Bone Ash Sky (13 page)

To date, the glorious Ottoman Empire spans the Caucasus to Eastern
Anatolia and as far as the Balkans,
he wrote
. Unfortunately, the Great War
has put a stop to any further imperialist ambitions. The Allies are doing
enough of that.
He put the pen down, chin on hand. The other boys' shouts grew raucous. He picked up his pen again, inked out
glorious.

Lilit came through the door, waving goodbye with her kerchief to someone who had only just run past below the hedge; she was still laughing, flushed with heat and vanity and the small, sweet deceits of her afternoon. Minas straightened up, peering through the cracked and flawed pane.

‘Who was that, chasing you to the front door of our house?'

‘Nobody. Anyway, Mr Nosey, you're too young to question me about what I do.'

‘Wait till Mamma gets home and you'll have something to worry about. Mincing around here in your red shoes.'

She poked out her tongue, admiring the bright wooden clogs she wore, pointing her toe rudely toward him. He refrained from his desire to hit her, retreating into lofty disdain. He hadn't much respect for her nowadays; she was out all the time, neglecting her chores, hiding in overgrown thickets and caves with her boyfriend. He even saw her at it once, moaning and licking at this boy's face, eyes closed against the world. He came upon them by accident, glad they hadn't spied him and relieved to escape without a thrashing. They were high on the slope of the mountain, under the shelter of cliff-side carvings his teacher told him dated from the Bronze Age. Etched designs of knowledge trees and streams of wisdom. Spiral suns and moons shaped like curving prows, for navigating sweeter dreams. Van cats with eyes of blue and amber; every beast of field and steppe. Such beasts, his sister and that boy. It disgusted him, Lilit's open need, the slight whimpers she made as she turned her head from side to side.

Now she tore a thick crescent from the bread on the table and devoured it, keeping half an eye on him.

‘Hey, I just baked that! It's all we have for tonight.'

She ignored him, proceeding to swallow her last morsel and tear another piece from the ashy, still-warm disc.

‘Mmm. Needs some oil and honey, I think—'

He couldn't let her get away with this. He bounded in front of her and grabbed her high up near the armpit. The bread fell to the ground and she fell with it, gasping, still laughing, tickling him hard until he fell on top of the bread too and bellowed at her to stop with breathless, wound-up cries.

They scrambled to their feet in a sudden shadow cast from the open door. It was Mamma.

‘What is going on here? I leave you two alone for an hour and what do I see?'

Minas picked up the bread from the ground and put it on the table again, giving the edges little pats here and there to squash it back into place.

Lilit lay with Yervan in his father's stables. Sounds all around were muted: the low cackle of a broody hen, rustling of straw – ‘It could be rats,' she whispered, but he shook his head – the high, limpid call of the shepherd to his few remaining lambs. She was almost content here, Yervan's arm strong around her waist, her head carved into the curve of his shoulder. Yet at the same time not completely content; she didn't like his attention to be somewhere other than on her.

She'd traversed fields of green-capped wheat to come to his house, afraid of being seen by a relative or neighbour on the main road and questioned. She was especially wary of Yervan's father seeing her on his property, making haste as she climbed the fence to run toward the stables. The old man had been heard to say he would kill the boy himself before he saw him married to a Pakradounian, with no dowry to speak of and a mother who read American books when she should have been bearing sons.

Her skirt was soaked through to her drawers by the dew that lay thick on the crops even at noon; spring had arrived late this year and the earth still retained the damp and danger of winter. Her eyes were dazzled by the intensity of wild poppies and anemones thrusting out of the grass. She picked a few of the reddest for Yervan, and took off her sodden skirt when she arrived, as well as her stockings. There they lay now, faintly human still from the imprint of her legs, crumpled from being peeled off in such haste. She wondered if they were dry enough to wear again, although she luxuriated in this half-nudity, Yervan's rough wool sleeve against the smoothness of her belly.

She sat up and checked on her stockings, feeling the dampness of fabric between thumb and forefinger. The anemones were limp now, already shedding their petals. Yervan moved his body a little to the left, finding a more comfortable position. She took the flowers and began pulling the heads off poppies, scattering them over his face and torso. Yervan didn't stir. He lay on his back, eyes wide open, looking beyond the vaulted roof to something else. His mastiff slept beside him, snoring gently in its dreams, and Yervan kept one hand on the dog's coarse flank.

She lay down again, throwing petals at his hair. If she moved her head a little to the right she could see his profile: too close, even painful, the edges of brow and nose and chin sharp against the fading light. He didn't respond to her, merely kept gazing far away, his face still and unmoving at her side with its fall of crimson.

All afternoon he'd been that way, refusing to caress her when she undressed, not talking much, sighing too often. She had lain like that for hours now, shivering, exposed, and he hadn't said anything at all. No compliments. Not even pleasantries. Selfish. Wrapped in his big man's thoughts, while she curled up beside him, freezing. And hungry. There wasn't much food left at home anymore, what with Kurds coming on midnight raids and the Turks taking the spoils. Shopkeepers in Van had barricaded their doors and windows to no avail. The peasants in Garden City could do nothing when they woke in the morning to find all their fruit and vegetables gone. Yet Yervan's parents were rumoured to have stockpiles. People even whispered they were collaborators.

‘I must go,' Lilit said. ‘Mamma will be home soon.'

