M. Michel stood in the Métro tunnel and asked the tall, thin young man why he was sitting there, like a beggar. Yalo tried to tell his story, but he did not know what to say. He sobbed. No, he didn’t sob, but his voice was choked. The gentleman asked him whose son he was. He answered that he was the son of the priest Ephraim Abyad, and the gentleman exclaimed, “Son of a priest and lying around here?” Yalo said that the priest was his grandfather. “Come on, come on,” the man said. “What evil luck. Now your father or grandfather is weeping in his grave. Come on. Get up and follow me.” So Yalo followed him and found himself in an elegant house. He bathed, put on clean clothes, and met Ata. M. Michel gave his guest no chance to ask questions. He ordered Ata to come forth and bless Daniel, son of the priest Ephraim Abyad. The short, big-bellied man with small hands approached and greeted Yalo. Then M. Michel asked him for oil. Ata hesitated a little before turning his back. He stood facing an icon of the Holy Trinity, which showed three figures with halos of sainthood around their heads sitting in a semicircle around a table bearing three goblets. Ata turned his back to Yalo and approached the icon, looking like he could have still been seated, his legs were so short and his posterior so wide. Ata extended his arms, and a few moments later, oil began to leak from his palms and Mr. Michel exclaimed, “Holy! Holy! Holy! Did you see the oil, my boy? Rise and receive the blessing. Make the sign of the cross and rise.” Yalo hesitated a little, but he followed M. Michel, who approached, his head bowed, and took a little of Ata’s oil to touch it to his forehead and make the sign of the cross. Yalo imitated his new master and did as he had done, not believing his eyes. It was as if he were dreaming. When Ata turned around again, the oil stopped dripping from his hands. He looked at Yalo, and seeing the look of surprise on his face, winked. All Yalo could do was wink back.
This was how the betrayal started. Yalo didn’t tell his master about the truth he knew, not because Ata had given him money, but because he was afraid. He was afraid he would say something that his master would not believe and he would find himself out on the street. This was the betrayal Yalo regretted having committed. Yalo had met Ata in the alleys of the war in Beirut. Ata Ata — that was his full name — had been active in a group of Jehovah’s Witnesses, a religious group that had greatly expanded during the war before slowly disappearing. It was a group claiming to belong to the Protestant sect and whose members were forbidden from smoking or drinking alcohol. Their women were not allowed to adorn themselves or use perfumes or cosmetics. Their main teaching was to prepare for the imminent end of the world. Ata carried around religious books and distributed them door-to-door. Yalo encountered him for the first time in his house in al-Mrayyeh as Gaby threw the swarthy-faced missionary out of the house, because, “God forbid, we were the followers of James the Saddler and the Syriac Saint Ephraim, and here these types came to preach to us the religion that was born in our own country and speaking our language? How shameful!” Then I encountered him a second time in the Karantina Prison, where it was said that he was imprisoned for stealing jewelry from a house he had entered to preach in. He was released only after he publicly repented and severed his relationship with the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Yalo answered Ata’s wink with an involuntary wink of his own after witnessing the miracle of the oil, which reoccurred with the visit of Archbishop Mikhail Sawaya to Michel Salloum’s residence in the rue Victor Hugo.
M. Michel was agitated that evening. Archbishop Mikhail would come to visit him in order to confirm the miracle of the oil that dripped from the hands of his servant Ata. A French chef had come that morning and prepared dinner, and a Filipino servant turned the apartment upside-down to clean it. In the evening His Eminence arrived with his staff, and no one was in the house but the three men.
