Yalo (21 page)

“Remember, my boy, this verse is from the Old Testament, from the Book of Genesis. Memorize it, because you too are a grandson of Ishmael, and you will become a wild ass.”

Yalo wrote about this wild ass, tore up the pages, and started again. He immersed himself in the whiteness of the page that stretched before him like a vast desert.

M
y name is Yalo, Daniel Jal'u, the son of George Jal'u, nicknamed Yalo, from the Syriac Quarter in the Mseitbeh district of Beirut. My mother is Gaby, Gabrielle Abel Abyad. I am an only child, I have no brothers or sisters. I lived with my mother and grandfather. I never knew my father, and my grandmother died before I was born, so I don't remember her at all, and my father I never knew because he left when my mother was in her seventh month of pregnancy with me. That's what they tell me. They said he emigrated to Sweden, and that my grandfather kicked him out of the house when he found out that he wasn't a Syriac. I don't know anything more about him. I know that my grandfather, the
cohno
Ephraim Abyad, consented to my mother's marriage to him in order to solve a major problem. My mother was in love with a married man, twenty years her senior. She worked for him in a sewing shop. His name was Elias al-Shami and he was a famous tailor. I don't know him well. He used to visit us sometimes at home, and take me on errands with my mother. I remember his eyeglasses and his eyebrows, which were thick and gray. I was afraid of him and his black eyeglasses. Then suddenly he stopped visiting us, after my grandfather found out that my mother went back to her relationship with the tailor. My mother swore to my grandfather that I was not the tailor's son, but the son of George Jal'u. My grandfather didn't believe her, but what's the difference? Whether one or the other had been my father, it wouldn't change anything in my life because my real father was my grandfather the
cohno
.

My mother married my father when she was twenty, so my mother is only twenty-one years older than I am. I love her very much. My grandfather discovered that George Jal'u was a liar, and when my father decided to emigrate, my grandfather refused to let my mother go with him. He told him, Go and do your best and later on you can send for your wife. Now your wife is pregnant and has to look after her health. So he went and didn't come back. They say he had not gone to Sweden but had returned to Aleppo, because he was from a rich Aleppan family that went broke. They worked in dovetailing and inlaying wood, but the business failed. My father came to Beirut and worked in the shop of Salim Rizq, who was blind. Salim was a friend of my grandfather's, but my father robbed him. That's how my grandfather knew that my father was an Aleppan from the Greek Catholic sect, like Mr. Rizq, and a liar and a thief. When my grandfather got mad at me, he'd tell me I was turning out like my father and I'd be a thief like him and I should go to Aleppo to look up my family tree, because I had no origins. Then he came back sorry and said I was his only son, since God had not blessed him with a son, but had given him two daughters, my mother and my aunt Sara, who married Jacques Kassab and went to Sweden with him. There they speak Suryoyo in the street, and they have Suryoyo radio and television, but that's no good because a language separated from its land dies. God had compensated him with me; he sent him Jal'u's son so that he could have a boy, and that he was like the prophet Zachary. He was struck dumb before my mother gave birth to me. He remained unable to speak for three days. Later on, when my mother was in labor, he spoke, and said I was a boy, and that he had seen the prophet Daniel in a dream, and that's why they named me Daniel, and I was called Yalo.

My full name is Daniel George Jal'u, born in Beirut in 1961. I went to the St. Severus School in the Syriac Quarter in the Mseitbeh district. During the summer I worked in Mr. Rizq's shop. Then the war started. We had to move to Mrayyeh Street in the Ain Rummaneh neighborhood, and I went to school at Atchaneh and then transferred to the Taqaddum School near the Myrna Chalouhi Center in Sinn al-Fil.
In 1979 I joined the Lebanese Forces and became a fighter, and remained a fighter until 1989. I submitted to several military courses in Dhuhr al-Wahsh, but I didn't go to Israel for training; I wasn't qualified for paratrooper training because of my height. I am very tall – 191 centimeters. Some of the guys in my company, which was called the “Billy Goat Company,” went there and trained, that is true, but me, no. My friend Tony Atiq took me to a training course and told me that Mr. Nabil Ephraim was recruiting Syriac guys and that we now controlled the biggest barracks in Achrafieh, the Georges Aramouni Barracks.

