Bone Ash Sky (24 page)

He sat again on the rug, took a long puff of his water pipe and looked at her, almost curious, or amused, through the fitful smoke.

‘Well, Lale?' he asked. ‘Where do we go from here?'

She didn't answer. The veiled woman shuffled toward them with a bundle of linen, poked her head in the door, hurried off again down the hall. Suleiman jerked his chin in her direction.

‘Fatima. My dead brother's wife. She already hates you.'

She didn't know what to make of this offhand admission, their obvious intimacy.

Minas watched Lilit being led away with no emotion. It was his heart, not his face that seemed blank and cold. On his face he exhibited every natural expression of grief that could be expected of him. His eyes watered, his lips twisted, his cheeks slow-burned. But it was only his heart that remained still and lifeless, its beat ever slowing to a threatened halt.

He watched Lilit's cropped head bobbing through the surge of people as she followed the Turk. The man seemed gentle, a little bemused by the spectacle perhaps. A follower. A man who submitted to authority, who bowed down before those who knew better. A man capable of any cruelty if someone else told him to do it. Minas hoped he was not a cruel man. Cruel or not, he still hated him. The way he prodded and poked at Lilit as if she were a cow. The silly grin on his face when he asked her if she was all right.
Of course she's not all right,
Minas wanted to yell.
Can't you see for yourself?
But he hadn't. He stood beside Lilit like an idiot, helpless to change the outcome of the moment, helpless to alter the course of their lives.

When Lilit couldn't be seen any longer, he sat down in the dust to await what the rest of the evening would bring. He crossed his legs beneath him and pulled his shirt tighter across his nipples. He ignored the rigidity in his stomach, signalling either hunger or anxiety, he couldn't tell which anymore. All around him, women were being led away by Turkish men of the town, some by the hand, others resisting, with the aid of knotted rope or even a chain. A group of Kurds had just arrived on unhealthy horses; they dismounted and made a great show of inspecting the rest of the women, only to leave without buying.

He watched them ride away with something like envy. It wasn't really envy, it was more a wistful question or a wish: Wouldn't it be wonderful to choose a place and then go? Just like that. To be autonomous, to have choices. He looked around at the other Armenian prisoners.
We have
no courage. We're letting them lead us around like animals.
But there was nothing he could do about it, except beg one of the Turks to let him die.

Again, the sick realisation that he was helpless, among others just as helpless as he, caused his throat to swell and his empty belly to revolt. He bent over and retched. A woman nearby wiped his brow with the back of her hand. He thanked her with a smile. It hurt to speak, he had no more words. He looked around him, looking for someone with strength, someone to lead them, a saviour. There was none. All that remained in the town square were the old, the very young, a few boys like himself and the disfigured or mad women, picking at their scabs. He curled up on the ground, at the feet of the woman who had helped him, and slept.

When he woke, all was grey. He could see the silhouettes of gendarmes standing about before the blaze of a dying fire, drinking. Dawn was beginning to break, and he was overwhelmed by thirst. He stood up, thinking to find Afet, perhaps some water. He approached the gendarmes, knelt in front of them with his hands outspread. Afet was nowhere to be seen. The Turks regarded him silently for a moment, then one of them giggled like a girl.

‘Give him a glass, boys. Where he's going he won't last long.'

Minas sat on the ground sipping at the rough moonshine he'd been given. For a moment, he was content just to drink and sit, and not think about anything else. He looked at the sleeping and huddled forms of his fellow prisoners, vulnerable now in the rising light. One boy sat apart from the rest, with his curly head bowed so low to the ground Minas thought he might be dead or in a coma. He shuffled over and jabbed him in the ribs.

‘You all right?'

The boy didn't look up. He gurgled deep down in his throat then a blob of mucus fell on the dirt, narrowly missing Minas's feet.

‘Leave me alone,' he growled.

Minas swore at him in a whisper then looked up, alarmed. The gendarmes were yelling now at the prisoners to start moving. There was another long walk ahead of them, to a camp on the outskirts of Der ez Zor.

They passed mulberry trees shading the length of cotton fields. Dusty leaves on the ground. In the distance, peasant women in white kerchiefs worked in the early morning coolness. Did they not realise what was happening? He wanted to cry out to them, make them understand. He watched their steady movements, their worn, quiet faces creased by the sun. He knew that, even if he ran toward them, even if he made it without being shot, even if he spoke to them in Turkish, knelt and put his arms around their knees, they would not help him. They would not even believe his story. He was nothing to them. He was annihilated.

He continued to trudge along with the other prisoners through the strengthening heat. After many hours, passing the town and into the desert, he looked up and saw a shape he couldn't place. It rose before him like a spike in the eye. The tent compound came closer and closer as they walked, and then reared in front of him, cruel, glinting in a shimmering heat, hidden by a heavy set of gates. He stopped short, looking up at their curved and rusting bars.

From inside, he could hear a shuffling and wailing, a sinister, whispered sound like the gnashing of teeth, the howling of wolves, the sound of unnamed fears at night. He felt his stomach contract, leaned over and tried to vomit again. Nothing came, but one of the gendarmes slapped him on the neck and laughed.

‘Time enough for that later. Wait till you get inside.'

