Yalo by Elias Khoury Read Free Book Online

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. Whenhis 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.
    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.
    â€œPut your arms down and confess, you dog, did you have a machine gun with you or not?”
    â€œNo,” said Yalo.
    â€œAnd the flashlights?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œWhy 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 ittrue 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.
    â€œLove is humiliation, sir,” he told the interrogator.
    â€œI 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.”
    â€œAnd the money?”