“Now do you understand how you should write?”
“. .”
“Listen, you dog, I have here the accounts of all the people you attacked, raped, and robbed. Only they have gaps and I want you to fill in those gaps. So — write down what happened when this guy was unconscious, you understand?”
Yalo said, he tried to say, that he was no longer able to write. He said that he didn’t know how to fill in the gaps. He said that he’d confessed to everything. He said that he didn’t know.
“And afterwards!” shouted the interrogator. “Afterwards, don’t leave out the details about the explosives network, and don’t go slandering all the women in the world, you understand?”
“I understand,” said Yalo.
“So now fill in the gaps,” said the interrogator.
“What gaps, sir?”
“About Georgette, and you kicked that guy, and what happened then.”
“I did not kick anyone, sir.”
“Here we go, he’s starting to lie again! Watch it — we know everything.”
“If you know everything, why do you need me to write? Just give it to me, sir, and I’ll sign it, but please, please let this be over.”
Yalo saw three men approaching the tall specter trying to protect his head with his hands. Then he saw how the specter rose up. It rose and did not feel pain, Yalo transcended pain. He rose higher and higher. He saw the world like a circle, and saw his soul circling inside him, and felt something stabbing him in the heart with one blow, and stayed there, where everything was a smothered moan, and smothered sobs, and smothered screams, and agony that penetrated the bone marrow and muscle membranes.
The interrogator ordered them to seat him on the bottle. The tall phantom heard the order but didn’t understand what it meant. He saw the interrogator take a cola bottle, open it, then put his thumb in the opening and pull it out, making the sound of a bottle being opened. The interrogator drank from the neck of the bottle, then put it back on the table in disgust saying he didn’t like cola except with ice.
“And you, how do you like it?”
“. .”
The interrogator approached him and ordered him to stand up. Yalo guided himself along the wall, but his hand slid down the wall and he fell again.
“Help him up,” said the interrogator.
They stood him up, and two men supported him under his armpits to keep him up.
“Come over here,” said the interrogator.
The two men advanced with Yalo, dragging him by his armpits.
“I asked you how you like your cola. Tell me.”
“Me?” said Yalo.
“Yes, you! Who do you think I’m talking to?!”
“I like it a lot,” said Yalo.
“I know you like it, but how? Cold or warm?”
“Normal,” said Yalo.
“Fine. Let him stand on his own.”
The men left him, and Yalo felt the pain in his back and shoulders spreading down to his calves, and he said, “Ouch!” before finding his balance. The interrogator gave him the bottle and asked him to drink.
“Me?” said Yalo.
“I want you to drink the whole bottle so you won’t be thirsty.”
Yalo drank, and the reddish-brown liquid ran down his gullet to his digestive tract, causing successive spasms. Yalo stopped swallowing because he felt the need to throw up. The interrogator shouted at him to raise the bottle again and drink it in one swallow. He felt the two men near him. The first seized his shoulders while the other grabbed the bottle and poured it down his throat all at once. Yalo was suffocating. He wanted to vomit. He realized suddenly that he was naked from the waist down, and the two men were forcing him to sit down. He didn’t see the empty bottle placed on the raised wooden bench they called “the throne.” The first held the bottle while both of them sat him down on it. He was invaded with spasms that quickly eased as he let out screams from his throat and mouth, involuntarily. One scream and Yalo was on the throne. Shards of glass came out of the neck of the bottle and mingled with his blood, and he began to ascend, hearing only voices coming from distant places.
When Yalo awoke in his cell, he was a mass of agonies. He remembered that a doctor visited him and gave him a black ointment, he remembered the doctor telling him how that part of the body was very sensitive, as a major mass of nerves met there. He advised him to wash the wound.
Yalo lived with his long torment. His visits to the toilet were the most painful, because the constipation he had during the first days following his descent from the throne soon turned into diarrhea. His days became pure pain; he could neither sit nor sleep, not even on his stomach. Yalo mounted a column of light that penetrated him from below, and climbed it, and found himself far from the prison, writing as he pleased, not as the interrogator had ordered him to, but as he saw with his three eyes he had the feeling that he was perched on the highest place in the world.
I want to write the story of my life from start to finish.
My life is over. Now I understand, sir, that I was unable to write because I was clinging to a cord of hope. I was convinced it was possible, that something could change, maybe Shirin, M. Michel, or Mme Randa. Maybe one of them would take pity on me and help me rid myself of this torment.
Now it’s over. Hope is gone, and it is up to Daniel George Jal’u, and Yalo Abel Abyad, to write his story from start to finish.
Yalo is on the throne, as if it were a minaret, and his three eyes are beams of light reaching the end of the story. He sits on the column like St. Simeon Stylites, who sat on his column a thousand years ago in Aleppo, the city of my father, George Jal’u, a city I have never seen except through the closed eyes of Master Salim Rizq.
Yes, sir, I see Yalo there and I envy him, I mean I envy myself, because my soul knows how to contact the souls of the dead and to talk to them, and discover that vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas. Man lives in a lie and believes in lies, and makes of his life a lie to add to all the others.
I write now about Yalo, whom you elevated atop a bottle called “the throne.” Yalo is on the throne, like the King of the Dead. Yes, sir, I see him dead, and the dead do not write because they are dying.
You were wrong to ask him to write the story of his life. Yalo cannot write because he has gone to another place, where they do not write, where they have no need to write. I, Daniel, am writing, and will write everything you want about him and about me and about everyone. But Yalo, no. I want to be frank with you and say that Yalo left me and went far away. I am body and he is spirit. I suffer and he soars. I got down off the bottle while he still sits on the throne.
I see him before me. I approach him, question him, but he doesn’t respond. He says that his words no longer understand his words. He mixes Arabic with Syriac with languages I do not know. So how can I understand him?
I write in Arabic, not only because you asked me to, but because I am an Arab. For even if George Jal’u of Aleppo is not my father, Elias al-Shami of Damascus is. There is no third possibility. I lean toward the second option, even though this is an issue of no importance to me. My mother kept the secret from me. She said many times that she would tell me something, but she was afraid it would shock me. Every time she began the story she would stop with the disappearance of her husband or with his departure, and when I asked about the secret she would yawn. I never knew a woman who yawned like that; she hid the secret in her open mouth, which she would cover with the palm of her hand, then she’d walk through the house bent over as if she were looking for something she had lost.