Bone Ash Sky (11 page)

He tore down the newer poster of Gemayel and tried to rip it in half. It was laminated, impossible to tear, so he threw it to the ground, stamping on it with his scuffed boots.

‘Hey, son! What are you doing?'

An old man leaned out of his newspaper booth, upsetting straight rows of cigarettes and chocolate bars and Tic Tac dispensers.

‘That's our future Christian president! What business have you to do this?'

‘There's no God but Allah.'

‘Are you crazy?'

Issa looked up and down the street. In a dawning joy he realised he and the old man were the only people on the rubbish-strewn, windswept street. Not even the foolhardy shoeshine boys had dared to venture out today. He scanned the booth, the old man, the pornographic magazines, the rows upon rows of bottles. Soft drink. Water.

‘Give me five of your biggest bottles of water.'

He took out his gun; it peeked almost shyly from the gap in his shirt buttons. The old man saw it and started to cry.

‘Don't kill me. Please don't kill me. I'm just trying to make a living.'

‘Give me the water.' A weird, unknown exhilaration took hold of him. It was unlike the adrenaline and raw animal pleasure he took in operating the tank down south, in attacking Israeli soldiers, in hand-to-hand combat against a creature equally armed and dangerous with killing lust. This man was pleading and sobbing. His mouth opened and closed, pink as a child's in search of nourishment. Issa raised his pistol to the old man's smooth oval head and watched as bottles were arranged on the counter by shaking hands. He put the pistol back, hugged the water to his chest and strolled away.

Sanaya doled out her daily ration of face cream each night before bed, frightened of the day there would be no more, yet at the same time ashamed of herself: others were already drinking salt water and eating garbage from the road. She knew Selim could get her some, even from Paris, but didn't want to ask. Why not? She asked him for almost everything else. Yet it was at these times she felt a jab of guilt. If he weren't so free with his largesse, would she want him at all?

She wiped off her make-up, spat into a cotton-ball and dabbed at her eyes. ‘Spit's good for the skin,' Rouba said. ‘Enzymes.' Tonight she was restless; she grimaced into her reflection and decided she looked older than ever, tired. Her eyes, once so bright and clear, were drooping, the irises a muddy colour. Wrinkles fanned out from the lids. She frowned, smiled, pouted at the mirror – and felt ashamed. She wanted to be frivolous like those Christian girls in east Beirut, wanted to see European films at the cinema, eat ice-cream at the seaside, travel north to a seafood restaurant in Byblos, white awnings pulled tight against a rising wind. She wanted to go with a man, any man, to that tiny twoseat cafe near the Pigeon Rocks, wear floaty dresses, string bikinis, have sex. She couldn't do any of these things in west Beirut. Except the last.

So she waited for Selim to knock on her door once a week, sometimes twice, if she was lucky. He could cross from one side of the Green Line to the other, unlike her. His militia protected him at checkpoints, with M16 rifles and Sherman tanks. She readied the apartment for his arrival: killed the spiders which determinedly spun their webs across her cornices, dusted the gilt-framed lithographs of Lebanese mountains and rivers she might be destined to never see again, mourned the loss of an old Beirut she half remembered, the one part of her childhood memory she allowed herself to dwell on fondly.

The rest was all falsity, the crumbling facades of the city's buildings, her frustrated dreams. Yet at times the destruction of Beirut pained rather than strengthened her resolve; at times she heard the tinkling of her mother's voice like a taunt.
Don't think you can fool me.
The fall of Beirut will mirror your own decay.
She remembered her self-consciousness as a teenager, her creeping boredom, the frilled little girl's dress she was forced to wear that scratched at her new breasts and throat. Mother was always at home to welcome visitors on Sunday afternoons, with murmured gossip under rattling teacups, the low laughter of well-dressed women, a lone piano playing the latest sheet music from France.

