Bone Ash Sky (75 page)

She pointed to the empty divan. Rouba patted her on the shoulder.

‘You really need a night out, honey.'

‘Is it safe to go out these days?' Bilqis asked.

Sanaya gave Inam some wooden spoons and a saucepan to play with, watched her throw them to the ground and clap her hands, then reach to do it all over again. She cupped the small, tapered head in one hand.

‘I've been walking out there alone for the whole of this damned war,' she said. ‘Nothing can touch me.'

She tried not to be angry with Issa but it was no use. When she lay in bed and Inam was finally asleep, she conducted frenzied, private debates with his dead body.
Why did you leave me? Wasn't I enough for
you?
She thought of those last few months before he vanished and then kidnapped Selim. Was there anything she didn't notice? Was he any different?

He read the Koran no more than usual. Had the same nightmares, the same bouts of stifled breathing and talking in his sleep. He spent a night away at HQ – that was normal. He came home the next morning at dawn after morning prayers at the mosque. He was singing, playful, ready for fun, but she was tired and sleepy and told him to shut up and come to bed. He was immediately angry. His happiness was always jittery, brittle, a thin veneer masking an abyss.

She wanted to find him alive again just so she could shake him. No, that was not entirely true. She wanted to shake him hard, yes, but she also wanted to touch him, kiss his mouth, grasp his head in her hands and ask him why he really did it. Why he thought he was so right.
Why
did you kill, Issa? Why did you kill so many people? Why did you kill Selim?
Why did you kill yourself?

Now she hit out at his imaginary corpse with her elbow. She whispered to him.
You're taking up too much of the bed. Selfish, that's what
you are. Well, you've got what you want now. Raised up to Paradise amid
clouds of spiritual glory. Good luck to you. And what about us?

BEIRUT, 1995

C
haim lies in bed. It's the only day off he's had for a fortnight. He's been in Nabatiye as promised, and is planning to confront Anoush tonight. Has she finally decided? He pretends to be asleep as she opens the door with her old key. She creeps into his bedroom, leans over his warm body, the sheet pulled tight to his neck.

‘I know what you're going to say, but I need a big favour. Please, please go and see Inam today. There's a morning tea for the prospective parents and I said I would be there.'

Chaim turns over, rolls the blanket all the way to the other side of the bed.

‘Why can't you go?'

‘I got a call at dawn from one of the nurses at the hospice. She said Bilqis is asking for me, panicking. They assume she thinks she's back in the camp. During the massacres.'

‘I don't see how I can go. The girl hates me, Anoush. Remember, it was intimated to me very clearly that it's only you wanting to adopt her, not
us
.'

‘Well, I can't be there. So you're the only one left.'

He mumbles something into the sheet, turns over and away from the filaments of light escaping from the curtains. She leans further and peers into his face. He puts a hand out from the folds to touch her mouth. Before she can plead one more time he sits up and stretches.

‘Okay. I'll do my best.'

‘Thank you,' Anoush says, and he hears the door shut carefully behind her. ‘I'll see you tonight.'

Chaim gathers gardenias from the pots on his balcony into a bouquet. A peace offering. A measure of his respect.
Inam may appreciate
it,
he thinks,
or else she may throw it to the floor.
She's that sort of girl. Some of the petals are already creased and splitting, but he ties them all together into a hard-packed wheel. He begins by feeling self-conscious carrying them on the bus, but in the next breath feels proud when Muslim women around him smile, open-faced and unsuspicious. Usually he only gets scowls for looking so evidently foreign.

I walk with trembling knees to Bilqis's ward. The contrast with the heat outside never fails to astonish me: cathode blue of fluorescent lights, iciness of walls and floors and the nurses' immovable features. I shiver as I hurry down the corridors, pressing my hands to my arms for warmth.

‘Didn't you bring a jacket?'

The Irish nurse who rang me stands at the side of a patient's bed, taking a vial of blood. She jabs at the old man's arm, trying to find a vein. He mews quietly, like a kitten. I stand and watch the slow drip-drip of blood thickly collecting, clotting to the sides of the glass. The nurse finishes and wriggles her own cardigan off in one gesture.

