Bone Ash Sky (64 page)
I go inside, watch street lights turn on, one by one, over the whole curving promenade. Tiny starbursts of light. I play the recording of the interview again: play, pause, rewind. Play again. I’ve played the last three seconds of the tape so often I’ve memorised the timbre of Sayed’s voice, the resigned, out-breath in the way he said his cousin’s name. Issa Ali. His voice comes to me when I lie in bed, when I’m under the shower, when I move a morsel to my mouth. Issa Ali. A line of song. A refrain. My reply to Sayed cut off, a swinging pendulum in the darkness of no sound.
I
ssa knelt during Friday prayers along with everyone else. It was satisfying, this abasement of the body, the tender skin of his forehead knocking against cold stone floor. The assembled men lamented the martyr Imam Ali, cradling their ears and wailing to the heavens, holding each other upright when the sadness and sense of injustice of his death was too much to be borne. Issa floated in a world all his own, buoyed by the collective suffering, grown majestic in its bodily expression all around him.
Allah is great
. He murmured along with the rising tide of voices, drew his faded-blue robe more tightly around him. It had grown chilly, just after sunset, here in the domed, cavernous mosque.
They sat cross-legged on their threadbare mats when prayers were over. The imam climbed like a great crab to his high seat. He was so slow Issa closed his eyes until the old man had finally shifted his weight and sat down. He commenced a long-winded, vague address to the congregation that caused most men around Issa to shuffle and yawn, examine the state of toenails and fingers, adjust caps and pull at their beards. Only Issa was attentive, gazing up at the imam’s brownish, wrinkled face. Only he could decipher what the imam was really saying.
The imam was speaking in code. Each time he quoted
suras
from the holy book –
the fruits of Heaven
,
the sin of the unbelievers
, or
the
date groves of the Prophet
– Issa received further confirmation of his new mission for Islamic Jihad. This was the way the Iranian leaders of Hezbollah communicated to their warriors in Lebanon. It was the only way that had been proven completely safe and foolproof.
He knew the selection of these phrases could mean nothing to the imam himself. He might or might not be judged committed enough, or clever enough, to be privy to the plan. The sermon had been written for him by his leaders in Iran and transmitted to every Shia mosque in west Beirut.
Issa listened carefully and decoded the key phrases. He now knew the date, the time, the three major steps of the operation assigned to him. He’d already prepared himself for the forty-eight hours he would spend entirely alone in a windowless room before his duty must be fulfilled. Solitary confinement, to ensure there was no turning back. He pictured himself sitting at a scratched desk, inscribed with the initials of so many others, writing brief letters to his loved ones. He sighed then, bowing his head to the ground. His duty had never been clearer than today.
Sanaya walked brisk and free through numb blue streets. Yes, there were still checkpoints belonging to militia upon militia, but they let her pass without demanding papers. Some gunmen even smiled. She smiled back, unthinking. Everyone was as dulled as the weather, testing the new lightness of their city. The Israelis had agreed to withdraw their troops from the whole of Lebanon. Even the Christians were happy about this. An end to things, come with the cold of the previous winter still in the air. Now even a beginning, she let herself hope, in the first warmth of spring breaking frost on the pavement. She hummed to herself, still smiling. A smile was no longer an arbitrary decision between life and death.
She picked her way through the garbage on the Corniche, where newly planted palms bent in strong winds from the north. She was on her way home, hugging her eggshell belly close under her coat, thinking,
I won’t tell Issa until I’m really sure
, as she stopped at a newsstand and bought the paper. She was going home to Issa, to kiss his nape as he leaned over the stove making tea, to watch him hand it to her, sweet and scalding, as she sat with her feet curled up under her on the divan. He would bring a basin of warm water and a handful of sea salt, he would kneel in front of her – head bent so low she would see the littleboy down on the back of his neck, the breakable bone at the base of his skull, further evidence of his amazing vulnerability – and he would grasp each foot in turn and knead it, snapping apart her stubborn toes. He would immerse her foot in water and bring it out into air again, a secular ablution he repeated five times.
She bought the paper, stood at the newsstand jiggling up and down against the cold, waiting for her change. She skimmed the headlines.
ISRAELI GOVERNMENT TO WITHDRAW FROM LEBANON ON CONDITION SYRIANS WITHDRAW SIMULTANEOUSLY.
She turned to the next page, hands deadened by the wind.
SYRIAN TROOPS REFUSE TO LEAVE LEBANON.
