Bone Ash Sky (10 page)

Invariably, as soon as he dwelled on Sanaya, he remembered his dead wife, while simultaneously trying to push the memory back, in the same way you struggle to fight off the onset of a cold. It was their wedding day that always came to him as clear – even clearer – as the first time they had sex. The sex had been rushed, icy, awkward. Painful for her. A death-knell for him. It was better not to remember.

Neither of them had smiled as they stood outside his father's house and waited for the priest to arrive. Such an honour, to be the first in the quarter married according to the old rites. ‘And not a moment too soon,' the neighbouring women exclaimed, crossing their ample breasts. ‘We arrived here fifty years ago.'

It had been hard, they conceded – chattering among themselves while Selim burned with boredom – what with the French occupation, famine in the twenties and two wars. They openly marvelled at the composure of the bride and groom. Selim and Anahit stood side by side, almost touching at arm and hip. First cousins, joined by blood. Behind them, fluted columns were festooned with tinsel and flowers, even the crazy outside plumbing draped with wreaths. ‘Too much expense,' the muttering went. ‘Who's Minas trying to impress?' Bougainvillea had been cut back to form a perfect bower, where Selim and his bride now stood. A shrewish wind rose high above roofs and aerials, away into the city. It flung petals onto Selim's shoulders, little flags of protest he brushed onto the ground. He didn't want to marry this girl – this cousin he'd known since he was born, seen bathe and eat and toilet, fought with and ignored. He looked at her belly under her wedding belt, still flat. He looked at the small, pinched mouth. He knew she'd been vomiting all morning, bending over the bathroom sink, quietly so nobody would know. Her cheeks were grey and white, ash and salt.

She didn't look at him. Guilty, maybe. She knew she'd trapped him now – with her mother's whispers, her pregnancy, her helplessness. She watched intently as the priest prepared to slit the throats of two white doves. The old man muttered, so the women had to lean forward to hear him.
Give the good news to the bride of light; thy groom is risen, go
forth before him bedecked with adornments; sing a new song to him that is
risen, to the fruit of life to them that are asleep.
He threw his beard over his shoulder in a way they thought far too irreverent, rolling up his wide black sleeves. The birds flapped in his hands, unblemished and perfect.
Selim and Anahit
.
Sacrificial doves.
Minas leaned over and whispered in his son's ear, clear and authoritative.

‘Be good to her, my son. Don't shame me again.'

Selim had thought his father at least would take his part against the others. But no. There was something secret between Minas and his sister, something shiny and complicit. He'd seen his father's face darken when Anahit told him Selim had made her pregnant, but it was more in disapproval of his own son than in judgement of his sister and her daughter. Everyone blamed Selim. They said he was reckless, always had been, even as a child, that he should have known better. Everyone blamed him, except for his mother. He watched Siran now as she stood a little apart from Minas and Lilit, her face arranged into a studied neutrality. For the first time since he was born, he saw that her ears were naked.

Lining the street in a trailing circle were familiar faces, grinning under a trifling drizzle. Someone unfurled an oiled umbrella over the bride. She touched her rain-damp hair, smoothing it at the temples, checked to see the earrings Siran had given her still dangled cold and significant at her neck. Thickly gold as the hairs on her legs, turquoise as the veins at her wrists, the thin white skin over her breasts traced with blue. Her mother sighed.

Selim glanced at Lilit for a moment and a shadow of doubt passed over both their foreheads.
You forced me into this. Now you owe
me everything, you owe me my life.
He knew what she was thinking in turn:
Will I be punished for wedding cousin to cousin? Will my daughter be
cursed? The Arabs do it all the time.

Minas coughed slightly and frowned as well, but Selim knew it was only because he was excited. Excited enough to say stupid things. He peered through the veil at the face of Anahit beside him, a face he'd known since his eyes could focus. Such filmy skin and translucent eyelids, such innocence, such trust in him. She wore the heavy bracelet his father had given her the day she arrived in Beirut. Selim looked down at his mirror-shine shoes, flinching from her gaze.

Now he shook his head to chase the memories away. This same bracelet circled his left wrist, caught and refracted the morning light as he rubbed at his neck with a flannel, scrubbed the back of his knees. It was a strange design, of bold interlinked silver squares and Armenian crosses, too masculine for a woman. One of the squares was slightly larger, and on it was engraved the surname
Pakradounian
, twisting along his inner wrist like a snake. It made a lozenge of light on the shower tiles. For a moment more, he was distracted from the demands of his day to stare at the pattern:
Look at the way I influence the world.
Then he turned his attention to his responsibilities. He mentally ticked off the least important items on his list: return telephone calls to the Red Cross, the Red Crescent, the UN, foreign-media news agencies; no time to attend to them now. Enquiries about lists of Muslim deaths, casualties, victims of the Phalange. Unimportant. Anything they claimed could be censored before printing by the Phalangist office, anyway. The priority today was to boost morale. Although the other militias didn't know it, the Phalange had suffered a beating in the last few months. He allowed himself a chuckle.
The Israelis
will soon help us reverse that
.
And they won't stay a minute longer than they
have to. Just long enough to ensure a Maronite peace. Liberators.

The hot water ran out within minutes. He jumped about underneath the dying stream, trying to wash the shampoo out of his hair and the soap out of his armpits without freezing to death. His penis had shrivelled to a dried date: insignificant. It was the only part of his body he forced himself to rinse thoroughly before he turned off the water. After all, it was the most important thing.

They're here,
Sanaya said to herself.
They're really here now.

