Bone Ash Sky (28 page)
Once in Boston, I didn’t have the time to wonder whether I hated – no, distrusted – Turks. But it was the first time I’d met any: petite girls with black hair like mine, skin as dark, eyes, gestures, songs, food, jokes – like mine. But I never became friends with them.
I’ve grown up with
the sounds of bombs in my sleep,
I whispered as I traversed silent, empty classrooms.
I’ve dreamed through explosions. You wouldn’t understand. I’m
immune to loss. Warring factions live inside me, tribes at odds with one
another, armed to the teeth.
I felt so sorry for myself it’s almost laughable now.
Do I still feel sorry for myself? My grandmother became the slave of a Turk. My grandfather was incarcerated in a death camp: seven months of hell in the desert. How did he survive? My father – what exactly happened to my father? Somehow, the horror of his death fails to touch me today. I’m okay. I’m still okay. Here I sit, fed, clean, rested. I can smell the faint rosemary residue of my shampoo when I move my head, the fine soap I brought all the way here from Boston on the tips of my fingers. My pressed, crisply washed clothes folded artfully as origami before I put them on. The maids at the hotel so quick, I barely have time to give them my dirty linen before it’s been washed and dried on the rooftop terrace.
My daily routines in these few weeks have become immutable; exercise at dawn, morning glasses of tea at the Cafe de Paris; the beginnings of those articles for
The Globe
that grow bristly with more questions. My marathon walks coming close, then closer to our old house in the Armenian quarter, yet never quite reaching its sacred, sinister arcs; exhaustion and sleep in the late afternoon; gin-soaked midnight conversations with journalists who spend more time at the Mayflower than on the ground. Each night, I lose myself in the intimacy of panelled bars and other peoples’ stories, in the harsh, glittery edges alcohol brings. Each day, I come closer to the core of my history, the blackness.
The two UN judges come in, sit down. It’s all so sudden, I don’t feel as if I have time to take it in. The verdict: charges dismissed against Ariel Sharon, although Israel is shown to bear ‘indirect responsibility’ for the massacres. The biggest villains are the Lebanese Phalange militia, with special mention made of Elie Hobeika and Selim Pakradounian. No reparations to the families of the victims. Just an official apology made by the Lebanese government and Israel under the auspices of the UN. It makes me so ashamed I want to hide my face. I sit paralysed in my seat and all around me groups of Palestinian families stand, cry, hug: children, women, holding flowers from their gardens, their faces awash with conflicting emotions. I see the old woman and the little girl again. They stand apart from the others, then the woman takes the girl’s hand in a slow gesture of resignation as they shuffle out to the street.
I raise my sleeve to hide my face. I know my father was a war criminal. I’ve always known it. But all along, I’d hoped that someone else would come along – someone from the past, someone with authority, and tell me I was wrong. As I wipe my eyes, I capture the indefinable smell of my childhood on summer mornings, when Siran would begin the day’s chores just after dawn. A day exactly like today: dew still on the ground and moisture dripping from the thick-veined petals of bougainvillaea. My father’s absence a continued knife-thrust, a sharp pebble in my throat. Streets stretching out into the distance, already flared white in a hot wind. Washing powder from a huge round tin and early sunshine, smooth as milk. Lilit in the kitchen making breakfast, hobbling out to the garden on her cane to tend our flowers. The scent of lime-blossom tea that hung, faintly cloying, in her withered hands and hair. It’s here I sit, on my hard slippery seat in the courthouse, and begin to accept where I’ve come from – a place where everybody was a victim, or a perpetrator. Or both at the same time. I came here, wanting to make sense of it, and found D’Andrea instead. He was so desperate that night, beside himself. I know he didn’t want to scare me, or hurt me. Nevertheless, he did. But I’m glad now that I erased the tape, because I’ll do anything – everything – not to be like any of them, not to be a victim again.
