Elias Khoury - Yalo

Mr. Salim told the story to his friend the cohno . Cohno Ephraim, who enjoyed a close friendship with Mr. Salim, begun after he arrived in Beirut, where he worked as a layer of tile in a workshop before adopting his priestly vocation. He told his friend to lay low if he felt tempted by disobedience, that was the secret. He volunteered to mediate with the abbess of Khan-shara Abbey, but she refused to receive him when she learned that he was an envoy from the Rizq family.

The cohno did not like nuns, and spoke of the need for a total separation between monastic and public life. “What is all this silliness? They say they’re nuns, but living like normal women. A nun’s place is in the convent, not amidst the public. They must live apart from the community,” said Ephraim to Salim Rizq as he told his friend about how the abbess of Khan-shara refused to receive him.

The story that destroyed Yalo’s vocational future began when Thérèse, a nun in her novitiate working as a teacher at the Tabaris School, came to the Rizq workshop to order frames for icons, and expressed her surprise at the beauty of the woodwork there, all without a single nail being driven. She asked the abbess’s permission to take woodworking lessons from the engineer. And so, along with a nun called Sister Rita, she became a student of the engineer.

What happened after that? Why did Sister Thérèse claim that she went to stay with her family in the village of Ain Dara, and had she disappeared for three days with Wajih in the Grand Kamel Hotel in the town of Souq al-Gharb before returning to the school?

It seemed that the engineer Wajih promised to marry Thérèse when, in the hotel room, he saw her long hair draped over her shoulders. But why did the postulant confess her error and come with the abbess to the shop four months after the hotel incident? When Wajih caught sight of them entering, he slipped out the back door. Mr. Salim found himself looking at a scene his eyes, closed for twenty years, had never contemplated.

After listening to Sister Thérèse’s confessions and her decision to abandon convent life to marry Wajih, who had taken away her virginity, Salim said that he did not know what to say.

The tall, fat abbess, who was more than sixty years old, said that Thérèse had incurred the convent’s harshest punishments. She was sent to Khan-shara and imprisoned for three months in the cellar below the convent, which was reserved in the past for nuns who had taken up with the Devil. “We left her for three months bound in iron chains, and all she ate was bread and water, and we saw that that was enough. We asked her what she wanted, and she said she wanted to come here. And I came with her to reach an understanding with the engineer Wajih.”

“But Wajih is married,” the father said, and burst out in a peal of hysterical laughter. “Wajih, my bastard, you’ve turned out worse than your father. Is this story true, ma soeur ? I find it very difficult to believe.”

The blind middle-aged man approached Thérèse, whose tawny face twitched with fear and disgrace, reached his hand out to her face, and then grasped her small, perspiring hand. He told her to come and live with him, for he was prepared to do whatever she wanted.

“Come closer, Thérèse, my girl, what I want to say to you is, we are Catholics, so we don’t divorce. My son Wajih is married with two boys, God bless you and bless them, only, what do you want me to do? Come and live with me. My wife died so I live alone, and I’m blind. I’m ready to make good for my son’s mistake, if that’s what you want and if it’s God’s will.”

“You!” shouted the abbess. “You want to marry this virgin girl, a bride of Christ? You’re old and blind. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself!”

He tried to explain to her that he had not meant marriage, even though marriage was a shield for beautiful girls and a shield against scandal.

“How can you see in the first place, to say she’s pretty?!” said the abbess, her voice quavering and irritated.

“Yes, ma soeur , I can see beauty, because beauty sees me.” He pointed to the treasures of woodworking that filled his small workshop. “Do you see those? Those are me. Even now I’m still the one who designs the difficult jobs. I read with my hands, ma soeur . What did I say to upset you? I promise I have a good heart. I shouldn’t have said a word. What business is it of mine? It’s Wajih. And Wajih isn’t here. Please tell me what you’d like me to do and I’ll do it.”

The abbess said that they would come back at ten o’clock the next morning. “Tell the gentleman to expect us,” and the two of them left.

When Wajih came back to the shop and his father confronted him with the truth, at first he denied everything and said that Thérèse was crazy and that she had made up the story, and that it had nothing to do with him.

“We’ll take care of everything,” his father said. “Just tell me how you slept with her. She’s a nun, how did she agree to it? Tell me what you did with her in the hotel.”

At first his son insisted that Thérèse was not a nun but a postulant, and there was a big difference, and that she must suffer from a touch of dementia because she had made up this story from A to Z. But when his father told him that the abbess would show up the next day, he broke down and admitted everything. He said that he didn’t know how he would get out of this mess.

“Don’t worry, my boy, if you can’t, I’ll take her.”

“You pathetic old man, you want to marry a nineteen-year-old girl?!”

Salim told the cohno how his son had hit and kicked him, and how Wajih had all of a sudden been possessed by a diabolical rage. “My son is lost, lost forever, my father. I can assure you I did not want to marry her. I’m not up to that, and anyway she was a child. I thought that way I’d be able to protect her and my son at the same time. And anyway, why did the abbess speak to me that way? Wajih told me he did not deflower her, she was already deflowered. Anyway, I don’t know anything anymore.”

Wajih disappeared and it was said that his wife had thrown him out of the house so he went to live in a cheap hotel in Bourj Square until his fate took him to the insane asylum in Aleppo.

Yalo did not sleep that night, after his mother recounted some details of the story, how the postulant came to the shop every day at ten o’clock, how she finally disappeared leaving no trace. Wajih’s wife had a nervous breakdown and then asked Salim Rizq for her husband’s share of the business and completely broke off relations with the Rizq family.

The scandal made its way to the family’s birthplace in Aleppo. Wajih went to build his pillar beside the pillar of St. Simeon Stylites of Aleppo, and was arrested, then sent to a hospital for the feebleminded. Now, the father could find no trace of his son, neither from his relatives there nor at the hospital, so he became certain that Wajih had started the rumor of the pillar to get rid of his wife and live in peace with his virginal nun.

Yalo did not sleep that night. He saw the beautiful tawny-skinned nun and reincarnated himself as Wajih the engineer as he took her to the Grand Kamel Hotel in Souq al-Gharb, breathing in her long hair that fell to her shoulders, immersing himself in the incense-fragrance emanating from her neck. He stayed with her for three days without ever leaving the room. Their meals were brought to the room. They bathed, ate, and slept together. She told him she loved him and that she loved the Lord Jesus Christ. She asked him to kneel beside her because the Lord blessed their love. And Yalo, or rather Wajih, drank in her youth, which dripped forth drop by drop from her pores into his own, and recited her prayers with her; he took all of her and she engulfed him.