They called him the Russian, but he was not Russian. He claimed he was a White Russian, and said that all of Russia was red, with only a single white spot called Alexei. But he was a Syriac who had forgotten the language of his ancestors, like Yalo and the rest of the young guys. He was also a close friend of Said al-Mansurati, who composed odes and sang them, proclaiming himself to be the great new entertainer of Lebanon who would emerge after the war. Alexei brought a bottle of white wine and Said played his lute and sang, and the guys got drunk on the rhythms of Andalusian ballads. Said recited poetry about Achrafieh and sang it in his hoarse voice that was like Farid al-Atrash’s, and the guys got drunk.
Said al-Mansurati disappeared, Alexei died, and Yalo found himself alone in his pool, listening to Alexei’s voice in his ears.
He said he had found him upstairs in the office: “I didn’t ask for his identity card or anything. I noticed that he had a foreign accent and I ordered him down to the basement and left him for about five hours on his knees and blindfolded. I swear to God I forgot about him, but after the line of cocaine I remembered him. When I bent over him, I saw that he had shit himself. What a coward! I forced him to eat it before he died. So he ate it. He knew he was going to die, and he ate it anyway. And you, you ran away, you coward. I swear to God, if your mother hadn’t answered the door, I would have given it to you, I would have made you shit yourself. You never would have forgotten me your whole life.”
“And him, what happened to him?” asked Yalo.
“Rest in peace,” said Alexei.
“You killed him?”
“What do you think I should have done?”
“No, seriously, I’m asking you for real.”
“No, I didn’t kill him, I left him in the basement and came over to your place. Come back with me and we can take care of it.”
“I don’t want to go with you.”
Alexei said that that the man died without his having to kill him. He let him finish his meal, then fired a bullet over his head and the man died.
“He died from fright, not from the shot,” said Alexei. “When a man dies, he dies of death, he dies from fright. You too, you’ll die one day from your cowardice.”
Yalo did not believe that the man had died of fear of the gunshot. He was sure that Alexei had killed him for a laugh. Yalo thought that Alexei was right, he decided to get rid of his cowardice and laugh too. He was sorry that he had run home afraid and vomited on himself. He felt a desire to kill everyone and laugh. He couldn’t imagine why everyone wasn’t laughing, and laughed. He spent the rest of the war on the verge of laughter. Even death was funny and entertaining. Laughter was the highest state of life. Laughter was everyone being strange and deserving a good laugh. A stranger is laughable just by being a stranger. Even Alexei was strange, someone we could laugh at whenever we liked.
Faced with Alexei’s corpse, something like a tremor of weeping swept through the young men, but Yalo felt like laughing. Alexei had not died the way most people die, but he was dead, and when they found him it was not him. He was a heap of clothes and pebbles and bones. Three months were enough for it not to be the man.
No one knew how Alexei had disappeared. Suddenly the blond Russian was just no longer there. They looked for him everywhere but found no trace of him. Their leader, Mario, decided that Alexei was a traitor and a coward. He gathered them all in the barracks and announced that he would turn him over to a military court as soon as he reappeared, but the blond did not reappear. The mill of the civil war kept turning. Mario called the war a mill and he bent over, naked from the waist up, like a mule, braying like a donkey, saying that he was carrying the millstone on his back.
“We grind people down, and they grind us down.”
He drank arak and spun around, his eyes would spin too, and when he got drunk, he would grind himself down and grind down others. The guys in the barracks watched their hero Mario become a mule, and they laughed. His name became Mario the Millstone.
Mario issued a death sentence against Alexei without a trial. He gathered the guys together and said that Alexei was a traitor: “We don’t know all the details. He said he was Russian but he wasn’t Russian. He said he was Syriac but he wasn’t Syriac. He said he was Lebanese but he wasn’t Lebanese. If you see him you must open fire without asking questions.”
“A word is a bullet,” Mario said. “Aim, fire, and get rid of him for me, once he’s dead we’ll interrogate him. Just as for all the others, the investigation begins after death. First we execute him, then we question him. That’s the way it goes.”
But how? How did Alexei melt away in that faraway building?
Alexei’s image would be burned into Yalo’s memory. But the face was not a face, it was a laughing skull.
Mario knew it when he saw it.
A bunch of guys showed up and told Mario that in the Jeraydini Building, opposite the French Medical Faculty in the rue Damas, they had seen a decomposed corpse, and Mario ordered them to dump it before taking their positions on the premises. Then he noticed the fear and horror on their faces.
“Dump it and I don’t want any bullshit. I told you to set up headquarters in the Jeraydini Building but you’re a bunch of cowards looking for excuses.”
Mario carried his rifle and marched ahead of them, and when they reached the heap of clothes and pebbles and bones, their leader bent over the remains and froze in place. In the middle of this dilapidated room, he looked like a taut bow.
Mario could hear their muttering about the remains and the bones. “Follow me,” he said, and ordered Yalo to come with him. He ran ahead of them and mounted the steps to the building two at a time. When they reached the third floor, he froze in place. Yalo followed the noise, not hurrying along with those running, walking heavily and mounting the steps slowly, and in a corner of the dark room, where broken furniture was stacked, he saw everything.
“That’s him,” said Tony.
Mario looked at Tony irritably and stepped back. He rested his short stocky body against the wall before advancing again to lean over the remains. Yalo did not know how long the short man stayed there bent over, but he felt that time had stopped over Mario’s back. Then his back began to quiver as though a wave passed through it from head to waist. He saw Tony step forward and embrace him, and he heard Mario’s voice saying something unintelligible because his voice was stifled in his throat as if it were the captive of his Adam’s apple that moved without liberating it. The back fell to the ground, Tony fell beside him, and Yalo saw himself fading away with the others.
“Where are you all going?” shouted Mario. “It’s Alexei.”
Mario’s shouts combined with the shouting of the other guys, and Yalo wanted to escape. He felt his legs getting ready to run, but the voice froze him to the spot, and he saw them all staggering. The light was black, wrapped in the darkness of the buildings destroyed by the war. The shadow of the destruction spread over them and they bent over to discover what seemed to be a skeleton in clothes ragged from rot.
“That’s Alexei,” said Mario. “We have to take him away.”
Yalo saw torn pants and a ragged shirt on a skeleton. The knees were bent and the bones bathed in black light.
“I recognized his belt,” said Mario. “Let’s take him away.”
The leather belt was the only sign. The Russian kid was carrion.
“Who ate him?” asked Yalo, who felt a laughing fit coming on. He wanted to laugh, but he cried like everyone else. That day Yalo understood that laughter was the neighbor of tears, and that distinguishing between them was terribly difficult, since they had been so closely related since the beginning of creation. Both were surprising and alienating, and both surged in to fill the emptiness the soul felt.