Bone Ash Sky (76 page)

Chaim eyes her revolving slice of cake.

‘Can I have it, if you're not eating?'

She passes it to him without a word. Chaim swallows in silence for a few seconds.

‘Anoush will bring you to my place one weekend and you can get acquainted with my dog again.'

Inam raises her eyebrow. ‘He's such a big dog. I'm scared of him.'

‘Well … yes, he is big. But he would never hurt you. He likes little girls.'

Inam sighs, worldly. ‘I'm not a little girl anymore. And I don't like dogs.'

‘Come on, you like Julius. Even more than you like me. Do you like me, even a little bit?

‘Hmmm …' Inam pauses.

‘So why don't you like me, Inam?'

‘Because.'

‘Tell me, I won't be offended.'

‘Grandma told me all Israelis are bad.'

‘You know that's not true. Not every person from one place can be bad.'

‘The ones at the prison were. They had big, nasty dogs too. And they swore at Anoush.'

‘Did they? She didn't tell me that.'

Inam nods, self-consciously serious.

‘My father would go out and kill them every day. I heard Grandma saying to Aunty Amal. Before he died.'

‘And do you want to kill me?'

Inam ignores the question, fixing her blue eyes on his.

‘I heard them talking. Grandma and Anoush. My father killed her father. Then he killed himself too.'

I sit by Bilqis's bed. My buttocks are stuck to the cushioned plastic seat.

‘Bilqis? If you're tired out, I might go home now.'

Bilqis doesn't open her eyes but her mouth works with the effort to speak. With her head flung right back on the pillow, her skin so white, she could be a corpse waiting to be laid out. I stand up and lean close to her face. The swollen eyelids blue and heavy.

‘What is it? What can I do for you?'

Bilqis tries to raise her left arm, the better one, but it flops onto the blanket after a brief struggle. I stroke her hand, breakable but heavy, the texture of crepe. Bilqis manages a sound, a bellowing cry. A word forms from it.

‘Can't—'

Another word.

‘—breathe.'

‘She can't breathe! Come quickly!'

I run out into the middle of the ward. Nurses rush past, attending to other patients, and I grab one by the arm.

‘She needs oxygen! She can't breathe!'

The girl runs after me to the bed. Bilqis is choking, great globules of food and spit being expelled as she gasps for air, skewed arms clutching at nothing.

‘What do you mean, your father killed hers?' Chaim narrows his eyes and glares at Inam.
Is she lying? Making things up?

Inam leans forward, confidingly.

‘I told you. It was in the war.'

She pronounces the word
war
as if uncertain of its precise meaning. Chaim rubs his eyes, tries to take her nail-bitten hand. She pulls it out of his reach with a grand gesture.

‘Are you sure, Inam? Are you sure you're telling me the truth?'

‘Of course I am. But Anoush still loves me, doesn't she?'

Chaim speaks automatically.

‘Yes, she loves you. Was her father a militiaman, then?'

‘I don't know.'

He grasps her by the shoulder, bringing her closer. She lets him.

‘Did you hear them say he was a soldier, you know, with a gun?'

Inam opens her mouth, hesitates.

‘I—I think so.'

‘Remember!'

‘Yeah. Yeah, a what-do-you-call-em, Pha-lang-ist, they said.'

Chaim leans back, expels the air he's been keeping tight inside his chest. Inam studies him and a ripple of doubt passes over her face.

‘It doesn't matter, does it, Chaim? It doesn't matter what happened then.'

Chaim repeats it after her –
doesn't matter what happened then
– believing something else entirely.

I slump in the matron's office, am handed a cup of cold tea, another cardigan draped across my shoulders. I'm shaking so much I can't hold the cup and a nurse takes it from me with painful solicitude. The matron speaks, breaking through the only sound in the tiny room, that of my teeth chattering.

‘I'm sorry, Ms Pakradounian. There was nothing we could do.'

I nod, look down at the linoleum floor, at the strip running from the door to the desk that is somehow lighter than the rest.

‘Is there anyone we can call, Ms Pakradounian?'

I try to think. I'm numb. After a while I open my mouth.

‘Her sister Amal. Her nephew, Sayed Ali.'

