Elias Khoury - Yalo

The story had disappeared into the depths of Yalo’s memory and resurfaced now before this white interrogator with his snub nose and deep-set eyes.

The interrogator raised his finger as if he wanted to say something, or perhaps he did say something, but Yalo was not listening to him. Yalo couldn’t stop asking himself the question posed before him as if it were up on a blackboard.

Why had Emile not done as Ephraim had?

Ephraim had demonstrated courage; he told his grandson that he had castrated his rival. “He came like a puffed-up rooster and left crowned with shame, he went in a rooster and left a hen. I didn’t do a thing. I just brandished the weapon of speech before him. Humans are weak when faced with speech, my boy, and that is why God the Father called his son Word. What is meant by the Word of God? It means his mystery and his truth. Your son is your word, and you are my word, my boy. Be my word, just as the Son was the word of the Father.”

Ephraim sent for Elias al-Shami. The tailor thought that the cohno wanted him to sew a white robe for an imminent elevation to the head of the priesthood, as he told all the cohno ’s congregation: “Someday, in a year or two or three, you’ll call me, sir.” And the years passed and the cohno waited, as since the death of his wife after that journey to Homs to seek healing from St. Elian, he had told everyone that it was the will of God. He did not shed a single tear at his wife’s funeral. He stood and accepted the people’s condolences, but instead of saying the traditional words like “May God compensate you” or “Live on,” he only uttered, “Christ is risen,” and waited for the mourners to respond, “Truly, he is risen.” The cohno said that God had yearned for his servant, meaning his poor wife who had died of cancer, because there was wisdom that we mortals could not comprehend. The misfortune was yearning, and God yearned for his servants through misfortunes, and perhaps this misfortune was a yearning of a special kind, as if God wanted something we knew nothing about.

Of course, no one took what he said seriously, for Almighty God had not been diminished to the point of naming the old prelate the shepherd of his humble flock. But in spite of the scornful looks, Cohno Ephraim still dreamed of being head of the priesthood. White hair overtook him and old age preyed upon him, but he performed his prayers as usual, awaiting the moment of glory.

The tailor arrived, thinking that he would joke with the cohno about becoming an archbishop, when he found himself facing the most difficult test of his life. The tailor Elias al-Shami was sixty years old and seemed eternally youthful; he sucked in his stomach to appear slender, and smiled broadly so that people could see his clean white teeth. The tailor was one of the first residents of Mseitbeh in Beirut to discover an Armenian dentist, Nobar Bakhshigian, and exchanged putting in a plate of false teeth for a set of permanent bridgework, which looked like real teeth.

The tailor sat across from the cohno as he had been asked to do — “Come, my son, and sit before me.” He bowed his head, which he dyed with henna, producing a reddish result, and kissed the hand that resembled the branch of a dead tree, then heard a strange request and gave a strange reply.

“You love the girl, right?”

The tailor did not understand the question, or claimed not to understand. “What girl, Abuna?” he asked.

“You love Gabrielle, my daughter Gaby. I know everything.”

The tailor did not know what to say, because if he denied it he would seem vile to this elderly cohno , who was watching his only remaining daughter drifting into nothingness in her relationship with this man. But if he said yes, he had no way of guessing what the cohno would ask of him. So he just nodded his head downward in order to let the cohno understand whatever he wanted.

“So take her.”

“. .”

“I am telling you take her, what are you waiting for?”

“What?”

“Take her, my son, I will take care of the legal aspect. I will divorce her from her husband, because he has been gone ten years now, and that way you can marry her.”

“But I am married.”

“I’ll divorce you too.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you.”

“But that is hard, Abuna, you know these things take time with Greek Orthodox.”

“We’ll make you Syriac, and that way I can divorce you in twenty-four hours.”

“Me, Syriac?”

“Why, is there something wrong with the Syriac?”

“I love the Syriac, Abuna, only. .”

“Only what?”

The cohno had told him to take her. The tailor kept his head bowed for a long time before answering.

“Where should I take her, Abuna?”

“Take her home with you and live with her lawfully. You have to find a way to take her. What’s going on now is shameful, and a sin.”

The two men did not speak for a long while, and sat immersed in a silence broken by Gabrielle when she came into the living room with a coffee tray.

“Sit down, my girl,” said the cohno .

Gabrielle sat down, all her limbs trembling.

“I told him to take you. I told him: If you love her, take her.” He gazed at Elias and asked him, “What do you say, my son?”

“I don’t know,” answered Elias, after taking a sip of his rosewater-scented Turkish coffee.

“What don’t you know?” asked the cohno .

“I don’t know, Abuna, why don’t you take her yourself.” Elias’s reply came like a rattle from deep inside him.

“What did you say?” asked the cohno .

“I swear, I don’t know what I want to say.”

“No, please repeat what you said. I did not hear you well,” said the cohno .

“. .”

“You said I should take her? Me!”

“I can’t,” said Elias.

“You’re telling me to take her, my own daughter! What is this, get out, you shit! I thought you were a man but you are shit! Get out and get away from me, and I warn you, if you come near my daughter I’ll crack your skull.”

Yalo did not know how the visit ended, or how Elias al-Shami got out of the house, but he imagined that Elias had staggered off.

“He came in a young kid and left an old man,” was how he would have reported it to Shirin, but he has never been able to tell her the story of his mother. When he met up with her she was frightened and in a rush and just wanted to go home. He wanted to tell her that it was up to a man to take the woman he loved. Had Emile dared to demand that he take her, he would have taken her. How could he abandon her? They all told him to take her so how could he not? It was unthinkable. And now if the interrogator told him, take her, he would take her. But the interrogator told him he knew everything, and everything meant that he knew about Madame Randa. No, that one he would not take. He imagined the lawyer Michel Salloum before him. He saw him sitting with him in front of the stove in the villa and telling him to take Randa, and then Yalo would say, “ Lo. No, you take her. I don’t want to.”

Shirin, she was another story. No one would tell him: Take her. When you are truly in love, that’s not the way things go. But there, at the villa, when Monsieur Michel would return from one of his trips to France or elsewhere and ask Yalo to come up to the villa, Yalo was afraid, he felt in his hands the shudders of Elias al-Shami. Yalo would trudge up, his back hunched like Elias al-Shami’s, afraid that such a command would escape the lips of his mentor. For he was certain that he could not take her, just as he did not want her. But he went to her when she summoned him, and slept with her when she wanted him. With her, he felt as if he were entering, in moments he had stolen, a world whose essence he did not understand, and when he tried to write about those moments in his cell, with nothing in front of him but a pile of white paper provided by the interrogator, he would never know what to write. Was he supposed to write that he had felt that he was stepping into flames of emotions that were cooking him alive? Or lie and say that he did not like having sex with her? Or what?