Bone Ash Sky (30 page)

Lost in thought, I miss my bus. At the Hamra taxi rank, I enter a cab absently and sit in the front seat without glancing at the driver, not taking in anything about him: age, attractiveness, ethnicity. I tell him my destination in English, a reflex. Next thing we’re speeding down an unknown highway. I strain to read the signs that flash past, the huge billboards for Chivas Regal and Calvin Klein jeans, the tattered posters of suicide bombers and beaming mullahs. Ayatollah Khomeini’s waxdoll face. The driver puts his white, hairless hand on my leg, and I slap it away. A hot panic grips me as soon as I realise I’m helpless, at the mercy of this stranger – the car’s going at a hundred; there’s no point even contemplating jumping out. There is an instant, when my vision dims and the light amid the blackness narrows to a pin, where I can see Lilit’s fate in the desert among the Turks, in Syria with Suleiman, hollow with pain in her Beirut bedroom. The taxi stops. Then the man simply shrugs, and I see the dark stains of sweat on his shirt as he leans over me to open the passenger door.

I stand on the kerb, ashamed, as if the whole incident has been my fault. Heart beating crazily, ears stinging with heat. I even paid him for groping me before I banged the car door shut. Threw some notes into his lap, trying to normalise the situation. This did not happen to me. I’m not that sort of person. Forcing myself to remain calm, I bend down to my laptop bag and take out my map.

I have no idea which suburb I’m in; it’s not a suburb I’d ever been to as a child, but the street is shiny and clean, the shops orderly, the people busy and well dressed.

‘Excuse me?’ I begin, hopeful.

No answer. Some passers-by make as if to stop, and I step forward, my features arranged into what I hope is a neutral expression. They offer a false smile and a miming gesture of the hands –
I speak no English
– and are gone.

I wonder why they won’t help. Of course they speak English. Everyone does here. Do I look so strange? My scruffy jeans and tight T-shirt are too grunge, too cobbled-together, in this enclave. I can’t see any young women or children, only purposeful men in Zegna suits and the occasional old woman, head down, scurrying about her errands in head-to-toe black. The old women don’t even glance up when I speak. In affluent America people understand my sort of dress: ironic, political, self-reflexive. Not so here. They just think I want something from them. I want to try my Arabic but something in me is afraid, as if it might reveal too much. To whom?

I’m being jostled and pushed by a crowd of intense, moustached men. They’re not wearing Zegna. They’re what I imagine fundamentalist Muslims look like. Shias. Fanatics. Suicide bombers. I walk further into the crowd, trying to evade them. There still don’t seem to be any young women or children in the neighbourhood, except for beggar boys who plead and wheedle with me for spare change. They don’t seem affected by my clothes.

There are domes of mulberries at a stall and I’m suddenly parched. I point, smiling. The vendor ignores me as well, tending to the pressing needs of other customers. He pours the berries into an antiquated blender that churns melodiously as it’s filled, and I’m mesmerised by his blackened fingers as he scoops up a handful and crushes them with shards of ice, at the transformed jewel-bright sludge spurting into a glass.

‘
Je voudrais un
—’

‘Here, allow me.’

A man in khaki stops and points a thick finger on my blowing map to hold it down. For a second I think he’s a soldier, then realise he’s wearing cast-off military clothes with a self-deprecating, slightly humorous air. Under his vest is a black T-shirt with the words
Free
Palestine
in English. His clothes seem incongruous next to his spiky greying hair, the whiter stubble on his chin and cheeks. Creases radiate from his greenish-grey eyes. He tosses a coin to the vendor from one of his many pockets, hands me a glass of juice. Glancing at the liquid as I begin to drink, he hesitates for a moment then reaches out for it.

‘Do you mind? I don’t have change for another.’

I shake my head, non-committal. I don’t want to share with a stranger but it would be rude now to protest.
Free Palestine.
He must be an old leftist hippie, accustomed to sharing fluids and filth. Now I see he has a dog with him: a huge, black-tufted mastiff that places its paws on the man’s knees and begs in whimpers.

‘Don’t bother looking at those tourist maps,’ the man says in English, his mouth full of ice and berries. ‘You got it from a hotel, didn’t you? Useless.’

He slaps at the dog. ‘Down, Julius. You won’t like it anyway.’

He addresses me again. ‘The streets are known by different names, locally. Where do you want to go?’

I open my mouth to speak.

‘No, no, no,’ he cuts in. ‘Not the number, the building. Nothing’s known by numbers around here.’

‘I know that,’ I say under my breath.

‘Hmmm?’

I look at him but don’t reply. Can I can trust him? Will he follow me there, take my money and passport, rape me? His accent is a hybrid I can’t place: part American, part cultured, part something else. He seems to be in his early fifties, the same generation as my father. The same age Selim would be if he were alive. He’s swallowed now and smiles through his stubble, as if sensing my hesitation. Hands me the half-empty glass.

‘Aren’t you going to finish your juice?’

Something about him looks out of place in the splenetic crowd, something as awkward as the way I feel. I suck at the straw, conscious of the stain of his saliva on the tip, and speak through a mouthful.

‘I’m going to the Sabra-Shatila camp. The driver stopped here because I thought it was somewhere nearby. Well, to tell you the truth, he was overcharging me
and
making moves and I just wanted to get out of his cab as quickly as I could.’

The man whistles.

‘Why are you going there anyway? Are you crazy? You could still get shot, even nowadays.’

‘I need to meet someone,’ I reply, taken aback. ‘I’m expected.’

‘Friends of yours?’ He pauses. ‘Okay, you don’t need to tell me who they are. I was only joking before, trying to scare you. It’s where all the half-baked journalists go for their taste of the real Lebanon.’

‘Oh, well, I’m a journalist.’

‘Are you now?’

