Elias Khoury - Yalo

“Never mind, ma’am, stay where you are,” said Mario.

“Never mind what,” said the woman testily. “Please help me up, I don’t want to be paralyzed.”

Mario approached her and extended his hand, she clasped it and pulled it toward her, nearly making him fall. But the woman could not get up, as if she were fastened to the couch, and her face flushed red. Yalo stepped forward and took her by the elbow and hand, using both his hands, and they tried again. Mario held her from one side and Yalo from the other, and the woman struggled with her arms but did not budge from her place. It was as if she had surrendered to gravity and was stuck to the sofa. Mario asked her to make an effort, “Push with me, mother, push,” and the woman pushed and moaned more loudly. It was as if she were giving birth, thought Yalo. She pushed and gasped with three men standing around her trying in vain to help her. Suddenly the woman slipped off the sofa; her head struck the floor and her legs flew into the air.

“That’s it, that’s it,” said Nina the Russian. “Leave me alone — that’s it.”

Yalo did not know why he thought that a child had come out between her thighs. He burst into laughter. He dropped the woman’s hand and left the living room to stifle his laughter and wait for his comrades. And there too, as the guys had stood bent over the heap of bones, weeping, Yalo stifled his laughter and stood waiting for them.

“Pick him up!” shouted Mario.

“How can we pick him up?” Tony’s hollow voice sounded as if it came from behind a mask covering his mouth.

Mario slipped his arms under the trousers and shirt to lift him up as one would lift a child, but Alexei fell apart. His bones began to drop out.

“Put him down, Mario,” said Tony, his voice white and frightened.

Tony bent down and picked up the bones that had fallen from Mario’s arms. Said al-Mansurati appeared with a wooden box resembling a coffin and put the parts of Alexei in it, then the box was carried to the headquarters in the Georges Aramouni Barracks at the Good Shepherd High School. There was no smell.

Alexei spent the night in the barracks, in a room no one entered. Tony suggested bringing in two big candles to put on either side of the box, as was the custom observed with corpses before burial, but everyone ignored his suggestion. So Alexei spent his final night in a dark room that no one had bothered to light up.

The next morning, Mario brought a real casket of brown wood, decorated with flowers in relief and with a metal plate attached bearing an engraved inscription: “Alexei, 1963–1988. Martyr.” The guys carried the bier to the St. Demetrius Church, where Alexei’s mother waited cloaked in black. The bier was placed before the altar between two large bright candles. The priest concluded his prayers, and the bier was carried to the Foreigners’ Cemetery, as the public cemetery was called, though it was the property of the church reserved for poor families, and at that moment the incident occurred that was etched in Yalo’s memory. The bier was opened so that the priest might sprinkle a handful of earth on the corpse and say, “Dust to dust,” and call for the burial. All the priest saw was a white sheet covering something, so he removed the sheet to sprinkle the earth on the face of the deceased, and what he saw was Alexei’s grinning skull. The priest drew back in horror. The handful of earth dropped from his hand, and Yalo got up to close the casket and asked the gravedigger to lower it into the ground. At that moment Nina found her way between the priest and Mario, saw the skull, and screamed, “That is not my son!” And she began to curse. A stream of curses flowed one after another from her mouth, and her face turned pale and sallow: “That is not Alexei! Why are you doing this to me? Where is my son?” Mario tried to calm her down, but she threw herself onto the bier, determined to throw it down and scatter its contents. However, Mario and Tony were able to keep her at a distance from it, and the casket was lowered into the grave.

As to what happened next, Yalo could not recall. Something like a black veil fell over his eyes and everything was wiped from the screen of his memory, but he heard the story from his comrades. He heard how the woman had to be carried to her house because she refused to leave the cemetery, and how after that she sought help from the disabled shelter at Atchaneh, though she refused to live there because all of the disabled women there spoke Syriac or Turkish, and she did not understand either one, so she went on to die in the Orthodox shelter, near the Saint George Hospital in Achrafieh. The staff was sure that the old woman was deranged. For she was not Russian as she claimed, she didn’t know a single word of Russian, and her son was not a saint and had not become a skeleton at the moment of his death, it was impossible, one of the signs of sainthood was the saint’s body remaining uncorrupted even after death. So how could Nina say that her son had shed his corporeal body, as a man sheds his clothes, to become a heap of bones?

Nina died, alone and sorrowful; she had come to believe that she was truly deranged, just as the old women at the shelter had whispered after hearing the story of the son who had shed his body. Nina would act out the scene; she’d begin by removing her clothes, then the screaming would escalate and the nurses would rush toward her to calm her down before restraining her. Nina tried to persuade the nurses to let her shed her body to become a saint like her son, St. Alexei.

Nina believed in her madness. She went to the shelter’s church to ask the young priest who served at the Sunday mass for Beirut’s small Russian community to cast the devils out of her. The priest pushed her away with the back of his hand to clear his way to the altar so that he could begin the early morning prayer that preceded the mass. Nina fell to the ground and suddenly all was confusion. She was carried back to the shelter after nurses and porters were summoned. She died two days later and was buried in the Foreigners’ Cemetery beside her son.

The priest did not kill her, as Sister Blajiah, the supervisor of the shelter, had insinuated. For Sister Blajiah hated White Russians and didn’t like the way they chanted their prayers. She said that the only acceptable manner of prayer was in Greek and in a Byzantine melody, because that was how they prayed in heaven.

The priest had nothing to do with it, the woman had come to the church to die there, and there were no devils to cast out. The Russian priest found nothing to liberate from her except her own soul. She left there, where everyone must leave one day or another, and that’s all there was to it. As for the story of her son the saint, no one believed her. Struck by a bullet in his chest, the saint leaned on his comrade Yalo and told him he would shed his body the moment he died because he couldn’t stand the thought of rotting and swelling up like the rest of the dead that were eaten up by vermin and worms, then he bowed his head and gave up the ghost. His friend bent over to pick him up but did not find him; he found only a skeleton.

Nina said that Yalo was terror-struck when he saw the skeleton and ran to his comrades to tell them of the marvel. And when they came, that sector had come under fire from the enemy camp and no one was able to get to where Alexei had shed his body and left a skeleton so they abandoned him. “And when I found out I went out by myself and brought him back to the house. His bones were as white as snow, as if they had been scrubbed with soap and water. I went myself, under fire, and brought him back. All his comrades refused to come with me, afraid for their lives — what cowards! And to think that I’d taken them for soldiers of the White Army! I went by myself and brought back his bones so that his name would be remembered. His grandfather was an officer in the czar’s army and I wanted him to become like him. The bastards, they let his flesh fall off his bones. They abandoned him there and no one saw the miracle, not even that tall Syriac, Yalo, Gaby’s son, who’d seen the miracle with his own eyes, he stood there like a mute. Tall and stupid, what could he say? Alexei’s grandfather told me, this is the kind of miracle that happened in Russia in the civil war times. He said that when an officer died he became a skeleton, the bones were as white as snow. That’s what happened with my son. In Russia, they blessed the officer who shed his body at the moment of his death, and they declared him a saint. But they abandoned Alexei because they’re cowards and they don’t believe in the Holy Trinity. I offered him up to the Trinity. His father died when he was young, and I have no one left but the Trinity and that boy.”