Yalo (26 page)

Yalo had not known the smell of his own blood, before he went to prison. Even when he stood in front of Alexei's bones, bereft of their flesh, and listened to the stories of Nina the Russian, he did not smell the odor he now smelled in his cell as he tried to cheat death by writing the story of his death.

The image of Nina came back to him in the cell, as if she had sprung from the wall.

“Are you Russians, auntie?” Yalo asked her as he drank the rosewater mixed with sugar specially prepared by the Muscovite.

“It's for the feast day of the living prophet Elias,” the woman said, pointing to the rosewater. “We drink rosewater with crushed ice – not because the feast day comes in July, when it's hot, no, because Elias is the prophet of fire. He ascended to heaven in his chariot drawn by steeds of fire. Ice with sugar for the fire. Before the feast of the prophet Elias I can't make rosewater. Rosewater, my son, is the essence of our local red rose whose hue is like fire. We pour fire over ice and drink it on the feast of fire. Drink up, my son.”

“Thank you, thank you,” said Yalo, and took a sip of the magical drink that refreshed the soul, hesitating a little before returning to his question.

“Are you Russians, auntie?”

“And you, my son, where are you from.”

“From here.”

“And before here?”

“We're from Ain Ward, that's what my grandfather says. That's a village in Tur Abdin.”

“Abu Alexei, may God have mercy on him, was from Mardin,” said the Russian woman. “That's why he didn't speak Syriac. The people of Mardin speak only Arabic. When he proposed to me, I told him I would not have a Syriac. He told me he was Syriac but at the same time he wasn't Syriac, and we were married.”

“So you are Syriacs?” asked Yalo.

“They are, sort of, my husband's family. Me, no.”

“Are you Russian?”

“That's what they say. They call us the children of the Muscovite, but we're Arabs. Someday I'll tell you the story of my grandmother's grandmother. She was the Muscovite, and it's from her time that the label stuck to us, and that's why I named my son Alexei. His father wanted to name him Iskandar, but I said, No, Iskandar means Alexei, this way the boy will have a Russian name, like the czars. What's better than the czars?”

Yalo entered the cloak of sleep. He wrapped himself up on the iron cot in the corner of the cell, closed his eyes, and saw the specter of the pregnant woman running in her long dress stained with blood. The woman had emerged from the wall, he saw her. The image of her began with her belly, stained with blood, a belly distended with a fetus in its sixth month, it emerged from the cracks in the wall in its black dress spotted with black blood.

The image began with the color black, soon replaced by white. The dress became white and blood spread into its folds, as if the blood were tracing the fetus's head and its stupified expression in the face of death, while the woman's face was indistinct, as if covered by a pale yellow stain.

The woman emerged from the wall and started rushing through narrow
streets. Suddenly the streets vanished and the woman was alone in the wilderness before she reached the outskirts of the city of Tyre. She stood before a walled structure. She knocked at the gate and a nun opened it, then slammed the iron gate in her face. But the white, bloodstained dress sounded again, emitting a noise like the cry of a baby. The nun reopened the gate, grasped the woman by the arm, and brought her into the convent.

The morsels of the story Yalo had heard from Nina the Russian became a picture on the wall of his cell. At night, the picture came off the wall and rushed off in search of the convent of Russian Orthodox nuns in Tyre that would take her in with her fetus crying in her belly, and that would save its life and hers.

Yalo couldn't remember the story in a coherent manner. Nina gave the name of the village, and told how the man had been slaughtered, his head upon his wife's belly, but now Yalo couldn't remember the name, nor did he know how to explain what happened in 1860, in the massacre that inaugurated a chain of massacres throughout Lebanon. They said that when the Russian Orthodox nun heard the crying of the fetus in the pregnant woman's belly as blood flooded around it, she went into a stupor. She had no choice but to reopen the gate and allow the woman to stay at the convent, where she gave birth to her only daughter.

“That girl was my great-grandmother, and they used to call her the Muscovite because she was born in the Russian nuns' convent in Tyre. Her children and grandchildren were called the children of the Muscovite. That became our name.”

What happened on that hot July day in 1860?

Yalo drew a picture of the village in his mind and called it “Nina's town.” There in the village that slumbered on the slope of Mount Hermon began the massacre in the house of the woman in her sixth month of pregnancy.

A man with a rifle came in and told the pregnant woman's husband that
he was his friend, so he would be the one to kill him, rather than letting anyone else torture him before killing him. He placed the man's neck against his young, pregnant wife's belly, and slaughtered him with a knife, like a sheep. The blood spurted and penetrated the woman's insides, and she lost the power of speech. She ran out of her house, to find herself in the convent of Russian nuns in Tyre, where she gave birth to her daughter.

Before the story got to the part about the rich man who asked the abbess for the orphan girl, who died leaving a huge fortune to her and her daughter, there were many things that needed clarification. But Yalo did not dare tell Nina that it was hard to swallow the story of the man placing his head on his pregnant wife's stomach before being slaughtered, or that some of the things said to have been said sounded more like something from a novel or a movie than like something that had really happened.

Yalo was certain that over the course of this war the Lebanese had dug up the history of all their past wars to justify their madness, which made talking to them impossible. It was true that he himself behaved like a Lebanese during the war, and he was Lebanese and wouldn't allow the interrogator to trick or threaten him with his father who was not his father and whom he had never known. Yalo had fought under the banners that had been raised, and swallowed everything he was told, but when Nina the Russian told him about her grandmother, he felt that he had taken in too many stories and couldn't bear it any longer. Nina told the story as if she had been an eyewitness, and even repeated the same words the killer spoke at the moment he committed his crime.

