Bone Ash Sky (6 page)

I was ashamed to be so transparent in front of a stranger. The nun opened Siran's door a crack and I saw an untidy shape under a cotton blanket, one foot poking out, small as a child's. The nun slipped away, her soft soles almost soundless on the linoleum floor. Siran's cheek rested on one hand. Her mouth half-open, as if she was on the brink of saying something that would change the course of my life. If only. On her flabby earlobes, my mother's earrings. They were the only point of light in the room. So that's what happened to them. She took her wedding gift back when my mother died. Can I blame her?

I knelt down beside her, afraid to touch. In sleep she was incredibly young, yet all the weight of the twelve years since I said goodbye was in her face.

‘Grandma,' I whispered. ‘It's Anoush. Are you listening?'

She didn't move. I reached out, laid my hand on her arm. Nothing. For a moment, panic filled me, and I thought she must be dead. But as I looked closer I could see the rise and fall of her narrow chest, her nostrils flare with every inhalation. I let my hand rest lightly on her arm, and as I bent my head to hers, wishing I was anywhere else but in this airless room, smelling her old woman's odour and the sour breath inches from my mouth, I was conscious of my ignorance of it all: Lilit's and Minas's fate, my mother's silent pain, the implications of my father's death.

Siran's slight, hiccupping breathing started to strip away the layers of denial I'd nursed in all my time in Boston, and in my first days here in Beirut. Suddenly the sweat was springing out of my pores, my mouth dry and my palms wet. I felt myself crumple at her feet and the sobs erupted out of my stomach, so violent I couldn't breathe. I didn't care about the nuns hearing, or scaring Siran if she woke. I was beyond caring about anything. For about five whole minutes I cried with the same intensity; then it subsided. I sat there drenched, panting. And still she slept.

I didn't stay. The nun said some days she didn't wake at all. That this day was one of them, and it would be better to come back tomorrow. I haven't been to see her since then. Haven't been to see my old house, visit friends, track down my father's fellow fighters, my neighbours. I'm wary of being pulled under, of becoming that little girl – longing, helpless, afraid – forced to flee Beirut with so many unanswered questions. Why did Selim leave me when I was born? Did he ever love me, or my mother? Was he the kind of man I can now try to love, or only despise?

The Beirut of my childhood seems as real as today's, yet more frightening. The Kurdish butcher I remember is still there, his lamb carcasses dangling like hanged men from hooks in the open air. The fish- and fruit-sellers with their improbable pyramids, buckets of rotting fruit and blood-spattered scales. So unlike the supermarket hush of Boston, housewives with lipsticked smiles, tennis bracelets, little white visors for the sun. The sun in Beirut is never so polite; it burns and shrieks at midday, fizzling out detail until all that's left to grasp are the bare bones of the city. Blackened sea, bougainvillea petals veined as a fair woman's wrists, frankincense and sweat in Maronite mountain chapels, pack donkeys with philosophers' eyes. The old men who live their lives in the cafes, their worry beads that sing lullabies. Those early mornings, getting ready for school after another sleepless night. Wetting my fingertips with water to place on tired eyes, coaxing a mere trickle from the shower in yet another water shortage. Olive oil soap that stained my hands green. Now I shower twice a day.

I lean over the dusty railing on the hotel balcony, letting the sea breeze dry my wet skin. I want some time to ease into the rhythm of the city, to take on its erratic pulse-beat as my own again: crazy cars, gesticulating hands, screech of vendors and beggars from the Sudan and Gaza, the Congo and the West Bank. Men, women, hordes of children lining the pathways, hands outstretched, little girls singing old love songs, their hip-swaying and come-hither eyes incongruous in childish faces. The rankness of trodden vegetables, open sewers and cigarette smoke, cripples and gypsies and tourist touts all jostling each other to get to the other side of the street, to the money, to Paradise. I ache for them, see my family in its own scramble for security.

Then a sudden fragrance and the falsetto voice I remember so well: the sweet-seller with his pyramids of acid pink and sour apple, his simple songs, dodging trolley buses and fruit barrows, mangoes and melons scenting the balcony with the promise of somewhere else. Somewhere less complicated. The manifold perfumes of my childhood, intensified by the sense that I have a limited time to enjoy them before the pull of the past takes me under again: to my ailing grandmother, a house that may be broken or bulldozed like so many others, a place somewhere in the Beka'a Valley where I now know my father was killed.

