Bone Ash Sky (2 page)

I'm going back to Beirut because of a phone call.

I had no intention of leaving the safety of Boston, the staid, comfortable routines of my exiled, unexciting life: new clothes, old music, pastry shops, roasting coffee. Which eggs or bread to buy, which milk: low-fat, full-fat, organic, walk-on-the-wild-side raw?

It was past midnight, everyone else in my share house asleep. I was lying on the couch, too lazy to turn off the TV and go upstairs. The phone rang, shrill in the dim room. An Old World, accented voice. Then I clicked: my godfather – a man I last spoke to when I was sixteen. No preamble. No
hello, it's been so long, how are you
.

I waited. Sarkis was always this way: a man of few words, and gestures that meant everything.

‘I know something about your father,' he said. ‘The war criminal.'

I flinched at that, but didn't reply.

‘Anoush, listen to me. There is a tribunal in Beirut. It is happening now. I will give you money to go there.'

‘Why? What's it got to do with him?'

‘It is for the victims – of the massacres at Sabra-Shatila.'

My stomach dropped. ‘He didn't do it.'

‘You know he did.'

‘So? What's it to you? Why do you care all of a sudden?'

‘You dare ask me why! You?'

He was shouting, ranting, off his head. He always did that to me when I was a kid, and now he was doing it again. Fuck him. Fucking old man. I'd made up my mind to hang up when all at once he stopped. Wheezed, gathered himself together.

‘Listen to me, child. I am sick. Come and see me. Tomorrow. We can meet somewhere public, if it makes you feel better.'

‘Why should I? Why should I believe you?'

He was whispering, his breath so soft I had to press the phone hard into my ear.

‘Anoush, I know how he died.'

I arrive in Beirut as massed clouds reveal another day. Amber, violet, parchment. Ashes, bone-dry hills, a panoramic sky. The ferry skims across the Mediterranean, skirts a curl of foam on pebbled beaches; red ribbons bleed into the harbour and paint the pockmarked seaside apartments pink.

In a flash I retrieve a dozen images: parties high in the suburbs above the city, plates of chickpea and lemon, whole chickens roasted on beds of coals, pickled eggplants small as my thumb. Alcohol like you wouldn't believe. The city spangled and fantastic and deeply unknowable below us, faraway noise of cars and Israeli bombs mere background music to the chatter at the table. And looking down from the ferry at that chaotic mishmash I called home, I now remember thinking – if only for a pulsating moment – that the world was opening up for me alone, that passion and love and freedom could be mine one day. I watch the waves, their hypnotic rise and fall. Maybe I'm idealising the past. Surely it couldn't have been that good?

Thud of the ferry's red hull, and the cabin erupts in shouts and cheers, people happy to be home. When Lilit, my maternal grandmother, arrived back from any journey she would ululate in ripe waves of sound that carried me aloft, lifting me up to the joy of weddings and homecomings, the sight of a beloved's face. But I have no beloved here, nobody who recognises me anymore in this city.

The man next to me is silent, head thrown back and eyes open. He seems to be studying the ceiling. I want to share the hilarity with someone but he's impassive. Since the beginning of the trip I've sat next to him, an engineer on his way home to Byblos. In the midst of his crisp pleasantries he turned away to the view of the sea and I took in his profile, bit by bit: sharp nose, heavy brows, an overbite that made his mouth seem poised on a silent conversation. He looks a little like my father: that wiriness with an incipient softness beneath, those creamy-lidded, thick-lashed eyes, tanned skin fading to pink. But this is wishful thinking, with only photographs to go on. Cardboard poses, black and white camera smiles. He left me as soon as I was born, and it hurts too much to think about.

Now I want to say to this man, ‘Let's turn back, forget about all of this: family, history, guilt. Let's hold each other and remember nothing.' But he's aloof and I smile tightly in the direction of the window, watching his hands on his thighs, waiting for him to reach across and open up another conversation. I'm tired but my eyes are open, head pumped full of adrenaline.

The port of Beirut gleams wetly now in a strengthening sun, corrugated-iron shacks refracting and mirroring its rays. Walking onto the ramp, I feel the early morning on my skin nostalgic as a caress.

I was born here. I lived here until I was sixteen. Part of me feels an incandescent joy. Yet as I enter the arrivals building my quick sense of familiarity fades, and I'm uncertain where to go next. It's understated, foreign in its hum of piped Arab pop and aircon. Nothing as I remember. Not the milling Beirutis in their new wealth, the ads selling designer bags, shoes, bras, faster cars, seaside villas, strip clubs. People with eyeless Gucci stares and flaunted bodies. As if the war never happened. As if I don't belong.

I'm held up, requested to take a seat and wait while my papers are processed. Officials go through my backpack with childish deliberation; they're only teenagers after all. So many books – why did I bring them? – are rifled through with disdain, toiletries examined, camera opened, underpants held aloft so others can smirk and exchange the expected glances. Laptop opened, booted up. My grandmother's old Koran passed over. Stiff sepia photographs, an embroidered veil. One of the officials touches the fabric for a moment, letting the fine weave wash through his fingers. He looks up, quizzical. His eyes are a startling mountain blue. Not the blue of Lake Van but the colour of cedars in the snow, winter wildflowers from villages in the north.

