Bone Ash Sky (51 page)

He was always pleased now, it seemed. Even with the Ottoman Empire waning, dwindling, dying; 1925 now and the treaties after the Great War left them in no-man’s land, no longer Asia and not yet in Europe. The last sultan was deposed and exiled to some obscure Italian town Lilit had never heard of. Now the Syrians were pressuring them to leave the newly independent country, yet Suleiman elected to stay. With the few remaining Turks, colonial widows and doddering men, he approached the Arab headman of the town and bowed his head in humility.

Lilit questioned the wisdom of this, remembering what certain races did to those they considered outsiders. But Suleiman waved his hand at her in dismissal.

‘Too late now to think of resettling in Turkey. I was born here, Lilit. My father came as a youth with the Imperial Army. If they can’t accept me, then I’d rather die here than go anywhere else.’

It was all the fault of this new general, Mustafa Kemal: the splintering of Empire, the lack of social cohesion, his scraping servility to Western powers. It was only a matter of time before the French marched in to occupy the country. Or so Lilit thought. Yet Suleiman worshipped him.

‘Ataturk,’ he said, ‘what a saviour. I feel as if I know him already.’

‘But you’ve never met him, Suli,’ she would reply.

‘Ah.’ He would lean over and fix her with a dogged eye. ‘Kemal is a man who knows my own heart.’

She felt a faint intimation of chill, then suppressed it in the next instant: the closing of the door on a draughty room. She remembered the Turk on the death marches, the captor Minas trusted the most. Now this new captor was threatening her world. He was forcing women out of the home and into work, abolishing the veil, making her feel that without education or employment she wasn’t worthy of being called Ottoman any longer. There were no longer any Ottomans anyway; now they were all Turks. The new political slogan was ‘Happy is he who was born a Turk’. Kemal had even changed the language, switched the Arabic script she laboured over for so many years to Roman characters, just as she was beginning to be fluent enough to write without Suleiman correcting her at every turn.

Turkey was proclaimed a republic. Suleiman rejoiced, with musicians brought from the town and feasting that lasted three nights. He even rose from the divan himself, tracing dance steps with Fatima on careful feet. Lilit sat aside on the rug and watched, diminished by a sadness she couldn’t explain. Perhaps it was change, perhaps foreboding, even the first intimations of memories she had long learnt to repress. The drawn-out beat of the tabla.

Suleiman tossed away his grandfather’s fez, a family heirloom, learnt French, even began stumbling through Schiller’s German. He rejoiced at the capture of Smyrna from the invading Greeks, although Lilit cried, thinking of the burning villas, the sea caught up in waves of fire. Old women praying, then dying in the flames.
To whom are they
praying?
she wondered.
One Allah. One God. Jesus the prophet, or was He
the Son?
Suleiman saw her weeping and caressed her face.

‘Ah, my little Armenian!’

The word no longer held its old sting; in truth, no longer held any meaning at all.

Fatima, also, had lost her sting of old. She still cursed, still grumbled, but she too was caught up in the thrills of modernisation. Although it was hard for her, she confessed to Lilit, to really see any changes in a backward little town like Der ez Zor. Lilit opened her mouth to say;
Why then, Fatima, don’t you go home to Turkey?
But she held her tongue. Perhaps Fatima would leave under her own volition, and she and Suleiman would finally be alone.

Fatima did not go. Within two years the French had arrived. She stayed behind, became a favourite with the occupiers for her provocative belly dancing. She threw off the veil, was given a gramophone by one of her admiring officers, even went so far one day as to announce she was going to bob her hair and become a flapper like the Western women she admired in fashion magazines. She took to parading the markets of Der ez Zor in her new cloche hat and skinny, beaded dresses, scandalising the Syrians and answering their jeers with a defiance born of her protection by the French.

Suleiman waved his hand at her when she would come home, indignant and red-faced, after one of her altercations.

‘Do whatever you like, my dear. I don’t really mind.’

More and more it was only the two of them in the house: Suleiman with his newspapers, Lilit with her memories, faded now, like worn-out slippers. Their servants all gone except for the loyal cook; it had become too expensive to keep them. The economy was undergoing radical reforms, so Suleiman said, now the French controlled its currency. Lilit didn’t understand. All she knew was that once he’d been rich and now he was struggling in this new Syria. His estates were being leased at lower and lower prices now the Empire had splintered, now the Pashas and Beys had fled. Labourers willing to work merely for food and shelter were becoming scarce.

Most young people were moving to the big cities now: Damascus, Cairo, Istanbul or the new Turkish capital, Ankara, to work and study. Suleiman was pleased at the news of women in universities, learning English and history and mathematics. Lilit was not so sure. Men didn’t like their women to be so conspicuous, so capable. She was only unequivocal in her praise of the practical benefits: sparkling sewerage drains and electric lights in every room.

She begged Suleiman again to allow them to move to Turkey, where they could sample the benefits of democracy. All they had in Syria were the same old lamps that spat oil and fizzled, the same squat outdoor privy, buzzing with flies.

She and Suleiman had become intimates, almost without realising it. They shared the same battered brass spoon as they stirred their tea in the morning – Karadeniz tea they brewed so black it needed a cupful of sugar in each pot – they enquired after each other’s health and sleep, the contents of their shared dreams. They’d long since built bridges to each other’s childhoods. Lilit told him of the birds she grew up listening to each summer in Van, stilts and herons flying to the lake from colder climates; he regaled her with tales of the bald ibis, now extinct, that his father claimed to have seen when he first arrived in the desert. She remembered for him the fragrances of inky blue iris and pink orchid, the many-petalled poppies she made into wreaths for her brother and his friends. She never mentioned Yervan, had almost stopped thinking about him altogether.

