Yalo (20 page)

Elvira told him that she loved him but was going to marry Isa because he was rich. Yalo was not sad. It is true that he loved this girl who was five years older than he was, but when she told him that she was going to get married, he felt as if he had already heard the words before, and that he had been expecting them for a while. He looked at her with sad eyes and then lifted her dress to give her tan thighs a farewell caress.

Yalo forgot Elvira the moment he was plunged into the war and its women. Where did they come from? Why was love like combat? And why did everything taste like sawdust?

The first kiss happened at the girls' school. There Yalo and his friends spied on the girls as they played volleyball in short shorts that exposed their thighs. The boys' gazes infiltrated the chain-link gate, generating the shiver that made their pants strain and erected the thorn that needed picking. Elvira jumped, her smooth tan legs glowing behind the iron network. There, Elvira taught him everything. She went back to the neighborhood with him, hanging back as if she were afraid. He waited for her in the afternoon every Saturday behind the school gate, and when the game was over
she put on her short dark blue skirt and found him waiting for her. They walked together from Raml al-Zarif, where the school was located, to her house in the Syriac Quarter. She held Yalo's arm and said, “You're five years younger than me. My goodness, if Auntie Gaby knew that I had snagged you!” When he told her that he loved her, she stroked his back and said, “Go play with girls your own age.” She tightened her grip on his elbow and his thorn was inflamed with desire and he tried to kiss her on the neck. “Not here in the street,” she said. In front of her house she invited him up but he hesitated. “Come up, I want to show you something.” He went upstairs to find the house empty. He sat in the living room and she asked him to wait a little because she wanted to take a shower. She reappeared just after in a loose white dress, sat beside him, and kissed him on the lips. He bent toward her and put his lips on hers, and tensely imagined that this would be like a movie. Elvira pulled her head away and said, “Not like that. Close your eyes and don't move.” He closed them and felt something probing around his lips. Again he pulled her close.

“I told you not like that. Sit and don't move.”

She asked him to close his eyes and her lips began to ascend his face, then he felt a lip come between his lips and the flavor entered his mouth. He felt her tongue and began to feel dizzy. The lips withdrew and he heard Elvira's voice asking him to open his eyes and kiss her as she had just kissed him. She closed her eyes and leaned back on the edge of the sofa, Yalo's lips approached her face and began to scale it slowly, reaching her lips. He tried to put his upper lip between hers but didn't succeed. Opening his lips and taking hers inside his, he wanted to devour her two red lips. He felt her hand pushing him back, but he did not retreat. He took her mouth in his, and his lips entered the kissing game. He kissed her and was not sated until pain spread throughout his lips. Elvira waited for his kisses,
resting her head on his arm, her eyes closed, inviting him to the banquet of her lips.

“Ouch,” said Yalo. “My lips are sore.”

She got up and said she would make some tea. Yalo stood up and hugged her. At that moment, when his body clung to hers, he ejaculated, and Yalo shivered with the desire that had unfurled before he began. He felt the ache in his thorn and kept clasping the waist of the girl who whispered a request for him to move back a little.

“Please, please, you're staining my dress.”

He moved back and saw the stains on his pants and the wet halos on her dress. She kissed him hurriedly and asked him to leave before her mother came home and saw him this way.

“What am I supposed to do?” he asked her.

“Don't do anything,” she said. “Go for a walk before you go home, and your pants will dry out.”

Walking had become his mandatory workout with Elvira. He'd walk her home and hug her behind the gate at the entrance to the building, then he'd walk around for a whole hour so that his pants would be dry before he went home.

Everything changed when Elvira took him to a discothèque called Le Quartier Latin in Ramlet al-Baida near the Egyptian Embassy. And there, in the dark, while they were dancing the tango in the dark, he felt his thorn grow and she told him, “No, not like this, today.” She went back with him to the darkened corner where they had been sitting. She asked him to unzip his pants, she took the thorn in her hands and put it between her thighs, and there, in the dark, he saw her, he saw the short shorts and the girl who jumped with the flying ball, and his heart opened up and he wanted to shout, but she put her hand over his mouth and asked him to come. “Go ahead,
love, come.” When he heard the word “Come,” everything exploded, and his white blood spread over her thighs. She snatched a paper tissue and wiped up the spill: “You're a true stud!” she said, wiping off the thorn and restoring it to its place inside his pants.

Yalo picked up the glass of wine in front of him to take a drink. “No,” she said. “Not now. Now give me your hand.” She took his hand and pulled it under her skirt, and began to move and moan, and asked him to kiss her ear.

“No, not here. Put it between your lips.”

She put the curve of her ear between his lips, and he licked it with his tongue, and heard Elvira's suppressed cry, but kept following the movements of his fingers.

“That's enough,” she said. “Hands off. It hurts.”

He withdrew his hand, drained the glass of wine in one swallow, and told her that he loved her: “I love you more than anything in the world.”

“You're still new at love,” she said. “Enjoy it now and later on we'll see.”

They started to go to the discothèque once a week, after her game. He would wait for her at the La Gondole Café, while she'd go home to shower, and then they'd head for the darkness of the dance floor.

Once he made love with her this way with the lights on. That was the day she informed him of her decision to marry Isa.

“But he's much older than you,” he said.

“I'm older than you,” she said.

She asked him to get dressed and go home. He left without having to walk through the streets; he left feeling his tongue. That day he had kissed and licked her breasts all over and discovered the map of her body. But she left him to get married. He went home to his mirror and tried to remember the black widow, burning with the fire of jealousy of a man he didn't know.

