Elias Khoury: Yalo

Yalo was unable to write a single word. He found himself in the solitary cell and saw the sheets of white paper stained with the black light shining around him. He closed his eyes and decided to sleep.

"Write, you dog!" the man shouted at him.

He took up the pen and saw the circles of shadow pierced by the silver light emanating from the depths of his eyes, but he could not write. He threw the pen onto the small table they had put in his cell and heard the voice shouting at him again. The voice began to ring in his head as if it were stuck in the whorls of his ears, echoes rebounding toward infinity.

Yalo said.

Yalo would say, when he finished writing, that the echoes were his everlasting companions during that long year of ink.

They brought him a fountain pen and a plastic bottle of ink and ordered him to write.

He wrote because he loved life and awaited the end of the long tunnel of torture when he would leave prison and get his revenge.

Yalo felt, in spite of the excruciating pain from the torture sessions, a strange pleasure. His pleasure was his imagination. When he was being beaten or whipped, or suspended by his arms, he imagined himself in the torturer's place, and imagined his victims: Shirin, Emile, Dr. Said and Madame Randa, the lawyer Michel Salloum, Tony Atiq, and everyone else.

No, he imagined these things after the end of the "party," as they called his torture sessions. During the party he imagined the cell, and in the cell he held his own party. He was thrown into the cell, utterly exhausted, finding that imagination and role-play were the only means of restoring his body and vitality. He shifted his mind and imagined things as he wanted them to be. This restored some of his strength, and a few glimmers of his old hawk eye kept fear at bay. He tore the pain out of his parts and cast it into other bodies and saw how the pains left his fingers and toes to possess his victims.

At that point he fell asleep.

After the torture parties, Yalo's sleep was his revenge. He fashioned his slumbers as he pleased. He prepared the instruments of torture in his imagination, and made sure that he had not forgotten anything, then let his eyes close to the rhythm of chains or to the screeches of electrical cords, and saw how his victims fell under his torment, which had become their torment.

Even the final torture, which, when he experienced it, made him feel that his spirit was calling out to death and his body ached for the grave, even that torture was portioned out to others, and he dozed off to the sounds of their guttural groans and cries for mercy.

That was the grand party.

In that party, which he called the grand one, and still later gave several other names to, Yalo was seized with a terror that prevented him from opening his mouth, so he raised his arms in the air in a show of surrender, with tears streaming from his eyes, and began to wail savagely before the officer ordered that the canvas sack be removed from the suspect's lower body.

Even this torture took Yalo into his imaginary world. He decided to reserve this one for Dr. Said, who had abandoned Shirin in the forest and fled in his car, whose tires screeched loudly as they scattered gravel all around.

At first, Yalo decided to forget the sack, and excised it from his imagination's memory, but he found himself facing the scene with the sack whenever he closed his tear-moistened eyes. He heard the meowing and saw the bamboo rod and felt the claws tearing at him.

That was the moment of torture that drove Yalo to offer all his confessions.

Why were they now asking him to write his life story? Why did the officer not believe his confessions?

On that day, which entered Yalo's memory as the Day of the Sack, they dragged him from his cell at dawn and put him in what seemed to be a small room. He was blindfolded and his hands bound, palpating with his bare feet the long passageway he traversed, trying not to fall. When he reached the small room a hand pushed him forward and knocked him to the floor. He heard a voice ordering him to take his pants off. He tried to stand but his feet failed and he rolled on the floor. He heard loud laughter and felt a hand lifting him up. He stood and felt the hand unbuttoning his pants. He reached for the buttons on his pants and a hard slap landed on his neck and reverberated before the hand untied his blindfold. At first all he saw was darkness. A few seconds later a tall, broad-shouldered man in a khaki uniform appeared and ordered him to remove his underwear.

Yalo's tired eyes looked around and saw, beside the officer, three powerfully muscular men whose sleeveless jerseys showed off the glossy black hair on their chests and arms. He felt certain that he was going to be raped. The world blurred over and he froze in his place.

"Take off your underwear, dog!"

He sought the wall and tried to enter it. He remembered his grandfather's story about the archbishop who kept retreating and retreating until the wall opened up and swallowed him.

That was a legend of Constantinople. "When Constantinople fell to Muhammad the Conqueror, the archbishop entered the wall, and they are still waiting for him to this day," said his smiling grandfather. "Those Byzantines weren't very bright, it was as if they didn't know that they were the cause of the disaster."

