Bone Ash Sky (32 page)
I swallow my apprehension and take a taxi back to the Mayflower Hotel. The trip passes without incident. I grab my room keys from the grinning boy at reception.
Merci. Shukran
. Never sure which language to use. Which voice.
Another icy air-conditioned room, noise of traffic muted by thick crimson curtains. I switch on my laptop, comforted by its whirring welcome. The screen lights up electric blue. I freeze, hands poised over the keyboard. Am I falling in love with the father I never knew, again, in Chaim? A failed, dirty, doomed love from the beginning.
Downstairs a busker wails. I type. Type anything: the weather outside, the scraping sound of a vacuum cleaner in the room next door, the way my shirt-collar feels hot and sticky on my neck. I stop. I have no opinions. Nothing to say. Nobody to blame.
I’ve heard Lebanese point the finger at their Ottoman heritage for the civil war and for their continued factionalism, a five-hundred-year occupation with its precedents of corruption and tradition of public neglect. I don’t believe it. Others bewail the sense of impotence left by the imperialist experience. The collective stupor of the twenties, or the present-day supremacy of America. I get up from the cramped hotel desk, turn on the sputtering TV. A Benny Hill comedy dubbed into Arabic. I pull off my shirt, loosen my bra. Relief. There’s sweat under my breasts, stinging.
Many Arabs maintain the West still conspires to keep them in second-class status. That they haven’t moved on from the mediaeval glory of their past. Arab culture continues to honour religion over reason, conformity over diversity, rhetoric over truth. Who’s to say the West isn’t doing the same thing? I kick off my sandals, lie on the bed and watch the antics on the screen.
L
ilit scrubbed Suleiman’s baggy underclothes against the ridged board in the tub outside. She rinsed them, wrung them out until she felt she could extract no more moisture from the heavy coiled folds. She scolded the servant girl responsible for the washing this morning; last week certain festival clothes had been folded and put away with sweat stains still on them.
She wasn’t sure herself if she was truly angry with the servant girl or merely conspiring to be outside in the courtyard today, closer to the front gate and to freedom. She’d taken to wearing every item of jewellery Suleiman had given her all at once, pushing ring upon silver ring onto her swollen fingers and fastening bracelets all the way up to her elbow. Leave-taking preparations, the decisive gesture finished before the brain had time to realise exactly what it meant. Just as she had pushed the girl away today, warning her she would be beaten if it happened again, and announced that for the first time she would soil her own hands with Suleiman’s dirty clothes.
She was surprised at her own audacity, she who only months ago was a scared and cringing slave in the household. She who now had the power to order the servants, to avoid heavy work and play the lady. A nameless doubt gripped her. Her hands were shaking, her lower spine ached. She straightened up and arched backward with her hands on her hips, stretching. The baby was nearly due. She could feel it rasp and fret inside her, a sharpened stone growing too large for its cavern, questioning, demanding to be let out, demanding to be free.
She wiped the soapsuds from her arms. Today was the day. She was going without telling Suleiman, without telling Fatima. She was going to leave them all and escape with her unborn baby. She reckoned on this time of day being safe: Suleiman at the notary’s office, discussing the ongoing lease of his cotton fields and palm groves; Fatima on her pallet with a headache, shutters closed and a wet cloth over her eyes; the cook ensconced in the kitchen muttering to herself as she chopped up a lamb killed only that morning, squatting on her haunches, throwing the pieces into a pot at her foot.
The noon hour had only just passed and the town seemed still and drowsy as a drugged bee. She rolled down her sleeves, fastening them at the wrists, collected her meagre provisions and the jingling cache of coins. One rolled out of the pouch and fell to the ground. She grimaced at the sound as she bent to pick it up, belting the pouch at her waist. The ginger cat miaowed as if aware of her defection, and she knelt down to bury her face one last time in its fur.
With swift deliberation, she draped her veil firmly over her face and traversed the courtyard in silent steps, peering into the kitchen on her way. The cook’s back was to her and she was humming. She unbolted the courtyard doors. Her hands were trembling again – she knew she made more noise than was necessary. The pounding of her heart louder than the fountains’ splash. She slipped through the tiny opening she made and closed the doors behind her.
When she was outside, she stopped for a moment with her back against the wall. Her blood was still surging in her temples, thick with dread.
It was so easy. So simple.
The street murmured painful foreboding in the shimmering heat. She shaded her eyes, gazed up and down its length and breadth.
But what do I do now?
Her plans had seemed so perfect, so watertight when she lay awake at night beside Suleiman, his knee wedged between her legs, her body weak and yielding and moulded into his.
She would go back to Van and find Papa. There would be
khans
on the journey for her to sleep in, where she might remain unmolested. She might be able to give birth on the way. This terrified her. But to wait here would mean she would lose all hope, all freedom, become Turkish and give birth to a child who would grow up Turkish, knowing nothing of its true culture. She had to leave, for her child’s sake if not her own. She would be protected, she’d have to be. A peasant woman would help her birth. A Bedouin, used to labouring alone in the desert. She would arrive home safely. She would reclaim their old house and live in it with only her baby if she couldn’t find Papa. If the house had been burnt down by the Turks, she’d get someone to build it again. Yervan? He might still be alive. After all, it was still their land. Suleiman had told her all Armenian assets had been classified by the government as abandoned goods. She didn’t quite understand what that meant in her case. Surely they couldn’t take away her ancestral fields. Surely she would be safe again at home.
Now the street stretched before her in a terrifying spiral of doubt.
Where do I go? What if the Turks find me? They’ ll know I’m Armenian.
She looped another thickness of fabric over her face and made herself walk to the end of the street. Her legs trembled and threatened to buckle beneath her. She knew she looked odd; she couldn’t help making little whimpers of fear she knew were audible through the veil.
