Yalo (33 page)

These are digressions, and there would be no need to bring them into the story of Yalo's life had his grandfather's culinary theory not played a decisive role in defining the young man's view of women. I can affirm that one of the causes of his voyeurism was his desire to see cooked women. Yalo's theory did not have the same symmetry that his grandfather's theory
had. The
cohno
hated the cooked and preferred the raw ripened by the sun. Yalo preferred the cooked. Cooked women ripened over the fire of their desire. The raw ones had no fire in them. What he hated most were the efforts raw women made to ripen themselves artificially using makeup or silicone, which had become so prevalent in Beirut after the war.

Yalo had mulled over his grandfather's words at length, and in the end adopted that view himself without realizing it. Cooked women did not require external fire; the sun of their desire sufficed to ripen them, and in this they resembled perfect vegetables, which were ripened by their inner fire.

When Yalo found a cooked woman, he was struck with an irresistible desire, and in those cases he did not rob or in any way insult the man escorting her, but showed a resolute desire. The other man understood that he must retreat, otherwise his life would be in danger.

So I can say for sure that when Yalo found himself with Shirin – and Shirin was a raw woman in every sense of the word – he felt no desire. The gray-haired man fled, abandoning the young, light-skinned girl, thus forcing Yalo to take her to his cottage. In the cottage all his and his grandfather's theories about fruit and women dropped away. He smelled the fragrance of the incense coming off the girl's outstretched arms, grew intoxicated, and entered the passionate unknown that led him to his miserable end.

I question him, but his face turns away as if he is living in another world. Once he wanted to ask Mme Randa her opinion about men and whether they could be divided into two kinds, the raw and the cooked, but he was embarrassed so didn't ask.

Yalo did not give up his theory. He considered Shirin to be an exception, and believed that women, too, categorized men the same way. Of course, I believed that I belonged in the cooked category, and I wanted to hear that
from a woman. Yalo didn't bring up the subject with Shirin because she forbade him to talk during sex. Even when they went to the seashore and ate fish and he put his arm around her waist so that she could lean back to await his kiss, even at that moment when he felt on top of the whole world, he didn't ask, afraid that Shirin would get upset. For the young girl was vulnerable and easily hurt.

How had this angelic creature become his adversary?

In the interrogation room, Shirin wore a mask of cruelty and indifference. The tenderness was gone from her eyes, and her small nose, which ran as much as her eyes teared, was like a thorn planted in her face.

Why did her nose suddenly get bigger?

His grandfather, God rest his soul, complained in his final days of his nose and ears. Every part of him had shrunk, he was shorter, and his skin hung on his bones because he was so emaciated, but his nose grew bigger, and his ears grew wider and longer. He gazed with disgust at his face in the mirror. Once he said that he wished he could trim his nose and ears the way people trimmed their fingernails. That frightened me. I, who had never been afraid in my whole life, was afraid of the
cohno
's nose and ears because he said that they were the marks of death. A person's body parts stopped growing, except for the nose and ears. Death was a mercy, for if a man kept living, he would turn into just a long nose and two giant ears, that is, a cross between an elephant and a donkey. God forbid.

I believe, sir, that I have explained the circumstances that drove Yalo to make his mistakes and commit his crimes. Now I will try to write the whole story from start to finish. Consider me to be his voice, which he lost when he sat on his throne. He is there, not complaining or moaning. I am positive that he is experiencing a tremendous moment no one has experienced before, except those who have undergone the gravest tortures.

Do not say that he gets no credit because he climbed his column by compulsion.
It is true that you forced me to drain the cola bottle and sit on it. But Yalo's achievement was his decision not to get off it. I got off; he didn't. I am in pain; he is not. My pains are great, sir, because fire burned the gate of my body. But I am convinced of the need for us to write the whole story so that we can remove ourselves from this predicament.

I
want to write, but I am lost.

When I write about my life, must I write about my grandfather, my mother, and my father, or about my life that concerns me alone? I do not know. You want everything, especially the stories of Ballouna, the women, and the explosives. I think the story should begin with those events. But I cannot. Because ever since I . . . since when? Since the cat sack, no, since the bastinado, no, since the throne, no . . . since the torture I experienced, I can't distinguish between the beginning and the end. By the way, I can only congratulate you on your original methods of torture and your ability to extract a suspect's confessions, as if you were extracting his soul. That is, he feels as if his soul is leaving his body and he is back in his mother's belly, which makes him confess everything. Though the torture is violent, the bodily signs of it vanish quickly, leaving only the spiritual traces that make you feel that your soul is about to leave you. I congratulate you, sir, especially for the bottle. The bottle is the conclusion after which there is no conclusion, because it's long, I mean it makes time long, even endless. I sat on the bottle for about a thousand hours, or a thousand times longer than that. You say that it was just half an hour, and you are right, because you know more than I do, because you wear accurate Swiss watches on your wrists. Me, alas, no. But the bottle changed the meaning of time. I mean, I
felt as if I were in eternity, that time was frozen, and that I was living the last moments of my life; yet that my life was long – never-ending. I wanted it to end so that the pain would be over, but it stopped ending. That is eternity. I will not mention the pains that are still with me even now, especially when I go to the toilet. It is not polite to talk about these things. But the truth, and you want the truth, the truth is that what frightens me most is my feeling that I need a toilet. There I go back to experiencing eternity again, and I smell my own smell, and I feel that pain has a smell. Yes, pain has a smell, and its smell is shit. That is what I feel and what I smell.

