Elias Khoury - Yalo

“You don’t know what?”

“I don’t know anything.”

She said she didn’t know anything.

I don’t know anything either, Yalo would say. Only he didn’t.

She had beaten him at announcing her ignorance of everything, so he did not know how to announce his own identical ignorance. Thus Yalo was, talking to her without knowing what to say, garbling his words, tripping over his tongue, and falling into a void.

There in the cell, where he sat alone writing the story of his whole life, he felt a void all around him. He saw the sheets of white paper and ink pens and longed for the smell of the ink in his grandfather’s room, grasping the secret of the squid, which Arabs called the habbar , or inkmaker. He understood that this sea creature was the first to discover writing, because it wrote with its ink in self-defense and to resist death. Its enemies were completely misled by the ink in their faces, and the cuttlefish vanished from their sight in the dense black thicket that the ink painted within the seawater.

Yalo was alone in his cell. He had to release the ink onto his sheets of paper. He was like the cuttlefish, possessing no weapon but ink to release in order to deceive the hunters and save himself from death. But woe to the sea creature who fell into the fishermen’s trap, because they would cook him in his ink. Yalo thought he would be cooked in the ink he was writing with now, that the black ink flowing onto the paper would kill him, and that he was powerless to deceive the hunter who awaited his sheets of paper in order to wrap him up in them, kill him, and devour him. He wrote and wrote, like a squid advancing toward his death.

“Hey you — animal!” shouted the interrogator.

“. .”

“. .”

How had the interrogator learned that Yalo called himself a hawk?

Had Shirin told him?

Had Yalo told her that he was a hawk?

Yalo had never spoken of it, so how did she know? What had she said? He had not told her, it was his secret, so how could he have revealed it?

He was a hawk. He lurked in the forest waiting for the moment to swoop down on his prey, and when he spotted it he would bide his time, determine the attack, stop. His black overcoat would fill with air and inflate, and the sleeves would stretch out. Yalo would lift his arms, which had become like wings, and hover with his bloated stomach, his rifle over his right shoulder, its dangling muzzle aimed at the earth, illuminate his black flashlight, and descend.

He felt as if he were swooping from an immense height, and once he trained the light on his prey he’d commence his descent to earth.

He was a hawk. A long black overcoat, and a narrow beam of light trained on the car swallowed by the night, two feet stepping lightly in rubber boots, a great nose picking up the scent of the perfumed victim, and two wide eyes that could see in the dark.

“Hey, you piece of shit — you’re a hawk?”

Two men seized him by his armpits and made him stand. He felt as if he were flying and closed his eyes.

“You used to tell women that you were a woman hawk?”

They carried him by his armpits, spreading his arms out like wings, and the words began to rain down on his face and nose.

“Hey, you piece of shit, you think you’re smart, you think you’ll fool the justice system?”

The hawk under stomping feet.

“You told Shirin you love her and you want to marry her. Do you know who you are, and who she is?”

They stomped on his face, breaking his beak, and the blood flowed.

“You really think you’re God’s gift to women?”

He saw the boots through his blurry eyes, and the refracted sunlight, and the pain.

“We want you to confess to the gang and the explosives. Can you hear us?”

Blood, hawk, and pain. Suddenly his body left its owner and went to incalculable pains. He saw it fade away and sink into the pool of pain. He saw it go but he could not call to it. His beak was broken, his voice was hoarse, and his blood covered the ground. The body went to its pain, and Yalo felt that he had shed the hawk and taken on the tentacles of the cuttlefish, and the pain stopped. He saw how he grew eight arms and seventy million optic cells stretched across his limbs, and saw his female, Shirin, swimming to his side in the depths, and he extended his fourth right arm to her, this arm was his sexual member, he pressed it into her feminine cavity, felt the eggs and fertilized them, and slept inside her.

The hawk was under their feet, and the cuttlefish mated with his female, who swayed around him and engaged in beautiful sport with him. His fourth arm was inside her and its thousands of eyes opened an infinite universe of colors to him. He saw what lay within the color blue and he saw colors that didn’t even have names because humankind could not perceive them. Ink emerged from every part of Yalo, who had moved from his hawkish state to his maritime state and sunk to the depths, extending his eight arms and flying through the water. When he saw them and their boots, he fired his ink to mislead them and blood-colored ink flooded out.

They made him stand and shackled him. He saw the interrogator’s face squinting into the sun and the red hue forming halos around his head, went out the window and flew away. The interrogator came close to him and spat in his face, and slapped him; then his palm filled with blood. He wiped his palm on the hawk’s overcoat and ordered them to take him away.

The hands on the wounded hawk withdrew and they let him drop to the floor. Red lights plaguing his eyes, Yalo closed them, felt his tears, and sensed a salinity spreading through his body. Yalo became salty — he wanted to tell them that he needed some fresh water. He wanted to weep and leave his body to tremble and moan so that the heat of death would leave him before he died. He had the impression of falling into an abyss, felt that the valley swallowed him, and that he had become a pine tree. He smelled the pine sap and began to chew. The blood gushing in his mouth tasted like grilled pine. He curled his body up just before feeling himself being dragged out of the interrogation room, toward a jeep, where they sat him down among a group of policemen whose fat bellies hung over their leather belts.

Yalo did not know what or where or how.

Had he drunk anything?

Had he eaten anything?

Had he said anything?

Had he?

Later on, he wrote that he found himself in a pool of water, leaning against the wall, the water rising to his chest as he struggled to breathe, colors mingling with smells. His body intermingled with the smell of his blood, feces, and urine. He stretched out in water before curling up in it, and began to drown. Yalo vaguely remembered that a voice emerged from his limbs, remembered that he had become a voice, that he felt a mouth howling inside his mouth, and then he remembered nothing.

Yalo wrote that he did not remember.

When they took him back to the interrogation room, when he saw the interrogator’s head by the window, when he saw the sun that had disappeared from the window, Yalo wanted to ask the interrogator where the sun had gone. He wanted to see the reflected light that veiled his vision but brought light. He wanted light, but the interrogator asked him for his opinion.

Why did he ask for his opinion?

“My opinion of what, sir?”

“Your opinion of what’s happened to you,” said the interrogator.

“Why? What has happened to me?” asked Yalo.

“The bathtub. Tell me, did you like the bathtub?”

Yalo understood that the bathtub was the name the interrogator gave to those vague memories filled with blood, water, and fear.

Yalo lowered his head and saw the interrogator’s hand coming toward him. He recoiled instinctively, but the hand approached with the white sheets of paper.