Yalo (28 page)

“I have three eyes,” he told Shirin.

“How did you see me?” she asked.

“I have three eyes,” he said, and pointed to the white puncture on his temple.

“I have a white eye in my black hair, but someday when I go gray, I don't know what will happen to this eye,” he said smiling. Shirin grimaced before letting out a smile and accepted his offer of a cup of coffee in a nearby café.

She asked him about the eye that resembled a white puncture and he told her that he didn't remember the incident, that he had even forgotten the features of the girl who was killed. He told her he had not heard a thing – he hadn't even heard the impact of the shell. “That is terror,” he said. “Terror is when you forget.” The young woman lit a cigarette, took a deep draw, coughed, and then the cigarette trembled in her fingers.

“So you mean to tell me that you were terrified, and that's why you don't remember a thing about the incident?”

“I told you I forgot because of the terror. Why don't you believe me?”

“And why don't you, too, believe me when I tell you I forgot everything that happened in Ballouna? You have to understand – I was terrified, too.”

“Terrified!” He repeated the word several times, softly. “But you reached out, and your arms smelled like incense.”

Had Shirin said that, or had Yalo heard, in his solitude, silence, and grief, voices coming from the depth of his imagination, meaning that he could no longer distinguish between reality and illusion?

Yalo did not tell her about the shell and the girl's death. He said it was his third eye; a third eye only grew for those who possessed the ability to see things from their various angles, then felt the green rising from his insides up to his esophagus, so he spat on Satan, and asked her to spit. Shirin irritably put out her cigarette in her coffee cup, swallowed her own saliva, and then left.

When Gaby told the story of the navel, and cited the Epistle of Barnabas, her father told her, “Spit on Satan, daughter.” The
cohno
spat, and his daughter spat, and his grandson spat. But Gaby was convinced that the Epistle of Barnabas might all be false, except for the story of the navel.

Elias al-Shami said that God was the first tailor because when he ordered the angel to remove spittle from Adam's body of clay, he also ordered him to sew a puncture in the belly of the first man. So the puncture became a navel, and the navel became the mark of man.

“Do you know, Gaby, what the navel is?” Elias said.

She was standing naked the way he liked her to be. He asked her to undress and walk naked around the workshop, then he knelt on the floor and started to kiss her navel before devouring her body with his hands.

“Do you know what navel means?” he asked her.

“Of course I know. It's the intestine retied to the placenta.”

“No, no, Gaby, listen, my love, I'll tell you, but this has to remain a secret between us, because the navel is the secret of man.”

Elias al-Shami rose and went into another room and then came back carrying a green book. He sat on the chair, put on his glasses, and began to turn the pages, then when he found the passage he was looking for, he said, “Listen,” and began to read:

“‘Then God said, one day when all the angels were assembled: “Let each one that takes me for his Lord straightaway bow down to this earth.” They that loved God bowed down, but Satan, with those that were of his ilk, said: “O Lord, we are spirit, it is not just that we should bow down to this clay.” Whereupon God said, “Depart from me, O ye accursed ones, for I have no mercy for you.” And Satan spat upon that mass of earth as he departed; the angel Gabriel raised up that spittle with some of the earth. So that therefore now man has a navel in his belly.'”

“Did you understand the story?” asked Elias.

She said that she understood, but he wasn't convinced. The tailor always treated her as if she didn't comprehend. He would tell her something, and ask her whether she understood, and when she answered yes, he would begin to repeat it. He would repeat himself several times to the point where the young woman was ready to explode, and she would gaze at him with narrowing eyes. Only then would he realize that he had gone too far, and he'd gather his sentences, shorten them, and drop his commentaries.

In this repetitive manner, Gaby learned the art of tailoring and the art of love, and all the Damascene arts that the master ascribed to his family, who left Damascus for Beirut after the massacres of 1860.

Master Elias always surprised his young love with one question: “What is the most important thing in life?”

When she gave the answer she had learned from the last time he'd asked
the same question, she discovered that this time he had another answer in mind. In the beginning the most important thing in life was the art of tailoring, then it became the navel, then dogs, but in the end she wasn't sure.

Master Elias al-Shami was infatuated with his young lover's navel. He read to her about the navel of our lord Adam, peace be upon him, from a forged book written by an Italian monk who embraced Islam in the sixteenth century, wanting thereby to solve the complex problem that humankind invented when they had wanted to divide up God among themselves. He'd lean down then to caress and kiss her navel.

“God is indivisible,” said Elias. “That is the most important thing.”

He bent over the young woman's navel. A small navel resembling a rose tucked into a smooth belly. He knelt and said that the navel was the first icon God made, an icon fashioned from the elimination of the stain of Satan's spittle.

She said that she understood. She suddenly felt the need to sit down; she had been standing before him naked, listening to him explain that love was the first lesson a man received when suckling at his mother's breast. He moved closer to her breasts, but, all of a sudden, a glacial fear came over Gaby and she said that what they were doing was a sin, the sin that her father the
cohno
had repeatedly discussed when talking about women: “God blessed me with only two daughters, one gone off to a faraway country and the other divorced yet not divorced, a widow yet not a widow. May God save us from sin.”

