Elias Khoury - Yalo

But the greater miracle, the cohno told his wife, was that he was able to forget. The mullah had come to awaken in his heart all that he’d forgotten.

Up above, Yalo refused to descend from his throne and come to me. I tell him not to be afraid because he is right. Yalo committed only one mistake for which he was very sorry, but he was unable to make up for it, and did not understand that this mistake would drive him to his end.

The mistake was not Shirin herself, but Shirin’s voice.

The girl he loved to death could not forget. She went out with him so many times; she laughed, cried, ate, and drank. She held his hand and kissed him, and slept with him in the little hotel in Jounieh. She loved him yet did not love him, but she could not forget that he had broken her voice.

“My voice broke in Ballouna, that’s why I can’t love you right,” she told him. He didn’t understand what she was talking about. He thought of a china plate falling to the floor and breaking. But he didn’t understand that when a woman’s voice broke, it meant that her heart had been irremediably derailed. And a derailed heart could not love.

She said that there, when Dr. Said fled in his car, and she remained alone in the forest with the tall man, she tried to scream, she did scream, but terror paralyzed her so that her voice never made it out of her throat. The sound was broken in her throat and it broke her.

She said that she was ready to do anything for him, but she was unable to restore her broken voice. That was why she couldn’t continue with him. She had decided to go back to her former fiancé. She begged Yalo to understand.

Yalo did not understand and that was a mortal sin. He hung on to the cords of her broken voice, and pursued his game with a broken woman.

That is how he got to prison, ascended to his torments, and lost his soul.

I approached him and tried to read to him, but I stopped reading because I saw his tears. I read to him about his grandfather and the Kurdish mullah and the broken voice, and the tears streamed down his cheeks and wet his neck.

How can I bring him down off his throne and gather him to my chest?

Yalo is coming down, now, sir. I see him coming down from the throne and walking in my direction. I see him along the window, I see him approaching. I rise, open my arms to him, and let him enter my eyes.

Yalo gazed at the pages, read a little, and asked me to stop writing, because the story was over.

It was noon.

The officer entered the solitary cell and ordered Yalo to follow him. The young man picked up his papers and walked through the dark corridors. He descended one steep step before finding himself inside a large room underground. The young man with knitted brows, long tan face, and tall, slender stature stood in the nearly dark room, holding his papers in his hands as he waited to offer his story to the interrogator. He had made it to the end of his long journey of torment, he had reached the end.

I stood, and did not see.

The darkness was dense; no, it was not the darkness, but the lights I bore in my eyes were blocking my vision and creating patches of darkness and light. I closed my eyes in order to see, as I always did, I closed my eyes in order to let the light retreat from them, then I opened them to see.

I stood in heavy silence that resembled darkness. I stood and waited with the pages in my hand. I was sure that everything I wrote was correct, and that I had written the story of my life from start to finish and would never after this day be subjected to torture.

I heard his voice: “Open your eyes!”

I opened them and waited to be asked for my papers. But the white man sitting behind the iron desk did not ask me for anything. I saw puddles of water on the floor and smelled the rotten odor that filled the place, and felt that I should go back up above. I should never have believed them and come down off my throne.

I felt that I was on the verge of collapsing. I heard his voice saying things I couldn’t understand. His words were slurred, and I wasn’t able to disentangle the letters from each other. I heard questions about a man named Richard Sawan and a woman named Marie. My answer was only that I had never heard these names before. I understood that I would be moved to the Roumieh Prison and that now I was in the lower level of the interrogation building of the intelligence service in Sinn al-Fil.

The interrogator said that my story was laughable, and his laughter rang in my ears. I approached him and offered him the pages. My hand remained suspended in the air. The story of my life from start to finish was in my hand, and my hand was in the air, while the interrogator laughed.

“Come here so I can see,” said the interrogator. “What’s that you have in your hand?”

Why did he ask me, when he knew the answer? Yalo thought, then said to himself that this was interrogation. They asked you about things you had already confessed to, and when you repeated your confessions you made mistakes, which was an unavoidable thing because you cannot tell the same story the same way twice. But this time, no. I will not answer a single question. All my answers are written down on paper. I will not tell my story all over again. I wrote the whole thing down from start to finish, so there is no margin for error. Black on white, and everything is here. I will not rewrite it or retell it. This is my story, so let them take it and do to me, and it, whatever they want, but I will not. .

Before Yalo could finish his sentence in his head, he felt a pain in his tongue and felt the answer forming in his throat, and words solidifying on his lips. He wanted to answer, but he could not. He held out his hand with the pages and stepped forward.

“I’m asking you, what is this?” shouted the interrogator.

“This. . this. .” said Yalo.

“What?”

“This is the story.”

“The story!”

“Yes, yes, the story.”

“What story?”

“The story. My story. This is the story of my life.”

He waved the pages, but the interrogator did not reach out to take them.

“The story of your life!” said the interrogator in amazement, and got up from behind the table.

“Yes, sir. You all asked me to write it, and I wrote it from start to finish.”

Here the interrogator burst out laughing and asked Yalo to come closer.

Yalo stepped over the hollows filled with stagnant water and saw the interrogator’s hand reach out to snatch the pages, so he drew his hand back instinctively, tightening his grip on them.

“Those are the pages?” asked the interrogator.

“Yes, yes, these are the pages.”

“Why did you go to so much trouble?”

“Sir, you asked me for everything, and I wrote everything. At first, the officer sent me to be tortured because I left things out. There’s nothing missing in these.”

“Great. Great. You’re really something, after all. A jackass — you are a jackass,” said the interrogator.

“I am a jackass,” said Yalo.

“What, are you making fun of me? Are you being clever?”

“. .”

“Who do you think you are?”

“. .”

“Maybe you thought we were waiting for your story so we can know the truth? We know everything. Anyway, who do you think you are? Do you think these papers will save you? You are nothing! You are less than nothing! Let me have a look at those pages.”

Yalo held out the papers and heard a burst of laughter.

“You’re a jackass and a fool! Do you know who you are?”

“. .”

“Answer when you’re asked a question.”

“Yes, I know.”

And I saw. I closed my eyes so that I could see, and I saw. The pages flew into the air before falling into the hollows filled with stinking water. I heard the interrogator’s voice.