She could feel it as she woke and made tea and sat on the balcony in her mother's dressing-gown, that pink silk grown threadbare under the arms: she'd become another forgotten member of the Sunni bourgeoisie, this new class of existential emigrants, homeless souls, internal exiles. Much as she despised them for their wealth and stupidity, their middleclass values, she'd become them. Become her mother of thirty years ago, a refugee of memory and the mind. She had something in common with Selim, at least. He always went on about being the son of an Armenian.

They had met at a party in east Beirut a year ago, when it was still possible for civilians to cross the Green Line and back again in a night. One of the many glittering receptions given by a leading hostess of the city. Tables so full of meze plates and serving platters and tureens the polished surfaces were no longer visible. More drink available than any of the well-stocked bars on the Corniche, and a record player pumping out a distorted version of the
Sgt. Pepper
album. It was one of those conspicuously wealthy parties, in appalling taste; the mood was jaded, edgy, slightly dangerous, and she found herself sitting alone near a potted palm, glad of the viewing screen it offered.

Her friend Amani had invited her. ‘Come along,' she had said earlier that evening. ‘My husband's away lecturing and I have nobody to go with.' Sanaya agreed, thinking the two of them would have a few quiet drinks, laugh at the antics of the other guests, then leave.

She needed a diversion; she'd been alone too long, spent too much time in her apartment, had even pleaded illness when her cousins insisted on their monthly drinks at her place. She wasn't sure why she felt so apathetic lately. Well, she was sure, but didn't care to admit it to herself. Somehow the bright girlhood dreams she once cherished had faded. There was no large future out there for her. There was no adventure, romance, success. This was it. Life was mundane and dangerous, and the realisation of this made her curl up into herself.

So that night she forced herself to swallow her social queasiness and dress for the party. She thought Amani would introduce her to a few friends, share some idle gossip. But Amani was out to have a good time – too good a time. As soon as they arrived, she disappeared into a side door with a tall man, a bottle of champagne and a wink at Sanaya.

Sanaya tried to smile when people walked past, raised their drinks to her. Others danced on the balcony, threw their empty glasses down, trying to skim them across the surface of the sea. They pointed and exclaimed at colours in the sky. Bursts of light from bombs and shells falling in other parts of the city were merely a backdrop to the view. Stars extinguished. Another explosion. Familiar war. The incessant crack of machine-gun fire, only a faintly off-the-beat bass line to the music inside.

Sanaya hummed along to ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds'. It was a strange choice. Out of date, ironic even, nostalgic for better days when there was no war, when Beirut was that much-lauded but true cliché: Paris of the East. Sanaya closed her eyes. She wanted to dance alone, oblivious to the ugliness around her, float among clouds with diamonds in place of pupils, a third eye shining bright. She let herself sway a little, opened her eyes. A man walking by raised his glass to her, self-deprecating, with a twist to the mouth. He was heavily tanned, like a construction worker, the whites of his eyes too bright. A woman behind him struck poses on the coffee table, in her own self-imposed trance, pushing aside the tiny, heaped plates onto the carpet with her stiletto heels. The man stopped in front of Sanaya, his body blocking out the other people. He was wearing a tuxedo, and although his dress shirt was half out of his trousers she thought him pretentious.

‘Having fun?'

She raised her eyes up to him and smirked, sitting more upright on her chair, cross-legged, almost prim except for her bare, hose-free legs.

‘Not really.'

His attention wandered for a moment; a blonde leaned backward over the balcony, screaming, her bell-shaped sleeves flying in the breeze. Sanaya looked, too, and grimaced.

‘I haven't had enough to drink, maybe that's why.'

He topped up her glass with whisky from a bottle he carried under his arm. She didn't think it strange at the time. She was only conscious of him looking at her. His too-white eyes were now closed, the violet lids veined with thread-like capillaries. When he opened them, he didn't blink. From his vantage point, she felt he could see right down into her cleavage. She stood up, too close in the humid, smoke-filled air, uncomfortably close. Excitingly close. He didn't move, their torsos and faces almost touching.

