It hadn’t occurred to Yalo to take her. He had rushed down because he heard the sound of a quarrel, and crying. But the man standing before him, half bowing, did not stop talking: Please, anything you want, take her if you want, but let me go. Yalo ignored the man, approached the window, and trained the light on the woman. It was a young girl, or so she appeared to his hawklike eyes open in the dark. She sensed the light and her moans increased. Yalo felt sure that she was not what her friend, who was around forty, had described her to be. Yalo retreated a step, kicked him between the legs, and spat on him. The man, doubled over with pain, started to empty his pockets of money. He held it out for Yalo. Yalo saw the money, but instead of pocketing it, again he kicked the man in the balls and spat on him. He gestured with the flashlight in his left hand for the man to go. The man got into the car, started the engine, and drove off, with the girl bent over beside him.
Yalo was surprised at how the girl had been content to stay with a man who had called her a whore. He should have rescued her from that bastard. But what would he have done with her?
He went back to his cottage and decided to wash up, and under the shower he imagined the girl to be with him, and what had to happen, happened.
That is how it began, sir.
The first time, Yalo did not steal or rape. The first time, he realized, after coming out of the shower and drinking a glass of arak and a tomato and onion salad with oil, that he was an idiot. He should have taken the woman and the money and maybe even the car, too. He got drunk and talked to himself, and laughed at his naiveté.
After the first time, things took a different course. Yalo did not plan out his operations, as his main preoccupations were observation and voyeurism. But he still descended on lovers every once in a while, and took whatever plunder God granted him. Yalo was not greedy; had he wanted to, he could have stolen whatever he wanted and had sex with whomever he wanted, but he was rather reserved in his operations and he savored them serenely. It had nothing to do with being afraid of the police, as he felt certain that none of these people would file a complaint with them. What would they say? Would they say that they were having sex in cars? What would their fate be, and the fate of their companions, if Lebanese law were applied?
Those whose testimonies the interrogator read had not told the truth. I am not saying that their testimonies were totally false, but they were incomplete. The police, sir, did not question them in a serious way, I mean c’mon! They all came with girls they didn’t know? That’s a lie. I swear to God, in my whole time there I only found one prostitute and I shared the money with her that I took from the man. As to the rest of the women, they were not of “unknown identity,” they were ordinary women. But the investigation was not serious because all that would have been needed was a single bastinado to beat the truth out of them, and they would have confessed the names of the women. I am not saying they should be tortured with water, the sack, the chair, or the bottle. That would be a sin, but if you had interrogated them, sir, you would have learned the truth of the lovers’ forest. But you were not interested in the truth itself. You were only interested in condemning me and pinning the crimes of rape and the explosives on me. So you let them all go their separate ways, and only your humble servant was left to mount his heavenly throne.
My forest stories are not all the same, but I will not relate them all because I do not know how to describe the difference between one fragrance and another, between one taste and another, so I will settle for spelling out the headlines, which is enough, because I am writing my confessions here, not an imaginary tale.
First:
I do not know the women’s names because I did not ask their names. I did not ask because I did not want to be asked; that is the rule of the game. So torturing me to compel me to name them will do you no good at all, because it will compel me to lie. And that is what I promised myself, and you, and God that I would not do.
Second:
I only stole what was offered to me. I confined myself to whispering, “Hand over everything,” and taking what came from their pockets. I did not demand their watches or jewelry, but I didn’t refuse them. Once I threw a watch away because it looked like a child’s watch, not worth anything; I saw the man bend over and pick it up, so I ordered him to give it to me. Then I saw that I had guessed right, it was worthless.
Third:
I would speak very little, and in a whisper, because I was intent on no one remembering my voice or my features. I would cover my head and face with the white woolen cap, and I spoke in a low voice because I think a low voice terrifies people.
Fourth:
I did not commit rape in the true sense of the word, only once. The man threatened me and treated me like shit, so I was forced to make him get into the trunk of the car, which I locked him into, then I dragged the girl over to the pine tree and tried with her, but she stubbornly refused and tore my shirt, so I threatened her with my weapon. The experiment was no fun because the woman was pretty well locked-up. I felt like my member was leaking, so I decided to stop having sex with the woman, but I didn’t succeed in sticking to my decision.
Fifth:
Only once was it actually fun, with a woman in her forties who was with a guy no more than twenty-five, or at least that was my guess.
Sixth:
There were more incidents of robbery than of sex.
Seventh:
I kept none of the stolen goods because I had decided from the beginning that it would have been a mistake to do so. That’s why I sold everything at pathetic prices and on any terms. I sold them in the jewelers’ market in the Aisha Bakkar neighborhood near the highway of the television studio. I determined not to deal with any one jeweler to avoid being found out, and I also spent all the money I had gotten very quickly.
That is, in brief, my story with the women in the forest. As you see, sir, what I did was not even one percent of what any other man in my position might have done. The wages were ample, and the automobiles thronged into the forest like mad.
As for the engineer’s story, which alleged that he was with Shirin in the forest, it is baseless. He was not her fiancé and did not come with her. Had he been with her it would have been completely different. Of course, sir, you noticed his greed and his rottenness when he was in the interrogation room, sitting like a deaf person at a wedding. He would pull a cigarette out of his suit pocket as if he were stealing it, instead of putting the pack of cigarettes out on the table in front of him like everyone else does. You, sir, put your pack on the table in front of you, and offered cigarettes to your colleagues and visitors — you even offered me a cigarette, but I didn’t notice it because my eyes were closed, a habit from my childhood. But him, sir — he reached into the inside pocket of his suit and pulled out a cigarette, because he is vile. I swear to God if I had seen this idiot in the forest, everything would have been different because I would have killed him. But God help us, had I killed a single person and buried him in the forest under the willow tree, the killing would not have stopped, and the forest would have become a graveyard like Ain Ward, where children were not allowed to play because of the cries that came from the tree branches.
My grandfather said that the reason he agreed to leave with his maternal uncle Abd al-Masih, when his uncle returned to the village to make an offer for his sister’s son, had been the laments of the willow forest and the white poplars that grew on the banks of a little river whose name I do not remember. That is where the whole story began, where I, your humble servant Daniel Abel Abyad, known as Yalo, was linked to the thread of blood reaching from Tur Abdin to the end of the world.