Bone Ash Sky (34 page)

Before the commander’s tirade began, he squatted in the dust and scrutinised his arms and legs, holding them out in front of him in the sunlight as if seeing them for the first time. Skeleton bones, shreds of yellow skin, reddish in places. Now he looked like everyone else, or even worse. A walking corpse. No longer himself. When was the last time he knew who he was anyway? The little boy who used to sit by the window in Van entranced by his schoolbooks. He searched for the pimpled girl and couldn’t see her. Maybe she was dead, he thought without emotion. Maybe she was avoiding him, afraid to be tainted by his botched escape and subsequent ordeal.

He kept to the outer reaches of the crowd of prisoners, trying to see without moving his head if there were any Bedouin waiting on the outskirts, beyond the barbed-wire fences. There were. He knew that to walk across and speak to one of them openly would mean certain death. And he wasn’t entirely sure he could walk that distance unaided. He knew no Arabic. He would have to trust they spoke at least some Turkish, would have to trust they would listen and not betray him. And would they even want his gold earrings?

Assembly ended with the usual curses and oaths from the commander. Minas was selected, as always, to go with the youngest team far into the desert to carry and bury corpses. He didn’t think he would be able to bear the dead weight, not now. They were given extra rations for this job – two ladles of gruel instead of one – and, even in his consternation, he was glad of that. During breakfast, the guards sat to one side and were never overly vigilant, slurping their tea from huge metal panniers, eating food the inmates of the camp could never dream of: fresh goat’s meat, frothy milk, eggs. He knew the Bedouin supplied them with such luxuries in exchange for a few more coins. The milling crowd of prisoners worked in his favour; it was easy to wander, be unpredictable.

He waited in line for gruel, using his fingers to scoop it into his mouth. He saw the boy who had betrayed him squatting behind the main cauldron, being fed by another inmate. The older man seemed to be cajoling him, one hand clamped on the boy’s scarred thigh. As Minas came near, the boy was in the act of opening his mouth wide to the spoon, like a baby bird. Minas caught his eye, made a growling sound in his throat then decided to ignore him. He was beneath contempt.

As he ate he walked in circles, feeling the strength come back to his legs and lower back, stretching, straightening, adjusting his spine. He walked, giving the impression of rumination, a man in the morning sunshine with nothing much to do. He caught the eye of a young Bedouin close by, a boy with a fine hawk’s nose and copper skin. The boy edged closer, twining his fingers in the mesh of the fence. His eyes were sharp beneath his red and white headscarf. Minas walked up and down, up and down, skirting the boy, always coming closer into his vicinity. When he passed him for the last time Minas slowed down, speaking between gulps of his gruel in rapid, slurred Turkish.

‘I have gold if you’ll help me.’

The Bedouin didn’t move, didn’t register a flicker of interest.

‘Do you understand?’

The Bedouin closed one eye, a lizard’s reflex. When he spoke, his Turkish was accented, melodious.

‘Show me the gold.’

Minas pulled up his shirt in a flash, then down again.

‘I need you to help me get out of here.’

The Bedouin made to walk away, not before making a clicking sound with his teeth.

‘Tonight,
insh’allah
, I shall come for you. Wait near the latrines.’

He waited, shivering in the cold air. If he were caught outside his sleeping block so late at night he’d be killed on the spot. Mauled by those dogs. The Bedouin hadn’t mentioned a time; he could be waiting here all night. He’d volunteered to be the one to empty the slops out in the shallow ditch that served as a latrine, to rinse out the bucket, to bring it back where it stood stinking all night by the door.

He’d been here many minutes now, maybe even five. Ten. Too long. He squatted in the ditch among the turds and felt his bare feet sink into the moistness of earth fed with excrement. He didn’t hold his nose; after the corpses he managed to carry all day, this was easy. Still, he didn’t like the sensation of it on his soles and worming around his toes. He fought the need to retch, but there was nothing in his stomach.
Maybe the Bedouin has been and gone. Maybe he’s going to betray me too.

Barking. The soft, crunching sound of bare feet on sand. He crouched still further into the ditch, until the spongy mass of it touched his nose. He covered his eyes with his hands.
If I’m mauled, I don’t want
to see it coming.
He heaved, tried not to cry.
After everything I’ve seen, why
am I so scared?
A light hand on his arm.

‘Quick, Nazarene.’

It was the Bedouin.

‘I managed to come in on the pretext of bringing them some
mansaf
. Run now. They will not be eating it for long.’

He swathed Minas in a dark bolt of fabric, winding it around his face and neck.

‘Good. Now you look more like us.’

He followed the Bedouin’s swishing robe to the very perimeter of the camp, on the south side, which the Turks usually manned with only one or two men. He saw a guard holding a gun and panicked.

‘I can’t,’ he panted. ‘I’m scared.’

The Bedouin put his finger to his lips, miming sleep. Minas looked again. The guard – just a boy – was indeed sleeping upright, head sagging, the gun almost slipping off his shoulder.

The Bedouin smiled, a flash of teeth and grimace in one, and cupped his hands low to the ground. Minas looked up at the barbedwire fence; it was too high, but he saw that the Bedouin had thrown a saddle over it to ease his passage.

‘Come. Use my hands. Jump up high. My cousin is waiting on the other side.’

He jumped, scraped his torso against the barbed wire, wincing at the sound, and managed to climb over, lacerating his whole body. When he landed in the sand on the other side, he felt his right leg buckle and knew he’d sprained an ankle. The cousin helped him to his feet. Limping, quietly sobbing, he clambered behind him onto a spitting, groaning, exasperated camel.

