Bone Ash Sky (52 page)

She pronounced new words, as they read, with childish care, and he coached her with his silence and approval. Within weeks she’d let her shoe fall to the floor and rubbed her silken foot – he couldn’t know if her movement was deliberate or merely habitual – to a quiet rhythm on his leg.

Some evenings they talked of the future, children, a house, without mentioning themselves by name in the equation. Impersonal chatter. They merely discussed possibilities, sounding each other out. He mentioned his mother’s gold earrings and how much he could get for them on the black market. Siran spoke of the Lebanese and French governments’ new scheme, good land going cheap in the camp. She said she had no dowry, her parents’ possessions had all been taken by the Turks, and looked down at her stockinged feet in shame.

The next morning he found her at the other side of the women’s communal latrines, washing her hair in a bucket. She was cross, he could tell, her customary curls dripping lank around her cheeks.

‘You shouldn’t be here, Minas. Can’t you see—’

He held out the earrings in a twist of paper. ‘Take these. Keep them until I ask for them back.’

She took the package, opened it to see. ‘Do you mean—’

‘What? That I want to marry you?’

She breathed in, squeezed some water from her hair in consternation. ‘I’m sorry, Minas, I didn’t mean to push you.’

‘This is your dowry, Siran. And it will come back to me.’

She flung herself at him and he felt the wetness of her face and hair at his throat, in his mouth. He wanted to kiss her but something stopped him, perhaps the memory of another’s look in her face. He drew away and unscrewed the earrings, putting them with slow formality in each of her ears.

‘I have to go now, clear away breakfast. Wait for me tonight. And after today, hide those earrings until we have our own home together. Until we’re safe.’

That night Siran laughed and clapped her hands when she managed to read a whole page of Charents’s poetry in Armenian, and Minas leaned over and kissed her warm, springy hair. It was only then he thought of the girl at the death camp with clarity and drew away.

Fatima had come back home to Suleiman, disgruntled. She’d been home for years now. She still complained of how the French had duped her in that brief golden period in the twenties. The French were stupid, the French were shallow, the French only liked young girls with no morals. They had let the Syrians gain independence. Not once, but twice. Once in the twenties and now, with the onset of yet another world war. If this is what one could call independence: lip service to the idea but fighting among themselves in the streets.

They would be here a long time yet, Suleiman told her. Free French fighting Vichy troops who were loyal to Germany. Many Vichy soldiers were fleeing the country, and Fatima was suddenly afraid. They shelled Damascus in one last blaze of resentment. She refused to believe they killed Syrian civilians in the blasts, snapped her mouth shut when Lilit waved the newspaper in front of her face. There were other soldiers on the streets now, in the
hammams
, in the marketplace: British and Australians with cold faces and red, capable hands. They were here to keep the French in tow. The local Arabs fawned over them, called them liberators.

Fatima let her hair grow back, resumed going to the mosque with Suleiman. The gramophone lay under an embroidered cloth in her bedroom until it was forgotten and used as a table for tea and halva when she had guests. Lilit stayed away from the centre of town and the sight of the foreign soldiers with a fear that paralysed her limbs and on some days made her brain cease to form coherent meanings. She spent more time in the courtyard among the date palms, taller now, dwarfing the high walls around her.

She continued to share Suleiman’s bed. Even now, when she was past forty and her breasts soft and limp, her thighs wasted. He still wondered at the beauty of her body, drank her long in his gaze. She let him swallow her, inch by inch. She lay still and ecstatic in his arms, felt her tenderness for this man change and grow, pricking her into sensation. She cried out in pain and he soothed her, murmuring words of forgiveness that she mouthed along with him. Then she became pregnant once again. A child of her waning moon.

This time, the baby lived. The midwife was Syrian Christian, well schooled and kind. She lit a votive lamp in front of the icons by the bedroom door, garlanded the image of Saint Hripsime, Armenian virgin, with roses from the garden. Lilit was nourished by a herbal broth, acrid with leaves and twigs, to prevent bleeding. The midwife carried church incense through the house and left it burning, redolent of gardenias, by the bed. She chanted Aramaic low under her breath as she massaged Lilit with olive oil, her belly, her tight shoulders and thighs.

There were no curses, no suspicions. Fatima was impotent, flabby, preoccupied in tending to her ailments. The baby squalled when the time came, latched on to the breast within seconds. A morsel of date flesh was placed in her mouth so she would find only sweetness in life to come. Lilit named her Anahit, and Suleiman stood aside with one hand on her glistening head.

More time passed. Suleiman grew fat and tired. He settled into his fifties with some of the resignation Lilit had seen in an old dog preparing to die. His breathing grew short and ragged, his heart gave him moments of pallor and panic that he dismissed with jokes and waves of the hand.

‘My heart has always given me all kinds of trouble,’ he said, and reached over to rub Lilit’s cheek with a smile.

