Yalo (5 page)

Why didn't Yalo tell the interrogator these things?

When the interrogator asked him about his family, he did not know how to respond. He closed his eyes as if he did not hear.

“Confess!” shouted the interrogator.

Yalo decided to confess, and he said: “Yes, but that isn't the way it happened.”

“What happened? Tell us.”

Yalo said that Shirin had not been in the car with Emile but with another man.

“Liar! Why didn't you say that when Mr. Emile was sitting here?”

Silence fell.

Yalo felt the silence pervading his whole body, a complete silence swallowing
him, and his voice, and his ears. That is how he had felt when he got to the villa. The lawyer had told him, “Come,” and he brought him from Paris to his dwelling. And there, in the village of Ballouna, he heard the voice of silence, and got used to it, and it became a part of him. He discovered that the night had a body, and that the body of night swooped down on him and covered him.

A night like a black coat, a silence like silence, and stars spread out above him as if they were the opening to eternity, an eternity taking him to the end of fear.

Michel Salloum, the lawyer, said that he had taken him here in order to guard the Villa Gardenia. He said that he had brought a Kalashnikov rifle and a box of ammunition and guided him to the cottage below the villa, where he lived.

“Yes, yes,” said Yalo.

“Go down to the house, clean yourself up, and then follow me up so I can introduce you to my wife, Madame Randa, and to my daughter, Ghada.”

“Yes, yes,” said Yalo.

“Have a bath – the water's hot – and change your clothes. I bought you fresh clothes. And then follow me.”

“Yes, yes,” said Yalo.

“I don't want any tricks, you understand? The rifle is not to be used unless something happens, God forbid. I don't want anyone seeing the rifle, and I don't want my wife to know.”

“Yes, yes,” said Yalo.

“My wife's afraid of dogs, otherwise we would have gotten a watchdog, I mean, to help you, but she's afraid, that's why you can't trust anyone. Just trust in God and yourself.”

“Yes, yes,” said Yalo.

Yalo went down to the cottage below the villa owned by Monsieur Michel
Salloum. The house was small and lovely, but to Yalo it felt like a palace – that's what he thought once he found himself alone in his new home. A spacious rectangular room, about forty meters square, walls painted white, the floor carpeted in green. To the right was a wide wooden bed covered with a blue blanket, and to the left was an old flowery sofa beside a wooden table and three rattan chairs. A single bare lightbulb hung from the ceiling. There was an iron wardrobe to the left, which Yalo opened and saw three pairs of new pants, several old but clean and ironed shirts, and an olive green woolen sweater. Off the room to the left was a kitchen with a small refrigerator, a gas canister with three outlets, a small table, a white cupboard holding pots and plates, and beside it a small bathroom with a toilet, shower, and a half-length mirror. There was a white first aid kit with the emblem of the Red Cross, and an electric water heater. Yalo lit the water heater, went back to the room, and sprawled on the sofa. He noticed cobwebs in the right-hand corner of the ceiling, and saw that the paint was flaking at the top of the wall to the left, but he still felt like a king. He took a shower, but the water wasn't hot enough, then put on a green shirt and gray pants, only to find out that the pants were too short and that the three other pairs of pants hanging in the wardrobe were a little short too. So he decided to put his old pants back on again, and to buy new ones the next day.

Yalo thought that for the first time in his life he would live in a house of his own. He thought he could bring Gabrielle, his mother, here, but then dropped the idea, for she'd said that she wanted to return to her old house, that she hated the suburb of Ain Rummaneh where she had been compelled to take refuge after their forced flight from their home in the Syriac Quarter in Mseitbeh at the outset of the war.

She said that her clients were waiting for her to go home to her neighborhood and that she would go back to her old trade because she was the best seamstress in Beirut.

She said that she could not bear this life anymore, that she longed for her old neighbors, that the civil war had ended or it had to end now.

She said that her father, Abuna Ephraim, had died alone here, like a stranger, and that she did not want to die in this neighborhood; she wanted to die at home, in her own house.

She talked and she talked, she stood for a long while in front of the mirror and talked. Yalo began to be afraid of his mother, that's why he decided to leave. He left the house two years ago and has never gone back. The days pulled him in all directions, and there, in the Paris Métro, the lawyer Michel Salloum discovered him and took him back to Lebanon.

Yalo had not visited his mother since his return to Lebanon, and he could not justify this to the interrogator – there was no legitimate excuse that could prevent a man from visiting his mother.

“I saw your mother,” said the interrogator. “She said she knew nothing about you. I went to see her in her house in Ain Rummaneh and asked about you.”

“She's still in Ain Rummaneh?” asked Yalo.

“Why don't you know where your mother lives?”

“Sure, sure, only I thought she'd moved back to Mseitbeh.”

“Do you mean to say that you haven't visited her since you came back from France?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don't know. I didn't want to. There was no reason to.”

“Why did you do that?”

“What did I do?”

“You know.”

Abuna Ephraim swallowed the syllables when he said: “You know well enough.” The interrogator also swallowed his syllables, as if he were choking
on the words. He took a sip from the glass of water before asking him again why he had not visited his mother.

Yalo knew that in spite of everything his mother was not a problem. He had not visited her because he didn't know, or because he did know, that she had gone back to her old house, and he did not like the old house, where there was nothing but a picture of Black Grandfather hanging on the wall.

