I understand, sir, that you are asking a man to write the story of his life for the purpose of ethics and retribution. But what is the use of my story? And why am I telling my grandfather’s story instead of my own? Is it because the cohno killed his wife? Is it true that Abel Abyad, known as Ephraim, killed his wife, and that was the cause of his fear of everything?
The cohno used to say that a man’s body was a temple of fear. God created for the soul a body of clay to calm its fear of fear or of God. But the corporeal temple became a new cause of fear, because of the original sin. Man died because he sinned, and death is his greatest fear. We fear the body, therefore we must dissolve it before it dissolves our souls. We must restore it to its clay state and not be overly solicitous of it, see to it as a potter cares for his clay, by watering it and setting it in the sun. The body needs only water and a few vegetables cooked by the sun. All else is vanity.
In the beginning, the cohno tried to defend himself. He said that he didn’t want the woman to suffer. But when suffering came after the disease spread to her bones, he didn’t know what to do, and had to get help from doctors. The woman was taken to the Greek hospital in Achrafieh, where she died amidst doses of morphine, which failed to ease her suffering.
Yalo did not understand the silence between the cohno and his daughter — which constituted a dialogue between them — until he heard their neighbor, Mme Mary Rose, threaten her husband by saying that she would let him die the way the cohno let his woman die, without getting treatment for her. Yalo imagined the scene and saw it through his mother’s eyes, and understood how a person could be capable of reading that which had been erased.
When his grandfather described the massacre that took place in Tur Abdin, he said that he could read what had been erased. We have to learn how to read words that have been erased, that is our story, we, a people whose story is erased and its language erased, so if we do not learn how to read what has been erased, all will be lost.
In the past, I did not believe the cohno could read books erased by time and torn by history. But now I am beginning to believe him, because I have seen how Yalo read silence and erased words.
My mother began to speak erased words before her image in the mirror was erased. She used silence so that the cohno would understand that she knew.
Yes, sir, it seems that my grandfather left his wife to die. He took her to the doctor who diagnosed cancer in her left breast, but instead of checking her into the hospital to remove the affected breast, he took her home, bought a box of aspirin, and let her die. He told his daughter that there was no medicine for cancer and that it was better that the doctors not be allowed to cut up her body; his only concern was that she not suffer.
But she suffered so much!
Gaby did not use that expression, but she looked at her father and he read it in her eyes, and his tongue lost the power of speech. That day, Gaby invented the language of silence, and tried to use it to address Elias al-Shami, but the tailor did not possess the gift of silence. Only Yalo learned it, and his relationship with his mother proceeded in silence. He came home and read her sorrow, solitude, and love for him in her eyes, and replied, without speaking, that he wanted to live his life and could do nothing for her.
Gaby lost the taste for food. She told her son that the taste had stayed behind in the old house in Mseitbeh and that she had been unable to cook because she no longer could distinguish flavors. All foods now tasted the same to her, all having the flavor of bulgur. “That’s how my father was at the end, and now maybe I’m at my end, and can no longer feel the taste of my mouth.”
Gaby did not tell her son how she answered her father when he said he had lost all taste, because she was afraid she might anger the cohno in his grave. For the cohno was greatly insulted when his daughter answered that he yearned for Kurdish flavors because he was a Kurd. Yalo did not know why his grandfather was so sensitive about the subject of his Kurdish origin. For his grandfather, when he came to Beirut fleeing his uncle in Al-Qamishli, spoke Arabic and Kurdish, and became fluent in classical Syriac only here. He said that he had forgotten Kurdish, as if it had been erased from his memory, even though he had spoken it when the Kurdish mullah came to their house in Mseitbeh, to witness his son’s rejection of his heritage.
Was this story true? Or did my mother make it up? I don’t know.
What has been asked of me is simple, I must write out the details of the crimes I committed, with a short introduction about my growing up and my experiences in the war.
I am trying, sir, to exclude the details that do not concern the respected interrogator or do not serve justice. Therefore I will concentrate on just two points: the crimes in Ballouna and the crimes related to the explosives, as you asked me to. But when I ask Yalo I find him silent. So what should I do? I ask him a question and his silence answers me with another question. Is that possible, sir? If everyone spoke they way he does, there would be no more speaking!
I asked him, and he asked me, whether the crimes in the forest were more serious than his grandfather’s crimes.
Yalo did not kill anyone. He was capable, if he wished, to kill whomever he liked and bury his victims in the forest, and no one would have asked any questions. If he’d killed Shirin, would she ever have filed a complaint with the police? Or would Dr. Said al-Halabi have had the nerve to go to the police station to file a complaint against a young man who had caught him in suspicious circumstances with a girl younger than his children?
Now Yalo was a criminal, which was natural, and his grandfather was a saint in the eyes of people, which was also natural, but where was justice?
I was found out, sir, because I had not killed anyone, while my grandfather became a saint because he killed. Do you call that justice? I don’t think that we can justify the cohno’s crime as being well-intentioned, just as Elias al-Shami’s crime against my mother cannot be justified by his claim that his wife was ill and he didn’t want to offend her.
Does my mother have to die for his wife’s sake? Did my grandmother die because the cohno was ambitious and wanted to be an archbishop?
And then what was my father’s story? My grandfather claimed that Mr. Salim Rizq said my father was not Syriac, but an Aleppan. So what? I worked three summers with Master Salim and his son, the engineer Wajih, and no one told me anything like that. I think my grandfather seized on this story about my father because he knew, deep in his heart, that I was the son of Elias al-Shami. The tailor was from Damascus, and Damascus is not so far from Aleppo. That is how I became a son of the Aleppan, or in other words, the son of al-Shami, the Damascene. But this is not the question. The question is how George Jal’u agreed to marry a girl who was not a virgin. What did he do when the virginal blood did not flow? Or did Gaby wound herself and cry out in false pain so that the man would have the impression that he had opened her? Did she shout like a whore to give the impression that she was a virgin? I do not say this because I have anything against non-virgins, I am convinced that there is just one virgin in all human history, the Virgin Mary, Mother of God, glory be to her. There is no need for virginity because Mary suffered for all women. But Gaby’s false virginity led George Jal’u into a trap. The man lived in the cohno’s house like a stranger. Even sleeping with his wife was done secretly and quietly, as if Gaby were not his wife, as if she were her father’s wife. He told her that she was her father’s wife before turning his back on her and vanishing, which proved to be correct in the sense that I too became the son of her father. But how could the cohno register me as his son, bearing in mind that his wife, that is, my actual grandmother, who is my mother according to my identity card, died before my mother’s marriage? The only explanation is that my grandfather went and dated my birth before the death of his wife. That is, he committed forgery, which is punishable under the law. It is most likely that I was not born in 1961, as officially recorded, but in 1962. That would explain my backwardness in school and my stammering as a boy, and much more. . but, how did he succeed at that? Didn’t the identity registration official notice that he was sixty years older then I was? So, how? Was he the prophet Zechariah as he claimed, when he told everyone that he was struck dumb three days before my birth? Where did he come up with this criminal fantasy?