Chaim rushes home from the orphanage. He kicks at loose rubbish, rolled-up newspapers, a garbage bag's contents spilled across the street. He stands for a minute, controlling his breath, looking out at the blackness of sea beyond the Corniche. A beggar comes toward him and Chaim gives him such a look of contempt he doesn't even attempt to ask for any money, backing away and shaking his head. Chaim fumes, left alone.

He sits on the sea wall, attempts to gather his thoughts. After taunting him about his own father and brother, making him feel like the enemy, like she was sacrificing so many of her principles to be with him. He too is a child of survivors, of genocide. Victims and perpetrators. How different are they? Her subtle rejection, renting her own apartment, wanting to have a separate life. And now this.

‘Anoush,' Chaim screws his mouth up to silently form the sound. ‘I don't care if your father was a Phalangist or a terrorist or a dictator. It's your attitude I'm so pissed about. You didn't trust me enough to tell me the truth. Now I can't trust you. So what the hell does that say about any future for us?'

He knocks on her front door feverishly, waits. Nothing. He tries the knob, bursts into her bare living room. There are no lights turned on. She has Julius with her. He barks once, a sharp, exhausted cry. In the beam from the promenade below he can discern her huddled form on the floorboards.
What right does she have to be upset over an old Arab
woman? The murderer's mother.
Her self-indulgence enrages him all the more.

‘Why did you hide it from me?'

She silences him with an upraised hand.

‘She's dead.'

On the way to Bilqis's memorial in a hired limousine, Chaim is coldly silent. It's been seven days since Bilqis's death and burial. I stood aside while Amal and the other women of the camp ritually washed the pallid body, folding her limbs – grown so thin in death – and wrapping them in a white shroud, clinging in all the wrong places like a little girl's sundress. Rowda stood aside as well, her lips as tight as the arms across her chest. She didn't speak to me.

Bilqis was buried the next day before sundown, with her head turned to face Mecca. Chaim didn't come.

‘It's not right,' I can remember him saying. ‘You'll end up resenting the kid for what her father did. Now it's all new and happy, but just wait a few years.'

I glance toward the front seat; Inam is happily ensconced with the driver. He's letting her choose which radio station she wants to listen to. Until now I've been looking out my window at the glaring streets, still heat-dazed in early winter: nougat sellers thrusting their wares into the car, the sudden smell of nuts and scorched sugar, vendors of feather dusters preening their borrowed plumage before presenting them to me through the open window like bouquets.

The car stops in traffic and an old woman looks up from selling herbs – feathery rocket, basil, fronds of coriander – from a hessian sack as she squats on the kerb. She holds up a bunch and smiles at me, gaptoothed, overly familiar, knowing I won't buy. An ironic greeting, a fitting farewell for Bilqis.

I whisper with violence into Chaim's ear. He jumps.

‘If I don't help Inam now I'll dry up and become self-obsessed and shallow. I don't want to die like my father.'

He seems surprised. ‘How do you know what state of mind he was in when he died?'

‘I can guess.'

‘And what good will it do to take her away from everything she's known? Don't you want to go back to the States?'

‘I told you, I won't go, not now. You know I've decided to stay here in Beirut. A year, at least. For Inam's sake and for my grandmother. At least until she dies too.'

‘And for me?'

I look at him, a different expression on my face. The tears of the last week still fresh in my eyes.

‘Well, not with your attitude of the last few days.'

‘Do you still want me?'

We stare at each other, not sure what to say next. The air around us grows heavy, the sounds of babbling humanity from outside increasing. I remember the excitement I felt when he first told me he loved me, the comfort of lying in bed beside him late at night, my head resting in the hollow made by his collarbones. I feel the thrill again of imagining a future together. A future with Chaim and Inam. I brush my hand against his freshly shaven face. Smoothness of a pebble.

‘I'm sorry, Chaim. I still don't know yet. You need to give me some more time. It's not just about you and me anymore. It's about Inam too.'

The driver stops at the mosque. I draw my white veil around my head and shoulders mechanically, get out of the car in a daze. The imam I requested is waiting outside; he sees me and rushes forward. Chaim sits. He can't seem to move his legs. After a while, he rouses himself, opens the door for Inam.