Bone Ash Sky (79 page)

Chaim wills himself to be cold and steady.

‘Why do you feel the need to make me excuse myself for it?'

Rowda puts down her tea glass. Some of it sloshes onto the saucer.

‘It's your own insecurity that makes you feel that. Self-hating Jew.'

Chaim can feel his eyes bulge.
The bitch.
When he speaks, his voice is slow, correct.

‘I don't hate, Rowda. I don't hate myself, or you. I don't hate Palestinians or Lebanese or Arabs. I don't even hate the terrorists and governments who kill innocent people every single day. What I do despair of is this ignorance, this pig-headedness that can't see people for who they really are. What I fear is the possibility of another Holocaust. And deep down, I know it's not even about hatred. It's about fear. I hope we'll all stop being afraid of each other all the time. I want better than that, for you and me, and Inam – for everyone.'

She simpers, runs her hand over the worn linen of his couch. He feels affronted by this as well.

‘Enough of the fine words, Chaim. I'll say I'm sorry, if you like. I didn't intend to insult you.'

She looks at him for a moment, her eyes travelling over his set shoulders, his frozen eyes. He can feel she's having trouble discerning his expression. He could go either way. She tosses her hair over her shoulder.

‘Could you please tell Anoush and Inam that I came? I'm sorry I missed them.'

She gets up. Before she can make for the door Chaim stands up too, blocking her way.

‘Don't you think I need more of an apology than that?'

Rowda crumples her mouth, ironically obsequious. ‘I see I've hit a nerve.'

Chaim becomes more solid, weighty. ‘Apologise.'

Rowda stands her ground. Julius wakes up and barks, his tail flapping wildly, as if he can't work out whether to be cruel or kind. The door opens. Inam stands there, takes in the scene. Chaim turns to her, afraid she may fly at him. Condemn him. He opens his mouth to plead his case; his face wrinkles with the effort.

‘Where's Anoush?'

Inam ignores him. Instead, she plants her feet on the welcome mat and points a finger at Rowda.

‘I was listening in the corridor. You were rude to Chaim.'

Rowda opens her mouth to say something, turns away and walks quickly down the stairs.

There's still tension, but it's manageable. There are disagreements, fights, tears, but they're usually over by nightfall. Inam spends inordinate amounts of time in the downstairs courtyard whispering to Julius when she feels she's been wronged. The dog rests his head in her lap and snuffles, humouring her complaints, his tail beating an upbeat tattoo on the tiles. There are long periods of sullen silence and stubbornness, but I'm becoming good at taking her for a walk down to the sea and coaxing the bad mood out of her.

Our city is waking as if from a long sleep. The Corniche hosts a carnival atmosphere every night, with food stalls and tea-sellers and buskers from all over the world. Chaim complains about music keeping him awake past midnight. But I like it, feel like going down there and making some noise myself. Downtown cafes are open all hours, dancing spills onto rubbled streets; the bookstalls and antique shops lining Rue Hamra are doing a roaring trade. I take Inam to the American University campus and we sit on the grass with an afternoon picnic, watching students loll about and kiss in secret, notebooks aflutter in the sea breeze. We check out the noticeboard, discussing the different subjects on offer. Inam wants to go to university one day, she says, to study history.

At her age, Inam shouldn't fully understand what history is. Not yet. But when I sit on the side of her bed at night, watching her sleep, I study her young yet troubled face. I watch the lidded pebble eyes, the knowing brow, the map of time smoothed out across her features. Other times, other people's histories. Inam was born with them, has first-hand knowledge of homelands, territories, injustices and desires. Intimations of her father and mother, in the flick of a hand, the crazy shapes of her elegant toes, the sharpness of her language. In the sly way she licks her forefinger to smooth down her eyebrows with the glue of her own saliva. The sticky mass of history. Inam surely knows more than enough about that.

She's celebrating her twelfth birthday. She's enjoying her new school – American, non-denominational, co-ed – has many friends her age, moderate Muslims and Christians of all stripes, Lebanese, Palestinian, Armenian, Greek. At our apartment, they crowd around her and the magnificent, lighted cake, a gooey thing of Belgian chocolate and Grand Marnier.

‘Are you sure you should put that much alcohol in it?' Chaim asked me the day before. Anxious, licking at a smear of icing with his finger. I flicked a lump at him, laughed.

‘I'm not Muslim, you know.' As soon as I heard myself say the words, I felt in the wrong. Am I dishonouring Inam's past, in this way and countless others? These doubts are unanswerable, an unease I know will follow me until Inam is grown up, maybe beyond, until I can feel my choices have been justified.

Chaim sat at the kitchen table and half-watched me ice the cake. He was absently building a little tower out of the beach pebbles Inam had gathered and left strewn there. Like the memorials of the Holocaust: each cairn a generation, each pebble a soul.

Inam stands at the head of the table and poses for photographs, ready to cut the cake. Chaim stands on a chair with the camera. ‘Look up!'

