Yalo

I believe, sir, that I have explained the circumstances that drove Yalo to make his mistakes and commit his crimes. Now I will try to write the whole story from start to finish. Consider me to be his voice, which he lost when he sat on his throne. He is there, not complaining or moaning. I am positive that he is experiencing a tremendous moment no one has experienced before, except those who have undergone the gravest tortures.

Do not say that he gets no credit because he climbed his column by compulsion. It is true that you forced me to drain the cola bottle and sit on it. But Yalo’s achievement was his decision not to get off it. I got off; he didn’t. I am in pain; he is not. My pains are great, sir, because fire burned the gate of my body. But I am convinced of the need for us to write the whole story so that we can remove ourselves from this predicament.

I want to write, but I am lost.

When I write about my life, must I write about my grandfather, my mother, and my father, or about my life that concerns me alone? I do not know. You want everything, especially the stories of Ballouna, the women, and the explosives. I think the story should begin with those events. But I cannot. Because ever since I. . since when? Since the cat sack, no, since the bastinado, no, since the throne, no. . since the torture I experienced, I can’t distinguish between the beginning and the end. By the way, I can only congratulate you on your original methods of torture and your ability to extract a suspect’s confessions, as if you were extracting his soul. That is, he feels as if his soul is leaving his body and he is back in his mother’s belly, which makes him confess everything. Though the torture is violent, the bodily signs of it vanish quickly, leaving only the spiritual traces that make you feel that your soul is about to leave you. I congratulate you, sir, especially for the bottle. The bottle is the conclusion after which there is no conclusion, because it’s long, I mean it makes time long, even endless. I sat on the bottle for about a thousand hours, or a thousand times longer than that. You say that it was just half an hour, and you are right, because you know more than I do, because you wear accurate Swiss watches on your wrists. Me, alas, no. But the bottle changed the meaning of time. I mean, I felt as if I were in eternity, that time was frozen, and that I was living the last moments of my life; yet that my life was long — never-ending. I wanted it to end so that the pain would be over, but it stopped ending. That is eternity. I will not mention the pains that are still with me even now, especially when I go to the toilet. It is not polite to talk about these things. But the truth, and you want the truth, the truth is that what frightens me most is my feeling that I need a toilet. There I go back to experiencing eternity again, and I smell my own smell, and I feel that pain has a smell. Yes, pain has a smell, and its smell is shit. That is what I feel and what I smell.

But I am very lucky, I feel that my grandfather’s prayers for me were not in vain. One of the prison guards here told me that many suspects died from the bottle because it broke in their backsides and they got gangrene in their large intestines, and all their insides grew inflamed. Thank God that did not happen to me. On the contrary, the bottle helped me a great deal. How can I explain to you — I don’t know. But your experience with prisoners must have made you capable of understanding what I am writing. For I was not the first to have ascended the throne of spiral glass, and of course will not be the last.

When I ascended the throne and the pain pierced me from bottom to top and from top to bottom, I was sure that I would die. I mounted it and death began, that is, I felt death. Death is violent and has a sound; something explodes inside you, and you hear a sound no one else does, and after the sound your body tingles and you sense that you are being dragged beyond white sleep. You are not sleeping, but you float beyond sleep. And then it’s over — Stop. Everything is dark, and it’s over. That is exactly how it happened with me. I am not lying. I am telling the truth, sir. Something snapped and I was beyond sleep, I mean, sleeping yet not sleeping, and then I woke up.

You took me into eternity and made me understand the meaning of life, because I tasted death, and drank it, from the top and from the bottom. I want to say, sir, that through all of these experiences, when I reached the essence of things, I saw him before me. Would you believe, sir, that my grandfather, who was also my father, was waiting for me everywhere? What did I want with him and his absurd story? But death, sir, when death approaches, it imposes its conditions. Death means that we experience things we never experienced, and the stories we have heard become facts. When I approached death, I became my grandfather and my grandfather’s grandfather, and all the descendants of men. I speak now from experience, so my mission is very difficult. I cannot write you the stories of all mankind that I know, but I wouldn’t know how to write them. Therefore I ask the respected interrogator to be a little patient with me. I will be brief and get to the heart of the subject you are looking for, but I saw another heart, just as essential, that I cannot ignore, so I will write it with the fewest words possible in order to be truthful to myself and to my soul suspended there on the throne of death.

When I thought that the story had to begin with my grandfather, I hated it, for I did not love my grandfather — he embodied cowardice and selfishness. My grandfather was afraid of everything, perhaps because his conscience reproached him so much after the death of my grandmother Marie Samaho, God rest her soul, of whom it was said, died because of him. My grandmother died before I was born, which was why my grandfather was imposed on my father — or my mother’s husband — to come and live with him in his house. I believe that the husband couldn’t bear it from the very first day, so he packed his things and fled the unbearable atmosphere of that house. He left because he never once felt that he was in a home of his own. The bed was not his bed and the life was not his life, and the woman was not his woman. My grandfather claimed that he had discovered by chance that my father, or my mother’s husband, was not Syriac but an Arab from Aleppo belonging to the Melkite Greek Catholic sect. Fine, what does that change? Where is the crime? And why did the cohno not discover the truth before his daughter married the man? My grandfather killed my father and trampled his shadow. Do you know, sir, that I do not possess a photo of my father? He was even torn out of the wedding pictures. Nothing remains of him — even his name is gone, because I bear my grandfather’s name. My identity card says that I am from the Abyad clan. So what am I supposed to say when even now I don’t know the difference between a person being Syriac or Arab. A person is a person, and we all come from Adam, and Adam came from dust. So why all these tricks? I do not understand my grandfather’s pains that made his mouth a graveyard of Christ’s language. What kind of foolishness is that? What, Christ does not understand Arabic, Greek, or Latin?

My grandfather’s fear cannot be described. My mother said that it came from his childhood, as a result of the massacre that was committed in the village of Ain Ward at the beginning of the twentieth century. But I am not sure of anything. Perhaps my grandmother’s death was the cause. I heard the news of my grandmother from other people, not from my mother. My mother spoke only rarely of her mother, but I sensed the presence of a dark shadow hanging over the silent relations between my mother and grandfather. Suddenly silence would fall between them and they would converse without words. I understood that true dialogue between people goes on without talking. Words do not express things — they cover them over. Now, sir, I understand why writing is difficult for me, because what is being asked of me is that I cover up the story, and here I feel deficient, for whoever wants to write must possess a double text, he must dub speech over the silence. As to when speech is your life, you speak in silence.