Elias Khoury - Yalo

Yalo did not remember the story in words, but as a sepia photograph. A woman standing before a baby cradle, she was bending over, putting a finger in the diaper, and then sucking it. After bathing her baby and before putting him to her breast, she bends over her breasts, smells the odor, and is intoxicated by the two odors: the smell of her son and the smell of her milk. The woman kept up this rite of hers until the doctor told her that the child required real food: fruits, vegetables, and eggs, so she fed him and lost him, — once he ate, the smell of his feces mingled with new odors. She began to sense the distance between her and her son; she could not smell the odor of shit, and she could no longer keep her vow. So she decided to disobey the doctor’s orders and began giving her son nothing but milk, though the new odor had taken over the baby’s body and feces so that she could no longer bring Yalo back to her. She felt that her son was separated from her.

Yalo saw himself now, that is, there, and saw the weeping. He was swimming in his own liquids and saw the tears streaming from his eyes, when he saw Alexei. What brought Alexei to this wakefulness that was so like sleep?

Blond Alexei, they called him. Tall, hulky, and blond-haired, he left the barracks to train on bodybuilding at the Sennacherib Club in Achrafieh. He enjoyed sodomy and formed suspect relationships with the young men he brought to the barracks on the pretext of training them to carry weapons. He denied the accusation and spoke only of his relationships with married women. He said that married women were practiced. “A woman has to be well-rounded, she has to be picked like an orange,” he said, and he cupped his palms as if picking two small breasts and began to gobble them up and lick his lips as if orange juice were dripping from them. Yalo did not believe the tales of his married women, but he made sure not to tell him about Thérèse.

It was true why, when he listened to the stories of Alexei’s conquests, he saw Sister Thérèse as if she were his tale, and he forgot the shop which smelled of wood, and over which revolved the blind man’s eyes. He went with Thérèse to a faraway hotel, where the engineer Wajih had taken her, and discovered love and sex with her. Sister Thérèse’s face was like a white light shining from the folds of her black clothing, pulling Yalo into it. Her soft white hand slipped into his black shorts and reduced the whole world to a fist holding the shaft of life that burned with desire. Thérèse had become his own story. He told no one, and the secret that he never experienced became his personal secret, which he was proud of without ever putting it into words.

Blond Alexei was crazy and could not keep a secret. Yalo did not know how Thérèse’s name had slipped off his tongue in front of Alexei, but the blond Russian began to refer to Yalo as “Thérèse’s thing,” and when the guys asked him about it, he did not talk as if he were hiding a deep secret. Then the name slipped out again in front of Shirin, but Yalo would not write about Thérèse when he wrote the story of his life. Once he told Shirin that she looked like Sister Thérèse and she asked who that was and he told her that she had been a nun who had taught him in school and that he was enthralled by her beauty and had a crush on her. He did not dare tell Shirin the true story.

Alexei was like a madman that awful night. No question, he had taken a serious hit of cocaine; otherwise why would he act like that? Yalo told Tony their first night in Paris that God would not forgive them because they forced that old man to eat his own feces. Tony laughed and shook his head, then he disappeared. He disappeared because he did not believe in anything. He stole the money and the language, leaving Yalo alone in that city.

Alexei appeared with cocaine powder traced in the red of his protuberant eyes, and told Yalo to come with him. They went to the underground floor of a building near the Hotel Dieu. They went down a flight of stairs and Alexei opened the door of the cellar with a key he had on him. There Yalo saw a lone blindfolded man, kneeling in the dark. Alexei trained the beam of his flashlight on the man’s head, and the man looked uneasily toward the light but said nothing.

Then Alexei began his game. He fired his pistol in the cellar. The sound was like a cannon shot. The kneeling man started trembling. Alexei approached him and put the hot muzzle of the pistol against the man’s temple and began to threaten him. When Alexei told the man that the hour of execution was approaching so he needed to prepare to meet his Maker, the man trembled and then sat back and stretched his legs out in front of him, and emptied his bowels. The stench spread quickly. Alexei approached the man, holding his nose, and ordered him to stand up. The man began to cry and plead, but when the muzzle of the pistol approached again he put his hands on the floor to push himself up, and Alexei saw the shit.

“You shit yourself, you coward?” shouted Alexei, guffawing. Then he told the man not to stand up: “It’s not worth it. We’ll execute you in your shit!” said Alexei. “And now before you die you must eat it!”

Yalo did not know why the man did it, since he was going to die anyway. Yalo saw the darkness and the smell, and the tears ran black down the sixty-year-old man’s cheeks. The man’s fingers reached out to his excrement, and he raised his fingers to his mouth and ate.

“You must eat it all!” shouted the blond Russian.

The man ate slowly, as if buying time before his death, and Yalo stood up. Suddenly Yalo felt a need to urinate and he was struck with a near inability to move, he thought he was going to collapse, he was suffocating, he couldn’t get enough air. All of a sudden, he saw himself running outside, he reached the house dizzy and began vomiting. He went into the bathroom and thrust his head into the sink. Yellow vomit spattered out of his mouth and nose and the noise filled his ears. He heard Alexei’s voice asking for him and laughing loudly. He wiped his mouth with a towel and opened the faucet to wash the yellowness out of the sink, then hurried out and went with the Russian back to the barracks, where he heard from everyone the story as the Russian told it, about the old guy they kidnapped and forced to eat his own shit.

They called him the Russian, but he was not Russian. He claimed he was a White Russian, and said that all of Russia was red, with only a single white spot called Alexei. But he was a Syriac who had forgotten the language of his ancestors, like Yalo and the rest of the young guys. He was also a close friend of Said al-Mansurati, who composed odes and sang them, proclaiming himself to be the great new entertainer of Lebanon who would emerge after the war. Alexei brought a bottle of white wine and Said played his lute and sang, and the guys got drunk on the rhythms of Andalusian ballads. Said recited poetry about Achrafieh and sang it in his hoarse voice that was like Farid al-Atrash’s, and the guys got drunk.

Said al-Mansurati disappeared, Alexei died, and Yalo found himself alone in his pool, listening to Alexei’s voice in his ears.

He said he had found him upstairs in the office: “I didn’t ask for his identity card or anything. I noticed that he had a foreign accent and I ordered him down to the basement and left him for about five hours on his knees and blindfolded. I swear to God I forgot about him, but after the line of cocaine I remembered him. When I bent over him, I saw that he had shit himself. What a coward! I forced him to eat it before he died. So he ate it. He knew he was going to die, and he ate it anyway. And you, you ran away, you coward. I swear to God, if your mother hadn’t answered the door, I would have given it to you, I would have made you shit yourself. You never would have forgotten me your whole life.”