Bone Ash Sky (40 page)
The wedding loaves at the entrance were coiled in wreaths of birds and flowers, highly polished. These weren’t to be bought, only admired – and coveted by all the young girls except her. She was marrying Taleb tomorrow. There would be wedding loaves – better than these – made by the virgins of her family, blessed by her little sister Amal, by nieces and cousins and spinster aunts. There would be trays of henna for hands and feet and hair, clay pots of kohl and all her mother-in-law’s jewellery, starred with candles and scattered with sweet basil. She would wear a silk abaya strewn with rose petals fashioned of pearls. She stood looking at the currants and lowered her mouth to her hand, nibbling at them, careful not to drop even one.
Now she fingered her house keys as she dreamed. They were heavy and made of iron; they made a satisfying clink when she moved them through her fingers. She opened her eyes but continued to block out the room she was in: draughty corners, blackened ceiling and dirt floor. She studied the keys as she’d done countless times before, fixing the Arabic inscription, the filigrees and curlicues in her mind.
Jaffa
, their house was called. Like the oranges they grew in their orchards above the sea, the orange she segmented with reverence and ate each morning of her brief girlhood in that house, its quick spurt their life’s blood. She hid the keys in a rusty tin that once held pale China tea, the very same container she carried her wedding jewellery in on the flight from Palestine.
How fierce she was then, how she refused to back down. When the soldiers came she waved her keys at them and flaunted her swollen belly, shouting, ‘I’m coming back. With my newborn baby. In two weeks we’ll all be back, you bastards.’ Her mother and sister chided her for using bad language. Mother died soon after, when they reached the camps in Beirut. The tents were erected on a swamp, which in the heavy rains became an open sewer, a torrent of disease, carrying her mother and others along in its wake.
She kept going. With her first baby, a little girl dead soon after from the same disease, and still unmarried, she threw stones at soldiers, becoming a shadow, a silent link in elaborate signalling systems warning of the approach of Merkava tanks. Hiding men during midnight searches, pretending each sleeping figure was husband or father or son. In time one of them did become a husband, and she gave birth to another child. Mahmoud, killed far in the south of the country fighting the Jews. Then Issa. The third, longed-for child, his mute blue-eyed gaze at her breast. Those dainty pink feet, skipping through the puddles and potholes of the camp.
She braved the constant identity checks. Her sister Amal lay with her on the makeshift bed, silent and pregnant, a grieving sixteen-yearold widow within a year. She was promised to the younger brother of Bilqis’s husband, a firebrand boy dead in an Israeli attack. Then she was given to the eldest of the Ali sons, according to Islamic tradition, yet she feared him. She hated living with his other wives, Lebanese Shias who looked down on the family and mocked her Palestinian accent. She came to live with Bilqis, discarded by her husband for being sullen, not swift enough in the household tasks. And what of the child in her belly, Bilqis demanded, when she saw her sister was too sad to resist.
But there were more pressing problems in the camp than the future of Amal’s unborn child. Israelis and Phalange shouted obscenities at both women in Arabic, wanting them to falter, flush, betray any small indiscretion. Amal merely sat and stared at them blankly. Bilqis shouted back. They confiscated the bread she just baked, splattered her walls with the bean stew she cooked, trampled her precious stores of flour into the floor with their boots. She merely bent down when they were gone, gathered the flour up and proceeded to bake on the coals once again. She forced little Issa to eat that night, picking grit out of the bread morsel by morsel before he would swallow it.
When Issa and she were in bed with Amal, the same soldiers came in again and beat her without passion. They spared Amal, perhaps because of her youth, or her straining belly. All Bilqis could think of while they were hitting her was Issa’s safety. She could sense him standing in front of his aunt in his pyjamas, eyes wide with terror, both hands clenched into fists as Amal held him back. Neither husband was there to help: always political meetings and committees to attend, dealing with the mediocrities of camp life, rationing, sewerage, factions, allegiances, armaments.
The Israelis left her on the floor of the hut, bleeding. It took all her courage to get up again that night and make light of it so Issa would not be so scared, to make jokes with Amal about Mumma’s split lip and cut forehead in order not to frighten him any further. And yet – she knows it now, feels the guilt and pain of it – the hatred she felt for those soldiers transmitted itself through her body to the boy.