‘Here. I'm hot anyway. Give it back to me when you leave.'

I take the cardigan thankfully and put it on, inhaling the nurse's scent of disinfectant and cheap soap and tobacco smoke. She jerks her head in the direction of Bilqis's bed.

‘She's still in the same place. Been screaming and raving all night. We didn't know what to do with her.'

As I slide down the smooth linoleum to Bilqis's bed, I hear the nurse call after me.

‘We gave her another shot about an hour ago, so she may still be a bit drowsy.'

Bilqis stares rigidly at me. Her face is a mask of pain, drawn-out mouth dribbling and eyes that dart about, trying to find some respite. I put both my hands on her cheeks.

‘Oh, Bilqis, what have they done to you?'

Chaim sits in the row of chairs provided for the would-be adoptive parents and foster families. The chairs are small and wooden and his legs buckle under him so grotesquely that he'd be better off kneeling upright on the floor. Some of the other men are having the same trouble, balancing cups of milky coffee and slices of cake on their distorted laps. Chaim clutches the bouquet so hard his knuckles turn white.

The French headmistress claps her hands gracefully, as with everything she does. The children, in various states of shyness and reluctance, file into the room hand in hand. They are all girls, all aged between four and twelve and all dressed identically in white starched pinafores and shirts with pale-blue cuffs. Chaim can hardly recognise Inam. She catches his eye, embarrassed and subdued by her scrubbed pink face and plaited hair, and grimaces. She mouths exaggeratedly at him. ‘Where's Anoush?'

He shakes his head and shrugs his shoulders as if to say,
I'm all
you've got today, sorry.
He lifts up the bouquet and gives a self-deprecating grin. The headmistress claps her hands once more.

‘
Mes enfants, attention
!'

The children stand still in perfect formation. Another teacher bends over a piano and begins to play, badly, out of tune.
Il etait une bergeré
et ron, ron, ron, petit patapon
. The children sing along in muted tones and with expressionless faces. Except for Inam. Although she suffers the same severe stance as the rest of them, feet splayed out in her ugly shoes and hands behind her back, she's singing completely different words. Her mouth is moving silently and she is singing in Arabic. She faces Chaim and smiles wide as she sings.

I feed Bilqis a mush of hashed meat with flecks of something orange through it, using the moulded plastic spoon the nurse has suggested so it's easier on Bilqis's tender, exposed mouth. I put some of the food on the spoon – ‘Just enough and not too much,' the nurse cautions – wait for Bilqis to wearily open up again, and stick the spoon almost as far down as her gullet. It's the only way she can eat. She's lost any ability to chew.

Most attempts fail. The spoon isn't down far enough; its contents spill over onto her tongue and down the chafed sides of her mouth, mixed with saliva and the half-digested remnants of yesterday's dinner. I despair, feel tears forming in my eyes. Bilqis gazes at me, steadfast as a lover.
It's okay,
she seems to be saying.
I have patience
. I try again. I gulp down a sob, load up one more spoonful.

‘One more,' I whisper to Bilqis. ‘Only one more to go.'

Just as I do, the Irish nurse enters the enclosed little world I've created by pulling plastic curtains around the bed.

‘You're taking too long, honey. Her food's gone cold. Kitchen staff want to wash up as well.'

She draws aside the curtains with a decisive slash and settles herself down near me. She takes the spoon and basin and proceeds to dose Bilqis with the last spoonful, forcefully and without compunction. I sit aside and watch in shame, as if I've betrayed Bilqis to her Phalangist torturers.

Inam sits on a chair next to Chaim, twirling her paper plate faultlessly on one hand. She hasn't touched her slice of cake. She's professing to be bored with anything he says. When Chaim told her Anoush couldn't make it because Bilqis had been asking for her, Inam changed the subject without the flicker of an eyelash. She accepted the flowers with something bordering on cautious delight, making a huge to-do of finding a vase for them. They repose now in a chipped mug on the laden trestle table, among filled baguettes and tinned sardines and jugs of bright-yellow custard from a packet.