Before the story got to the part about the rich man who asked the abbess for the orphan girl, who died leaving a huge fortune to her and her daughter, there were many things that needed clarification. But Yalo did not dare tell Nina that it was hard to swallow the story of the man placing his head on his pregnant wife’s stomach before being slaughtered, or that some of the things said to have been said sounded more like something from a novel or a movie than like something that had really happened.
Yalo was certain that over the course of this war the Lebanese had dug up the history of all their past wars to justify their madness, which made talking to them impossible. It was true that he himself behaved like a Lebanese during the war, and he was Lebanese and wouldn’t allow the interrogator to trick or threaten him with his father who was not his father and whom he had never known. Yalo had fought under the banners that had been raised, and swallowed everything he was told, but when Nina the Russian told him about her grandmother, he felt that he had taken in too many stories and couldn’t bear it any longer. Nina told the story as if she had been an eyewitness, and even repeated the same words the killer spoke at the moment he committed his crime.
“You’re my friend, I’m the one who’s going to kill you. Don’t be afraid. You won’t feel anything, just a little hornet’s sting.”
She said that the killer said “hornet’s sting” and that the night before the crime he’d come to the house of the victim and reassured him, saying that nothing would happen in their village, that their coexistence there was sacred. The man slept reassured despite the smell of fear that pervaded the village. The next morning he heard a knock at the door, opened it, and beheld the face of death. Suddenly the man was struck with horror and never uttered a word. He bowed his head, laid it against his wife’s belly, and died.
“A hornet’s sting,” he said before taking the knife and slashing the neck upon the belly of the pregnant wife who had not yet turned seventeen. Then he left, leaving the young woman to wander like a madwoman for days and days on country roads before arriving at the Russian nuns’ convent.
“It couldn’t have happened that way,” thought Yalo, as he watched the woman emerge from the wall with her distended belly, as she began running toward the convent in Tyre.
She knocked, and the nun opened the iron gate a crack. When she saw the round belly stained with blood, she slammed the gate shut.
She knocked again, and the fetus cried in her belly.
Nina said that had the Russian nun not heard the sound of the fetus’s crying coming from the woman’s belly, she would not have opened the door a second time.
“The fetus cried in its mother’s belly,” said Nina.
“Is that possible?” asked Yalo.
“Of course it’s possible, my son. It was a miracle, and the proof was that the nun was a saint. The other nuns began to kiss the nun’s hand that opened the door, because she’d heard the voice that no one but Elisabeth had heard. No one but a saint can hear the voice of a fetus.”
“But maybe it’s your grandmother who was the saint, because it’s the fetus in her belly that spoke,” said Yalo.
“No, my son, that wasn’t my grandmother, that was my great-grandmother. She didn’t hear the fetus crying in her belly, because God didn’t open her ears to it. Only divine intervention can open ears.”
Yalo said that he understood, but in fact he didn’t understand a thing. The young woman had fled her village and taken shelter at the convent, where she gave birth to her baby girl, and they lived there together, the mother serving and the young daughter studying. When the girl turned fourteen, the gentleman Nakhleh Sadeq met her; he was a Tyrian merchant of fifty who had emigrated to Argentina and come to Lebanon to marry and then return to his new country. He saw the girl once in front of the convent and fell in love with her. He asked her mother for her daughter’s hand, but she refused to discuss the matter with him. She said that she and her daughter belonged to the convent and that he had to speak with the abbess. The abbess summoned the girl, feeling certain that she would refuse the marriage — being the child of the miracle — that she would choose a vow of chastity and become a bride of Christ. So the abbess was surprised to see the girl agree to the marriage. Her conditions were that her mother should live in the house with them, and that Mr. Nakhleh not return to Argentina. The even greater surprise was when Mr. Nakhleh agreed to both conditions. The rich merchant married the girl, and she gave him her only son, Musa.
“That is how we became the Musa family, only everyone called us the children of the Muscovite,” said Nina.
“So you are not White Russians,” said Yalo.
“Our hearts are white and we love Russia,” said Nina.
Yalo saw the young woman emerge from the wall with her distended belly, whose bloodstains had taken on the shape of a fetus attached to its mother’s belly. The mother rushed into the forest and hid behind the first pine tree she found, then got up to run toward the convent of Russian nuns.
Yalo did not ask what happened to the corpse of the husband whose wife was forced to remove his severed head from her belly before gathering up her blood-drenched dress to go. Did the woman discard the head? Or did the murderer-friend not sever the head from the body but merely slaughter the man by slitting his veins? Who then buried the body? Was it buried at all, or left to rot by itself in the abandoned house?
To Yalo the story seemed impossible, but when he saw the pregnant woman emerging from the wall of his cell, coming toward him, and anointing his forehead with the sticky blood dripping from her long dress, he felt that writing this story was easier than writing the story of his life.
How could he write? What could he write? He didn’t know how to put the necessary distance between a word and its image. He wrote the name Nina and saw Christians and Druze drowning in their own blood. He wrote his name and saw his image affixed to the name, so he was forced to erase the image in order to keep writing, but the name vanished along with the image. Yalo found himself in the silence of black ink.
Tomorrow when the interrogator came, Yalo would give him the pages he’d written and say that this was everything; all the confessions were written down, and that was enough.
“I don’t know how to write, sir,” he would say.
Yalo closed his eyes and fell asleep, and that featureless woman appeared. She came and sat down beside him, and wept. Yalo became both men, the murdered husband and the murdering neighbor. He placed his head on her distended belly and heard the beating of two hearts as they mingled in a strange rhythm, and he understood what his mother had said about the sensations that men were incapable of feeling.
His mother was drinking coffee in the living room with her friend Catherine, telling the story of Elias al-Shami and her father, and weeping. After disparaging Elias al-Shami and throwing him out of the house, the cohno raised his finger in his daughter’s face and told her, “That is enough fooling around. Now I think you need to take control of your feelings, and cast Satan out of your body.”
She said her father was a man, and men understood nothing. The cohno thought that she was like him and that the incentive for her establishing that long-standing relationship with the tailor was to satisfy her sexual urges. Even Elias thought that. “He’d sleep with me and finish, and then he’d look at me and ask, Did you come? At first I’d tell the truth and would wonder why he’d ask when he knew that when a woman comes she’s like a fountain-head. When I said that I hadn’t come, he’d get upset and pout. Later I began lying to him and saying that I had come, so he’d relax and light a cigarette and puff himself up like a rooster.”