Bone Ash Sky (43 page)

The midwife knew she was Armenian, as did everyone in Der ez Zor. They had all been poisoned against her by Fatima, by her carping at the market about favouritism in the bedroom, the way Lilit cut a tray of
baqlawa
into far too few pieces, the way she held her spoon. Fatima, who stayed by the door all the while, watching under her veil as the baby was born. Fatima, with her muttered invocations and
suras
from the Koran, curses instead of blessings. Lilit opened her eyes then. It was Fatima, rummaging inside her, pulling out her womb and killing the baby too. She watched Fatima blow into his face, slap him, but he would not breathe. Lilit didn’t pick him up, didn’t hold him. She tried to stand, held down by the midwife.

‘Don’t touch him!’ She pointed at Fatima. ‘Don’t touch my baby. You’ve already cursed us.’

Fatima stopped inches from Lilit’s face.

‘You dare blame me? It’s your bad blood that’s killed him. Christian blood.’

Lilit staggered off the rug, tearing at Fatima’s upper arms, breaking her fingernails on the sparkling clothes. Sequins scattered, beads rolled across the floor. Fatima didn’t resist, letting her tire. Lilit breathed out and sank to the floor.

‘You poisoned me because you can’t have one!’

Fatima wrenched herself away.

‘You broke a promise and now Allah’s punishing you for it.’

Lilit curled up, scrabbling for her baby. He was cold already, turning black. So many babies, all dead.
Why should I care if one more baby dies?
He wasn’t even Armenian, as the others had been. Marred by Turkish blood. Maybe she was being punished for what the Chetti did to her on the march. Damaged her inside, made her worthless. A faulty womb. She stretched out her arm to touch the baby’s head, his face twisted toward her in the gaze of Suleiman. In the next moment she drew away and screamed up to the ceiling, drumming her feet and fists on the stone floor. The hell of loss was too much to bear without noise to cover it.

It had been hard coming back from her aborted escape and accepting that Suleiman already had a wife in Fatima, even if he debased her daily; that she, Lilit, was a slave, a servant, an exalted concubine at best. And yet, as weeks and then months passed since Fatima’s humbling, Lilit could see her own status in the household improving. Some mornings when she lay in bed with Suleiman, late and drowsy, his hand a gentle arc over her belly, it was Fatima who was summoned to bring them tea. She did so, grumbling and not before cursing them both under her breath. Lilit could hear her in the kitchen banging coffee pots and copper trays, smashing a glass under her slippered heel and leaving it for the cook to sweep up.

Suleiman often tried to explain the situation to Lilit, propping his cheek on his elbow and watching her for any signs of sadness. She lay very still and quiet, her face at rest as white as the pillow.

‘I’ve grown to love you more,’ he said. ‘I know you can feel it. But she’s family – and you, you’ll always be different from us. Even if you decide to convert.’

‘I know,
effendim
.’

‘No, you don’t know. It’s hard for me to be mocked in the marketplace, to be sneered at for treating you so well, while your compatriots are killed in the—’

She put her hand over his mouth.

‘Don’t! I am not one of them now.’

Then she collected herself, smiled at him. The gesture was effacing, gratuitous, and she hated herself for it.

‘Suleiman, I want to be your wife.’

She remembered these words, going round and round her head as she laboured to give birth and tried not to cry out. It was shameful for Muslim women to cry out, she was told by the midwife. Only Christian women sobbed like children in the midst of their pain. She could remember thinking:
Am I his now? Oh, yes.
And the strangest thing was, she wanted to be. His wife, his only. She had wanted to be his wife and wanted Fatima gone.

Now she screamed again.

‘I hate you, Suleiman!’

There was no answer. Fatima turned toward the wall, as if embarrassed.

‘I hate you all! I hate you, Suleiman!’ she repeated, screaming the last word louder than the others. She tried to get up again, but was too weak now. She lay huddled among the pillows shivering hot and cold, feeling her tears beat onto her breasts.

Suleiman rushed into the room, grabbing Fatima on the way and planting himself above Lilit’s body. The midwife hurried to cover her. For what seemed like a long time, Suleiman stood looking at his dead son as if he couldn’t believe this had happened to him. He turned to the midwife, still holding Fatima by the arm. His voice a breath.

‘The child?’

‘Strangled,
Bey effendim
, with his own cord.’ She gestured to Lilit, helpless. ‘A difficult birth. A fragile mother.’

Suleiman reached down to touch the top of his son’s head. It was a moment, no more. He stroked the soft skull with the fingers of his right hand. The women stared at him, silent now. He caught his breath. Turned to Fatima.

‘And you! Making trouble again?’

He dragged her down to Lilit’s level and hissed through his teeth.

‘Whores and bitches, daughters of dogs! Apologise to each other. I will not live in a household divided as this.’

The two women glared at him, forgetting each other for a moment.

‘You choose,’ Lilit growled.

He turned on her, incredulous.

‘You? You—whom I rescued from the gutter? You ask me to choose?’

She looked from his face to her baby. Hers? Dead. Not hers anymore. She leaned forward and pushed the tiny corpse toward him.

‘I don’t want to look at him. He reminds me of you.’

BEIRUT, 1982

M
ore Israeli air raids came to terrorise Beirut with their soprano whine. Bilqis sometimes thought her own laughter was a challenge to that sound: she laughed in the same unstable way, an out-of-breath gurgle and a screech. The raids targeted Palestinian camps in the southern suburbs with American-made cluster bombs. They exploded indiscriminately, showering anyone close by with perfect steel balls and jagged metal fragments.

