Yalo (25 page)

I now confess, and proclaim that I have decided to repent, and follow the path of my grandfather – God rest his soul – and take care of my poor mother. I have
decided not to marry and to relinquish everything else. And I have decided to stop eating meat.

This is the whole story of my life, from the moment of my birth until now, written in prison in February 1992, and let God be my witness that I have been truthful in everything I have written. I am ready to repeat all I have stated in court.

Y
alo read the pages he had written and put them aside with a feeling of deep relief. He had succeeded at writing the whole story of his life. Now, when he was summoned for interrogation, he would say that he had admitted to everything and written everything down, forgetting nothing.

He wrote about his boyhood, his youth, about the war and Michel Salloum. He wrote about his mother and her lover the tailor, and about the
cohno
. He wrote about Shirin, whom he had loved, and hunting in Ballouna. It was true that he had been compelled to write a fake story – the story about Haykal, Naddaf, and the explosives – but there, there was no avoiding fakery. Yalo felt that he had outsmarted the interrogator because he remembered the names of two men no one would ever find. Haykal had committed suicide in November 1991; it was said that he had hanged himself because he could no longer obtain cocaine. Naddaf had moved to Brazil and never been heard from again. Yalo had confessed, as they'd wanted, but he hadn't opened up a crack allowing them to ravage his soul and his body again. The interrogator would read these names, research them, and decide to close the dossier due to the impossibility of following up the case with two men who no longer existed.

Yalo sat on the floor of his cell and rested his head against the wall, feeling hungry. It was as if the words he had written had opened up a gulf inside
him that could only be filled with food. He saw a fish before him and his mouth began to water. He would have told Shirin, had she been there, that he no longer feared anything once he had discovered blood in fish.

He told her, or would have told her, about Munir Shammo, who had brought a big sea perch home, wriggling in the throes of death.

What happened that day?

As Yalo recollected the story for Shirin's sake, he felt that speech was not possible without love. When he gave in to love, he felt the taste of speech. Speech was full of flavor when it was spoken with love. It was true that now he no longer loved her, and that he felt capable of killing her because she had shattered him by betraying him; written on her bare thighs in the interrogation room was a flagrant sign of her treachery. Yet now when he sat down to write, he felt her presence, and remembered how he had become an open book to her. He had tried to seduce her with words, with stories, true or fictitious, but she remained indifferent. He had written his life in front of her but she refused to read it. She was always in a hurry with her mind elsewhere, as if she did not understand or didn't want to understand.

Now she was here, as if she were sitting beside him in the cell, listening to the story of the fish. But his mind strayed a little because of her lipstick. She began to eat, curling her lips so she wouldn't smear the red; then, when she realized the impossibility of that, she wiped off the red with a tissue. Yalo cried, No! and wanted her lips. He imagined himself rubbing his lips against hers and licking the red from them. He knew she did not like Arabic songs or Arabic poetry, but he could not control himself, so he told her to listen, and Shirin put the tissue on the table and looked at him, waiting for him to go on.

“Listen to this poem,” he said. “Mansurati used to sit in the barracks and sing, and we'd sing with him. He immediately entranced with his voice and his lute. Never in my life was I able to hit the right note, my voice was
terminally off-key. But Mansurati – my God. When he picked up his lute and started singing, I felt the soul of the world, I can't even describe it. Don't you feel that way when you hear music?”

She replied in a murmur that the kind of music that moved the soul of the world was classical music. She said she loved Bach, and thought that songs were a violation of music.

“You don't like Nizar Qabbani?” he asked her.

“I'm not talking about Arabic poetry,” she said. “Even Jacques Brel – you know Jacques Brel?”

He nodded to say that yes, he did, but his incomprehension was clear from the way his eyebrows knitted together in his effort to show he knew.

“What are you talking about?” he said.

“I was saying that even with Jacques Brel, whose songs are complex, I feel like he's lowering the standard of music when he puts in words and meanings.”

“But listen to what I'm going to recite for you,” he said. “It's the most beautiful song in the world, even more beautiful than Abd al-Halim Hafiz. Listen.”

And he drew his head back to rest his temple on his right hand before reciting the poem in a heightened voice:

In Achrafieh, the day I was there and came to her,

I surrendered my life to your lips

And I tasted the fruit, what a taste
!

If not succulent grapes

Something very similar.

Were it not for her sweetness in love and

My tenderness in love,

I would have eaten those lips and feasted on them.

He began to tremble: “– feasted . . . fea . . . sted . . . on . . . them. Isn't that lovely? That was our song in the barracks. We sang “feasted” and everyone interpreted it his own way. Alexei took out the f and put in a
b
, and Mansurati got mad. I swear to God he was a great artist. I don't know what happened. He said that he was fed up with the war, that he wanted to be a performer. Of course all of us were fed up with the war, but not everyone who got fed up became a performer, it's not like that.”

Yalo laughed, thinking he had said something funny, but when he saw no trace of a smile on her lips, he became serious again and told her about the fish and the war.

When he recalled how he remembered this incident, he was dumbstruck. For the fish full of blood had sunk into his memory as if it had never happened, and when she tried to wipe the red from her lips so she wouldn't mess up her lips, the fish woke up and the story came back.

He remembered the fish's head, its two quicksilver eyes, and its mouth opening and shutting as if it wanted to say something but couldn't. The
cohno
's friend Munir Shammo, who was retired from his tiling work and now spent his days fishing, showed up early that Saturday morning with a fish in his basket. He put it in the kitchen and left. When Gaby came into the kitchen, she cursed her luck for being the one who had to clean the hideous black fish, full of bones, the fish called in Lebanon “the Bolshevik.” But she froze in her tracks and screamed when she saw the fish wriggling and flapping on the kitchen floor. The fish had flipped itself off the counter to the floor. Hearing his daughter's cry, the grandfather hurried in and saw it too.

