Bone Ash Sky (22 page)

I pull off my clothes, stand and gaze at a ghostly face above my nakedness. Something in my own expression – dazed, passive, almost surprised – reminds me of my grandmother. Lilit looked like that in the days before I left. As if she regretted letting me go. Or was it more than that? There was so much left unsaid, so many memories untouched, left to moulder in chests like the poppy-embroidered veil – such fine woven silk – I once glimpsed under layers of goat's hair blankets. Now I have it, swaddling Lilit's Koran. I hadn't asked Lilit about it then, knowing any more questions would only hurt us both. Was it given to her by the teenage sweetheart or the Turkish husband? Did she wear it because she wanted to, or because she was forced? I see her aging face in an unknown future, marked by war and work and the loss of everything familiar. Her shortened girlhood, its petty joys and loves.

I know all too well the details of the deportations, forced marches through the desert, the cattle trains that came out of nowhere like noisy harbingers of Hitler's Final Solution.
Who, after all, remembers the
Armenians today?
And who remembers my father? There's nobody left alive who knew him.

I laughed and joked in the dimly lit restaurant last night with D'Andrea, drank four glasses of arak, meandered to the beach across the road together. It was past midnight, past two, past three, the time when identities merge and fall apart, when alliances are forged and broken. As the evening wore on, after I'd told him whose daughter I am, he'd become brasher, larger, less complicated. I began to like him more; his former affectations seemed funny rather than condescending. So I let him hold my hand as we clambered over the rocks in the dark, almost falling over and laughing at ourselves. His palm was alert and cool in the dark, and I felt safe. I was open to any experience, felt maybe that was why I'd come here. I let him stop me with a hand on my upper arm, then slowly kiss me, his tongue a swollen muscle in my mouth. But when we got to the sea my mood became more sombre.

The strip of beach when we got there was a grave: dark and narrow. Nobody else around. I sat close to him on the pebbles. It was nice not to care, not to strive. I wanted to lie there and fall asleep, his heavy arm over my hip. I lay down, then got up again almost straight away, thinking better of it. I think he noticed, and I could feel the affront in him. His voice changed. He started talking about the man who ordered the killing of my father, without mentioning any names. Said he actually knew who it was, but needed to know that I could be trusted with the information.

‘Trusted with information about my own father's death?' I blurted out. ‘You don't need to tell me, anyway. I already know it was Islamic Jihad.'

‘Yes, but who?' he shot back. ‘I know the name of the man who effectively pulled the trigger, who arranged the whole thing.'

He told me he knew the family from his work in the camps, knew who the dead man had been, and who his child was, a little girl. I closed my eyes, put my head on my knees. I didn't want to hear it, not from him. Suddenly, I was scared. If I found out the name of this man, of his family, I would have to do something. I would have to befriend them, or make enemies of them. Either way, I would lose.

I think he felt my shutting-off, because then he licked his index finger – I could hear the wetness of his mouth in the dark – and placed it on my nape, leaning forward into my hair. I jumped.

‘I can have them taken care of,' he whispered, his breath tickling my scalp.

I sat up, my hand still on the recorder in my bag, almost brought it out to show him how stupid he'd been. But he didn't give me time. He lunged forward, his leg hard over mine. I heard the catch in his breath, almost a sob, the bitter excitement, but I turned away, tried to get up. He held me down, swiftly unzipped his trousers. I saw his white, baggy underpants, the limp penis. Now I was panicking. The black night that was so still a moment before seemed full of our loud, rasping breaths. We fought without speaking. He pushed me back onto the pebbles, grinding against me with all the weight of his middle-aged body. My tight lips, his soft paunch against my belly. The pebbles felt sharper now, dangerous. He took out his penis, nudged it against my mouth. I bucked. All I could think of was my father, floating somewhere above us, outraged, and I broke free, sprinting across the sand, toward the lights of the promenade.

Now I lie back on the bed with my eyes wide open. I can't get up, can't even shower. I can't believe this has happened to me. Me, at my age. I think of how his unremarkable face looked, fuzzy around the edges from moonlight and arak, precise as a housewife when he unzipped his trousers. His eyes were open, searching my face for some intimation of what I felt. What did I really feel? Fear? Curiosity? Desire? Disappointment. I close my eyes and try to sleep again as the day's light fades, my pillow pressed like a stone to my belly.

DER EZ ZOR, 1915

T
here was malice and revelry in the faces of the Turks, their lewd jokes and swearing, the aroma of raki from their mouths colouring the air.
Not
such good Muslims after all,
Lilit thought. She saw a man at the back of the mob puff out his weak chest and look about, smiling at the drunken gendarmes who grinned back, frowning at the white naked women who kept their heads lowered to the dust. Lilit kept her head up; she knew by now it was the way to survive. Many women were already mad, maimed beyond recognition, fingernails and toenails gone, disjointed puppets with burnt skin peeling in patches from their faces.

The man moved forward through the marketplace, brushing women with his shoulders as he walked. It was almost as if he had to touch each woman as he passed to steady himself. Most were naked, but some wore rags that were once underclothes: bloomers and corsets and petticoats now grey and disintegrating. Lilit still wore the skirt she'd been wearing in Van, though it hung in limp ribbons now. But she was thankful she had it. Her whole body was black with filth and she hid her breasts with her arms, conscious even in her terror to be ashamed.

She watched his face; he looked as though he would vomit. A woman close by gazed at him in sublime indifference, her proud lion's head created by the lack of a nose. Only a gaping hole remained, the bridge completely cut away. A gendarme saw him staring, too, and boomed in his ear.

‘See this? I taught her a lesson. She kept screaming about her baby, her baby, her arsehole baby. Not a peep out of her now.'

