Bone Ash Sky (53 page)

Sanaya and Issa were almost out the door when Rouba shouted at the neighbours to leave, throwing off her blankets and running into the hallway. She wrapped her arms tightly around her breasts, pacing, pacing up and down the hall, one hand beating the other arm harder and faster – an ancient gesture, tragic. It was hard to restrain her from rushing out into the street in her nightgown, to help her put on house slippers and throw a shawl over her head and shoulders, to stop her from ripping at her own clothes and skin in her haste to find Hadiya.

Sanaya tried to dress her, pulling limp arms through the sleeves of a cardigan, tying her hair back away from her face. This enforced proximity with another woman’s body, with the animal aroma of her mouth and the slick of sweat on her forehead and chest, made something in her alternately attracted and repelled.

‘Come on,’ Issa barked. ‘There may not be much time.’

Sanaya looked up at his face over Rouba’s prone head; there was an inflection in his voice that betrayed him, something more than simple shock or grief. He looked back, challenging her to speak her doubt aloud. She lowered her eyes, keeping still as she knelt on the cold floor of the bedroom. Rouba writhed in her arms. Issa’s gaze on the back of her neck, laser-like.
Oh, Hadiya
. A moan almost escaped her, before she suppressed it.

Rouba was crumpling onto the floor, scratching at broken tiles as if trying to bury her daughter. She tore at her cheeks, pulled out the band from her hair. Sanaya tried to hold her arms down, wrestling with her, until Rouba slapped herself twice on the face, leaving a stripe of white against the jagged scratches she’d made.

In a taxi on the way, she was quiet. Her pale hands lay folded in her lap; she could have been asleep or dead herself, if it wasn’t for the hiccupping sobs she made at intervals. As they neared the hospital she began to convulse, her whole body moving in a discordant rhythm to the shudders of her sobs. ‘God forbid,’ she muttered. ‘God forbid.’ Sanaya took her arm, stroked it up and down. Hadiya. Flesh of her flesh. How could Rouba sit there now, merely leaning her head against the window? How could she not run out into these tired streets, scream at everyone here, blame them, take a gun and kill them too for the death of her husband and the pain of her daughter’s life? Rouba just sat there, shaking. When they reached the hospital, a long, inhuman cry seemed to issue from her stomach.

She wrenched free of Sanaya and opened the car door, running into the hospital and down the ward. Hurrying after her down the crowded corridors, Sanaya tried to contain her panic. This couldn’t be happening. This didn’t happen to little girls. The war couldn’t touch her. She dodged hysterical patients and anxious nurses. The odour of bodily fluids and antiseptic made her want to retch. At her feet, swirls of fresh blood where a wheelchair had skidded on the linoleum. The whole building breathed fear, in the echoes of countless conversations, the click of broken-down machinery, the stamp of harried, exhausted feet. There were narrow chipboard coffins lined up against the wall in a row. Near them, a little boy sat upright, trying not to doze, his head falling onto his chest each time before he jerked it up again. She could feel Issa behind her, his breathing heavy. She tried to keep well ahead of him. In the taxi she noticed that he stank of ingrained dirt and lack of sleep, and for a slow, sickening moment she couldn’t ever imagine touching his body, lying next to him in a bed.

Hadiya lay on a mattress placed on the floor, with a sheet beneath her that didn’t fit to the end. The blueness of the linen made her head look unnaturally large. Sanaya had a flash of a premature baby, tubes coming out of nostrils and mouth, stick-like arms. The peace of deep sleep. Hadiya didn’t look peaceful. Her face was screwed up into an expression her mother would have called peevish if all had been well. The cotton blanket thrown on top of her was so threadbare Sanaya could see the shape of her hipbones under it, the almost imperceptible rise and fall of her breath, the fragile planes of her little girl’s chest.

Her teacher’s apartment block, supposedly housing a member of the PLO, was hit by an Israeli cluster bomb at one in the afternoon. Its five floors smashed like a child’s hand through a mound of jelly. Hadiya was on the ground floor, saying her farewells in the foyer, waiting for Issa to come and pick her up. That’s why she didn’t die on impact or end up buried alive in the rubble. She had the presence of mind to run into the street when they all heard the familiar drone of aircraft. That’s why she was still alive. The doctor explained there were tiny needles now swimming through her body, tearing at her organs even as they spoke. They were difficult to detect, even by X-ray – which the hospital couldn’t get to function any longer – and thus difficult to remove.

Rouba lay down beside her daughter. She didn’t try to speak to her, didn’t kiss her cheek or hold her hand. She got under the blanket and pressed the whole length of her body against Hadiya’s: inanimate, as if resigned to dying with her, intimate as warming her in bed on a cold night. She closed her own eyes, reached across and laid Hadiya’s limp hand on her slack belly, umbilicus of their twinned lives.

‘Mmmm,’ she sang under her breath. ‘Mama’s here. You’re okay. Everything will be okay. Mmm, Mama’s here now, mmm,’ a murmured buzzing that frightened Sanaya more than anything else had. ‘Mmm. Mama’s here. You’re okay. Mama’s here now.’

Rouba had given up. Sanaya could see that now.
No
, she wanted to yell at her.
If you do this, there’s no hope for her. For any of us.
Then she was ashamed. She could see Hadiya’s trembling lids, her small brown hands, dead birds, little thrushes at her side. Her hair – that coppery plait Sanaya had so carefully woven this morning – was still glorious, attracting light to it even as the child sank away, diminished into herself. Issa slumped to the floor, put his grey face close to hers. The doctor moved away to another patient, with a resigned shrug of her shoulders.

‘We’ve made her comfortable,’ she mouthed at Sanaya. ‘I’m sorry. It’s all we can do.’

