Bone Ash Sky (58 page)
‘Feel like a walk?’
She nodded and tied a scarf over her hair. Siran was busy putting Selim down for his nap. He flailed and fought and screamed, and she looked up as they passed and blew a kiss to her husband. He couldn’t bring himself to blow one back; he felt too guilty at his desire to tell his sister of the news first and not his wife.
They hurried down Urfa Street to the jewellery shop. Anahit clung to her mother’s and uncle’s hands, skipping between them to keep pace. She looked up from one to the other as they spoke, keeping quiet, listening, although she couldn’t understand much of what they said. Minas spoke in an undertone.
‘Boss offered me the business today.’
‘He did what?’
‘Wants to retire, has no sons, thinks I’ll follow in his footsteps and keep the family name.’
‘Will you?’
‘Course not.’
‘Is he giving the shop to you?’
He laughed, increasing his pace.
‘Lilit, I didn’t think you were so naive.’
‘How much does he want?’
‘We haven’t discussed terms yet, but I’m sure he’ll look after me.’
‘Well, how are you going to pay for it? Will you sell Mamma’s earrings?’
He stopped mid-stride, breathless.
‘We should keep those in the family. After all, we lost so much else.’
He coughed and a bright-red particle flew into his cupped palm. He showed it to his sister silently as if he were still a little boy, then flung it to the ground. She made as if she hadn’t seen it.
‘So how else to pay?’
‘You told me that you—’
‘Minas, that’s my daughter’s dowry.’
‘Please, Lilit! I’ll pay you back.’
‘What if you can’t?’
‘I’ll make it up to you somehow. You’re already living in our house, eating our food—’
‘I knew you’d waste no time casting it up to me! I’ll have you know, brother, that I more than earn my keep.’
He loosed his hand from Anahit’s, laid it on Lilit’s shoulder.
‘We want you here, Siran and I. I don’t know what she would do without you. But can’t you see, if I own this business, how much better it will be for all of us?’
He studied her face, she seemed more troubled than he had expected.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I’m already late.’
He began walking around the corner, his sister and her daughter running behind. At the entrance to the shop, Lilit stopped him with a hand on his arm.
‘Minas. I’ll give it all to you. But promise me one thing.’
‘Anything.’
‘You’ll look after my daughter as if she’s yours. All your life.’
He kissed her on the cheek, lightly.
‘You will give her the shop when you die, Minas.’
‘But my son—’
‘You will give her the shop. She needs a dowry. Your son can make his own way.’
He nodded, deep in thought. He knelt down in front of Anahit and took her face in both his hands, looking up at his sister.
‘I promise.’
‘And you’ll give her the earrings when she marries. Whomever she marries – whether he be Muslim or Christian.’
He hesitated.
‘Minas! Do you promise? Do you promise to look upon her as your own daughter?’
He entered the shop, called out again over his shoulder.
‘I promise!’
‘If you don’t,’ Lilit shouted back, ‘I’ll curse you worse than Mamma did.’
I
lie in Chaim’s bed, stretch my legs and arms out wide to reach the cool parts of the sheets. Then I realise he isn’t there. He’s always working. Yes, so am I, but it’s not all-consuming the way it is for him. I resent him for it – knowing how illogical my resentment is – yet my old sense of abandonment sours our brief time together. And he realises how fragile our state of coexistence is, how easily his behaviour can slide into shades of an absent father. But he doesn’t know what to do. I know I’m being overly sensitive and unreasonable. How do other women cope with being the one at home, the one who waits, who cleans and cooks, making the private sphere bearable?
My grandmothers never had any expectations. At least, Siran didn’t. Minas practically lived at the jewellery shop, especially after Selim was born. Lilit, on the other hand, seemed to expect much more from her men. Yet she didn’t keep any of those men. In the meantime here I am, aping the tired dance of a generation ago. So how far have I come?
Chaim has again told me he loves me, and I was surprised at how right it felt for me to answer right away, ‘I love you too.’ As a young girl, I thought all this would be mawkish, awkward, when it inevitably happened to me. Yet now, in the thick of it, I swing from elation to confusion: daily, hourly. When he’s here with me, there’s no tomorrow, and my spirits soar. When he’s away, I plummet, doubt him and myself.