Lilit tried to block out his voice. She squinted at the sinking horizon and the stippled sand dunes with the odd sensation of coming to a place where she knew she would stay. Dead or alive, she wasn't going anywhere. One woman lay on the ground, legs open in a triangle, palms upturned to the sky. The way she'd lowered herself down was careful and pathetic, like an old woman preparing for bed. Seeing this, an obtuse, dangerous anger took hold of Lilit. The light breeze irritating the hairs on the back of her neck seemed complicit, intimate as a lover's or an assassin's breath. Beneath it, the smell of sweat, of meat and blood. And something else mocking her – not rage exactly, but an emptiness, or a profound regret. The gendarmes made her line up in a row with the others, and she suddenly goose-pimpled as the rising wind hit her bare skin. A familiar panic lashed through her as one and two and three, thirty, more, were bound together, now beyond speech or thought or the shame she'd felt so acutely the moment before.

Yet she still stood straight, head held up. Her braid had been hacked off some days before, and she could feel the rough cut at her nape, the bite of the bayonet on tender skin. Her brother, one of the few boys left alive, closed his eyes and murmured to himself. She turned her head to look at him, maybe for the last time: he was growing, already had a faint smudge on his upper lip, reddish strands of hair. He spun around, oblivious, humming.
My darling, my love, your sufferings and joys will
be many.
She pulled him to her to quieten him and felt his bones grind against hers.

But they weren't being killed, not this time. Only sold as slaves.

So many had already been killed in countless ways. Thrown into desert rivers, roped together by the waist so only one bullet would drag them down. Lines of dead women, the whiteness of their thighs. Caves nearby filled with the living, then torched by Turkish boys carrying bundles of wood. Charred stumps, blackened rock, matchstick bones. Mass graves of grandfathers, sons, children without names. Mothers and girls raped, strangled, pushed under clumps of sand.

The man that had been standing at the back now came forward and touched Lilit's arm. She lifted her chin, stared at him. His face was pale, as if he spent a great deal of time indoors, and he wore fine European clothes. She assumed he was checking for typhus or dysentery before he paid, pulling her lips away from her teeth. ‘Gently, gently,' he murmured, studying the whites of her eyes. Pushing a finger into her distended stomach. He came so close she could smell his breath. He stank of desert wells, death and decomposition. The sand and sky and a lone thorn tree seemed to recede behind him into the distance, then come to rest between him and her, suspended in silence amid the chaos.

Lilit leaned forward, then spat in his face. For a moment he stood there, her spit dripping off his forehead onto his lashes. Then he sprang back, wiping it off with the edge of his jacket.

‘Crazy girl,' he whispered. ‘Who do you think you are?'

Three Turkish soldiers came running, bayonets ready. The man put both hands out wide, held them back.

‘It's all right, all right. Nothing happened. She accidentally stepped on my foot.'

Twenty piastres they asked for her, claiming she was still a virgin. Those visibly raped and mutilated went only for five. Tarnished coins, tarnished women, passing from hand to filthy hand. He led her away. When they were out of sight of the gendarmes he placed his soiled jacket over her shoulders.

She looked back at the marketplace once, to see her brother for the last time, but by then it felt as if she'd already left him forever.

Suleiman wasn't aroused in the least by the girl he'd bought; the sight of breasts, small or large or pointy or spaced wide apart, round or sagging, the details of thighs and hips and groins, the emaciation or dimpled fat, the hair under armpits and on legs was too confronting, pathetic. They had all become one strange mass of limbs and no faces. Animals. He had to cut out the expressions and the eyes; it was too much. Most of all, beneath the awe and revulsion he felt was a deep, profound sadness. He would never plumb the depths of this sadness. Women, these women – all women – were unknowable.

And he was distracted. He wasn't happy to be here, afternoon sun and flies, touch of heatstroke coming on, more accounts to do at home and the cook sulking yet again. Something about plates of food being virtually untouched at the feast last night. Did they not appreciate all her efforts? Only Suleiman could appease her. But the summons had come that morning from Zeki Bey, the governor of Der ez Zor, and couldn't be ignored by any Ottoman subject. Anybody disregarding the command could be called a traitor. Even the Syrian Arabs had come. Only males were duty-bound, of course. It wouldn't do to let their women see such horrors.

He'd chosen a woman to buy not because he wanted one, but because not to do so would invite recrimination. The soldiers were so drunk all they wanted was more money to buy raki and wine. He wondered what his dead brother's wife would say when she saw him bring another woman into the household. At least Armenians were people of the book. Even if he did end up sleeping with her the Koran allowed it, though he didn't think it likely he would want to. She was not unattractive, though. She had a small round mouth so she would be tight, that was one good thing. Her thighs seemed thick and strong – she would be bold in bed. He decided to like her.

She stood straight beside him, head held up and with no expression. She was black-haired, which was normal for an Armenian. He preferred blondes: Georgians, Circassians, Northern Greeks. Her braid had been hacked off. At least she wouldn't have head lice if her hair was so short. She still wore a skirt, unlike most of the other women, although it was so ragged it hung about her calves in strips.

Her irises were a flat, serene blue that made him draw breath. They seemed to have no depth, only colour. She looked almost healthy, even robust compared to the terrible condition of the others, and incredibly young. She did have lice, though; he could see them crawling over her hair and under her arms. In her secret hair, too, no doubt. He suppressed the urge to part her legs and look. Her eyes stared at him with no plea, no recognition of him as a human being. He flinched inwardly at this. He didn't like to think she had the moral high ground.

He had given the gendarmes all the liras he had in his pocketbook, not caring how much he paid. After all, what was a human being worth? He had only let himself ask the question for a moment, as he watched the money being counted. He wondered again, with the panic of a man with no recourse, what Fatima would do to him when he walked through the door with another woman.