Bone Ash Sky (48 page)

I give up too soon on the house, search for my grandfather’s jewellery shop. There it is, gilt letters underneath new Armenian script.
Minas
Pakradounian – Jeweller Extraordinaire.
It’s shut, opens at ten. I stay at the window, dazzled by row upon row of identical gold wedding bands. No more silver and carnelian bracelets, inlaid mother-of-pearl rings. No traces of Armenia. Only the same gold jewellery found everywhere in the city.

I drift through the quarter’s busy thoroughfares, stopping to read the street signs at every corner. Ani. Erzerum. Van. I can’t find Urfa Street but don’t want to ask. Some of the old neighbours may remember me and I’m in no mood to talk, to explain why I’m here. I can’t help but think of the Armenian houses burnt down in Van, just like these: timbered, graceful, with wide carved balconies and sloping roofs. Mulberry trees, charred, with stunted, bitter fruit. Clogs the colour of fire, worn by a young girl going to church.

I sit on a bench in Municipality Square, watching the same meagre plane trees shed the same thin-pointed leaves I monitored each year when I was a little girl. Lilit would bring me here in the autumn when the leaves glistened. I must have been very small, before I started school, because Lilit could walk and didn’t even need a stick. I held her hand and we played wild, screaming games with the drifts of leaves, which slowly blackened as the day wore on, catching them then kicking at the street sweeper’s piles to make them dance in the air.

Once, sitting on this very bench, between Lilit and Minas, I heard them talk. I would have been about three. They were in one of their sad, quiet moods, and I’d wanted to get up and play but was clutching a huge sugared doughnut and Lilit wouldn’t let me eat and run at the same time. So I sat, licking wet sugar from my fingers, and they talked on, half in Armenian and half Arabic, while I was alternately shocked and bored. They spoke of my dead mother, my father who was gone. Something they called a ‘shotgun wedding’. And Lilit saying the jewellery shop belonged to me, without a doubt. They blamed Selim, Selim all the time. Until Minas stood up finally, the sky a lurid orange behind him.

‘Whatever he is, whatever he’s become – I want to find my son again before I die. I can’t bear not knowing where he is each night.’

‘Please, Minas. He knows where we are, he sends money – don’t you think, if he cared for you, wouldn’t he come?’

I watched Minas crumple into Lilit’s arms. I could see he was trying to hold back his tears, but they came in retching gulps. Lilit looked over his shoulder at me and pressed her lips together as if she didn’t know what to do. Something in the twitch of her mouth made me think she wasn’t as upset as she should have been about her brother crying, that something in her was happy about it.

The wind picks up now and fallen leaves flurry around my feet. In the middle of the square is a children’s playground, all rusting slides and swings that look too dangerous to play on. A broken fountain. No children. One yellow and red plastic slippery slide, banked up with the sodden leaves. A rocking horse balancing crazily on its bouncing coil, half-uprooted from the ground. There was none of this when I was growing up. I get up now, brush leaves off my shoulders and skirt, walk to the main road. I press some liras into a bus driver’s hand, don’t tell him any destination. Anywhere. Away from here.

I get off the bus at a corner that looks familiar. Walk as if I know where I’m going. Don’t hesitate. I set off at a brisk pace, taking care to keep to the side of the road, away from shacks and ramshackle buildings, open doorways revealing sharp-bearded men and squalling babies, young women squatting over paraffin stoves, the smell of raw meat and unleavened bread. I squelch through mud and refuse, but keep to the verge. An unshaven man offers me a cigarette and a leer and I avert my eyes.

Soon I find myself in the vicinity of the Sabra-Shatila camps. A little boy of about twelve runs down the incline to the street when he sees me. He stops, awkward, one hand clutching a jagged stone.

‘Mademoiselle?’

I look around; we’re alone
. How did he know I’m a foreigner?
I think he may throw the stone at me. The zip on his trousers is undone or broken, I can’t tell. He comes toward me and begins his patter in a servile voice I know he’s used on others countless times before.

