cold of Paris. Yalo found himself in a strange land without even the means to buy a dry crust of bread. He sat in the Métro and begged. There Monsieur Michel Salloum found him and took him back to Lebanon, and from that point the story was known, because it all alternated between the interrogation room and his jail cell.

Yalo said that he had lied to her so that she would be impressed and fall in love with him.

He said it was love.

He said that Shirin let him languish for a whole year waiting for her. A year during which all he saw were promises in her small eyes. A year during which he called every day and waited under the window of her house or in front of the Araissi Advertising Company building, where she worked. A year during which he haunted the Beirut night searching for her and her middle-aged lover, and later on for the young man with the thin mustache she said was her fiancé.

Yalo wrote that he was surprised when he saw the young man sitting beside Shirin in the interrogation room, squinting through his thick, black-framed eyeglasses as if he couldn't see. A short, full-bodied young man, fair-skinned and pink-cheeked, with plump thighs, sitting quietly in the interrogation room, Shirin at his side, proud of her fiancé and gazing gloatingly at Yalo, who nearly fell over when he saw her. He steadied himself on the chair before sitting on it.

“Stand up, you dog. Who told you to sit down?” shouted the interrogator.

Yalo stood up, trembling, his eyes closed, before the interrogator allowed him to sit. Then the barrage of questions came at him.

Yalo wrote that when he gathered himself on the chair, opened his eyes, and saw the young man, he ached for his flashlight. This guy would never be able to resist a single point of light; he would collapse and crawl on the ground and say, “Take her, sir, and just let me go.”

But the fiancé sat under the sun falling from the window behind the interrogator's head, lifted up his little nose as if he were apart from this story and from this whole country.

Yalo would write that when he saw Shirin sitting beside her fiancé, he suffered the third shock of his life.

The first shock was his mother with the mirror that swallowed her face and made her disappear, or at least made her feel that she'd died before her death.

His second shock was Tony Atiq, who vanished in Paris, taking the money with him, along with the French he knew, leaving Yalo alone with no money and no language.

Shirin was the third shock.

When they arrested him in his little house, the thought of Shirin never occurred to him. He assumed that the Madame had betrayed him. He had begun to notice for some time the hatred in Madame Randa's eyes. Even
when he slept with her, he felt that she was no longer sleeping with him, but sleeping through him.

He said to himself, as he raised his hands in the face of the rifles pointed at him, that this was Madame's doing, and he laughed to himself. He would expose her and tell everything about his relationship with her. He would enjoy the way Monsieur Michel Salloum's face would wince as he heard the truth.

“My husband never suspects me, ever. I don't know what would happen if he ever found out about you. My husband's crazy about me. He could never imagine you bewitched me.”

Yalo decided not to answer the questions in his house. He put his hands in the air and let them search the house. They confiscated the machine gun, the pistol, a box of ammunition, his overcoat, and the flashlight, while he waited quietly. There at the police station he would expose everything; instead of telling them about his exploits in the lovers' forest, he would tell them about the Madame.

Then he saw her in front of him, just as he had seen her for the first time.

He came with M. Michel to the villa in Ballouna. Yalo went to his house, showered, put on clean clothes, and went up to the villa. There he saw the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life. Randa was tall and dark with short black hair. Her lips were thick and full and her eyes green. He walked in and saw her embracing her husband with her bare arms. When she noticed Yalo, she took a step back. Yalo sensed that this woman's gaze fell on him from above. He detected a fugitive smile meant for him alone; embarrassed, he felt that his feet could no longer support him, so he closed his eyes and fell into the chair. Then he got up, wishing to leave.

“Just a moment, just a moment,” said Madame.

Yalo stood in front of the door, confused, when Monsieur Michel
motioned for him to sit. He sat on the soft red sofa and noticed that Madame had disappeared; then Monsieur also disappeared. Yalo was left alone in a spacious salon hung with various Byzantine icons.

When they returned, Madame Randa was wearing a blue dressing gown over her blue dress and bearing a tray on which she had placed a long-handled coffeepot and glasses of cognac. She poured the coffee and the cognac and offered them to the two men before sitting down. She crossed her legs so he could see the sole of her tawny foot and her calf rising and falling with the smoke of her American cigarette, which she exhaled into the air of the salon.

Yalo drank his coffee and cognac quickly and left with Monsieur Michel for his house, where he understood that his job would be to guard the villa as well as Madame and her daughter, that he must not openly carry a weapon by night or by day, that he would receive a monthly salary of three hundred American dollars in addition to the meals that would be sent to him from the villa.

