Yalo (34 page)

In the past, I did not believe the
cohno
could read books erased by time and torn by history. But now I am beginning to believe him, because I have seen how Yalo read silence and erased words.

My mother began to speak erased words before her image in the mirror was erased. She used silence so that the
cohno
would understand that she knew.

Yes, sir, it seems that my grandfather left his wife to die. He took her to the doctor who diagnosed cancer in her left breast, but instead of checking her into the hospital to remove the affected breast, he took her home, bought a box of aspirin, and let her die. He told his daughter that there was no medicine for cancer and that it was better that the doctors not be allowed to cut up her body; his only concern was that she not suffer.

But she suffered so much!

Gaby did not use that expression, but she looked at her father and he read it in her eyes, and his tongue lost the power of speech. That day, Gaby invented the language of silence, and tried to use it to address Elias al-Shami, but the tailor did not possess the gift of silence. Only Yalo learned it, and his relationship with his mother proceeded in silence. He came home and read her sorrow, solitude, and love for him in her eyes, and replied, without speaking, that he wanted to live his life and could do nothing for her.

Gaby lost the taste for food. She told her son that the taste had stayed behind in the old house in Mseitbeh and that she had been unable to cook because she no longer could distinguish flavors. All foods now tasted the same to her, all having the flavor of bulgur. “That's how my father was at the end, and now maybe I'm at my end, and can no longer feel the taste of my mouth.”

Gaby did not tell her son how she answered her father when he said he had lost all taste, because she was afraid she might anger the
cohno
in his grave. For the
cohno
was greatly insulted when his daughter answered that he yearned for Kurdish flavors because he was a Kurd. Yalo did not know why his grandfather was so sensitive about the subject of his Kurdish
origin. For his grandfather, when he came to Beirut fleeing his uncle in Al-Qamishli, spoke Arabic and Kurdish, and became fluent in classical Syriac only here. He said that he had forgotten Kurdish, as if it had been erased from his memory, even though he had spoken it when the Kurdish mullah came to their house in Mseitbeh, to witness his son's rejection of his heritage.

Was this story true? Or did my mother make it up? I don't know.

W
hat has been asked of me is simple, I must write out the details of the crimes I committed, with a short introduction about my growing up and my experiences in the war.

I am trying, sir, to exclude the details that do not concern the respected interrogator or do not serve justice. Therefore I will concentrate on just two points: the crimes in Ballouna and the crimes related to the explosives, as you asked me to. But when I ask Yalo I find him silent. So what should I do? I ask him a question and his silence answers me with another question. Is that possible, sir? If everyone spoke they way he does, there would be no more speaking!

I asked him, and he asked me, whether the crimes in the forest were more serious than his grandfather's crimes.

Yalo did not kill anyone. He was capable, if he wished, to kill whomever he liked and bury his victims in the forest, and no one would have asked any questions. If he'd killed Shirin, would she ever have filed a complaint with the police? Or would Dr. Said al-Halabi have had the nerve to go to the police station to file a complaint against a young man who had caught him in suspicious circumstances with a girl younger than his children?

Now Yalo was a criminal, which was natural, and his grandfather was a saint in the eyes of people, which was also natural, but where was justice?

I was found out, sir, because I had not killed anyone, while my grandfather became a saint because he killed. Do you call that justice? I don't think that we can justify the
cohno
's crime as being well-intentioned, just as Elias al-Shami's crime against my mother cannot be justified by his claim that his wife was ill and he didn't want to offend her.

Does my mother have to die for his wife's sake? Did my grandmother die because the
cohno
was ambitious and wanted to be an archbishop?