‘Mademoiselle,’ he says. ‘Mademoiselle, can you spare a coin for a poor Palestinian?’

I fumble in my daypack, careful not to open it too wide.

‘Wait a bit, not sure I have any coins.’

‘Notes are good.’

He comes closer. I notice my hands are trembling. I know he can see this, wonder what he thinks of me, whether he despises me for my fear, my suspicion or merely my perceived Western wealth.

‘American dollars are better.’

‘I’m not American.’

‘I can see that. You speak Arabic too well. But you’re not one of us either.’

I fold some lira notes into his open palm and surprise myself with the vehemence of my words.

‘Now leave me alone.’

‘It’s all right,’ he whispers. ‘I won’t hurt you.’

I walk away, sense him watching my gait all the way down the potholed, empty street. I walk faster, forcing my legs to obey, afraid that at any moment they’ll buckle and let me down. Now I’m shaking all over, with fear, disgust, another shame that’s harder to define.

I don’t mean to come to Chaim’s apartment. My feet lead me here; I’m upset over Siran and the Palestinian boy, and not thinking straight, and now I’m hot and exasperated from walking so far, sweat soaking my lower back, making stains on my blouse. I need to sit down for a minute and Chaim’s apartment is on the way to my hotel. I only want a glass of water. I only want to wash my hands. I want to sit in his living room and look at him, simply look at him.

I press the bell and try to scrutinise my face in the glass doors leading to the building’s foyer. I can’t see a thing and lean closer, rearranging my irritation into something like serenity. Chaim’s voice cuts through.

‘Yes?’

‘It’s me, Chaim. It’s A—’

‘I know it’s you. Come up.’

He buzzes me in. I sit for a while in the marble dampness of the atrium, on the imitation Regency chair for visitors. I can hear Julius in the courtyard playing with children from the ground-floor apartment, can’t imagine what these Muslim mothers with their cultural disgust for dogs think of him; he has a tendency to drool and bark at the slightest provocation, yet he’s gentle and calm even with their toddlers, who slap at him and pull his ears. I know Chaim is upstairs waiting for me, know also that I need this brief, silent time alone to sit, cool down, examine why I’m here.

I trudge up the shallow stairs, feeling his gaze burn the top of my head as he waits at the open door. With the light of the midday sun behind him, he’s transfigured, an angel of mixed tidings.

When I reach the landing he’s vanished into the apartment. I want to hold him, rest my tired head on his chest. Let him comfort me, as my father never did, never will. I tiptoe onto the bare boards, careful not to make any noise. I want to call out to him, run through his rooms, but to do this would break the fragile, spinning game he’s initiated. Instead I let my laptop bag fall onto the sofa with a graceful thump, peer into the kitchen and bathroom, discarding my sandals as I go. My heart’s flailing in my chest, a painful rhythm I attempt to control by breathing out slowly, then in.

When I reach the balcony I lean over the railing, hoping he’ll steal behind me, push his face into my nape, end this stupid vanishing trick. I breathe, counting the length of my inhalations. Nothing. As I move inside again I’m struck by the quality of light over Beirut: the heavy silvering pall that heralds a storm. The sea is flat, a blank page waiting to be inscribed.

I open the bedroom door.

‘Here,’ Chaim says.

He’s standing in front of the bank of windows, his body an indistinct shape against the glare. I can’t see if he’s smiling or solemn, or how I’m supposed to respond to the flat sobriety of his voice. He lets me wait, turning away to draw closed the dark floor-length curtains. His bedroom shrouded now, the brilliance of the sea neutered. Far away on the horizon the low growl of thunder.

‘Kiss me, Chaim?’

He does so, hesitantly, afraid of my resolve. I shiver at the sensation of his moist lips on the dryness of mine, catch the specific, genetic smell of his mouth, his tongue, the recesses of his throat and stomach: too intimate. A phrase from the Armenian liturgy plays through my head.
This kiss is given for a bond of fullness. The enmity hath been removed. And
love is spread over us all.

