Bone Ash Sky (80 page)

BEIRUT, 1984

R
ouba leaned into a seated Sanaya, applying electric-blue mascara to her widened eyes.

‘Now look up. That's better. I don't want my friends thinking you're half asleep.'

She stood back, surveyed Sanaya's make-up with her head to one side, came closer to apply another coat of mascara. She murmured under her breath, lips an inch away from Sanaya's cheek.

‘You haven't been looking your best lately, poor thing.'

Their physical proximity was oddly comforting, but tonight Sanaya was not in the mood. She suffered Rouba's attentions, swivelled in her seat. This morning, as she woke before dawn to breastfeed Inam, she found the canary on the floor of its cage, claws curled in the spasm of death.

‘It's not a good sign, Rouba,' she murmured, as the other woman turned away toward the mirror to pat at her own face with powder.

‘What's not?'

‘The dead bird. It was healthy for so long.'

‘What, you're still going on about that? Canaries are not known for their longevity, darling.'

She dabbed glitter cream on Sanaya's bottom lip, feathered some rouge on her cheeks.

‘That'll make you look more alive.'

Sanaya kissed Inam, hugged her with an intensity that surprised her. She and Rouba made for the door. She stopped and shouted down the hall.

‘Please Bilqis, don't let her stay up too late! You know how unsettled she gets when we overstimulate her. I need her in bed by eight.'

Bilqis looked up from her game with Inam and chuckled.

The two women walked to the party all the way, enjoying the spring gusts caressing their necks, ruffling their shiny satin blouses. Rouba sewed them herself from the gaudy pink-and-gold quilts abandoned by the Druze family downstairs. She flapped her headscarf about, making little puffs of air beneath the fabric. Then she decided to take it off. In one movement, she crumpled it up and dropped it into her handbag. Sanaya gasped and then cheered.

‘I don't need it anymore,' Rouba said.

Sanaya felt more vital now they were outside. She suppressed a deep flash of separation-pain from her baby, close to guilt, then reasoned with herself that Inam was with her grandmother, who loved her, that she wouldn't even notice her mother was gone. She and Rouba both laughed loudly, drawing attention to themselves, clutching their mesh handbags to their hips. Rouba made a passing commentary on every man who walked by.

Sanaya told her to shut up between giggles. ‘I'd forgotten what it was like to feel so alive.'

They walked through a Shia neighbourhood, careful not to offend the black-veiled women, the milling white-suited men, tiny children cloaked in floor-length chadors. Here they walked faster, not speaking, holding hands in order not to be separated in the crowd.

As they passed a parked BMW Rouba paused to check her hair in the tinted windows, teasing out the gelled strands that had fallen limp. She sprayed some perfume on Sanaya's inner elbow and Sanaya sprang back, rubbing at the sudden stinging coolness.

As she did so, the car exploded. Both women were flung forward then back among the debris.

LAKE VAN, TURKEY, 1996

I
lead the way into town by following the pale thread of lake. Inam wants to drive into the centre – says she's tired of walking, all this holiday has been is walking – but I feel that approaching Van on foot will reveal more, so we leave the car behind.

On the distant island of Akdamar all that can be seen is a triangletopped dome. The rest of the tenth-century church is obscured by vapour rising from the surface of the water. I have no desire to go there, to ache again for the loss of so many looted treasures, vandalised icons, mosaics gone dull with age. I remember Lilit telling me about the carvings – delicate reliefs of Adam and Eve, Samson, Jonah and his whale, with the head of a perplexed dog. Does Inam want to go and see them? But she's strangely afraid of the cone-shaped, rickety boats moored at the shore, making her displeasure known until the sailors shrink away, muttering.

The lake is a mirror. I look into it, Inam by my side, and feel ashamed. Guilty I've managed to survive, that I can stand here with unmarked skin, healthy limbs wrapped in micro-fibres from the sweatshops of the Third World. What trick of fate has left a few Armenians to survive, to have children, grandchildren, to keep the pain and anger and disbelief alive? In another time, I would have been the bound woman marched through blood and sand, torn from home, trembling in fear of the final blow. Yet from the destruction of my race, tribe, family – I've survived. Survived to bear this guilt, this sense of unworthiness. Such a statement sounds so trite on this bare earth, among this bitter history. Psychobabble. As does the political, the economic, the aesthetic universe I float in like a fish underwater.