But I am very lucky, I feel that my grandfather's prayers for me were not in vain. One of the prison guards here told me that many suspects died from the bottle because it broke in their backsides and they got gangrene in their large intestines, and all their insides grew inflamed. Thank God that did not happen to me. On the contrary, the bottle helped me a great deal. How can I explain to you – I don't know. But your experience with prisoners must have made you capable of understanding what I am writing. For I was not the first to have ascended the throne of spiral glass, and of course will not be the last.

When I ascended the throne and the pain pierced me from bottom to top and from top to bottom, I was sure that I would die. I mounted it and death began, that is, I felt death. Death is violent and has a sound; something explodes inside you, and you hear a sound no one else does, and after the sound your body tingles and you sense that you are being dragged beyond white sleep. You are not sleeping, but you float beyond sleep. And then it's over – Stop. Everything is dark, and it's over. That is exactly how it happened with me. I am not lying. I am telling the truth, sir. Something snapped and I was beyond sleep, I mean, sleeping yet not sleeping, and then I woke up.

You took me into eternity and made me understand the meaning of life,
because I tasted death, and drank it, from the top and from the bottom. I want to say, sir, that through all of these experiences, when I reached the essence of things, I saw him before me. Would you believe, sir, that my grandfather, who was also my father, was waiting for me everywhere? What did I want with him and his absurd story? But death, sir, when death approaches, it imposes its conditions. Death means that we experience things we never experienced, and the stories we have heard become facts. When I approached death, I became my grandfather and my grandfather's grandfather, and all the descendants of men. I speak now from experience, so my mission is very difficult. I cannot write you the stories of all mankind that I know, but I wouldn't know how to write them. Therefore I ask the respected interrogator to be a little patient with me. I will be brief and get to the heart of the subject you are looking for, but I saw another heart, just as essential, that I cannot ignore, so I will write it with the fewest words possible in order to be truthful to myself and to my soul suspended there on the throne of death.

When I thought that the story had to begin with my grandfather, I hated it, for I did not love my grandfather – he embodied cowardice and selfishness. My grandfather was afraid of everything, perhaps because his conscience reproached him so much after the death of my grandmother Marie Samaho, God rest her soul, of whom it was said, died because of him. My grandmother died before I was born, which was why my grandfather was imposed on my father – or my mother's husband – to come and live with him in his house. I believe that the husband couldn't bear it from the very first day, so he packed his things and fled the unbearable atmosphere of that house. He left because he never once felt that he was in a home of his own. The bed was not his bed and the life was not his life, and the woman was not his woman. My grandfather claimed that he had discovered by chance that my father, or my mother's husband, was not Syriac but an Arab from Aleppo
belonging to the Melkite Greek Catholic sect. Fine, what does that change? Where is the crime? And why did the
cohno
not discover the truth before his daughter married the man? My grandfather killed my father and trampled his shadow. Do you know, sir, that I do not possess a photo of my father? He was even torn out of the wedding pictures. Nothing remains of him – even his name is gone, because I bear my grandfather's name. My identity card says that I am from the Abyad clan. So what am I supposed to say when even now I don't know the difference between a person being Syriac or Arab. A person is a person, and we all come from Adam, and Adam came from dust. So why all these tricks? I do not understand my grandfather's pains that made his mouth a graveyard of Christ's language. What kind of foolishness is that? What, Christ does not understand Arabic, Greek, or Latin?

My grandfather's fear cannot be described. My mother said that it came from his childhood, as a result of the massacre that was committed in the village of Ain Ward at the beginning of the twentieth century. But I am not sure of anything. Perhaps my grandmother's death was the cause. I heard the news of my grandmother from other people, not from my mother. My mother spoke only rarely of her mother, but I sensed the presence of a dark shadow hanging over the silent relations between my mother and grandfather. Suddenly silence would fall between them and they would converse without words. I understood that true dialogue between people goes on without talking. Words do not express things – they cover them over. Now, sir, I understand why writing is difficult for me, because what is being asked of me is that I cover up the story, and here I feel deficient, for whoever wants to write must possess a double text, he must dub speech over the silence. As to when speech is your life, you speak in silence.

I understand, sir, that you are asking a man to write the story of his life for the purpose of ethics and retribution. But what is the use of my story? And why am I telling my grandfather's story instead of my own? Is it because the
cohno
killed his wife? Is it true that Abel Abyad, known as Ephraim, killed his wife, and that was the cause of his fear of everything?

The
cohno
used to say that a man's body was a temple of fear. God created for the soul a body of clay to calm its fear of fear or of God. But the corporeal temple became a new cause of fear, because of the original sin. Man died because he sinned, and death is his greatest fear. We fear the body, therefore we must dissolve it before it dissolves our souls. We must restore it to its clay state and not be overly solicitous of it, see to it as a potter cares for his clay, by watering it and setting it in the sun. The body needs only water and a few vegetables cooked by the sun. All else is vanity.

In the beginning, the
cohno
tried to defend himself. He said that he didn't want the woman to suffer. But when suffering came after the disease spread to her bones, he didn't know what to do, and had to get help from doctors. The woman was taken to the Greek hospital in Achrafieh, where she died amidst doses of morphine, which failed to ease her suffering.

Yalo did not understand the silence between the
cohno
and his daughter – which constituted a dialogue between them – until he heard their neighbor, Mme Mary Rose, threaten her husband by saying that she would let him die the way the
cohno
let his woman die, without getting treatment for her. Yalo imagined the scene and saw it through his mother's eyes, and understood how a person could be capable of reading that which had been erased.

When his grandfather described the massacre that took place in Tur Abdin, he said that he could read what had been erased. We have to learn how to read words that have been erased, that is our story, we, a people whose story is erased and its language erased, so if we do not learn how to read what has been erased, all will be lost.