By mid-morning I'm in the Cafe de Paris. The main thoroughfare of Rue Hamra is close to the hotel and the breakfast offered by its oldest cafe marginally better. I can't stomach the hotel's day-old croissants tasting of the diesel truck they came in, the same flaccid figs refrigerated and brought out again day after day; I finally gave up after a few mornings of sitting and eating nothing. Here in the sidewalk cafe, old men sit at the same tables they seem to have occupied for decades. Above them, broken red neon lights mimic the follies of the Left Bank. The men cross and uncross their legs in a fury of backgammon, gulp down shots of arak with their muddy coffee. Argue. I sip sweetened tea, use my laptop.

‘Move on,' I can hear my more esoteric friends say. ‘Free yourself of these burdens. Meditate. Burn some candles. Get a tattoo in Armenian then make peace with it.' I always suppress the urge to laugh when they talk that way. But I got the tattoo, more fool me. And now I can't even summon an ironic smile.

I envisage the landscape of Lilit's stories. Was its dawn light or evening hush the same as here? I was never told much about the details before my family left Van, but Lilit waxed lyrical about Garden City, that white stone house with its painted shutters, the tender wheat fields and blossoming trees of their ancestral orchards. Lilit had never been back. Most of the town was burnt by the Turks after the deportations. Who knows if the old house is still standing or taken over by some Muslim family, oblivious to its bloodied past? I'm here in Beirut now, where Lilit's journey ended. Must I go further back, to the very beginning?

Today I hope my stomach – still upset by the boat trip – will allow me to eat bread served warm from the bakery next door, and a slab of mulberry preserve so thick I can cut it with a knife. The cafe owner proposes his house specialty without fail each morning, and each morning I smile and refuse. People come from all over the city for this dish of fried duck eggs and liver. Beirutis in their designer tracksuits with artificially whitened teeth. Their large appetites and gym-toned bodies fascinate me. I watch, listen to their swift talk. Their dialogue flits from Arabic to French to Americanisms, banter, ephemera: mispronounced symbols of attainment. They discuss television shows, nightclubs, manicurists. Complain about living at home with their parents, the price of waterfront property. One woman at the next table leans over and touches me on the arm.

‘American, are you? We see you here two times.'

‘How did you guess?'

‘Your clothes. Hair. The way you so polite to staff. Is not necessary, you know.'

I stay silent, smiling hard. Take a sip of tea.

‘I was born here. I wonder if that makes me a Beiruti, like you?'

‘Of course. Once a Beiruti, always a Beiruti, eh?'

The woman laughs and turns to her boyfriend, and I laugh with her, despising myself. Yet I'm strangely drawn to that bright artificiality, liking to imagine myself safe in the same position: never having left Beirut, taking the smog, the noise, the heat and chaos for granted. The unpredictability of life in this city. The unhealed traumas of war. In a strange way these drawbacks flash the allure of toughness. I'd like to be so big and brash. I'd like to have such a large, uncomplicated smile, such white teeth. Large appetites. To go to the gym each morning and talk and laugh and make love with abandon.

Sometimes it's those we despise the most that we long to become. I'm deeply, shamefully envious of their shininess, their frivolity, their long muscular legs. I watch with a longing to join in that's almost sexual. They drink Diet Coke for breakfast. The man burps softly behind his hand and the woman cuffs him. Her long red fingernails reach up to her lover's hair, ruffle it, lose themselves in its strands. They hum together, surprisingly well. Listen to the latest hip-hop and watch MTV from rooftop satellites. Take holidays in Ibiza and Mykonos, in loud nightclubs and bars that stay open until dawn. They light unfiltered French cigarettes and exhale smoke into my face.

BEIRUT, 1981

A
s the city weakened, Sanaya grew stronger. She woke early each morning and stood on the balcony, leaning out onto the Corniche. Even in its devastation, as she greeted fruit stalls, hawkers, beat-up taxis skimming back and forth between luxury hotels, she couldn't stop a smile of possession from creasing the corners of her mouth. Beirut belonged to her. The country had already been at war for seven years and here she stood, on the knife-edge of another Israeli invasion. Yet she wasn't sure the Israelis were coming now, if at all.

She wasn't sure of anything in this war of rumours. But it might be the end, on a morning such as this. It was all too beautiful to last. The sea cupped the peninsula in a lover's embrace and waterfront apartments jutted out white and shimmering as if rising straight from the waves. Even the frilled edges of their shrapnel marks seemed to wink at her in the morning sun. She lit a French cigarette and called over her balcony to the apartment below.