Bilqis hobbled out of the camp’s air-raid shelter screaming at the planes still hovering above, watching them retreat with the whirring motions of startled pigeons. ‘Bastards! We’re still alive!’

Children chorused around her.

‘Still alive!’

They hugged each other: teenage widows, militia fighters, those stick-limbed, hysterical children, shaking in disbelief at their own good fortune. As the planes circled the camps once again then left, the refugees fell apart from each other to hug themselves, revelling in that moment of aliveness, still watching as the planes disappeared into the light sky.

Still more leaflets. Printed on crinkled paper of yellow and green, cellophane flowers. Most of which were dropped over the Corniche, only to fall into the churning water or to hang limply, dampening inch by inch on the knife-sharp rocks.

You in west Beirut should remember today
that time is running out and
with every delay the risk to your dear ones increases. Hurry up.
Save the lives of your dear ones before it is too late.

‘It’s already too late,’ Sanaya said, as she threw it in the bin. ‘I have no dear ones to save. Except Hadiya, and she’s not even mine.’

She was scrubbing the shower recess with the last of the detergent and dirty water.

What about Selim? She hated him. She loved him. No, it wasn’t that. She hated the public Selim, the one who killed. She loved the private Selim, the one who made her feel safe. She hadn’t seen him for a long while; he was never home when she phoned. What about Issa? Crazy. So was the whole city. He fitted in well.

In the evening, gold streamers of light appeared around the edges of west Beirut. They were from jets firing flares over the rooftops, a carnival of the grotesque. Israelis sputtered on loudspeakers in bad Arabic. ‘Leave the west of the city immediately,’ they droned on and on into the night, disturbing Sanaya’s sleep until she stood on the balcony and shouted back at them. ‘You fucking leave the city! I’m staying here.’

It was her city now, more than ever. Now, in its decrepitude, its clamorous pain and filth, it begged her loyalty as in no other time. When she was younger, when Beirut was vibrant, flaunting wealth and power, she did not feel part of it the way she did now. When the restaurants were filled every night, casinos glittering, swimming pools floodlit and lagoon-blue, actors and directors swanning into waterfront clubs, the city did not need her.

She saw it now from her balcony and suffered. Most buildings were shells, open to sky and rain. Furniture and electronic goods had been carted away from abandoned houses, the only items left behind too sodden or soiled to be contemplated. Cooking pots and saucepans filled with the shit of retreating Israeli soldiers. Vandalised beds and clothes. Walls pitted with scars and graffiti, last-ditch pleas for justice. She couldn’t leave, not now. Now, more than ever, the city relied on her for its very existence.

She sat through the next day and slept through the next, waking only for sips of cold tea. She slept through the beginning of the siege proper, through the electrical power circuits being switched off, water supplies cut totally, no more food allowed into the city from any channels, black market or otherwise. She sipped her tea and saved her dry bread for later, when things would surely get worse.

Two weeks into the siege, she decided to risk going outside. She’d been kept alive by her store of canned food and shrivelled potatoes, scary tubers in the dark of the cupboard. Yet she had been kept from total malnourishment by gifts from Selim: army rations of brittle chocolate and shortbread, oranges and day-old pastries. He’d been coming around much more now, almost every day, checking if she was all right, gently solicitous of her comfort. Something in him had died, she thought. He seemed older and more wary of emotion.

Issa was nowhere to be found, and even Rouba had no idea where he was fighting, or for whom. Sanaya had broken the silence between them. One morning after she saw Hadiya go out into the courtyard to play, she made her glass of tea, put her stale croissant on a plate to have for breakfast. She sat on the balcony to read the paper, as she always did, regardless of the danger, then suddenly thought of Rouba directly downstairs, maybe with nothing to eat at all. She knocked on the door then, watched Rouba open it in her crumpled nightgown and silently handed her the plate.

Now she shared her treats with Rouba most days, pressing food into her hands, sweeping away her feeble protestations.
Take it. Eat it
in front of me.
Both women had grown thinner, sallow and pinched and perpetually hungry. Hadiya’s emaciation was heartbreaking, as if her hair had now sucked all the life out of her. She no longer went to school, waiting until the teacher could resume small classes in her own apartment.

Sanaya tried to wash before going out, an exercise in exasperation, as seawater was all they had now, trickling it over herself, leaving her hair and face greasy with a slick of diesel oil and salt, and hardly reaching the rest of her body.

She walked out into a nightmare. Crooked piles of burning garbage, streets stinking of shit and blood, children running to her with rivulets of snot from both nostrils, begging for coins, scabies reddening their hollow cheeks. The Israeli bombardment had been both discriminate and accurate. Finally those ritualistic words ‘surgical precision’ had become blazingly real to her. True, they were usually meant to denote the targeting of military buildings and few, if any, civilian casualties. Yet as she walked she saw the Israelis had targeted every civilian area possible: schools, mosques, churches, hospitals, apartments, hotels, shops, parks, even the city’s only synagogue.

She walked further, past the Hamra district, toward the Green Line into the dusk. She checked her watch – already nine. The light from the sky didn’t diminish, rather became more distinct with every step. The other people appeared undisturbed by it, yet for her it was like being hunted, found and examined under glass.

She grabbed a young girl by the arm.

‘I’m sorry, why is the city lit up like this?’