Elias Khoury - Yalo

Yalo did not ask what happened to the corpse of the husband whose wife was forced to remove his severed head from her belly before gathering up her blood-drenched dress to go. Did the woman discard the head? Or did the murderer-friend not sever the head from the body but merely slaughter the man by slitting his veins? Who then buried the body? Was it buried at all, or left to rot by itself in the abandoned house?

To Yalo the story seemed impossible, but when he saw the pregnant woman emerging from the wall of his cell, coming toward him, and anointing his forehead with the sticky blood dripping from her long dress, he felt that writing this story was easier than writing the story of his life.

How could he write? What could he write? He didn’t know how to put the necessary distance between a word and its image. He wrote the name Nina and saw Christians and Druze drowning in their own blood. He wrote his name and saw his image affixed to the name, so he was forced to erase the image in order to keep writing, but the name vanished along with the image. Yalo found himself in the silence of black ink.

Tomorrow when the interrogator came, Yalo would give him the pages he’d written and say that this was everything; all the confessions were written down, and that was enough.

“I don’t know how to write, sir,” he would say.

Yalo closed his eyes and fell asleep, and that featureless woman appeared. She came and sat down beside him, and wept. Yalo became both men, the murdered husband and the murdering neighbor. He placed his head on her distended belly and heard the beating of two hearts as they mingled in a strange rhythm, and he understood what his mother had said about the sensations that men were incapable of feeling.

His mother was drinking coffee in the living room with her friend Catherine, telling the story of Elias al-Shami and her father, and weeping. After disparaging Elias al-Shami and throwing him out of the house, the cohno raised his finger in his daughter’s face and told her, “That is enough fooling around. Now I think you need to take control of your feelings, and cast Satan out of your body.”

She said her father was a man, and men understood nothing. The cohno thought that she was like him and that the incentive for her establishing that long-standing relationship with the tailor was to satisfy her sexual urges. Even Elias thought that. “He’d sleep with me and finish, and then he’d look at me and ask, Did you come? At first I’d tell the truth and would wonder why he’d ask when he knew that when a woman comes she’s like a fountain-head. When I said that I hadn’t come, he’d get upset and pout. Later I began lying to him and saying that I had come, so he’d relax and light a cigarette and puff himself up like a rooster.”

“So you never came?” asked Catherine.

“Of course, lots of times, what do you think?” Gaby’s peal of laughter came from deep in her throat. “But not at the push of a button.”

Gaby said that men did not understand desire, that they thought of it as a circle fixed around the head of their member. “That’s why men finish before they start. They don’t know the feeling of the wave that rises inside, taking your body to unknown places with infinite zigzags.”

“I didn’t want anything from Elias. My father misunderstood everything. It wasn’t about sex, it was about tenderness. I knew he couldn’t marry me. It’s true that I suffered a lot and I hated him when he told me about his wife and children. I told him, “Please don’t speak of this because I can’t stand it, these are things that I already know, but I can’t stand to hear you speaking about them. When you talk about your wife and her illnesses, I hate you and I hate myself.”

Gaby said that she forbid him from talking about his family because when he started talking about Evelyn, his wife, he became another person. He lost his manhood and his attractiveness and became a middle-aged man giving off the rotten stench of his false teeth.

Gaby told no one this.

How could she say what could not be said? How could she say that she no longer remembered anything of that day except for the scent of the man’s words that had spread over her body? How could she say that when she was naked in his arms, she emerged from the darkness? She rose like a hidden sun from the darkness of her shroud-like clothes.

Gaby was eighteen when she went to learn her trade in Elias al-Shami’s tailor shop, and it was there where love blossomed to the point of dominating her whole life.

She remembered that he had said something about the need to sew a new dress. It was a November evening with dusk falling, but Elias al-Shami did not turn on the electricity. The two assistant seamstresses had gone home, and Gaby was busy with the day’s last chores in the shop before going home. She sensed Mr. Elias at her side saying that he wanted to make a new dress for her and that he had found a beautiful piece of fabric just for her.

“For me?” asked the young woman.

“Of course for you. I want you to wear a dress that shows off your beauty. It is a crime that you wear these old clothes that hide you. Clothes aren’t supposed to cover the body, they are made to be an extension of the body. That is the secret of dressmaking. That’s what makes it an art. Come closer so I can see,” said Elias.

The young woman came closer hesitantly. He took the measuring tape and started to take her measurements. He measured her height and then her hips, he then brought the tape measure to her breasts and she saw her dress fall to the floor without her even feeling the hands that had undone the buttons in front. The dress fell and Gaby stood in her underwear under the gaze of the tailor, a gaze that crept across her body and never left her. She crossed her arms as if to cover herself, but actually she was trying to calm her body hair, which stood on end as if a magnetic field surrounded her.

He left her standing there before him and drew her body with green chalk on tracing paper, then looked at her breasts and said, “What kind of camisole is that? Tomorrow I’ll buy you a new one.” Then he sat down on the chair and asked her to come to him.

The camisole fell to the floor, and Gaby saw herself standing before the seated man. She felt his breath on her breasts. He put his head between her breasts and took a deep breath. He said that he smelled flowers. She felt his lips taking in the nipple of her left breast before starting to suck the nectar. That’s what he would later say whenever he brought his lips to her breast. “I want to suck the soul of the rose.” The young woman felt her breasts between the man’s lips crawl, climb, retreat, and advance. Something deep within her rose up and then sank down again, and made her tremble.

His head pulled back, and he rose from the chair and went into the next room. Gaby didn’t move, not knowing what to do. Her insides throbbed with contractions that came and went. Time stood still as she stood motionless. Then she bent over, picked up the camisole and her dress and put them back on. When she saw him coming, she said, “Do you need anything, sir? I’m going.” She felt that she was hearing her own voice for the first time; her voice emerged like the voice of another woman. It felt deep and rose straight from her chest. She asked him if he wanted anything. He shook his head but said nothing.

Suddenly night fell. She bent over to retrieve her camisole, and while she was putting it on, night fell. When she’d bent down, a pale white glow was enveloping everything, but when she picked it up and stood in front of the mirror to put it on, she saw only darkness and no longer could see herself in the mirror. She was not in a hurry and decided to go back home. She saw him standing at the door of the room like a phantom and asked him if he needed anything, and hearing her own voice, she went out. Once at home, she went into the bathroom and washed, and when she covered her breasts with soapsuds, the sensation of the magnetic field that had taken her to faraway places now came back to her and made her discover that the kokina anchored with safety pins no longer suited the beauty of her nakedness and that from now on she needed her long hair in order to possess her own shadow.