Elias Khoury: Yalo

"Now the truth is out!" shouted the interrogator.

Why did the interrogator say that the truth was out? Because Shirin had shown up with Emile and lied? Was that how the truth came out?

The interrogator said that the truth was out, "So it's no use lying anymore."

"Yes, sir," said Yalo. He wanted to confess. He bowed his head, closed his eyes, and sensed his confession, and heard the hoarse voice of his grandfather the cohno, deep in his throat, "Confess." Yalo was afraid when he heard his mother say that her father had "swallowed his voice," he was afraid and even stopped swallowing entirely, in order not to swallow his voice and become like his grandfather.

"Confess, boy," shouted the cohno.

Yalo saw nothing but a white beard with an odd smell around it.

"That's the smell of incense," his mother said. "Your grandfather is a cohno, my boy, he chews frankincense and musk before starting prayers. You too, someday when you're grown, God willing, you'll be a cohno like your grandfather."

"I hate all the cohnos" said Daniel.

But his grandfather, Abuna Ephraim, as he became known once he entered the priesthood, forgot everything. He forgot his first name, which was Abel, and his second name, which the Kurdish mullah had given him, and forgot his work as a layer of tile in construction projects all over Beirut. He forgot his mother, who had died in a faraway village called Ain Ward, and he forgot his first wife, who died after a long illness.

All Cohno Ephraim remembered of his mother was her long black hair, with spots of congealed blood over it like open eyes. Ephraim chewed the resin of the pine tree and perfumed his beard with incense, and was afraid of the open eyes.

"Close your eyes, boy, and confess."

"This lad's eyes frighten me. Why are they so big and his eyelashes so long? Where did he get these eyes from? We don't have big eyes like this incur family."

Yalo did not know how to answer his cohno grandfather's questions, but he closed his eyes and confessed that he had lied or stolen an apple, or not studied, or anything that came into his head. When the cohno listened to his confessions, he was transformed from a cohno who heard the sacrament of confession into a grandfather, and instead of preaching to the lad who confessed before him with bowed head and closed eyes, he would beat him with a bamboo stick.

"I don't want to confess to you, Grandpa."

"I am not Grandpa, I am Abuna Ephraim, and if you don't confess, you won't eat tomorrow."

He forced him to confess, then would beat him, and the boy became afraid of the hoarse voice which heralded the whack of the bamboo stick on his bare feet.

Yalo did not cry. He held back, and trembled with misery before his grandfather.

He called him Black Grandfather - that stocky, honey-eyed, big-nosed man whose white beard occupied his whole face, and spilled over his chest, he was the master of this little family made up of Yalo and his mother, Gaby. Yalo was fatherless. His father had long since emigrated to Sweden and had never been heard from again; nor was there a brother or sister.

"There are just three of us," is what Yalo told the interrogator when he was asked about his family.

"We are a family of just three persons: Abo, Bro, and Ruho Qadisho. I'm Bro."

"What are you talking about? Do you think I'm joking?" shouted the interrogator.

"No, sir, but my Black Grandfather talked that way. He's Syriac, even though I think he's really Kurdish, but I don't know which is his strange mix. That's what we are, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. My mother is the Holy Spirit, that's what I learned when I was little, but my grandfather stopped calling me Bro, he said I was not a good Bro, because the Bro is the Christ, and I was growing up like Judas, a crook, a good-for-nothing, and that's why he started calling me Yalo, and when he heard my mother calling me Bro, he shouted at her and told her to stop it." ,

Why didn't Yalo tell the interrogator these things?

When the interrogator asked him about his family, he did not know how to respond. He closed his eyes as if he did not hear.

"Confess!" shouted the interrogator.

Yalo decided to confess, and he said: "Yes, but that isn't the way it happened."

"What happened? Tell us."

Yalo said that Shirin had not been in the car with Emile but with another

man.

"Liar! Why didn't you say that when Mr. Emile was sitting here?"

Silence fell.

Yalo felt the silence pervading his whole body, a complete silence swallowing him, and his voice, and his ears. That is how he had felt when he got to the villa. The lawyer had told him, "Come," and he brought him from Paris to his dwelling. And there, in the village of Ballouna, he heard the voice of silence, and got used to it, and it became a part of him. He discovered that the night had a body, and that the body of night swooped down on him and covered him.

A night like a black coat, a silence like silence, and stars spread out above him as if they were the opening to eternity, an eternity taking him to the end of fear.

Translated from the Arabic by Peter Theroux