Bone Ash Sky (71 page)

In the next instant I’m ashamed of speaking to Inam that way. But I can’t help myself, and even as I inwardly cringe I take her hand in a rough grasp and stride to the perimeter of the prison. I try not to let stupid tears run down my cheeks. Was the guard lying under orders, because of my altercation with the others at the gate? Has Sayed rejected me? Has he given thought to the past and decided it’s folly to campaign for his release? Is he just depressed? And what of his responsibility to Inam?

I run past the guards at the checkpoint, dragging Inam alongside. There’s nothing I can do right. Chaim’s gone. And now even Sayed has abandoned me. Was this how my father’s lover felt? I finally feel a sharp prod of sympathy for her; pregnant, vulnerable and alone, both protectors dead.

BEIRUT, 1983

S
anaya came home and rushed into the bathroom, leaving the front door wide open. All she could think of was the blood. All she could think of was to wash the blood off her feet and legs. She clicked the latch into place on the bathroom door and wet a facecloth at the tap. Holding it, feeling its cold slowness seep into her hand, she sank to the floor. Now all she could think of was her baby floating in its flesh prison, contaminated by other people's fluids. The fear made her wooden, sleepy, limbs turned to lead. The trickle of water from the washer was warmer now, pooling at her wrist. She couldn't move, could hardly breathe, until she heard Rouba banging on the bathroom door and began swiping at her ankles with the cloth.

‘So you didn't go?'

Sanaya hesitated before answering, couldn't remember what Rouba was referring to.

‘No.'

‘Open the door.'

‘No.'

‘What are you doing in there? I saw blood on the stairs—'

‘No.'

‘Let me in then.'

Rouba banged at the door again, rattling at the loose latch, finally kicking hard enough so it dislodged and fell open. Her eyes widened at Sanaya sitting on the floor with her legs splayed like a doll's in front of her. She fell to the tiles and took her shoulder.

‘Talk to me. Tell me what to do.'

Sanaya continued dabbing at her legs with the bloodied face washer.

‘Nothing. I'm not losing the baby.'

‘Then why—were you anywhere near the explosion? I was downstairs listening to the news when I heard you running up the stairs.'

‘Somebody blew up the US embassy.'

‘I know. Islamic Jihad just claimed responsibility on TV. They could be lying. They're saying it was a suicide bomber.'

Rouba took the cloth and rinsed it at the tap, kneeling down and wiping Sanaya's feet and ankles, lost in thought.

‘Do you think it—' she began.

Sanaya looked up at her, caught a sob in her throat. In that instant both of them remembered the tapes they found. Issa's tapes: all the detailed explanations of death.

‘No. It couldn't be.'

Rouba rinsed out the cloth methodically and placed it to dry on the edge of the basin, before turning to face Sanaya.

‘I'm going to make some calls. I know a few of those men, friends of Issa's from the mosque. If they'll speak to me. We have to find out.'

Issa's body was not found – well, not all of it. When the Red Crescent workers had been and gone Bilqis and Sanaya went searching too. ‘All genetic materials have been taken away,' the officials assured them. ‘You will find nothing. We've even isolated hair, teeth, fingernails, shreds of skin. All classified. All in plastic bags, labelled
unidentified
.'

It was dusk now and puffs of smoke from disturbed rubble darkened the pink-tinged sky. Rouba stayed home. She couldn't face it again, she said, not after her husband, not after Hadiya.

Now that Sanaya was huddled on all fours, searching for something, anything, to connect her to Issa among the ruins, she couldn't stop thinking about his part in this carnage. Rumbling like a half-formed song in her brain was the old traditional term of endearment he would mumble as they made love. ‘My eyes, my eyes,' he would say in a voice clotted with passion, and she would feel exquisite, in the moment, wholly new. ‘My lion,' she would reply, and the pleasure she saw on his face blotted out the whole world – all that she didn't want to think about his past as a militiaman, his nightmares, his suffering, his daily unexplained absences from her. She was certain it was him now. The killer of so many innocents. Unless Islamic Jihad was lying, or using him as a decoy, there could be no other conclusion.

She thought of her shock when she found out. When Rouba had gone downstairs to telephone Sanaya had hurried after her. They found Bilqis sitting on the divan with a videotape in her hands. She held it straight out before her as if it were alive and could do her untold harm.

‘It was on the mat in the hall when I went to take the garbage out,' she whispered.

Rouba snatched it out of her hands and turned it to the side so she could read the scrawled inscription.

‘It says
Issa Ali, 1964–1983
.'

Now Sanaya couldn't stop thinking about Issa's appearance on the tape. He was flat, bloodless, like a man already dead. Gone was the fire of his convictions, the inflamed passion of hatred he'd nurtured since a child. As he spoke to the camera, eyes lowered to his boots, he cradled his gun in his arms as if it were an infant. Behind him, grainy scenes of training camps were spliced with his passive face: close-ups of men in bandannas and black scarves that only revealed their eyes, boys face down in the mud crawling to some unknown destination, leaping up and shooting targets shaped like bodies, chanting an unidentifiable phrase that drowned out Issa's modest, mumbled speech.

