Bone Ash Sky (42 page)

Most of the beggars were ignored, stepped over or kicked. A few, mostly children and young mothers, were given a coin or two. Some women were obviously prostitutes, leading men away behind the sea wall.

When the sun set behind the tall villas, Minas grew cold. It began to drizzle. He watched the beggars who were now squatting under the palms and counting their day’s takings. They had set up a brazier and he inadvertently edged closer, rubbing his hands over the damp fire. A young woman with a blackened mouth saw him, spat on the ground and began to shout.

‘We want none of your kind around here!’

He didn’t remember how he came to be running and crying, fleeing through the streets away from the shore and rubbing at his eyes, trying to stem the flow of tears that only made him colder. After what seemed like many miles, he could no longer distinguish between his tears or the rain that had soaked through his clothes.
A man of no substance
, he thought, as he continued to limp and run, walk and stumble;
I am a
man of water and sand.

He stopped at a street corner high above the harbour, holding his side. He looked about him, at the curve of the Corniche promenade and the steep roofs of houses, far away in the distance the blink of ships’ lights. All was dark below, except for the full moon casting a silver line of light from rooftop to rooftop. He began to cry again. He had no idea where he was.

The next morning he woke to the sound of many feet over his head and all around him. He opened his eyes and sat up to see he had fallen asleep on the steps leading to a tenement. Somebody cursed; he felt a kick aimed at his groin. He stood up then, favouring his bad ankle, leaned against the building. He stayed there, watching the tide of people swarm and increase in number, tea boys hurrying past with embossed brass pots on their backs, women balancing baskets and babies, lottery ticket hawkers thrusting their long festooned poles into the air, smacking at ribs if someone got in their way. Near him, a gang of children muddied their bare feet in potholes of water left from last night’s rain. He swayed with weakness. He was hungrier than he’d been on the marches, or in the camp. He was hungrier now than he had ever been.

He drifted through the climbing streets, dodging children with stones and angry mothers sluicing pavements with soapy water. The incense wafting from their houses hurt him with the memory of his mother. In Van she would burn the silvery coals every Saturday night in preparation for the Sabbath. Anointing the icons with fragrance, leaving the Byzantine holder smoking at their front door in case evil entered.
Oh, Mamma.
Somehow it didn’t feel right to ask her help any longer. As if he didn’t deserve it now. His feet were wet and his ankle throbbing. She wasn’t here to comfort him.

He sat on the ground and checked his wounds, only to see that his whole foot had swelled and become an angry red. He sat where he was, cross-legged, oblivious to the insults about him, the strange faces and threats to call the gendarmes if he didn’t move on. He continued to sit, until the women and children left him alone and went inside. Their men came home from work at lunchtime and then again in the evening, not even glancing at him, hurrying inside to warmth and dinner, sleepy childish voices.

He rose then, trudged with care toward a main road, some openair markets with rows of festive food under strings of coloured paper. There was a performance going on, with gypsies who beat hide drums and capered between the spectators, faces painted in crimson streaks and their children treading a tightrope strung between two plane trees. He was intimidated by the noises, and the mechanical gymnastics of the little girls unnerved him. He squinted beneath the bright lights and the scampering, hopeful children, being elbowed out of the way as if unworthy of their attention.

He knew if he didn’t steal something to eat he would faint. Yet he was afraid to act, hopping on his painful ankle between the stalls, aware of the sidelong glances, concentrating on smelling, really smelling the aromas of cooking – juice of burnt meat, grilled gilt-head bream, orange-flower sherbets tingeing the aisles – hoping he might obtain some sustenance through his pores. Low tables and cushions were laid under the spreading plane trees, and the perfume of black tea and baking thickened the dusk.

At one stall he was accosted by an old Armenian with ears cocked for a sale. When the man took in the parlous state of his feet, he waved him down the road.

‘Go to the Red Cross,’ he said in Armenian. ‘They’ve set up shelter and free food.’

