Bone Ash Sky (3 page)

When the saleswoman emerges from her dark interior, suspicious but expectant, I turn away to follow a crooked road downhill to the sea, elated by its promise of welcome.

I heave my backpack to the ground when it becomes too cumbersome. I haven't found my hotel yet, still on a sleep-deprived high from my night on the boat and my first glimpse of the city. I'm pushed and jostled by passers-by, standing my ground to squint up at a street sign that isn't shown on my map.

This Levantine sun, harshly hot, exposes every mote and speck of dust, corruption, hypocrisy. I promise myself to buy some sunglasses at the next street stall. A sad artiste caresses his broken oud. The street signs just as I remember, squares of hammered blue tin bordered in white, nailed onto buildings, fences, corners. There's something aesthetically satisfying about them: I imagine upbeat tourists collecting them as retro artwork to put on their living-room walls.

The musician is oblivious to me standing here, staring at the street sign in Arabic and French above him. The old man sings in a whine.
My
violet city luxuriates in the light of dusk.
His instrument is only just being held together with peeling layers of tape. Behind him, crumbling colonial apartments: butter and rose and Nile green polluted to grey. Mock-Corinthian columns hold up rickety balconies that double as summer bedrooms, bristling with electrical wiring and outdoor plumbing, the ugliness of modernity obscuring beauty beneath.

And yet there's still a sense of grace to my city, in its narrow painted shutters, olive trees and jasmine sprouting from rooftop gardens. The ease with which high-rises marred by shrapnel stand like sentinels, the fretwork of balconies designed for women to see without being seen. I imagine how it would feel to touch those rusting grilles, stroke them as if they'll suddenly unfurl, revealing my father's face. Through the gate an Ottoman townhouse, its formal garden taken over by knee-high grass and weeds. Only a matter of time before it too vanishes by bombs or plain neglect. The musician keens.
My darling, my love, your sufferings
and joys will be many.
The sea behind him white with heat and debris from the smoke-filled, hazy air.

I walk to the Corniche, to drink raisin juice on the promenade. It's something I did every Sunday. My grandmother Lilit would bring me here, still well enough to walk, both dressed in our church-going finery. She with her walking-stick, its staccato dance on the potholed path; me, conscious of my white eyelet dress and the oversized bow perched like a butterfly in my hair. I would wish my mother was with us too, my lovely mother who had looked so much like Lilit. I took after my father's side of the family, they used to say: the spitting image of Selim. Yet more and more, when I look at my face in the mirror now, it's only Lilit I see. Not in my features, but in the expression. Beggars and refugees and young men lifting their proud heads to look at me, steeped rows of apartment blocks above the sea lit silver and gold and all the shades of cream in morning sunlight. Behind them, bare mountains whisper their dark secrets. I would take off my shoes and walk in the pearl-pale wash of foam on the beach, while Lilit sat on the sea wall, watching. A
kaïk
vendor walked by with his long wooden pole wreathed in the warm, hollow bread. When I gave him a coin I could feel his palm smooth and dry with sesame seeds. The Orthodox liturgy insinuating its reedy refrain into my thoughts:
Profound mystery
, the congregation sang. The priest in an undertone,
I will wash my hands in innocence and go around
your altar, O Lord
. We would leave my other grandmother, Siran, taking coffee with the priest and the rest of the old ladies. Crying over her lost son, Selim. Siran thought Lilit was blasphemous for keeping a copy of the Koran by her bedside as well as the Bible. I'd heard them arguing over Lilit's muffled past – her Turkish husband, her veils, that silver jewellery from Syria – as if the innocent green-covered volume was its entire manifestation.

Lilit was different, even then. She had a streak of danger I admired, something dark in her past that made her joyful and reckless. She could swim – in a huge, black, knitted bathing suit – unlike any of the other old ladies I knew. She joked. She sometimes even swore.

