Elias Khoury - Yalo

But I am very lucky, I feel that my grandfather’s prayers for me were not in vain. One of the prison guards here told me that many suspects died from the bottle because it broke in their backsides and they got gangrene in their large intestines, and all their insides grew inflamed. Thank God that did not happen to me. On the contrary, the bottle helped me a great deal. How can I explain to you — I don’t know. But your experience with prisoners must have made you capable of understanding what I am writing. For I was not the first to have ascended the throne of spiral glass, and of course will not be the last.

When I ascended the throne and the pain pierced me from bottom to top and from top to bottom, I was sure that I would die. I mounted it and death began, that is, I felt death. Death is violent and has a sound; something explodes inside you, and you hear a sound no one else does, and after the sound your body tingles and you sense that you are being dragged beyond white sleep. You are not sleeping, but you float beyond sleep. And then it’s over — Stop. Everything is dark, and it’s over. That is exactly how it happened with me. I am not lying. I am telling the truth, sir. Something snapped and I was beyond sleep, I mean, sleeping yet not sleeping, and then I woke up.

You took me into eternity and made me understand the meaning of life, because I tasted death, and drank it, from the top and from the bottom. I want to say, sir, that through all of these experiences, when I reached the essence of things, I saw him before me. Would you believe, sir, that my grandfather, who was also my father, was waiting for me everywhere? What did I want with him and his absurd story? But death, sir, when death approaches, it imposes its conditions. Death means that we experience things we never experienced, and the stories we have heard become facts. When I approached death, I became my grandfather and my grandfather’s grandfather, and all the descendants of men. I speak now from experience, so my mission is very difficult. I cannot write you the stories of all mankind that I know, but I wouldn’t know how to write them. Therefore I ask the respected interrogator to be a little patient with me. I will be brief and get to the heart of the subject you are looking for, but I saw another heart, just as essential, that I cannot ignore, so I will write it with the fewest words possible in order to be truthful to myself and to my soul suspended there on the throne of death.

When I thought that the story had to begin with my grandfather, I hated it, for I did not love my grandfather — he embodied cowardice and selfishness. My grandfather was afraid of everything, perhaps because his conscience reproached him so much after the death of my grandmother Marie Samaho, God rest her soul, of whom it was said, died because of him. My grandmother died before I was born, which was why my grandfather was imposed on my father — or my mother’s husband — to come and live with him in his house. I believe that the husband couldn’t bear it from the very first day, so he packed his things and fled the unbearable atmosphere of that house. He left because he never once felt that he was in a home of his own. The bed was not his bed and the life was not his life, and the woman was not his woman. My grandfather claimed that he had discovered by chance that my father, or my mother’s husband, was not Syriac but an Arab from Aleppo belonging to the Melkite Greek Catholic sect. Fine, what does that change? Where is the crime? And why did the cohno not discover the truth before his daughter married the man? My grandfather killed my father and trampled his shadow. Do you know, sir, that I do not possess a photo of my father? He was even torn out of the wedding pictures. Nothing remains of him — even his name is gone, because I bear my grandfather’s name. My identity card says that I am from the Abyad clan. So what am I supposed to say when even now I don’t know the difference between a person being Syriac or Arab. A person is a person, and we all come from Adam, and Adam came from dust. So why all these tricks? I do not understand my grandfather’s pains that made his mouth a graveyard of Christ’s language. What kind of foolishness is that? What, Christ does not understand Arabic, Greek, or Latin?

My grandfather’s fear cannot be described. My mother said that it came from his childhood, as a result of the massacre that was committed in the village of Ain Ward at the beginning of the twentieth century. But I am not sure of anything. Perhaps my grandmother’s death was the cause. I heard the news of my grandmother from other people, not from my mother. My mother spoke only rarely of her mother, but I sensed the presence of a dark shadow hanging over the silent relations between my mother and grandfather. Suddenly silence would fall between them and they would converse without words. I understood that true dialogue between people goes on without talking. Words do not express things — they cover them over. Now, sir, I understand why writing is difficult for me, because what is being asked of me is that I cover up the story, and here I feel deficient, for whoever wants to write must possess a double text, he must dub speech over the silence. As to when speech is your life, you speak in silence.

I understand, sir, that you are asking a man to write the story of his life for the purpose of ethics and retribution. But what is the use of my story? And why am I telling my grandfather’s story instead of my own? Is it because the cohno killed his wife? Is it true that Abel Abyad, known as Ephraim, killed his wife, and that was the cause of his fear of everything?

The cohno used to say that a man’s body was a temple of fear. God created for the soul a body of clay to calm its fear of fear or of God. But the corporeal temple became a new cause of fear, because of the original sin. Man died because he sinned, and death is his greatest fear. We fear the body, therefore we must dissolve it before it dissolves our souls. We must restore it to its clay state and not be overly solicitous of it, see to it as a potter cares for his clay, by watering it and setting it in the sun. The body needs only water and a few vegetables cooked by the sun. All else is vanity.

In the beginning, the cohno tried to defend himself. He said that he didn’t want the woman to suffer. But when suffering came after the disease spread to her bones, he didn’t know what to do, and had to get help from doctors. The woman was taken to the Greek hospital in Achrafieh, where she died amidst doses of morphine, which failed to ease her suffering.

Yalo did not understand the silence between the cohno and his daughter — which constituted a dialogue between them — until he heard their neighbor, Mme Mary Rose, threaten her husband by saying that she would let him die the way the cohno let his woman die, without getting treatment for her. Yalo imagined the scene and saw it through his mother’s eyes, and understood how a person could be capable of reading that which had been erased.

When his grandfather described the massacre that took place in Tur Abdin, he said that he could read what had been erased. We have to learn how to read words that have been erased, that is our story, we, a people whose story is erased and its language erased, so if we do not learn how to read what has been erased, all will be lost.

In the past, I did not believe the cohno could read books erased by time and torn by history. But now I am beginning to believe him, because I have seen how Yalo read silence and erased words.

My mother began to speak erased words before her image in the mirror was erased. She used silence so that the cohno would understand that she knew.

Yes, sir, it seems that my grandfather left his wife to die. He took her to the doctor who diagnosed cancer in her left breast, but instead of checking her into the hospital to remove the affected breast, he took her home, bought a box of aspirin, and let her die. He told his daughter that there was no medicine for cancer and that it was better that the doctors not be allowed to cut up her body; his only concern was that she not suffer.