I was sitting by myself in my little room when M. Michel opened the door and asked me to come out and greet His Eminence. I felt extremely ashamed. M. Michel must surely have told the bishop about my story, and now the Q and A would start and I did not feel like talking. I thought of slipping out of the house because I’d had enough of the phantoms of the priests, and now came this fraud performing miracles, with an archbishop presiding. Only where could I go? I understood, sir, that my grandfather was the reason I was saved from degradation in Paris. Had M. Michel not fallen under the spell of miracles, he would not have looked after me. When he found out that my grandfather was a priest, he said, “Get up and follow me.” I got up and found myself sitting alone in a corner of the salon while Ata turned his back to his master and the archbishop sitting on the sofa facing the icon of the Holy Trinity. Suddenly the oil began leaking out of his small outstretched hands. M. Michel exclaimed, “Holy! Holy! Holy!” and the archbishop made the sign of the cross. Ata seemed to shrink while the shadows drawn by the candlelight on the walls created a strange ambience. The lights had been turned off on Ata’s orders. The electric lights were turned off and candles were lit. The shadows fell onto the walls and the oil started. Ata’s feet disappeared and Yalo trembled when Ata’s feet disappeared, and he nearly believed the miracle. Then he noticed that the man was kneeling and the oil was gushing more freely. Ata stood there, not turning his back to the icon, and walked backwards, his face to the icon and his back to the archbishop. When he reached the archbishop he suddenly turned around and bowed before His Eminence and kissed his hand, but the archbishop took Ata’s hands in his, then raised them to his beard and massaged it with the holy oil. At that point M. Michel fell off the sofa and knelt before Ata asking him to place his hands on his head. Ata placed his hands on his master’s head and then raised them up, retreated two steps, and folded his arms.
The archbishop asked why the oil stopped, and M. Michel replied that the oil stopped when Ata turned his back to the miraculous icon.
The archbishop stood and approached the icon, bowed before it in such a way that the fingers of his right hand touched the floor, then he kissed the icon and exclaimed, “Holy, holy, holy,” and fell on his knees. M. Michel fell on his knees beside him, and I heard the archbishop say that the icon was leaking oil, and then his voice was raised in this prayer: “Now release your slave, Lord, according to your saying Peace, because my eyes have witnessed your redemption.” Then the archbishop stood and asked Michel to turn on the lights. The living room chandelier lit up, and Yalo saw the three men shining under the effect of the oil.
I saw tears in the archbishop’s eyes as he was trying to sit down. Ata held him by his arm and helped him back to the sofa. The archbishop said that he felt dizzy, so M. Michel offered him some orange-blossom water, but His Eminence refused with a twitch of his narrow eyebrows, and asked Michel and Ata to sit by his side.
I was sitting alone in the corner, seeing them without their seeing me, and the idea came to me that His Eminence plucked his eyebrows like women do, and I nearly burst out laughing, but the archbishop’s voice froze the blood in my veins. I heard a broad, deep voice, which seemed to rise from his chest, say: “The Father, the Father, I see the Father. Look, Michel, look, my sons, the Father seated in the middle of the icon is moving, he is carrying the goblet and bringing it to his lips. No one has seen the Father without dying. The Father calls us to his kingdom and brings news of the second coming of the Lord.” He said that the Father raised his goblet a second time and the icon was erased. “The icon is erased,” he announced in his resounding voice, before falling to the ground.
I thought the archbishop was going to die. He flopped off the sofa and fell in a sitting position on the Persian carpet covering the floor, then walked toward the icon and knelt down, placing his forehead against the floor. Michel and Ata knelt on the floor, and I found myself kneeling and gazing at the icon without seeing any change in it. I don’t know how long I knelt but I felt that it would never end. We knelt in silence, hearing nothing but the breathing of the old archbishop, which sounded like snoring, then he began to breathe calmly. I thought that we would remain kneeling like that forever, and my knees were aching, and my eyes began to hurt, so I closed them, and after a long while, I heard Ata’s voice saying that dinner was served. It seemed that he had left us kneeling and went to set the table. I opened my eyes and saw that they had arisen, and I followed them to the dining room. The table was set, there were five place settings, five goblets, a bottle of wine, a bowl of salad, and a steaming platter giving off the fragrance of mutton. After the archbishop pronounced a blessing over the table, he turned to the empty chair and asked M. Michel whether we needed to wait for another dinner guest before starting. M. Michel glanced toward Ata, who explained that the extra place was left for the living St. Elias. The archbishop said that this was a Jewish custom, and asked that the place be removed. But Ata resisted, saying that the plate had appeared to him in a vision. He said that he had heard the voice of St. Elias asking him to leave him a place at the table. Then Ata’s voice started rising until it sounded like a little girl’s, begging the archbishop for permission for the prophet Elijah to sit with us. Annoyance showed plainly on the archbishop’s face as he devoured the mutton but said nothing. Silence fell and His Eminence took only one swallow from his goblet, so no one else drank.