Elias Khoury - Yalo

“You butchered it!” exclaimed the cohno . “Why, daughter? Who butchers a fish?”

Gaby had sliced open the fish’s belly, scooped out the insides, and begun to pare off the scales with a large knife when the cohno came back accompanied by Munir Shammo.

Blood streamed from the butchered fish, which continued to tremble in Gaby’s hands, which were busy scaling it as she commented that this was the best fish she had ever seen in her life. She said that she’d get three meals out of it. She’d fry the bottom half for lunch, grill the upper half for Sunday, and the huge head would be cooked in a rice pilaf — a fisherman’s dish.

“Bless your hands, Uncle Munir. Please join us for three meals of fish.”

The grandfather kept lamenting the butchered fish, and left the house with his friend. He came back late in the evening and announced that he had given up eating fish.

“That’s how my grandfather stopped eating fish, even cuttlefish he wouldn’t eat, although cuttlefish are full of ink — there isn’t a drop of blood in their veins.

“You know that in France they eat blood?”

“What?!” Shirin exclaimed.

“I’m telling you, they eat blood. M. Michel let me taste something called boudin; he said they stuff a pig’s intestines with blood and eat it.”

“You ate it?”

“Of course. Why not? And then I lived in a house where they drank blood almost every day.”

“You all ate blood?” she asked, a look of nausea on her face; she turned away and scowled, and then grabbed a tissue to wipe the red from her lips.

“No, don’t wipe off the red. I love the red.”

She looked at her watch. When Shirin looked at her watch it meant she had made up her mind to leave. He surprised her then with his question about whether she believed in God.

“Of course. Of course,” she said.

“And you go to the ‘atdo ?”

“The what?”

“You go to church?”

“Not all the time. But of course at Christmas and Good Friday. So, like everybody.”

“And you take the sacrament?”

“Kind of. Sometimes.”

“And when you take it, what do you feel?”

“What’s with these stupid questions? C’mon, let’s go.”

“No, let’s not go. I’m asking you a question. Answer.”

“Fine. I open my mouth and I eat the host.”

“And blood!”

She said that it was just a symbol. The wine did not become blood in the mass except symbolically.

“That’s not true,” said Yalo. “The mass is a sacrifice, which means a slaughter, a real slaughter. I know that.”

“You don’t know anything,” she said.

She said that she didn’t like discussing religion because she didn’t understand anything about it, but she believed in God and that was enough.

“Of course that’s enough,” said Yalo. “But I was telling you about the cohno , my grandfather, being vegetarian, but he drinks blood every day.”

“He drinks blood?”

“Of course he drinks blood, he’s a cohno . At mass he drinks the blood of Christ, he puts sweet wine and water into the chalice and drinks it.”

“That’s wine. You scared me. I don’t know why I still believe you.”

“No, it is not wine, it becomes blood,” said Yalo, but he didn’t tell her that he was afraid at mass. He would close his eyes and open his mouth to take the host, he would feel the taste of blood, and become dizzy. He wanted to tell her about his grandfather’s wonders, about the miracle of the Kurdish mullah, about Alexei and his mother the Muscovite. But he felt that every conversation with Shirin opened up innumerable empty spaces within him, and he was incapable of filling them. The words would pour out of him, yet he realized that he was saying nothing because he was unable to speak of a clear and simple concept — his love for her.

“But you don’t know me,” she said.

“I know everything,” he answered her. “Love is the greatest knowledge.” He wanted to tell her that her smell never left him and that he was ready to change his life for her, and that he was not just a thief or villa guard; circumstances had made him what he was. He would open a fine woodworking shop. But he didn’t say any of that. Speech needed something, something beyond what Yalo was going to learn in his solitary cell. Speech required a ruse, and ruses only came to him here, when he was trapped between two walls: the gray prison wall with its peeling paint, with numerous fissures and gaps that took on human shapes at night, and the wall of the white pages placed before him so that he could write the story of his life. Yalo had not known that this method of extracting confessions from a suspect was the most prevalent method in the Arab world for political prisoners, after the traditional torture parties. A prisoner found himself facing an empty cola bottle, and was forced to sit naked upon the bottle. If he succeeded in avoiding death by septicemia or blood loss, he was given a sheaf of white pages and was asked to write the story of his life. This was when the real torture began, for the act of writing became an instrument of death and a path to suicide. The words became like knives stabbing the one who bore them. So the prisoner tumbled into the pit he had dug himself, slipping on his words, falling into his blood, which had taken on the color of ink, and sniffing his own blood.

Yalo had not known the smell of his own blood, before he went to prison. Even when he stood in front of Alexei’s bones, bereft of their flesh, and listened to the stories of Nina the Russian, he did not smell the odor he now smelled in his cell as he tried to cheat death by writing the story of his death.

The image of Nina came back to him in the cell, as if she had sprung from the wall.

“Are you Russians, auntie?” Yalo asked her as he drank the rosewater mixed with sugar specially prepared by the Muscovite.

“It’s for the feast day of the living prophet Elias,” the woman said, pointing to the rosewater. “We drink rosewater with crushed ice — not because the feast day comes in July, when it’s hot, no, because Elias is the prophet of fire. He ascended to heaven in his chariot drawn by steeds of fire. Ice with sugar for the fire. Before the feast of the prophet Elias I can’t make rosewater. Rosewater, my son, is the essence of our local red rose whose hue is like fire. We pour fire over ice and drink it on the feast of fire. Drink up, my son.”

“Thank you, thank you,” said Yalo, and took a sip of the magical drink that refreshed the soul, hesitating a little before returning to his question.

“Are you Russians, auntie?”

“And you, my son, where are you from.”

“From here.”

“And before here?”

“We’re from Ain Ward, that’s what my grandfather says. That’s a village in Tur Abdin.”

“Abu Alexei, may God have mercy on him, was from Mardin,” said the Russian woman. “That’s why he didn’t speak Syriac. The people of Mardin speak only Arabic. When he proposed to me, I told him I would not have a Syriac. He told me he was Syriac but at the same time he wasn’t Syriac, and we were married.”

“So you are Syriacs?” asked Yalo.

“They are, sort of, my husband’s family. Me, no.”

“Are you Russian?”

“That’s what they say. They call us the children of the Muscovite, but we’re Arabs. Someday I’ll tell you the story of my grandmother’s grandmother. She was the Muscovite, and it’s from her time that the label stuck to us, and that’s why I named my son Alexei. His father wanted to name him Iskandar, but I said, No, Iskandar means Alexei, this way the boy will have a Russian name, like the czars. What’s better than the czars?”

Yalo entered the cloak of sleep. He wrapped himself up on the iron cot in the corner of the cell, closed his eyes, and saw the specter of the pregnant woman running in her long dress stained with blood. The woman had emerged from the wall, he saw her. The image of her began with her belly, stained with blood, a belly distended with a fetus in its sixth month, it emerged from the cracks in the wall in its black dress spotted with black blood.