Yet there was nobody around. The buildings moved closer together in the heat haze, conferring over her escape. Black palms swayed above her, although there was no wind. She looked up, squinted into the sky, blue as the indigo dye she saw for sale in the markets. Too blue, too perfect, sinister, like the cold glass eye Suleiman had tucked into the folds of her nightdress when he found out she was pregnant. She hadn’t wanted to look at it. It reminded her too much of her own Armenian eyes, the colour of Lake Van.
‘Keep this,’ he said. ‘It will protect you and our baby. Trust me.’
She fumbled in her clothes as she walked higher up the incline of the silent street. Her fingers searched between her breasts, in her underclothes, digging into her navel. It was nowhere to be found.
I’ve
left it behind!
She halted, her face twisting beneath her veil.
I can’t leave here if
I’ve left it behind.
The panic of choice held her down, deep in the belly.
Suleiman. Our child. Help me.
She remembered the way his face had looked last night in the moon’s pale shiver. ‘No,’ he had said when she bent down and touched her mouth to him. His penis was a little furled bud, vulnerable. ‘No.’ His cheeks crumpled, like a baby hurting. He helped her put her clothes back on with jerky movements, fumbling with the buttons, tying the sash askew, and sat with her on the bed, saying he was too tired. ‘The others,’ he said, ‘they demand so much from me. You, Lale—I can only be myself with you.’
Standing at the crossroads, torn by her indecision and the desire to scurry back to the safety of the courtyard, she saw a caravan in the distance, visible over the high town walls.
I could go straight back there now and nobody would ever suspect.
She thought of Fatima: all those barren years of longing, her reckless desperation. She thought of her child in the future, a son or daughter that would look just like its father, blank-eyed when she tried to tell the story of its origins, the suffering of its race.
The caravan was coming closer now, skirting the edge of town. She could see men in bright checked scarves, the fluid grace of camels, litters and palanquins carrying piles of clothes, rugs, thick bolts of rainbow fabric. Also women, perched high on the smaller beasts, unveiled and tattooed on forehead and chin. She thought their eyes sought her out, could see who she really was under all her veils and gold. For an instant she thought she would raise her hand and alert them to her presence. They would take her now, look after her. But her hands remained where they were, clasped loose on her belly. The child kicked; a sublime nudge into the present. She turned away and began to retrace her steps to Suleiman’s house.
Now the voice in Minas’s head redoubled in its efforts. It was shrill and then there were more of them calling, brittle and insistent, sweet singing refrains from the community of the dead. They would not let him rest so he lay awake at night scheming, planning his escape. He pushed away the girl with the flat of his hand when she wanted to touch him. Yet he was selfish. He held on to her greasy braid as he plotted, the same way he had with his sister when their mother left for work each dawn in Van. Her hair a living reminder he was not alone in the dark.
He thought of the other boy, now assigned to the best sleeping block in the camp and given work in the kitchens. Minas had seen him some mornings in the back courtyard, throwing last week’s slops to prisoners lucky enough to be there at the right time. Old and young men fighting over garbage, cradling it in cupped hands, taking it back to their sleeping block or behind the latrines to savour, mouthful by mouthful, deflecting kicks and blows from the others. He watched the boy eat his breakfast ration of gruel with fastidious slowness, brushing the curls out of his eyes, then wipe the tin bowl with his little finger to lick it clean. He seemed more energetic than most, even robust, with less prominent ribs. Working among food would have something to do with that, scrounging scraps left over from the guards’ meals, stealing an extra mouthful here and there.
Minas hadn’t approached him again since the time he was rebuffed; they hardly acknowledged each other’s presence at all. Survival was hard enough without pleasantries. Yet tonight as he curled up beside the girl and tugged at her hair, he knew the key to his escape lay with this boy. He seemed to have retained a faint trace of dignity among the filth, some vestige of an intact identity from his life before; the rigours of the camp had not yet rendered it meaningless. This awareness was present in all his gestures: the unhurried rhythm of his movements, his sense of hygiene, the youthful arrogance Minas could also – faintly – recognise in himself.
The boy was the only other inmate in good enough physical condition, and perhaps even optimistic enough, to consider attempting an escape. He had access to water and provisions they could take with them for the desert journey; he could even steal a knife or two for their protection. He was younger than Minas, perhaps even young enough to be easily manipulated should anything go wrong.
He rose from the ground, stealthy, and the girl beside him grasped his arm.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Piss,’ he muttered.
She let him go, her hand lingering for a moment on his elbow. He stepped over sleeping bodies, eased the tent-flap open. He strained his eyes into the desert dark, terrible and final as a blanket draped over the eyes. No Turks close by. Far away, in the direction of the kitchens, he could hear male voices singing, smashing glass, a girl’s thin, insistent cry. He made his way to the next sleeping block, his ears painful with the effort of listening out for a patrolling guard’s footsteps, the slaver of the sleeping dogs, his own cough.
Now he slipped into the other tent. How to find the boy among so many people? He stepped over recumbent bodies again, more careful this time of out-flung arms or legs. In a moment of panic, he realised he didn’t know the boy’s name. He waited until he stood in the centre before he spoke, hearing his own voice come back to him in a tight, controlled whisper. ‘Is the young boy here who works in the kitchen? The one with curly hair?’
Nothing. Then from the darkness came murmurs and whispers like the rising of a tide. ‘Why, do you want to fuck him?’ ‘No boys here, only men!’ And a reedy woman’s voice, ‘Shut up, all of you, I’m trying to sleep.’ One of the figures sat upright, pointing an accusing finger. ‘I’ll call the guards! Get back to your own block, you’ll have us all killed.’