In his small cell, Yalo racked his brains, and tried. He longed to listen to a Fairuz or Marcel Khalifé song to get outside himself and feel like a human being again, but they refused to give him a radio. According to the guard, the decision was to keep him in complete isolation so that he could concentrate and write.
“But I just can’t write!” said Yalo.
“Have it your way, but I’m warning you, there was a guy here before you who didn’t write, and if you knew what happened to him.”
“What happened?” asked Yalo.
“They beat him until he began to shit like a bull, and they didn’t stop beating him until he was dead.”
“Dead!”
“Of course not, I mean, it was like he was dead.”
“And then?”
“And then he wrote. He sat behind the table and wrote about fifty pages.”
“Fifty pages!”
“Of course,” said the guard. “A guy has to write the whole story of his life. And a person’s life needs at least fifty pages.”
“How long did it take him to write it?”
“A month. Here all they give you is a month. Sometimes, if it’s something important and the prisoner is into it, they extend the time. But usually it’s just a month. And whoever doesn’t write. . misses out.”
“So you’re missing out, Yalo. I can’t write like that. I need a radio and cigarettes. I can’t write without cigarettes.”
“I can get cigarettes for you,” said the guard. “Give me some money.”
“I don’t have money. They took all my money away from me.”
“Give me the receipt and I’ll take as much as you need.”
“They didn’t give me a receipt.”
“No way. Here they give every prisoner a receipt for the money they’ve taken from him, and his watch, and rings, and everything,” said the guard.
“I tell you they didn’t give me a receipt,” said Yalo.
“Maybe your lawyer has it. Ask for a meeting with your lawyer, he must have it. And then I’ll get you anything you want.”
“But I don’t have a lawyer,” Yalo said.
“That’s impossible. Here they appoint a lawyer if the accused doesn’t have money. They appoint one.”
Yalo felt regretful.
Now he remembered that the interrogator had brought him a lawyer after the night of the sack, but Yalo refused to talk to him, saying that God was his lawyer, and that he needed no mortal to defend him.
The lawyer signed the record without reading it or speaking to the accused. He whispered with the interrogator, signed the record, and left.
Yalo thought about asking for the lawyer to come back to help him write, and asked the guard to contact the lawyer, whose name he did not know, but the next day the guard gave him a single Marlboro cigarette and said that he could do nothing for him. He had brought him the cigarette out of pity. “The cigarette might help your mind open up. I swear that’s all I’m able to do. Trust in God, take a deep breath, and try to write.”
Yalo trusted in God, smoked the cigarette after breakfast, and felt extremely dizzy. It had been months since he had tasted a cigarette, so now the cigarette revealed its real taste. Tobacco was better than hashish; it took you to the tremors of lassitude and of dizziness. But people made a joke of smoking by turning it into a meaningless habit. Yalo decided that when he got out of prison he would smoke one cigarette a day and get drunk on it.
He went back to his pages and reread them and realized that they would not do. It was certain that when the interrogator read them he would think Yalo was trying to trick him and would arrange for him the fate of the bull the guard had talked about.
Yalo never asked the guard his name. He had learned in his solitary cell to hear the sound of the silence that rang in his ears. The short, hunchbacked guard with the pale, scarred face had never directed a single word toward Yalo. He unlatched the opening in the cell door to slide in a meal twice a day, at eight o’clock in the morning and five o’clock in the afternoon, and opened the door at ten o’clock in the morning, motioning for his prisoner to follow him to the bathroom. It was as if he wore rubber-soled shoes, for Yalo could not even hear his footsteps. The silence around the cell was like a sealed black wall, so that Yalo dared not cough or talk to himself aloud. He whispered to himself, looking to the right and left, fearing that someone might have heard him. The silence remained unbroken until the day he finished writing the story of his life, which was too short and would not do. He didn’t know how to rewrite it. It was then that he craved music and cigarettes. He didn’t know where he found the daring to speak to the guard and ask for his help, but the result was not impressive: one cigarette and the story of the bull.
Yalo read what he had written and decided to tear it up. He shouldn’t have written about his father and the blind Mr. Salim Rizq, because it exposed him. The interrogator would tell him that he was not Lebanese because his father was a Syrian from Aleppo, and this charge would be added to the charges of stealing, rape, and the explosives. He would be accused of falsifying his nationality and impersonating a Lebanese because his father, George Jal’u, had not been a Lebanese citizen. “But I’m Lebanese,” he’d tell the interrogator. “The proof is my identity card.”
And that was the problem.
They had not believed him during the interrogation when he said that George Jal’u was his father and the cohno Ephraim his grandfather. What was recorded on his identity card was different, as his grandfather had recorded Yalo as his son for official Lebanese purposes. On Yalo’s identity card he was the son of Abel Abyad and Marie Samaho, and his mother, Gaby, was his sister. Of course this was not the truth. Cohno Ephraim had been called Abel in lay life and did not change his name on his identity card after he joined the priesthood and the bishop gave him the name Ephraim. The cohno had registered his grandson under his own name in order to give him Lebanese nationality, and to avoid the Lebanese citizenship law, which did not allow a woman to transmit citizenship to her son, even if his father was dead, vanished, had divorced her, or had left the country never to return.
When during the interrogation Yalo was asked whose son he was, and answered with the truth, he was considered a plagiarist and liar, and was brutally beaten before the interrogator was convinced.
“Fine, according to the identity card you are the son of Abel Abyad!”
“Yes,” said Yalo, “but the truth is that Abel is my grandfather. My father’s name is George Jal’u.”
“That is a lie,” said the interrogator. “We must summon Mr. Abel for questioning.”
“Mr. Abel has become a cohno and changed his name. Now he is Abuna Ephraim,” said Yalo.
“We’ll summon Father Ephraim Abyad.”
“But he died about ten years ago, sir, and I didn’t do anything wrong here. It’s not any of my doing. I had scarcely been born when he made up my identity papers. Let’s assume that he adopted me, and consider that solved.”
“That’s what we’ll assume,” said the interrogator.
“So that when they ask my name, I have to say Daniel Abyad, right?” asked Yalo.
“Exactly. But—”
“But what?”
“I told you that’s what I’ll assume temporarily; that is, I won’t consider you a Syrian citizen who falsified his papers to be Lebanese, I’ll consider you temporarily Lebanese, and later on we’ll see.”