She held his hand there, alarmed at how cold it was against her skin, and went for the doctor. Suleiman swallowed the pills the doctor gave him each day with his tea, grew quieter and more careful in his movements. He played with their new daughter desultorily, as with everything he did. He just couldn’t be bothered much any longer. The young Arabs of the town tolerated him, waved at him, half-respectful, half-disdainful, as they passed the house, where he reclined on the rooftop under a shirred canopy.

He had become a relic of ages past, like the fat belly dancers they trundled out at festivals, like the sense-memory songs of the wailing oud.

Lilit served Suleiman iced sherbets and sweetmeats with the same reverence she had always exhibited. It had been thirty years since she came into his life. He was pleased she was there, he said. Allah willed it.

BEIRUT, 1982

H
adiya was in a bad mood at breakfast. Her chocolate milk was too hot, the
labneh
on her bread too runny. Sanaya almost yelled at her to go back downstairs. Was this what it was like being a mother? This helplessness, this exasperation? There were so many shortages now, hunger in the streets, and this selfish child was taking food out of all their mouths by being so fussy. She set her jaw, peeled Hadiya some of the last precious fruit she’d been given by Selim. A tangerine, golden in the autumn sunshine. A floury green apple with mottled skin. She tried to brush Hadiya’s knotted hair, while the little girl wriggled and squealed her protests.

‘Off to school with you now,’ Sanaya said, irritated again. ‘Your uncle’s walking you there today.’

She watched her go through the door, the swayback walk that reminded her of a pony, the wobble of her lovely, soft child’s flesh – watched her tearily as if in the cut-glass light of some nostalgic afternoon.

When she was gone, Sanaya was at a loss. She picked at the halfchewed fruit on the plate, stood on her balcony watching the sea. Where was Issa now? Had he come straight back home after dropping Hadiya off at her teacher’s apartment? She didn’t want to admit it, but she missed him – even though he was living merely a floor beneath her, sleeping in his narrow childish bed, lost in thought as he washed under a trickle of water, sharing small morsels with Rouba and the child. It was almost a physical pain. She woke with an ache in her stomach for him, a dryness in her throat. Selim she never thought about when he was away from her, as if he ceased to exist the moment he walked out the door. They’d had so many arguments now about what he did in his public life, and yet every time she heard his quiet rap on the door, at midnight, or two or three in the morning, she always opened it. In private, in the dark, he was another man. If she made a pact with herself that she wouldn’t talk about the war, all went well – for her and for him. But after Sabra-Shatila, she wasn’t sure if she could swallow her distaste much longer, if she could bear to see him again.

At lunchtime, Issa and Hadiya didn’t come home. Sanaya tried not to imagine what could have happened, what might be happening at that very moment. There had been so many more casualties in the last few months, car bombs and kidnappings, so many incursions from the air. Only last week she read of a non-denominational nursery school bombed by the Phalange. A mistake, they said. Friendly fire.

She stood by the telephone – who to call? – pressing her fingers hard to her eyelids. She dialled the number of Hadiya’s teacher at her apartment. She couldn’t get through. Of course. She tried again. The connection continued to drop out. Surely Issa and Hadiya must have eaten at a friend’s house. That’s right, little Samara. She tried the number of Umm Ibrahim’s house, thankfully heard the woman’s slow
sa’ laam
. She sounded calm, no traces of panic in her voice. Must mean they were safe. Must mean they were there.

‘I’m sorry,’ the woman said. ‘Issa and Hadiya aren’t here. Samara didn’t go to school today. I thought it wasn’t safe enough.’

With hands that wouldn’t stop shaking, she wrapped Hadiya’s portion of rice and lentils in baking paper and placed the package in the coolest part of the kitchen.
Maybe if I do this carefully enough she’ ll walk
through the door.
Part of her was comforted, lulled by domestic ritual, the mundane motions of hand and eye.
If I do this properly, she’ ll be all
right.
Another, denying part of her thought:
She might like a snack when
she comes home from school
.

She ran down the street to Rue Hamra.
Must find Rouba.
That was all she could think of now. Rouba’s face swam before her, placid and untroubled, unaware of all this danger, on the kerbs, in gutters, crawling over flesh. Her wide eyes, made wider by the thin pencilled line of her eyebrows. Her slack red mouth when she laughed and ate. Her daughter’s, pliant in the mornings when she licked warm milk from her lips. Sanaya dodged taxis and ice-cream barrows and limp calla lilies expiring in buckets of water.

She arrived breathless at the fruit stand where Rouba worked. Smoking and chatting with customers, Rouba was busy arranging grapes and figs and sliced watermelon into orderly rows, spraying them with a pump full of water to make them look fresher in the wilting sun.

‘Hey, what’s the matter?’ Rouba flicked some cigarette ash from her jeans, rolled up the sleeves of her abaya and didn’t wait for an answer. She helped a customer, cigarette hidden among the folds of her robe, smiled rosily as they left.

‘Issa and Hadiya aren’t home yet,’ Sanaya said. ‘Did they come see you at lunch?’

At sunset Issa came home. He said he’d spent the whole afternoon looking for Hadiya in the hospitals. Rouba seemed too distraught to be moved so the Druze neighbours from the ground floor were called in to make glasses of tea and try to put her to bed.