Much as I battle against it, my daily routines have settled into long-established forms. I wake most mornings to find Chaim already gone. Even if he’s not stationed in the south, he’s usually at the company’s Beirut headquarters by seven, filling in reports and checking files. He phones by half-past to wake me.
‘Morning.’ I cradle the receiver in the hollow between my ear and shoulder, eyes still closed.
‘Hello there.’
Against my will, his voice lulls me into security.
‘Come home early today. I miss you already.’
When the phone call is over, I luxuriate in the softness of the mattress, the slight tinge of sweat left on his pillow. I need to go to the camp again today for the interview, but my grandmothers’ voices sing me still further to sleep, into a state of drowsy contentment where the outside world and its pressing duties somehow don’t seem so important any longer. I sleep for an hour, two hours more. In my dreams, the insistence of my father’s memory recedes, changes, billows into illusion.
When I finally get up, it’s as if my dreams have given me an answer. I’m ready to find the place where my father died. Was murdered. By a suicide bomber, an old rival who wanted him killed. Or so Sarkis said. I’ll go today, after I see the woman at the camp. And I won’t blame any of them for what they did. Anyone can become a killer if they find themselves in a place where killing is necessary. Yet, as I rise from the bed, these justifications seem ramshackle, deliberately obtuse.
As I tidy the bedroom, wash and dress, I’m distracted by the physical manifestations of Chaim’s existence: crinkled hair, butterscotch and grey, caught in the shower drain, rings of soap left in the bathroom sink after he’s shaved. His boxer shorts discarded on a chair. Mounds of clean, curled-up socks, forgotten between the cushions on the couch. I wear one of his T-shirts as I make my way to the kitchen, drink out of the mug he’s rinsed and left on the draining board. It’s still wet on the rim.
I miss him. I love it when he tucks the bedclothes around me at night, a single sheet-fold soft on my nape, a blanket wedged beneath the angle of my spine. As I float further into sleep, the careful way he arranges the various weights for comfort suggests a memory – my grandmothers fussing about me as a toddler when they put me down for a nap. Part of me knows these traits of his will soon pall or even begin to irritate me. A day will come when I’ll wrinkle my nose at the manifestations of his age, or simple maleness, shout at him over petty tasks like washing up and wiping bathroom mirrors of shower steam. I’ve never seen it first-hand with a father or mother but I’ve heard about it from Dilek and other girlfriends, watched it in enough films and books. Running beneath my pleasure at this new, elated state of being is the threat of its eventual demise. Some nights I feel it like a tight thread beneath my passion: disgust laps at me briefly when he rolls over after we’ve made love, a baby ecstatic and sated after the breast, when he burps unashamedly after a meal, looks slyly at other women. When I wash his dirty clothes.
Yet I stay in the apartment, revelling in his closeness. I move between wanting him here, and feeling ashamed to show so much need. I want to stay here, waiting for him, yet at the same time know my purpose in coming to Beirut is for something else, something larger. I look at maps, brush up on my written Arabic, read historical texts, tell myself I’m justly preparing for the journey to my father’s truth.
I’ve finished my article on the new Beirut, and one about Shia and Sunni Palestinian clashes during the war. What next? I can wait until I’ve seen the Palestinian woman, ask about the massacres, do my human-interest story fifteen years on. Beneath the distraction of activity is a deep, nameless and guilty fear. I try to ignore it, drink in Chaim’s presence with abandon, and in his absence worship the imperfect amulets he leaves behind. Discarded watchstrap grown too frayed to wear. Amber bottle of vitamins, a year out of date. Threadbare silk underpants from a kibbutz trip to China – so long ago – crumpled under his pillow. I go shopping with Julius at neighbourhood markets that set up each morning at the end of the street and then dismantle at dusk within twenty minutes, ephemeral treasures. Julius and I run together through fleeting summer rains. I buy rainbow-coloured shellfish, extravagant shapes so unlike the Atlantic clams of Boston, and two whole sardines to grill in vine leaves, a traditional Constantinople dish Siran would make in summer. I know I won’t be able to eat any of it, with my stomach still unaccustomed to the bacteria of Beirut.
When I’m done cooking, I curl up on his broken sofa with a book on the civil war and stare out at the sea, slick with rain, without reading a single word. Do I trust him? He’s Israeli. So what? I’m Armenian. Turkish. American. A citizen of Lebanon. So many warring identities, I’m surprised there’s anything left. When I lie in bed beside him, his face pressed against mine, I feel as if we blur into each other. He’s not other, he is me. When he leaves, the man walking away changes, becomes someone else again. What do I offer him? Am I so selfish that all I can think about is what he can give me? Then what hope is there? Why do we care for each other at all?