During the war I got to know a lot of guys, especially the Syriac guys who had come from Syria. They joined the war so they could get Lebanese citizenship. We fought, and a lot of us died, and we stole some, as everyone did who had fought, but we were afraid, especially the Syrian guys, because their dialect wasn't Lebanese, and there was the danger that they'd get stuck at our checkpoints, and it was a lot of work for Mario, our company commander.

In late 1989 I was depressed about everything. It was Tony Atiq's idea to move to France. Tony and I stole the money from the barracks and escaped to France. We went by sea from Jounieh to Cyprus, and from Cyprus we flew to Paris. That was the first time in my life I was on a plane. I enjoyed the plane a lot, but Tony drank a lot of whiskey and threw up, and embarrassed us. But flying in the plane was wonderful. In Paris, Tony left me in the hotel and took the money. He ran away and left me stranded. Didn't have a single franc. He was the money man for the trip, and the money disappeared. I don't speak French. I left the hotel and became a
clochard
. That's what they call homeless people there. I became a
clochard
, and didn't have the price of a bite of bread. That is, I became a beggar sleeping in the Métro tunnel at Montparnasse Station.

I met Monsieur Michel Salloum, may God honor him, in the Métro station. He took me to his house at 45, rue Victor Hugo, bathed me, dressed me in new clothes, and fed me. When he'd heard my story he offered me a job in Lebanon. He said he did not like young militia guys, but he saw in me someone different, from a good
family, and that my grandfather the
cohno
had interceded with him for me. I went back to Cyprus by plane, and enjoyed it. I drank only one glass of whiskey, afraid that what happened with Tony on the plane would happen to me. In Larnaca I met M. Michel and we took the ferry together to Jounieh and from Jounieh to Ballouna, and I worked as a guard at his Villa Gardenia. I lived in a little house below the villa, and that's where I began a life of crime.

Yes, crime, I say it and I feel bad, and I hope God will forgive me, and I pray for my grandfather the
cohno
to intercede with God on my behalf, because I fornicated with the women of other men. I sat and watched the cars of lovers who came to the pine forest to make love in their cars. My grandfather would tell me that I was turning out like my father and I'd become a thief like him. That is what happened. The truth is that my main goal was pleasure, and I didn't want to rob anyone. I had a lot of fun watching those sexual exploits in cars. I'm ashamed now to write about those scenes that might offend a gentle reader's eyes, and lead him into sin.

The Devil tempted me, and I got involved in crime. At first it was stealing. I would come up to the cars with my flashlight and M. Michel's Kalashnikov, and when they saw me they'd be afraid of scandal or of dying, and they'd offer me anything they had just so I'd let them leave. I began to steal, then as things developed – and here I have to say it was not my fault alone, it was their fault too, because if they had resisted I would not have done the things I did, I would have retreated. Anyway, sir, the first time I raped a woman it happened by chance, without any premeditation or thought, but the man who was with her ran away, and she was standing there waiting. She was shaking with fear, and I approached her and made her sleep with me.

I am not lying. I promised the esteemed officer that I would write the truth, and the truth is that I misunderstood her shaking. I thought she was waiting for me to do it, so I slept with her, but I was mistaken. My feeling was wrong, because my situation was wrong. When I began to have sex with her she began to weep. She put the palms of her hands over her eyes and wept, but instead of stopping, I felt a
strange pleasure. It was as if I were a beast. I swear to God, I don't know what happened to me, and now, after I fell in love with Shirin, I understood that that feeling is disgraceful and it is called rape.

After the first time, it was easier. I began to combine robbery and rape. Sometimes, however, I would be content with just robbery and I felt gallant, especially when I saw how the woman would thank me with her shamed eyes because I had done nothing more than rob her. I felt gallant and noble, and that restored some of my dignity.