Gaby said that she went back to him after her husband had disappeared and she had given birth to her son, not for the sake of the navel or for sex, but because she felt alone and the night weighed down on her body. She went back and wanted him at night. She told him: Just one night. I want to sleep the whole night beside you in bed so that I won't feel that the night will swallow me like an abyss.” Gaby was unable to describe to the man the
signs of her fear of the night, not because she did not know how to speak, but because speech came only when the other was ready to listen. Speech. Without this readiness, it fell into the gulf that separated one human from another. That is what Yalo learned from Madame Randa. In the beginning, when his magic randified her, she never stopped talking, and he drank in her words and her love. He did not talk much because he didn't know how to talk as she did, though her speech began to seem as if it were his. When their talking ended, their love ended. Yalo understood that a man spoke only when the other became a part of his speech. That was why Shirin left him sad. He tested her silence with his speech. He told her about his adventures, his wars, stories he had experienced and some he had not, in order to throw her a line to draw her in toward him; she approached the line, grasped the end of it, then let go.

Elias al-Shami was different. When Gaby went back to him, he felt that he was awakening. He said that he didn't want to lie to her, that he did not want to be like all the other men who lied. He said that when she got married, she fell off the edge of his life. He said that he'd forgotten her and was relieved. “Why are you coming back? I was calm. It was over.”

What could she say? At six o'clock in the evening, she felt a gale stirring inside her, and this gale commanded her to go to the tailor shop. She knew that the master would be by himself now. He opened the door and rubbed his eyes as if he didn't believe them.

“Come in, come in,” he said hesitantly.

She entered and stood in the portico where she had always stood at six o'clock nude beneath his gaze, and he would take her in his arms. She stood there, hesitant, stammering.

“You're still beautiful, Gaby,” he said. He lit a cigarette and sat in the rocking chair without inviting her to have a seat. So she remained standing, arms folded. He told her how he'd forgotten her to return to his normal life
and reconnect with his clients. He went back to his innocent sexual banter with the women workers in the shop, which never left him troubled, and he never had to undress. He burst out laughing: “Do you know, Gaby, you're the one who taught me how to strip? Maybe I taught you everything, but you taught me how to take off my clothes. I don't like taking off my clothes, I feel self-conscious. Even with my wife, I never –”

“I don't want to hear about your wife,” she said.

Gaby didn't know where this old talk came from. When they had been in love, she had never allowed him to speak of his wife or his three children. And now, even though she had come here for work, and she didn't want to rekindle their relationship or be maddened by jealousy again, she reverted involuntarily to her old way of speaking.

When Gaby agreed to marry, it was as if she were throwing herself into an abyss. She saw the man coming to the house and heard her father giving his consent. She closed her eyes, said yes, and fell from a great height. She said yes and went to the shop the next morning. She went to Master Elias's room, where he was drawing with green chalk on a piece of fabric, and she said, with no preliminaries, that she was engaged and was going to get married. The man raised his head from the piece of fabric and looked at her from beneath his glasses. “Congratulations,” he said. “I can't say anything but congratulations, my darling. It's your right, I have no right over you. I pray that you'll be happy.”

She left his room and went back to her sewing machine, immersing herself in her work. That evening, she did not linger, as had been her habit; instead, she was one of the first to leave the shop. When she was at the door, she heard his voice calling to her to stay a little longer because one of the dresses needed altering. She said, “Sorry, but I'm in a hurry. Tomorrow.”

She did not return to work. She told her father that she had lost the desire to work, and the
cohno
said that it was for the better. It never occurred
to him that his daughter, who had closed her eyes as she agreed to marry George Jal'u, was throwing herself into an abyss of despair after having given up on her true love.

She said that she had not come here for the sake of the past; now she was a married woman and had come for work; she asked him whether she might get her old job back.

“Everything will be like before,” he said. “You can start tomorrow morning.” Then he came near her and reached his hand out as he had done before, but she didn't offer him hers or come near him.

“Thanks, boss,” she said, and left.

But this
thanks, boss
evaporated quickly, and Gaby slipped back into their old story. And there he was again insisting: “What is the most important thing in life?”

Gaby couldn't understand how this man never bored himself with his own talk. She was with him now because she needed a job and because she dreaded the heaviness of the night. She wanted him just one night, for which they would go to a hotel or anyplace he wanted. He promised her that they would go to the Grand Hotel in Sofar, and he set a rendezvous with her there, but at the last minute – after she had invented a plausible lie for her father – he said that he couldn't make it and had to postpone. Whenever she got upset, he would shrink with sorrow and anger, and in the end she would console him, as if she had committed some sin that needed his forgiveness.

“You still haven't told me what the most important thing in life is.”

She knew that he was waiting for the same answer about the navel and the art of tailoring. But the last time, he surprised her with the dog. He said that dogs were the most important thing. And he went back to the Gospel of Barnabas to recite how God had created the dog.

“Listen,” he said.

She stood half naked, yawning, certain that she would hear the story of Adam, the spittle, and all the rest.

He opened the book and recited:

“‘One day Satan approached the gates of Paradise, and when he saw the horses eating grass, he told them that if this mass of earth received a soul, they would suffer from it; therefore it was in their interest to trample on that mass of earth so that it would be ruined. So the horses, stirred up, violently commenced to assail that bit of earth among the lilies and roses.

“‘And so God thenceforth gave a soul to that unclean part of the earth upon which fell the spittle of Satan, which Gabriel took from the mass. And dogs were created, barking, and the horses were frightened and fled. Then God gave a soul to humankind and all the angels sang: Our Lord, may His holy name be blessed.'

“Did you understand?” he asked.

“God bless you, please, that's enough. I want to go home, I'm tired.”