He continued to look upward, not heeding her movements as she rose and pulled on her skirt, an old velvet jacket far too tight, so she looked awkward when she walked and tried to swing her arms. It was not like him to ignore anything she did. She bundled one of her breasts further into her blouse and leaned over him.

‘Yervan? I said I'm going.'

He passed a hand over his eyes, scowled at nothing in particular.

‘I'm sorry, Lilit, I just feel so lazy – and what's the point of anything?'

She laughed, but not too loudly in case someone should hear.

‘Has your papa been waking you too early for the chores?'

‘No—no. He lets me sleep late when I'm not at school. But—I'm not well, I think.'

She bent down further, felt a wave of concern flood her face.

‘Do you have pain?'

She pressed her palm to his forehead, pulled up his shirt to expose his belly.

‘No, no pain. I think I'm—frightened. In my stomach and my head. Did you know the Armenians in the army have had their weapons confiscated? Papa told me they'll just be killed now.'

‘Why would they do that, Yervan? The Muslims need us, always have. We're smarter than them.'

She scoffed at his fears and left, after kissing him on the mouth and demanding they meet tomorrow at the same time. The skin of her forearms prickled with impatience. As she turned to go, Yervan yelled after her, heedless of any farmhands hearing him.

‘Lilit! I'm worried you and I are doing the wrong thing and we'll be punished for it too.'

The dog followed her to the boundary of his master's property, as if seeing her safely away, but she ignored him as she had ignored Yervan. Surely he was being silly, too sensitive. As if God were an irascible old prude, with nothing better to do than punish people who loved each other! Yet when she walked, scuffing her clogs on the gravel like any child, she wondered if Yervan was right. If God wouldn't punish them, the Turks would.

Now she'd seen him, she was somewhat bolder and scorned the wet way home through the fields. It was quicker to pass the central square but she didn't look in the shop windows as she always did. She was already late. Mamma might be home already, and Minas was sure to tell. Also, there were more soldiers than usual crowding the middle of the square, loitering near the bakery, squatting on their haunches with cigarettes as if their time was their own. Of course they were all Turks. A pair got up when they saw her and pretended to be on duty, tearing down some flaking insurgents' posters from the walls.
Better ten days' liberty than
to die the slaves we've been.
She tried to avoid them by walking fast and keeping her head down. She couldn't help noticing the others tearing at freshly baked loaves, fluffy and white and unlike any bread she had seen in a long while, cramming it into their mouths. Others held
simit
, the ring-shaped sesame rolls she remembered Papa bringing home on winter evenings when she was a child. Before this war raging through all of Europe, before the Turks had taken over the town. It was all she could do not to beg them to give her one.

She didn't like the way the soldiers looked at her.
Is it wrong to let
Yervan touch me? Can they see it?
Their stares confirmed her suspicions. They lingered too long on the flex of her breasts and arms, on her blackbright hair under a brighter scarf. She reddened, looked down at her feet. She knew Turks were afraid of blue eyes, thought they could cast evil spells. Who knew what they would do to her if they took it into their heads she was a witch? An Armenian witch. They kept staring. One soldier's fists were clenched at his sides. Lilit turned away. She began to stride over the cobblestones – hard to do in clogs. One Turk stood and leapt in front, barring her way.

‘Hey, little one,' he said, stretching his arms out wide.

She dodged him, but now there were others all around, laughing at her and shouting in Turkish.

‘Pretty whore! Pretty unbeliever!'

She crossed her arms over her chest, tried to find a way out of the crush of men's bodies, their sweat, their breath.

‘Come on,
gaivour
, how about a look at this?'

The soldier in front made as if to unbutton his trousers. She ducked away from him, evaded grasping hands, running through the mass of stamping boots and kit and laughing faces. As she ran she could feel them pelting her with their pieces of bread.

Bread at home became blacker and coarser and Lilit's hands hurt from kneading. She complained of it every day and Minas could see tiny cracks of blood in her knuckles when he looked hard enough. He would have baked for her but the jobs Mamma assigned him now were all out of the house. He grew tired of spotting the grains left behind on the threshing floor after the army requisitioned the town's harvest, hauling his meagre collection onto the table before stomping out to sit in the yard, head on knees, eyes smarting.

‘Don't whine,' Lilit called to him, wiping the last of the grey dough from her fingers. ‘At least you're not here when they burst in searching for arms.'

She took to hiding in the back storeroom whenever there was rumour of a search, a woollen scarf snug around her face. Minas felt sorry and brought her mugs of well water and even some of his simpler books; there was nothing else he could do. She had only finished three years of school before Mamma and Papa kept her home, so her reading of Turkish and even Armenian script was not very advanced. Minas sat with her some evenings and tried to teach her the harder words, but she became petulant and flung the book to the floor. He knew she hadn't seen Yervan for weeks. He tried to care, but couldn't.

There was more talk of killings at night, rape by the light of a lamp. Fortunately, nothing like that had happened to anyone in the Garden City neighbourhood, or to any of their relatives in the walled town. Only the poorer folk who lived near the army barracks. The streetwalkers who prowled the banks of the lake at night. The widows. The beggar women. But one could never be sure, Mamma said. So Lilit was banished to the storeroom for more and more hours each day, and Minas was ordered not to play outside with his friends from school. Most of them had joined the resistance, anyway.