‘Hadiya! Come up here before you go to school.'

She had a surprise for the little girl: an old photograph she'd found of herself at the same age. Mirror images of each other, except for the enveloping chador Hadiya was forced to wear. Sanaya butted out her cigarette and went inside. The photograph was propped up on the kitchen windowsill, curling at the edges in the morning damp. She broke up half a bar of wartime chocolate into shards, stirring powdered milk into the saucepan. As she stood at the stove, she thought about what she would have done if Selim Pakradounian hadn't been so free these past few years with his gifts of food and clothes and cash. Starve probably, like everyone else in west Beirut. He was generous with his money, if not his time. She suspected he had other lovers. She'd heard rumours of an abandoned daughter, living in the Armenian quarter. But she'd learnt to wait and, if she cared to be honest, grown so accustomed to feigning indifference she began to feel it grow cold and hard in her flesh. A secret cyst plumped full of dissatisfaction and regret. She wasn't sure what he meant to her, or she to him, but it was enough for now to sit out the war together.

She prodded at the frothing milk with a spoon, watching swirls of grey powder turn brown. Not exactly the colour of real chocolate, but a close-enough approximation. Her former self stared out into the future with the same blank gaze Hadiya affected with strangers, as if hiding some delicious irony of childhood. The little girl had the same straight honey strands in plaits, the same self-conscious upright figure. The cheap chocolate refused to melt but Sanaya poured the lumps into a mug anyway, wishing there was more.

Hadiya ran in with her satchel on and her hair flying behind her.

‘Where's your scarf?'

‘Downstairs. It's too hot to wear today.'

‘What will your mummy say?'

‘She doesn't care. And you know Daddy's still in the south.'

Sanaya couldn't suppress an intake of breath. She never supposed the fighting would last so long and come so close, with the threat coming ever closer.

‘Here.' She gestured to the steaming chocolate. ‘Have this.'

Hadiya took the mug in both hands without wanting to betray her hunger, and sipped at the foam. Sanaya knew she wanted to slurp it all down in one ferocious gulp.

‘Drink it quick, you're late for school.'

‘Mummy's rushing to work, can you fix my hair?'

She sat the little girl on a kitchen stool facing out into the courtyard, so she'd have something to look at besides the sea, obscured now by a greyish viscous scum, all the detritus of industry and war. The fountain, tiled in Persian blue, splashed in seeming contentment under a solitary fig tree. This year the tree had borne no fruit. Around its perimeter, glazed pots of basil and rosemary had long since been plundered, even the square sweet-grass lawn plucked bald by enterprising cooks. Hadiya settled her buttocks into the seat with a wriggle, letting Sanaya brush out her hair, comfortable in their silent intimacy.

After a decent interval of brushing she began to speak in a dreamy, singsong voice. ‘Our canary's so cute, isn't he? Hope the old man downstairs doesn't cover him up when there's an air raid.'

‘There won't be an air raid, Hadiya. What makes you say that?'

Hadiya twirled her tongue around the last of the chocolate.

‘You'll see. Back home, my pet birdie would sing especially loud during the bombs. He loved it.'

Sanaya brushed and looped the rough, lustrous hair that grew more magnificent the more malnourished the child became, as if in some perverse compensation. Hadiya's family were Shia Muslim Palestinians from the south of Lebanon, forced out of their camps by the Israeli invasion three years ago, exiled from their ancestral orchards for generations. They arrived in Beirut with two pans and a single blanket.

Sanaya suspected the Maronite Christian who owned the apartment below would murder her when he came back from Paris – if he ever came back – seeing the way she had aided the squatters. He'd been away since the beginning of the war – seven years – and it didn't look like he'd be back any time soon. Although she was Muslim, he'd trusted her to watch out for his property. He and her parents lived in such close proximity for decades, guarding each other's interests in fear of their own. He took her to church once when she was seven, the same age Hadiya was now, and she remembered the pale wafer he showed her, poking out his tongue. She'd wanted to try it, wondering if it tasted like a vanilla milkshake, those frothy concoctions she begged for on Friday afternoons after school, the paper straw too big for her mouth. Her parents had been more Western than he. No matter. She shook her head and rolled up her sleeves, not entirely convinced how she fitted into these categories, arbitrary labels that changed overnight.