But Yalo never confessed his real sins to his grandfather, because he was convinced that there was only one sin, and that he committed it in spite of himself and unthinkingly. He would find himself alone with his sin, he'd go into the bathroom, grasp his sin, and see stars.

He told Shirin that he loved her because he saw stars. This impression of stars, opening like eyes within the body of the night, came to him anew only when he was with Shirin, there in his little home below the villa. With other women, forest women, Madame, the war girls – no.

“I love you for the sake of the stars,” he told her in the restaurant, but she did not understand a thing. She said she was ready to give him all the money he wanted, all at once, but on condition that he leave her alone once and for all.

In tears, she said that she was begging him, that she was afraid of him, that she did not love him, but loved another man whom she was going to marry. He slapped her. He had spoken to her of stars, and she understood that he wanted money! Before leaving the restaurant, he looked at the bill in front of him on the table and wanted to take care of it, but she was quicker than him and paid it.

“I'm the one who invited you,” she said.

“No, that's not right. You pay every time.”

“Never mind, let me, this time too,” she said.

She paid and went out without her escorting him to Sassine Square where his car was parked. She got into the car without opening the door for him, started the engine, and left. Yalo was left standing on the sidewalk of the narrow street. She said she was busy and had to get back to work. But this was insolence! That's what he would tell her on the phone the next day, though instead of her reply he would hear the sound of the line going dead as she hung up on him. He would call her back dozens of times but never hear anything. Yalo was sure that she was hanging up the phone every time she heard his voice saying
allo
into the receiver. He began to dial the number, and when she lifted the receiver he was quiet and tried not to breathe. But she did not even say
allo
. She let the silence hang over the telephone receiver, then hung up. Yalo spent three days playing the silent telephone game, then sound blossomed again and Shirin resumed speaking to him, and made appointments with him, though she always tried to contrive excuses not to keep them.

Why did she say that he came over on the night of her birthday and he had terrified her?

Yalo hadn't done anything. He would say that he hadn't done anything. He'd stood under the streetlight in his long black coat, and didn't budge from the spot, and she had seen him. There was no way she could have not seen him, since his eyes were bright and he cast them on her bedroom window.

Yalo was able to swear that he had done nothing but shine his big black eyes on her window. He had stood still for long hours without moving, then Shirin opened her window and steam came out. Yalo did not know what they were doing inside there, but he saw white smoke coming from the window and becoming a cloud. He saw Shirin, a white halo of smoke encircling her head.

“That's right, you dog, that's right, you stood beneath her window the night of her birthday?” shouted the interrogator.

Why had she said that he carried two flashlights and stood under the streetlight, pointing both beams at her bedroom window?

Why did she lie and say that he was carrying a Kalashnikov? And that he had focused on her window as he had done that night in the Ballouna forest when he had attacked her and her fiancé, in his long black coat and his shoes that crunched on the dirt and gravel, and his white woolen hat that covered his face, and the blinding beam of his flashlight?

Why did she tell the interrogator that he had stood beneath her window with a rifle and two flashlights?

The rifle was impossible – who would dare carry a rifle openly in the street, and in Beirut, and with the war over? And as for the flashlight – Yalo had never carried more than one flashlight in his life, and it was the best in the world; Madame had given it to him when the power went out. A thin black flashlight, which emitted a piercing light, like a laser, as bright as lightning. Yalo had not used his flashlight that night, nor had he stood threateningly beneath her window, nor had he rapped the windowpane with the muzzle of a rifle.

True, he had gone and stood there, with his flashlight unused deep in his coat pocket beside the knife he was never without. But he had not brought his rifle with him.

He stood there, his eyes ablaze with love.

“It was love, sir,” Yalo wanted to tell the interrogator.

“Love is humiliation, sir,” he wanted to say.

“Love is like the cross, sir,” he wanted to say.

But Yalo did not know how to say these things in front of the interrogator, because when he did he heard the voice of his mother, Gabrielle, coming out of his throat. She would stand in front of the mirror and say that her face
didn't look like her own face anymore. She cried, then turned on the faucet and washed her face, washed her tears away. She would stand for hours in front of the mirror and say that she was washing the age from her face.

“Only water can wash away age, my son,” she said.

He went away and left her, and her face, washed with the water of age, remained etched in his memory, and her voice followed him with its light rasp and a lisp that made the words that she pronounced only vaguely resemble words.

“How do you understand what your mother says?” asked his friend Tony, who would take him to Paris.

“Everyone understands her,” replied Yalo. “People understand speech from facial expressions, not from words.”

Yalo was not philosophizing when he talked to Tony about facial expressions, for he knew only a few words of Syriac, but he understood everything from the tear-filled eyes of his grandfather, and answered in Arabic, except for the one word
lo
.

He wanted to tell the interrogator to go away,
lo
, not like this, but Shirin pained him. Why had she said those things? Why had she looked at him as if she hated him?

When Yalo entered the interrogator's room, Shirin pointed at him and said, “That's him.”

At that moment Yalo looked over and saw her bare thighs, and saw the man sitting beside her, and dropped onto the chair set in the middle of the room for the suspect, with everyone looking at him, under the stern gaze of the interrogator.

He sank under the stares and closed his eyes. Shirin had told the interrogator everything before Yalo was brought into the room, and once he was there she said little. She sat quietly behind the paleness of her slender thighs revealed by her short red skirt. She hid behind the paleness as she
had hidden behind the white cloud that had drifted out of her window, there.

“I went and stood under the window to tell her I love her,” Yalo said.