Bone Ash Sky (26 page)

Minas rummaged in his tattered pants. A girl studied him with a smirk pulling at the corners of her mouth, the skin around it pitted with tiny sores from the dry heat of the day and the wind and cold of those desert nights.

He looked up, noticed her bug-eyed stare.

‘What?’

‘Nothing. Any food in there?’

He scratched at his testicles again, pinched and then held out something in his thumb and forefinger for her to inspect.

‘Got it. Just catching lice.’

She smiled, disappointed.

‘Eat it. Better than dead dogs and locusts.’

He made a face.

‘I have my limits.’

‘How long will they keep us here?’

‘Forever.’

‘What do you mean?’

A guard banged his rifle butt on the ground beside them.

‘Enough talking, little rats!’

Minas spoke, hardly moving his lips.

‘This is the end.’

Later that day while he roamed the camp looking for food, the girl managed to slip beside him. He barely registered her presence, intent on scouring the fence line for new grass, which he held to his mouth and sucked until his lips and teeth were stained green. In the distance, he was aware of Bedouin tribesmen huddled around their camels, watching the camp with what he could discern as a mixture of fascination and fear. He turned to her and pointed.

‘See those men? I wonder if they could help us.’

The girl wouldn’t look.

‘Them? What do they care about us? They’re Muslims.’

She nodded toward the centre of the camp. He was surprised afresh at the sores around her lips, her lank chestnut plaits.

‘A few women killed themselves just before,’ she said. ‘People are fighting over the bodies.’

What for?

‘Fresh food.’

He flashed his teeth at her; made a fast, exaggerated, chewing motion.

‘Should we join them?’

She laughed: a soft, strangled sound.

‘I have my limits too. So far.’

They spent a while combing the ground for more vegetation.

‘I love you.’

He looked around, startled.

‘What?’

‘I love you and want you close to me before I die.’

She looked straight ahead, licked her cracked lips with a violet tongue.

‘Please.’

He took her little finger in his hand and nodded.

Fatima caught Lilit undressing for bed one evening by the light of an oil lamp. Lilit blushed and backed into a dark corner, hastily tying her robe together over her swell of stomach. Fatima followed her, until she was wedged into a corner of the room with the other woman pressing against her.

‘Stop looking at me with those big round eyes. I’m in his bed tonight. So don’t even bother putting on any of your stinking ointments.’

She nodded, her eyes grown wider in alarm. Fatima came closer until her breath was rancid against Lilit’s mouth.

‘Don’t think I’ll ever forget, even if he does. You’re still an Armenian to me.’

Fatima left the room then, flinging off her veil so it trailed behind her as she flounced through the door. When she was gone and Lilit could no longer hear her rustle down the corridor, she untied her robe, watched it fall open across her stomach and slither down to the floor. She let herself follow its trajectory, sliding down the wall and squatting on her thighs in the corner. She rocked back and forth, some small comfort. She sighed; a broken, wavering sound.
Why does such a mundane
exchange make me shake so much
? She splayed her hands open over her nude stomach and tried to quiet her fears with the faint human warmth from her child.

The next day, Fatima appeared distant from Suleiman at the morning meal. She and Lilit customarily stood behind him, one on either side, and waited until he finished before they could take a bite. Usually Fatima snatched morsels from Suleiman’s plate as she leaned over his shoulder, making them both laugh. Yet today when she sat cross-legged opposite Lilit on the rug, she ate little of her bread and even less yoghurt, her eyes downcast. Lilit also noticed her hands trembling, but Fatima walked about the house all day with a strained smirk on her face.

Suleiman took Lilit into his bed the next night and the night after that. He praised her pearl-skinned buttocks and the roundness of her wrists and ankles, circled by henna. She floated about the house in a jangle of gifts: silver jewellery, linen scarves fringed with turquoise beads, shiny packages of cherry-scented mastic. Fatima’s smirk began to smudge into a frown. At the end of the week she was so downcast Lilit forced herself to speak. She approached Fatima in the courtyard, where she stood by the main fountain looking into a swirling pool of water.

‘Fatima.’

She looked around, saw Lilit and frowned.

‘What do you want, slave? Go away.’

‘I wanted to ask you why—why it has to be so difficult between us. If only—’

‘If only you weren’t here!’

Fatima sat on the rim of the fountain and burst into tears. She put her head in her hands and convulsed, shoulders shaking with the force of her crying. Lilit knelt down next to her. This woman had finally become human. Not lovable, but human. She wanted to place a hand on Fatima’s shoulder, stroke her, comfort her. But she too couldn’t forgive the pain of the past few months.

