Elias Khoury - Yalo

We are all tools, sir. No one exists by himself or for himself. So why did God create us? To torture and be tortured?

Yalo does not agree with me that life is meaningless; it’s as if he’s just discovered some other meaning of life, which he doesn’t want to tell anyone. Even I don’t know it. I come up close to him and read to him, he’ll turn his head toward me for a moment and then will return to his private world, which takes him someplace I do not know about.

Yalo, sir, discovered that a man does not exist until he sinks to the lowest of the low. And from there, no one returns as the tool of another. There he becomes a lamb to be slaughtered in place of all, and his soul flies above the world because it has been freed.

But I am afraid for him. I am writing because I am afraid for him. I feel a tremendous pain rising from my posterior to my neck, choking me. I sit on the place of pain and write about him, for him, and beg him to get off and come back to me. But he is there, above, not hearing or seeing, though of course he hears voices coming from within, and sees when he closes his eyes. I envy him and fear for him and am afraid of him, and I do not know. Do I have a right to ask him to come down so that he can return to me, so that we can leave this prison together and start our life anew? I want to begin my life. Now I know the meaning of life. When I leave here I will open a little workshop for dovetailing wood, take care of my poor mother and console her, and I’ll forget Shirin, the story of Shirin, and my love for Shirin.

The story has become clear to me now, for you, for him, and for me. Poor Yalo. Do you know, sir, that no more than ten, or a few more, rapes were attributed to him, in the space of a year and a half? Of course, we must add to that about twenty counts of premeditated or unpremeditated theft.

The charge is unfounded, sir.

I know that one count is sufficient for you to incarcerate me and curse my forefathers, but things have to be understood within their context, and mitigating circumstances should be taken into consideration. And in my view, the only charge on which I should be tried is the charge of voyeurism.

Here I would like to examine closely the charge of rape. Who is the real accused here, sir, Yalo or the men and women who used their cars in the forest of Ballouna for fornication? Lebanese law is clear and candid, it outlaws fornication in public places. It might be said that it is an unjust law because it infringes on individual rights. That is true but it is not legally valid. The law says that a woman found in suspicious circumstances in a vehicle in a public place is to be dealt with as a prostitute until proven otherwise. So why do you apply the law only to Yalo?

I know that you do not want me to philosophize. The officer told me when I was on the throne that he wanted the story without philosophizing or bullshit. I am relating the facts as I lived them and witnessed them. But do you not agree with me that I have been wronged in this case?

I do not want it to be understood from what I am saying that I want to pin the blame on Shirin. Shirin is pure and innocent, and came to the forest with that pimp Dr. Said al-Halabi only because she had despaired of life and her fiancé’s stupidity. You saw him, sir, how he sat in the interrogation with his fat thighs rubbing together. He said that he was an engineer and a graduate of the American University. What would this jackass with his fat thighs know how to engineer? How could she choose him and abandon me? Can’t her eyes see? Is it possible to dump a tall, slender young man, who walks on tiptoe so he won’t disturb the dead that cover the face of the earth, for this bastard afraid of his own shadow? Plus, how could he say he had been with her in Ballouna? What a despicable liar. He was happy to show off his consort in order to see me in prison. I swear to God, sir, if I had seen this idiot with her I would have shot him and planted his corpse in the forest and left his soul to lament forever among the pine trees. But I did not kill anyone. Had Yalo been a criminal, he would have killed all of them and made a forest for the dead like the jungle in Ain Ward.

I will not digress from the topic now, in spite of the shadows of my grandfather that fill my head and the gravelly voice of his last days that still rings in my ears. I will not digress and tell you about the willows of the dead from which the weeping of the trees was heard, but I will tell you the truth of Yalo’s passions and burglaries, and how he would descend upon the cars with their lights off amid the piney night and plunder the money, watches, and rings that God apportioned to him. Yes, the ring that he offered to Shirin was one of the spoils of Ballouna, and when he saw it inside the interrogator’s handkerchief, he came undone; the tears gushed from his eyes, not because he felt guilty, nor because he was seeking sympathy as you’d believed, but because he was upset that Shirin had betrayed their covenant. He’d given the thick silver ring with engraved pharaonic symbols to Shirin as a symbol of his love. They sat in the Rawdah Café, by the sea. That day she took the ring, her heart was open, and he felt her love. She took the ring and thanked him and spoke as if she were an open book. She spoke of her family, of her brothers who had immigrated to Canada. She said she was weary of people who didn’t know how to enjoy life. She said that she envied Yalo, yes, she told Yalo that she envied him, because he was living life to the fullest and enjoying it. She thanked him because he had taught her how to eat and savor. She spoke of her mother, who only cared about plastic surgery and face-lifts, and of her father, a contractor who went to the Casino du Liban every night to gamble. She said that she’d decided to go back to college to study French literature, and she recited to him the poems of Jacques Prévert that she loved. Yalo saw himself climbing her words, rolling in them, and embracing them. Then she reached out her hand and he clasped it. She said that she thanked him for everything before looking at her watch and saying that she had to go home.

The ring of love became the ring of accusation. Shirin no longer wanted it, preferring to wear her fiancé’s gold wedding band. She is free, and I will not discuss her freedom, but why did she give the ring to the interrogator?

The interrogator knew that the ring was worthless. Had it been worth anything, she would have held on to it. Why had his excellency the interrogator not asked her why she accepted a ring from a man who had stalked her, hated her, and wanted to get rid of her? The interrogator saw the ring as criminal evidence, and he was right, but had he asked Shirin when she had received it from Yalo? Of course not. Even had he asked her, she would have lied rather than confess that she had taken it six months before she pressed charges against me. I will not request that you ask her what happened during those months, and how many times we ate fish and kibbeh nayeh and drank arak.

But please be patient.

I confess that I stole, and the penalty for stealing is prison, and I confess that I committed adultery with women in Ballouna, and my punishment will come from Almighty God. I will write about how things happened and I will try to remember, and I hope you will forgive me for the gaps in my memory. A man’s memory is full of gaps and no one but God can fill them. God alone possesses a perfect memory, whereas a man remembers only to forget.

You want the beginning of the story, and the beginning was Ballouna.

The story began when one night I saw a car park in the forest for half an hour and then leave again. As a guard, I was worried. It was pitch-black; in my head I drew up all sorts of plans to defend the villa should it come under armed attack. I know, from having overheard M. Michel, that the villa might come under threat. As you know, he was involved in arms trafficking, owned a hotel in Ras al-Khaimah, did business with the biggest fashion designers in Lebanon, arranged for Lebanese fashion models to visit the Gulf, and the like. . I was crouched in the dark, ready to face the worst, but nothing happened, thank God.