Bone Ash Sky (47 page)

She wailed now, flung her hands about, pointed to the corpses and pronounced the names she knew. The journalists wrote them down in fat notebooks with diligent flourishes of the pen. Named. This one small gesture of respect at least.

She was silent most of the next day and following night, seated at the window in Rouba’s kitchen. Not even her granddaughter Hadiya, with her child’s wit and dolls and laughter, could rouse her from the blackness. Amal was in bed in another room, still shaking as she lay there. The canary filled in the silences with short, exhausted trills whenever somebody moved.

‘Issa?’

‘He’s somewhere fighting, Mother. He told me he’d be back next week.’

She subsided into silence again. Rouba turned on the radio and after much fiddling with the dials tuned in to her favourite station, Radio Monte Carlo.

‘At last count, more than three thousand Palestinian and Muslim Lebanese residents of the Sabra-Shatila refugee camps have been killed or have disappeared. We suspect those not yet accounted for have been taken to unknown destinations in Phalange army trucks.’

Rouba turned off the radio.

‘I’m sorry, Mother.’

Bilqis twitched; she seemed not to have heard.

‘Some noodles? Or maybe you should go to bed? I’ve made up a sofa in the room where Amal is. You haven’t slept at all.’

Bilqis sighed and turned her face to the window. Rouba persisted, against her own better judgement.

‘There have already been demonstrations against this even in Israel. And all over the world.’

A smile – could it be a smile? – played across Bilqis’s lips.

‘You know, Rouba, I’m remembering this thing. It will not leave my head.’

‘Please try to forget, Mother. I’m sorry I turned on the radio. It’s not good for you.’

‘Listen. A British journalist once asked me,
Why are you in such a
hurry to leave the camps? The children seem to really love it, such a perfect
playground for them
.’

‘Yes?’ Rouba asked gently.

No answer. Bilqis was back there, beside the journalist, listening to his clipped BBC tones and answering the interpreter in monosyllables. She stood at the door of her hut, sun westering behind the hills, one hand shielding her squinting eyes. The photographer took many shots, told her to pose with her hand on her hip, leaning into the doorframe as if she were tired. Mahmoud and little Issa played in the dust at her feet with intermittent squeals of frustration at the sharp stones, those eddies of dust, at cockroaches that crawled over their legs if they stayed down there too long. Bilqis looked at the squalid dwellings all around her, their roofs of corrugated iron weighted down by bricks, their homemade walls of squashed petrol cans, herbs growing in rusting tins, clouds of flies, stink of animals and shit, the long line of women just like her queuing at the UNRWA truck for a small bag of rice, kerosene, or a few kilos of flour. She felt a shudder of desire for her childhood home: that small bare orchard overlooking the sea. Then she merely looked at the journalist. He understood her contempt for him, and left.

BEIRUT, 1995

T
oday I can’t get Siran’s voice out of my head. That reedy whine she punctuated with coughs, the melancholy inflection I wonder if my father inherited.

It saddens me that I’ve never heard his voice. Never seen him move, or laugh, or dance. When I think of him he’s always static, caught in a noiseless dream. I would hear Siran nag Minas in that voice, and I hated it. I wanted them to be happy, wanted all of us to be, and had no idea how to do it.

Minas, killed in 1967 by his own rage. Before he died, he spent hours staring at the wall, only jolted out of his reverie by Siran with bowls of warm milk for his stomach. The tumours didn’t kill him, so she said; his guilt and grief did.

‘I’m dying,’ he would scream. ‘I’m dying for all of you.’

I take the bus to the nursing home early, forgoing my cafe breakfast, stomach a tight knot of misery, head teeming with memories, fragments of conversations, disjointed scenes. I’ve picked some jasmine on the way to the bus stop, thinking to give it to Siran. Crooked streets warp then bulge in the strengthening heat, fragile structures creak on wooden poles. The swamp where the Armenian refugee camp once stood continues to bubble beneath.

The nursing home looks smaller, more dingy than I remember. As I pass open doors, catch glimpses of bath-robed, shuffling figures, I remember with a new clarity all those years of secretly listening to Lilit’s mumblings of massacres and deportations, the death of her family and friends.

