I said that I hated my grandfather but that is not true. How could I hate him with his body like a clay figure and his failing memory? He is the spirit returned to the source, the spirit indifferent to stories. I will tell the story from start to finish. The beginning is over there, with my grandfather, who, returning to his beginnings, had stopped eating and had begun living out his deficient memories. At this point in his life he told me everything, but I did not believe a thing. How could we believe a crazy man who tied a rooster by its feet to a fig tree and then killed it, because the way it mounted hens disgusted him? The story was unbelievable, sir, and I am not asking you to believe it.
We lived in Mseitbeh, in a small house with a big garden. My mother raised chickens for their eggs. We owned one rooster and a dozen or so chickens, I don’t remember exactly how many, but I do remember how they died, and that’s the story.
One day, my mother came home to the surprising sight of our rooster tied up to the tree, humiliated. It was a huge rooster with yellow feathers and colored wings, and its crowing deafened the world. She didn’t ask who tied up the rooster because she knew. She went to the fig tree and untied him. The rooster surged up and laid into the hens, and what happened happened. I heard the crowing of the rooster and ran to the yard and saw an unforgettable sight. The rooster was screwing all the hens at once. I don’t remember how old I was, perhaps I was eight, and of course I counted my age by my identity card, being unaware of my grandfather’s forgery, which I discovered only here in prison, thanks to your plan to make me write the story of my life, which has allowed me to remember things I never remembered existed. Therefore, sir, I offer you this thought, for writing is the only way to remember, otherwise men’s lives would be limited to the present and they would live without a memory, like animals. I discovered that when I write, the gates of memory open before me. I know that you want me to write a short story, so I will be brief, but I am amazed at my memory, which opens up and takes on the memories of my mother, grandfather, father, Tony Atiq, Alexei, Mario, Shirin, and all the people I’ve known in my miserable life. My greatest surprise was ink. For ink flows involuntarily. Ink does not come from somewhere else. Ink flows from between my fingers, without stuttering, as if I were the cuttlefish that Shirin consumed. Now Shirin consumes me, and I see her gobbling the cuttlefish that feels terrible pains from my bottom to the bottom of the world. Ink spills from between my fingers and teaches me Arabic. I am writing now because Jurji Zaidan taught me language and writing. Had it not been for him, I would have been like so many who do not know the beauty and magic of language. My mother brought the al-Hilal novels from Elias al-Shami and I read them. Master Elias was infatuated with history books and with my mother, so he gave her the books as gifts, but she didn’t read them. In reading I found a distraction from my solitude. At first it was difficult, then the lines that resembled anthills transformed into words and penetrated my head. This was what was behind my success in Arabic in school. I have asked the guard here to bring me books, but all he brings me is the Gospel. I’ve nothing against the Gospel, but I wanted the books of Jurji Zaidan for inspiration. I mean, it is true that the story I am writing now is not historical, because Yalo is not one of the heroes of history, yet he is a hero; I mean, there is some heroism in his life. One hundred years from now this story will be part of history. But fine, I will try to write what I know, without forgetting my debt to Jurji Zaidan. He revealed to me that the Ghassanid kings had been Syriac, that is, they were Jacobites and Monophysites. When I learned this fact, I teased my grandfather, telling him that the Arabs were Syriac and so there was no need to blame me for my origins, and that I would not study Syriac because the Ghassanids prayed in Arabic and their faith was righteous. When he did not answer and tried the silent treatment on me, I said that he had lost his power. At that, the cohno seized on the word haylo, he asked me what haylo meant. “Haylo means haylo,” I told him. “Listen,” he said. “Qadishat Eluho, qadishat Hayltuno, qadishat lo yo muto. Translate that into the language of the Ghassanids, like a good boy.” So I translated it, though the truth is that I didn’t know how to translate, but I knew the meaning of the sentence because we prayed it every Sunday in church. I said, “Most Holy is God, Most Holy is the All-Powerful, Most Holy is the Eternal.” He said that hayltunofo came from the Syriac word haylo, which meant power. “Now, you are using a Syriac word without even knowing it. Half the words people use are Syriac. Those Ghassanids did not know what they were saying.” And he began to enumerate the words that were the names of the months, from Qilaya to Soka, Nahlo, and so on. . he could find nothing to defend himself and his dead language save admonitions that supported my mother’s theory about the flower that had bloomed.
The flower was now blooming in the ink covering my pages. The flower was blooming inside my body, which rose with Yalo and embraced the souls of the dead and sympathized with my mother. Sir, I must take her back to her house in Mseitbeh. If am not sentenced to death because of the affair of the explosives, which I will tell you about in detail, and I get out of prison, the first thing I do will be to take my mother home so that she may live, dignified and honored. Then I will go back to my first job, dovetailing wood. I thought that I had forgotten the craft, but ta’shiq is like swimming, it is not forgotten. You must know how to divide wood into two types, male and female, and join them as a man joins a woman. Nails kill the spirit of wood, whereas dovetailing returns its life by marrying it to itself and restores the fluid that flowed out when the trees were cut. Engineer Wajih told me that wood never dies because ta’shiq gives it a new eternal life.
Instead of getting upset with his son, Master Salim offered himself to solve the problem, a sign of blind Mr. Salim’s fine moral qualities — he was Cohno Ephraim’s opposite. Truly, how was it they were friends? Instead of Salim’s tying his son to the trunk of the fig tree, he took it upon himself to defend him, then tried to save the situation, which won him only ridicule. As to my grandfather, when he saw that my mother had released the rooster, he shouted that he had tied up the rooster because it was insatiable. We endured three days of quarreling, him tying it up and her freeing it, saying that he was just jealous. On the third day, my mother came home to find the rooster tottering around, tied to the fig tree. Its yellow feathers were dropping, and the rooster was dying. She asked him what he had done, and he said he had beaten the rooster not in order to kill it but to teach it a lesson and temper its sexual voracity.