Bone Ash Sky (25 page)
Now I turn my head on the pillow. Lilit’s gone. In the photo by my bedside, she’s posed against a fountain in a bone-yellow courtyard, tiles at her feet in black and white. A desert oasis, with a river close by that saw many bodies, many deaths. When I was younger, I didn’t really listen to the explanation. I was more interested in the similarities I could detect in the young woman’s face. Thin lips like mine, closed against a secret. A fringed veil thrown back over her forehead as if irritated by its weight, feet bare and ringed with beads. Under the gauzy fabric, roughcut hair, fine as mine when I was a baby. I still chart my own features in hers: fingers just like mine, the sharp elbows visible beneath the sheerness of her sleeves, a dress in the dull green of Islam. Wrists dyed indigo, like a Bedouin. Her lapis eyes under the veil, the same colour and shape as mine, and my mother’s, and my father’s. Is that a slight swell under her clothes? A child’s body heavy with a woman’s burdens. A body that, in the wake of its mortality, is becoming increasingly hard to fathom, impossible to categorise. Hands and lips and eyes that have witnessed death, tranquil limbs invaded by brutality.
When she died, a box arrived for me in Boston from the Lebanese nuns who had looked after her. It was full of the debris of a life: photographs, letters, even a baby’s caul. My mother’s? At the bottom, a French–Lebanese dictionary. I was careful with the rice-paper thinness of its pages, sneezed as I opened it. So much dust. On the flyleaf, blue ink fading to grey:
Property of Minas Pakradounian, Bourj-Hammoud
Refugee Camp, Beirut, 1922.
My grandfather made sure none of the family forgot his heroics, reliving his youth at the table, in front of guests, how he made a grand escape from the death camp with Turkish guards in pursuit, and he, a mere boy of thirteen. He only stayed in Damascus a week, spurred on by his need to travel, to make his fortune on the trading coast. An imam he met in the Umayyad mosque carried him on his mule cart over the Anti-Lebanon mountains and down into the Beka’a Valley, then Minas hitched onward to Beirut. Fig trees and prickly pears growing on the verges gave him sustenance – sometimes a shepherd would share his midday cheese and bread. He drank fresh water from the Litani River, and his feet were grazed down to bone on the grit of the road. Even then, when I was only small, I knew his arrival in Beirut was inspired less by courage than by an all-encompassing fear.
I leafed through the dictionary that day, noting Minas’s underlining of certain words and phrases. Then a note between the pages, dated 1966, the year of my birth, and folded many times. When I smoothed it out on my knee I couldn’t place the inept handwriting.
Dear Papa,
I know you’ ll be disappointed in me. Then again, you
always were.I’m leaving. Maybe I’m leaving to prove to you that I can
do exactly what you did. Maybe I’m afraid of being a coward.
Here the ink faded and ran out until I had to hold the paper up to discern the rest of the words, etchings in angry relief against the light.
Maybe it’s more cowardly to leave than to stay behind. Anyway,
I’m gone.Selim.
My father had held that paper in his hands, touched the pen that made those bright marks – now faded – on its surface. I have the note now, also hidden in Lilit’s Koran. How my father would have hated that.
I also have D’Andrea’s tape. It weighs on me now like the burden of my father’s death, the annihilation of my people. I remember the slight wobble in his voice just now on the phone, his split-second vulnerability.
I get up, sit cross-legged on the bed, lay all my relics out on the covers like an incendiary game of Patience. Lilit’s photograph, the veil, the Koran. The black and white photo of my parent’s wedding. My father’s note. The tape with D’Andrea’s damning words. An inventory of objects that hold me back. I close my eyes, for a beat of silence. There’s no way I want to be as vengeful as my father. I take the tape into both my hands, leaving a gap in the line of items. Push it into my recorder and press
erase
.
L
ilit knew Suleiman wasn’t sure how to approach her. She saw him lower his eyes when she chanced to meet him in the downstairs corridor, shuffle out of her way when she carried the brazier to his bedroom at sunset. After that first night, when she shared his bed as a sister or a child, he sent her to the latticed quarters upstairs and did not call her back again. So far he hadn’t touched her. At first she thought he was disgusted by her Armenian blood – she was an infidel according to him, after all – or by her bedraggled state when he found her. Perhaps he only bought her as a cheap servant. Or maybe he was ashamed, his desire blocked before the reality of her great suffering. Yes, that was it. He felt pity for her because she wasn’t normal any longer.
Often she thought of the initial walk home. He had said he didn’t mind her stink when she asked him. At first, though, he had no compunction in calling her a slave. This had been the pattern of the past weeks since that day: he would say something compassionate then follow it with brutal logic that left her cold. As with that first beating, coming directly after his kindness with the jacket, the way he pulled her to him in the street.
Welcome home.
And yet – his avoidance of her, his awkwardness in her presence, the passionate beatings then contrition, told another story entirely. She didn’t know what to think any longer.
She knew she’d regained some of her youthful attractiveness now. She had become plumper on a diet of spiced breads and pastries, sometimes worried she was even getting fat. She stood in front of the only mirror in the house and pinched her waist, made fists of flesh from her inner thighs. The older servants soothed her concerns, saying Muslim men liked their women to be squishy and soft as
loukoum
. Rosepink and powdered with sugar. They commented on her black lashes and coral ears, her wide, spreading hips. The master would be well pleased with her. They didn’t comment on her eyes; she knew they were afraid of the colour, and she tried to cover her face with her veil when she remembered. Only Fatima sat aside and remained silent.
Her hair was no longer cropped to the skull, although it was still far too short for a woman. Thankfully she had a large array of veils. She was given clothes and jewellery, even a pair of antique earrings the servants told her had been especially chosen by the master. She put them on before the mirror, screwing in the thick studs. Gold earrings. She remembered Mamma’s. Minas had taken them.
