Elias Khoury - Yalo

The next night I heard a similar noise and witnessed almost the same scene, although things took a more complicated turn. A first car had turned off its lights, then a second car came and parked not far from it, also turning off its engine and lights. The first car left after a while, while the second waited another half an hour before leaving. That made me fearful and suspicious. I said to myself they must be surveillance cars, and that two cars together meant that the operation had been carefully managed and coordinated.

I thought I might go over to the second car, but I was afraid of being the victim of an ambush. I decided to wait and watch with my hand on my weapon. But the second car suddenly turned on its lights and drove away. So I resolved to tell Madame what I had seen, but then changed my mind. The man had trusted me with his home and his family and made me understand that he was relying on me alone. So I decided not to stoke her fears and to do my best under the circumstances.

That went on for about two weeks. I proclaimed a state of alert every night and built imaginary fortifications along the pine and willow trees in my head, until the truth took my by surprise.

The moon was full. A car came and parked under the willow tree as if it wanted to camouflage itself. As usual, the engine and the lights were turned off. From my hiding place behind the wall of the villa I couldn’t see. I didn’t know what to do. Should I move toward the car, leaving my machine gun behind the wall, and walk as if crossing a street, so as not to get into a premature battle with this gang that had planned out the assassination of M. Michel, or the kidnapping of his wife or daughter for ransom? Or carry my gun and advance stealthily so that they could not see me, despite the risk? Then I remembered what our trainer, Costa, told us about a fighter’s relationship with his rifle. There were three things a man never left behind or lent, even to those closest to him: his woman, his rifle, or his horse.

I took the rifle and advanced slowly and cautiously. I moved away from the villa wall, adopting the duck waddle that I learned in my military training. I moved in like a duck and concealed myself under a pine tree from where I could see the car clearly, and who was inside it.

That was when the surprise happened.

I was expecting to see armed men, but I saw no drawn weapons. I found a man and a woman. I said, this is it, they are pretending to be lovers so that they can surveil and make plans, but no, you couldn’t fool Yalo so easily! I decided to stay and watch until the end. Heck — it was like watching a movie!

But little by little I began to forget the gang, because I sensed that the man and the woman were not role-playing, but seemed to be having sex, I mean, like teenagers. I got into it with them. No, in the beginning I was not aroused because I was afraid, and a guy who’s afraid, can’t. But gradually my fear faded and I controlled my breathing and began enjoying myself. That was the first time in my life I saw people actually having sex. I got very aroused and I was afraid I’d fall to the ground because I was squatting and my knees hurt, but I decided not to get up at all. That time, I finished before the guy in the car finished. I let my rifle slip down in my hands and rub its wooden hollow against my erect member until I shot. I never saw anything like that. A man fondling every part of a woman’s body, her breasts coming out of the top of her dress, and more. . my friends told me how they had spied on their families at night and how lust came to them amidst the whispers of their fathers on top of their mothers; me, alas. My father had left long since, Elias al-Shami did not sleep with my mother in our house, and my grandfather was a dried-up tree stump.

There, under the pine tree, lust seized me. I saw that man, whose features I could not make out, sucking two big breasts, then playing with them, then. . I don’t know how I can describe it, but it was an extraordinary sight. After I heard the sound of the engine turning over, I rushed back to my cottage so I could clean myself up. And a strange thing would happen. I would get aroused again and touch myself under the shower, and since then, I’d get aroused as soon as I step into the shower.

After that moonlit night, and from my ongoing act of surveillance, I understood the whole game. It had nothing to do with gangs and assassination and kidnap attempts, as it appeared to me in the beginning, it was all about sex in cars. I decided to pursue my observation. I never abandoned my machine gun, though I also started bringing along the flashlight Madame Randa had given me, and would pull a white woolen cap that I’d found in the cottage over my head.

The story of the flashlight is tied up with the electrical current being cut off. Two months after I had started my job, the electricity died and I heard Madame Randa’s screams. The villa’s electricity did not fail, as a rule, since when it was cut off in the area, it would come back on automatically from a huge generator that circulated electricity to the houses in the village. But it seems the generator was down, so darkness spread, and Yalo heard Madame Randa’s voice asking him to come up. She had a lit candle and a slim black flashlight in her hand. She gave him the flashlight and asked him to start up the villa’s own generator, which was in the garden. Yalo went down to the garden, attended to the generator, and kept the flashlight. No, it was the Madame who’d asked him to hold on to the flashlight in case of emergencies. So he put it in his coat pocket and it became his constant companion since his life was filled with emergencies.

Yalo did not initiate the adventure, the adventure came to him. What could he do? His adventure had been spying on blind cars that parked among the trees, with the steam of lust rising from them above the green pine branches.

A man goes to his fate, as they say. And Yalo’s fate was the forest. Yalo waited for the night, lived the night, and breathed the night. In his eyes, the cars started to resemble animals having sex in the dark. He liked this idea and he decided to tell no one. When he told Shirin the story for the first time, he omitted the part about him putting the rifle against his thighs and what happened after that. Shirin believed him. Yalo was convinced that Shirin believed every word he told her. That is why he was so surprised to see her in the interrogation room — and that’s what led to his caving quickly and his confessing to everything. Yalo was not such a coward as to confess so easily, but he confessed because Shirin’s presence threw him off balance; he found himself in a maelstrom he could not pull himself out of before grasping that they wanted him to confess to the explosives, so he did. But you found his confessions lacking, which was true, but not out of an effort to obstruct the investigation or to mislead the court, as they said, but because he didn’t know. This is a story I have set out for you in detail, sir, and I ask that no more be demanded of me, for I have resigned myself to the will of God.

The first time it happened by chance.

Yalo was squatting in his usual place, behind the villa wall under the pine tree, when a car came and parked in the forest. The car’s headlights went out, so he could no longer see a thing. He spent most of his nights that way, sitting in the dark, counting his breaths and imagining. He never really could see unless the moon had risen, and so he came to love Fairuz’s song “We’re Neighbors With the Moon,” and he would sing with her, “His home is behind our hills, he comes up before us.” But the moon did not follow Fairuz’s orders; the moon shone only when it was full. And because the moon waxed and waned like the breasts of his beloved Shirin, or so he imagined them that strange night when she gave off the scent of incense, he called them “moons,” and gave them the name sahro . Every time he uttered this Syriac word, he had to explain its meaning to Shirin.