Yalo (13 page)

He took a knife and fork and cut a small piece of the sea creature, then put the morsel of cuttlefish into a piece of bread, dipped it in the ink, and offered it to Shirin, who obediently opened her mouth. When she began to chew the morsel, she closed her eyes and started humming a melody.

After the first morsel, Shirin got into the mood of the cuttlefish, licked
the lemon and garlic-spiced ink from her lips, and thanked him for making her taste the most delicious food in the world. She was affectionate with Yalo in his car, allowing him to hold her hand on the Dbayyeh highway after the Dog River tunnel, and when they were in front of her house in Hazemiya, she let him place a long kiss on her lips, then got out of the car and bent over the window to tell him good-bye.

That was the day Yalo was sure he would marry her.

Yalo told himself in the mirror when he was shaving the next morning that he would marry Shirin; he would buy all the cuttlefish in the world and eat them with her, and live in her house. He had not said the words “her house,” but when he thought about marriage and the house and children, he saw the entrance to her building and the sycamore tree on the sidewalk opposite and imagined himself under that tree, playing ball with a blond child speaking French. He remembered his grandfather and wondered how he would speak with his grandson's son, and in what language?

In his last days, his grandfather had stopped speaking Arabic and gone back to his mother tongue. He began to spend his time alone in his room, with a stack of papers by his bed. He copied the Syriac poems of Mar Ephraim and said that Mar Ephraim was a great poet and that he regretted that his only grandson was half illiterate, knowing only Arabic and deciphering Syriac letters only with difficulty.

“Come here and learn something, boy, I want you to become a writer like me.”

Yalo laughed inwardly and said, “Only you're not writing, Grandfather, you're copying Mar Ephraim's poems. You're not the author.”

“But I am Mar Ephraim,” replied his grandfather, smiling at the foolishness of his grandson, who did not realize that all the writers in the world were copyists, that there was in the whole world only one book. This unseen book was not written from human inspiration but of infinite parts
that revealed themselves to novelists and poets who would copy them down and rearrange them anew.

Yalo came closer to his grandfather and tried to read.

“Do you understand?” asked his grandfather.

“
Eluho hab yulfuno
,” said Yalo as he stared at the words. “Kind of,” he replied, “but why go to the trouble, Grandfather?”

Here the
cohno
went into his philosophy of books. He believed that books were like icons. Books were the windows that we open onto the infinite, and through them we can look into the other world. “That is, we don't see everything, we see fragments, as if we are peeking.”

“Grandfather, people don't peek at books, people peek at women.”

“Books are nicer than women, my boy, what do you know about books and women?!”

His grandfather, covered from head to toe in his black robe, and with his jar of ink placed on the table beside him, resembled a sea creature giving off the smell of ink.

Yalo wanted to tell Shirin about his grandfather, who resembled a cuttlefish, and peeking at books, and women who were like open books through which one might peek into the infinite, but he didn't tell her. Ideas vanished from his head when he was with her. He would begin to speak but then forget, and then knew nothing.

That was the story of his life.

The story was he did not say anything, he stammered in front of this girl; he became a little boy again, stuttering, forgetting, hesitating. Shirin was afraid of his stammering, and in listening to him, she sensed that his words could not be put together into a coherent sentence; she heard random words that did not belong beside each other on the branch of speech.

“Why are you talking that way?” she asked him.

“Don't you like my talking?” he answered her.

“Of course, of course, that's not what I meant. I don't know.”

“You don't know what?”

“I don't know anything.”

She said she didn't know anything.

I don't know anything either, Yalo would say. Only he didn't.

She had beaten him at announcing her ignorance of everything, so he did not know how to announce his own identical ignorance. Thus Yalo was, talking to her without knowing what to say, garbling his words, tripping over his tongue, and falling into a void.

There in the cell, where he sat alone writing the story of his whole life, he felt a void all around him. He saw the sheets of white paper and ink pens and longed for the smell of the ink in his grandfather's room, grasping the secret of the squid, which Arabs called the
habbar
, or inkmaker. He understood that this sea creature was the first to discover writing, because it wrote with its ink in self-defense and to resist death. Its enemies were completely misled by the ink in their faces, and the cuttlefish vanished from their sight in the dense black thicket that the ink painted within the seawater.

Yalo was alone in his cell. He had to release the ink onto his sheets of paper. He was like the cuttlefish, possessing no weapon but ink to release in order to deceive the hunters and save himself from death. But woe to the sea creature who fell into the fishermen's trap, because they would cook him in his ink. Yalo thought he would be cooked in the ink he was writing with now, that the black ink flowing onto the paper would kill him, and that he was powerless to deceive the hunter who awaited his sheets of paper in order to wrap him up in them, kill him, and devour him. He wrote and wrote, like a squid advancing toward his death.

“Hey you – animal!” shouted the interrogator.

“. . .”

“. . .”

How had the interrogator learned that Yalo called himself a hawk?

Had Shirin told him?

Had Yalo told her that he was a hawk?

Yalo had never spoken of it, so how did she know? What had she said? He had not told her, it was his secret, so how could he have revealed it?

He was a hawk. He lurked in the forest waiting for the moment to swoop down on his prey, and when he spotted it he would bide his time, determine the attack, stop. His black overcoat would fill with air and inflate, and the sleeves would stretch out. Yalo would lift his arms, which had become like wings, and hover with his bloated stomach, his rifle over his right shoulder, its dangling muzzle aimed at the earth, illuminate his black flashlight, and descend.

