Yalo by Elias Khoury Page A

you well,” said the cohno .
    â€œ. . .”
    â€œYou said I should take her? Me!”
    â€œI can’t,” said Elias.
    â€œYou’re telling me to take her, my own daughter! What is this, get out, you shit! I thought you were a man but you are shit! Get out and get away from me, and I warn you, if you come near my daughter I’ll crack your skull.”
    Yalo did not know how the visit ended, or how Elias al-Shami got out of the house, but he imagined that Elias had staggered off.
    â€œHe came in a young kid and left an old man,” was how he would have reported it to Shirin, but he has never been able to tell her the story of his mother. When he met up with her she was frightened and in a rush and just wanted to go home. He wanted to tell her that it was up to a man to take the woman he loved. Had Emile dared to demand that he take her, he would have taken her. How could he abandon her? They all told him to take her so how could he not? It was unthinkable. And now if the interrogator told him, take her, he would take her. But the interrogator told him he knew everything, and everything meant that he knew about Madame Randa. No, that one he would not take. He imagined the lawyer Michel Salloum before him. He saw him sitting with him in front of the stove in the villaand telling him to take Randa, and then Yalo would say, “ Lo. No, you take her. I don’t want to.”
    Shirin, she was another story. No one would tell him: Take her. When you are truly in love, that’s not the way things go. But there, at the villa, when Monsieur Michel would return from one of his trips to France or elsewhere and ask Yalo to come up to the villa, Yalo was afraid, he felt in his hands the shudders of Elias al-Shami. Yalo would trudge up, his back hunched like Elias al-Shami’s, afraid that such a command would escape the lips of his mentor. For he was certain that he could not take her, just as he did not want her. But he went to her when she summoned him, and slept with her when she wanted him. With her, he felt as if he were entering, in moments he had stolen, a world whose essence he did not understand, and when he tried to write about those moments in his cell, with nothing in front of him but a pile of white paper provided by the interrogator, he would never know what to write. Was he supposed to write that he had felt that he was stepping into flames of emotions that were cooking him alive? Or lie and say that he did not like having sex with her? Or what?
    Yalo was writhing in the fire of Madame and getting as hard and sharp as a spear, and she was shouting at him to stab her with his spear, and he was swaying, burning and whistling like a wild gale, as she was moaning and telling him to say her name: “Say Randa, say Randa.” He repeated it after her and she kept it up. He even started to call sex randifying. He randified her, randified while he waited for her, randified himself, and randified in the shower.
    â€œDon’t look up until I call your name,” she told him.
    He came when she called him, and waited when she did not call him, and she came to him whenever she felt like it, and told him that she missed nature.
    â€œI’m in the mood to sleep with your smell,” she told him when she cameto his small house for the first time, and they randified in his bed as they had randified in hers. She told him his smell here enchanted her, and that she loved the smells of thyme and pine mingled together, and he randified and speared her. He told her, “What do you say we trade places? You get down here and I’ll get on top.” She laughed and said he was outrageous, and that she loved him because he made her laugh. Then she left, going home to her bathtub filled with hot water and foamy soap, while he stood in the shower, shivering from the cold, in his little house.
    â€œHow did you start hunting people?” the interrogator asked.
    â€œI never in my life