When I turned to my other grandmother for confirmation or response, Siran merely looked away over the Beirut rooftops then back again at my face.

‘What was it like for you, Grandma? How did it feel?’

Siran laughed, nodding at Lilit. ‘Oh, darling. It was like a bad dream for us, exactly like a dream.’ There wasn’t any weight of blame in her version of events. It was like a moving picture she’d had the misfortune to watch.

Now she sits on an old pink-frilled bath chair with an expression of childish malice. Near her, a plastic bowl containing a sop of bread and milk, food for infants. A fly buzzes, settling on the rim. I start with an involuntary shiver at the sight of her awake, and one of the nuns puts a cautious hand on my arm.

‘It’s the drugs she needs for her diabetes, her sleep, to control her bowels. They give her that look.’

I advance toward her. What can I bring to this brittle wisp of skin and bone? Yellowish hair balding in patches, scrofula reddening her scalp and the back of her neck. Dangling from her ears again, my mother’s earrings. Turquoise and gold, somehow obscene on her soft, drooping lobes. She’s murmuring and rocking, repeating the phrase
where is my son, where is my son
in rhythmic flutters that don’t stop or waver in intensity. I tuck the jasmine into my blouse. She wouldn’t know what to do with it.

‘She says the same thing over and over all day,’ the nun whispers, solicitous.

I’m aware of smiling stupidly, conscious I have nothing to say, naught to offer.

‘Grandma? I came to see you before but you were asleep.’

I kneel, kiss her upraised palm. Siran flings it away, querulous.

‘Where’s my son, little girl? I was in the shop on the corner buying some bread, stale bread for soup, and he skipped past in his uniform so long ago. He’d gone to be a soldier, he was holding a dead baby in his arms and it was screaming – but where is he now?’

Her new, loud voice and the nonsense she shouts shocks me.

‘I don’t know where he is, Grandma. I thought you might tell me.’

The nun makes a discreet gesture, mutters something about bringing some glasses of tea back, takes the bowl of uneaten food and closes the door behind her. I get up from the floor, sit opposite Siran in another chair. She seems to be half-asleep now, her anger subsided, slippered feet tapping in a soft rhythm on the linoleum floor. Flecks of green and cream, the bottles of pills arranged in a row on the dresser, the narrow, girlish bed with its corners tucked in. There are no ornaments from home, no photographs, no icons. A life wiped out. The cheap chipboard furniture, the threadbare woven blankets, stains on the floor of—blood, urine, faeces? I’m letting my grandmother die here? The blank pale-blue walls, the grimy windowsill, the trapped fly that bangs itself against the pane and then alights on Siran’s lap, twitching. Siran might as well be dead.

I open the window, flick the fly away. Leaning out, I take deep breaths of fresh air cooled by arcing sprinklers on the lawn.

I sit down again. Decide to leave but don’t stir. The nurse might come back with the tea. But there’s nothing I can do here. Yet I feel a drag of responsibility for the wall-eyed, mumbling woman beside me.

Siran is talking in her sleep about the saucepan lid that was dented and needed to be fixed and the dress he bought her one Easter that fell to her hips. She was so thin nothing fitted her anymore. I assume she’s referring to Minas. I listen and sit and wait, wondering when I’ll have the courage to get up and go, hearing the rattle in her throat as she snores, watching a thin trail of spittle form on her chin.

Finding a tissue on a side table, I dab at it without any force, afraid to wake her. As I wipe nausea rises to the roof of my mouth. I try not to gag, making a small noise at the back of my throat. This seems to rouse her.

‘What do you want here, little girl? The men have already come and killed our fathers and the rug from Persia needs cleaning with expensive soap. I told her I could do the washing better than her and she went ahead and did it, then I had to do it all over again.’

‘I’m here to see you, Grandma. It’s Anoush.’

The old woman is silent now, face averted to the window. I have the urge to chatter and gossip, fill such obscene quiet with meaningless words. I lean forward and put a gentle hand on her arm.

