Elias Khoury - Yalo

The flower was now blooming in the ink covering my pages. The flower was blooming inside my body, which rose with Yalo and embraced the souls of the dead and sympathized with my mother. Sir, I must take her back to her house in Mseitbeh. If am not sentenced to death because of the affair of the explosives, which I will tell you about in detail, and I get out of prison, the first thing I do will be to take my mother home so that she may live, dignified and honored. Then I will go back to my first job, dovetailing wood. I thought that I had forgotten the craft, but ta’shiq is like swimming, it is not forgotten. You must know how to divide wood into two types, male and female, and join them as a man joins a woman. Nails kill the spirit of wood, whereas dovetailing returns its life by marrying it to itself and restores the fluid that flowed out when the trees were cut. Engineer Wajih told me that wood never dies because ta’shiq gives it a new eternal life.

Instead of getting upset with his son, Master Salim offered himself to solve the problem, a sign of blind Mr. Salim’s fine moral qualities — he was Cohno Ephraim’s opposite. Truly, how was it they were friends? Instead of Salim’s tying his son to the trunk of the fig tree, he took it upon himself to defend him, then tried to save the situation, which won him only ridicule. As to my grandfather, when he saw that my mother had released the rooster, he shouted that he had tied up the rooster because it was insatiable. We endured three days of quarreling, him tying it up and her freeing it, saying that he was just jealous. On the third day, my mother came home to find the rooster tottering around, tied to the fig tree. Its yellow feathers were dropping, and the rooster was dying. She asked him what he had done, and he said he had beaten the rooster not in order to kill it but to teach it a lesson and temper its sexual voracity.

The rooster learned its lesson for good and gave you its life. The rooster died alone in a corner of the yard. Early the next morning, we awoke to strange sounds. The terrified hens were swarming around the rooster’s corpse, screeching. Yes, the hens were screeching as if they were hoarse roosters, and they did not stop screeching until my mother went down to the yard, took away the rooster’s corpse, and buried it in the garden.

After the death of the rooster began the misery of the hens who turned the garden of our house into a slaughterhouse. The slaughter started after the death of the rooster because the hens began getting dizzy, tottering around, and falling to the ground. Had anyone besides me seen a hen in love stumble in her walk, then spread her wings to regain her balance so that she would not fall? I began to fear my mother’s return home in the evening because that meant that a hen would be slaughtered. My mother would go down to the garden, sleeves rolled up, grab a hen and break its neck, then finish it off with a knife and throw it down, shaking off the blood. My mother’s pretext was that the hens were sick and would die of sorrow over the rooster, so they had to be slaughtered before they died and would be inedible as carrion.

For a whole month we ate nothing but hen, and my grandfather peered into the chicken broth and grumbled about the globules of fat spread over the surface. Now I have come to understand my grandfather’s position, who abstained from eating meat, given the rancid smell of blood. The sole embodiment of my solidarity with my grandfather came directly after his death, when I stopped drinking wine for good, because wine reminded me of the smell of blood. Now I know that I was wrong, that abstaining from wine and drinking arak instead really damaged my stomach.

Shirin loved wine, but I forced her to drink arak, and that was a mistake. I made so many mistakes with Shirin, as if a beast had awakened inside me, and I interpreted things as I chose. I understood her fear of me as a lover’s fear of commitment, and her refusal to eat as the contentment that comes along with passion. That’s what happened with me when I was in love with Madame Randa. I do not deny that I loved her — that woman deprived me of my right mind, and all because of the calf of her leg which appeared and disappeared in the slit of her long cloak. I wanted her every day, night and day. I waited for her and I burned. I was literally burning when M. Michel came home from Paris. That was when she dealt me a card and began ignoring me altogether, her voice grew flat and she started treating me like a servant. She’d put her nose in the air as if she smelled something bad while I stood before her like a dog.

My intention was not to steal, sir. I was searching for my self, which this woman had taken possession of. By coincidence I discovered lovers’ cars, and there I found my entertainment and consolation. I am not a dog willing to accept that kind of treatment. Yes, I accepted the unacceptable when I was in the shadow of the tawny calf of her leg which was damp with the sweat of lust. With the car game in the forest, things began to change. My life changed in the forest, and gradually I began to move away from Madame. But, may Almighty God be praised, my lust for her ended only when I fell in love with Shirin.

I know, sir, that you want three things from me: what I did in Paris, the women in the Ballouna forest, and the explosives gang I was connected to.

I will tell you Yalo’s stories in detail. I want this story to be a warning for those who might need one. So when I sit in the chair before the table holding the fountain pen to write, I feel fright. For this ink which fills the pages is my soul. I want my soul to flow. I am not like the cuttlefish, which uses its ink to deceive fishermen and predatory fish. I don’t want to deceive anyone. I know that in the end you will cook me in this ink, but I will go to my fate with perfect acceptance.

I do not fear death, sir, nor do I use my ink to deceive you. But I would be lying if I confessed to what you are demanding of me. Would you agree to my leaving some pages blank for you to write whatever you want there, with my acceptance of everything you write? Of course I will not do that because I do fear your anger.

After Yalo viewed the world from that steep height, it became unthinkable to take him down from his throne to torture him. I tried to mollify him. I told him not to be afraid, because I would write everything, and from now on would not allow him to taste physical torture.

I knelt before the window where he sat in exaltation and asked him to help me a little. I cannot write these things by myself. Excavating a skull hurts, and makes you incapable of putting words in useful sentences.

The cohno knew that, so he took words just as they were and copied them. He copied the odes that Ephraim the Syriac had written, or the Syriac poems that Hanno al-Ainwardi wrote to eulogize the people led to the slaughter, and his blood became a long line stretching to the border of the heavens.

The cohno wrote a line of red blood in black ink, and said that when he copied odes and Syriac poems he became the author without any harm to the words or phrases. I wish I had before me a book telling Yalo’s story so that I could copy it and be done with all this. I said to myself that my soul must remember, but every time it remembered, it forgot, and I discovered that I had to remember all over again, and that I was still far from the essence of what I had to write, that is, a frank confession of my crimes, a statement of readiness to accept responsibility for them, and acceptance of the just verdict that will be rendered against me.

The fact is, sir, that I did nothing in Paris. I spent three weeks there, which felt longer than an entire year. I learned about misery and hunger there. Had God not sent me the lawyer M. Michel Salloum, I would have died like a dog on a Métro station platform. I confess that my greatest crime was that I spat on the hand that reached out to help and comfort me. Instead of being the slave of that decent and honorable man who saved my life, I betrayed him. Yes, I betrayed him, and that is my worst crime. I’m not talking about my relationship with his wife, who was destined for me — I had no hand in it — for the betrayal happened long before that. I betrayed him in Paris, and it was a deed I will have to regret for as long as I live. I do not care if M. Michel made his fortune dealing in arms in Lebanon, Europe, and the Gulf. He can do as he likes and his money is his own business. We in Lebanon should be the last people in the world with any right to condemn arms dealing. Had it not been for arms dealers, how would we have been able to fight? He is an arms dealer and we resorted to arms. What more can be said?