And then what was my father's story? My grandfather claimed that Mr. Salim Rizq said my father was not Syriac, but an Aleppan. So what? I worked three summers with Master Salim and his son, the engineer Wajih, and no one told me anything like that. I think my grandfather seized on this story about my father because he knew, deep in his heart, that I was the son of Elias al-Shami. The tailor was from Damascus, and Damascus is not so far from Aleppo. That is how I became a son of the Aleppan, or in other words, the son of al-Shami, the Damascene. But this is not the question. The question is how George Jal'u agreed to marry a girl who was not a virgin. What did he do when the virginal blood did not flow? Or did Gaby wound herself and cry out in false pain so that the man would have the impression that he had opened her? Did she shout like a whore to give the impression that she was a virgin? I do not say this because I have anything against non-virgins, I am convinced that there is just one virgin in all human history, the Virgin Mary, Mother of God, glory be to her. There is no need for virginity because Mary suffered for all women. But Gaby's false virginity led George Jal'u into a trap. The man lived in the
cohno
's house like a stranger. Even sleeping with his wife was done secretly and quietly, as if Gaby were not his wife, as if she were her father's wife. He told her that she was her father's wife before turning his back on her and vanishing, which proved to be correct in the sense that I too became the son of her father. But how could the
cohno
register me as his son, bearing in mind that his wife,
that is, my actual grandmother, who is my mother according to my identity card, died before my mother's marriage? The only explanation is that my grandfather went and dated my birth before the death of his wife. That is, he committed forgery, which is punishable under the law. It is most likely that I was not born in 1961, as officially recorded, but in 1962. That would explain my backwardness in school and my stammering as a boy, and much more . . . but, how did he succeed at that? Didn't the identity registration official notice that he was sixty years older then I was? So, how? Was he the prophet Zechariah as he claimed, when he told everyone that he was struck dumb three days before my birth? Where did he come up with this criminal fantasy?

I said that I hated my grandfather but that is not true. How could I hate him with his body like a clay figure and his failing memory? He is the spirit returned to the source, the spirit indifferent to stories. I will tell the story from start to finish. The beginning is over there, with my grandfather, who, returning to his beginnings, had stopped eating and had begun living out his deficient memories. At this point in his life he told me everything, but I did not believe a thing. How could we believe a crazy man who tied a rooster by its feet to a fig tree and then killed it, because the way it mounted hens disgusted him? The story was unbelievable, sir, and I am not asking you to believe it.

We lived in Mseitbeh, in a small house with a big garden. My mother raised chickens for their eggs. We owned one rooster and a dozen or so chickens, I don't remember exactly how many, but I do remember how they died, and that's the story.