But Yalo had erred, he would write that he had erred, and would feel moments of regret for the Madame during his long stay in detention. No, the truth was that his feelings of regret for the Madame began when he saw Shirin with her slender, trembling thighs in the interrogator's room. Suddenly everything ran together in his head and he tasted thorns, and saw before him the Madame's flirtatious calf, before he fell captive to Shirin's small eyes.

Yalo had erred that night two months before he was arrested and he was incapable of justifying or explaining his foolish behavior. Madame was wearing a white nightdress, stretched out on the sofa in the salon, her full breasts nearly exposed by the opening of her dress, emanating the fragrance of her perfume, Madame Roche. Yalo took his usual place on the floor beside the sofa. He told her he was tired and his eyes hurt, but she didn't
believe him. She poured out two tumblers of whiskey and told him to drink. She picked up the remote control and started the movie, and began ruffling the hair of the young man sitting by her. That night Yalo did not wait for the end of the movie, just as he did not wait for her teasing – that slow sexual ritual that she imposed on him. Fed up, he took her on the sofa. He heard her voice pleading, “No, not like this,” but he didn't stop. He had never before slept with her here. She would take his hand and lead him to the bedroom and there slowly undress, drawing him to her slowly, and when he took her she asked him not to come quickly. She languished and delayed as she gazed at her naked body in the huge mirror placed at the foot of her bed and Yalo was immersed in the fragrance of her perfume and writhed between her thighs and at the cleft of her large, firm breasts. He came near at a signal from her eyes and moved away at a signal from her hands, and when he heard her final sighs and sank beneath the water that flowed freely from inside her, seeming to disappear, he felt that he was shooting his whole soul into her and that he wanted to fall asleep in her arms. But Madame transformed quickly at the final moment into a stranger, covered herself with the bedclothes, and her dilated pupils began to shift feverishly, and she said that she was afraid that her husband would be showing up. Yalo would laugh and go back to her but she firmly resisted him and he understood that he had to go. He put on his underwear and his rumpled pants tossed beside the bed, and he felt that his feet were as rumpled and limp as his trousers. He would walk on trembling feet to his house, where he'd drink a bottle of red wine and fry three eggs, then take a shower and sleep like the dead.

That night Yalo felt nauseated and did not know how he had been able to get erect and feel desire. He felt sure that he would not be able to sleep with Madame Randa, but suddenly he got hard and was proud of himself. Yalo had wanted to ask her to postpone it but she did not understand his hint. He sat down on the floor like a dog, watching a movie that was like all those
movies. All pornos were alike but possessed an undeniable excitement. He drained his glass in a single swallow, then jumped on top of Madame, took her in seconds, and got up. He did not take off his clothes. He unzipped his pants, flung himself on her, and finished. He refastened his pants, sat on the opposite sofa, poured himself another drink, and lit a cigarette.

Madame Randa got up and covered her naked thighs in a nightdress, left the television bright with the movie, and went into her room, dragging her feet. At that moment Yalo saw how Madame's gaze came from above and broke on the floor. He did not finish his drink. He put out his cigarette and went home.

In the days that followed, they spoke to each other. She scolded him and he scolded her, but she never uttered the words “I love you.” She never once told him that she loved him, even when her water would spill in his arms. She'd rise like a ghost then sit cross-legged on the bed, her eyes dancing and shifting above her long neck before settling down and gazing afar.

In the course of that long week she still never uttered those words. Her pleading, broken eyes spoke but did not speak. Yalo felt a mixture of fear and pride. He saw her at the entrance to the villa and felt the bliss of that night. He followed her as usual to help her carry her purchases, but she did not look at him.

One night she summoned him to the villa. He went up, grumbling, sure that this would be another bickering session. He went in and saw her sitting alone in the salon, drinking whiskey. She motioned for him to approach and sit down. He sat on the floor beside her sofa and reached out to pour himself a drink, but she said no. She did not reach out to fondle his head. She drank and drank while he sat in his place. Then she turned to him and pointed to the door. Yalo left, stumbling, and realizing as he slammed the door that it was all over. He sensed that his days in the villa were numbered, and began to prepare for a new turn in his life, but he still could not let go
of Shirin. He called her every morning, went to her house and stood in front of it, followed her to the company where she worked, and stood in front of the building entrance. Now he went home to the villa only at night. His hunting activities ended; he no longer had any desire to stand under the oak tree waiting for lovers who would fall prey to his flashlight. Ghada returned the books he had stolen for her from the Ras Beirut Bookstore on Bliss Street. Yalo would live sad and alone and would never stop buying the music tapes of Abd al-Halim Hafiz. He would spend his nights listening to the song “Her Beloved.” He thought about writing a letter to Shirin, but realized that he could only write in Arabic, and doubted that the girl knew how to read Arabic. From then on, his encounters with her would depend on pure chance.