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the left was a kitchen with a small refrigerator, a gas canister with three outlets, a small table, a white cupboard holding pots and plates, and beside it a small bathroom with a toilet, shower, and a half-length mirror. There was a white first aid kit with the emblem of the Red Cross, and an electric water heater. Yalo lit the water heater, went back to the room, and sprawled on the sofa. He noticed cobwebs in the right-hand corner of the ceiling, and saw that the paint was flaking at the top of the wall to the left, but he still felt like a king. He took a shower, but the water wasn’t hot enough, then put on a green shirt and gray pants, only to find out that the pants were too short and that the three other pairs of pants hanging in the wardrobe were a little short too. So he decided to put his old pants back on again, and to buy new ones the next day.
    Yalo thought that for the first time in his life he would live in a house of his own. He thought he could bring Gabrielle, his mother, here, but then dropped the idea, for she’d said that she wanted to return to her old house, that she hated the suburb of Ain Rummaneh where she had been compelled to take refuge after their forced flight from their home in the Syriac Quarter in Mseitbeh at the outset of the war.
    She said that her clients were waiting for her to go home to her neighborhood and that she would go back to her old trade because she was the best seamstress in Beirut.
    She said that she could not bear this life anymore, that she longed for her old neighbors, that the civil war had ended or it had to end now.
    She said that her father, Abuna Ephraim, had died alone here, like a stranger, and that she did not want to die in this neighborhood; she wanted to die at home, in her own house.
    She talked and she talked, she stood for a long while in front of the mirror and talked. Yalo began to be afraid of his mother, that’s why he decided to leave. He left the house two years ago and has never gone back. The days pulled him in all directions, and there, in the Paris Métro, the lawyer Michel Salloum discovered him and took him back to Lebanon.
    Yalo had not visited his mother since his return to Lebanon, and he could not justify this to the interrogator – there was no legitimate excuse that could prevent a man from visiting his mother.
    â€œI saw your mother,” said the interrogator. “She said she knew nothing about you. I went to see her in her house in Ain Rummaneh and asked about you.”
    â€œShe’s still in Ain Rummaneh?” asked Yalo.
    â€œWhy don’t you know where your mother lives?”
    â€œSure, sure, only I thought she’d moved back to Mseitbeh.”
    â€œDo you mean to say that you haven’t visited her since you came back from France?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œI don’t know. I didn’t want to. There was no reason to.”
    â€œWhy did you do that?”
    â€œWhat did I do?”
    â€œYou know.”
    Abuna Ephraim swallowed the syllables when he said: “You know well enough.” The interrogator also swallowed his syllables, as if he were chokingon the words. He took a sip from the glass of water before asking him again why he had not visited his mother.
    Yalo knew that in spite of everything his mother was not a problem. He had not visited her because he didn’t know, or because he did know, that she had gone back to her old house, and he did not like the old house, where there was nothing but a picture of Black Grandfather hanging on the wall.
    But Yalo never confessed his real sins to his grandfather, because he was convinced that there was only one sin, and that he committed it in spite of himself and unthinkingly. He would find himself alone with his sin, he’d go into the bathroom, grasp his sin, and see stars.
    He told Shirin that he loved her because he saw stars. This impression of stars, opening like eyes within the body of the