One day, my mother came home to the surprising sight of our rooster tied up to the tree, humiliated. It was a huge rooster with yellow feathers and colored wings, and its crowing deafened the world. She didn't ask who tied up the rooster because she knew. She went to the fig tree and untied
him. The rooster surged up and laid into the hens, and what happened happened. I heard the crowing of the rooster and ran to the yard and saw an unforgettable sight. The rooster was screwing all the hens at once. I don't remember how old I was, perhaps I was eight, and of course I counted my age by my identity card, being unaware of my grandfather's forgery, which I discovered only here in prison, thanks to your plan to make me write the story of my life, which has allowed me to remember things I never remembered existed. Therefore, sir, I offer you this thought, for writing is the only way to remember, otherwise men's lives would be limited to the present and they would live without a memory, like animals. I discovered that when I write, the gates of memory open before me. I know that you want me to write a short story, so I will be brief, but I am amazed at my memory, which opens up and takes on the memories of my mother, grandfather, father, Tony Atiq, Alexei, Mario, Shirin, and all the people I've known in my miserable life. My greatest surprise was ink. For ink flows involuntarily. Ink does not come from somewhere else. Ink flows from between my fingers, without stuttering, as if I were the cuttlefish that Shirin consumed. Now Shirin consumes me, and I see her gobbling the cuttlefish that feels terrible pains from my bottom to the bottom of the world. Ink spills from between my fingers and teaches me Arabic. I am writing now because Jurji Zaidan taught me language and writing. Had it not been for him, I would have been like so many who do not know the beauty and magic of language. My mother brought the al-Hilal novels from Elias al-Shami and I read them. Master Elias was infatuated with history books and with my mother, so he gave her the books as gifts, but she didn't read them. In reading I found a distraction from my solitude. At first it was difficult, then the lines that resembled anthills transformed into words and penetrated my head. This was what was behind my success in Arabic in school. I have asked the guard here to bring me books, but all he brings me is the Gospel. I've nothing
against the Gospel, but I wanted the books of Jurji Zaidan for inspiration. I mean, it is true that the story I am writing now is not historical, because Yalo is not one of the heroes of history, yet he is a hero; I mean, there is some heroism in his life. One hundred years from now this story will be part of history. But fine, I will try to write what I know, without forgetting my debt to Jurji Zaidan. He revealed to me that the Ghassanid kings had been Syriac, that is, they were Jacobites and Monophysites. When I learned this fact, I teased my grandfather, telling him that the Arabs were Syriac and so there was no need to blame me for my origins, and that I would not study Syriac because the Ghassanids prayed in Arabic and their faith was righteous. When he did not answer and tried the silent treatment on me, I said that he had lost his power. At that, the
cohno
seized on the word
haylo
, he asked me what
haylo
meant. “
Haylo means haylo
,” I told him. “Listen,” he said. “
Qadishat Eluho, qadishat Hayltuno, qadishat lo yo muto
. Translate that into the language of the Ghassanids, like a good boy.” So I translated it, though the truth is that I didn't know how to translate, but I knew the meaning of the sentence because we prayed it every Sunday in church. I said, “Most Holy is God, Most Holy is the All-Powerful, Most Holy is the Eternal.” He said that
hayltunofo
came from the Syriac word
haylo
, which meant power. “Now, you are using a Syriac word without even knowing it. Half the words people use are Syriac. Those Ghassanids did not know what they were saying.” And he began to enumerate the words that were the names of the months, from Qilaya to Soka, Nahlo, and so on . . . he could find nothing to defend himself and his dead language save admonitions that supported my mother's theory about the flower that had bloomed.

The flower was now blooming in the ink covering my pages. The flower was blooming inside my body, which rose with Yalo and embraced the souls of the dead and sympathized with my mother. Sir, I must take her back to her house in Mseitbeh. If am not sentenced to death because of the affair of
the explosives, which I will tell you about in detail, and I get out of prison, the first thing I do will be to take my mother home so that she may live, dignified and honored. Then I will go back to my first job, dovetailing wood. I thought that I had forgotten the craft, but
ta'shiq
is like swimming, it is not forgotten. You must know how to divide wood into two types, male and female, and join them as a man joins a woman. Nails kill the spirit of wood, whereas dovetailing returns its life by marrying it to itself and restores the fluid that flowed out when the trees were cut. Engineer Wajih told me that wood never dies because
ta'shiq
gives it a new eternal life.

Instead of getting upset with his son, Master Salim offered himself to solve the problem, a sign of blind Mr. Salim's fine moral qualities – he was Cohno Ephraim's opposite. Truly, how was it they were friends? Instead of Salim's tying his son to the trunk of the fig tree, he took it upon himself to defend him, then tried to save the situation, which won him only ridicule. As to my grandfather, when he saw that my mother had released the rooster, he shouted that he had tied up the rooster because it was insatiable. We endured three days of quarreling, him tying it up and her freeing it, saying that he was just jealous. On the third day, my mother came home to find the rooster tottering around, tied to the fig tree. Its yellow feathers were dropping, and the rooster was dying. She asked him what he had done, and he said he had beaten the rooster not in order to kill it but to teach it a lesson and temper its sexual voracity.

The rooster learned its lesson for good and gave you its life. The rooster died alone in a corner of the yard. Early the next morning, we awoke to strange sounds. The terrified hens were swarming around the rooster's corpse, screeching. Yes, the hens were screeching as if they were hoarse roosters, and they did not stop screeching until my mother went down to the yard, took away the rooster's corpse, and buried it in the garden.