It’s crazy to sit here worrying about it. He won’t be home till late anyway. I turn off the simmering stew, cover the pot as securely as I can with a mismatched lid. I call a cab, having found the drivers are more reliable that way.
On the way to the camp I clasp and unclasp my hands in my lap, twisting my fingers together. When we get there, I make the driver promise he’ll be back in an hour. He looks surprised to find himself there but lights another cigarette and nods, making a U-turn back into the city.
I unfurl my umbrella. The streets have become dirtier, children more ragged, the presence of women less prominent. The camp is behind a row of Chanel, Gucci and Versace posters, torn and papered over with the faces of bearded mullahs and boyish bombers, grimly gazing into Paradise. The jagged silhouette of the camp buildings rise behind the hoardings, limp clothes and even limper models displayed behind Koranic phrases in fresh green swags of paint. Advertisements from Paris and Milan, skeleton women rendered irrelevant, immoral, by the faces of the pious and the dead. A slapdash concrete wall topped with barbed wire. Heavy gates and guard posts, the stink of sewerage and hopelessness emanating from it with the black smoke of burning rubber.
I walk toward it purposefully, conscious of my high strides on the greasy footpath, my posture crumpling in the rain. I called the Texan UNDP worker last night and asked why the family hadn’t been there last time. There was some excuse: illness, the little girl, hospital. The Palestinian woman finally agreed to another day. Is it only because I’m a Pakradounian? That the woman seemed to register my name? The suspicion sends waves of apprehension through me.
I wait for a gap in the flow of traffic, decide on the fatalistic approach I’ve seen others take, running and dodging, trusting drivers to slow down or swerve. A late-model Mercedes misses me by a few centimetres.
In a few minutes the rain has stopped and I’m sweating. The street stinks of car fumes, potatoes fried in cheap oil. My stomach begins to cramp, at first imperceptibly, like an ant labouring up a hill. I’m an ant. Labouring. The pincer motion increases. I double over, holding onto a corner wall for support. I’m going to die. I’m going to vomit and shit out everything inside me. The panic increases. I moan. People don’t stop but I’m dimly aware of sidelong glances. A crazy man babbles to himself, eating red jam out of a jar with his fingers. I turn to the wall of an apartment building, doing everything in my power to stop from letting my bowels go. Please let there be a cab. A welter of people, fluttering by like the old Syrian man’s words on paper. I squat down like a beggar, like the Syrian on the corner in the rain.
A man sitting on his apartment balcony above me calls down and waves.
‘You okay?’
His wide gesture leaves no room for refusal; he’s beckoning me to his home. Saviour. He’ll let me use his toilet. I find the entrance, clutching my stomach, still doubled over in pain. The waves intensify, then suddenly subside. Blessed relief. I stand on his front step, face wiped clean with the agony I experienced only a second ago, my forehead wet.
The man opens the door, stands with me and closes the door behind him. My heart sinks.
‘Are you pregnant?’
‘Umm, no, no.’
‘Good. Here, take one of these. It won’t harm you.’
The man holds a smooth white pill in his hand. Seeing my expression, he thrusts it further, close to my mouth. In the other hand he holds a glass of water.
‘This will fix your problem. I see this all the time for tourists in Beirut. Don’t be afraid, I work at the American University Hospital.’
I take the pill into my mouth and keep it hidden between my gum and cheek. A voice screams in my skull:
This is the truth you must swallow.
‘Don’t need water, thank you,’ I mumble.
I hope the pill won’t dissolve. Not opening my mouth, I nod my thanks and almost run in the other direction. I don’t need to go to the toilet any longer. I feel drained of everything: fluid, energy, will. Once out of the man’s line of vision I spit the pill out onto the ground and take a cab back to Chaim’s apartment.
As I spoon dog food into a bowl for Julius, I call the UNDP worker, give my apologies, almost retching when the meaty stench assaults me. When I explain my physical state, the woman’s attitude alters in an instant. ‘I get it all the time too,’ she says. ‘Damn this place. I can’t eat a thing except dry potato chips. It’s debilitating. No big deal. I’ll try to smooth any ruffled feathers. Any time you feel fine.’