Yalo sat down behind the green table, took the pen posed between his lips like a cigarette, looked at the blank sheets of paper, and wrote his story again.
My name is Daniel, but everyone calls me Yalo, I’m from the Syriac Quarter in Beirut. I was born in 1961, I’m an only child, I have no brothers or sisters. We left the Syriac Quarter in Mseitbeh in 1976 because the war had intensified and we were afraid of the religious feelings that were mounting. We had a big house surrounded by a garden with every kind of tree — loquat trees, almond trees, acacias, China trees, and date palms. We left our house without taking any of our belongings and went to the neighborhood of al-Mrayyeh in Ain Rummaneh. There my mother rented a furnished apartment from one of her clients. My mother is a seamstress, and her customer arranged the place for us at two hundred fifty lira per month and said it was temporary. I moved from the St. Severus School to the Taqaddum School. My grandfather the cohno was unemployed because in our new neighborhood there were no other Syriac families. My grandfather died of grief. My mother was without work in Ain Rummaneh, so she started to go from house to house to do day work. That is, she would go to a house and spend the whole day there, sewing whatever they needed, lengthening or letting out their clothes, raising hems or cutting cloth. She was paid by the day, not by the kind of work. Our situation became very difficult. I did not fit in well at my new school. The grades were all mixed together, and most of the students were from families that had fled from Damour. I left the school and joined the war. Tony took me to Achrafieh and there I got to know a guy named Alexei, who was a White Russian, and one of the leaders of the Billy Goats Battalion. Alexei asked me if I wanted to become a goat and I told him no. I told him I wanted to fight to defend my country. Tony laughed at me and said that I did not understand the language of war. He told me, say that you want to be a Goat. I said I was willing to be a goat, and I became a fighter, and I fought.
I fought because my grandfather urged me not to emigrate. He told me that emigration kills a man’s soul and makes him a wanderer. He told me about his emigration from Ain Ward to Al-Qamishli when he was fifteen years old.
My grandfather told me not to emigrate. But I left for France, and that was the cause of all my troubles. The truth is that I was tired, tired of the war, and poverty, and my mother. My mother had become like a maniac with her mirror and the ghost of my grandfather, whom she saw every night in her dreams. It was Tony’s idea to emigrate, and I was enthusiastic about it. The name on my identity card is Daniel Abel Abyad. But people call me Ibn Jal’u. I was born in Beirut in 1961. I worked as a guard at the Villa Gardenia, which is owned by Monsieur Michel Salloum, in the village of Ballouna in Kesrouan.
I started my new job at the end of the war. My friend Tony Atiq and I traveled to France. We fled after we stole the money from the Georges Aramouni Barracks in Achrafieh. In Paris we stayed in a small hotel in Montparnasse. It was a great place, and it was the first time in my life I had my own room. In our house I slept in my grandfather’s room. My grandfather decided it would be that way when I was five years old, when he ordered me to move from my mother’s room to his. He said that the regimen in the house had to be strict: men in one room, women in another. So I moved in with him, but nearly every night I would sneak into my mother’s room to sleep in her bed.
We stayed in the hotel for about two weeks. We did nothing. We strolled around Paris, ate in restaurants, and drank French wine. Once we went to the Pigalle district, and a French woman, I mean a whore, made me wear a condom when I slept with her. I hated it, and something almost happened then that never happened in all my life, which was going soft at the last moment. I hate wearing a condom. But here in France they force people to do that out of fear of AIDS.
I began to worry because we weren’t working. Tony reassured me saying that he would get in touch with some of our friends here to find us work, but we were in no hurry because Tony had plenty of money.
Then Tony deserted me.
I don’t know how or why. I didn’t even realize he was playing a trick on me. I was walking along with him, following blindly, and suddenly I noticed that he had disappeared. So I was alone in Paris, without a single franc.
The proprietress of the hotel, a respectable Frenchwoman, took pity on me. She communicated with me through gestures and with a few English words, and managed to explain that Tony had paid her for two nights for me before he left the hotel. She added that she was prepared to let me stay one additional night for free, and would give me breakfast for three days; after that I was on my own.
Tony spoke French but I didn’t. When that woman started talking to me I felt like she was throwing stones at me. I had that feeling until I was back in Lebanon. In France, I understood that words were like stones. When you don’t understand the language, it is as if people are stoning you or torturing you. With the Syriac language it was different. True, I did not understand it, but I felt it and I knew that I could get between the words and sentences to grasp some meaning. My grandfather used to talk to my mother in Syriac and she would answer him in Arabic and told him to stop speaking Kurdish. It really provoked him. My grandfather was Kurdish, no, what should I say, he was not Kurdish, but he spent his childhood among the Kurds after the Ain Ward massacre, and he spoke their language. Then he emigrated to Beirut and worked in tiling, like so many of the Syriac youths who ended up in the Syriac Quarter in Mseitbeh in Beirut. It was in Beirut that he began to learn the Syriac language. He had not studied the colloquial Suryoyo that people used every day; he learned the formal liturgical language. When he became a cohno, he began to use the formal language, but with me he spoke colloquial Arabic with some Syriac words sprinkled in. When my mother called him “the Kurd,” it got under his skin, especially in his last days when he would have long crying fit, and my mother didn’t know how to soothe him. After my grandfather became a cohno he stopped eating meat. Then his wife died of cancer and he became very inflexible, almost unbearable, especially in matters of diet, cleanliness, and morals.
My grandfather’s inflexibility caused a major problem in the family. I had not paid much attention to it, but my grandfather told me how Elias al-Shami had been castrated, and my mother went crazy. She went crazy not because my grandfather had castrated her lover, since that didn’t concern her, but because he had told me about it and exposed her.