He looks at me keenly, as if wondering whether I’m telling the truth. I feel the need to justify myself to him for some insane reason, and all the while as I’m preparing to speak I inwardly squirm at how naive I’ll seem. I hand back the unfinished glass.

‘Here, the rest is for you. I’ve had enough.’

He accepts it, regards me with his head tilted to one side. I succumb to the need to explain.

‘I’m Lebanese. I mean, Armenian. Just back from the States. On assignment for
The Boston Globe
—’ He interrupts, throws the empty glass back at the vendor.

‘Still want to go there? Okay. We need to get you another taxi. How can you carry that laptop bag around? You’ll be robbed. Sorry. Here, allow me.’

I hesitate, shrug and gesture to my bag. The man exclaims at its heaviness and hails a cab, whose owner complains about the dog but nevertheless allows us inside.

Back in the hotel bathroom, I turn on the light and scrutinise my eyebrows. They’re more untidy than usual. I think of the man I just met. The way he talked about his lack of family, his engineering degree, without telling me where he was from, the way he finished all the juice between pronouncements. I left him in the taxi, still slurping at the dregs. He leaned out of the window, said I looked agitated, it was getting late, that he’d wait until I was finished. I was annoyed, but glad. I could feel him watching me as I stepped onto the kerb and walked fast toward the camp gates. When I came back twenty minutes later he was dozing, head thrown back, the dog snoring at his feet. I tapped him gently on the arm.

‘They’re not there. The woman and child. Nobody could tell me why.’

‘You probably got the time wrong.’

‘Believe me, I didn’t.’

‘Okay, you didn’t. Who knows, maybe they chickened out.’

‘Or maybe they’re sick, or just running late. I think I should go back, wait at least another fifteen minutes.’

‘I’ll come with you if you like.’

I hesitated. ‘It’s okay. I’ve left a note.’

‘Well, shall we go somewhere else now?’

‘I know a cafe,’ I suggested. ‘In Rue Hamra, the Cafe de—’

He cut me off again. ‘Terrible place. Where all the tourists go.’

Instead he took me to a tiny bar called Che Guevara’s and talked through two local Almaza beers. The dog curled up at his feet, snoring like a man. I only allowed myself one arak, in order to keep some control. He was a stranger, after all.

He told me he’s a minesweeper, pressed his business card into my hand. His job is to clear Israeli mines from the south of Lebanon for a non-profit organisation. He said he wanted to take me out on the town that evening, show me the new Beirut.

I like him. I like him a lot. His T-shirt has something to do with it, the solidity of torso beneath, his sunburnt cheeks and short, short hair. I trust his penetrating expression somehow. I tell myself to stop, not to romanticise him already. I always do this. Sometimes I despise myself for being so open, so ready to love. He has curiously thin brows, like Errol Flynn or Clark Gable.

I take tweezers and yank unruly hairs, one by one, from my own brows, pat down my hair. Put on some lipstick, stand back to look. My tattoo shows in my sleeveless dress, but I get the feeling he will like it. He’s promised to show me a nightclub, stupidly fashionable, prohibitively expensive, rumoured to have been a torture centre run by the Phalangists during the war. I had to suppress a shudder. Surely my father wasn’t involved? It’s one thing to know intellectually the things he did, another to see them, touch them, participate in Beirut’s continual whitewashing of the past.

‘Call me Chris,’ he said in the cab on the way to the hotel, paying the driver in American dollars. ‘Most people can’t pronounce my real name anyway.’

‘I’m sure I could. Try me.’

‘I’ll tell you later. Meet me in the lobby at nine.’

I meet him downstairs and his eyes light up when he sees me.

‘I love a woman in a white cotton dress,’ he says, and I don’t know what to reply.

He takes my hand and instinctively I pull away before submitting. Never sure of the right way to be.

‘Let’s walk,’ he says. ‘It’s a cool evening, for a change.’

The streets are uneven and narrow, shaded by high-rise apartments. Squat villas built in other, saner eras press up against the kerb like fat women craning to get a better view of the spectacle of sleek cars and damaged people. Painted shutters open to fumes and dust, in all their fading shades of lemon and leaf-green and rose. I peer into a bedroom, at its bare light bulb, brown-papered walls. Pages cut out of fashion magazines are pasted to the peeling wallpaper.

‘Hey, don’t be so rude,’ Chris whispers.

I’m beginning to tire already of his familiarity, his arrogance, his opinions on everything. It’s as if I’ve known him for years, already been made to endure all his theories. At the same time this sense of ease gives me comfort among so much that’s unfamiliar in this new, shiny Beirut.

We pass more apartment blocks with open courtyards and broken fountains, baby olive trees planted in blue-painted oil tins. Grey scum on walls, grease on the pavement. We walk, slipping at times, following open sewers that lead us down to the sea. On the Corniche promenade, women stride past in heels and tight jeans, gelled glitter in bouffant hair. I can’t help contrasting their stalking feline grace with my own diffidence, retreating under their gaze. Surely I can’t compete with these beauties. I watch Chris appraising them, one thin eyebrow raised – yet his hand’s on my arm; he’s in step with me, making me laugh. I watch the way my shadow and his – elongated, elegant, long-limbed – walk beside us, like idealised versions of ourselves. Now he’s switched from being fatherly to funny, I can let myself relax. Now he’s looking at me in that appreciative way, a tiny glint in his eye.

I can smell the hot spiciness of his aftershave, the skin of his face and neck gold-stubbled in the last of the light. Waves lap against the sea wall like a lullaby. Above the noise of cars and mopeds and hawkers – all hushed now for this brief moment in the stillness of sunset – Beirut’s waterfront apartments shimmer in the evening mist, telegraphing messages I alone can hear. I pause, looking up at them, and Chris stops in front of me.