Now I poke with my straw at the pistachios floating on the surface of the ruby liquid, wonder what I'm really doing here. Already lonely, condemned to this fruitless exercise. Too earnest for companionship, for the quick darting smiles of these dark-cheeked waiters with their knowing bows.

Lilit arrived here in the clamour that comes with the end of war. Did she walk on this pebbled beach as a young woman, face exposed for only a moment to the sun, sit laughing at a cafe table? More likely she stood on her flimsy balcony in east Beirut, veiled in a Turkish yashmak, knuckles white against the rail. Her position in the city so precarious, her view of her future so small. Fighter ships in the distance would have seemed as small and inconsequential as children's toys. I can see them now, still lounging in the port. Are they American, or Israeli? Paper cutouts against a sharp sky. The morning so still it makes no reference to war. Black-fronded palms crackle in the haze from car exhausts, the burning of garbage in the poorer parts of the city. A lone fruit vendor, walking crazily as if dazed by the heat, leads a cart laden with pomegranates down the road among the cars. They look like Christmas decorations, round baubles of painted wood. Everyone swerves to accommodate him. Traffic noise diminishes and all I can hear is the slap of feet on broken pavement, the tinkle of Lilit's cheap silver rings against my glass.

Down on the grimy beach, a blonde in a bikini stands poised against the horizon, her waist-length hair being brushed by a short, attentive man. I watch young women like myself choose a table, sit down. Their expressions muted by sunglasses in the latest fashions, extraordinary curtains of hair. Middle-aged men argue on mobile phones, shovel in pastries as they speak. My father would have been their age if he survived the war. One of those soft-paunched men with good humour and dirty jokes and a love of home-cooked food. Who would know just by looking at Selim Pakradounian that he was a militiaman? Someone who kills. Kills indiscriminately. If he were still alive, he'd sit with me in these cafes, listen to my hopes and doubts. We would eat more pastry than was good for us.

I watch other people, mothers and daughters, lovers and friends. The trickle of rosewater syrup. Crushed cardamom at the bottom of a cup. The tap of false nails on marble tabletops, clink of glass against raised glass. Do I have the courage to stop people, thrust my taperecorder in their faces:
What did you do in the war? And you? You?
I know I can't do it, not yet. I need to travel further back, until there's nowhere left to go.

LAKE VAN, TURKISH
ARMENIA, 1905–1915

A
white wall. It was the first thing she saw when her mother took her outside, opening her eyes wide into the sun's dazzle. A white wall. She looked at it and remembered everything she'd learnt to forget. Memory before memory had a name. A white wall. Its flickering light familiar yet distant, the same blankness she'd gazed at for forty weeks, the walls of her mother's womb.

First a wall, whitewashed each spring. On its surface, shadows of a window grille in diamond shapes: close-patterned bands of light and dark as the sun moved. She lay and looked at it for a long time.

Her mother called her lamb, quince-bud, rose-petal. The infant responded to the sounds but did not understand the meanings. She cooed and held out her fists.

In time the child learnt to recognise numbers and letters, great black rounded vowels. She didn't know how to string them together but Mamma did; she would start to speak and a bracelet of sound would form itself into links of here and there, yes and no, right and wrong. Truth and lies. Muslims and Christians. Them and us. Turks and Armenians.

‘There's a war on its way,' she heard Papa say. ‘A world war.'

He said it in the same way he spoke of the weather, approaching rain. Her small head was tucked into the curve of Mamma's neck and shoulder and she burrowed in, rubbing the soft creases of skin with her lips and cheeks.

‘Ssh,' Mamma said. ‘The child.'

Mamma's breath smelled of apricots. Dragonflies swooped around her hair, her pale cheeks, her mouth with its constant uplift of surprise. The airy sound their wings made had nothing to do with war, fear, what they were hearing. She fanned them away, stamped her bare feet a little in the long grass. When she moved closer to Papa, wet blades lay flattened and crumpled where she stood.

‘Maybe it's already in the city,' he continued. ‘Wars start there and seep into the countryside like blight.'

