“He drinks blood?”
“Of course he drinks blood, he’s a cohno. At mass he drinks the blood of Christ, he puts sweet wine and water into the chalice and drinks it.”
“That’s wine. You scared me. I don’t know why I still believe you.”
“No, it is not wine, it becomes blood,” said Yalo, but he didn’t tell her that he was afraid at mass. He would close his eyes and open his mouth to take the host, he would feel the taste of blood, and become dizzy. He wanted to tell her about his grandfather’s wonders, about the miracle of the Kurdish mullah, about Alexei and his mother the Muscovite. But he felt that every conversation with Shirin opened up innumerable empty spaces within him, and he was incapable of filling them. The words would pour out of him, yet he realized that he was saying nothing because he was unable to speak of a clear and simple concept — his love for her.
“But you don’t know me,” she said.
“I know everything,” he answered her. “Love is the greatest knowledge.” He wanted to tell her that her smell never left him and that he was ready to change his life for her, and that he was not just a thief or villa guard; circumstances had made him what he was. He would open a fine woodworking shop. But he didn’t say any of that. Speech needed something, something beyond what Yalo was going to learn in his solitary cell. Speech required a ruse, and ruses only came to him here, when he was trapped between two walls: the gray prison wall with its peeling paint, with numerous fissures and gaps that took on human shapes at night, and the wall of the white pages placed before him so that he could write the story of his life. Yalo had not known that this method of extracting confessions from a suspect was the most prevalent method in the Arab world for political prisoners, after the traditional torture parties. A prisoner found himself facing an empty cola bottle, and was forced to sit naked upon the bottle. If he succeeded in avoiding death by septicemia or blood loss, he was given a sheaf of white pages and was asked to write the story of his life. This was when the real torture began, for the act of writing became an instrument of death and a path to suicide. The words became like knives stabbing the one who bore them. So the prisoner tumbled into the pit he had dug himself, slipping on his words, falling into his blood, which had taken on the color of ink, and sniffing his own blood.
Yalo had not known the smell of his own blood, before he went to prison. Even when he stood in front of Alexei’s bones, bereft of their flesh, and listened to the stories of Nina the Russian, he did not smell the odor he now smelled in his cell as he tried to cheat death by writing the story of his death.
The image of Nina came back to him in the cell, as if she had sprung from the wall.
“Are you Russians, auntie?” Yalo asked her as he drank the rosewater mixed with sugar specially prepared by the Muscovite.
“It’s for the feast day of the living prophet Elias,” the woman said, pointing to the rosewater. “We drink rosewater with crushed ice — not because the feast day comes in July, when it’s hot, no, because Elias is the prophet of fire. He ascended to heaven in his chariot drawn by steeds of fire. Ice with sugar for the fire. Before the feast of the prophet Elias I can’t make rosewater. Rosewater, my son, is the essence of our local red rose whose hue is like fire. We pour fire over ice and drink it on the feast of fire. Drink up, my son.”
“Thank you, thank you,” said Yalo, and took a sip of the magical drink that refreshed the soul, hesitating a little before returning to his question.
“Are you Russians, auntie?”
“And you, my son, where are you from.”
“From here.”
“And before here?”
“We’re from Ain Ward, that’s what my grandfather says. That’s a village in Tur Abdin.”
“Abu Alexei, may God have mercy on him, was from Mardin,” said the Russian woman. “That’s why he didn’t speak Syriac. The people of Mardin speak only Arabic. When he proposed to me, I told him I would not have a Syriac. He told me he was Syriac but at the same time he wasn’t Syriac, and we were married.”
“So you are Syriacs?” asked Yalo.
“They are, sort of, my husband’s family. Me, no.”
“Are you Russian?”
“That’s what they say. They call us the children of the Muscovite, but we’re Arabs. Someday I’ll tell you the story of my grandmother’s grandmother. She was the Muscovite, and it’s from her time that the label stuck to us, and that’s why I named my son Alexei. His father wanted to name him Iskandar, but I said, No, Iskandar means Alexei, this way the boy will have a Russian name, like the czars. What’s better than the czars?”
Yalo entered the cloak of sleep. He wrapped himself up on the iron cot in the corner of the cell, closed his eyes, and saw the specter of the pregnant woman running in her long dress stained with blood. The woman had emerged from the wall, he saw her. The image of her began with her belly, stained with blood, a belly distended with a fetus in its sixth month, it emerged from the cracks in the wall in its black dress spotted with black blood.
The image began with the color black, soon replaced by white. The dress became white and blood spread into its folds, as if the blood were tracing the fetus’s head and its stupified expression in the face of death, while the woman’s face was indistinct, as if covered by a pale yellow stain.
The woman emerged from the wall and started rushing through narrow streets. Suddenly the streets vanished and the woman was alone in the wilderness before she reached the outskirts of the city of Tyre. She stood before a walled structure. She knocked at the gate and a nun opened it, then slammed the iron gate in her face. But the white, bloodstained dress sounded again, emitting a noise like the cry of a baby. The nun reopened the gate, grasped the woman by the arm, and brought her into the convent.
The morsels of the story Yalo had heard from Nina the Russian became a picture on the wall of his cell. At night, the picture came off the wall and rushed off in search of the convent of Russian Orthodox nuns in Tyre that would take her in with her fetus crying in her belly, and that would save its life and hers.
Yalo couldn’t remember the story in a coherent manner. Nina gave the name of the village, and told how the man had been slaughtered, his head upon his wife’s belly, but now Yalo couldn’t remember the name, nor did he know how to explain what happened in 1860, in the massacre that inaugurated a chain of massacres throughout Lebanon. They said that when the Russian Orthodox nun heard the crying of the fetus in the pregnant woman’s belly as blood flooded around it, she went into a stupor. She had no choice but to reopen the gate and allow the woman to stay at the convent, where she gave birth to her only daughter.
“That girl was my great-grandmother, and they used to call her the Muscovite because she was born in the Russian nuns’ convent in Tyre. Her children and grandchildren were called the children of the Muscovite. That became our name.”
What happened on that hot July day in 1860?
Yalo drew a picture of the village in his mind and called it “Nina’s town.” There in the village that slumbered on the slope of Mount Hermon began the massacre in the house of the woman in her sixth month of pregnancy.
A man with a rifle came in and told the pregnant woman’s husband that he was his friend, so he would be the one to kill him, rather than letting anyone else torture him before killing him. He placed the man’s neck against his young, pregnant wife’s belly, and slaughtered him with a knife, like a sheep. The blood spurted and penetrated the woman’s insides, and she lost the power of speech. She ran out of her house, to find herself in the convent of Russian nuns in Tyre, where she gave birth to her daughter.