“How can we pray, Yishou, when the words are dying? I can sense the worms emerging from them, as if my mouth has become a graveyard. Your language is dying, and You are doing nothing about it. With whom do You wish to speak upon Your second coming? There is no longer anyone in the world left but me who can understand You. And me, the Sultan has abandoned me, and death is approaching. Someday when Your servant Ephraim has died, what will You do?”
Yalo told Shirin that he wanted her to come with him to the beach at Ramlet al-Baida after Christmas. She said no. Yalo got mad, grabbed her by the arms, and made her feel the pistol on his hip. He said that he was prepared to put the gun on the plate, even in front of everyone, just so that she would believe his love for her.
“But no, no, sir,” Yalo said, “I did not force her to come to the beach.”
Yalo called Shirin more than ten times that day, and she repeated over and over that she did not want to go to the beach; she preferred to meet him at the café. In the end, however, he convinced her. He told her that he would show her a miracle, that he would speak to the fish in Syriac. She agreed to come, on the condition that their meeting be short, because she had to be somewhere for dinner. But their meeting lasted until late into the night, not because Yalo forced her to stay and drink wine, as she told the interrogator, but because the miracle indeed occurred.
They walked along the beach at Ramlet al-Baida, then he asked her to go into the water with him.
“It’s cold, please just cut it out.”
He left her standing there and plunged into the waves without taking his clothes off, then came back with salt water cupped in his hands and asked her to drink of it before they sat together on the cold damp sand. He pulled from the pocket of his overcoat a bottle of red wine and a loaf of bread. He drank from the bottle and had her drink from it, ate some bread and fed some to her.
“The wine is too sweet. I don’t like sweet wine,” she said.
“That is sweet fresh water, not wine.”
Then he stood up, walked to the water, and walked on the water. He left her sitting on the sand, and began to see himself through her eyes. He saw his back draped in the black overcoat, he saw his shadow that stretched to the sky. When he returned to her, dripping wet, his teeth chattering with cold, he saw her sitting with her head down on her pulled-up knees, and when he raised her head to kiss her, he tasted tears.
She wept and said she would die here.
“Please, let me go home before I die.”
Why did she say he had forced her to eat bread and that she had vomited up the sweet wine mixed with salt water? The water had turned as sweet as honey but she did not understand, and now as he stood in front of the interrogator who appeared to him through blinding sunlight, he discovered all at once the secret of the bread.
He wanted to tell the interrogator that he was sorry. He had suddenly discovered the secret of the bread, and this whole story with Shirin appeared ridiculous to him, not even worth discussing. Yalo burst into laughter, much to the interrogator’s consternation, and after this hearty laughter he sank into thoughtful silence and stopped responding to the questions. What could he say? That the bread — that everything except for the bread was nonsense.
“Don’t tell me the world has changed, my boy,” said his grandfather. “Whatever has happened or is going to happen, nothing changes. The real thing that mankind has discovered is bread. Apart from food, show me one single invention and I’d be willing to believe that the world has changed. The world does not change, it is round, like a loaf of bread. Everything, my boy, is the same as it was except for the unpleasant taste in my mouth, but I continue to chew incense or pine sap every day. And all because the Sultan has left me. My boy, there are only two things in life, sleep and bread. That is our faith. Christ is a grain of wheat, that died in order to rise, and transformed death into sleep. A man sleeps every night in order to get used to death. When the Sultan of Sleep starts to abandon you, and you start to lose your craving for bread, that is when real death is drawing near. Only what’s the difference? There is no difference, it’s like sleeping. In sleep we dream, and in death we’ll dream.”
Yalo wanted to tell her, he wanted to inform her, but she was crying. How could he tell her about his mother’s hair, gleaming with gold, amid the white sand, when Shirin was bent over her knees weeping, not daring to look up.
“Please let me go home,” she said.
“Did you see the miracle?” he asked her.
“I saw everything, but I want to go.”
“When will I see you?”
“Call me tomorrow and we’ll set something up, but let me go.”
He saw her disappear into the night. She took off her high heels and ran on the sand until the shadows swallowed her. Yalo remained alone on the beach with an empty red wine bottle and what was left of the bread.
He had not told Shirin about his mother. He had wanted to tell her how his mother drank seawater, how she opened her eyes, how she let her hair down. He wanted to tell her that he saw dozens of women on the beach, standing beneath flowing hair, intoxicated with the gold wrought by the small moon that swung between the clouds, swallowed up by one cloud which then cast it out to another. The light dimmed and then reemerged, and the long hair covered the boy trembling with cold, huddled up on the woolen blanket.
Why did she say that he had made her eat the bread and drink the wine and then stole all the contents of her handbag? Why did she say that when she met him, she made sure not to put more than one hundred American dollars in her handbag? Why did she say that every time they met he took a one-hundred-dollar bill?
“But she did not tell the whole truth, sir.”
“And what is the truth? Please tell me.”
“The truth is that no one but God knows the truth.”
Yalo was no longer sure of anything, but in those encounters he felt that Shirin was dissolving under his gaze, as if she wanted him to pull her to him, but something prevented her from speaking her feelings, as if she were connected by a hidden wire to another world, which she could not leave. Yalo’s gazes reached out to her to come to him.
“Come to my place,” he said.
“Where?” she asked.
“My heart.”
“Yes, yes,” she answered.
She was afraid. Now Yalo understood that she had been afraid. Fear was a deceiver, it inspired fear of things that did not even exist. Now — that is, in a torture chamber — Yalo understood. Confessions under torture were like lovers’ confessions. Suddenly a lover loses control of his tongue and says things that destroy love.
Now Yalo was convinced that he had made a mistake. He should not have told Shirin the truth about what he had experienced, yet he did. When he told her about Madame Randa, and how he randified her, and about her daughter, Ghada, and how her eyes flashed with jealousy as she told him about her friend in college who had moved to Canada, and that she would follow him there soon, and how when he told her about his adventures in the forest and his compassion for Monsieur Michel Salloum, he had fallen into a word trap. His trick had been discovered.
Had he not told her that he was sure Madame would report him to the police, this nameless girl would never have dared go to the police station to lodge a complaint against him.
It was the disease of truth that he came down with when he fell in love.
He told her that he did not know why he felt that way, or why he was no longer able to lie. He told her everything, and when the love flowed off his tongue he found himself in the police station, where he saw her, in her short skirt with her slender white thighs, pointing him out as a criminal.