But Mamma turned away, spoke so low only her little girl could hear. ‘There's always hope, do you know what that means?'

Hope.
She made her daughter say it.
Hope means everything will be
all right someday.
The little girl nodded and bit her lip, afraid to say anything wrong. Mamma sighed and swung her up into the trees, so high she was covered in leaves, while polished fruit all around threatened to fall. ‘Pomegranates,' Mamma whispered. ‘The fruit of our forbears. Remember that.' As she looked down through Mamma's arms, yellow and purple irises made a Persian rug beneath her, their two lower petals little sucking mouths.

She played by the lake while Mamma caught fish to sell. Pearl mullet migrated against the current at this time of year, leaping out of the water straight into Mamma's hands. She waded in with an apron bunched high around her hips, and algae trailed behind to catch between her legs, sinister green curls.

‘You wait there, my lamb. Don't follow me.'

She nodded with her finger far in her mouth. She remembered a time, so much time ago it seemed, when she tried to follow her mother into the shallows, fell and cut her lip on the jagged rocks that hid beneath. Her blood fanned out into the water like wet hair, like the moving, sipping weeds on Mamma's thighs.

Mamma was gone a long time, so she pulled oval stones from the suck of mud and washed them until their colours sang dove-grey and pomegranate red. She didn't know those words yet but remembered the drowsy feel of pink and green and purple behind her eyes, when her mother hummed an old Armenian song as she bent over her at night.
My
darling, my love, your sufferings and joys will be many.

She learnt Lake Van was dangerous, more lethal than a split lip. Mamma told her the surface might look like a pale drawn-out sheet of sky, so calm and still it reflected the mountains above, but the depths were dead, so salty nothing could live there.
Be careful. You could sink to
the bottom and we would never know.
The little girl poked her toe in the water, drew it away again. There was always fear around her in whispered commands:
Don't do that
, or
Watch out
. She moved imperceptibly so she wouldn't brush against Mamma's anger.
Mamma is very sad when you're
naughty.
Or,
Wait till I smack you.
She was on guard against accidents: of gesture, thought, word. Perhaps that was why it took so long for her to speak. She learnt her name first:
Lilit.
Lilit Pakradounian. It was another litany against fear. Mamma made her repeat it many times, scolding if she stammered.

She was ashamed, bowing her head, afraid of letting Mamma see the sting of water in her eyes. Flat stone eyes, blue-black as the scum of silt marking her mother's feet in wavering lines. Van blue, Mamma called them.
You have eyes like the lake before sunrise.
Lilit didn't know if this was the truth; she'd never seen her own face. She turned the pebbles over, sleek round objects, comforting to hold. They warmed her hands, these little reflections of her, mirror shards polished by the lake at low tide. She looked into them, opened her eyes wide. Tried on different faces: sad, sorry, fearful, glad. She was bored. They stood all day together beside the pot of fish, throwing their arms out wide whenever a horse and rider or a cart clattered by, raising vapours of dust.

Sometimes they had eggs to sell. Mullet roe Mamma smoked then piled in tiny pyramids, amber orbs come alive again, gleaming in the slow sun.

‘
Tsoug
,' they shouted at retreating travellers, making the sign of a fish with their hands, two fingers apart like a gaping mouth and forked tail.

One of Lilit's hands was clenched tight, holding on to the last pebble.

At night they smelled the burning of fragrant grass. It went on for weeks but nobody in Van paid much heed, other than to bolt the shutters of their houses more carefully than usual at sundown. Only the ancient widow who begged outside church would point to the mountains, charred now, divested of foliage, and say: ‘They stank like that the last time our people were killed
.
' Lilit looked up as she passed into the nave, lit a candle to hush her heart's pounding. Her little brother Minas poked at her with a cruel finger, before rushing to join the priest behind the altar to begin the liturgy. She didn't respond. The old, nameless fear paralysed any movement, the same fear that haunted her since she was a small child, the fear of never knowing enough.