Bone Ash Sky (46 page)

‘Please,’ he said. ‘Are you awake?’

She exhaled. The sound broke his concentration. He shook himself, let her head fall back again to the ground. When he got up off his knees, his first thought was to light another cigarette. He tossed the empty packet down, stood above her and watched ash fall on her bright chest, the barest hint of cleavage.

‘I had to do it,’ he told her.

He finished his cigarette and pulled a notebook out of his pocket, walking away from the young girl to some shade and noting down the time, 5.25 pm. He calculated how long he would like it all to take and noted down that time as well. He prided himself on his precise nature, calm and efficient under any circumstances.

Candles guttered in all four corners of the room. Outside in the southern suburbs, distant flares of a mandarin hue shocked the camps into seeming daylight.

‘Selim?’

‘Hmm?’

He was busy unfastening Sanaya’s blouse. Calm and efficient.

‘I heard the news on the radio.’

‘Which news?’

His gold crucifix glittered in the half-light.

‘The massacres. At Sabra-Shatila.’

‘And?’

He cupped one of her breasts, watching the way it stayed full and round in his palm, let it fall. Overhead, Israeli planes crisscrossed the night sky, raining shells down on the south coast.

‘Were you part of it?’

‘You know what I do.’

She turned away, threw her blouse over her shoulders.

‘Sanaya! Don’t blame me like this. We had our conversation, the night that Palestinian was here. Enough. It is what it is.’

‘How can your grand ideals be corrupted so much you’re killing mothers and babies? Your own neighbours?’

‘Is your Palestinian friend any better?’

‘I’m not saying that. All of you, you’re all the same.’

‘My dream is of a Christian Lebanon.’

‘What about me?’

‘I’ll make an exception.’

‘You make me sick.’

‘Don’t be so dramatic. It’s not worth all this.’

‘This—this what? This myth of an equal Christian and Muslim country everyone wants to believe because it’s such a nice idea?’

‘I’m not advocating equality, except when I talk to diplomats and journalists—’

‘Let me finish. This dream you espouse reinforces everything you like to think yourselves to be: civilised, urbane, compassionate, reasonable. But you’re none of those things.’

‘I’m not pretending I am. I’ll say it again: it’s your Palestinian friend downstairs who pretends to be so concerned about the welfare of his fellow human beings when all he wants to do is kill everyone – Christian, Jew, Sunni, Syrian, anyone who’s not Shia. We get more trouble from those Shias than any other Muslim faction combined.’

He leaned over close to her face and she could smell the stiff pomade, sourly sweet, that he put through his hair. Or was it something else she could smell? Had he washed since he came back from the camps? She could hardly hear what he was saying.

‘Listen. My father was a survivor from one of the worst genocides the world has ever seen. And who did it to him? Muslims. It’s my duty to fight them and avenge my family’s honour.’

He pulled down his underpants.

‘Come on, I don’t have much time.’

When the horn honked downstairs before dawn, he was dressed and ready in a minute. Sanaya noticed his hands looked old: splodgy, soft-knuckled. She looked away. He gave her a light kiss on the shoulder, pushed her down onto the bed.

‘Sleep now. You look terrible.’

In the rear of the Mercedes, he settled back but somehow couldn’t find the right position. He looked out the window at the deracinated palms, the first intimations of heat-shimmer on the sea. He looked down again at his hands folded in his lap.
I’m the son of a genocide
survivor. I have every right.
He tapped on the glass dividing him from Gilbert.

‘Stop for a coffee in Achrafiye. At my regular place.’

He looked at his old bracelet, fingered the large silver links with affection. He checked his watch. Still early, he could stop for a while before reporting to headquarters. Gilbert was driving fast, racing to the Green Line before shooting for another day began in full force.

Selim smoothed the tiny creases on his pants near his thighs precisely, with the tips of his square-cut nails.
We’ve suffered so much we’re absolved
of all guilt.
He looked down at his hands again, clenched and unclenched them in his lap.
My hands are clean. I didn’t rape any of those girls pleading
with me, didn’t torture any men. Even that last girl, she didn’t suffer for a
second.
He bit a hangnail from his thumb, spat it onto the floor of the car.

He remembered the blood rush to his head, the euphoria of power. It came on especially strong after the doubt he had experienced earlier, hot on the heels of his creeping shame. He had run into the centre of the camp after the killing of the young girl, barking further orders, weaving between the hovels and alleys behind them and the winding stairways that led to flat roofs. It was just before sunset.

He stood high up on one of those roofs, legs wide apart, surveying the swarms of militiamen advancing like a black fire into the camp. He could see no opposing gunmen, no terrorists, only old men and women and hysterical children. No answering shots rang out. There was no resistance from the inmates of the camp. Subtly and insidiously, the shapeless doubt took hold of him again.