“You're my friend, I'm the one who's going to kill you. Don't be afraid. You won't feel anything, just a little hornet's sting.”

She said that the killer said “hornet's sting” and that the night before the crime he'd come to the house of the victim and reassured him, saying that nothing would happen in their village, that their coexistence there was
sacred. The man slept reassured despite the smell of fear that pervaded the village. The next morning he heard a knock at the door, opened it, and beheld the face of death. Suddenly the man was struck with horror and never uttered a word. He bowed his head, laid it against his wife's belly, and died.

“A hornet's sting,” he said before taking the knife and slashing the neck upon the belly of the pregnant wife who had not yet turned seventeen. Then he left, leaving the young woman to wander like a madwoman for days and days on country roads before arriving at the Russian nuns' convent.

“It couldn't have happened that way,” thought Yalo, as he watched the woman emerge from the wall with her distended belly, as she began running toward the convent in Tyre.

She knocked, and the nun opened the iron gate a crack. When she saw the round belly stained with blood, she slammed the gate shut.

She knocked again, and the fetus cried in her belly.

Nina said that had the Russian nun not heard the sound of the fetus's crying coming from the woman's belly, she would not have opened the door a second time.

“The fetus cried in its mother's belly,” said Nina.

“Is that possible?” asked Yalo.

“Of course it's possible, my son. It was a miracle, and the proof was that the nun was a saint. The other nuns began to kiss the nun's hand that opened the door, because she'd heard the voice that no one but Elisabeth had heard. No one but a saint can hear the voice of a fetus.”

“But maybe it's your grandmother who was the saint, because it's the fetus in her belly that spoke,” said Yalo.

“No, my son, that wasn't my grandmother, that was my great-grandmother. She didn't hear the fetus crying in her belly, because God didn't open her ears to it. Only divine intervention can open ears.”

Yalo said that he understood, but in fact he didn't understand a thing. The young woman had fled her village and taken shelter at the convent, where she gave birth to her baby girl, and they lived there together, the mother serving and the young daughter studying. When the girl turned fourteen, the gentleman Nakhleh Sadeq met her; he was a Tyrian merchant of fifty who had emigrated to Argentina and come to Lebanon to marry and then return to his new country. He saw the girl once in front of the convent and fell in love with her. He asked her mother for her daughter's hand, but she refused to discuss the matter with him. She said that she and her daughter belonged to the convent and that he had to speak with the abbess. The abbess summoned the girl, feeling certain that she would refuse the marriage – being the child of the miracle – that she would choose a vow of chastity and become a bride of Christ. So the abbess was surprised to see the girl agree to the marriage. Her conditions were that her mother should live in the house with them, and that Mr. Nakhleh not return to Argentina. The even greater surprise was when Mr. Nakhleh agreed to both conditions. The rich merchant married the girl, and she gave him her only son, Musa.

“That is how we became the Musa family, only everyone called us the children of the Muscovite,” said Nina.

“So you are not White Russians,” said Yalo.

“Our hearts are white and we love Russia,” said Nina.

Yalo saw the young woman emerge from the wall with her distended belly, whose bloodstains had taken on the shape of a fetus attached to its mother's belly. The mother rushed into the forest and hid behind the first pine tree she found, then got up to run toward the convent of Russian nuns.

Yalo did not ask what happened to the corpse of the husband whose wife was forced to remove his severed head from her belly before gathering up her blood-drenched dress to go. Did the woman discard the head? Or did
the murderer-friend not sever the head from the body but merely slaughter the man by slitting his veins? Who then buried the body? Was it buried at all, or left to rot by itself in the abandoned house?

To Yalo the story seemed impossible, but when he saw the pregnant woman emerging from the wall of his cell, coming toward him, and anointing his forehead with the sticky blood dripping from her long dress, he felt that writing this story was easier than writing the story of his life.

How could he write? What could he write? He didn't know how to put the necessary distance between a word and its image. He wrote the name Nina and saw Christians and Druze drowning in their own blood. He wrote his name and saw his image affixed to the name, so he was forced to erase the image in order to keep writing, but the name vanished along with the image. Yalo found himself in the silence of black ink.

Tomorrow when the interrogator came, Yalo would give him the pages he'd written and say that this was everything; all the confessions were written down, and that was enough.

“I don't know how to write, sir,” he would say.

Yalo closed his eyes and fell asleep, and that featureless woman appeared. She came and sat down beside him, and wept. Yalo became both men, the murdered husband and the murdering neighbor. He placed his head on her distended belly and heard the beating of two hearts as they mingled in a strange rhythm, and he understood what his mother had said about the sensations that men were incapable of feeling.

His mother was drinking coffee in the living room with her friend Catherine, telling the story of Elias al-Shami and her father, and weeping. After disparaging Elias al-Shami and throwing him out of the house, the
cohno
raised his finger in his daughter's face and told her, “That is enough fooling around. Now I think you need to take control of your feelings, and cast Satan out of your body.”

She said her father was a man, and men understood nothing. The
cohno
thought that she was like him and that the incentive for her establishing that long-standing relationship with the tailor was to satisfy her sexual urges. Even Elias thought that. “He'd sleep with me and finish, and then he'd look at me and ask, Did you come? At first I'd tell the truth and would wonder why he'd ask when he knew that when a woman comes she's like a fountain-head. When I said that I hadn't come, he'd get upset and pout. Later I began lying to him and saying that I had come, so he'd relax and light a cigarette and puff himself up like a rooster.”

“So you never came?” asked Catherine.

“Of course, lots of times, what do you think?” Gaby's peal of laughter came from deep in her throat. “But not at the push of a button.”