Yalo by Elias Khoury

fair-skinned and pink-cheeked, with plump thighs, sitting quietly in the interrogation room, Shirin at his side, proud of her fiancé and gazing gloatingly at Yalo, who nearly fell over when he saw her. He steadied himself on the chair before sitting on it.
    â€œStand up, you dog. Who told you to sit down?” shouted the interrogator.
    Yalo stood up, trembling, his eyes closed, before the interrogator allowed him to sit. Then the barrage of questions came at him.
    Yalo wrote that when he gathered himself on the chair, opened his eyes, and saw the young man, he ached for his flashlight. This guy would never be able to resist a single point of light; he would collapse and crawl on the ground and say, “Take her, sir, and just let me go.”
    But the fiancé sat under the sun falling from the window behind the interrogator’s head, lifted up his little nose as if he were apart from this story and from this whole country.
    Yalo would write that when he saw Shirin sitting beside her fiancé, he suffered the third shock of his life.
    The first shock was his mother with the mirror that swallowed her face and made her disappear, or at least made her feel that she’d died before her death.
    His second shock was Tony Atiq, who vanished in Paris, taking the money with him, along with the French he knew, leaving Yalo alone with no money and no language.
    Shirin was the third shock.
    When they arrested him in his little house, the thought of Shirin never occurred to him. He assumed that the Madame had betrayed him. He had begun to notice for some time the hatred in Madame Randa’s eyes. Evenwhen he slept with her, he felt that she was no longer sleeping with him, but sleeping through him.
    He said to himself, as he raised his hands in the face of the rifles pointed at him, that this was Madame’s doing, and he laughed to himself. He would expose her and tell everything about his relationship with her. He would enjoy the way Monsieur Michel Salloum’s face would wince as he heard the truth.
    â€œMy husband never suspects me, ever. I don’t know what would happen if he ever found out about you. My husband’s crazy about me. He could never imagine you bewitched me.”
    Yalo decided not to answer the questions in his house. He put his hands in the air and let them search the house. They confiscated the machine gun, the pistol, a box of ammunition, his overcoat, and the flashlight, while he waited quietly. There at the police station he would expose everything; instead of telling them about his exploits in the lovers’ forest, he would tell them about the Madame.
    Then he saw her in front of him, just as he had seen her for the first time.
    He came with M. Michel to the villa in Ballouna. Yalo went to his house, showered, put on clean clothes, and went up to the villa. There he saw the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life. Randa was tall and dark with short black hair. Her lips were thick and full and her eyes green. He walked in and saw her embracing her husband with her bare arms. When she noticed Yalo, she took a step back. Yalo sensed that this woman’s gaze fell on him from above. He detected a fugitive smile meant for him alone; embarrassed, he felt that his feet could no longer support him, so he closed his eyes and fell into the chair. Then he got up, wishing to leave.
    â€œJust a moment, just a moment,” said Madame.
    Yalo stood in front of the door, confused, when Monsieur Michelmotioned for him to sit. He sat on the soft red sofa and noticed that Madame had disappeared; then Monsieur also disappeared. Yalo was left alone in a spacious salon hung with various Byzantine icons.
    When they returned, Madame Randa was wearing a blue dressing gown over her blue dress and bearing a tray on which she had placed a long-handled coffeepot and glasses of cognac. She poured the coffee and the cognac and offered them to the two men before sitting down. She crossed her legs