S
anaya decided that she wouldn’t replace the glass in her windows again. She’d already had it done three times and was sick of avoiding flying fragments in the dark. Today she’d stand on a chair and tape plastic sheets over the window frames, just like everybody else. Around her she sensed the other inhabitants of her building, her city, her country, continuing to surrender to the instinctive desire to bring some order and comfort into life amid the chaos and death. A desire she had only this moment abandoned as hopeless.
She recognised in herself a loosening, a strange calm. Slowly, she was letting go of the need to impress. She didn’t fret anymore if her clothes were dirty or if there was no water in which to wash. She stopped wearing so much make-up, tied her hair up every morning because it was so lank. Her days and nights were as slow moving as a dream, and as unpredictable.
She saw women washing clothes carefully with a sliver of soap or none at all, hanging grey underclothes between fallen facades to dry, throwing a pinch of spice into a courtyard pot filled with boiling seawater in which there was nothing but greens gathered from city streets. They scrubbed at rubble that was once a bedroom wall. Busied themselves smoothing threadbare sheets over torn mattresses, looted from ruins next door. This was what gave her city its distinctive and bizarre paradox: the nature of humanity to busy itself with the inane while denying the inevitable.
She forced herself to go downstairs with a bucket and spade to remove broken bricks and garbage from the once-proud fountain. Rouba helped her sometimes, but the others in the building merely conspired in filling it up again. Their concierge – the fountain and garden and its birds had been his pride and joy – was killed by a hooded gunman while crossing the street. Which militia the murderer had belonged to, nobody knew. Anybody could find a gun nowadays and patrol their corner of the street without fear of censure. Except, of course, when a bigger militia decided to claim the same turf. The dabblers and dilettantes would run inside to their wives and brag about their neighbourhood exploits for years to come, on their balconies in the late evenings, in the courtyard downstairs while playing cards.
The care of the canary had been taken over by Hadiya. In reality it was Issa who went with her each morning, changed the water dish and scattered grain, put down fresh newspaper. Sometimes he would take Hadiya by the hand and scour the garden and surrounding streets for a bud, a blade of grass, a rotten lettuce leaf to offer. He professed a deep fondness for the little bird, and was as gentle with it as he always was with Hadiya. Sanaya felt herself grow soft when she watched him with the little girl, aching at his youthfulness, the springiness of his brown skin. She wanted him to hold her hand instead, to touch her lightly, look into her face with the same glittering focus he brought to bear on the bird, the cup of water, a tiny flower he’d found. ‘Our prophet loved animals,’ he told her. Instead of getting up to disturb a cat sleeping on the edge of his robe, Mohammed cut the garment. But Issa was not often home anymore, so the bird’s welfare was left to Rouba. She had no idea where Issa had gone when Sanaya asked her, all she knew was that he wasn’t in the south any longer.
‘Why not?’ Sanaya pressed. ‘Isn’t that where the worst fighting is?’
Rouba looked away. ‘He’s somewhere in Beirut,’ she replied, and Sanaya imagined him getting hurt or dying and was surprised at the chill that crept over her.
The concierge used to hang the canary’s cage from the boughs of the fig tree on sunny days, but this tree had now been stripped of everything: not only its fruit, but its leaves and even its branches too. It had become a stump the neighbourhood children sometimes proclaimed from in their complicated games of cruelty and justice. Hadiya was kept away from those games.
Today Sanaya came to terms with the fact that perhaps she didn’t want the war to end. If it ended, this ultimate distraction from real life and its pressures – find a job, choose a husband, accumulate wealth, have children, succeed, compete – would no longer hold any sway. Nobody was competing now, except to kill each other. Most people were living in the moment, helping each other in small, delicate ways to survive.