‘Fatima, it’s not my choice to be here.’

When Fatima lifted her head from her hands Lilit recoiled at the spectacle of her face. She was a fearsome sight, tears and mucus and kohl combined to tragic effect.

‘I can’t have a baby. I’ll never have one. My first husband, Suleiman’s brother – he threatened to divorce me, before he died. Now you’re here, Suleiman will stop keeping me as well.’

Lilit looked around the silent courtyard, fearful of Suleiman hearing her. She heard herself hiss at Fatima under her breath and hated herself for lying even as she said it.

‘Does he love you anyway? I don’t see it. Does he love me? Of course not. I don’t think he loves anyone at all.’

Fatima gulped, dabbing at the corners of her eyes with her veil. Lilit made herself come closer and put a light hand on Fatima’s knee.

‘See how he treats you already! Like a common concubine, not a wife. We should both be united against him, Fatima. It’s our only hope.’

Fatima leaned over, fixing Lilit with her stone-idol eyes.

‘Give the baby to me, Lilit. Then I’ll help you escape. You can go back to Armenia.’

Lilit lowered her eyes and nodded. She was no longer sure where she belonged.

Minas grew to know the camp and even respect its workings: the vomit-coloured sand, its erratic pulse of killing and torture and the few blessed hours at night of respite from terror. What gnawed at him was more than fatigue and the familiar grip of hunger; it was the constant mental strain of keeping alive.

Each morning at dawn the camp commander blared his refrain from a loudspeaker: ‘Armenians! The lice crawling on you are less vermin than you are.’ The prisoners picked at their sores, peeled the scabs off their wounds, exposing still more moisture for lice to feed on. Nearly all the inmates were naked, their clothes stolen by the guards or disintegrated into rags from the forced march through the desert. Minas had lost his trousers to another inmate weeks ago, trading them for an extra mouthful of gruel. Food was more important than warmth; that he knew. Yet he held on to his threadbare shirt, which still managed to hide the earrings glinting in his nipples.

With bared yellow teeth, the trained dogs were three-headed monsters guarding the gates of Hell. They watched the prisoners as if eyeing butcher’s cuts of meat. Minas supposed he looked like that now: red raw, shapeless, moving slowly if at all. He couldn’t see himself. He stared at the other prisoners and tried to imagine his own face in that man’s hollow cheeks, this woman’s sunken eye sockets. The formless fear he read in each person’s eyes, the downward scrape of mouth. A few of his teeth had been knocked out by a drunken guard, and he had taken to sucking at the inside of his cheeks like an old man. Some days he rubbed his hand over his jawline and the manly rasp of stubble always surprised him. He’d lost all perspective. He saw a boy his age attacked by the pack of dogs, and guards standing by and laughing. That night he thought about the boy with the curly hair he’d sworn at in the marketplace, so long ago it seemed. Maybe he was already dead.

Some of the inmates were more frightening to him than the dead. They seemed to have withdrawn from the present altogether, men and women drifting from sleeping block to morning assembly and back again in a trance. Sometimes he was tempted to steal their food rations; they seemed so passive – he was sure it would work. Yet he put it off, alternately fascinated and repelled. They didn’t speak, didn’t answer when spoken to. They didn’t make eye contact with anyone, indeed seemed not to breathe at all. The guards found it easier to kill them this way, no doubt. He wasn’t so upset at those times; it didn’t seem to matter if they were alive or dead. He almost welcomed the moment of disbelief, the swift dispatch. As if a favour had been done for them.

He’d been assigned a job these last few days. He was healthier than most of the other prisoners, one of the few young boys in the camp, and almost agile except for the blisters on his feet from the march. He had to help bury the dead bodies after they had been shot or knifed to death. Also those tortured in the interrogation centre – the only permanent building in the whole compound – with its barred high windows and twenty-four-hour lamps, burning, burning, a thread of fire glimpsed under the locked door. There wasn’t so much to learn from such broken and diseased prisoners, he assumed. But he knew the Turks continued interrogating each arriving convoy for clues to hidden cash, heirlooms, the undying myth of Armenian gold. Some of the corpses he carried were twisted in death-agony, others serene and pink, placid mouths smiling at the sky. Yet they were all heavy, even the children. Heavy with the weight of mortality.

He felt a mixture of shame and disgust for the corpses. Confusing, his divided sentiments. He dragged the bodies from killing floor to mass grave, wrists threatening to snap each time and nails bleeding. The guards whipped him on the back and sometimes around the face and never ceased to abuse him. He grew to admire them for it – they articulated for him the punishment he couldn’t inflict on himself: daily atonement for his guilt at still being alive.