Her husband died too. She sat up in bed now and looked around, as if unaware how she came to be in this place. Photographs? None – lost or stolen by soldiers or Shin Bet, probably burnt. Husbands died. That’s what they did. There was no solace there. Husbands, sons, soldiers; they all blurred together, those blank-faced, boyish men with the fury of killing and all the intensity of children playing games. Children with gleaming toys of destruction and visions of glory, ephemeral dreams of exalted pain.
She was startled from her reverie by a tap at the door. Who could it be? Her blue-eyed boy, after so many weeks? No, only the UNRWA counsellor on her weekly rounds.
She called from the other side of the door. ‘Still asleep, Mrs Ali? That’s not like you.’
She pushed the door open without being asked. Bilqis cursed these prefabricated huts for not having any locks, and struggled to sit up straighter in bed.
‘Never mind. I’ll just plonk myself down right here, shall I?’
‘Speak Arabic,’ Bilqis said. ‘Please.’
The smile did not leave the young woman’s face.
‘Of course. You speak English so well sometimes I forget you disapprove. And how is your son – Isfan, wasn’t that his name?’
‘Issa. His father died the night before our wedding.’
‘Yes, I know, Mrs Ali. You’ve told me before. No, wait a minute, it was your first child’s father who died then, not Issa’s. Your little girl, the one who died. Don’t you remember?’
Bilqis ignored the contradiction. Who cared about chronology?
‘He was shot by his own people.’
‘Yes. All that infighting, PLO, Amal, Fatah, Hamas, Hezbollah, I can hardly keep up.’
‘Thank Allah I was pregnant, although I didn’t know it.
Alhamdulillah
. Thank Allah a little good came out of such sin.’
The young woman’s smile tightened as the door was flung open.
‘Mumma!’
Issa burrowed into Bilqis’s body in a raw intimacy that made the UNRWA worker look away. It was incongruous, a tall, grown man acting like a child. He noticed her staring. ‘What are you doing?’
‘I—I was talking to your—’
‘Enough. We don’t want you here.’
Bilqis saw how his face changed when he spoke to the foreigner. In his dismissal of the young woman was a childish desperation, an anxiety that she would not obey him, and his identity would thus shatter at the challenge. But she went, not before putting a hand on Bilqis’s shoulder.
‘If there’s anything you need, Mrs Ali, you just make sure you tell us, okay?’
Bilqis nodded and even smiled at the young woman’s humiliation, half wanting to reassure her, half to join in taunting at her discomfort.
I
miss Sarkis sometimes, now he’s dead. After all, he was the only one who filled in the gaps in my stories. By the end of his last week, he had almost made me feel whole.
I know now from the hints he dropped, from questions I liked to think were subtle on my part, that he was the boy who betrayed my grandfather in the death camp at Der ez Zor. And that calling me out of the blue that night in Boston was a crooked part of his atonement. When he called I didn’t know he would be dead a week later. He knew, of course. He wouldn’t have contacted me any other way. The cancer had already gone into his liver and lungs and bones, was reaching his brain. But I didn’t know that until after, at the funeral.
We met at a restaurant over a long weekend. He’d chosen a neutral place, perhaps so I wouldn’t cry, shout, make a scene. But his unshed tears were enough to silence me. Outside the plate-glass windows, night rain turned the sky to black and silver. Diamond points in my hair, his old eyes. I sat opposite, playing with my cutlery. He sipped wine between sentences, didn’t touch any of the food on his plate. His hands were trembling, and a thin curl of spit stayed just on the side of his mouth the whole time we were there. I wanted to wipe it off. Every now and then he would open a pillbox and swallow two or three large white pills with his wine. Now I know it was morphine. On noticing my expression, he merely raised his eyebrows, or what was left of them.
He told me what he knew of my father’s death. He didn’t know the real name of the man who had ordered him killed, but he knew the man worked for Islamic Jihad, and that he was a suicide bomber, and a rival of Selim’s. He also knew the name of the Lebanese town in which my father was buried.