This is the Armenia of my childhood then. It became Turkey eighty years ago. This lake and its town, uneven rows of skinny houses with carved timber balconies, window frames, studded doors, the slow piling of brick upon hand-hewn brick by Armenians not so long ago. Dirt roads that join remote villages with their Armenian names, old Armenian inscriptions. Defaced words, names since changed, slightly wrong. The memory of oil lamps tended and candles lit in mountain chapels: burnt now, desecrated, their frescoes hacked away. How did we let this happen?

The lake is silent. Inam and I wear sandals too flimsy for this stony bank: a land that seems determined to devour, to reduce me to itself. All I can remember now is Lilit's mouth: an old scar that cut her bottom lip in half and became white then whiter whenever she cried.

‘So, Inam,' I finally say. ‘Will you be glad to go home tomorrow?'

‘I miss Beirut,' she replies. ‘I miss school and I'm sure they're all ahead of me by now.'

‘After only a week? Surely you're too clever for that.'

She smiles at the compliment. ‘And you? What do you miss?'

I pause.
I miss my grandmother
, I want to say.
I miss the father I never
knew. But most of all, I miss knowing who's right and who is wrong.
I miss the heaviness of womanhood too, the pull of biology. No time for that yet. I have Inam to look after, work, my responsibility to the past. I have Siran. I feel a pinch of anxiety when I think of going back to Beirut, as if the flamboyant city with all its conflict and chaos has become too much for me. I don't know what I'm doing with Chaim, whether I'm big enough to wait for Sayed to come out of prison. Whether I love them both in different ways. Or if I can just be alone.

My womb is empty for now – and if full at all, would be papery, rectangular, stretched tight by words, stories, swollen with competing versions of the past. No unborn child with its secrets. I have my own living, breathing child now. No infant who knows the world before all worlds. I carry my own worlds now. Worlds of difference, foreign languages, warring tribes.

‘You know, Inam, I think I might miss Beirut too.'

Across the lake, the island starts to rise from the mist as if by some blind force of will. This lake with all its colours of bone and ash and sky. Blue as Lilit's eyes when she was fifteen, still unclouded by horror. Bone. Ash. Sky. Someone keeps saying it. Repeating it, over and over. Bone and ashes. Sky – that's all there is. And the lapping of water, like a lullaby that puts me in mind of Lilit – again – singing the high-pitched songs of childhood. I can hear those songs: distant monks from the island's church chanting in accents plaintive and half-familiar. But there are no more monks on Akdamar, only an abandoned ruin and a story I'd rather forget.

Genocide. A race wiped out. I try on various emotions and the faces that go with them: terror, outrage, acceptance, grief. None of them fit the sense, beneath it all, that I'm repeating empty gestures, the movements of somebody else, on the edge of this same lake, sometime in the past. Could it be possible so much killing took place here? Mass graves shouldn't be this beautiful. On this serene, cloud-curdled day the atrocities seem a fabrication, tales told to frighten children. Now Inam is uncharacteristically silent. As we walk hand in hand we bend down and comb through the sand, finding smooth treasures, pebbles fragile as bird-bone. I want this ancestral earth to be rich, evocative; soil I can only hope will give birth to something new. We find a sweet wrapper, crudely pink; a Turkish cola can squashed so flat it could be tribal jewellery, millennial old. A clod of earth, a grave of rubbish. A thin human wrist-joint severed from the arm. I fall to my knees now, digging, with unexpected tears blurring my vision. Inam stops, frightened. I'm digging deeper. Fast, faster. She kneels down to help. Brown shards, soft as clay, our fingers crumbling them into unrecognisable splinters. The broken ends of bone are creamy, bleached white. I sift through, more careful now. Teeth, jaw, eye-sockets. These were once skin, fat, hair, a face.

My disbelief at the scale of my discovery attacks me somewhere under the breastbone.

‘It's okay, Inam. It's okay. Let's just place them in the earth again, say a prayer.'