Where is he now?
She closed her eyes. When she opened them again, she knew to concentrate only on her new earrings. She moved her head, watched the filigree glitter. From each stud dangled a scimitar, sharp and dangerous, tiny blades brushing at her neck. Her own curved knife-edge of desire.
She thought about Suleiman as she carried the brazier through the corridor to his bedroom, with the ginger cat shadowing her like a thought. For some reason the task had fallen to her to perfume his chambers each night with ambergris, living coals of fragrance. It was difficult at times seeing another woman from the household or even a tenant from Suleiman’s fields lolling on the divan. She knew the women were peasants from the baggy floral pantaloons they wore. Catching a glimpse of brown shoulder, an arched foot. Suleiman in an unbuttoned nightshirt. His lax belly, the chosen woman waiting for him to disrobe. If it was Fatima in the bed she didn’t even lower her eyes but invited Lilit’s gaze, challenging.
She convinced herself Suleiman didn’t desire her, that she would never share his bed. The realisation made her feel more discarded and worthless than she cared to admit. She was left spinning, lost without an anchor. She sat in the courtyard with the cat in her lap on most days, filled in her idle hours with the light household tasks assigned to her, polishing copper trays used for serving sweets, pruning the female date palm that stood over the central fountain, dusting the precious mirror. She looked at herself long and hard as she wiped the rag back and forth, and a sad stranger stared back at her. She was no longer the Lilit she thought she was. Yet who exactly she had metamorphosed into was another cause for anxiety. She was still growing, or being stunted inside; still in that amorphous, ugly state of flux between knowing and unknowing, past and present, exile and refuge. This was worse than being forced to leave home, worse than losing everybody, worse than being violated in the desert. She couldn’t exactly tell herself why it was worse, but it was.
It wasn’t until tonight, when Suleiman smiled up at her and said thank you as she placed the brazier on the floor beside his bed, when he clasped her bangled wrist and held her there, half-crouching, halfstanding over him, that she realised what his problem had really been all these weeks.
He’s falling in love with me.
It was impossible, comic and ludicrous, yet there it was. She was surprised to feel that she welcomed it.
She hovered above him in this position, light from the lamps all around illuminating the heat spreading from her chest to her face. She forced herself to look into his eyes and saw how they rested on her mouth, now moving over her cheeks, her spiky hair under the gauze veil. Not once did they travel to her breasts or her bare, goose-fleshed arms.
My God, he is in love with me. He’s not sure what to do next.
She sat on the bed beside him and with her free arm drew the veil away from her head. They both watched it puddle at her feet. It seemed to take forever.
She lay down beside him, stretching out the full length of her body on the bed. In her head the shame and hurt and violence of the other man receded, paled into insignificance beside the tender breathing of Suleiman beside her, a musical breath whose rise and fall and expectation she could feel pass from his body to hers. She turned toward him and loosened the grip of his hand from her wrist, guiding his arms around her.
‘Yervan,’ she whispered in his ear, and knew he thought she was murmuring some endearment to him in Armenian.
If I do this now Yervan will be alive. I will make it so.
Yet she knew even as she made the bargain that she was only lying to herself. This wasn’t a sacrifice by any stretch. She wanted to do it.
‘Suleiman,’ she said, louder.
She felt him hesitate for an instant when he realised she was not a virgin. But his desire beat hot and deep now and was not to be slowed, and he took her with some of the painful love and hatred she felt for him already, the kindness and cruelty they shared. She breathed into her belly and held him inside her and his rising shudders jolted awake her memory again.
Turk. Another Turk inside me. Papa. Mamma dead. Oh, Minas.
But it was only for a moment. Suleiman arched above her and spoke into her mouth in a caress.
‘What is it?’
She closed her eyes and drew him deeper into her.
‘Nothing,’ she said in Turkish.
Suleiman gave her the Bible to read as well as the Koran. He taught her more careful Turkish than she’d ever known, and even classical Arabic, showed her how to wind the spangled veil over her face and breasts and leave her hands free to work, to cook, to pleasure him. To read the two holy books aloud, in those long evenings spent in the sky-filled courtyard amid the scent of water.
Sometimes they smelled burning and heard reports of Armenian deaths. Suleiman showed her newspaper articles discussing Talaat and Enver Pasha’s latest statement in parliament.
La question Arménienne
n’existe plus.
The final solution –
hall ve fasl
– had been successful. She wasn’t sure what that meant. Did it mean the Turks would stop deporting the few Armenians that survived and repatriate them?
The Armenian
question is no more.
What did that concede exactly? Acknowledgement of guilt? Or had they already killed enough Armenians to consider the task finished?
‘Many are still being thrown into the Euphrates,’ the old women muttered to each other in the market.
She turned her face away and the women spoke louder, knowing from gossip where she was from and to whom she belonged. Suleiman was always there to frown at them for her, to grip her hand with a careful, comforting pain. She had asked him many times to help her find Minas. After all, the work camp was not so far away. Surely Suleiman had some influence. But he looked afraid when she pressed him, telling her the authorities would punish him for prying, that her brother was sure to be dead already. It was not a work camp, he said. It was a camp of death.
Lilit stopped asking. She soon learnt to ignore any rumours and cultivate a sublime indifference to the public sphere. She concentrated instead on Suleiman and the moods of her growing body. Could there be a baby? Testing her belly for tenderness, learning to pad silently on bare feet through empty corridors with tea on the brazier, to wash the morning hush with songs of light.
My darling, my love, your sufferings
and joys will be many.
With her new languages came new voids, clean surfaces one couldn’t penetrate, rooms of meaning opened to the sun, bleached of significance then closed again.