Minas remembered his sister: her half-smile, the way he laughed at her long plait and pulled it hard so she screamed. There was not much else to do, except think and remember. He thought of the girl he left behind at the camp. Her own greasy braid, cold as a snake between his fingers at night. He tried not to think of her again. He’d been hiding now in the litter under a pile of rugs for too long. His thigh muscles ached, his neck permanently twisted to one side, his throat tickled then shut down completely from lack of fluid. The Bedouin gave him water twice a day with his food but in this heat he craved liquid constantly. The dried strips of unidentifiable meat they gave him increased his thirst only the more.

On the first night, they pressed a cold, mealy compress of some desert herb on his ankle, bandaged the swelling and left it to heal. He reached inside the swaddling now and scraped some of the paste onto his fingers, tasted it and immediately spat it out. It did not quench his thirst and was decidedly bitter. He regretted the loss of saliva. He moved his ankle cautiously now, flexing it back and forward, feeling the warning twinge of pain all the way up his thigh.

At sunset he was let out for a few minutes with a handful of dates. He balanced on one leg, holding his penis, pissing in a trickle and gazing at the promise of a new world. The Bedouin had laughed at him the first time; they all knelt to urinate in an attitude of prayer. He continued to stand, heedless of their remarks, gazing out at a landscape with no horizon. The colours of the dunes and pillars of sand became softer, although at the same time more distinct: shimmer pinks and beaten gold and tinges of night blue. Clay dwellings in the distance were shaped like helmets fashioned of copper, ancient headdresses for long-dead Armenian men. His dates were fresh and plump, syrupy. The sensation on his tongue overwhelming. While he ate them, they alone constituted the sum of his existence. He kept the few date pips in his mouth until he had extracted every last molecule of sweetness from them, until they resembled pellets of bone, sparking a jolt of memory.

The young Bedouin hadn’t accepted the earrings after all. He waved Minas’s offer away with wide smiles and clicking sounds and said he was as glad as Minas to be going far away from those Turks, to be travelling to Damascus to buy kilim saddlebags and tea sets and iridescent veils for the long journey back to Baghdad. They had gold enough this season, he said. Their trade was good. They sold their wares for twice the price the further east they went. Better than any amount of gold was the coinage of heaven. And by saving him, hopefully the Bedouin had paid some of his dues.

Sometimes people would sit on top of the pile of rugs and woollen saddles and he almost suffocated in the odour of hot flesh and drying sweat. At those moments he felt the Bedouin were torturing him for their own pleasure instead of aiding his escape. He cursed them under his breath as vile Arabs, traitors, sadists as bad as any Turk. He waited until the next meal, the next morsel tossed from camel-blackened hands. He begged for more water, clutching at his throat, but the boy assigned to him didn’t understand, or didn’t want to.

When they left him in Damascus he had no idea what to do. They had provided him with a clean set of clothes in the Arab style; it took him several days before he grew used to feeling the loose fabric swirl across his calves, the uprush of air on his genitals as he walked, limping at first, then slowly gaining in strength. Even in all his fear and confusion, sometimes the airiness of his new clothes made him desire another’s body. He wandered the streets in this way, patting the beard that had grown sparse and wispy as a grandfather’s in patches over his cheeks. Reddish, he assumed, as his father’s had once been. He had no mirror.

He tried to catch a glimpse of his reflection in shop windows or in mounds of scattered glass on the road but he never managed to see any detail or colour, only his smudge of a face, features clouding, insubstantial. He bared his teeth at himself like an animal. Over the last months in the desert and with the Bedouin he had become a man.

He scavenged in piles of refuse for discarded food and drank full to bursting from the elaborate fountains on every street corner. He didn’t want to sell the earrings, not yet. He had sewn them into the hem of his garment before he left the Bedouin, with needle and strong thread they gave him. He wasn’t sure where he wanted to go next, or what to do with the money if he sold them. At the same time he grew to like Damascus and was loath to leave. Its open squares and fountains were bathed in early morning light, where he washed fully clothed with the city beggars. Spikes of sun came through the high palms that shaded its thoroughfares. The water raining over his body made cataracts of silver that fanned out into the circling streets, wetting flower sellers, donkeys laden with watermelons and boiled sweets and bananas, or the derelicts that seemed more affluent to Minas than himself. The mosques and museums offered shaded courtyards where he could sleep and rest in the noonday heat, sometimes even eat a meal when pilgrims and mourners dispensed their largesse of crescent-shaped cakes and jellies to all the beggars.

He made a habit each day of walking through the dim archways of the gold souk, wondering how much his earrings would be worth. He pressed his nose to the polished-glass fronts of jewellery shops, street upon street. They were all the same. Tiny bands of gold for newborn babies, miniature fragments of the Koran on thin chains, garish belts of carnelian and chased silver.
Papa’s were better than these.
He straightened up, caught a blur of his own reflection in the glass.
I can do better than
these.
He wondered if he could stay in Damascus, settle into life as a shopkeeper and fashioner of gold. In the next breath he dismissed the thought.
I’m a refugee, for God’s sake. I don’t even have any shoes.

He passed a stall on the corner near the Umayyad mosque and begged for food by placing both hands together and bowing his head. The vendor gave him a dried husk of corn, assuming he was a Muslim pilgrim. At noon when the sun reached its zenith he entered the mosque compound and lay with believers in the shade of jasmine vines that ran riot over gates and crumbling stone walls. He slept with the scent of his mother all about him. He dreamed of her, a pale shade dead for little less than a year now. His sister gone with a Turk seven months ago. Probably dead as well.