“Your father was a Muslim?”
“Lo. Lo.”
“What was his name?”
“I was telling you about tears. Father Joachim said that baptism is not complete without tears. He was old, like your grandfather now, and when he spoke Syriac with me his tears would fall, and I had to hold my laughter back. Then one day I understood, and when you grow up you will discover the importance of the baptism of tears.”
The cohno, whose face had been invaded by an immense white beard, sank into his final baptism. Yalo did not understand, nor did he dare to approach that sacrament of which it is said that the greatest event in the life of a man is his death, and that the cohno had woven his shroud with his tears, and raved about the mullah that wanted to bequeath him blood. Father Joachim revealed to him that the common legacy of humankind was its tears.
He asked his mother about tears, but she hushed him. “Do not speak anymore of this. We shouldn’t be asking questions now. We should just be helping your grandfather.” Yalo told his mother that he did not understand. She told him, “Later. Someday when you’re grown up you’ll understand.” But he grew up and still did not understand.
On January 6, 1975, the eve of the war, when Yalo was thirteen, his mother asked him to help her take the cohno to the beach at Ramlet al-Baida. At first Yalo refused, saying that the man would be unable to bear the cold weather, that he might die, but eventually gave in to his mother’s insistence.
“You still believe in fairy tales,” he told her.
“Shut up. He can hear you,” she answered. “Come on, take his hand and follow me.”
They went in the night and the rain. On the beach, under a hard rain, as hard as bullets, the woman let down her hair and took her father’s hand, and walked with him into the sea. The old man stumbled, fell into a wave, swallowed the water and the salt and cried intensely, then he was quenched. Gaby cupped her hands and took some seawater to make the cohno and her son drink, and she said that the water had become sweeter than honey.
“I have seen the miracle,” she said.
“Look at my hair, how it’s become golden,” she said.
“The water has become pure and sweet as honey,” she said.
“Christ the Lord, peace be upon him, has said that you will be healed, Father Ephraim,” she said.
But the cohno was collapsing. His feet were no longer able to support him, so Yalo and his mother worked together to carry him to the street, where they brought him home in a taxi.
“Don’t die, I beg of you!” shouted his daughter.
Ephraim lived after the Ramlet al-Baida incident, after which fever struck him for a whole week. He died a year later, but Gaby lived the rest of her life with a bad conscience.
“I killed him,” she said, “I killed the cohno. After that outing he couldn’t walk anymore. He was consumed by weeping, his eyes shrank, as if he didn’t even have eyes anymore, as if they had been rubbed away with only two black dots left, two little wells from which tears flowed, as if he had just bathed himself in his tears and died.”
And Yalo now, or rather there, when he was extricated from the sack, sank into his tears. Yalo now, there, found that he was like his grandfather and like Ishmael, he traversed the baptism of tears and sank into his eyes.
He placed the white sheet of paper in front of him and decided to write, but he could not; yet there was no escape. The interrogator awaited him, as did his own fear. It was true that Yalo suffered greatly during the days of writing, but no suffering in the world could be compared to the pool of cats that had stormed over his lower half and cast him into a deep abyss. The sack remained in his memory. As he wrote he saw two sacks, one above and one below.
The first sack was no problem, it was the war sack, the fighters controlled this sack and Yalo was one of them, so he did not fear this first sack they put over his head when he was arrested. He closed his eyes inside it and went with them. Of course he fell to the ground and felt that his legs had become blind, but he was not afraid. He knew that the game of shadows was part of the game of war, and that he was now entering the other side of a scheme in a world he knew all too well. He would say that he fled Beirut for Paris because the war nauseated him and he was utterly weary of the screams of the victims. But he did not say that. He was the son of a war that never lied because it never spoke. In the barracks he entered at the age of fourteen, Yalo learned not to talk, because the war camouflaged its words behind other words which fell to the ground like banana peels that people would slip on. The sacks were masks that covered everything. He wore the first mask after two weeks of training in the forested land around a mountain village whose name he had forgotten. He had gotten used to the mask. Then he discovered that speech wore a mask too, and that was a long story he would experience when he wrote the story of his life, as the interrogator had demanded of him.
The second sack, however, was different. The sack below was not a mask; it was an instrument of revelation, of scandal, of sorrow. Yalo awoke from what seemed like a coma and could not find the sack covering his lower half. He saw himself amidst his urine and feces; reached his hand between his thighs and felt a familiar warmth, he remembered Shirin and his tears began to flow. He understood at that moment the meaning of love and felt her tears in his own eyes, and the trembling of her lower lip in his lip, and her warm knee within his knee. He placed his hand on his own knee and the ghost of a smile appeared and as he saw how he had reached out to her small knee and rubbed his palm along it.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m lathering my hands. I like to be clean when I see you, and the best soap is your knee. Your knee is a bit like a little round soap, no?”
Her small eyes looked at him and a half smile escaped her lips before answering, “Yes, it’s true.”
Yalo laughed and Shirin asked him to remove his hand from her “soap” because they would be seen.
“I don’t care about being seen. All I care about is you.”
“Fine. Then for my sake, remove your hand.”
He did so and rubbed his face with both hands as if he were scrubbing it with soap. Shirin screamed for him not to take his hands off the steering wheel, so he put his hands in the air, leaving the car to glide on its own on the Jounieh highway, before regaining control by seizing the wheel with his left hand, leaving his right hand on the seat, seeking her hand.
Yalo swam in his excrement, as he would say later, alleging nausea, but there in the middle of the pool where he found himself, he felt capable of doubling over against himself; he rolled up and became an infant, shrinking as if returning to his mother’s womb. He reached out his hand, hungry and thirsty. He reached out and sucked. He closed his eyes and swallowed the sticky liquid, and craved sleep. He saw his mother’s face and Alexei’s face, and vanished amidst the tears.