Elias Khoury - Yalo

And given that the Court, after giving due consideration, views the granting of the accused the mitigating circumstances, based on Article 253 of the Criminal Code;

Therefore the court decides,

After hearing the arguments of the public prosecutor, the defense, and the accused;

1. The accused, Daniel Abel Abyad, is convicted of the felony in accordance with Articles 639 and 640 of the Criminal Code, and is condemned to twenty years of hard labor, based on the first provision, to increase this penalty to hard labor for life based on the second provision, and reducing the sentence to ten years of hard labor, based on Article 253 of the Criminal Code, and to consider the time he spent in detention.

2. The sentenced party will be responsible for the payment of all legal costs and fees.

Duly judged against the sentenced party, publicly issued and informed in the presence of the representative of the public prosecutor on 6 June 1994.

M

ARCH

1995, R

OUMIEH

P

RISON

, C

ELL

12

I live in this cell with a large group of prisoners. But I am alone and don’t deal with anyone. I asked the guards for paper and pens but they refused. One of the guards, named Nabil Zeitoun, took pity on me. All the prisoners here ask for food and cigarettes, but not me. I have no desire for food; cigarettes, on the other hand, I do crave, but I don’t ask for them. I asked for white paper. I want paper like my pages that were destroyed in the interrogation vault. When I look at my life, I feel that it is a story. I want to read the story so that I will be able to bear the pains that come back to me. I can’t tell my story to anyone, because they’d think I’m crazy, and also no one would understand. I wrote my story by myself and for myself.

The prisoners here watch me with strange eyes. They think I’m the “king of sex” — that’s what the head of the cell named me. He’s a professional hashish smuggler who lives here as if he were in a palace. The prisoners serve him as if he were not a prisoner like them. When I entered cell 12, Mr. Abu Tariq al-Arnaut — that’s the name of the head of our cell — gave me a cot on the side of the room near the door, and told the prisoners to watch out around me because I’m an insatiable sex fiend.

I do not want any of them. I look at the steel-barred window and I see him, and I feel like crying.

After the verdict sentencing me to ten years in prison, I was moved to this elongated cell stinking of male sweat. Odor, not fear. For I no longer fear anything. I was publicly proclaimed innocent of the explosives crimes. The incidents in the lovers’ forest, and the circumstances, made the judge laugh several times, especially when I was asked to supply the details. I felt sure that day that my sentence would be light. But when they told me that the sentence was ten years, I fell into a depression that would not go away. My only request of the court was the pages that the interrogator trampled. That too made them laugh.

I could not explain to them that I wanted my papers for his sake. How could I tell them about Yalo, who has returned to his heavenly throne, near the window, and who doesn’t answer me?

The prisoners give me strange looks here, because they yearn to hear my story, after all that was said about my sexual exploits, and that I had not only raped women, but men too! Horrible! I see the prisoners’ eyes widen with lust for the stories without any of them daring to come near me out of fear of being suspected along with me.

I do not want them, nor do I have the slightest desire to talk with anyone. I want to talk to myself and cure myself of its pains. I look toward the window and address a person that only I can see, and I try to remember the stories I wrote, but my memory fails me.

No one can claim that he has done me a favor. I have paid the price for everything. Life and me, we’re even now. If you put us on the scales of a balance, we would balance out. That is why I have no pangs of conscience or regret over what I have done, not because I am pleased with what I have done, but because it was bought with my own suffering and blood.

I long for the smell of pine sap and the fragrance of incense that surrounded the Villa Gardenia. I long only for those two smells. As for the people who passed through my life, I feel nothing toward them. Even my mother, I do not long for her in the real sense of the word. I knew true longing when I was in love and stupid. Longing bites and hurts. But now I long for my mother without pain, I miss her because I pity her. The poor thing visited me once in prison. Visits here are strange. The prisoners stand behind iron bars while family members face them from the other side, and the shouting starts. My mother came once and brought me nothing, unlike the other family members who brought food and cigarettes to their imprisoned sons. She came and stood with the rest of the group, and did not see me. It was truly strange — I am the tallest prisoner here, and I feel that I am growing taller, even though that is scientifically impossible, since a man stops growing when he is in adolescence. Yet I’m growing taller and thinner, I know it and I am surprised by it, yet my mother didn’t see me. She stood there with her mussed kokina and looked to the right and the left looking for me, while all the time I was standing right in front of her. I shouted out to her and then she saw me and wept. She covered her ears with her hands and bowed her head. She covered her ears because the clamor hurt them, it was like my grandfather whose ears grew larger in his last days and who would spread his palms over them so that the sound wouldn’t enter his brain and crush it.

I shouted out to her and she blocked her ears and asked me to lower my voice. I asked her how she was doing and she answered me quietly, but I did hear her. I heard her voice through all the other voices and understood that they had evicted her from the house in the al-Mrayyeh quarter in Ain Rummaneh. When she went back to her house in Mseitbeh, she found it inhabited by a family she didn’t know. She told them it was her house, but they threw her out and threatened to call the police. She said that now she lived in lower Mseitbeh. She had rented a small room in the neighborhood of huts inhabited by housemaids, Syrian construction workers, and Kurds. She also said that she was paying a hundred thousand lira a month for her room and that she was going to end up begging in order to eat because she didn’t have a cent.

Nabil Zeitoun, one of the prison guards, took pity on me. He noticed that no one visited me, and that I put nothing in the trust, and seeing my insistence, he gave me twenty sheets of white paper and a ballpoint pen, saying that was all he could manage for me. I decided to write the story of my life all over again, in tiny script, with words like ants, so that no one else could read it. I saw with my own eyes how the interrogator had trampled my pages and how he drowned the pages in the foul stagnant water. I can still smell it, mingled with the smell of men’s sweat and urine, which keeps me from remembering. I want to remember everything. I try, but I see everything black on white, I cannot read, it’s as if I were reading in a dream. I see letters whose riddles I cannot unlock.

On these pages I’ll write very small letters, squeezing an entire page into one line. The pain has not left me. The prison doctor diagnosed me as suffering from a rectal prolapse because of the bottle and said that it might require an operation. But he advised me to be patient and not to have the operation in the prison hospital because the outcome was not guaranteed.

I am not writing for my own sake but for his sake and his mother’s. I want him to come back to me for his poor mother’s sake. We must find a solution for her, because she will be the heroine of the story. I don’t like stories where the heroes are men. Gaby will be the heroine of my story, with her kokina and her long hair that turns golden before the sea, and her lover the tailor, her father the cohno , and her son who wasted his life.