Elias Khoury - Yalo

Yalo told Shirin about the cold. He tried to tell her, but she laughed at him: “You’re the world’s greatest liar!” she said, and refused to go up to Ballouna with him.

That was one week after the famous night in Ballouna. He called her house in the morning. Her mother answered the phone sleepy and yawning, and he heard her call to her daughter that someone named Yalo wanted to talk to her. Then came the tone of her delicate voice. Suddenly her delicate voice became broad and deep.

“Hello,” she said in her delicate voice. Then her voice amplified, slowed down, and became scratchy, as if coming from an old recorded tape.

“It’s me,” he said, after hearing her ask, “Who is this?”

“Who is this?” she asked.

“Me, Yalo.”

“Hi. . hi.”

“How are you?”

“I’m. . fine. . thanks.”

“I miss you.”

“. .”

He said that he wanted to see her that day and she replied that she was busy. He said that he would wait for her in front of the Araissi office at nine in the morning and she said no. He said he would be there anyway.

“Fine, fine,” she said.

“I’ll be waiting for you,” he said.

“No, not in front of the office. You’ll find me in the News Café.”

He said he did not know where to find that place and she told him it was near the Clemenceau Cinema.

“Okay, in an hour, so, at nine I’ll be waiting for you there.”

“No, no — I can’t before five in the afternoon.”

“Okay, I’ll be waiting for you at five.”

“Sure, sure,” she said, and hung up.

When he met her at the café and they drank tea, he told her about the cold. She laughed and said, “You’re the world’s greatest liar!”

Yalo went to the café at four o’clock. He sat in a quiet corner, drank a beer, and waited. When the hands of the clock approached five o’clock, he felt nervous and fearful that he would not recognize her. He recalled all her features in his eyes, and waited as he sipped his beer slowly. But as soon as he heard her footsteps on the floor he recognized her, then scented the fragrance of the incense that preceded her. She paused a moment before sitting across from him and did not offer her hand in greeting. She pulled out the chair and sat down in silence. When the waiter appeared she ordered a cup of tea and Yalo also ordered tea.

She drank, and he drank.

She spoke, and he spoke.

Yalo did not remember what he said, or how the time passed in an instant, and then it was six thirty. Shirin looked at her watch and said she had to go.

“Should I give you a ride there?” he asked.

“No thanks, I have my car.”

“Why don’t we go to the mountain?”

“Where?” she asked.

“Ballouna,” he said.

“Please, Monsieur Yalo.”

“You still remember my name?”

“Please, please do me a favor, I’m very grateful to you. You were a gentleman with me. Please keep being a gentleman.”

“Why am I, what did you say?” he said. “I wanted for us to go for a drive and get some fresh air.”

“Please, let’s just forget it,” she said.

Then she asked him how her knew her name and telephone number, and he said he knew everything about her. He knew where she lived, describing for her the tall building in Hazemiya, and he knew where she worked, and he loved her.

Yalo did not remember when he had spoken of love, whether in their first encounter or the second. He remembered that he showed up at their first appointment stammering, and that when he saw her shivering in front of him in the café, he again felt like the hawk he was. He waited for an hour before she arrived, and he felt as if there were water trembling inside the muscles of his chest and inside his arms and legs, making him quiver in his chair. When she came and sat facing him and he saw the trembling of her narrow lower lip, colored red but almost pink, giving off a strong smell of perfume mixed with the scent of incense from her upper arms, his hawk feelings returned, and instead of being gentle, he felt that he had regained the power of words to say whatever he wanted without stuttering.

But he said nothing.

He noticed the trembling of the left corner of her lower lip. He lit a cigarette, sucked in the smoke, and exhaled it in a series of smoke rings. He shaped his lips into a circle and blew rings that landed against Shirin’s eyes and dissolved on her lips.

Did she say then that she was afraid of him, or was that the second time they met?

Yalo did not remember the order of events exactly, but it was probable that she had said that at their second encounter.

She said she had begun to be scared to answer the telephone, or open her bedroom window, or walk home alone, or. . because she saw his specter everywhere, and she was afraid.

He said that he saw her all the time in his imagination, and that her image had never left his eyes since they met in Ballouna, and that he could smell the scent of her body from his own body; that he had been unable to forget her, and that he loved her.

She said she was begging him.

He said he was begging her.

When she showed signs of standing up after paying the check, he caught her by the hand and felt everything inside him tremble. The softness of her hand cheered and intoxicated him. Yalo would write that there in the café he discovered a softness he had never known and would feel regret that he’d not discovered it at his home in Ballouna. There he felt a woman so light that she could have flown to the rhythm of the desire exploding inside him. It had not been sated. He said he had never felt her softness because he had been submerged in the scent of the incense from her forearms. In the café, an unspeakable softness spread through his limbs, as if her cold fingers were made of silk and stitched to her palm.

Why were her fingers always cold?

Once he told her, when he gently took her hand, that her fingers were as cold as ice and that when he took her hand he felt the urge for a glass of whiskey that he would put her icy fingers into and get intoxicated. She laughed; when she laughed at him or with him she was like someone trying not to laugh. The laughter erupted from her lips and fell back to them, then her lips contracted again, and her eyes emitted a ray of sadness.

She taught him how to read sorrow in people’s eyes.

Once she told him that she could read sadness in people’s eyes. They used to stand in front of the entrance of the building where she worked at five o’clock in the evening as sunset stretched streaks of darkness into the brightness. One day he waited for her for two hours in front of her office building, went down to Beirut but found nothing to do there, called her but was told that she couldn’t speak to him because she was in a meeting, and then headed for the sidewalk in front of the company, and stood there without budging. He stood there unmoving for two hours or more without feeling the passage of time. When she looked out of the doorway she saw him and motioned for him to follow her. He followed her to her car without saying a word. When they reached her white Golf and she bent over to put the key in the lock, she looked up and saw him staring blankly, and greeted him, then he got in beside her and they went to the Café Chatila on the beach and sipped beers. Yalo could think of nothing to say. He felt the sorrow radiating from his eyes, felt alone, and decided to go and visit his mother. They drank beer and she said she had to go, and she went. She did not offer him a lift in her car, nor did he offer her anything. He let her go and he strolled along the seaside corniche road, seeing himself, in the mirror of his own eyes, enveloped in sorrow.

He learned from Shirin how to read sorrow in people’s eyes — that is what he wanted to tell his mother, but he didn’t tell her anything. He walked until he reached his car in Achrafieh, where he then drove to his mother’s house in Ain Rummaneh. He did not know why he stood there without going in. He saw his mother through the window, sitting in the kitchen eating burghul . He did not approach to speak to her. He saw the sorrow in her eyes as well. He forgot what happened next; all he remembered was the bowl of burghul cooked with tomato and the taste of hot pepper piercing his tongue, and the sorrow that gathered around his mother’s mucus-caked eyes, as if they had not been washed for days.