Gaby said that her father got lost and Yalo believed her. He began to picture his Black Grandfather inside a labyrinth of crossed lines. The old man no longer knew how to get out of his bedroom or the bathroom. He would enter a place and get stuck there, not leaving until Bro came to the rescue. Toward the end, Bro had to go searching for his grandfather all night long through the streets of the city, to bring him back home.
When the interrogator used the expression “ran like the wind,” Yalo pictured himself climbing the wind, and felt that the sleeves of his coat had become the wings of a bird, and that when he stood there under the window he didn’t look like himself, but had become instead a falcon with a long beak. Yalo lifted his arms up as if about to fly, when he heard the interrogator shouting at him.
“Put your arms down and confess, you dog, did you have a machine gun with you or not?”
“No,” said Yalo.
“And the flashlights?”
“No.”
“Why did you stand beneath her window, pointing the flashlights at the home of Miss Shirin Raad? Is it true that you wanted to kidnap her? Is it true you wanted money? Is it true that you told her you wanted to marry her and take her to Egypt? Why did you frighten her all the time?”
Why had she lied, saying he had forced her to buy him a plane ticket to Egypt?
She had bought the ticket and offered it to him with a thousand Egyptian pounds. She said it was a gift, and that she believed he needed a change of scenery, and that she couldn’t leave her job to travel with him. That day she did not mention the name of her fiancé, Emile, and that same day Yalo was convinced she had begun to fall in love with him. It never occurred to him that when he took the ticket and the money he had stepped into a trap and was incapable of seeing things as they really were. He told her to come with him to Egypt, he told her he’d take her to Luxor, where she would see God, but she told him she could not. He took the ticket and put it in a drawer. The thousand pounds, which he decided to hide in the hope that Shirin would agree to come with him to Egypt, he ended up having to convert into Lebanese lira and spend. He had thought of the money as a gift, and as a pledge of love. Anyhow, he was certain that he had not taken money from her, though the interrogator said, quoting Shirin, that he had robbed her.
Why did the interrogator shout at him, “What is the truth?”
Should he have replied that the truth was love? But how could he talk to the interrogator of love.
“Love is humiliation, sir,” he told the interrogator.
“I loved her, and I still love her. No, now, after what happened, I don’t know, but the thing is that I loved her and I was ready to do whatever she wanted.”
“And the money?” asked the interrogator.
“The money, sir. There was no money. Money means nothing.”
“You liar! Is that why you frightened her, and forced her to pay?”
How could Yalo talk to the interrogator of love, when the interrogator held a thick bundle of papers and was saying that in them he had all the information about Daniel, and all the members of the gang, and everybody? At this point Yalo understood that “everybody” meant Madame Randa and her husband, the lawyer Michel Salloum, so he decided to refuse to respond to all the questions relating to this topic. What could he say about the wife of the lawyer who had saved him from starvation and homelessness in Paris, and brought him back to his homeland? No, he would say nothing. It was true that he was depraved, as Madame Randa told him when she found out about his nighttime adventures in the lovers’ forest, but his depravity would not extend to his confessing his relationship with Madame Randa, and harming the reputation of the good man who had saved him. Even if he confessed, the interrogator would not believe him, even the husband would not believe it. But it was certain that the Madame would not be able to say that he had raped her. Shirin could, if she wanted, talk about rape, because her situation was different, but the Madame, no. Shirin came to the interrogator’s room and sat beside her fiancé, and said that he had raped her in the forest.
Why did she say in the forest, why not in the hut or at his house?
The forest was better for rape, thought Yalo, there a rape was the real thing. What did this poor girl know about rape? But that other one, now she was a woman. A woman of forty, with the taste of cherry. Her boyfriend sat on the ground and put his head in his hands when Yalo took her behind the huge oak tree. He had stalked her by chance. That summer night, with the road jammed with cars fleeing Beirut’s heat for the mountain, he was sure that he wouldn’t find anything. He wore his long black coat and crossed the road that divided the Villa Gardenia from the forest, sat in the pine shade, and waited without waiting. He dozed off, or so it seemed, because he did not see the car approaching the trap. He awoke to the sound of tires screeching to a stop. He opened his slumber-heavy eyes and saw the woman. He felt the flashlight in the pocket of his coat and straightened up. Yalo would never be able to describe how he succeeded in standing up and catching his victim in the beam of his flashlight at the same moment. Then things happened quickly. He approached the car window and motioned with his rifle. The man got out first, then the woman. He motioned to the woman and she followed him, and there under the oak tree he took her, while her companion sat on the ground, head in hands. All Yalo remembered was the taste of cherry. He laid his rifle on the ground and approached the woman, pulled her to him, then put his hand behind her waist and she sank to the ground. She did not undress, neither did he. He even kept his coat on and pictured himself immersing himself in water. Never in his life had Yalo tasted anything like this. The woman’s water gushed out pure and soaked everything, and he shuddered with bliss. Everything trembled within a man and woman entwined inside a black coat, making love beside an idle rifle and extinguished flashlight. When Yalo finished, his spirit spent and his trousers drenched in feminine water, he tried to pull away but he could not. The woman was holding him tightly, so much that it hurt. A cry started to gather in his throat; it was as if he were on the verge of starting again when he saw her hands pushing at his chest and pulling him out of her. He stopped, zipped up his pants, bent over to pick up his rifle, and went home. He did not wait for them to leave. He craved a hot cup of tea so he left. When he turned back toward the car, he saw the woman opening the door as the man started the engine without daring to turn on the headlights.
“But I. . but not in the forest,” said Yalo. “I did not rape her.”
What did Shirin tell her fiancé, Emile?
He sat here in the interrogation room, beside her, nodding as if he knew everything, but he did not know anything.
Had she told him the truth, or lied to him?
Had she told him that she went to Ballouna with her doctor lover, where they had sex in the car? Or did she say that she had gone with him on an innocent drive, when they had been attacked by a wild beast in a long black coat, that raped her?
Why did the fiancé agree to play this role? Did he think he was gallant? Had he been gallant, things would have ended differently, thought Yalo. Why had he not called him and settled the matter with him man to man? He could have invited Yalo to the café and spoken with him, told him that he loved her too. He could have proposed that one of them give in to the other as befitted a noble-minded man, as Cohno Ephraim had done with the tailor Elias al-Shami when he learned that his daughter had gone back to her original lover.
Cohno Ephraim had told the story to his grandson, and at the time Yalo understood nothing, but now he understood everything.
At the time, his grandfather ended the affair gallantly, and told his grandson the story to teach him the meaning of gallantry. “Life is a word of honor that you say, and that remains etched into the earth.”