Yalo did not understand why they tortured him this much, or why there had to be the period of waiting before more unimaginable torture set in. Was this because of Shirin and the cars, the night in Ballouna? Why didn’t they prosecute the whole Lebanese people? Yalo was sure that everyone in Lebanon made love in cars. So why just him? Why were the other lovers not prosecuted? Was it because he stole? And who didn’t steal? His grandfather told him that everyone stole, and that one of the saints wrote that all the rich were thieves, so people could get rich only by stealing from others. “Look, my boy,” said the cohno. “Look well. Everyone is putting his hand in someone else’s pocket. Look well, my boy. You have to see behind things, and a man cannot see what is behind things unless he has the grace of the Gospel. Look, and learn how to accept grace, and then you will see. And when you see, you will discover that the greatest curse on mankind is the hand. Sin lies in the hand, and when a man puts his hand in his neighbor’s pocket, and the neighbor into yet another’s pocket, and so on, then that is society. That is why the saintly fathers withdrew from the world.”
“And you, Grandfather, why didn’t you withdraw?”
“Because I’m not a saint. I am just a poor soul. I don’t know why my life has unfolded as it has, or if it has any meaning.”
Yalo laughed when he saw how the fear of God make his grandfather’s hand tremble. For Yalo knew that things were different; the discovery that Yalo made in Ballouna was greater than all his experiences in the war. The war taught him death, but Ballouna taught him that everything was death, or resembled death, and that the hand was in fact an extension of the penis. He learned this with Randa, before discovering the darkness in the forest where the differences between the parts of the human body were erased. The lovers in the cars taught him that man could be like a sardine covered in the oil of sex. The cars were like sardine cans, and the people were curvy fish swimming in oil. He liked this idea and decided to add it to his first idea about writing. He took out a blank sheet of paper and wrote. This was the first time he had written anything beyond what the interrogation required.
He wrote, first, that a person could not write his life; he had to choose between living and writing. Yalo had chosen to live; therefore he wrote what the interrogation required. But he did not want to end as Jurji Zaidan had ended, excavating the lives of others; he preferred that writers excavate his life, that is if they wanted to write a love story unlike any other.
He wrote, second, that everyone desires everyone, and that his experience had taught him, as he observed the lovers in Ballouna, that most lovers committed betrayal or accepted it. And that even he himself, when he loved Shirin, would betray her when he got the chance, because “the scent of treachery is the sweetest scent.” He had stolen this idea from Madame Randa, who told him during one of her randifications with him that betrayal was the sweetest thing, and that she had begun to worry that she would get used to it and would no longer feel treacherous when she was with him.
Third, he wrote that all ideas were stolen, and that people spent their time stealing ideas from one another.
Yalo was cheered as he wrote down these three thoughts in the form of three consecutive sentences:
1. No one is capable of writing his life.
2. Desires are in desires.
3. All ideas are stolen.
He felt a strange relief, and decided to revise the story of his life. He would write it in a condensed and clear form and would offer two versions to the interrogator the next day: a detailed version, and a condensed version eloquently relating his life.
He sat behind the green table puffing at his pen as if he were smoking a cigarette, and began.
Sir, respected judge.
I want to add these pages to the story of my life that you requested me to write, and which you will find in the personal file of the accused, Daniel Abel Abyad, called Yalo.
Sir, I want to seek a pardon. For in the two months I spent in solitary confinement, with nothing but white pages and the Holy Bible to keep me company, I discovered that I am not Yalo the criminal.
No, no, I am not pleading insanity as criminals do to escape the noose. No sir, I am no longer that Yalo. I discovered, as I was writing the story of my life, that I am no longer him. The days I spent in interrogation, and my reading of the Bible, made me discover that I was reborn. For this, sir, I go back to the Gospel and all the holy books. When they say, In the beginning was the Word, that means the word was the first thing. And when I wrote the story of my life, I discovered the word that created me anew. I do not know how to explain that in plain Arabic, but as I saw my entire life pass before me from beginning to end, I was convinced that I had become a new man, just as I was convinced that the old Yalo was not conscious of the things he did. I mean, he did not fashion his life as he would have liked, he was like a hypnotized person and it would not be fair for a man to pay the price of deeds that he did not chose to perform. Yalo the tall phantom in a black overcoat, who descended upon lovers’ cars, Yalo who fought and killed, laughing all the time — he is gone for good.
I can assure you, sir, judge, that I have become a new man. I know my story because I wrote it, and I will write it again if you wish, but here, in prison, I feel that I no longer have any connection to the past. All I learned from the past was love. Yes, sir, Yalo’s life began when he discovered love, but this love was also the cause of his death. That is, Yalo fell when he stood up, and became despicable when he became human. Yes, sir, he mistreated Shirin and pursued her, but he discovered love. A human being, sir, is a man who loves. That is what my grandfather the cohno taught me, God rest his soul, yet he was the cause of our ruin. He forbade my poor mother from staying with the man she loved because he was married and cowardly and did not dare divorce his wife. Should my mother have been deprived of love because her beloved was a coward? My mother was deprived of love, and a woman deprived cannot give. I believe that this was the root of the disorder I experienced.
Sir, I fled because of the war, not because of the money stolen at the Georges Aramouni Barracks. In any case, I was tricked in Paris, because my friend Tony stole the money and left me stranded.
I fled the war because I no longer understood it. No, I was not a coward; I never once ran away, even when I was afraid. I would control myself and tell myself that I wasn’t afraid. Isn’t that courage? So I was courageous, and I abandoned the war because I was fed up with it. In the beginning I was like all the young guys. I wanted to defend Lebanon, and then I found out that I was fighting the impoverished, like me, and that I would remain an outsider no matter what I did. A human being is an outsider in this world and my grandfather would say it’s precisely because he was a human being. When I discovered that I was a human being, I fled to Paris, and I was tricked, and Monsieur Michel Salloum saved me. He gave me work as the guard at the Villa Gardenia in Ballouna.