She hurried up the stairs to the top floor, making tiny grumbling noises against the cold, unbuttoning her coat before she reached the landing, ready to fling it over the hooks near the door. The fur collar itched; she sweated. When she turned the key in the lock, calling out to Issa, he was not there. She could feel the chill of aloneness in the room. As if he had never been.
Issa parked the Renault in front of the gym, two other militiamen in the back. They could see Selim through the plate glass, his puffing and pounding of weights, his tight buttocks in absurdly small shorts. They sniggered among themselves, quietly.
Issa had been apart from Sanaya since early February. A little less than two months. He wanted to see how long it would take for Selim to come sniffing around the place. He wanted to see how long it would take for Sanaya to have the Armenian back and to forget that she once loved Issa. It was a test he needed to set her.
Selim left the building, showered and dressed now, heading to his car. He began to cross the road, planning his afternoon appointments in his head. He was ashamed about this morning. He had tried to call Sanaya and she had refused to speak to him. She hung up, albeit gently. Their relationship hadn’t resumed but he was willing to wait. In truth, he was a little afraid of what could transpire between them now. He’d seen her eating at the new Italian place on the seafront. She told him to go away. She was heavier around the hips and thighs, and this comforted him somehow; she was earthbound now, enmeshed in his protection again.
I’ll keep asking her if she needs my help; I’ll keep asking until she says
yes
. He stopped at the kerb and noticed a car, adjusted his collar in the smoky glass of the side window, something black in fast motion on the periphery of his vision. His leg stretched out to step off into the slowing traffic when two hooded men grabbed him. Slits for eyes. Once in the car, he was hidden from view by a curtain pulled over the rear window, his torso bent crooked across their laps. Face in someone’s groin, soapsmelling. The car started and he was flung back and forth as it skidded over gravel, righted itself, increased in speed.
A man chuckled. There was no mirth in the sound.
‘Did you really think she’d go back to you?’
He tried to raise his head toward the voice. He was held down firmly, but without brutality, so his voice came out muffled and unassuming. ‘What? Let me out of here!’
‘I’ve been watching her. I suspect she’s carrying my child.’
‘Who the hell are you? I know your voice.’
Issa ripped away his hood with one hand and turned around for a fraction of a second.
‘It can’t be yours,’ he said. ‘I’ve done the calculations.’
Selim caught the blue glint of his eyes and thought,
I’m a dead man
.
The kidnappings usually happened at noon. Sanaya knew; it had happened to her partying friend Amani. She was making lunch for her husband and herself, looking out the kitchen window and thinking it was such a beautiful spring day, perfect for meeting her new lover in the park. But her husband was working from home that afternoon, correcting essays and sniffling every minute with a head cold. She was trapped, frustrated; she thought she would go mad if she heard him blow his nose one more time.
‘We had white wine from my uncle’s vineyard,’ she told Sanaya. ‘I was getting it out of the fridge, pouring a glass for myself as I cooked. There was a knock on the door, very quiet, very gentle. We almost didn’t hear it. My husband went to answer; I could hear him speaking in a low voice, normal tones, blowing his nose. I hurried out into the entry hall, arranging my hair. I even remember stopping at the mirror near the door, checking my lipstick hadn’t smudged. I wanted to ask the kidnappers to lunch. I didn’t know who they were, maybe colleagues from university or my husband’s students.’
Then they each put a pistol to her husband’s head.
Sanaya never thought it would happen to anybody close to her. She was Muslim; surely that gave her friends some protection. She lived in west Beirut. Then again, so did all the journalists and university professors who were kidnapped every day on their way home from work. Most of all, she didn’t think it would ever happen to Selim. Not with his assortment of rifles and pistols, his armoured escorts, his swagger and his flash. Not with his powerful superiors, warlords of such talent they made money in everything from trading stolen antiquities to raw opium and hashish grown in the Beka’a Valley.
As Issa did not come home, so Selim vanished. Soon posters of Selim’s smirking face appeared on street corners under direction of the Phalange. Sanaya waited a day, two days, a week. Maybe Issa was out fighting. Maybe he was on a secret mission to the south and had to leave without telling her. She looked for a note or a sign on every surface in the apartment, under every ashtray, in every book.
It could only be him. She listened to the radio for any reports, crowded into the ground-floor apartment of the Sunnis downstairs and watched their television at night. Nothing. She questioned Rouba, railed at Bilqis for bringing up such a son. Issa, the dainty kidnapper. All three women ransacked his old bedroom in Rouba’s apartment. When he’d moved upstairs with Sanaya he hadn’t bothered to bring anything with him except his clothes and his Koran.