She paid and went out without her escorting him to Sassine Square where his car was parked. She got into the car without opening the door for him, started the engine, and left. Yalo was left standing on the sidewalk of the narrow street. She said she was busy and had to get back to work. But this was insolence! That’s what he would tell her on the phone the next day, though instead of her reply he would hear the sound of the line going dead as she hung up on him. He would call her back dozens of times but never hear anything. Yalo was sure that she was hanging up the phone every time she heard his voice saying allo into the receiver. He began to dial the number, and when she lifted the receiver he was quiet and tried not to breathe. But she did not even say allo. She let the silence hang over the telephone receiver, then hung up. Yalo spent three days playing the silent telephone game, then sound blossomed again and Shirin resumed speaking to him, and made appointments with him, though she always tried to contrive excuses not to keep them.
Why did she say that he came over on the night of her birthday and he had terrified her?
Yalo hadn’t done anything. He would say that he hadn’t done anything. He’d stood under the streetlight in his long black coat, and didn’t budge from the spot, and she had seen him. There was no way she could have not seen him, since his eyes were bright and he cast them on her bedroom window.
Yalo was able to swear that he had done nothing but shine his big black eyes on her window. He had stood still for long hours without moving, then Shirin opened her window and steam came out. Yalo did not know what they were doing inside there, but he saw white smoke coming from the window and becoming a cloud. He saw Shirin, a white halo of smoke encircling her head.
“That’s right, you dog, that’s right, you stood beneath her window the night of her birthday?” shouted the interrogator.
Why had she said that he carried two flashlights and stood under the streetlight, pointing both beams at her bedroom window?
Why did she lie and say that he was carrying a Kalashnikov? And that he had focused on her window as he had done that night in the Ballouna forest when he had attacked her and her fiancé, in his long black coat and his shoes that crunched on the dirt and gravel, and his white woolen hat that covered his face, and the blinding beam of his flashlight?
Why did she tell the interrogator that he had stood beneath her window with a rifle and two flashlights?
The rifle was impossible — who would dare carry a rifle openly in the street, and in Beirut, and with the war over? And as for the flashlight — Yalo had never carried more than one flashlight in his life, and it was the best in the world; Madame had given it to him when the power went out. A thin black flashlight, which emitted a piercing light, like a laser, as bright as lightning. Yalo had not used his flashlight that night, nor had he stood threateningly beneath her window, nor had he rapped the windowpane with the muzzle of a rifle.
True, he had gone and stood there, with his flashlight unused deep in his coat pocket beside the knife he was never without. But he had not brought his rifle with him.
He stood there, his eyes ablaze with love.
“It was love, sir,” Yalo wanted to tell the interrogator.
“Love is humiliation, sir,” he wanted to say.
“Love is like the cross, sir,” he wanted to say.
But Yalo did not know how to say these things in front of the interrogator, because when he did he heard the voice of his mother, Gabrielle, coming out of his throat. She would stand in front of the mirror and say that her face didn’t look like her own face anymore. She cried, then turned on the faucet and washed her face, washed her tears away. She would stand for hours in front of the mirror and say that she was washing the age from her face.
“Only water can wash away age, my son,” she said.
He went away and left her, and her face, washed with the water of age, remained etched in his memory, and her voice followed him with its light rasp and a lisp that made the words that she pronounced only vaguely resemble words.
“How do you understand what your mother says?” asked his friend Tony, who would take him to Paris.
“Everyone understands her,” replied Yalo. “People understand speech from facial expressions, not from words.”
Yalo was not philosophizing when he talked to Tony about facial expressions, for he knew only a few words of Syriac, but he understood everything from the tear-filled eyes of his grandfather, and answered in Arabic, except for the one word lo.
He wanted to tell the interrogator to go away, lo, not like this, but Shirin pained him. Why had she said those things? Why had she looked at him as if she hated him?
When Yalo entered the interrogator’s room, Shirin pointed at him and said, “That’s him.”
At that moment Yalo looked over and saw her bare thighs, and saw the man sitting beside her, and dropped onto the chair set in the middle of the room for the suspect, with everyone looking at him, under the stern gaze of the interrogator.
He sank under the stares and closed his eyes. Shirin had told the interrogator everything before Yalo was brought into the room, and once he was there she said little. She sat quietly behind the paleness of her slender thighs revealed by her short red skirt. She hid behind the paleness as she had hidden behind the white cloud that had drifted out of her window, there.
“I went and stood under the window to tell her I love her,” Yalo said.
I wanted to surprise her for her birthday. I went at ten o’clock at night and stood under the window, and I stayed there until morning, and I thought, this way when she wakes up tomorrow and sees me standing there like a lamp post, she’ll get a surprise, and understand how much I love her.
But Yalo did not say that. The interrogator’s words shocked him like the lashes of a whip on his face.
The interrogator said that Yalo had carried two flashlights and a Kalashnikov rifle, had stood beneath Shirin’s window, and aimed the beams of both flashlights at the window, and as she opened the window, he raised the rifle and aimed it at her. When she screamed, Yalo escaped.
The interrogator did not use the word “escaped.” His whole sentence was, “And when she screamed, he ran like the wind.”
“What does ‘ran like the wind,’ mean?” asked Yalo.
“It means you ran away, coward,” said the interrogator. Yalo pictured himself running as fast as he could with the wind chasing him, and he smiled.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing, nothing.” Yalo saw the wind and saw the words. The words took shape before him, and he felt as if he were bumping into them instead of hearing or reading them. He had been afraid of his Black Grandfather because he feared the old man’s words. He heard the phrase, “Approach, Bro,” and felt as if there were shears hanging over his head. He shielded his head with his hands and approached his grandfather, as the shears hovered above as if they might sweep all the hair off his head at any moment. When his mother told him to go to school, he would not see a school but naked girls running behind the nuns, and he’d feel his mouth watering. When his grandfather asked him to fry an egg, he would see an expanse filled with stray dogs. He lived his whole life this way, hearing a word and seeing something else, but this did not mean that he did not understand what was being said. He went to school, and knew that bro meant son, and that his grandfather’s requests must be obeyed, because a cohno’s orders could not be ignored.
The cohno met his death in an unusual way. At first he stopped eating meat entirely, and ate only eggs, milk, and vegetables, then he cut out the eggs and concentrated on fruit and vegetables, before being struck with amnesia.