Elias Khoury - Yalo

Here, my grandfather said, God saved him. A love of learning blossomed in his heart, and he excelled among his peers, memorizing all of the Syriac prayers without understanding a word.

Once again fate intervened because the deacon Shimon advised Abel to go to Beirut, where the world would open before him. The boy made his decision right away, collected his weekly pay from the bakery, and instead of going home, took the bus from Al-Qamishli to Aleppo and onward to Tripoli and then Beirut. Abel arrived in Beirut carrying nothing with him but the address of the St. Severus Church in Mseitbeh. He searched for the church for a long time before finding himself before its locked door, where he spent the night.

In the morning, a new chapter of the story began. Cohno Hanna al-Dinohi arrived at the church and saw the boy sleeping on the sidewalk. He woke him gently and asked who he was, and Abel gave him Deacon Shimon’s letter. The cohno read the letter carefully, took the lad into the church, and led him to a side room where he could stay until they decided how to handle him. The next day he gave him a letter of introduction for Mr. Mitri, who ran the Yazbek Tile Factory, suggesting that he not talk much because his dialect might seem too strange to the Lebanese ear.

Here, sir, was the beginning of the grandfather I knew. That is, he became Abel Abyad. He worked in the tile factory and helped in the church. He studied Syriac and religion, and the malfono marveled at his ability to memorize his lessons with record speed. My grandfather was the best student in Cohno Hanna’s night school, in which a number of Syriac tile workers, who had come from Syria, studied. Then the cohno married him to his sister’s daughter, according to the official family narrative. The truth is that the cohno ’s niece fell in love with my grandfather and went on a hunger strike for his sake. This forced her family to consent to her marriage to the young Kurd who became, with this marriage, a legitimate son of the sect in Beirut. Eventually the cohno asked Abel to quit his tile work and help him manage the affairs of his parish, as he was growing old. My grandfather had grown in stature and knowledge, and had turned to glorifying the Creator, which had elevated him in the eyes of the three times regretted Bishop Daoud Karjo, to become an assistant cohno in the Church of St. Severus, and later was bequeathed the position after the death of Cohno Hanna.

My grandfather studied a great deal. My mother said that he studied Syriac at fifteen and was fascinated with theology and the debate over the One Nature versus Dual Nature of Christ. He went to study in Damascus, to return with the highest theological degree. His ambition then emerged because he felt that God had chosen him from the netherworld, and just as Christ had chosen his disciples from among fishermen, the Lord had chosen his disciple Ephraim from among the children of the massacres.

The story has to end here. My grandfather’s story ends, like all stories, with the death of the hero. My grandfather died, ages ago. The story truly ends here, because all the events that would occur after the death of his wife were expected. The man aged all at once and discovered that his life was futile. He began to invent books that he had not written and to impose strange rituals on his daughter and grandson.

Gaby, however, believed that the story did not end entirely with the death of her mother. My grandfather had begun to change before his wife’s death; her death had been just an additional factor in a transformation that had begun with that strange visit Mullah Mustafa had made to the cohno ’s house in Mseitbeh. What a strange story! Why did the Kurdish mullah come to the house of the Syriac cohno ? Was it true that he asked him to go back with him to Ain Ward, and that he promised him his inheritance, offering to marry him to his cousin after he repented to his Lord and returned to his true faith?

My mother said that had she been told that story, she would not have believed it; but she saw it with her own eyes and heard it with her own ears. She heard a rapping at the door, and saw the old man with his white beard and black cloak speak to her mother in strange Arabic, asking for Abel. The woman asked him to come in and sit down, and she called her husband, who was in his room putting on his priestly robe in preparation to go out. My mother and her sister, Sara, went into the living room to look at the strange man who had hugged and kissed them.

My grandfather came into the living room and saw the old man fidgeting in his armchair, about to get up. The cohno ran toward him like a little boy, took his hand and kissed it, and put it against his head. He kissed both the top and the palm, and the old man kissed him on the shoulder and sat down again. The cohno remained standing, head bowed, before the old man. The mullah ordered him to sit, so Abel sat down on the side of the couch, as if ready to get up again at any moment. The men had a strange conversation in a strange tongue. They drank tea and smoked rolled cigarettes the mullah brought in the pocket of his cloak. The cohno , whose lips had not touched a cigarette since he joined the clergy, smoked like a practiced smoker. The cohno wept and the mullah wept. Then when the mullah stood up to depart, the cohno bowed over again and kissed his hand.

My mother said that the mullah proposed that his son return to Ain Ward because he wanted to bequeath him land and also proposed that he marry the mullah’s niece. But my grandfather refused the offer and said he could not.

They did not speak much, for a man such as the mullah, whose authority extended over the whole region of Tur Abdin, was not used to talking much. It was enough that he took the trouble to come. His honoring you with his presence could hardly be repaid. That’s what my grandfather said, yet even so he told him that he could not.

The cohno cried bitterly, my mother said. The mullah cried quietly. The two men’s tears ran into their beards, then the mullah left and the cohno stayed, dazed, as if he were blind and deaf.

My mother said that her father remained practically mute for seven days, and that on the Sunday after his visit, he did not go to church on the pretext that he was ill. And that he refused to receive any member of his parish. He spent a week in bed eating nothing but bread and water.

My mother said she discovered that day that her father was a Kurd, and that when she saw him speaking Kurdish with the mullah, she saw his true face, which she never saw again until the moment of his death.

The cohno was very changed after that visit, as if a strange spirit had entered his body, as if the Syriac language had possessed him and he had become dazzled by all the names of the Lebanese, Syrian, and Palestinian villages that started with the word kafr . He would interrupt conversations countless times in order to trace the Arabic words to their Syriac roots. He said that the very air spoke Syriac, and he stood before an icon of Christ and spoke to it in the language only the two of them understood.

Only once did my grandfather relate his conversation with his Kurdish father to his wife. He said it was a test. “Just as Satan tested Christ, the mullah was sent to me so that my faith might be tested.” He said that he was afraid of himself, especially when his Kurdish father told him about the torments the Kurds experienced in Turkey and the oppression they felt and how their villages were violated every day. The mullah, whose mere footfall made everyone shudder, seemed hesitant and sad, as if he had come to be rescued by his son. Both men cried a great deal, laughing only when the mullah reminded his son how he had memorized the Holy Koran at the age of seven, which in Ain Ward was considered a virtual miracle.