“Listen to this poem,” he said. “Mansurati used to sit in the barracks and sing, and we’d sing with him. He immediately entranced with his voice and his lute. Never in my life was I able to hit the right note, my voice was terminally off-key. But Mansurati — my God. When he picked up his lute and started singing, I felt the soul of the world, I can’t even describe it. Don’t you feel that way when you hear music?”
She replied in a murmur that the kind of music that moved the soul of the world was classical music. She said she loved Bach, and thought that songs were a violation of music.
“You don’t like Nizar Qabbani?” he asked her.
“I’m not talking about Arabic poetry,” she said. “Even Jacques Brel — you know Jacques Brel?”
He nodded to say that yes, he did, but his incomprehension was clear from the way his eyebrows knitted together in his effort to show he knew.
“What are you talking about?” he said.
“I was saying that even with Jacques Brel, whose songs are complex, I feel like he’s lowering the standard of music when he puts in words and meanings.”
“But listen to what I’m going to recite for you,” he said. “It’s the most beautiful song in the world, even more beautiful than Abd al-Halim Hafiz. Listen.”
And he drew his head back to rest his temple on his right hand before reciting the poem in a heightened voice:
In Achrafieh, the day I was there and came to her,
I surrendered my life to your lips
And I tasted the fruit, what a taste!
If not succulent grapes
Something very similar.
Were it not for her sweetness in love and
My tenderness in love,
I would have eaten those lips and feasted on them.
He began to tremble: “— feasted. . fea. . sted. . on. . them. Isn’t that lovely? That was our song in the barracks. We sang “feasted” and everyone interpreted it his own way. Alexei took out the f and put in a b, and Mansurati got mad. I swear to God he was a great artist. I don’t know what happened. He said that he was fed up with the war, that he wanted to be a performer. Of course all of us were fed up with the war, but not everyone who got fed up became a performer, it’s not like that.”
Yalo laughed, thinking he had said something funny, but when he saw no trace of a smile on her lips, he became serious again and told her about the fish and the war.
When he recalled how he remembered this incident, he was dumbstruck. For the fish full of blood had sunk into his memory as if it had never happened, and when she tried to wipe the red from her lips so she wouldn’t mess up her lips, the fish woke up and the story came back.
He remembered the fish’s head, its two quicksilver eyes, and its mouth opening and shutting as if it wanted to say something but couldn’t. The cohno’s friend Munir Shammo, who was retired from his tiling work and now spent his days fishing, showed up early that Saturday morning with a fish in his basket. He put it in the kitchen and left. When Gaby came into the kitchen, she cursed her luck for being the one who had to clean the hideous black fish, full of bones, the fish called in Lebanon “the Bolshevik.” But she froze in her tracks and screamed when she saw the fish wriggling and flapping on the kitchen floor. The fish had flipped itself off the counter to the floor. Hearing his daughter’s cry, the grandfather hurried in and saw it too.
“The fish is talking to God,” he said, and knelt to pick it up, but the fish slid out of his hands. The fish was almost a meter long, its gray scales were spattered with white spots, and its eyes were shining with life. Ephraim bent to the floor and took it in his arms as if he were picking up a child, and said that he was going to return it to the sea, but the fish fell from his embrace. The cohno backed away and said he was going to fetch the fisherman. Yalo could not remember where his mother had disappeared to, but he found himself alone with the fish in the kitchen. He approached it, but slipped and fell, landing on the head of the fish, and blood began to flow. Of the black coffee grinds his mother used to stanch the blood and of the carnage that had spilled across the sink, Yalo couldn’t remember a thing. All he remembered was his grandfather weeping over the fish whose blood had splashed and stained the sink and the kitchen wall.
“You butchered it!” exclaimed the cohno. “Why, daughter? Who butchers a fish?”
Gaby had sliced open the fish’s belly, scooped out the insides, and begun to pare off the scales with a large knife when the cohno came back accompanied by Munir Shammo.
Blood streamed from the butchered fish, which continued to tremble in Gaby’s hands, which were busy scaling it as she commented that this was the best fish she had ever seen in her life. She said that she’d get three meals out of it. She’d fry the bottom half for lunch, grill the upper half for Sunday, and the huge head would be cooked in a rice pilaf — a fisherman’s dish.
“Bless your hands, Uncle Munir. Please join us for three meals of fish.”
The grandfather kept lamenting the butchered fish, and left the house with his friend. He came back late in the evening and announced that he had given up eating fish.
“That’s how my grandfather stopped eating fish, even cuttlefish he wouldn’t eat, although cuttlefish are full of ink — there isn’t a drop of blood in their veins.
“You know that in France they eat blood?”
“What?!” Shirin exclaimed.
“I’m telling you, they eat blood. M. Michel let me taste something called boudin; he said they stuff a pig’s intestines with blood and eat it.”
“You ate it?”
“Of course. Why not? And then I lived in a house where they drank blood almost every day.”
“You all ate blood?” she asked, a look of nausea on her face; she turned away and scowled, and then grabbed a tissue to wipe the red from her lips.
“No, don’t wipe off the red. I love the red.”
She looked at her watch. When Shirin looked at her watch it meant she had made up her mind to leave. He surprised her then with his question about whether she believed in God.
“Of course. Of course,” she said.
“And you go to the ‘atdo?”
“The what?”
“You go to church?”
“Not all the time. But of course at Christmas and Good Friday. So, like everybody.”
“And you take the sacrament?”
“Kind of. Sometimes.”
“And when you take it, what do you feel?”
“What’s with these stupid questions? C’mon, let’s go.”
“No, let’s not go. I’m asking you a question. Answer.”
“Fine. I open my mouth and I eat the host.”
“And blood!”
She said that it was just a symbol. The wine did not become blood in the mass except symbolically.
“That’s not true,” said Yalo. “The mass is a sacrifice, which means a slaughter, a real slaughter. I know that.”
“You don’t know anything,” she said.
She said that she didn’t like discussing religion because she didn’t understand anything about it, but she believed in God and that was enough.
“Of course that’s enough,” said Yalo. “But I was telling you about the cohno, my grandfather, being vegetarian, but he drinks blood every day.”