Sacrilege. Blasphemy. Shouldn’t I be with an Armenian man, erasing our combined past with this simple act? I turn my head away, walking to the tall, pointed windows. When I open the curtains an inch a line of light splits his body in half. Divided man. A brief fizz of lightning and his face and hands are white. Scent of gardenias from the balcony, semen-sour. I go back and kiss him again, blinding myself to the particularities, frenzied, biting, wanting to peel back the skin of age and gender and culture. He grabs my hands, holds them to his cheeks.

‘Anoush. Can you tell me what you’re doing?’

I kneel and bury my face in his thighs. He puts his big hands on my shoulders, murmurs under his breath.

‘Please tell me what you need. Surely not this.’

I stand and put my fingers on his eyes, his mouth, closing them. He sighs, enfolds me.

‘Okay. But think about what you’re doing.’

He begins to undress me, button by button, as if he’s never done this before. But I’m impatient again; stepping out of my skirt, pausing as it rests at my feet, a perfect circle. He sits on the bed and I can now see the top of his head, hair slightly thinning, the small, vulnerable circle of his skull. Is this how my father looked down upon those women? Is this who he was in private, how he played the sexual game? This is no game. I unpeel my bra, proud yet half-ashamed of my youthful breasts. His arm goes around me, pulling me close. As soon as I’ve slid out of my underpants I’m suddenly unsure. Angry. At him, at myself. He’s not of my tribe, my flesh. His hands on my breasts are square, wrinkled, wiry hairs all the way down to his fingertips; surely I should have noticed before? My father had pale hands, smooth as a pianist’s. Siran told me.

I turn my head sharply, push him away. ‘Always get what you want, do you?’

He whispers, hurt. ‘Isn’t this what you wanted?’

‘Why are you even here, Chaim?’ I cover my breasts with my hands, flop to the floor. I’m aware of the smell of my sweaty armpits in the close, dark room. ‘Why don’t you go back to Israel?’

‘Why do you keep taking it out on me?’

He’s crumpling now, still in his trousers.

‘What was it like doing your military service, bulldozing houses and bombing civilians?’

‘What are you talking about? I didn’t do any of those things. I tried to help. If you really want to know, suicide bombers tried to blow up our checkpoint twice. Once, they succeeded. I was nearly killed. That’s when I decided to leave.’

I stand, looking for my blouse.

‘You with your
Free Palestine
fucking T-shirts. What a hypocrite you are. Why didn’t you stay behind and do something?’

‘It was traumatic. It had nothing to do with me at that point, it was like, like a—it was just like a film in slow motion.’

‘Don’t be so naive. You’re just like my grandmother in the nursing home.
Only a dream, my dear, only a dream.
Of course you’re part of it. Part of the occupation. You bastards have been here for nearly twenty years, let alone in Palestine.’

‘It’s nothing to do with me.’

‘Oh, really! What about your brother? Don’t you worry, I’ve been doing my research.’

‘And what did you find?’

‘Your big brother was a fighter pilot during the war. He helped bomb Beirut.’

‘My brother is not me, Anoush. And you know what – if it wasn’t for people like my brother, and my father, there would be no Israel. There would be no me.’ He spreads his arms out, savagely. ‘There would be no Chaim for you to kick around.’

I catch a sob in my throat.

‘Oh, Chaim. I never meant to—’

‘Listen,’ he says. ‘Listen to me just for once, and get your victim crap out of the way. My people were almost annihilated, right? Just like yours. Genocide. We’ve all suffered, agree?’

I nod, ashamed.

‘And,’ he continues, ‘my family have nowhere else to go. We’re not occupiers, we’re refugees. Do you understand that?’

‘But your family didn’t have a right to go and take over someone else’s land. There were people living on it, before you.’

‘According to many sources, the Jews were there first. Thousands of years ago. How can you say whether the Turks or Armenians were in your country first? If we go down that line, nobody would have the balls to settle anywhere. We all have a right to a home. A right to defend ourselves. And we all have a right to feel safe.’

‘And you feel safe – here? I find that hard to believe.’

‘I’m making a sacrifice to be here. And I didn’t choose to be born there. I’m not going back.’