Bone Ash Sky (5 page)

When they arrived home, the chicken was cooked through and dripping fat. Mamma placed dough on the
tonir
over a bed of coals as they washed and prepared to eat. The dough was elastic, so transparent her hands could be seen through it. Minas took out his schoolbooks, not before telling Mamma she should sprinkle a little water on the bread as it baked to prevent it from drying out. She replied that a young man shouldn't be so concerned over the doings of women, slapping the dough onto the hot surface, where it blistered. Yet Lilit knew she was pleased Minas knew about cooking and keeping house. She only yelled at him to keep Papa satisfied his only son wasn't turning into a girl.

Papa napped now near the smell of baking, his cheek cupped in one hand. Mamma went outside to pull up spring onions to have with their meat, and Minas sighed as he began to read from the light at the window. Lilit stood in the middle of the room watching them all; she could sense the mood of her family, of the town, concentric ripples of doubt under sedate Sunday streets. She was alone; she among them had nothing to distract her. A shiver of fear passed through her, but she was used to that by now. She unbuttoned her cuffs, rolled up her sleeves in prudent folds and sat at the piano.

In front of her stood another window and a low white wall marking the boundary of their property. Mamma had never planted a vine or flowers over it; she said the shadows of fruit trees were beautiful enough. Lilit cracked her knuckles and looked at it now. Moving light seemed to draw letters on the rough surface, letters more powerful than those she wore at her waist.
You will see him
, it said. The shadows weren't of leaves and branches, but of the diamond-shaped bars on windows that kept her inside.
He will love you above all others
. She began to play. Her fingers were long and brown and thin against the black and white keys. Two silver rings clicked against each other, point and counterpoint. The piano was badly tuned, some keys emitted no sound, some only creaked when she laid her fingers on them. But to her it was a wonder, singling her out to Yervan from the rest of the girls. She could play – granted, not very well – but she could play.

She knew Yervan's family would walk past on their way home, and she wanted him to hear her voice and stop, enchanted by its lilting beauty.
My darling, my love, your sufferings and joys will be many.
Mamma stopped to click her tongue.

‘It's Sunday, Lilit. Aren't you ashamed of yourself, singing like a Turk?'

BEIRUT, 1995

T
here's a hum and burning behind my eyes. The hotel curtains let in too much light; I wake at dawn every morning and can't get back to sleep. I've been here three days now yet it feels more like years – or as if I never left. The same smells, sounds, undertone of anxiety. The bathroom tap drips in a slow, melancholy devotion. Yellowed sheets, threadbare with the washing of generations.

I chose the Mayflower because it was where journalists mostly stayed during the civil war. Now, its faded gentility makes me alternately nostalgic and irritated. The lobby sombre and outdated, stiff fake flowers bleached white by the sun. My room airless, windows nailed shut, balcony doors rusted by sea air. But the staff are welcoming, and there are always a few journalists at the bar downstairs every night. There's an uneasy excitement about the place, even with its shabbiness, the hotel incinerator under my room, the bathroom door that won't close all the way.

But I'm still only halfway here, still rising in the cold light of another sunrise, breathing the stale air of a Boston apartment that belongs to me now my godfather is dead. It's been willed to me, and I feel glad and surprised and slightly queasy. It's all happened so quickly: his phone call, his death, my journey back. He told me what he knew about the manner of my father's death, and who killed him, then the struggle was over. He was sick; he knew he was going to die. That's the only reason he decided to tell me the truth. I realised soon enough that it wasn't possible for me to listen to all the details. We'd arranged to meet in a restaurant, and I had to leave my seat and go to the bathroom to hide.

Yesterday was my second day in Beirut, and I went to the tribunal. It's already been underway for a few days, but once I got there I didn't feel as if I'd missed anything. Like a soap opera with the same interminable plot.

