Bone Ash Sky (68 page)
‘
Merhaba
. I need to go to east Beirut.’
The driver shook his head.
‘No way, madam. I haven’t been over there since the beginning of the war. Eight years!’
‘Please. I need to get to the Beka’a. It’s important.’
He ignored her, pointing upward. Black smoke curled into the sky from all directions. Down near the embassy road, a red flame as tall as a building uncoiled itself from the earth. She left him and ran in its direction without knowing why.
It was 1.03 pm. Issa had been given a Chevrolet pickup truck in unintended irony. American made, built to last. There was a militia car in front of him, in case he grew frightened at the last moment, blocking any escape. Another car behind, with more explosives in case his attempt failed. He waited around the corner for a while, composing himself, breathing in exhaust fumes, dust, the momentous air all around him, deep into his lungs.
My lungs, my heart, my lips, my body.
He opened his Koran and read aloud a few soothing
suras
.
Each soul is the hostage of its own deeds. Those on
the right hand will in their gardens ask the sinners: ‘What has brought you into
Hell?’
He couldn’t concentrate. He put the book down.
My body the weapon.
He passed his hand over his eyes. After a short time, he took a piece of paper out of his pocket. The instructions were typed in bold block letters.
BEFORE DRIVING INTO THE EMBASSY, PRAY:
Oh, Allah. Open all doors to me.
Oh, Allah, who answers all those who seek help.
I ask you to light the way and lift the burden of this life
from me.
He pulled out from between the two other vehicles, manoeuvred the truck, smiling and with eyes closed, straight into the front doors of the embassy building.
Now it was 1.13 pm. She slipped in pale blood mixed with water and smashed glass. She fell onto a suited torso and was helped up by a faceless man in a surgical mask.
‘Are you family?’ he demanded.
‘No. I mean, yes.’
‘Just get out of here.’
So many parts of bodies the horror did not touch her. They weren’t people; they were only leering heads and severed arms and legs tangled in a sick fantasy. The live ones were more frightening. They convulsed, they lashed out at each other, clutched at her ankles and pleaded with a stranger’s name on their lips. She shook her head at them, trying to breathe normally, trying to wipe away the water that flowed down her cheeks. She wasn’t aware what the liquid was that blurred her vision, and continued wiping it from her face, not conscious of crying, walking through the wreckage, swollen feet through her sandals shiny with blood.
When it was 1.17 pm, Selim was shot in the back of the head by the Algerian guard. He lay face down near the wall he’d been chained to for the last two months. He didn’t make a sound, but his right hand spread itself out after he stopped breathing, as if attempting to contain the dark pool of his existence.
I
take a service taxi from the Beka’a Valley to the south that same afternoon. After leaving the strange man and the mulberry tree, I feel somehow lighter, floating without any goal. I haven’t yet expiated my father’s death, far from it, but I’ve somehow silenced the insistence of the unknown. I’ve done all I can, now. I’ve been there, where he died, and found him somewhere else instead. My father’s right beside me, always has been. With his bloodied hands, his many contradictions, the pink flowers under his jacket. He’s part of me now, and he’s all mine. As I sit in the taxi my body is entirely relaxed for the first time since I came back to Beirut.
When I arrive at the compound where Sayed is held it’s already evening, the floodlights on and Israeli soldiers’ faces bathed in an eerie underwater glow. I had tried to phone first and arrange a time to see Sayed, but there was no answer. Now I beg to see him for five minutes at least. It’s not a visiting day and the hour is late. The soldiers confer with each other, call their superiors, shake their heads. I sit on the steps of the sentry box.
‘I’m not going until I see him. Please. I only need to say one thing.’
After two hours, and after the soldiers realise I’m not going to move, I’m allowed in to see Sayed.
‘Three minutes,’ the guard tells me. ‘I’ll be timing you.’
Sayed leans over and puts the back of his hand on my cheek. The coolness of his skin, its tiny black hairs against me, is unbearably intimate. I feel either I’ll hit him or embrace him. Yet I stay still, waiting for him to remove his hand. It feels to me as if with this casual gesture he’s marked me out as one of them. A Palestinian. I think of Chaim, and don’t want to take sides, not anymore.
‘You’re wet,’ he says.
‘Sweaty. It’s been a long wait.’
The guard nearest us steps forward.
‘No touching between detainees and visitors.’
Sayed grimaces and leans back into his chair. ‘Forgive me?’
‘For what?’
‘Being the one to tell you.’
‘Like you said, Sayed, it’s not our fault. Neither of us.’
There’s a silence neither of us wishes to fill. Sayed puffs out his cheeks in the way I’ve seen Inam do.