The gates were opened by armed guards, and the prisoners herded into the compound. Within an instant, a naked man seized Minas's arm. He pleaded with him in Armenian for hope, escape, any news of outside. Minas saw burst pustules around his eyes, fat flies buzzing. He lurched backward in disgust, shook him off before he could finish what he was saying. The man fell to the ground and opened his mouth to curse, but no sound came out. A guard had lunged forward and stabbed a bayonet into his spine.

Minas hurried on with the rest of the prisoners, not looking back at the fallen body.
I must keep going. Won't let anyone stop me.
The guards increased the collective speed to a trot, barking out orders.

‘Haircuts over here! Latrines there! Line up in rows for assignment to sleeping blocks!'

He tried to avoid the barber's long shears. He kept very still but the man still managed to nick his ear, graze his forehead, as it was all done in such fear and reckless haste. He could feel the barber's hands trembling as he cut down to the scalp; he was a prisoner too. The men lining the paths between the tents and outhouses were prisoners: gaunt, shiny-faced with sores, but they had learnt to talk in the half-chewed jargon of the guards. They held whips and clubs fashioned of desert thorn. They beat him as he ran from one tent to another, as if punishing him for arriving even a moment later to the camp, for suffering one iota less than they already had.

He saw the bathing room, swiftly put his mother's earrings into his mouth. He would not speak now, he would keep going, outwit them all. He tasted sour gold and blood on his tongue. The man assigned to help him wash was also a prisoner. He muttered without opening his own mouth as he doused Minas's head with cold water and kerosene for lice and rubbed all over his body and wet clothes with a cake of coarse brown soap.

He strained to hear the man's ceaseless patter: ‘Don't get sick, they'll kill you, don't catch malaria, they'll surely kill you, don't let them see you vomit, they'll kill you right away, don't help anyone else, they'll kill you, don't look at anyone, don't raise your eyes, don't stop, don't sleep, don't lose your soul, they'll kill you.'

Minas set his jaw and suffered the man's ministrations, careful not to allow him to brush his hands over the wounds left by his mother's earrings.

BEIRUT, 1995

I
wake with the phone ringing by my head, glance at the clock radio on the bedside table. It’s past seven, and I need to be at the tribunal by nine. I slept badly after waking at sunset and trying to get back to sleep; spent the night stewing over my own stupidity.

‘A Mr D’Andrea to speak to you, madam. Shall I put him through?’

‘No—okay, yes.’

‘Ms Pakradounian? I’m sorry to disturb you so early. I hope I haven’t woken you?’

I’m disgusted by the formality in his voice. As if nothing happened last night on the beach.

‘No, I’m awake. Do you have anything in particular to say to me?’

‘Well, I wanted to apologise for—for, er, having too much to drink. And for my indiscretion.’

‘Which one?’

I’m not giving an inch. He sighs.

‘I
am
sorry, whatever you think. I was pushy and I frightened you, and I—said some inappropriate things.’

‘Yes.’

Now he’s exasperated.

‘Yes, what? Don’t even think you can blackmail me; nobody around here would believe you.’

‘That’s not my intention. But I do think people would believe me. And I don’t accept your apology – for either of your blunders.’

I slam the phone down. My shoulders relax. He mustn’t know about the tape. And I still don’t know what to do with it. Incriminate him, or save him? Forget about it, or stay angry? I wish Lilit was here – she’d tell me what to do. We would lie like this before I left Beirut, her heavy flank against my hip, head turned so her cinnamon breath stirred the fine hairs on my arms.

I wasn’t there when she was killed, but I know exactly how she would have slumped on her pillow when she was shot. Hardly any movement at all. Imperceptible. Smash of glass, car horns, howls, guns receding – silence. A sniper, a random death. Blood on her face, coming in a syncopated rhythm from mouth, nostrils, eyes; they would have darted about, flickered, then rested on one last point before her heart stopped beating. Was it the ceiling she saw last, with its cracks and damp patches, the open door, the lugubrious sunset outside her window?

She was always so sad. I’d tried to comfort her, to make up to her all the hurts that couldn’t be articulated or explained. But it wasn’t Beirut that made her so sad. I knew that, even as a child. It wasn’t the brief, intense twilights or the sounds of hawkers from across the street. She watched them from her bed, day and night, calling out their wares to passers-by. She told me they hadn’t changed since she first came here. Sometimes she’d trick herself into thinking the hawkers were singing. Singing to her. But it wasn’t their voices that made her sad, or their undertone of painful resignation. It wasn’t the caged monkeys they paraded from the north of Africa or their little sisters, teenage whores in the bars over the beach. It wasn’t any of these things. It was other things, more intangible. Stray dogs like harbingers of death, smell of fish over open fires, the incinerating of garbage. Burning corpses.

Some were refugees, she told me, from camps on the other side of the city. Palestinians. Victims of infighting, revenge killings by PLO militiamen, swift deaths of traitors and Israeli spies. Also, victims of the Phalange. ‘Selim. That stupid, stupid boy.’ I blanched when she spoke like that about my father. They didn’t like to discuss him too much, except when Siran tossed off a few too many Armenian brandies on Christmas Day and started wailing for her long-lost son, her patriot, her poor misunderstood boy. I sat aside with my unwrapped gifts and listened, made myself invisible under the heavy scented tree, arranging and rearranging the placement of the nativity figurines. Mary in the background. Joseph to her left. The baby Jesus in my right-hand pocket, where he’d always be safe. The dead mother. The lost father. The missing bracelet. Even then I was trying to make sense of my own misplaced trinity:
If I find just one of the three, will all the others fall into place?