She studies my face, concerned. ‘Why are you crying? There's nothing to cry about.'

The lake now so still. We get up, hold hands. Not even a bird, not a leaf stirring.

In the long evenings … there was time enough to consider where
the core of the tragedy lay. In the age of the Assyrians, the Empire of
Rome, in the 1860s perhaps? In the French mandate? In Auschwitz?
In Palestine? In those rusting front door keys now buried deep in the
rubble of Chatila? In the 1978 Israeli invasion? The 1982 invasion?
Was there a point where one could have said: Stop, beyond this point
there is no future?

Robert Fisk,
Pity the Nation

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

T
hree men have believed in my work over many years.

My husband, Nick Georges, who allowed me to drag him to deserts and war zones for the sake of love and research, who printed out countless copies of my manuscript and brings home tulips and poppies on days when my writing has gone stale.

My literary agent, Tim Curnow, whose humorous, experienced and authentic encouragement has for twelve years pushed me toward deeper truths, and who has now become more than an agent to me – family friend, mentor and wise counsel.

Peter Bishop, formerly of Varuna, The Writers’ House, Australia’s patron saint of writers, who went beyond the course of duty to read this book in its very early stages.

Thanks to Dr Izzeldin Abuelaish, who took the time to read the entire manuscript and provide such heartfelt praise. Also the
Independent
’s foreign correspondent Robert Fisk – who not only read the sample my agent sent him, but went to the trouble of phoning me personally right away – for being so generous with his time, his knowledge of the Middle East and his contacts, and for making suggestions for the chapters he read.

The whole team at Hardie Grant Australia and the UK – from CEO to sales, marketing, publicity and proofreading – have my eternal gratitude: firstly, for being brave and far-sighted enough to take on this difficult and controversial book during such tough times in publishing, and for nurturing me with such enthusiasm and kindness.

Special gratitude to the wonderful Rose Michael, my editor and publisher. Without her bold commitment to the book in the beginning, and the intense energy she brought to championing it, editing it, promoting it and believing in it throughout the whole process, none of this would have occurred. Thanks also to my fellow writer Libby-Jane Charleston, for, without a chance conversation between Rose and her, this partnership would never have come to fruition.

Huge thanks to Nicola Redhouse, for her insightful and exhaustive thematic and line-editing. Sometimes I felt she cared as much – if not more – for the book as I did.

Kenneth Hachikian, chairman of the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA) has gone far beyond the call of duty to be a passionate advocate of my novel in the US and overseas. Varant Mergueditchian, executive director of the Armenian National Committee of Australia (ANC) was also supportive and enthusiastic about this work in his former role. Vache Kahramanian, his successor, has also been a tireless advocate for me and the book. Khatchig Mouradian, editor of the US-based
Armenian Weekly
, has also been a great supporter and help – and a fount of knowledge about the genocide. Thank you all for your incredible generosity and belief in my retelling of your story, and for welcoming a non-Armenian into the fold.

I would like to thank the Australia Council for a generous yearlong grant and a residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in County Monaghan, Ireland, in 2003, where I began this novel. I would also like to express my appreciation for a three-year Australian Postgraduate Award (APA) scholarship that allowed me to complete my doctorate at the University of Technology, Sydney, and to pave the way for this book. My mentors and colleagues at UTS, particularly Dr John Dale, were an invaluable source of inspiration throughout this process, as were my early workshop partners, Heather Banyard, Libby-Jane Charleston and Dr Carol Major.

Fellow writer Christopher Cyril fully inhabited the ‘dream’ of the novel, as he so beautifully termed it, and gave me fresh insights when I was at a low ebb.

Huge, humbling thanks to Sophie Haythornthwaite, who read the manuscript countless times (with much brainstorming for titles) between the demands of children and her own need to paint. Also to Anyo Geddes, who gave me valuable feedback when I asked her to read many chapters at the last minute.

Thanks to Dr Martes Alison for reading an early draft.

Also to Hugh Barrett in London, who always reads with a fresh eye and an inexhaustible knowledge of culture and geo-politics.

Big thanks to Armen Gakavian, who read the novel in its final stages and made sure my Armenian content and language was correct.