He’d swerved, scanning the lane below. Heard a rat scurry to his left. A woman looked up and saw him and started running away. Her fat behind waddling. He’d bounded down the steps, his rifle banging against his shoulder. She turned her head and he caught a glimpse of her face in profile, a flash of eye and cheek. He stopped at the foot of the stairs panting, aimed his rifle but didn’t fire. She had seen him, looked him straight in the face. And he just stood there, wiping the sweat from his forehead with one hand, the violence of his breathing causing the gun to shake in his grip.

He stared vacantly out the car window now, the streets blurring into unrecognisable movement.
I just eliminated them. That’s all I did. Except
for that woman. I let her run away. Don’t know why I did that. Maybe she
wasn’t worth chasing. She’ ll drop dead of her own accord, anyway, when she
sees all those bodies.

They were just Muslims: Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians, Turks. All Turks, his father would say. Good for nothing other than killing. Selim went one step further. No race has a monopoly on cruelty.
If they hurt us,
we will hurt them a hundred times worse.
His argument flowed sluggish in his veins and he closed his eyes, thinking of Sanaya, of his daughter.

All day Bilqis and Amal could smell corpses from their hiding place. It was a high, stinging smell that cut into their noses and forced them to breathe through their mouths. It even cancelled out the discomfort of staying crouched together in so small a space behind the bed, in the mouldy concrete hollow they found.

Throughout the day the smell drove out any question of pity or compassion or even fear: in the morning, when they were too cautious to get up and forage; at midday, when they were too sick to contemplate eating; at sunset, when Bilqis forced herself to gnaw at a UNRWA biscuit.

Amal was in shock. She sat, her back against the wall, shaking. She couldn’t eat. Bilqis tried to give her a cup of water mixed with sugar, but she couldn’t swallow and the liquid dribbled over her chin. As the sun began to go down Bilqis wrapped her in blankets, told her to lie on the bed and sleep.

‘I’m going outside. Don’t worry about me. I’ll bring you back a hot drink.’

All that was left in Bilqis now was a white-hot anger: against the Israelis, the Christians, the Syrians, the PLO, even against the corpses themselves. She wanted to push the smell away, forget it, if she could, distance herself. She hated the corpses, who forced her to smell them. She hated the corpses with the same level of passion she assumed the perpetrators did when they killed living, breathing, fleshy, human beings.

As she opened the door, she could see her porcelain and glass figurines crowding the windowsill, taunting her, mocking her luck at being alive. These gifts were from grateful journalists and UNRWA workers she spoke to honestly and without taking sides. There was the Swedish correspondent – a young woman with a grave face who came with a local translator Bilqis knew was an Israeli collaborator. There was the American journalist who tried to trick her into saying she hated Jews. And the aid worker from Italy who clasped her hands together and cried. No more gifts. It was time to take sides. They shone like avatars from some unwritten past, these smiling shepherdesses and solemn china cats and glass ovals, incarnations of divinity.

She walked out of her hut, unsteady, in a daze of humid evening heat. Flies settled on her nostrils, the edges of her mouth, in the corners of her eyes so she could hardly see where she was going. A massacre. An atrocity. A war crime. None of those epithets let even a glimmer of understanding in. No understanding, no analysis. Only the rotten, sweet air filling her nostrils and choking her breath deep in her throat. There were Mariam and Maha, young women with blank faces and torn undergarments in the yard next door. Were they raped in front of their husbands and sons? The rats had already arrived, scurrying over their bodies in the too-bright moonlight.

She walked further down the main road of the camp. Her knees had turned to water. Scattered school shoes, a tarnished spoon with a dent in it, old photographs charred black and frilled around the edges. She picked one up, marvelling at the composed faces and high, rigid collars. She carried the photograph with her as she reached the middle of the camp, where most of the Shia Lebanese lived.
Had lived.
Where her in-laws had lived.

She stopped, looking down. She stepped back, dropped the photograph. It was easy to miss the corpses in the half-light, grey as those desperate rats, they were too mixed up in the garbage and detritus of a retreating army: half-eaten rolls of bread, empty soda bottles, ration tins, ammunition stamped with ‘made in USA’ and torn clothing, fluttering, fluttering over the faces of the dead.

She peered closer. She sat down in the rubble for a moment to be nearer to them. Perhaps she could comfort them, stop their crying. Wasn’t that a baby’s wail she heard behind that building, carried on the wind? She found the old photograph again at her feet, studied the black and white faces with intent. Were they from Jaffa too? They looked like her own mother and father, could even be her grandparents posing for a wedding memento, the only photograph they could afford their whole lives.

She looked up and became distracted by the patterns made by bricks on a wall, some crooked, laid slapdash, some already crumbling, and she wished to set them straight. Who did such a bad job? She was sitting like this, staring, still rearranging the bricks into neater configurations in her head, sobbing softly, when another woman helped her to her feet, clucking, and ushered her away.

There was panic among the few survivors on this, the first night of the massacre. Rumours the Phalange were coming back to finish their work. With the arrival of the foreign journalists Bilqis relaxed somewhat. They spoke to her in English and French, in incomprehensible German. ‘There were also Israelis at the massacre,’ she told them. ‘I heard them speaking in Hebrew while I hid.’