His grandfather left the table repeating his graveyard theory: “Why are you treating the boy that way, daughter? A man’s stomach should not be a graveyard for dead animals. Man is the image of God. What is this savagery, killing animals and burying them in our bellies so that we become like walking tombs. A man becomes a big graveyard. His stomach is a grave and his head and eyes are the gravestones. Then when a man dies he is devoured by the graveyard inside of him. His belly becomes his graveyard. Saints’ bodies do not decompose and worms don’t invade them because they do not eat the flesh of the dead. What is man, a graveyard?”
His grandfather spoke of tombs, and Yalo imagined his belly as a tomb for animals, and wept at his mother’s firm hand, which did not pity the little lamb whose raw liver had become a morsel she thrust into the mouth of her son, who was a weakling. She would trick her son by preparing bulgur with meat, telling him it was potato balls. Yalo lived for some time on this disguised food. That is what his mother assured him when he started to go to the Sennacherib Club to practice martial arts and bodybuilding and ate only meat and sought nothing in food but protein so that he might overcome his weakness and develop his muscles.
The war made Yalo forget bodybuilding, but it did not make him forget his grandfather’s stories about bellies and graveyards, or his life with the Kurds and the sight of slaughtered animals hanging at the entrance to the house and the smell of blood. The mullah lifted his cloak off the ground and stood with his feet apart to select chunks of meat he ate raw, with his womenfolk and children around him.
“I ate like them, pouncing on the slaughtered animal and dipping my hand in the blood. I was always hungry. The only thing that scared me was going hungry, I felt alone, a stranger among them. My brothers — his sons, that is — called me the son of the Christians and stole the food in front of me, so I was always afraid of dying of starvation. When I escaped, no, I didn’t escape, my mother’s brother came and offered to buy me, only my father, that is, the mullah, refused to sell me. He spat on the ground and said: “He is free to do as he likes.” And I don’t remember anything else until I was with my uncle in Al-Qamishli. There I felt I had made a mistake, so I escaped to Beirut and worked as a layer of tile. Then I received the divine calling and became a cohno. One day, kneeling at the hands of the lord archbishop as he was blessing me, I saw my whole life pass before my eyes. Don’t they say that at the moment of death a man sees his whole life rush by like a reel of film? I saw my life at the hands of the lord archbishop and I saw blood. I saw sheep and calves hanging in front of me and I began to weep. I felt blood dripping out of my eyes rather than tears. Everything tasted salty, and I even saw the calves crying. Before a calf is slaughtered it cries like a little child. I felt as if I were about to be slaughtered. I finished praying and remained kneeling where I was. I should have gone to the altar to take part in the mass, but I couldn’t stand up. I felt as if my legs were frozen, so I stayed there kneeling and weeping. Then the archbishop took hold of me, God rest his soul, by my shoulder and called me, ‘Ephraim’ — I had completely forgotten that they’d given me the name Ephraim, my name was actually Abel Abyad. And I said, ‘Who is Ephraim?’ ‘Tell me what’s wrong, my boy. Come, get up, your name has become Ephraim by the power of the Spirit. You must forget your old name. Spit on Satan and rise.’ I got up, and I decided that day to stop eating meat. My wife fooled me, the way your mother fooled you. I did not become the master of my fate until after your grandmother died, may she rest in peace. She’d mix the meat in with everything else, and tell me it was vegetarian, and I knew no better. But later I discovered, because after she died my body smell changed — the rancid smell was gone. I decided then to become like clay, to eat nothing but the plants of the earth, my basic food must be greens, of which the most important is what they call Arabs’ bread, or mallow. Eat greens and that’s all. How did you get like this, my boy? When you were young you were like the saint. Now you’ve become a beast and your belly is a graveyard.”
Alexei became a graveyard of his own, with nothing remaining of him but a set of bones and the ragged clothes around which gathered the sobs and exclamations of his horrified comrades.
Yalo saw himself as a tomb after the Alexei night, he saw his death in the form of shouts mingled with the claws that tore at his lower parts, and felt that death was a true mercy. The laughter of the officer who held the bamboo cane in his hand was like the echo of distant voices coming from beyond death. He tried to scream, but his voice came out as a feeble meow, then dizziness silenced him. There in silence he licked his excrement, unconsciously, as if consuming himself before sinking into the tomb.
That was the day Yalo confessed to everything.
What did he say? He no longer remembered, but he listened to his tremulous voice, knelt on the ground, and told the officer that he was ready to kiss his boots. He bent over the boots and kissed one. He did not see how the muscles in the officer’s face tensed with pride and exaltedness. The officer was enjoying his triumph over this man prostrate before him, who had become a heap of shit and piss.
“You are shit,” said the officer. “Listen to me. I’m asking you. What are you?”
“. .”
“Answer the question.”
“I’m shit,” said Yalo.
The officer’s guffaws spread through the room filled with a nauseating smell, they were like the lashes of the whip that had rained on Yalo’s back.
Yalo discovered that a man was capable of anything. That was what Madame Randa taught him. With her he discovered his body as separate parts for pleasure. She taught him how to kiss. No, the kiss was the first lesson Elvira had inculcated in him — Elvira who married Isa, the director of the Banca di Roma branch in Hamra, even though she loved Yalo. But the women of the war made him forget the taste of that kiss until Madame Randa came along and randified his lips.
Elvira told him that she loved him but was going to marry Isa because he was rich. Yalo was not sad. It is true that he loved this girl who was five years older than he was, but when she told him that she was going to get married, he felt as if he had already heard the words before, and that he had been expecting them for a while. He looked at her with sad eyes and then lifted her dress to give her tan thighs a farewell caress.
Yalo forgot Elvira the moment he was plunged into the war and its women. Where did they come from? Why was love like combat? And why did everything taste like sawdust?
The first kiss happened at the girls’ school. There Yalo and his friends spied on the girls as they played volleyball in short shorts that exposed their thighs. The boys’ gazes infiltrated the chain-link gate, generating the shiver that made their pants strain and erected the thorn that needed picking. Elvira jumped, her smooth tan legs glowing behind the iron network. There, Elvira taught him everything. She went back to the neighborhood with him, hanging back as if she were afraid. He waited for her in the afternoon every Saturday behind the school gate, and when the game was over she put on her short dark blue skirt and found him waiting for her. They walked together from Raml al-Zarif, where the school was located, to her house in the Syriac Quarter. She held Yalo’s arm and said, “You’re five years younger than me. My goodness, if Auntie Gaby knew that I had snagged you!” When he told her that he loved her, she stroked his back and said, “Go play with girls your own age.” She tightened her grip on his elbow and his thorn was inflamed with desire and he tried to kiss her on the neck. “Not here in the street,” she said. In front of her house she invited him up but he hesitated. “Come up, I want to show you something.” He went upstairs to find the house empty. He sat in the living room and she asked him to wait a little because she wanted to take a shower. She reappeared just after in a loose white dress, sat beside him, and kissed him on the lips. He bent toward her and put his lips on hers, and tensely imagined that this would be like a movie. Elvira pulled her head away and said, “Not like that. Close your eyes and don’t move.” He closed them and felt something probing around his lips. Again he pulled her close.