Minas nodded, bewildered. The old man gestured to his wares, dried fruit and nuts and jars of sesame paste.

‘Take something before you go. Please. You are my countryman.’

Minas lunged at the food. He grabbed a handful of almonds, stuffed them into his robe, then another handful, a packet of raisins, knocked a basket of figs to the ground in his haste. The old man opened his hands wide, told him to take more. Minas hobbled away, cramming all the food into his cheeks at once, swallowing it all down without tasting.

The Red Cross relief post was set up in the centre of the sprawling refugee camp of Bourj-Hammoud, built on stilts to rise above the constantly shifting, gurgling marshland. He didn’t like that word.
Camp.
Something in him wanted to turn back, continue his aimless existence in Damascus. He thought of his father, his mother, his shadowy sister, either alive or dead. Yet he was alive. He owed it to them to make a life. Only in this humped building teetering on matchstick legs could he get some hot food, wash perhaps, even sleep in a proper bed. He remembered starched white sheets and lambs’ wool blankets, and stepped forward with a new energy through the door.

There were signs in different languages everywhere. Armenian, Arabic, English, French.
Queue here to be processed. Identity cards to be
collected between 12.00 and 16.00 hours.
Only here could he be processed and given an identity card.
Processed
. He made his face blank and pushed through the melee of bodies.

There were desks under the low ceiling, bare oil-wick lamps throwing dirty puddles of light on faces and hands. Many hands writing, recording names and birth dates and ages. Armenian records. Armenian lives. Evidence of their continued existence. He felt a slight upsurge of something akin to vindication, even joy.
They tried, but they didn’t get all
of us.
Precise voices could be heard whispering, in French and English and Arabic; he could understand a word here and there.

A French woman gestured to him, tight-lipped. He stood before her, nodded when she guessed from the way he pronounced his surname which
vilayet
he was from. His voice was rusty; he hadn’t used it for so many weeks. It hurt to form the sounds. He coughed, tried it out once more.

‘Are there many here from Van?’ he croaked, incredulous.

‘Not so many,’ she replied carefully, wary of his response.

He watched her write his name in cursive script, fine and bold.
Minas Pakradounian.
She penned his age and blacked in the special box:
No dependants
.

‘Any skills?’ she asked.

He was just about to shake his head when he coughed again and cleared his throat.

‘Jeweller. Gold- and silver-smithing.’

He watched her write the words, and somehow this made what he had just said more real. She nodded at him, flicked her wrist to the other side of the room. Stained screens of army canvas hid men shouting and laughing. Someone sobbed in strangled gulps like a baby. Thin, greasy blankets on all the beds, in various shades of ash.

Minas inched his way to the other side. All around him were tin hipbaths, some with nude men in them, soaping themselves and blowing bubbles, others empty, with the water still swirling from the movement of a body standing up and stepping onto the brown, dusty floor. Muddy footprints of bath water everywhere in the dirt.

These were Armenian men, his countrymen, but never before had he felt more alone. Not on the march, not in the camp, not with the Bedouin. These men were definitely Armenian; he could see that from their hard, rangy bodies and sloped, elongated heads. But they were laughing, making jokes, flopping their penises about at each other and guffawing. He choked.
How can you do this? Have you seen what I’ve seen? So many have died, are still dying.
One man with a smashed face and hairy back stood up in his bath, sloshing water on the floor and yelling. He waved his arms around as if conducting an orchestra, wriggled his hips like an odalisque and used his penis as an accessory to the dance, until a nurse hurried over to stop him.

He wanted to shake them, strike them, burn them all, upset their bath water over the floor and shout: ‘Don’t you know why we’re here? Armenia is gone forever if we forget!’ But he didn’t. He hung his head, ashamed of his own sparse nudity, carrying his rolled-up clothes under one arm. He clutched his mother’s earrings, they bit into his palm. An American nurse saw him and took his hand. She propelled him to the far side of the room.

