Elias Khoury - Yalo

I now confess, and proclaim that I have decided to repent, and follow the path of my grandfather — God rest his soul — and take care of my poor mother. I have decided not to marry and to relinquish everything else. And I have decided to stop eating meat.

This is the whole story of my life, from the moment of my birth until now, written in prison in February 1992, and let God be my witness that I have been truthful in everything I have written. I am ready to repeat all I have stated in court.

Yalo read the pages he had written and put them aside with a feeling of deep relief. He had succeeded at writing the whole story of his life. Now, when he was summoned for interrogation, he would say that he had admitted to everything and written everything down, forgetting nothing.

He wrote about his boyhood, his youth, about the war and Michel Salloum. He wrote about his mother and her lover the tailor, and about the cohno . He wrote about Shirin, whom he had loved, and hunting in Ballouna. It was true that he had been compelled to write a fake story — the story about Haykal, Naddaf, and the explosives — but there, there was no avoiding fakery. Yalo felt that he had outsmarted the interrogator because he remembered the names of two men no one would ever find. Haykal had committed suicide in November 1991; it was said that he had hanged himself because he could no longer obtain cocaine. Naddaf had moved to Brazil and never been heard from again. Yalo had confessed, as they’d wanted, but he hadn’t opened up a crack allowing them to ravage his soul and his body again. The interrogator would read these names, research them, and decide to close the dossier due to the impossibility of following up the case with two men who no longer existed.

Yalo sat on the floor of his cell and rested his head against the wall, feeling hungry. It was as if the words he had written had opened up a gulf inside him that could only be filled with food. He saw a fish before him and his mouth began to water. He would have told Shirin, had she been there, that he no longer feared anything once he had discovered blood in fish.

He told her, or would have told her, about Munir Shammo, who had brought a big sea perch home, wriggling in the throes of death.

What happened that day?

As Yalo recollected the story for Shirin’s sake, he felt that speech was not possible without love. When he gave in to love, he felt the taste of speech. Speech was full of flavor when it was spoken with love. It was true that now he no longer loved her, and that he felt capable of killing her because she had shattered him by betraying him; written on her bare thighs in the interrogation room was a flagrant sign of her treachery. Yet now when he sat down to write, he felt her presence, and remembered how he had become an open book to her. He had tried to seduce her with words, with stories, true or fictitious, but she remained indifferent. He had written his life in front of her but she refused to read it. She was always in a hurry with her mind elsewhere, as if she did not understand or didn’t want to understand.

Now she was here, as if she were sitting beside him in the cell, listening to the story of the fish. But his mind strayed a little because of her lipstick. She began to eat, curling her lips so she wouldn’t smear the red; then, when she realized the impossibility of that, she wiped off the red with a tissue. Yalo cried, No! and wanted her lips. He imagined himself rubbing his lips against hers and licking the red from them. He knew she did not like Arabic songs or Arabic poetry, but he could not control himself, so he told her to listen, and Shirin put the tissue on the table and looked at him, waiting for him to go on.

“Listen to this poem,” he said. “Mansurati used to sit in the barracks and sing, and we’d sing with him. He immediately entranced with his voice and his lute. Never in my life was I able to hit the right note, my voice was terminally off-key. But Mansurati — my God. When he picked up his lute and started singing, I felt the soul of the world, I can’t even describe it. Don’t you feel that way when you hear music?”

She replied in a murmur that the kind of music that moved the soul of the world was classical music. She said she loved Bach, and thought that songs were a violation of music.

“You don’t like Nizar Qabbani?” he asked her.

“I’m not talking about Arabic poetry,” she said. “Even Jacques Brel — you know Jacques Brel?”

He nodded to say that yes, he did, but his incomprehension was clear from the way his eyebrows knitted together in his effort to show he knew.

“What are you talking about?” he said.

“I was saying that even with Jacques Brel, whose songs are complex, I feel like he’s lowering the standard of music when he puts in words and meanings.”

“But listen to what I’m going to recite for you,” he said. “It’s the most beautiful song in the world, even more beautiful than Abd al-Halim Hafiz. Listen.”

And he drew his head back to rest his temple on his right hand before reciting the poem in a heightened voice:

In Achrafieh, the day I was there and came to her,

I surrendered my life to your lips

And I tasted the fruit, what a taste !

If not succulent grapes

Something very similar.

Were it not for her sweetness in love and

My tenderness in love,

I would have eaten those lips and feasted on them.

He began to tremble: “— feasted. . fea. . sted. . on. . them. Isn’t that lovely? That was our song in the barracks. We sang “feasted” and everyone interpreted it his own way. Alexei took out the f and put in a b , and Mansurati got mad. I swear to God he was a great artist. I don’t know what happened. He said that he was fed up with the war, that he wanted to be a performer. Of course all of us were fed up with the war, but not everyone who got fed up became a performer, it’s not like that.”

Yalo laughed, thinking he had said something funny, but when he saw no trace of a smile on her lips, he became serious again and told her about the fish and the war.

When he recalled how he remembered this incident, he was dumbstruck. For the fish full of blood had sunk into his memory as if it had never happened, and when she tried to wipe the red from her lips so she wouldn’t mess up her lips, the fish woke up and the story came back.

He remembered the fish’s head, its two quicksilver eyes, and its mouth opening and shutting as if it wanted to say something but couldn’t. The cohno ’s friend Munir Shammo, who was retired from his tiling work and now spent his days fishing, showed up early that Saturday morning with a fish in his basket. He put it in the kitchen and left. When Gaby came into the kitchen, she cursed her luck for being the one who had to clean the hideous black fish, full of bones, the fish called in Lebanon “the Bolshevik.” But she froze in her tracks and screamed when she saw the fish wriggling and flapping on the kitchen floor. The fish had flipped itself off the counter to the floor. Hearing his daughter’s cry, the grandfather hurried in and saw it too.

“The fish is talking to God,” he said, and knelt to pick it up, but the fish slid out of his hands. The fish was almost a meter long, its gray scales were spattered with white spots, and its eyes were shining with life. Ephraim bent to the floor and took it in his arms as if he were picking up a child, and said that he was going to return it to the sea, but the fish fell from his embrace. The cohno backed away and said he was going to fetch the fisherman. Yalo could not remember where his mother had disappeared to, but he found himself alone with the fish in the kitchen. He approached it, but slipped and fell, landing on the head of the fish, and blood began to flow. Of the black coffee grinds his mother used to stanch the blood and of the carnage that had spilled across the sink, Yalo couldn’t remember a thing. All he remembered was his grandfather weeping over the fish whose blood had splashed and stained the sink and the kitchen wall.