There, facing this scene he would never forget, the tears were like a hemorrhage from a deep wound. Yalo saw himself bent over a pile of bones, which a brown, singed leather belt allowed them to identify, and he saw his comrades stripped of their clothes and their flesh. He saw bones bent over bones, and was overcome by laughter arising from tears, and understood what he had been unable to explain to Shirin, when he had been pursuing her with his love. He understood this mixture of laughter and tears was the hallmark of humanity, and that every human bore two souls with him, the first for laughter and the second for weeping. His problem was that the two souls worked together and that was why it was always impossible to define his feelings.
He told Shirin when she wept that weeping was a sign of happiness and love. She looked at him with her small reddened eyes as if she did not understand why he did not understand.
“Please, Yalo, understand me.”
Getting up, she asked him to understand her. Shirin had the habit of getting up in the middle of their rendezvous as if she were preparing to leave, but when he looked at her with his hawk eyes she’d sit down again without a word.
She would tell the interrogator that she was afraid of his eyes and his long narrow eyebrows. She would say that she didn’t know why she went out with him, that she was afraid of him, and that she agreed to meet him in order to persuade him to end the relationship.
The interrogator asked her why she went to meet him the first time, when the story had not started yet, and she said that she wanted to put an end to it with him.
“Okay, so you met him once, but after that why did you go back to see him so many more times?” the interrogator asked.
The girl stammered and said she didn’t know, but she was afraid of him and felt sorry for him at the same time.
When she came to meet him, she would stand up to leave within minutes, but he sharpened his gaze and she’d find herself back in her chair. Shirin firmly believed that Yalo had two faces and that each face had a different set of eyes. When they’d met, first she’d see the first face with its drowsy, half-closed eyes, and she’d resolve to leave. She’d get up to say it was all over, then out came the second face with its eyes wide open, nailing her in place before forcing her to sit down again. She would weep listening to him speak words of love.
Shirin did not understand because she had not seen Alexei as a heap of bones covered with ragged clothes, and the young guys turning into skeletons and sobbing around him.
Yalo retreated, seeing how a human being devoured himself. This was the second truth of man. The first truth was the mixture of laughter and weeping, and the second was that he consumed himself. On the third floor of the Jeraydini Building, Yalo understood that what a human being offered himself at the final banquet was his death.
The voice was Yalo’s but the question was everyone’s:
“Who devoured him?”
Yalo looked around, expecting to find a dog or fierce beast. For in those days dogs ruled the war-devastated city. Yalo believed that it had been one of the wild or stray dogs that the fighters would shoot at for fun at the crossing points that divided Beirut from Beirut that had preyed on Alexei, but this had not been the case.
Mario said that Alexei had died from an overdose: “The bastard started wanting coke all the time. He started shooting himself up, too. Of course he was up there with one of his boys, he shot up and died. No one killed him, that’s for sure, who would have done it? It was the needle. I just want to know who was with him? And how on earth they could have left him like this? Hell. We’ve become worse than animals.”
Mario ended the discussion with his decree that Alexei had died of an overdose. But Yalo saw something else. He saw Alexei eat himself. He had bent over his death, and began his final banquet. He ate himself by himself. That was death, the last supper, when the dead man became the banquet and the guests at once. He ate without food, because he had become the food, and when the meal was gone he was gone with it, leaving behind only what was inedible. A skull, white bones, a laugh. That was what Alexei had become, a collection of bones, the remains of a meal. After Alexei had finished eating himself, he gobbled down his teeth. Nothing remained but a laughing skull. The mouth was a void, full of laughter and death.
The skull laughed and Mario wept and drank his tears. They all drank their tears and started coughing as if the tears were stuck in their throats and they could no longer swallow them or spit them out. So they sobbed and coughed and stood helpless before a corpse that looked nothing like a corpse.
“How are we supposed to carry him?” Tony asked, and pulled at Yalo’s arm to make him help, but Yalo didn’t budge from his place. He stood still, imagining the banquet Alexei had made for himself in this room with its doors and windows ripped away. Alexei had refused to hold his banquet in secret. He had not entered the grave to eat himself in the dark, he returned as a child to eat his insides, as would happen with Yalo after the night of the sack, when, seeking warmth, he would lick his remains and drink his tears.
But Gaby did not understand the meaning of the final banquet. She clasped her son’s hand and dragged him to the bathroom so he could see how her face had disappeared. “So, your image is consuming you, Mother,” he told her.
“What does that mean?” she asked, frightened.
“How do I know? Go to sleep, Mother, and be sensible. Forget the mirrors.”
But Gaby stood there as firmly as Mario stood before the bones spread out in the remains of the blue trousers and khaki shirt.
“Don’t be afraid, Mother, come on. Go to bed.”
“No, no,” she replied. “Look closely. Do you see my face in the mirror or not?”
“I see you, Mother. The image is clear. Get these black thoughts out of your head and look.”
“I don’t see anything, I don’t know what’s happening to me. Please, Yalo, tell me what to do.”
“God, what am I doing? Please just leave me alone and go to bed.”
Yalo told the interrogator that he had run away out of fear of her and her speech: “I ran away from her and her mirror. I was afraid she’d kill me with her stories. I was afraid I’d go crazy because of her, because of this war, because of this life, so I decided to escape. When Tony said, ‘Let’s go,’ I went with him to France.”
“So what brought you back to Lebanon?”
“I told you, sir, Tony stole the money and left me stranded.”
“And then?”
“Then Ballouna, from France to Ballouna. You know the whole story, sir.”
“No, I don’t. I want the true story.”
“I told you the whole story with Shirin. I am guilty, I swear.”
“You think you can make fools of us? I want the story of the explosives, I want the details of the activities of the gang and who its members are, and the sources of its funding, and who was giving the orders.”
“It has nothing to do with me and I don’t know anything about it,” said Yalo.
“Your memory isn’t so good, maybe we need to activate it. It looks like you won’t talk until we work you over. Let’s go.”
He said, “Let’s go,” and Yalo was taken to the sack, and there amidst the pool of his innards that had gushed out, he opened his eyes to see Alexei’s mother in front of him. Who had brought her to the prison?
The heavy, pale woman was sitting on the floor beside Yalo, smiling the feebleminded smile that had been on her face since she had seen her son in his coffin.
Mario and his two comrades, including Yalo, arrived at her house behind the Azarite Convent in the long, winding street that overlooked the St. Demetrius Cemetery in Achrafieh. The woman had seen death and the traces of weeping were etched on her face. Mario told her that Alexei had been found dead and that the burial rites would take place on the following day. The woman said nothing. She did not ask where he had been found, how he had been killed, or who killed him. She let herself collapse into the couch and apologized for not preparing coffee for her visitors because she was unable to get up.