Yalo by Elias Khoury Page B

was a sniper in the war, sir,” Yalo said.
    â€œDon’t play innocent! I’m asking you about the forest, the cars, and the women. When did you start going after cars?”
    Truly, how had it begun?
    How could he answer a question as vague as that?
    â€œIt started by chance. I saw a car and I went down.”
    â€œAlone?”
    â€œYes, I was alone.”
    â€œAnd then?”
    â€œAfter that I was still alone.”
    When Yalo tried to remember, he saw himself alone, he saw the night. How had the night begun? How was it possible for anyone to ask the night how it became night?
    He wanted to tell the interrogator that the hunting he was asking about was like the night. But his throat was dry and he couldn’t find the words. There he was, lacking words when he wanted to speak. His mother said her son had a heavy tongue, but he did not find his tongue heavy. The words were hanging in his throat, but instead of spitting them out as other people did, he swallowed them, and prayers, pledges, and pebbles were of no avail.
    When Yalo remembered those days, he saw a different person. He saw a child enveloped in his mother’s words, they glided over him, yet he was unable to speak. The words began forming in his mouth and he felt them to be whole, then he tried to utter them but they slipped down his gullet and would not emerge. He strained until the veins in his neck stood out, and his mother guided his words with her eyes, then saw how they slipped inside and would only emerge broken. So she’d start the lesson over again:
    â€œIsn’t it clear, darling, isn’t it clear? I explained to you how you have to get it out. Try to spit. Come on, spit, you see how it all comes out at once? That’s how words are, they should come out like spit. Go ahead, try.”
    He tried, swallowing his words and his saliva, feeling that he would be a mute when he grew up.
    But one day he overcame it. At the barracks near the museum, when he shouted out that he had become a billy goat like the others, Tony had told him to spit it out, so he spat it out and learned how to spit.
    The war was us spitting, that is what he would say, if he were asked to define the war.
    But he did not know how to say or write these big words. He knew how to spit. When he spat, the words would no longer hang in his throat; he spat and became a billy goat, in other words, a hero. It was true that after that he went back to swallowing his words, but he knew why, so he did not fear turning mute. His stammer came back after he and Tony stole the barracks’ money and fled to Paris. There Yalo tasted banishment and homelessness, and yearned to be the animal he had been. Yalo would not agree that war was animalistic work; it was basically heroism, but heroism was impossible without a certain animal component. Military training was not complete without awakening the wolf inside you.
    â€œYou are wolves,” the trainer had said.
    â€œNo, we’re billy goats,” shouted Tony, standing in the first row of thetraining formation. And they became billy goats. It was not Tony who had nicknamed their battalion based near the museum. Yalo did not know why, but people started calling them billy goats, and they became the Billy Goats.
    Yalo felt that there was something like the spear awakening within him. But Madame Randa had not understood him, or did not care, and when she asked him about his spear, that thing that never left him awoke within, and he became a goat or a wolf. He speared her, and when M. Michel Salloum found him in the Paris Métro and brought him to his home in the Sixteenth Arrondissement, he told him not to be a sheep. “That’s not right. You’re a young man. Why are you behaving like this, like a sheep?” But Yalo was not acting like a sheep; he felt that he had actually become one, and that he had lost his inner spear. Suddenly he found himself in a strange country; Tony, who knew French,