She now found herself engulfed by rage as she bent over the charred evidence of suits and desks and building materials outside the embassy – those damned Iranians were using Issa's death for recruitment propaganda. She had watched him farewell his mother on the tape, kissing the fingers of both hands in an unconvincing gesture, murmuring goodbye to his brother's wife, to his unborn child. She'd caught a glint of silver on his wrist, but dismissed it. He then punched his right fist into the air and his gun clattered awkwardly to the floor. There the tape ended; with the sound of metal on concrete. He made no mention of Sanaya. Was this to protect her? Even so, as she sifted through the rubble in the dim half-light, she was devastated by his omission.

She and Bilqis found a severed finger, a hexagonal lump of flesh: powdery, disintegrating into soot in their hands. Bilqis said she knew these were Issa's remains, even when at home Rouba told her they couldn't be, even when Sanaya's face betrayed her quiet disbelief. Bilqis had them laid out in a plain pasteboard box, covered them in stones, blue and grey pebbles, marbled from the sea and gathered at low tide.

‘Exactly the colour of his eyes,' she whispered to Sanaya.

Before the box was sealed Sanaya bent over the remains, touching the pebbles with her mouth. Their smooth surfaces were blank, inert. They betrayed no secrets, no mythic instructions for the rest of her life. At that moment, slow and eternal, death seemed preferable to life, to grief, to rage. She couldn't imagine being normal again. Like a numbing of the limbs in cold water, she began to understand in some small way why Issa had chosen to die. Part of her wished to join him, if it weren't for the unborn child. In the instant she pressed her lips to stone, the slow curdle of life became too much to bear and she was drawn to him with more intensity than when he was her lover.

She stood still, hunched over the makeshift coffin, breathing hard.
If I breathe, in, out, in, out, then it must mean I'm still alive.
In the end, she left Issa to his death. She took two pebbles away with her and carried one to the Corniche, stood in the wind and threw it into the churning water. The other she put aside, unsure why she needed to keep it.

BEIRUT, 1995

B
ilqis hobbles inside where I'm helping Inam with her English-language homework. She's only up once a day now, either to accompany us on our afternoon stroll or to feed the manic hens. She scatters grain from her hands in haste as she closes the door behind her, and we look up from our books in alarm.

‘There's a strange man outside. I'm worried.'

I rise from the table, wiping my inky hands on my thighs. Inam shadows me. I squint at the setting sun, cup my hand over my eyes. A thick-set silhouette visible at the end of the yard. One bent leg as he leans against a wall, carrying all the weight of his body.

‘Chaim.' His name feels alien to my lips. I walk forward without realising what I'm doing, without meaning to show him how he still holds me in his thrall. The hens at my feet squawk and peck at dry earth, sometimes missing their targets and tapping at my bare toes, but I don't care.

‘Go inside, Inam.'

She stays where she is, glued to my side.

I feel no time elapse between my loneliness and being engulfed in the warmth of his body. I allow myself to melt, ebullient with relief, elated by his open-handed touch.

‘I'm so glad you found me.'

‘Are you? Then why did you run away?'

Strange, this new mouth light on mine. I'm flexible in his grip, changing into somebody else. Inam stares up at us both and tugs at my arm.

‘Anoush, Anoush! Come back inside with me.'

I wave her away, disentangling the furious hands. Inam plants her two feet between us, wriggling her body through.

‘Go away! Leave her alone.'

‘Inam, don't be silly. I told you to go inside.'

Inam punches me in the belly. Chaim gasps.

‘Traitor!' Inam shouts. ‘Traitor. I hate you.'

She runs inside and slams the door so hard the hut shakes on its flimsy foundations.

We huddle together on Chaim's futon for days. Somehow the guilt of quitting the camp, leaving an enraged Inam and mildly acceptant Bilqis behind, of not working, not writing, not answering the telephone, not being responsible to anybody but each other, renders the time we lie there in artificial darkness ever more potent. We play games with intertwined arms and legs, make a tent of the bedclothes, giggle at each other's fiercely rumbling stomachs, ignore our hunger pangs for a day as we kiss and press against each other: new love now, tender and slow.

Finally Chaim gets up at sunset, only to bring back stale date biscuits and a jar of bergamot preserves – all he can find in his empty kitchen cupboards – brewing watery Arabic coffee to keep us awake. We eat the preserves with our fingers, licking Nile-green syrup from each other's wrists and chins. He burrows beneath the bedclothes, his rough, grey-flecked head between my legs.

‘Don't,' I'm tempted to say, but I stay still, frozen, as his tongue finds me. This is the first time he's done it. Yet something makes me shudder, something in me wants to recoil. I push his head away. He sits up.

‘What's wrong?'

I can see his age now in the harsh glare of the bedside lamp, the wiry white hairs around his groin and the soft rolls of fat, belly to hip.

‘Aren't we together again? Why are you holding back?'

I feel guilty at betraying Sayed, wrong to leave Bilqis and Inam, but I can't say this. He's telling me what to do again, and I'm a little girl who can't help but comply.

‘Lie down again,' I say. ‘Come on. I'll rub you.'

He mumbles, his voice flattened by the sheet beneath his face.

‘All that time without you, not knowing where you'd gone, made me realise—'

‘You didn't even come to the Mayflower to find me.'

‘How could I? I didn't know who you'd have in the hotel bed with you.'

‘That's a low blow, Chaim. Sayed's in prison, for God's sake.'

‘So it's the Palestinian you think about, is it?'

‘Please, let's not start that again.'

‘I'm sorry. Forget it. I'm just scared. Scared that I'll lose you.'

I continue rubbing, pressing my thumb into the hollows of his spine, leaning closer.