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he stood threateningly beneath her window, nor had he rapped the windowpane with the muzzle of a rifle.
    True, he had gone and stood there, with his flashlight unused deep in his coat pocket beside the knife he was never without. But he had not brought his rifle with him.
    He stood there, his eyes ablaze with love.
    â€œIt was love, sir,” Yalo wanted to tell the interrogator.
    â€œLove is humiliation, sir,” he wanted to say.
    â€œLove is like the cross, sir,” he wanted to say.
    But Yalo did not know how to say these things in front of the interrogator, because when he did he heard the voice of his mother, Gabrielle, coming out of his throat. She would stand in front of the mirror and say that her facedidn’t look like her own face anymore. She cried, then turned on the faucet and washed her face, washed her tears away. She would stand for hours in front of the mirror and say that she was washing the age from her face.
    â€œOnly water can wash away age, my son,” she said.
    He went away and left her, and her face, washed with the water of age, remained etched in his memory, and her voice followed him with its light rasp and a lisp that made the words that she pronounced only vaguely resemble words.
    â€œHow do you understand what your mother says?” asked his friend Tony, who would take him to Paris.
    â€œEveryone understands her,” replied Yalo. “People understand speech from facial expressions, not from words.”
    Yalo was not philosophizing when he talked to Tony about facial expressions, for he knew only a few words of Syriac, but he understood everything from the tear-filled eyes of his grandfather, and answered in Arabic, except for the one word lo .
    He wanted to tell the interrogator to go away, lo , not like this, but Shirin pained him. Why had she said those things? Why had she looked at him as if she hated him?
    When Yalo entered the interrogator’s room, Shirin pointed at him and said, “That’s him.”
    At that moment Yalo looked over and saw her bare thighs, and saw the man sitting beside her, and dropped onto the chair set in the middle of the room for the suspect, with everyone looking at him, under the stern gaze of the interrogator.
    He sank under the stares and closed his eyes. Shirin had told the interrogator everything before Yalo was brought into the room, and once he was there she said little. She sat quietly behind the paleness of her slender thighs revealed by her short red skirt. She hid behind the paleness as shehad hidden behind the white cloud that had drifted out of her window, there.
    â€œI went and stood under the window to tell her I love her,” Yalo said.
    I wanted to surprise her for her birthday. I went at ten o’clock at night and stood under the window, and I stayed there until morning, and I thought, this way when she wakes up tomorrow and sees me standing there like a lamp post, she’ll get a surprise, and understand how much I love her.
    But Yalo did not say that. The interrogator’s words shocked him like the lashes of a whip on his face.
    The interrogator said that Yalo had carried two flashlights and a Kalashnikov rifle, had stood beneath Shirin’s window, and aimed the beams of both flashlights at the window, and as she opened the window, he raised the rifle and aimed it at her. When she screamed, Yalo escaped.
    The interrogator did not use the word “escaped.” His whole sentence was, “And when she screamed, he ran like the wind.”
    â€œWhat does ‘ran like the wind,’ mean?” asked Yalo.
    â€œIt means you ran away, coward,” said the interrogator. Yalo pictured himself running as fast as he could with the wind chasing him, and he smiled.
    â€œWhat’s so funny?”
    â€œNothing, nothing.” Yalo saw the wind and saw the words. The words took shape before him, and he felt as if he were bumping into them instead of hearing or reading them. He had