I'll be content with the sentence the court will give me. Almighty God has already punished me for my atrocious deeds and I have been subjected to the torture I deserve, I now proclaim my penitence.

In Beirut I saw Haykal, who had been with us in the Georges Aramouni Barracks, and had tempted me with money. He gave me five hundred American dollars and said that it was from Abu Ahmad al-Naddaf, and he asked me to hide the stuff in my house or the cottage below the villa. I hid it. I didn't know Abu Ahmad al-Naddaf and had never met him. But Haykal had taken a paratroopers course in Israel, and that's where he came to know Naddaf. The stuff I hid in my house was ten kilos of gelignite, twenty detonators, and five hand grenades. Later on we got started.

Haykal came and said that the job was starting, and they began to take the explosives and went I don't know where. I paid no attention to the business since my main concern was Shirin. I made appointments with her and followed her from place to place, and I loved her. Don't ask me, sir, why I loved her, because love is from God. I loved her, and she became the light of my eyes and the warmth in my heart, and she loved me too, in her own way. I felt her love when she laughed with me, but she was also afraid of me, and now I know she was right, because my behavior, what can I say . . . was not worthy of her. But for her to go and press charges, and ruin me, as she did, that I do not understand. It would have been enough for her, sir, to ask me, seriously, to break off our relationship, and I would have broken it off. Can one person force another person to love them? But she did not ask for that outright; I
felt she was hesitant. That's what made me continue with her. My goal was honorable. I wanted to marry her and put an end to the dog's life I was living. When my grandfather would get mad at me, he'd call me a son of a dog to remind me of who had abandoned me in my mother's belly and went I don't know where. Monsieur Michel told me that he didn't get a dog to help me guard the villa because Madame Randa was afraid of them. So he made me guard it alone. And I felt like a dog. I told myself, I work with al-Naddaf; I'll save a little money, marry Shirin, and live with her in a small, beautiful house in Hazemiya. But in the meantime I have to save some money to open a shop to dovetail wood. When I was a boy, my grandfather sent me to learn woodworking at Mr. Rizq's, that's how I learned the basics of the trade.

Then I got arrested.

I confess now, before God and the court, and I ask mercy for my soul. I have decided to repent and follow the path of my grandfather – God rest his soul – to take care of my poor mother, and not marry. I decided not to marry, and to give up Shirin, and love, and everything. I have also decided to stop eating meat.

This is the whole story of my life, from the moment of my birth until now. I wrote it myself in prison in February 1992, and God is my witness that I have been truthful in everything I have written. I am prepared to repeat in court everything I have said.

Y
alo reread what he had written and felt frustrated. He had spent more than ten days writing these pages. He wept and suffered and felt unable to write. The respite would end in twenty days. The officer had given him the sheets of paper and had said he had only a month. “I'll give you one month, and you must write your whole life story. Write everything, and I wouldn't forget anything if I were you.”

In his small cell, Yalo racked his brains, and tried. He longed to listen to a Fairuz or Marcel Khalifé song to get outside himself and feel like a human being again, but they refused to give him a radio. According to the guard, the decision was to keep him in complete isolation so that he could concentrate and write.

“But I just can't write!” said Yalo.

“Have it your way, but I'm warning you, there was a guy here before you who didn't write, and if you knew what happened to him.”

“What happened?” asked Yalo.

“They beat him until he began to shit like a bull, and they didn't stop beating him until he was dead.”

“Dead!”

“Of course not, I mean, it was like he was dead.”

“And then?”

“And then he wrote. He sat behind the table and wrote about fifty pages.”

“Fifty pages!”

“Of course,” said the guard. “A guy has to write the whole story of his life. And a person's life needs at least fifty pages.”

“How long did it take him to write it?”

“A month. Here all they give you is a month. Sometimes, if it's something important and the prisoner is into it, they extend the time. But usually it's just a month. And whoever doesn't write . . . misses out.”