‘Which reminds me. Your article? You said on the phone you had it published.’
‘Yes, in
The Globe
. And here in Lebanon.
The Star
.’
I unfold the cuttings and let him read them. He leans over the table, his head nearly touching mine, and the Israeli guard moves forward again.
‘No touching.’
Sayed springs back.
‘If only.’
He catches my eye and I smile, not sure whether to be pleased or sad.
Chaim is back in Beirut again. To celebrate he suggests a daytrip to the ruins of the temple of Ba’al. We stop at Chtaura for lunch, eating with leisure under vine leaves, slow burble of irrigation channels at our feet. The waiter pours more wine. I put my hand over the glass.
‘No more for me. I’m already tipsy.’
I’m dazed with heat and alcohol. I finish my curd cheese, scooping it up with bread, pick at the last of the purslane salad. Shafts of light pierce through the leaves onto the white tablecloth, the white plates, Chaim’s greying hair turned blonder in the sun. I want to tell him what Rowda said, and about Sayed’s note, but don’t know how to go about it. In a strange way, I fear that either sentence once spoken will open a chasm between us that can’t be forded again. So I’m quiet, letting him finish the bottle of wine, take my hand and lead me to the car. Our driver is happy too, singing ballads under his breath as he drives. Along the highway huge posters of sheiks and mullahs, holy martyrs, contemporary, smiling, raise their hands in benediction at the buses and cars and trucks filled with women and children and farm animals. The closer we come to Ba’albek the bigger and shinier the posters become, the more beatific the smiles.
Close to the town the mountains begin to shimmer with an otherworldly light. The Beka’a Valley when we enter is hot and sticky. As we pull up at the ruins, crippled men thrust forward with trinkets, T-shirts, keffiyehs, cheap postcards in long concertinas trailing behind them in the dust. Some have fake Hellenistic and Roman finds they try to palm off as original: tarnished coins, fragments of mosaic, tiny busts of Aphrodite. Chaim stops to examine a terracotta perfume vial, atmospherically grimy, and a votive candle-holder redolent with its newly applied history. They are mostly Hezbollah fighters, wounded family men, home from battle to eke out their existence in the vegetable patches and fruit orchards the same way their grandfathers and great-grandfathers did. When they’re well enough they will go south again to fight the Israelis on the border. I fend them off with shakes of the head and outstretched arms, stride through and up the steps to the temple compound, leaving Chaim to question and cajole, and in the end buy nothing. The men are friendly; I can hear them. They want talk more than a sale, but I’m tired from the trip and enjoying the solitude of the cavernous, weed-choked space between the huge temples too much. All around are fallen Corinthian columns and pediments, graceful statuary: a rounded arm, a breast, a carved pomegranate tinged red, still so insanely red after millennia. I bend to the ground and rub some pigment onto my palm.
Chaim joins me and we walk together through the ruins. The merchants have long since dropped behind. Before us the main temple of Jupiter appears rosy and pale gold in the afternoon light, dwarfing the surrounding landscape of concrete two-storey houses and shops, crazy aerials and cypresses. Away to the right, sitting in the shade, an old man with a twisted staff watches over his few goats grazing among the ruins. He waves at us in a slow greeting as we come closer. We climb up and into the entablature, careful of falling pediments and broken columns scattered at our feet. Chaim helps me over a fallen frieze. His hand stays in mine, tight. A carved Medusa’s head stares up at us.
‘She’s not much fun,’ he says.
‘Oh, but look at him.’
We bend down and look at another bas-relief that has fallen: a black-winged Eros with one leg thrust forward, his quiver full of redtipped arrows like tiny nipples. Chaim’s breath caresses my ear and I shiver.
‘Any response in the US to your article about Sayed Ali?’
‘Yeah, mostly negative. What did I expect? But I’m interviewing him again, for an opinion piece, trying to contextualise his predicament. I like him.’
‘Like him? In what way?’
‘Well, he didn’t do it, I’m sure.’
‘Hmm. How can you be so sure? And you haven’t answered my question.’ Chaim stops walking with me, turns around and blocks the narrow path. ‘Tell me, Anoush, who the hell in this conflict hasn’t been persecuted? If you talk to my mother or her friends they’ll tell you the persecution began long before they arrived in Israel.’
‘But he’s being persecuted
now
.’
‘And what of the kids in Israel who can’t go to school without an armoured guard? Aren’t they being persecuted?
Now.
What of the bits of blown-up people I’ve had to scrape off the pavement? The orphans and widows?’
‘Okay, okay, I get your point. We’re both on the same side here, Chaim.’