"Is it true that the wall opened up?" asked Yalo. "That's what they say," said his grandfather. "And what was the disaster?" "That they went into the wall, and are still there." Yalo felt the hand that had unbuttoned his pants now reaching for his underwear and removing it. He bent over and his underwear slid off, and he stood before them naked from the waist down, humiliated, waiting for the order to bend over so that the rape could begin.

The tall officer was smiling behind his cigarette smoke, which had filled the small room, filling Yalo with dread and nausea.

"Let's go, guys," said the officer. Yalo backed up, terrified, his back square against the wall, trembling with fear and the cold. Two men with a canvas sack approached him. The first held the mouth of the sack while the other held the lower part of it.

"Come here, come on. Don't be afraid," said the officer. Yalo froze where he stood, his behind pressed ever harder against the wall.

"I told you to come here!" said the officer. "Take the sack from these guys and put it on!"

"How am I supposed to put it on?" Yalo asked softly. "Put it on like a pair of pants," said the officer.

"Pants!" said Yalo under his breath, without grasping what was being asked of him, standing rigid, not knowing what to do.

He .rested his head against the wall and closed his eyes. The three men pounced on him, grabbed his shoulders, and pulled him to the middle of the room, then one stepped up behind him and seized him by the chest, pressing himself against him from behind. Then the two other men advanced with the sack and bent over while the third man raised him up erect and made him put his feet into the sack. After that the first man got up and tied the canvas sack shut around Yalo's waist with a cord threaded through the mouth of the sack.

The three men withdrew, leaving Yalo alone in the middle of the room. He felt something strange moving between his bare feet, but he did not understand the game until the officer came forward with a bamboo rod in his hand.

"Are you going to confess or do we begin?" asked the officer.

"I swear, I swear to God, I confessed everything, and I will do anything you want. I told you everything, but I'll say anything you want, whatever you want."

"Now you are still lying to us," said the officer.

"I told the truth, I swear, I swear to God, I swear to God I'm not lying."

The officer's bamboo rod descended and landed on the canvas sack between Yalo's feet, and the journey into torture began. The rod goaded on the thing inside the sack and the meowing and clawing started, along with his feeling of falling into the abyss. He goaded it one more time, so that the cat began to leap up and attack Yalo's lower parts from the bottom of the sack. The cat trembled with savagery, springing and butting, climbing up Yalo's member to bite and scratch it. And it had whiskers. Yalo could not see the whiskers, but he could see them nonetheless, gleaming in the dark. The cat's eyes flashed in the darkness and its whiskers gleamed, and Yalo fell to the floor. At first his mind did not grasp what was happening, he heard the scratching and the yowling, but he didn't understand until he heard the officer ordering the cat with his rod to leap up; then he understood that he was at the mercy of a wild cat.

"Kitty, kitty, kitty-jump up! Up!" said the officer.

Yalo fell to the floor. He bent over with the cat's attacks and squatted, but then the animal grew fiercer. It leaped up to seize his testicles, at which point Yalo saw it and saw its whiskers and he felt that his testicles were exploding and that his member was trickling blood. He stood up wanting relief but the officer's rod never stopped goading the sack as he said "Kitty, kitty, kitty!" The cat squirmed and jumped frantically and Yalo collapsed.

With the sack Yalo discovered how fear erased pain and how a valley opened in his belly that stretched to the belly of the earth.

The officer with the swinging rod in his hand, and Yalo with the sack jumping between his legs, the sack with the cat that bit, scratched, howled, and squalled. The meows of the cat were like the crying of a thousand infants, and Yalo was like a lone child who had lost the power to scream.

When Yalo raised his hands in the air and his tears streamed down, he confessed to everything.

"I'll confess now," he wanted to say, but he did not say it. His voice came out like a throaty meow and he collapsed, and saw himself in a jungle of savage cats tearing at his body. He was like someone swimming, he would say that he was swimming in cats, and called the sack a pool of cats. He saw himself swimming in blood, howling, and meows.

And he saw his tears.

For three days and three nights his tears flowed, bathing his eyes and face. He did not wipe them away, he let them flow and take their course and channels, then drop to his neck and cover his whole body.

Finally, the pool of cats baptized him with tears.

"The true baptism, my boy, is the baptism of tears," his grandfather told him. "I am being baptized now."

Translated from the Arabic by Peter Theroux