Yalo woke up looking at boots. He reached down below to make sure
that his member was there, that the cat had not devastated it. He bent over, kissed the boot, and declared that he was prepared to confess everything.

“Do you confess to the rape?” the officer asked.

“I confess.”

“And that you are agents of Israel?”

“I confess.”

“And that you received orders from Abu Ahmad al-Naddaf.”

“I confess.”

“That you planted the explosives in Antilias and Achrafieh?”

“I confess.”

“That you directed the network in Beirut and Mount Lebanon.”

“I confess.”

“Great. Now that you've confessed to everything, we're going to move you to detention. I'm sure the court will take into consideration the fact that you cooperated with questioning and will find cause for mitigating factors.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Now you'll sign your statement, and later on the real sessions will begin.”

“There are still more sessions, sir? I confessed just as you wanted.”

Yalo had said that he wanted to confess to everything to get it over with. He said it was over, and the inside of his mouth tasted like rubber. He said that he was hungry, that he was thirsty.

“I'm thirsty, sir, and hungry, too. May I have something to drink?”

“You ate everything and you're still hungry?”

“I'm hungry, but whatever you say.”

“You may eat and drink,” the interrogator said, “but first you need to sign these papers. We'll read your confessions to you, and if you consent, you sign, and then everything's okay.”

“I'll sign whatever you want. There's no need to read them. I'll sign everything.”

The voice began to read. Yalo heard his name and his father's and mother's names. He heard about Ballouna and Shirin, about Emile Shahin and the explosives gang. He heard the names of the victims, and nodded in agreement.

The officer leaned over, handing him some sheets of paper and saying that the real sessions would pass in solitude, since he would be required to write the entire story of his life, from start to finish, omitting nothing.

In the cell, Yalo had been unable to write. He felt that he had fallen into a well and could not breathe. For after the exhausting interrogation sessions that had concluded with his admitting everything, Yalo could no longer remember anything. On top of that he didn't know what to write, what could he write? In the Paris Métro he had written on a placard and sat beside it like the beggars, under the merciless eyes of the passersby. There he felt the savagery of language. The French words whose meaning he did not understand landed on his head like the blows of a whip. He missed his mother, and he longed for anyone who might speak to him in Arabic, the only language he knew. In that Metro tunnel, Yalo wept when M. Michel Salloum spoke to him in Arabic, he wept because he heard the sounds of Arabic and smelled the scent of Lebanon. But here, in his solitary cell, he felt that he didn't know how to write.

They read him his confession in Classical Arabic, and the tall young man signed them in dialect. The first time he signed his name in Syriac. The interrogator took the sheet of paper and raised his eyebrows, eyebrows were raised in the Jounieh police station and again in prison when the interrogator visited him several times to rewrite what he had written. This meant that things were not going well, and that the investigation would lead Yalo back to torture.

“What is this?” the officer shouted.

“That's my signature.”

“What, are you trying to trick us? You think you're pretty smart.”

When Yalo explained his signature, the officer exploded in anger. “So now you're going to teach us Syriac? And you said you didn't know Syriac.”

“I don't know it, but that's how I sign my name.”

“No, that's no good,” the officer said, looking around him and raising his eyebrows, and Yalo was certain that torture was now inevitable, so he said he was sorry for the unintentional mistake and that he was ready to sign as they wanted. The officer looked at the clerk and ordered him to recopy the final page so that Yalo could sign it in Arabic.

Yalo held the fresh sheet of paper in shaking fingers and signed it: Yalo. Once again the officer cursed him.

“What is this shit? Why don't you write your real name?”

“That is my name,” said Yalo.

“Take him away,” said the officer.

They put him into a truck and took him to a solitary cell, a small room four meters square with an aperture high in the wall covered by an iron grate, and to the right an iron cot with three woolen blankets on it. In the left corner was a green Formica table and white plastic chair. On the table were sheets of white paper, a fountain pen, and a bottle of ink. Yalo was to write his life story at this table.

Had he been a poet, he would have written that he'd fallen into a well of words, that he embraced the night, that his ink was blacker than the night.

Had he been a novelist, he would have written his memoirs in one single swoop and called them Ain Ward. The story would begin with the young boy who would become his grandfather, how he experienced the massacre of his village in Tur Abdin, how his feet led him to Al-Qamishli and from
there to Beirut, how a layer of tile became a
cohno
, and how someone ignorant of the Syriac language became a fervent advocate of this language dying in his mouth.

Had Yalo been a storyteller, he would have sat in prison and told of the fearless Yalo, who'd fought like no one else, who was chivalrous and brave, then had experienced banishment much as his grandfather had, emigrating to France, from which he returned to become a lord among lovers, and, like all lovers, was betrayed.

If he had been.

But he was not.

He was Yalo, a young man trying to read in the whiteness of the paper his story, which he did not know how to tell, his language, which he did not know how to write, and his memory, which he did not know how to provide with a voice. He saw himself as a wild ass lost in the wilderness.

Had his grandfather the
cohno
not told him that Ishmael was the ancestor of the Arabs and Assyrians, the Christians and the Muslims?

“Yisma' Allah, Ismail, means ‘God hears.' God hears nothing but the language of tears. We are the descendants of Ishmael. He baptized us in tears before Christ came and baptized us with water.”

“He shall be the father of a great nation of people and shall dwell in the wilderness like a wild ass,” the
cohno
said.