‘Where you from?'

‘America.'

‘No, where you from?'

‘Here.'

He laughs with real warmth, and points to a chair. ‘Welcome in Lebanon!'

Another official eases himself next to me, too close, and asks the questions I expect to hear. He looks my age, with his designer sunglasses and expensive haircut. Astringent face, afraid to crack. Gun fastened at his belt like a fashion accessory. He switches from English to French to Arabic randomly. ‘Why have you come back after so many years?' ‘How long will you stay?' ‘Where will you live?' ‘Why did you go to Cyprus first?' ‘Do you have friends here, relations?' ‘What do they do?' ‘What do you plan to do here?' ‘Do you have a return ticket?'

I answer without enthusiasm, matching his indifference. Deflect, give him the stock phrases he wishes to hear.

I'm apprehensive of my legal status, uncertain of the reception I'll receive in Lebanon, even with dual citizenship, two passports, a tourist visa if all doesn't go to plan. My entry card scrawled with
journalist
, a word that never fails to give me a self-satisfied thrill. But it also makes me far more interesting to government officials. I pass over a letter, crisply folded. It's from the editor of the World section of
The Boston
Globe.
The official looks at it intently; I'm not sure he can read English. The editor has agreed to consider any feature pieces I write from Beirut, after I wrote a few articles for him in the previous year, mostly about ‘the Armenian question' as he coyly terms it, and my family's close connection to the events.

The official opens my Lebanese passport lazily, flicking through the pages with the air of someone who's seen it all before. At my photograph he pauses, looks up and scans my face. I assume the blank, stunned gaze of my forefathers, going to their deaths. My face small, square-jawed, in the falsetto of the fluoro lights.

Name:
Anoush Pakradounian.
Hair:
Black
. Eyes:
Dark blue
. Height:
5 feet 4 inches
. Age:
29 years.
Place of birth:
Beirut.

Before I turn away from his gaze, I will myself to look – carefully, without sentimentality – at myself through his eyes. My tattoo of Mount Ararat – I know, I know, what a cliché – is too confronting here; I cover it with my sleeve. Lips in a thin, disappointing line, slanted Armenian eyes that hide something. Everything. It's my grandmother's face he's looking at: her hair shorn ragged by a Turkish bayonet, cheeks burnt by rage and fear and heat, eyes narrowed by desert sun.

He looks through my health documents. All the right shots. But there are no vaccinations against this sickness, this compulsion
to find
out
. Grandmothers, fathers, histories, wars. All these wars. I'm an American citizen, but now I'm home I feel as if I'm not deserving of this privilege.

The official gets up, taking my passports with him, and his dismissal scares me more than his words. How will I survive in this country, where cruelty is so casual? Too many years in polite, pampered Boston, writing articles about student housing or where to get a cheap meal, seeing reports on TV that failed to register, that managed only to be broken down into secondhand stories, subcategories of rage and pain.

I retrieve my laptop and begin to write. Maybe I can start on an article about ‘the new Beirut', a flashy Beirut intent on forgetting the past. Yet this is no letter from home. It's a letter to the past, certainly, but it leaps out into the future: bold, precarious, with a strangled cry. Soon enough I'm tired of my stilted phrasing, my half-baked ideas. Leaning my head on the chair I try to rest, so the security guards, the arrivals and departures, the disinfectant odour, become a hum and burning behind my eyes.

I traverse west Beirut on foot. Noon, the sun so high in the sky it's become unrecognisable, a black circle spinning nowhere. I stop in the shade of palm trees, on stony squares so small they seem like afterthoughts, someone's idea of civic duty.

Beneath the paving stones of this city, behind building-bricks and those blinding white pieces of gravel, breathes an older, more frightening Beirut – a city hiding war and bloodshed, a little girl lost in memories I dare not speak. The civil war is over, and all those wars, but I still have trouble convincing myself. Only a matter of time before Beirut is blazing again. I know this in my bones, in the pulse of my hybrid blood: Armenian, Lebanese, Turkish. There's another, secret war, lodged deep inside. The battle between hating my father and loving him. Hating him for being a ruthless killer, for leaving me before I had a chance to know him. Grasping at this chance to absolve him, restore the fierce torchbearer to me again.

I pass a boutique on Rue Hamra and peer into its display. Thigh-slashed gowns with artificial blooms on the shoulder: birdlike, predatory. Sequins, stiletto heels. The sort of dresses I longed for as a teenager, watching other girls at dances, weddings, while my grandmothers would force me to wear little-girl gowns, puffed sleeves and a bow tied at the back. Today I wear a shirt with bone buttons – more than a decade old, reminding me of who I once used to be in this city. Camel-bone, like the carved Syrian earrings dotted with gold leaf that I wear in my ears. Another of my grandmother's treasures. Spoils of war. The shirt's been washed so many times it's become diaphanous. So comforting to wear something so frayed, full of holes: like my memory of those times.