“What’s this?” asked Elias al-Shami. “Come, come, you need another shower.”
She started to tie up her chignon again and asked him not to touch her hair.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m tying up my hair.”
“You’re crazy!”
He said she was crazy. He said that this hair needed to be draped over her shoulders, and when she tried to explain to him that she could not because her hair had to stay tied up in a bun to crown her head, and that it was let down only for the miracle of the Epiphany or her wedding day, the tailor laughed and said, “What nonsense! Hair is the soul of a woman.”
She tied up her hair again, fastened it with several pins, and wrapped it around her head. “Incredible,” the tailor said. “Incredible, you should leave it loose.” “It’s not done, Master Elias, it’s not done!” she replied.
She wrapped her kokina and left without looking back, but she discovered that her heart had fallen on the ground and she felt the urge to bend over and pick it up, but she got hold of herself and walked home.
And so Gaby began. She renounced the old Gaby, and put on a new image along with her yellow dress. She would discover in the street that led to Talaat Shahhada Street, where the tailor’s shop was located, in the Syriac Quarter where she lived, that the sound of her footsteps on the street had changed. She felt her hips and the curve of her pelvis, and her neck that drove her forward.
Elias al-Shami initiated her into the secrets of the world where her navel became the secret of life. There he had begun, explaining to his young love that the art of tailoring began at the navel. For when man first tied a baby’s umbilical cord at the moment of birth, he discovered that he could knot hides, devise fabrics and fibers. He told her the story of the navel and the dog. He said that he had read it in the Epistle of Barnabas. When the girl asked her father about this Gospel, the cohno cursed Satan and spat, and told his daughter to spit on Satan.
Spitting on Satan was a custom of the Abyad family in Beirut, and Yalo carried on the custom everywhere. Even here in prison, when he wrote a sentence wrong or he had an inappropriate thought, he’d feel a strange taste rising in his throat, up to his tongue, and would say, “I spit on Satan!” and spit. Shirin hated spitting, and her features contracted in disgust whenever Yalo cleared this throat to prepare his spit. When he tried to explain to her that he had to spit on Satan, because he was the one who had first spit on humankind, the look of disgust around her eyes grew even more intense. But Yalo felt that he had to spit in order not to vomit. Then he understood that he had earlier suffered from stomach ulcers. The ulcers were accompanied by his scalp turning dry and scabrous, and both conditions derived from terror. Yalo did not deny that during the civil war, he had begun to distinguish between terror and fear. Yalo could never forget his first night at the Sodeco checkpoint on the Green Line in Beirut when the shooting started and he felt unable to control his bowels and that his knees were going to give out. He crept over to the corner of the checkpoint, squatted, and defecated. No one saw him. All the guys were busy fighting while he was busy shitting, as Alexei told him the next day when the odor was obvious. The word shit would have become part of his name had the Goat Battalion not withdrawn from Sodeco and taken up a new position near the museum. There, at the museum line, Yalo learned how to be afraid without losing control of his bowels, though at the beginning of every exchange of gunfire he felt the need to urinate. He controlled himself in the beginning, then when he was nearly losing control, he joked to the guys that he was going to piss on the enemy. When he saw their looks of bewilderment, he came out from behind the barricade, squatted, and pissed under the volleys of bullets.
“Why do you piss that way, like the Bedouin?” asked Tony.
Yalo replied that this was the humanitarian way to urinate: “We have to squat rather than flaunt what God has given us,” said Yalo, repeating his grandfather’s saying.
It was during the war that Yalo learned the difference between fear and terror. A fighter might be afraid, but an ordinary person would be terror-struck. That was why Yalo chose to be a fighter. He fought to inflict rather than feel terror. It’s true that he was afraid, but fear was nothing compared to the terror that paralyzed a man and made his mind a blank.
When Yalo was eleven, and a shell landed in the street where he was playing, he was not afraid, but he was terror-struck and froze on the spot. A few days after that, white scabs formed on his scalp and everyone said that he was in danger of going bald, and a burning taste was coming up from his stomach. His mother took him to the doctor, who said it was caused by terror. He asked Yalo what had happened, but the boy could no longer remember. The image of the girl Najwa, with whom he had been playing ball in front of his house, had been erased from his memory when the shell landed and the girl had been torn to pieces. Yalo didn’t remember the incident. He listened to his mother tell him about it. She told the doctor that her son had been deaf and dumb for two days, then began to vomit a green fluid and the white patch started to grow on his scalp.
The doctor said it was terror and prescribed a yellow ointment for Yalo’s head and a black liquid for him to drink every morning before breakfast for the ulcers. This was the cause of the small white puncture prominent on Yalo’s right temple, which he called his third eye.
“I have three eyes,” he told Shirin.
“How did you see me?” she asked.
“I have three eyes,” he said, and pointed to the white puncture on his temple.
“I have a white eye in my black hair, but someday when I go gray, I don’t know what will happen to this eye,” he said smiling. Shirin grimaced before letting out a smile and accepted his offer of a cup of coffee in a nearby café.
She asked him about the eye that resembled a white puncture and he told her that he didn’t remember the incident, that he had even forgotten the features of the girl who was killed. He told her he had not heard a thing — he hadn’t even heard the impact of the shell. “That is terror,” he said. “Terror is when you forget.” The young woman lit a cigarette, took a deep draw, coughed, and then the cigarette trembled in her fingers.
“So you mean to tell me that you were terrified, and that’s why you don’t remember a thing about the incident?”
“I told you I forgot because of the terror. Why don’t you believe me?”
“And why don’t you, too, believe me when I tell you I forgot everything that happened in Ballouna? You have to understand — I was terrified, too.”
“Terrified!” He repeated the word several times, softly. “But you reached out, and your arms smelled like incense.”
Had Shirin said that, or had Yalo heard, in his solitude, silence, and grief, voices coming from the depth of his imagination, meaning that he could no longer distinguish between reality and illusion?
Yalo did not tell her about the shell and the girl’s death. He said it was his third eye; a third eye only grew for those who possessed the ability to see things from their various angles, then felt the green rising from his insides up to his esophagus, so he spat on Satan, and asked her to spit. Shirin irritably put out her cigarette in her coffee cup, swallowed her own saliva, and then left.