It was held in a provincial court building a long bus ride away from here – in an outer suburb of Beirut that may as well be another town. When I got there I took a seat in the back, not telling anyone who I was. My stomach was churning, I couldn't even have a sip of water. Couldn't swallow, couldn't ingest the reality of what my father did to these people. I had the illogical fear, as I sat there, that someone would recognise me, that one of his victims would turn around and point the finger, scream in my face. I saw Lebanese–Palestinians mostly, relatives of the victims, and a handful of Israelis. Even a girl, about twelve, sitting with what looked like her grandmother. There were no bearded militiamen of my father's generation there, no generals. Just a few tired-looking Belgian lawyers and two bored UN judges: one Dutch, one Swedish.

On the way there, I'd had visions of standing up, telling them I was Selim Pakradounian's daughter, confessing my part in their history. Atoning for my father. Asking their forgiveness. But what good would it do? I was worried I'd become emotional, that my memories of the massacre and my father's role in it weren't accurate enough to base anything on. So I skulked in the back and listened to Ariel Sharon's name, Elie Hobeika's name and my father's name repeated over and over by lawyers, judges, victims. Elie Hobeika seemed to get the brunt of the accusations – after all, he was the supreme commander of the Phalangist militia during the civil war. My father was only second-incommand, merely following orders. But isn't that what Eichmann said? I felt uncomfortable, itchy. That first day hasn't illuminated anything for me, except how unnerved I have the capacity to become.

Now there's a whiff of burnt skin and rot, the smell of sinks on rainy nights when drains are full. My pillow is hot at my neck. My shorts have bunched into a thick, irritating wad. I take them off and throw them. I count the things I know, the few, slight things I'm certain of.

One. I know there was a civil war. I was here for most of it, born in the midst of its paradoxes; as a child, understood no other life.

Two. I know it lasted seventeen years.

Three. The death count rose to two hundred and fifty thousand. And counting, though the war's officially over.

What I don't yet know is my father's part in it. His intentions. How he felt when he came home after a killing spree. His justifications. Did he lie in lumpy beds like this one and eat himself alive with guilt? I worry my past like the lucent amber beads Arab men play with in midnight cafes. The beads my father would have slid through his fingers, settling his scores. Same bed, same city. Not the same sector of the city, though his Muslim lover had a seafront apartment in west Beirut. He lived far away from Israeli bombs on the other side of the Green Line.

I know that much from my grandmothers, from the man I called godfather. He made it his business to know everything about everyone. Nothing about Sarkis – not his money, his clothes, his laughter or sadness – was innocuous. Tonight I want to go back to Boston, forget about this crazy quest for truth. Old friends wait for me there, and gentle young men who push and prod for more: passion, commitment, a house in the suburbs, three children, undying love. Are all these even compatible? They never introduce me to their parents. I'm not Jewish, or a WASP. I don't come from the elite of Boston's families. Since graduating, I've worked two days a week tutoring first-years in the craft of researching a topic, writing an article, hooking a reader. Most nights I work in the cafe making coffee for those same students, deflecting the attentions of pubescent boys. I sometimes get an article published, mostly in alternative papers and magazines: streetwalkers in downtown Boston, ten-year-olds on drugs, where to get the best meal in Chinatown. The sympathetic editor from
The Boston Globe
has only been a recent supporter; for once I was writing about something that related to me directly, and it was the only article I was paid decent money for.

Yet with all my hard work I'm still not the sort of girl the middleclass matrons of Boston want for their sons. I'm too socially awkward – though sometimes it drops away from me and I feel the fluidity of childhood: unselfconscious, untramelled, free. I speak with an undefined accent – though I can't hear it. The prim, glossy mothers, the large, hawhaw fathers, would be horrified.

Should I go back? Dilek is back there by now, working in legal aid. Then there are my former housemates – good-natured, herbal New Agers – to whom I no longer have anything to say. What else could I go back to? Other friends, already with jobs on major newspapers, in banks, law firms: the corporate cop-outs? Pressure, the trite imperatives, get a good job, compete, succeed. Who am I kidding? I can't go back.

On my last day in America I pained for Sarkis; too late, I know. Pewter drizzle of a Boston morning, fastening my army surplus jacket at my throat with fingers numb in anticipation. His bedroom abandoned, ghostly in its lack of furniture, grey marks on the wall where his Arshile Gorky reproductions hung. I'd stored them in the basement downstairs, scared of sleeping with the self-portrait of a teenage Gorky, his dead mother's memory veining his crazed eyes. Her closed-off, cowled face. The peony in his buttonhole, its answering pinkness in her bosom.