Fatima retreated into her bedroom to listen to her gramophone when she was at home, which wasn’t often any longer. She bought French furniture and papered the walls in Louis XIV patterns of embossed rose and gold. She took frequent trips to Pamukkale with the French soldiers for her health, the same women’s problems that had always plagued her. She brought back photographs of them all bathing in calcium pools and wearing the absurd trunks she knitted, meandering arm in arm along the ancient paths.

Suleiman dispensed money and good advice, told her to settle in Turkey, closer to the healing waters. Lilit knew he wanted to be rid of her for some peace at last, but Fatima had her eye on his estate when he died. When Lilit thought of him dying, her abdomen tightened and her knees turned to water. She realised Fatima was well advised if not justified; she was after all the first, and the legal, wife.

Minas sat alone on the steps of his sleeping block, smoking. An aid worker had given him an American cigarette that morning and he saved it all day until his afternoon break from the kitchens. He inhaled now and coughed, then exhaled with pleasure. The smoke was rich and dark, heavy in his lungs. Nothing like the cinders that passed for tobacco here, wrapped in little smirched squares of print.

He took out his week-old newspaper, opened it. It was an Armenian weekly someone had bought on the black market – a rarity. He was pleased. Nobody told the truth about the world like the Armenians. He turned the pages and scanned the headlines, not really reading, worrying about tomorrow, what he should make with the few tins and sacks of grain they still had left until the next shipment. He remembered Mamma’s cooking in those early war years: famine food. She’d stir together a soup of cracked wheat and yoghurt, arch backward with her hands on her hips and sigh. That’s what he would do tomorrow, remind the men of hardship, their mothers, the harsh comfort of the past. Bulghur soup.

He stopped short in his musings, holding the cigarette low at his side so that some ash fell to the ground. The headline on the third page read:

MONDAY 24 OCTOBER, 1946: DJEVET BEY, FORMER VALI OF VAN, CAPTURED YESTERDAY BY ARMENIAN REPUBLICAN FORCES AND SENTENCED TO DEATH. THE BEY, FIFTY-FOUR AND IN BAD HEALTH, WAS FOUND HIDING IN AN UNDERGROUND CAVE IN THE CITY OF—

He stopped reading and looked up at the sky, feeling tears, hot, angry childish tears, start to his eyes. This was the man who condemned Papa to death, drove them all out of their homes, deported them into the desert. He had a vision of the old man now: unshaven, filthy, wild-eyed, tortured maybe, at the mercy of his former victims. Yet he too had only been obeying orders from higher up, a factotum himself, merely a petty bureaucrat immersed in paperwork.

He had an image of himself leaning over and staring into that flabby, bluish face. Eye to bloodshot eye, a picture so strong it caused his throat to parch and the hand that held his dwindling cigarette to tremble.
What would I do?
Drawing his lips together to spit into that face. ‘Help me,’ the Turk would mouth, ‘please help me.’ And Minas would turn away, without revenge, yet without forgiveness either.

He had entertained a brief notion of returning to Armenia, of joining the Republican forces. But something small and lost inside him caused his stomach to turn jelly-like whenever he contemplated going home. Was it shame for Papa’s death, Mamma’s unmarked burial in the sand, the broken memory of his sister? Anguish at his own helplessness. And where would he go now anyway? To Yerevan? The new capital city of the Armenian Communist state, a satellite of the Soviet Union. He wouldn’t dream of going there, to be sucked into yet another empire bent on glory. Or Aykesdan, with its fertile fields and orchards? His home in Van was officially in Turkey now, the house they once lived in taken by Kurds, no doubt, filthy nomads who had no idea how to sleep straight in a bed.

He glanced up and saw a young woman standing before him, leaning sideways to read the same headline. She was a stranger, a newcomer to the camp perhaps. He didn’t recall seeing her at the communal table or at the weekly meetings. He spoke before he could think.

‘I saw him once.’

‘Who?’

‘The man they’re going to kill.’

‘A Turk? They’re executing a lot of them these days.’

‘Not the masterminds, of course, only the lackeys.’

‘Do you think they should execute this one?’

He looked at her again, without seeing. All he could take in was a smear of mouth, her soiled apron that melded into the grit and dirt and grey sky around them.

‘Without a doubt. Did you need to ask?’ He flung the newspaper into the mud. ‘You can have it. I’m finished.’

She picked it up with motherly concern and grinned.

‘I never learnt to read.’

‘But I saw you reading just then.’

‘I can recognise some of the letters but can’t make them into words.’

He held the stub of his cigarette toward her, inclined his head to get a closer look.

‘Smoke?’

She shook her head. He drank her in now, his hungry gaze hidden by the screen of smoke and his hands. She was short, ample-hipped. Her hair curled around her ears and into her eyes. No etched designs of slavery on her face or hands, no marks of blue. Her shoes were scuffed and old, the stockings darned; she balanced on one heel, waiting for him to speak, like a little girl.

‘I can teach you,’ he said.

The days passed swiftly now for Minas. He met the young woman in the dinner hall every evening after the meal was cleared, and they sat close together at the long table, heads almost touching. Her name was Siran; her parents and three sisters had died in the first of the Constantinople massacres. She was the youngest, hidden by her mother with a Muslim neighbour who then tried to betray her, but she escaped. She told him this with absolute purity and acceptance. She showed him the welt on her neck from a Turkish knife. Her broad, pale face made him marvel as she spoke.