“Just as you say,” said Yalo.
“No, just as you say,” said the interrogator. “I mean, if you cooperate and confess, we’ll forget about this.”
“I will obey,” said Yalo.
“But if you don’t cooperate with us, you’ll not only be humiliated and tortured, but you’ll lose your Lebanese citizenship.”
What should I write? wondered Yalo.
Should he write about his true father, about whom he didn’t know much, or write his name as it appeared on his identity card? If he left out his true father, and later on he was accused of lying or concealing the facts, then what would he say?
The best solution was to stay out of it completely. He wouldn’t write out his full name at any time. He would eliminate his father and after that he would eliminate the tales of Mr. Salim Rizq, who was responsible for exposing his father’s origins. He would write that his name was Yalo and would eliminate his family name. He would cut Mr. Rizq out of the picture. But how would he explain his infatuation with Arabic script, oriental art, and the woodworking that had led him into Madame Randa’s arms?
The blind carpenter, who saw with his eyebrows and read with his fingertips, occupied a great deal of the storytelling of the cohno, who wanted his grandson to learn a trade, and who during summer vacations sent Yalo to work in the blind man’s shop near the St. Georges Hotel, where he sold the most beautiful authentic wooden Damascene doors with which wealthy Beirutis were then adorning their homes as part of the oriental ambience that was all the rage in Beirut in the early 1970s.
The grandfather wanted his grandson to learn to labor and toil, and to instill in him that by the sweat of his brow he would earn his bread.
Yalo worked three summers in Rizq’s shop and began to like the trade. He now looked forward to the end of each school day so that he could go to his woodworking. Yalo decided that his future career would be in woodworking, and that he did not need more education. All he needed was to know how to read and write, and he had accomplished that. Plus, Mr. Rizq’s son Wajih, who was called “the engineer,” discerned in Yalo a gift for Arabic calligraphy and began to train him in writing Koranic verses in the Kufic script, which was very much in demand at that moment.
“I’m an artist,” Yalo told his grandfather in the voice of the engineer that rang in his ears as the engineer trained him how to hold the quill and copy the Verse of the Throne.
But in the summer of 1974, when Yalo was thirteen years old, he did not go to work in the shop. His grandfather told him that he didn’t need to get a summer job anymore. “Summer is for relaxation. You should read, study, and prepare, because the coming year will be middle school, which is difficult and requires preparation.”
It was only years later that Yalo understood why he was not sent to the shop, when he put together the accounts his mother revealed of the circumstances of Mr. Salim’s death, and of the engineer and Thérèse.
Gaby said that the engineer’s wife did not attend the burial of her uncle, her husband’s father. She closed up her house and took her sons to the mountain without performing her duties. “How shameful!”
“So where’s the engineer?” asked Yalo innocently.
“Acting like you don’t know, huh?” said Gaby, resuming her disjointed lamentation of the blind man who endured his son’s offense with such magnanimity and courage.
She told Thérèse, “You are like a daughter to me. Come and live with me if you like. What more can I do?”
The son disappeared and it was said that he wanted to repent his sins so he went to Aleppo, where he decided to build himself a column near the column of St. Simeon Stylites, and sat atop it, like a Sufi, withdrawn from the world, until they arrested him and sent him to the insane asylum.
Mr. Salim told the story to his friend the cohno. Cohno Ephraim, who enjoyed a close friendship with Mr. Salim, begun after he arrived in Beirut, where he worked as a layer of tile in a workshop before adopting his priestly vocation. He told his friend to lay low if he felt tempted by disobedience, that was the secret. He volunteered to mediate with the abbess of Khan-shara Abbey, but she refused to receive him when she learned that he was an envoy from the Rizq family.
The cohno did not like nuns, and spoke of the need for a total separation between monastic and public life. “What is all this silliness? They say they’re nuns, but living like normal women. A nun’s place is in the convent, not amidst the public. They must live apart from the community,” said Ephraim to Salim Rizq as he told his friend about how the abbess of Khan-shara refused to receive him.
The story that destroyed Yalo’s vocational future began when Thérèse, a nun in her novitiate working as a teacher at the Tabaris School, came to the Rizq workshop to order frames for icons, and expressed her surprise at the beauty of the woodwork there, all without a single nail being driven. She asked the abbess’s permission to take woodworking lessons from the engineer. And so, along with a nun called Sister Rita, she became a student of the engineer.
What happened after that? Why did Sister Thérèse claim that she went to stay with her family in the village of Ain Dara, and had she disappeared for three days with Wajih in the Grand Kamel Hotel in the town of Souq al-Gharb before returning to the school?
It seemed that the engineer Wajih promised to marry Thérèse when, in the hotel room, he saw her long hair draped over her shoulders. But why did the postulant confess her error and come with the abbess to the shop four months after the hotel incident? When Wajih caught sight of them entering, he slipped out the back door. Mr. Salim found himself looking at a scene his eyes, closed for twenty years, had never contemplated.
After listening to Sister Thérèse’s confessions and her decision to abandon convent life to marry Wajih, who had taken away her virginity, Salim said that he did not know what to say.
The tall, fat abbess, who was more than sixty years old, said that Thérèse had incurred the convent’s harshest punishments. She was sent to Khan-shara and imprisoned for three months in the cellar below the convent, which was reserved in the past for nuns who had taken up with the Devil. “We left her for three months bound in iron chains, and all she ate was bread and water, and we saw that that was enough. We asked her what she wanted, and she said she wanted to come here. And I came with her to reach an understanding with the engineer Wajih.”
“But Wajih is married,” the father said, and burst out in a peal of hysterical laughter. “Wajih, my bastard, you’ve turned out worse than your father. Is this story true, ma soeur? I find it very difficult to believe.”
The blind middle-aged man approached Thérèse, whose tawny face twitched with fear and disgrace, reached his hand out to her face, and then grasped her small, perspiring hand. He told her to come and live with him, for he was prepared to do whatever she wanted.
“Come closer, Thérèse, my girl, what I want to say to you is, we are Catholics, so we don’t divorce. My son Wajih is married with two boys, God bless you and bless them, only, what do you want me to do? Come and live with me. My wife died so I live alone, and I’m blind. I’m ready to make good for my son’s mistake, if that’s what you want and if it’s God’s will.”
“You!” shouted the abbess. “You want to marry this virgin girl, a bride of Christ? You’re old and blind. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself!”
He tried to explain to her that he had not meant marriage, even though marriage was a shield for beautiful girls and a shield against scandal.
“How can you see in the first place, to say she’s pretty?!” said the abbess, her voice quavering and irritated.
“Yes, ma soeur, I can see beauty, because beauty sees me.” He pointed to the treasures of woodworking that filled his small workshop. “Do you see those? Those are me. Even now I’m still the one who designs the difficult jobs. I read with my hands, ma soeur. What did I say to upset you? I promise I have a good heart. I shouldn’t have said a word. What business is it of mine? It’s Wajih. And Wajih isn’t here. Please tell me what you’d like me to do and I’ll do it.”