‘You all right?’

He nodded, although he didn’t understand what she’d said. He spoke to her in Turkish.

‘A mirror, please?’

She raised her eyebrows, shrugged her shoulders. She switched from English to French.

‘
Je ne comprends pas
. I don’t understand.’

‘
Un miroir
,’ he repeated, and touched the side of his face with one finger.

She grinned brightly and marched off to somebody else who was pissing in his bath, making a yellow fountain rise up from the murky water. When she came back, she held a jagged sliver of mirror in a clean cloth. He waited until she was gone to look at himself. He held the mirror out at arm’s length, afraid of what he might see.

The way he held his jaw had changed, clenched and tight as if constantly chewing at the inside of his mouth. Maybe it had something to do with some of his teeth having been knocked out in the camp. His face seemed twisted in a perpetual state of suffering. He tried to smile at his reflection, found he couldn’t arrange his features satisfactorily. He bared his remaining teeth again, as he had in Damascus; it made him feel stronger somehow. Then he became distracted by his hair. It was lank and brushed his shoulders, the new, patchy beard a fiery gold. He looked closer, yanked a white hair from his nostril. He brought the mirror down past his nipples, angry red and weeping fluid, past his genitals, pale and brushed with scurf, down to his rickety knees.
I’m an
old man at fourteen.

He put the mirror down and stepped into a bath. It looked a little cleaner than the others. Around him, scores of other men were doing the same thing. Testing the water for heat with the tips of their toes, knowing even as they did so it would be lukewarm at best, heated only by the memory of another’s body. Armenians exchanging the fluids and the filth of each other’s destiny. Stepping in, stepping out. Shaking the water from their skin in a rain of drops like dogs.

He stood in the bath. His feet were on fire. The cake of soap balancing on the rim of his tub was lumpy, yellowish. He picked it up, weighed it in his hand. Pork fat. Animal fat. Human. He sprang up from the water and lay very still on the dirt floor. Hiding. In the camp again.

Another nurse came past with rubber gloves, brisk. She wrenched him from the ground, ignominious, balls flopping, tears squeezed out of his shut eyes. She smiled fiercely, stroked his head when she sat him on the rim of the tub.

‘There’s a good boy,’ she said in English.

He didn’t understand. He winced as she smeared hard soap all over his chest, over the wounds in his nipples left by his mother’s earrings.

Lilit squatted on the birthing rug and pushed, holding on to the midwife’s arms. Hot, hairy arms, easy to grip on to so as not to fall. Fall, falling into pain. Blood spattered the flagstones, drops of blood on sand. She remembered murmured prayers at nightfall, Mamma crying, snatches of Armenian song. A bluish half-moon fell from the Der ez Zor sky. Her mouth was dry. She panted, holding it all in. Then one last push. There was not a cell in her body or brain that was not consumed by this agony. She was finding it hard to remember who she was. Another push. ‘One last push,’ they kept telling her, the liars. ‘One last push.’

The baby flopped on the ground like a fish, squirming once then lying still. She put her hand out to touch the tiny body, then drew it back, afraid. Blue scrap of bone and tissue, throbbing cord tight around his neck. Pulsating, coiling, a snake come to strangle her baby. She was paralysed, staring at the little puffing face trying to breathe.

‘Help him,’ she yelled, and time seemed to warp, elongate, until she was no longer there in the room anymore. She fell back on the pillows and shut her eyes, shivering with cold. At her feet she could hear swearing, muttering, women’s hands scratching and slapping at flesh – were they tugging inside her or dismembering the child? – but she was too tired to move or look or even open her eyes. She suspected the midwife for colluding with Fatima to bring her down. What if Suleiman cast her out when she failed to bear him a son? At times like this, when the anodyne routine of daily life ruptured and changed, when Suleiman threatened to become morose and distant again, she remembered she was Armenian. Whatever that meant.