Elias Khoury - Yalo

“And him, what happened to him?” asked Yalo.

“Rest in peace,” said Alexei.

“You killed him?”

“What do you think I should have done?”

“No, seriously, I’m asking you for real.”

“No, I didn’t kill him, I left him in the basement and came over to your place. Come back with me and we can take care of it.”

“I don’t want to go with you.”

Alexei said that that the man died without his having to kill him. He let him finish his meal, then fired a bullet over his head and the man died.

“He died from fright, not from the shot,” said Alexei. “When a man dies, he dies of death, he dies from fright. You too, you’ll die one day from your cowardice.”

Yalo did not believe that the man had died of fear of the gunshot. He was sure that Alexei had killed him for a laugh. Yalo thought that Alexei was right, he decided to get rid of his cowardice and laugh too. He was sorry that he had run home afraid and vomited on himself. He felt a desire to kill everyone and laugh. He couldn’t imagine why everyone wasn’t laughing, and laughed. He spent the rest of the war on the verge of laughter. Even death was funny and entertaining. Laughter was the highest state of life. Laughter was everyone being strange and deserving a good laugh. A stranger is laughable just by being a stranger. Even Alexei was strange, someone we could laugh at whenever we liked.

Faced with Alexei’s corpse, something like a tremor of weeping swept through the young men, but Yalo felt like laughing. Alexei had not died the way most people die, but he was dead, and when they found him it was not him. He was a heap of clothes and pebbles and bones. Three months were enough for it not to be the man.

No one knew how Alexei had disappeared. Suddenly the blond Russian was just no longer there. They looked for him everywhere but found no trace of him. Their leader, Mario, decided that Alexei was a traitor and a coward. He gathered them all in the barracks and announced that he would turn him over to a military court as soon as he reappeared, but the blond did not reappear. The mill of the civil war kept turning. Mario called the war a mill and he bent over, naked from the waist up, like a mule, braying like a donkey, saying that he was carrying the millstone on his back.

“We grind people down, and they grind us down.”

He drank arak and spun around, his eyes would spin too, and when he got drunk, he would grind himself down and grind down others. The guys in the barracks watched their hero Mario become a mule, and they laughed. His name became Mario the Millstone.

Mario issued a death sentence against Alexei without a trial. He gathered the guys together and said that Alexei was a traitor: “We don’t know all the details. He said he was Russian but he wasn’t Russian. He said he was Syriac but he wasn’t Syriac. He said he was Lebanese but he wasn’t Lebanese. If you see him you must open fire without asking questions.”

“A word is a bullet,” Mario said. “Aim, fire, and get rid of him for me, once he’s dead we’ll interrogate him. Just as for all the others, the investigation begins after death. First we execute him, then we question him. That’s the way it goes.”

But how? How did Alexei melt away in that faraway building?

Alexei’s image would be burned into Yalo’s memory. But the face was not a face, it was a laughing skull.

Mario knew it when he saw it.

A bunch of guys showed up and told Mario that in the Jeraydini Building, opposite the French Medical Faculty in the rue Damas, they had seen a decomposed corpse, and Mario ordered them to dump it before taking their positions on the premises. Then he noticed the fear and horror on their faces.

“Dump it and I don’t want any bullshit. I told you to set up headquarters in the Jeraydini Building but you’re a bunch of cowards looking for excuses.”

Mario carried his rifle and marched ahead of them, and when they reached the heap of clothes and pebbles and bones, their leader bent over the remains and froze in place. In the middle of this dilapidated room, he looked like a taut bow.

Mario could hear their muttering about the remains and the bones. “Follow me,” he said, and ordered Yalo to come with him. He ran ahead of them and mounted the steps to the building two at a time. When they reached the third floor, he froze in place. Yalo followed the noise, not hurrying along with those running, walking heavily and mounting the steps slowly, and in a corner of the dark room, where broken furniture was stacked, he saw everything.

“That’s him,” said Tony.

Mario looked at Tony irritably and stepped back. He rested his short stocky body against the wall before advancing again to lean over the remains. Yalo did not know how long the short man stayed there bent over, but he felt that time had stopped over Mario’s back. Then his back began to quiver as though a wave passed through it from head to waist. He saw Tony step forward and embrace him, and he heard Mario’s voice saying something unintelligible because his voice was stifled in his throat as if it were the captive of his Adam’s apple that moved without liberating it. The back fell to the ground, Tony fell beside him, and Yalo saw himself fading away with the others.

“Where are you all going?” shouted Mario. “It’s Alexei.”

Mario’s shouts combined with the shouting of the other guys, and Yalo wanted to escape. He felt his legs getting ready to run, but the voice froze him to the spot, and he saw them all staggering. The light was black, wrapped in the darkness of the buildings destroyed by the war. The shadow of the destruction spread over them and they bent over to discover what seemed to be a skeleton in clothes ragged from rot.

“That’s Alexei,” said Mario. “We have to take him away.”

Yalo saw torn pants and a ragged shirt on a skeleton. The knees were bent and the bones bathed in black light.

“I recognized his belt,” said Mario. “Let’s take him away.”

The leather belt was the only sign. The Russian kid was carrion.

“Who ate him?” asked Yalo, who felt a laughing fit coming on. He wanted to laugh, but he cried like everyone else. That day Yalo understood that laughter was the neighbor of tears, and that distinguishing between them was terribly difficult, since they had been so closely related since the beginning of creation. Both were surprising and alienating, and both surged in to fill the emptiness the soul felt.

There, facing this scene he would never forget, the tears were like a hemorrhage from a deep wound. Yalo saw himself bent over a pile of bones, which a brown, singed leather belt allowed them to identify, and he saw his comrades stripped of their clothes and their flesh. He saw bones bent over bones, and was overcome by laughter arising from tears, and understood what he had been unable to explain to Shirin, when he had been pursuing her with his love. He understood this mixture of laughter and tears was the hallmark of humanity, and that every human bore two souls with him, the first for laughter and the second for weeping. His problem was that the two souls worked together and that was why it was always impossible to define his feelings.

He told Shirin when she wept that weeping was a sign of happiness and love. She looked at him with her small reddened eyes as if she did not understand why he did not understand.

“Please, Yalo, understand me.”

Getting up, she asked him to understand her. Shirin had the habit of getting up in the middle of their rendezvous as if she were preparing to leave, but when he looked at her with his hawk eyes she’d sit down again without a word.

She would tell the interrogator that she was afraid of his eyes and his long narrow eyebrows. She would say that she didn’t know why she went out with him, that she was afraid of him, and that she agreed to meet him in order to persuade him to end the relationship.