Elias Khoury - Yalo

I am not lying. I promised the esteemed officer that I would write the truth, and the truth is that I misunderstood her shaking. I thought she was waiting for me to do it, so I slept with her, but I was mistaken. My feeling was wrong, because my situation was wrong. When I began to have sex with her she began to weep. She put the palms of her hands over her eyes and wept, but instead of stopping, I felt a strange pleasure. It was as if I were a beast. I swear to God, I don’t know what happened to me, and now, after I fell in love with Shirin, I understood that that feeling is disgraceful and it is called rape.

After the first time, it was easier. I began to combine robbery and rape. Sometimes, however, I would be content with just robbery and I felt gallant, especially when I saw how the woman would thank me with her shamed eyes because I had done nothing more than rob her. I felt gallant and noble, and that restored some of my dignity.

I’ll be content with the sentence the court will give me. Almighty God has already punished me for my atrocious deeds and I have been subjected to the torture I deserve, I now proclaim my penitence.

In Beirut I saw Haykal, who had been with us in the Georges Aramouni Barracks, and had tempted me with money. He gave me five hundred American dollars and said that it was from Abu Ahmad al-Naddaf, and he asked me to hide the stuff in my house or the cottage below the villa. I hid it. I didn’t know Abu Ahmad al-Naddaf and had never met him. But Haykal had taken a paratroopers course in Israel, and that’s where he came to know Naddaf. The stuff I hid in my house was ten kilos of gelignite, twenty detonators, and five hand grenades. Later on we got started.

Haykal came and said that the job was starting, and they began to take the explosives and went I don’t know where. I paid no attention to the business since my main concern was Shirin. I made appointments with her and followed her from place to place, and I loved her. Don’t ask me, sir, why I loved her, because love is from God. I loved her, and she became the light of my eyes and the warmth in my heart, and she loved me too, in her own way. I felt her love when she laughed with me, but she was also afraid of me, and now I know she was right, because my behavior, what can I say. . was not worthy of her. But for her to go and press charges, and ruin me, as she did, that I do not understand. It would have been enough for her, sir, to ask me, seriously, to break off our relationship, and I would have broken it off. Can one person force another person to love them? But she did not ask for that outright; I felt she was hesitant. That’s what made me continue with her. My goal was honorable. I wanted to marry her and put an end to the dog’s life I was living. When my grandfather would get mad at me, he’d call me a son of a dog to remind me of who had abandoned me in my mother’s belly and went I don’t know where. Monsieur Michel told me that he didn’t get a dog to help me guard the villa because Madame Randa was afraid of them. So he made me guard it alone. And I felt like a dog. I told myself, I work with al-Naddaf; I’ll save a little money, marry Shirin, and live with her in a small, beautiful house in Hazemiya. But in the meantime I have to save some money to open a shop to dovetail wood. When I was a boy, my grandfather sent me to learn woodworking at Mr. Rizq’s, that’s how I learned the basics of the trade.

Then I got arrested.

I confess now, before God and the court, and I ask mercy for my soul. I have decided to repent and follow the path of my grandfather — God rest his soul — to take care of my poor mother, and not marry. I decided not to marry, and to give up Shirin, and love, and everything. I have also decided to stop eating meat.

This is the whole story of my life, from the moment of my birth until now. I wrote it myself in prison in February 1992, and God is my witness that I have been truthful in everything I have written. I am prepared to repeat in court everything I have said.

Yalo reread what he had written and felt frustrated. He had spent more than ten days writing these pages. He wept and suffered and felt unable to write. The respite would end in twenty days. The officer had given him the sheets of paper and had said he had only a month. “I’ll give you one month, and you must write your whole life story. Write everything, and I wouldn’t forget anything if I were you.”

In his small cell, Yalo racked his brains, and tried. He longed to listen to a Fairuz or Marcel Khalifé song to get outside himself and feel like a human being again, but they refused to give him a radio. According to the guard, the decision was to keep him in complete isolation so that he could concentrate and write.

“But I just can’t write!” said Yalo.

“Have it your way, but I’m warning you, there was a guy here before you who didn’t write, and if you knew what happened to him.”

“What happened?” asked Yalo.

“They beat him until he began to shit like a bull, and they didn’t stop beating him until he was dead.”

“Dead!”

“Of course not, I mean, it was like he was dead.”

“And then?”

“And then he wrote. He sat behind the table and wrote about fifty pages.”

“Fifty pages!”

“Of course,” said the guard. “A guy has to write the whole story of his life. And a person’s life needs at least fifty pages.”

“How long did it take him to write it?”

“A month. Here all they give you is a month. Sometimes, if it’s something important and the prisoner is into it, they extend the time. But usually it’s just a month. And whoever doesn’t write. . misses out.”

“So you’re missing out, Yalo. I can’t write like that. I need a radio and cigarettes. I can’t write without cigarettes.”

“I can get cigarettes for you,” said the guard. “Give me some money.”

“I don’t have money. They took all my money away from me.”

“Give me the receipt and I’ll take as much as you need.”

“They didn’t give me a receipt.”

“No way. Here they give every prisoner a receipt for the money they’ve taken from him, and his watch, and rings, and everything,” said the guard.

“I tell you they didn’t give me a receipt,” said Yalo.

“Maybe your lawyer has it. Ask for a meeting with your lawyer, he must have it. And then I’ll get you anything you want.”

“But I don’t have a lawyer,” Yalo said.

“That’s impossible. Here they appoint a lawyer if the accused doesn’t have money. They appoint one.”

Yalo felt regretful.

Now he remembered that the interrogator had brought him a lawyer after the night of the sack, but Yalo refused to talk to him, saying that God was his lawyer, and that he needed no mortal to defend him.

The lawyer signed the record without reading it or speaking to the accused. He whispered with the interrogator, signed the record, and left.

Yalo thought about asking for the lawyer to come back to help him write, and asked the guard to contact the lawyer, whose name he did not know, but the next day the guard gave him a single Marlboro cigarette and said that he could do nothing for him. He had brought him the cigarette out of pity. “The cigarette might help your mind open up. I swear that’s all I’m able to do. Trust in God, take a deep breath, and try to write.”

Yalo trusted in God, smoked the cigarette after breakfast, and felt extremely dizzy. It had been months since he had tasted a cigarette, so now the cigarette revealed its real taste. Tobacco was better than hashish; it took you to the tremors of lassitude and of dizziness. But people made a joke of smoking by turning it into a meaningless habit. Yalo decided that when he got out of prison he would smoke one cigarette a day and get drunk on it.