“The fish is talking to God,” he said, and knelt to pick it up, but the fish slid out of his hands. The fish was almost a meter long, its gray scales were spattered with white spots, and its eyes were shining with life. Ephraim bent to the floor and took it in his arms as if he were picking up a child, and said that he was going to return it to the sea, but the fish fell from his embrace.
The
cohno
backed away and said he was going to fetch the fisherman. Yalo could not remember where his mother had disappeared to, but he found himself alone with the fish in the kitchen. He approached it, but slipped and fell, landing on the head of the fish, and blood began to flow. Of the black coffee grinds his mother used to stanch the blood and of the carnage that had spilled across the sink, Yalo couldn't remember a thing. All he remembered was his grandfather weeping over the fish whose blood had splashed and stained the sink and the kitchen wall.

“You butchered it!” exclaimed the
cohno
. “Why, daughter? Who butchers a fish?”

Gaby had sliced open the fish's belly, scooped out the insides, and begun to pare off the scales with a large knife when the
cohno
came back accompanied by Munir Shammo.

Blood streamed from the butchered fish, which continued to tremble in Gaby's hands, which were busy scaling it as she commented that this was the best fish she had ever seen in her life. She said that she'd get three meals out of it. She'd fry the bottom half for lunch, grill the upper half for Sunday, and the huge head would be cooked in a rice pilaf – a fisherman's dish.

“Bless your hands, Uncle Munir. Please join us for three meals of fish.”

The grandfather kept lamenting the butchered fish, and left the house with his friend. He came back late in the evening and announced that he had given up eating fish.

“That's how my grandfather stopped eating fish, even cuttlefish he wouldn't eat, although cuttlefish are full of ink – there isn't a drop of blood in their veins.

“You know that in France they eat blood?”

“What?!” Shirin exclaimed.

“I'm telling you, they eat blood. M. Michel let me taste something called boudin; he said they stuff a pig's intestines with blood and eat it.”

“You ate it?”

“Of course. Why not? And then I lived in a house where they drank blood almost every day.”

“You all ate blood?” she asked, a look of nausea on her face; she turned away and scowled, and then grabbed a tissue to wipe the red from her lips.

“No, don't wipe off the red. I love the red.”

She looked at her watch. When Shirin looked at her watch it meant she had made up her mind to leave. He surprised her then with his question about whether she believed in God.

“Of course. Of course,” she said.

“And you go to the
‘atdo
?”

“The what?”

“You go to church?”

“Not all the time. But of course at Christmas and Good Friday. So, like everybody.”

“And you take the sacrament?”

“Kind of. Sometimes.”

“And when you take it, what do you feel?”

“What's with these stupid questions? C'mon, let's go.”

“No, let's not go. I'm asking you a question. Answer.”

“Fine. I open my mouth and I eat the host.”

“And blood!”

She said that it was just a symbol. The wine did not become blood in the mass except symbolically.

“That's not true,” said Yalo. “The mass is a sacrifice, which means a slaughter, a real slaughter. I know that.”

“You don't know anything,” she said.

She said that she didn't like discussing religion because she didn't understand anything about it, but she believed in God and that was enough.

“Of course that's enough,” said Yalo. “But I was telling you about the
cohno
, my grandfather, being vegetarian, but he drinks blood every day.”

“He drinks blood?”

“Of course he drinks blood, he's a
cohno
. At mass he drinks the blood of Christ, he puts sweet wine and water into the chalice and drinks it.”

“That's wine. You scared me. I don't know why I still believe you.”

“No, it is not wine, it becomes blood,” said Yalo, but he didn't tell her that he was afraid at mass. He would close his eyes and open his mouth to take the host, he would feel the taste of blood, and become dizzy. He wanted to tell her about his grandfather's wonders, about the miracle of the Kurdish mullah, about Alexei and his mother the Muscovite. But he felt that every conversation with Shirin opened up innumerable empty spaces within him, and he was incapable of filling them. The words would pour out of him, yet he realized that he was saying nothing because he was unable to speak of a clear and simple concept – his love for her.

“But you don't know me,” she said.

“I know everything,” he answered her. “Love is the greatest knowledge.” He wanted to tell her that her smell never left him and that he was ready to change his life for her, and that he was not just a thief or villa guard; circumstances had made him what he was. He would open a fine woodworking shop. But he didn't say any of that. Speech needed something, something beyond what Yalo was going to learn in his solitary cell. Speech required a ruse, and ruses only came to him here, when he was trapped between two walls: the gray prison wall with its peeling paint, with numerous fissures and gaps that took on human shapes at night, and the wall of the white pages placed before him so that he could write the story of his life. Yalo had not known that this method of extracting confessions from a suspect was the most prevalent method in the Arab world for political prisoners, after the traditional torture parties. A prisoner found himself facing an empty
cola bottle, and was forced to sit naked upon the bottle. If he succeeded in avoiding death by septicemia or blood loss, he was given a sheaf of white pages and was asked to write the story of his life. This was when the real torture began, for the act of writing became an instrument of death and a path to suicide. The words became like knives stabbing the one who bore them. So the prisoner tumbled into the pit he had dug himself, slipping on his words, falling into his blood, which had taken on the color of ink, and sniffing his own blood.