‘What?' she asked. ‘Is there something wrong?'

He shook his head. Together in rhythm, they turned and downed their glasses of whisky. He shook out a packet of cigarettes.

‘Smoke?'

‘Sometimes.'

She let him lean forward and light the cigarette for her, smelled something from his hair, spice and sourness; a lock of it touched her face. She shivered, felt the pressing-down sensation of desire in her belly, runnels of energy, almost like anxiety, or ambiguous signals of distress. She inhaled, felt the smoke enter her brain in tendrils like another form of lust.

That had been a year ago, to the day. An anniversary of sorts. Tonight, Selim would be dropped off at her apartment by his fellow militiamen, after an evening session at the gym. It was always a different Mercedes, armour-plated, that she could see from her upstairs window: always a different number plate, but always with the same gleam, the same plushness, the same understated malice. He was still sweaty and red-faced when he arrived, clutching a half-full bottle of Johnny Walker and jumbo packets of Marlboros, tokens of the generosity and goodwill of Israel and America. No matter how many times he brought these gifts, she tried to make him take them back. But she still wanted them, regretted her scruples once again when he took them away.

The money he brought her she always accepted. He pressed folded notes into her hand in rainbow currencies – dollars, deutschmarks, pounds – citing her cracked ceiling, her mother's massive, mahogany furniture, the leak from next door's bathroom seeping into her hall. He never brought her Lebanese liras, worthless for anything but buying bread and newspapers. She conferred with him and nodded at his suggestions, but when he was gone she put the money away under the bed, separate from her own emergency stash. She had no heart for repairs and purchases. She knew Selim didn't even notice each time he visited that the apartment hadn't changed at all. She wasn't sure what to do with the money, but continued to stretch her hand out for more. There was tangible security in so many bills, even if they were worthless.

He eased her into his arms as she stood by the door and, further still, into a blanket of cologne. Under the green upland scent, something rancid as bacteria. She extricated herself from him and lit another cigarette, took some Valium from the packet he proffered.

‘Sit down and stop pawing me. I need a glass of water with this.'

‘I can paw you better in bed.'

She let him lead her by the elbow to her bedroom, swallowed her pills dry.

Selim, as second-in-command to the Christian Phalange leader, specialised in assassinations of key Muslims: rival militiamen, political subversives, intellectuals. The regiments within the Phalange sported religious titles evocative of the Crusades: Selim's was called The Knights of the Virgin. Whenever he – rarely – went into battle against the PLO or any of the other factions, he wore an enormous rose-red crucifix embroidered onto his breastplate.

‘So they know where to hit me,' he told her. ‘Right over the heart.'

He saw himself as a Crusader of old, defending Christendom against the bloody hand of Islam. His brand of idealism came with an essential pragmatism, his religion merely a sentimental exercise reserved for Sunday mornings and the lulling ritual of litany, requiring less a conviction of faith than a simple appreciation of the pleasures of incense and flowers. Certainty and absolution, strictly earthly concerns. The fact that Sanaya was born a Muslim didn't seem to pose a problem in this rough reasoning of his. It was as though he saw women operating outside religion: featureless, fashioned by man not God, neutral bounty, unwieldy spoils of war.

She didn't want to marry a Muslim. This was partly why she continued to see Selim. Even with his early paunch, his bloodshot eyes, his drinking, he was a good catch. His legs and arms were strong; in summer, with his tan, he looked like a man of the land. She loved this about him, the thrum of sinew and muscle beneath his flesh. She loved his thick eyelashes. She loved his glossy hair. Or so she liked to tell herself. He had power in this upside-down world of war. And some of his tarnished lustre brushed onto her, however briefly, if only when she lay in bed with him before dusk, saffron circle of the late sun clawing its way through her blinds. His palms were soft on her belly, her cheeks, through her hair, his thighs hairless and vulnerable between hers. It was the Armenian in him, he said. Pliable, but steely beneath.