He felt as if he were swooping from an immense height, and once he trained the light on his prey he'd commence his descent to earth.

He was a hawk. A long black overcoat, and a narrow beam of light trained on the car swallowed by the night, two feet stepping lightly in rubber boots, a great nose picking up the scent of the perfumed victim, and two wide eyes that could see in the dark.

“Hey, you piece of shit – you're a hawk?”

Two men seized him by his armpits and made him stand. He felt as if he were flying and closed his eyes.

“You used to tell women that you were a woman hawk?”

They carried him by his armpits, spreading his arms out like wings, and the words began to rain down on his face and nose.

“Hey, you piece of shit, you think you're smart, you think you'll fool the justice system?”

The hawk under stomping feet.

“You told Shirin you love her and you want to marry her. Do you know who you are, and who she is?”

They stomped on his face, breaking his beak, and the blood flowed.

“You really think you're God's gift to women?”

He saw the boots through his blurry eyes, and the refracted sunlight, and the pain.

“We want you to confess to the gang and the explosives. Can you hear us?”

Blood, hawk, and pain. Suddenly his body left its owner and went to incalculable pains. He saw it fade away and sink into the pool of pain. He saw it go but he could not call to it. His beak was broken, his voice was hoarse, and his blood covered the ground. The body went to its pain, and Yalo felt that he had shed the hawk and taken on the tentacles of the cuttlefish, and the pain stopped. He saw how he grew eight arms and seventy million optic cells stretched across his limbs, and saw his female, Shirin, swimming to his side in the depths, and he extended his fourth right arm to her, this arm was his sexual member, he pressed it into her feminine cavity, felt the eggs and fertilized them, and slept inside her.

The hawk was under their feet, and the cuttlefish mated with his female, who swayed around him and engaged in beautiful sport with him. His fourth arm was inside her and its thousands of eyes opened an infinite universe of colors to him. He saw what lay within the color blue and he saw colors that didn't even have names because humankind could not perceive them. Ink emerged from every part of Yalo, who had moved from his hawkish state to his maritime state and sunk to the depths, extending his eight arms and flying through the water. When he saw them and their boots, he fired his ink to mislead them and blood-colored ink flooded out.

They made him stand and shackled him. He saw the interrogator's face squinting into the sun and the red hue forming halos around his head, went out the window and flew away. The interrogator came close to him and spat in his face, and slapped him; then his palm filled with blood. He wiped his palm on the hawk's overcoat and ordered them to take him away.

The hands on the wounded hawk withdrew and they let him drop to the floor. Red lights plaguing his eyes, Yalo closed them, felt his tears, and sensed a salinity spreading through his body. Yalo became salty – he wanted to tell them that he needed some fresh water. He wanted to weep and leave his body to tremble and moan so that the heat of death would leave him before he died. He had the impression of falling into an abyss, felt that the valley swallowed him, and that he had become a pine tree. He smelled the pine sap and began to chew. The blood gushing in his mouth tasted like grilled pine. He curled his body up just before feeling himself being dragged out of the interrogation room, toward a jeep, where they sat him down among a group of policemen whose fat bellies hung over their leather belts.

Yalo did not know what or where or how.

Had he drunk anything?

Had he eaten anything?

Had he said anything?

Had he?

Later on, he wrote that he found himself in a pool of water, leaning against the wall, the water rising to his chest as he struggled to breathe, colors mingling with smells. His body intermingled with the smell of his blood, feces, and urine. He stretched out in water before curling up in it, and began to drown. Yalo vaguely remembered that a voice emerged from his limbs, remembered that he had become a voice, that he felt a mouth howling inside his mouth, and then he remembered nothing.

Yalo wrote that he did not remember.

When they took him back to the interrogation room, when he saw the interrogator's head by the window, when he saw the sun that had disappeared from the window, Yalo wanted to ask the interrogator where the sun had gone. He wanted to see the reflected light that veiled his vision
but brought light. He wanted light, but the interrogator asked him for his opinion.

Why did he ask for his opinion?

“My opinion of what, sir?”

“Your opinion of what's happened to you,” said the interrogator.

“Why? What has happened to me?” asked Yalo.

“The bathtub. Tell me, did you like the bathtub?”

Yalo understood that the bathtub was the name the interrogator gave to those vague memories filled with blood, water, and fear.

Yalo lowered his head and saw the interrogator's hand coming toward him. He recoiled instinctively, but the hand approached with the white sheets of paper.

“Take these,” said the interrogator, giving him the sheaf of paper.

“Write the story of your life from beginning to end.”

Yalo wanted to say that he didn't know how to write.

“I want everything. Don't forget even the smallest detail.”

“. . .”

“I want whoever reads it to know and understand everything. Don't write me any riddles. Write things as they happened.”

“. . .”

“I don't want you to make anything up. Sit down and remember and write down what you remember. I want the story from start to finish.”

Yalo wanted to say that he did not know the start from the finish, and that he could not write, but the blood prevented him. Blood was dribbling from his nose and the air around him grew thinner. He tried to open his mouth to breathe. He closed his eyes.

Y
alo was unable to write a single word. He found himself in the solitary cell and saw the sheets of white paper stained with the black light shining around him. He closed his eyes and decided to sleep.

“Write, you dog!” the man shouted at him.

He took up the pen and saw the circles of shadow pierced by the silver light emanating from the depths of his eyes, but he could not write. He threw the pen onto the small table they had put in his cell and heard the voice shouting at him again. The voice began to ring in his head as if it were stuck in the whorls of his ears, echoes rebounding toward infinity.