‘Are you comfortable, Grandma? Can I get you anything – a glass of water, maybe? A biscuit? The nuns have been so nice and hospitable. You know, it’s so lovely here in Beirut, I’d almost forgotten how perfect the city can be in summer. Grandma, I’ve met someone in the last few weeks – he’s so kind, I think you’d approve. He’s a little older than me but it doesn’t seem to matter when we’re together. After all, you always used to say—’

Siran nods then, suddenly knowing. She leans forward and spits out her words.

‘You made my son run away, little girl. It was you who did it.’

I want to protest:
I was just a baby when he left us
.
A newborn.
Instead, I wait for her to continue.

‘He would have stayed if it hadn’t been for the scheming of that Lilit and her brother, God curse him. My own husband conspiring against me, little boy and girl, throats cut, thrown in the river. Tell me, did that lamb have to be so charred? My dead beloved silly boy. And your mother Anahit, my girl, all roses and cream, but tarred with a Turkish brush. Curse them all. Especially Minas. Gave me a hard life. All those soiled sheets, what to do? Soak them and boil them and put them in the sun to dry. Hanging like dead men. Get rid of that other woman’s smells. A pimpled girl, dead now. He dreamed about her, spoke of her in his sleep. A husband needs loyalty to his wife, not his sister. And not to some nightmare girl from the desert. Even the Bible says it.
A man shall leave
his father and mother and cleave unto his wife.
Not that Lilit was truly Christian anymore, what with all that time spent in an ungodly country. Dirty spoons, they fell on the ground. Lick them quickly.’

‘What did Lilit and Minas do?’

She’s stopped now, going over her words again, muttering, repeating her phrase from the Bible. She lapses again into the wail for her son and I come forward, without knowing what I’m going to do, and take her by the hands.

‘Tell me what happened, Grandma.’

Siran shuts her red-rimmed eyes, obstinate. ‘Where is my son, where is my son?’ she whispers and shouts, fading and then growing in fervour. I shake her, gripping both shoulders. I shake her again, shake her some more.

‘Tell me, Grandma! I have a right to know.’

She’s blank-faced, lolling in my arms. She should be dead, she deserves to be dead, she’s limp now, useless. I can’t stop shaking her, she’s complicit, her neck so easy to snap, my wrists burning with a rage that’s almost sexual. Suddenly I see the livid eyes and the fear in her mouth and release her, going back to my chair, exhausted by my own violence.

‘I’m sorry, Grandma. Forgive me.’

She hangs her head, unmoving. I kneel again at her feet, kiss the mottled hand. She looks up.

‘Go now, child. Go, Anoush. What a silly name they chose.’ Her voice so lucid now it seems to belong to somebody else.

‘But—Grandma. I didn’t mean to hurt you.’

She unclasps my mother’s earrings in a swift, irritated movement, shoves them at me. Her pink lobes ravaged now, as if she’s taken a knife to them. I look at the gold and turquoise lump in her hands, still warm from her pulse.

‘But Grandma, Minas gave them to you so long ago—’

‘Yes, child. So long ago. Then I gave them to your mother—before she died. Time for you to have them now. Go quickly. You’re late for school.’

She hangs her head and waves me away.

I leave the nursing home with blurred vision, walking through the narrow intimacy of streets, not knowing where to go next. I stow the earrings away in my daypack, shuddering at the thought of ever wearing them. Siran, reduced to a dry husk, an insect’s carapace, an absence of broken memories. And what did I do for her? Nothing. No compassion, no pity. Instead, I tried to force the truth out of her. A truth I already knew. Lilit conspired with Anahit to get her pregnant, so she could marry Selim. My birth was the result of two women, their whispered secrets and lies. Immaculate.

In a moment I have an intense desire to look for my childhood house. I keep walking, my feet hurt in their high sandals; I rub at my red eyes with my fists, ashamed to appear so weak to passers-by, who ignore me and continue on their way. Not sure where I am, the streets have changed, been made wider, more accessible, new apartment blocks everywhere now, casting their long shadows in the early morning sun.