The only thing she was afraid of in this war was death. Living with the war had become a necessary distraction, a challenge of daily habit. It came closer each day, placing a hand on her shoulder like a friend. Dying in the war was another matter entirely. If she were younger, she’d say her youth rendered her invulnerable. But she was just old enough to be sensitive to the onset of decay. Just old enough to coddle herself the same way she fabricated her fantasies of the city. The twinned destruction of herself and Beirut, yet their resolute obstinacy to remain – as a city, and as a citizen of Beirut – gave them both just enough strength to continue.
Yet it wouldn’t do to rely solely on this connection between herself and the city. She had rituals to perform, repeating them daily to protect herself. She never shook the tablecloth outside at night, never cooked without throwing a pinch of salt over her left shoulder. She would never remove the amulet she’d worn since birth, the gold hand of Fatima, from around her neck. In her long evenings of reflection, she mused over where she had learnt these superstitions and concluded that she had no idea. Her mother was never interested in rituals, in folk remedies or myths. The first port of call in any family crisis had always been a straight whisky at six and sleeping pills at bedtime. Western doctors, specialists’ fees and potent creams for her beautiful, aging face.
The view of the sea from Sanaya’s balcony lulled her, on some primitive level, into feeling the human war below couldn’t touch her. Violent sunsets, the rush and boom of waves between marbled rocks, the silvery sheen of dawn on the horizon gave her an illusion of constancy. Yet the war of machines, the mechanical war of bombs and explosions, terrified her. Some mornings she didn’t get up at all and stayed in bed all day reading old fashion magazines, telling herself this wasn’t a form of absolution, of giving up. When Issa came back, after weeks of silence, she was deaf to his protests during air raids. She wouldn’t go and hide in the corridor anymore, so he came to her.
Rouba, Hadiya and Issa sat with her in the bathroom for hours during the fighting, playing backgammon, eating, talking. Sanaya took note of the way Issa always let her win, watched the way he ate daintily, like his bird. She liked the way he sat, arranging his long limbs loosely on the floor next to her. Resting his arm against hers as he played, he smelled of sweat and spices, and she found herself surprised that she didn’t mind – whenever she smelled Selim after his workouts, she always wanted him to shower right away.
‘The bathroom’s safer anyway,’ Rouba announced, trying to make the best of the situation. ‘And I wouldn’t want to die all mangled up with our neighbours. It’s better this way.’
Whenever Issa found food in defiance of the blockade, he bought enough for all of them, as much as he could carry.
‘Why do you spend so much time with those backward Shias?’ Selim would ask. ‘Don’t accept anything from them. I can source everything from the Israelis: chocolate, bread, orange juice, toilet paper, extra soft.’
When the water supply was cut off intermittently by the Israelis, Sanaya’s neighbourhood dug its own wells; when electric power was out for more than twelve hours a day, they installed temperamental generators; when the police disappeared, they affiliated themselves with neighbourhood militias for protection. This was another reason she was still with Selim, even under pain of death by Muslim militias if they found out she was sleeping with a Phalangist. He seemed more effective than they. He seemed more powerful than Issa.
Of course, he was more powerful than any of the militias. He had the backing of Israel and America. Sleeping with the devil, that’s what she was doing. A demon with a crooked smile, a soft moustache that hid his frown. A demon who came to her apartment in the middle of the night or the early hours of the morning, so nobody would see him. Especially Issa, though Sanaya didn’t let herself articulate the thought. How would she feel if both men were in the same room?
Selim was so serene at dawn when they lay on their backs, talking. He knew exactly what to do when she became frightened: of the war, the onset of middle age, her lack of a child of her own. He kissed her, opened her up. Calm and efficient.
Selim staked out the Armenian quarter late at night in the Mercedes. His driver didn’t question the location, the post-midnight hour, or Selim’s continued drinking in the back seat. He merely drove back and forth, from street to street and house to house, as directed by Selim’s confused grumbling. Selim knew he was drunk, knew he was sad and confused, but on nights like this there was nothing else for it except to wallow.
‘Show me Urfa Street again, Pierre.’