Yalo Read Online Free PDF

about Emile?” asked Yalo.
    â€œNo, no, Emile knew nothing about my relationship with Dr. Said. Anyway, what kind of a relationship is it when it’s no fun?”
    She said that even with Emile she did not feel the pleasure of things, but she was going to marry him. She slept with him without any real desire, though she felt affection for him, especially since he was so weighed downby his feelings of guilt. As if he were afraid for her. Shirin said she would marry Emile and wanted Yalo to understand her situation, and to stop harrassing her with his phone calls, because the official engagement would be announced soon.
    â€œEngagement? What engagement?”
    â€œMy engagement to Emile,” said Shirin. “We decided to get engaged. So please, that’s it.”

“N ow the truth is out!” shouted the interrogator.
    Why did the interrogator say that the truth was out? Because Shirin had shown up with Emile and lied? Was that how the truth came out?
    The interrogator said that the truth was out, “So it’s no use lying anymore.”
    â€œYes, sir,” said Yalo. He wanted to confess. He bowed his head, closed his eyes, and sensed his confession, and heard the hoarse voice of his grandfather the cohno , deep in his throat, “Confess.” Yalo was afraid when he heard his mother say that her father had “swallowed his voice,” he was afraid and even stopped swallowing entirely, in order not to swallow his voice and become like his grandfather.
    â€œConfess, boy,” shouted the cohno .
    Yalo saw nothing but a white beard with an odd smell around it.
    â€œThat’s the smell of incense,” his mother said. “Your grandfather is a cohno , my boy, he chews frankincense and musk before starting prayers. You too, someday when you’re grown, God willing, you’ll be a cohno like your grandfather.”
    â€œI hate all the cohnos ,” said Daniel.
    But his grandfather, Abuna Ephraim, as he became known once he entered the priesthood, forgot everything. He forgot his first name, whichwas Abel, and his second name, which the Kurdish mullah had given him, and forgot his work as a layer of tile in construction projects all over Beirut. He forgot his mother, who had died in a faraway village called Ain Ward, and he forgot his first wife, who died after a long illness.
    All Cohno Ephraim remembered of his mother was her long black hair, with spots of congealed blood over it like open eyes. Ephraim chewed the resin of the pine tree and perfumed his beard with incense, and was afraid of the open eyes.
    â€œClose your eyes, boy, and confess.”
    â€œThis lad’s eyes frighten me. Why are they so big and his eyelashes so long? Where did he get these eyes from? We don’t have big eyes like this in our family.”
    Yalo did not know how to answer his cohno grandfather’s questions, but he closed his eyes and confessed that he had lied or stolen an apple, or not studied, or anything that came into his head. When the cohno listened to his confessions, he was transformed from a cohno who heard the sacrament of confession into a grandfather, and instead of preaching to the lad who confessed before him with bowed head and closed eyes, he would beat him with a bamboo stick.
    â€œI don’t want to confess to you, Grandpa.”
    â€œI am not Grandpa, I am Abuna Ephraim, and if you don’t confess, you won’t eat tomorrow.”
    He forced him to confess, then would beat him, and the boy became afraid of the hoarse voice which heralded the whack of the bamboo stick on his bare feet.
    Yalo did not cry. He held back, and trembled with misery before his grandfather.
    He called him Black Grandfather – that stocky, honey-eyed, big-nosed man whose white beard occupied his whole face, and spilled over his chest,he was the master of this little family made up of Yalo and his mother, Gaby. Yalo was fatherless. His father had long since emigrated