They read him his confession in Classical Arabic, and the tall young man signed them in dialect. The first time he signed his name in Syriac. The interrogator took the sheet of paper and raised his eyebrows, eyebrows were raised in the Jounieh police station and again in prison when the interrogator visited him several times to rewrite what he had written. This meant that things were not going well, and that the investigation would lead Yalo back to torture.
“What is this?” the officer shouted.
“That’s my signature.”
“What, are you trying to trick us? You think you’re pretty smart.”
When Yalo explained his signature, the officer exploded in anger. “So now you’re going to teach us Syriac? And you said you didn’t know Syriac.”
“I don’t know it, but that’s how I sign my name.”
“No, that’s no good,” the officer said, looking around him and raising his eyebrows, and Yalo was certain that torture was now inevitable, so he said he was sorry for the unintentional mistake and that he was ready to sign as they wanted. The officer looked at the clerk and ordered him to recopy the final page so that Yalo could sign it in Arabic.
Yalo held the fresh sheet of paper in shaking fingers and signed it: Yalo. Once again the officer cursed him.
“What is this shit? Why don’t you write your real name?”
“That is my name,” said Yalo.
“Take him away,” said the officer.
They put him into a truck and took him to a solitary cell, a small room four meters square with an aperture high in the wall covered by an iron grate, and to the right an iron cot with three woolen blankets on it. In the left corner was a green Formica table and white plastic chair. On the table were sheets of white paper, a fountain pen, and a bottle of ink. Yalo was to write his life story at this table.
Had he been a poet, he would have written that he’d fallen into a well of words, that he embraced the night, that his ink was blacker than the night.
Had he been a novelist, he would have written his memoirs in one single swoop and called them Ain Ward. The story would begin with the young boy who would become his grandfather, how he experienced the massacre of his village in Tur Abdin, how his feet led him to Al-Qamishli and from there to Beirut, how a layer of tile became a cohno, and how someone ignorant of the Syriac language became a fervent advocate of this language dying in his mouth.
Had Yalo been a storyteller, he would have sat in prison and told of the fearless Yalo, who’d fought like no one else, who was chivalrous and brave, then had experienced banishment much as his grandfather had, emigrating to France, from which he returned to become a lord among lovers, and, like all lovers, was betrayed.
If he had been.
But he was not.
He was Yalo, a young man trying to read in the whiteness of the paper his story, which he did not know how to tell, his language, which he did not know how to write, and his memory, which he did not know how to provide with a voice. He saw himself as a wild ass lost in the wilderness.
Had his grandfather the cohno not told him that Ishmael was the ancestor of the Arabs and Assyrians, the Christians and the Muslims?
“Yisma’ Allah, Ismail, means ‘God hears.’ God hears nothing but the language of tears. We are the descendants of Ishmael. He baptized us in tears before Christ came and baptized us with water.”
“He shall be the father of a great nation of people and shall dwell in the wilderness like a wild ass,” the cohno said.
“Remember, my boy, this verse is from the Old Testament, from the Book of Genesis. Memorize it, because you too are a grandson of Ishmael, and you will become a wild ass.”
Yalo wrote about this wild ass, tore up the pages, and started again. He immersed himself in the whiteness of the page that stretched before him like a vast desert.
My name is Yalo, Daniel Jal’u, the son of George Jal’u, nicknamed Yalo, from the Syriac Quarter in the Mseitbeh district of Beirut. My mother is Gaby, Gabrielle Abel Abyad. I am an only child, I have no brothers or sisters. I lived with my mother and grandfather. I never knew my father, and my grandmother died before I was born, so I don’t remember her at all, and my father I never knew because he left when my mother was in her seventh month of pregnancy with me. That’s what they tell me. They said he emigrated to Sweden, and that my grandfather kicked him out of the house when he found out that he wasn’t a Syriac. I don’t know anything more about him. I know that my grandfather, the cohno Ephraim Abyad, consented to my mother’s marriage to him in order to solve a major problem. My mother was in love with a married man, twenty years her senior. She worked for him in a sewing shop. His name was Elias al-Shami and he was a famous tailor. I don’t know him well. He used to visit us sometimes at home, and take me on errands with my mother. I remember his eyeglasses and his eyebrows, which were thick and gray. I was afraid of him and his black eyeglasses. Then suddenly he stopped visiting us, after my grandfather found out that my mother went back to her relationship with the tailor. My mother swore to my grandfather that I was not the tailor’s son, but the son of George Jal’u. My grandfather didn’t believe her, but what’s the difference? Whether one or the other had been my father, it wouldn’t change anything in my life because my real father was my grandfather the cohno.
My mother married my father when she was twenty, so my mother is only twenty-one years older than I am. I love her very much. My grandfather discovered that George Jal’u was a liar, and when my father decided to emigrate, my grandfather refused to let my mother go with him. He told him, Go and do your best and later on you can send for your wife. Now your wife is pregnant and has to look after her health. So he went and didn’t come back. They say he had not gone to Sweden but had returned to Aleppo, because he was from a rich Aleppan family that went broke. They worked in dovetailing and inlaying wood, but the business failed. My father came to Beirut and worked in the shop of Salim Rizq, who was blind. Salim was a friend of my grandfather’s, but my father robbed him. That’s how my grandfather knew that my father was an Aleppan from the Greek Catholic sect, like Mr. Rizq, and a liar and a thief. When my grandfather got mad at me, he’d tell me I was turning out like my father and I’d be a thief like him and I should go to Aleppo to look up my family tree, because I had no origins. Then he came back sorry and said I was his only son, since God had not blessed him with a son, but had given him two daughters, my mother and my aunt Sara, who married Jacques Kassab and went to Sweden with him. There they speak Suryoyo in the street, and they have Suryoyo radio and television, but that’s no good because a language separated from its land dies. God had compensated him with me; he sent him Jal’u’s son so that he could have a boy, and that he was like the prophet Zachary. He was struck dumb before my mother gave birth to me. He remained unable to speak for three days. Later on, when my mother was in labor, he spoke, and said I was a boy, and that he had seen the prophet Daniel in a dream, and that’s why they named me Daniel, and I was called Yalo.
My full name is Daniel George Jal’u, born in Beirut in 1961. I went to the St. Severus School in the Syriac Quarter in the Mseitbeh district. During the summer I worked in Mr. Rizq’s shop. Then the war started. We had to move to Mrayyeh Street in the Ain Rummaneh neighborhood, and I went to school at Atchaneh and then transferred to the Taqaddum School near the Myrna Chalouhi Center in Sinn al-Fil. In 1979 I joined the Lebanese Forces and became a fighter, and remained a fighter until 1989. I submitted to several military courses in Dhuhr al-Wahsh, but I didn’t go to Israel for training; I wasn’t qualified for paratrooper training because of my height. I am very tall — 191 centimeters. Some of the guys in my company, which was called the “Billy Goat Company,” went there and trained, that is true, but me, no. My friend Tony Atiq took me to a training course and told me that Mr. Nabil Ephraim was recruiting Syriac guys and that we now controlled the biggest barracks in Achrafieh, the Georges Aramouni Barracks.