The girlish singing – the boys refuse to join in – is deafening, raucous.

‘
Happy birthday to you! Happy birthday!
'

Inam closes her eyes, just for a moment, and I close mine too. The song wobbles and changes, our grandmothers' voices cracking, calling:
My darling, my love, your sufferings and joys will be many.
We remember; do we really remember or would we merely like to? The strength of our desire to know overcomes reality. Another room, another time, a beautiful mother dimly known from photographs and Bilqis and a fat white candle, funereal tones, a corpse-like father grinning from the corner.

Hot wax drips onto the icing. Inam cuts the cake and makes a silent wish; I gather up the spent candles and take them to the kitchen, to save them for next year. Standing at the counter, I break off a piece, the wax warm and yielding in my palm. Alive. I roll it between my fingers, making a tiny, perfect ball. I can try to tell Inam about hatred, about mistakes and lies. What I can't tell her is how to avoid them. I see Lilit led away by Turkish men, flushed face in her palms. Split pomegranates and the solid ball, like this wax, that water gruel makes when it cools, Minas stuffing it into his mouth in the death camp. I think of Chaim, and last night: the trail of his semen on my thighs so thin, so translucent I took it between my fingers for only a moment before it vanished. All of us, here for a single moment, then gone.

Late that night, when the girls and boys have all gone home clutching paper plates of leftovers and moist parcels of cake, I sit on the edge of Inam's bed and tuck the sheets down over the still-flat chest.

‘Before you go to sleep, there's something I need to give you.'

‘Another present?'

‘No – not really another present. Haven't you had enough?'

I laugh. Inam laughs too, holding up her wrist with its Armenian bracelet, so that the heavy silver links and crosses sparkle in the lamp's dim light.

‘This one's my favourite.'

‘It was my father's for a while. An antique from the forties. One day I'll tell you the story of your father and this bracelet too.'

‘Not now? I hate it when people tell me I'm not old enough to know things. I understand
everything
.'

‘I'm sure you do. But maybe not this – not yet. Isn't it gorgeous? My grandfather made it himself. Apparently my mother wore this bracelet originally, even when she was a little girl.'

‘The mumma you never knew?'

I try to speak softly. ‘That's right, Inam.'

‘Just like me.'

‘Just like you. And now we have each other.'

Inam sighs, but it's a sigh of contentment and tiredness. I squeeze the thin, braceleted wrist.

‘Time for some sleep now. But first, our secret. Actually, it's a little like a present.'

Inam sits up in bed and looks at the envelope. On it is a message in Arabic, scrawled in black pencil:
For my darling Inam. Don't open until
you turn twelve.

‘Your grandmother gave it to me before they took her to the hospice. It's from your mother.'

I bend down and kiss her on the forehead. ‘Do you need me to be here while you read it?'

Inam shakes her head, slowly. I get up to leave, come back on an irresistible impulse and kiss her again, holding her so tight she can't breathe.

‘Call me if you need to talk about anything in the letter.'

I close the door.

Inam sits very still for a while, until she's certain Anoush has gone down the hall and into her own bedroom. She then opens the envelope with small, careful tears where it's been glued down, and takes out a smooth, flat pebble. Not stopping to examine it further, she lays it on the bedspread as she unfolds the letter. Her eyes scan the closely written page in Arabic, searching for the last line.
With great and everlasting
love, Your mother, Sanaya.
She winces when she sees the handwriting, can't recall if she's ever seen anything written by her mother at all.

14 November 1983

My darling Inam,

Now that you're twelve, no longer a child, not yet a
woman, I'm writing this to you. Writing, not speaking, in case
in these uncertain times, you find yourself alone without me to
guide you and tell you a little of your history.

We're a historic people, all of us, and we allow this to
shape our actions and emotions and the very stuff we suppose we
are made of. When we allow history to shape us in this way we
sometimes lose our humanity, our compassion, our logic, and we
can commit any crime in the name of ignorance. All those little,
messy truths and that one big lie – the lie of who is right and
who is wrong. Nobody is right, my darling Inam. We're all right
and we are all, too often, and tragically, wrong.

Your father loved you although he never knew you. I'm
sure of that. I'm sure he looks over you from wherever he is and
smiles. He hated injustice and this hatred consumed him, but
he also felt a deep love for the smallest objects: the soft line of a
woman's veil, a piece of fruit, the bird outside his window.

He loved more often than he hated, but hatred became so
much easier to fall into. Please don't judge him.

With great and everlasting love,

Your mother,

Sanaya

Inam isn't sure what to feel after reading this. Part of her would like to understand; the other part shuns this raw, new knowledge. She puts the letter back inside the envelope, licks it shut again and wedges it under her mattress. The pebble she looks at carefully now: greyish-blue, shiny as a mirror, perfect as a peach. She holds it tight in her hand as she falls asleep.