Issa didn’t say anything to his niece, just watched the rise and fall of her chest as she breathed, the shuddering of eyeballs behind those veined blue lids. Sanaya stood close to him now, one hand, without meaning to, resting on top of his head. He looked up at her and the whispered words seemed squeezed out of him by hatred, close to bursting.

‘She’s going to die and there’s nothing we can do about it.’

All she could do was nod. Once, twice, too many times. Afraid that if she spoke, if she moved the rest of her body an inch closer or further away, she’d scream, lash out, go mad. They waited, silence closing in on them. It throbbed, pulsated. At the end of the corridor, a woman flailed and bucked as they took her dead son away from the ward, but her high-pitched, eternal scream was also part of the oppressive silence. There were distant shots, too far away to perceive as gunfire. At one point Issa turned his face up again to Sanaya and she had to avert her eyes from his, to the neutrality of the wall behind him.

‘You watch. That fucking Arafat and his cronies, they’ll let this happen again and again.’

His voice paled in the silence, as if afraid of itself. They waited, the two of them: he, bent double over Hadiya’s body; she, watching herself standing frozen above him, until the narrow chest faltered and stopped. There was no emotion; nothing left to think. Rouba continued to lie pressed against the tiny body. Her voice resumed its thrumming. Issa pressed Hadiya’s eyelids down with his fingers and they left Rouba alone with her daughter.

Issa stood precariously on bare feet. His upper lip trembled and one eye twitched fast as he tried not to stare at Sanaya. He’d spent the last few weeks trying to forget her, fighting hard, banishing her memory. Avenging Hadiya’s death. Sanaya wasn’t good enough for him, wasn’t worth the effort. Hadn’t Mumma always said it was his duty to marry a Palestinian girl, virgin-pale and swathed in fabric? To give birth to more Palestinians for the cause. To replace Hadiya’s life.

But now he was here, standing before Sanaya, trying to keep the shake out of his voice.

‘I was wondering—’

‘Where have you been all this time?’

‘Fighting. Going to mosque. Sleeping at HQ.’

‘I never thought I’d see you again. Rouba needs your help now she’s alone. And your mother—’

‘I know. I’ve already seen her. I was wondering …’

It was early; he could see his knock had forced her out of bed. Without articulating it to himself, he was glad he’d woken her. It put him at the advantage. She wouldn’t want him to see her like this, hair clumped to one side and mascara streaks down her nose. She drew her dressing-gown a little tighter across her chest.

‘I was wondering if you’d like to go out with me sometime.’

It came all in a rush and he flushed scarlet.

‘We used to go out all the time, Issa, on our walks.’

He hated her condescending tone, its overriding familiarity.

‘Take me seriously, Sanaya.’

‘How old are you?’

‘It doesn’t matter!’

‘Come on, how old are you? You know I’m past thirty.’

‘Don’t you see it doesn’t matter? All I want to do is take you somewhere to eat and talk – when there’s a ceasefire long enough. We could go to the Commodore Hotel.’

‘What will your fundamentalist friends say to that?’

‘I don’t care. I just want to be somewhere, away from here – alone with you.’

She shook her head, smiling, and shut the door. He waited there, disbelieving. He could hear nothing on the other side. He watched her open the door again, saw her right hand reach for his and hold it for a moment, not showing her face, before she closed the door again.

Issa read the Koran in Rouba’s bathroom. He read it through without really attending to it at all. He knew the
suras
so well by now he could recite them while standing to attention, while pissing, while thinking about something else. He thought about sex. Those moonthighed virgins with downcast eyes that Mohammed spoke of. Seventy-two supple houris to wait on him when he died.
They shall sit with
bashful, dark-eyed virgins, as chaste as the sheltered eggs of ostriches.
White thighs, bruise marks, foreign tongues. American women, journalists and aid workers he still saw in bombed-out bars and restaurants on the seafront, sucking at cigarettes and swallowing beer.

Sanaya. She’d like to be one of those women: amoral, unfettered, living moment by dissolute moment, will o’ the wisps, little balls of fluff. She was lost to him already, blurry, ambiguous, like the West. Lost to him even before he had the chance. He could see – could still see – her potential to be a good Muslim wife. ‘Ah, the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.’ That’s what she said to him when he questioned her beliefs. ‘Where’s that from?’ he asked, puzzled. She laughed, flung out her arm at him in self-deprecation. ‘You’re right, Issa. I’m not a real Muslim. It isn’t even from the Koran.’

He lay awake in the spare room at Rouba’s, thinking of Hadiya and her pointless death, feeling the pain and frustration of his helplessness eat at his sanity. He’d been the one who dropped her off at the teacher’s apartment. He had been the one who let her go. He should have waited at the street corner that day, watched her at the teacher’s window saying her lessons, however long it took, kept her safe with the mere presence of his body. He should never have left her. He tried not to think of it, lay back on the bed and his thoughts led him again to Sanaya. Was she upstairs, right now, with Selim? It hurt him, pained him in his bones. He groaned aloud then writhed in embarrassment in case Rouba woke and heard him. He couldn’t believe Sanaya had let that man touch her. Let him touch her all the time. Have sex. Sex. He didn’t really know what that meant. Except the little his commander had taught him.

Why was everyone in the West having sex? Why were the men so gentle, hairless, child-like? Why were men having sex with other men?
They will pass from hand to hand a cup inspiring no idle talk, no sinful urge;
and there shall wait on them young boys of their own, as fair as virgin pearls.
He passed his hand over the muscles in his legs, pinching, aggressive to his own flesh. He was a real man, even though he let his commander touch him that one night –
what choice did I have?
– in the steamy dark of the underground garage they slept in down south, keeping his eyes wide open in the hope that, if he looked hard enough at the other sleeping militiamen, they wouldn’t hear him whimper and plead no.