Scattered machine-gun fire reverberated through the corridors. It felt as though the gunmen would burst through the door in a moment, accuse her of everything and condemn her in an instant. There was a knock. She jumped. The door opened a crack and a black-veiled head poked through. Rouba's cheeks were rounder now, yet unhealthy, as if swollen by her grief. Behind her, Hadiya's flower-like face peeped into the room, eyes huge with fear.

‘Hadiya's scared,' Rouba said. ‘She kept asking for you. And I persuaded Issa to come up too. Do you mind if we—' Issa squeezed through before them, hanging his head. Sanaya came with short hurrying steps, one hand outstretched to Hadiya as she fixed her gaze on him.

‘Sorry, Issa—I—I'm surprised to see you here.'

She scooped Hadiya up into her arms, at the same time surveying Issa's face, attempting unsuccessfully to hide her stare. He was wounded, and blood seeped through an inexpertly tied bandage on his shoulder.

Rouba pushed forward. ‘He won't let me look after him. Sanaya. Maybe you have some influence. He insists on bandaging himself.'

Issa squirmed under the combined gaze of both women, embarrassed.

‘I haven't been out there at all today. My commander said I needed some time off after—after this happened to me. Of course I wanted to keep going—'

‘Of course,' Sanaya echoed. Something in his voice wasn't right, as if he was hiding something. Lying. Yet why should he? She turned to the kitchen, put Hadiya down on a stool with a glass of peach nectar – Italian, a gift of Selim's. She rattled spoons and saucers. Who cared if Issa lied like everyone else? She lied all the time, most of all to herself.
I am strong. I am happy. I won't die like everyone else.
Any truth was a scarce enough commodity nowadays.

‘I'm glad you're all here,' she said. ‘I'll make some tea.'

The light bulb in the kitchen guttered and fizzled out, a faint rumble from afar and it shone steady again. Issa stood and cleared his throat.

‘There's no water, Sanaya. Only what we've saved in the fountain. It's grey.'

‘Damn, I forgot.'

‘I'll go get some.'

‘No you won't!' Rouba said. ‘You're already wounded. I forbid you.'

‘Who are you – a woman – to forbid me?'

‘Be careful,' Sanaya said. ‘We'll think you're serious.'

‘I am,' he replied, and turned to go.

On his way out of the building he patted the outline of his pistol through his shirt. He weaved through clumps of household garbage and stranded cars, others appearing stationary but actually caught in the eternal traffic jam of west Beirut. Some people were trying to get home before more bombardments, others trying to flee the city, even a few out merely for a drive because the incessant waiting at home to be hit was driving them crazy. Each driver's hand fixed permanently to the horn. Those leaving Beirut were jammed in, ten to a car, roof racks strapped with the accumulation of lifetimes: heirloom blankets, gas stoves, overstuffed mattresses, even a black goat that bleated in fury as it was forced to endure the dust, the heat, the smoke and ashes of a disintegrating city. The deserters were the most insistent honkers of all.

He hummed to loud radio music mingling with the honking, in rhythm with the gunfire, syncopating the faraway bombs. The petrol station on the corner was overflowing with people jostling each other to buy enough fuel to get them to the countryside. Taxi drivers loitered nearby, knowing those desperate enough or unprepared enough would pay any price to get out.

As Issa crossed to the seafront, he wrinkled his nose at the stink of raw sewerage thrown up by the tide and admonished himself for showing such weakness. A warrior of the Prophet must be as stone. No human emotion must touch him, only purified fire from the fear of Allah. He thought of his mother with painful affection; that in itself was weakness. He thought of that woman Sanaya, of her immodesty and imperious voice; weakness again.

Weakness. He knew too much about it, didn't want to go back down south. Not ever. He slapped his right hand to his heart. Through the dense haze of car exhausts he spied his regional commander's gleaming Renault. Could it be his? He dived behind a parked car and hid, trembling. He was shirking his duty, staying with the women tonight. He'd be sent back to the south as punishment if he was caught, and this he wouldn't – couldn't – bear. There was something there, something dark, that he dared not admit to himself.

He was letting down his friends, his fellow freedom fighters. He knew at this very moment they were running on foot into Israeli gunfire. The Jews were advancing into the city, by ground and air. His friends were launching homemade grenades at Israeli tanks, unafraid, spines tingling, shrieking the oath of Allah at their foes.
Allahu Akbar
. God is great. He too should be there. They were tearing pieces from their shirts and wrapping them about their foreheads like Khomeini's martyrs. His friends were within twenty feet of death. And here he was, hiding behind a car, twitching in fear.

When the Renault moved on, after what seemed like hours, he made for Rue Hamra. There was sure to be at least one shop open to buy some bottles of water. Those renegade shopkeepers would never pass up a chance to make a profit, even at the risk of being bombed. He ran down the street now, afraid the bombing might begin again. His head jerking to the right and left. Signs on the awnings showed more French, less Arabic, these days. Some were even replaced by Hebrew graffiti, no doubt scrawled by the Phalange.

Tattered posters of the Syrian president smiled at him. Assad everywhere: on the shuttered shopfronts, flapping in the wind from the sea, on the windscreens of cars alongside shiny pictures of Bashir Gemayel, the Phalangist poster boy, in his aviator sunglasses and a deeper shade of tan. Other posters, more garish: Yasir Arafat parting his fleshy lips in a leer and gazing toward the green-girdled fantasy of a free Palestine.
Butchers all
, Issa thought.
And that Arafat worse than all of
them, pretending to do right by his people and all the while only looking after
himself. Hypocrite.
Syrian or Lebanese or Palestinian, all they wanted was earthly power without the will of Allah.