I feel a pang of regret now for my small, careful American life, the safe routines of walk and work and study; what was I thinking, leaving it all? Father dead – now godfather. Lilit died long ago, my mother when I was only an hour old. Nobody to stay in Boston for. Nothing there but my own petty flaws, my raw wounds. In Beirut the only link to the past is my other grandmother, Siran, and her grip on reality wanes by the day.

The kitchen was dark and airless; Sarkis's tea canisters and herbal remedies littered the peeling benches. A cockroach darted for safety into the shadows, living room windows sealed tight against the cold. I took a mug from the cupboard, gulped down water from the tap – ice on my fingertips, the back of my throat – left it unrinsed in the sink. My new tenant would wash it, dry it, put it away. I turned to face the apartment after I opened the front door, knowing how sentimental I was. On the coffee table, lilies in a vase I remembered from my childhood, their alien petals gone brown.

Before I hailed a cab I walked down the street, lugging my backpack and laptop, feeling rain on my hair. A hurried farewell to the extravagantly pierced girl behind the counter; the boy who was the best barista; my one-time employer, his arms elbow-deep in grey suds. Dilek and I worked there together; forgot orders, burnt milk, served those same derelicts with leftovers at the end of a shift, collapsed on the kitchen floor at midnight in hysterics at how tired we were. Dilek asked me to come with her to Cyprus right there, behind that counter. And I said yes, without telling her my real reasons.

I smiled, waved with my free hand. Fellow students just come back from a party, heads down and hung-over, coffee warming their palms. None for me, I was late already. And I knew they weren't sorry to see me go. I've always been the outsider in this university, the entire country. Or so it was easy to think, now I was leaving. I needed it to sound that way or else I wouldn't go.

At least I've established a routine of sorts in Beirut, a comforting pattern that bears no resemblance to my childhood in this city. I wake just after dawn, sprint up the stairs to the hotel gym and run barefoot on the treadmill, gazing far away beyond the mirrored image of my body into the past, where everyone is alive, where everything will be given meaning, where lake meets sky. When I get back to my room I wash the sweat out of my hair to the tinkle of those thick silver rings Lilit gave me before I left Beirut. Tap, tap, as they bang against each other with every movement of my hands, my fingers that look just like Lilit's, even down to the square, ridged, fragile nails – the metallic sound insistent, as if awakening memory. Responsibility. I sing in the shower, old Turkish wails, American jazz, so I won't have to heed its call. There was always so much jewellery to ask about, as if the tarnished filigrees and arabesques of silver rings and gold earrings, bridal necklaces and bracelets, held all the answers to Lilit's Armenian past. Bracelets. Whatever happened to my mother's bracelet, and the earrings Siran gave her on her wedding day? Nobody ever told me when I asked.

It's been a week and I've only been to see my grandmother Siran once. I thought I missed her when I was in Boston, but I have to admit I missed – still miss – Lilit more. I miss the silences of our Beirut house, the late-afternoon sun that lay thick on the surface of the marble-floored sala and lit pale icons and picture frames into shadow-jewels of silver and blue. Lilit's singing, which seemed part of the silence itself, Siran's low agreement as she listened to the radio. Siran always talked to herself, always forgot the names of things. It became a family joke.

I went to see her the day before I went to the enquiry, exhausted by lack of sleep since Boston – since Sarkis's death, really – and the cheap Greek coffee I ingested in such a quantity on the boat. When I woke at five, I couldn't settle. On the bus I closed my eyes, trying to rest, then noticed my hands locked into fists on my lap. The sky was a bruise in the first bars of light silvering the sea.

When I got off I was directed to the nursing home by a sullen shoeshine boy. I walked through carefully tended lawns and fragrant hedges to the Armenian Apostolic Sisters' Home for the Aged. Inside, the building reeked of disinfectant and an obscure stink of decay. Down grey corridors, I was tempted to hold my nose. The head nun clucked in sympathy. ‘We try to mask it as well as we can, but it takes over every time.'