He told me all this without glancing up once. Each sentence was a short, pithy fable engineered to impart some important message. The moral evaded me – I was just hungry for the details of my father’s life, any small clues as to who he really was. I asked Sarkis how he knew all this, and he finally looked up at me, his mouth twitching.
‘I’ve spent the last ten years finding out.’
‘But who told you? Do you trust them?’
‘I found some old men, like me. They used to work for Islamic Jihad in the eighties. One of them was Algerian, he lives here in Boston now. I trust his account the most. Do you want to meet him?’
I shook my head. ‘I trust you.’
Sarkis lowered his head again. ‘And I trust him, because he was there. He was the one who pulled the trigger.’
‘What? Who is he? What’s his name? How can he still be roaming the streets, a killer?’
‘He was nothing. A foot soldier, following instructions. He isn’t to blame. The man who told him what to do is the one you should hate.’
‘And who was he?’
‘I don’t know. Only the Iranians in Islamic Jihad knew his real name.’
This final version added something new to the flesh and fat and bone of my father’s character, but at the same time made me sick to my stomach. I had to go to the bathroom and hide my grief. By the end the bottle was finished but our plates were untouched. I had to help Sarkis home. Through slippery streets in the dark, he seemed half-alive, insubstantial, an old man finally empty of guilt.
He’d aged so much since I saw him last. No more the courtly flirtation with its hint of menace, sly intimations of something more. I didn’t confront him that night with how uncomfortable he had made me feel as a sixteen-year-old – it seemed another life. Even as a teenager I’d managed to overcome my dislike of his attentions, allowing him in weak moments to manhandle me, only this much and no more – a flutter of the hand here, a sly tickle there – as he introduced me to Boston’s Armenian community as his goddaughter. I would plaster a smile on my face. By then I’d learnt the necessary coquetries. Poor little orphan, the powdered ladies clucked, jangling as they moved in their old Armenian gold, their bright new American diamonds, and I would let my own forehead crumple in mimed pathos.
I would sit on his sofa when he released me, away from the other guests, and watch the cable news channel that beamed in live footage from the Middle East. I would think of my unknown father. Where was he? Looking for my own features in this or that militiaman’s moustached face. The money had stopped suddenly, Lilit said in one of her letters. Could that mean he was dead? Or in trouble? Now I know that by then he’d already been killed.
Sarkis was so vulnerable that week before he died. His body – long broken by the torture – was folding in on itself. He spoke plainly about the death marches, the camp. He regained some energy in the lobby of his apartment when we got there, his stick wobbling wildly as he righted himself, re-enacting the pain, twisting his body, pulling at his own fingers until they turned red.
They did it like this. Like that. They hit me like this,
and I watched the white saliva foam again at the corners of his mouth as he worked himself into a frenzy, as he mimed the mechanical efficiency of the blows, hatred steady as a metronome. I begged him to stop, his breathing so laboured, chest and scalp slick with sweat. His bones were shell-light, his skull shiny and hairless, except for a few baby curls at the crown.
When I got him into his apartment he told me his housekeeper was asleep, her door shut. Now I know she was a night nurse. I helped him bath, averting my eyes from the welts and marks of his torturers as I soaped his back, held a towel out for him to slowly, precariously step into. His long shanks, his Armenian leanness. The harmless penis, curled like a snail.
He died at home in the apartment, not in hospital. The nurse called me, and I saw him when his body was still warm. It was the first time I’d seen a corpse so close – a corpse that wasn’t mangled, or covered in blood. The thin, bluish hands clasped over his breastbone were getting colder, stiffening even as I watched. I bent over his body, my warm tears on his dead cheeks, and surprised myself by kissing him softly on the mouth. Now I make myself believe that his lips retained a final tremor. As if he was going to tell me the last piece of the puzzle, the one name that would change everything.
Chaim comes every other evening with the dog, Julius, and waits in the lobby of the Mayflower hotel. He gazes wistfully at the glass doors of the Duke of Wellington bar on the ground floor, but resists temptation, knowing if he goes in there among the smoke and laughter he may miss Anoush.