Bone Ash Sky (27 page)

Many of the older Turks were well disposed toward him, taking him aside to offer a bite from a hard-boiled egg, a cup of raki to fortify him. They asked him if he was tired, made him sit cross-legged at their feet. Some even commented on how beautiful a boy he was, so fair-skinned for an Armenian. They admired his glossy hair, the fineness of his eyebrows. He tried to smile through closed lips, ashamed of his toothlessness even among all this madness. One guard wiped the sweat from Minas’s temples with a clean handkerchief then sniffed at it, and he finally knew. He began to realise they expected sex in return for such small kindnesses, and he learnt to avoid them. Yet he knew, even as he did so, that it was only a matter of time before he would do the unthinkable.

He buried dark-haired infants who looked somehow like his sister, surreptitiously stroking the ringlets on their damp, flushed cheeks. He covered over warm-bellied women who reminded him of his mother, obscured their eyes, suffocated them in sand. He carried teenage girls in his arms, tried not to look at their gaping vaginas and limp, bloodsoaked plaits. He saw a younger boy killed for being too slow, with the spade he had held only a moment ago for digging graves. He saw the curly-haired boy again, but only on days when there was a particularly big burial. Mostly, from what he could see, the boy was adept at gaining favour from the guards, flirting with them and avoiding heavy work.

In the late evenings, after sunset, he returned to the inner camp and lay side by side with the pimpled girl. She always managed to seek him out. He was cruel at first, unfeeling and cold and reeking of shit and sweat and other, more sinister fluids he couldn’t wipe off with sand or fingertips of water from the bucket in the corner. The girl revived him, made him forget where he was for a few seconds, even a minute or two, in those rare times he mustered the energy to enter her. He knew he was being selfish, using her body for his own brief respite. But she surrendered to him, and in the dark he felt her thighs and belly go soft and her breath exhale out, out, out, until she was still and quiet and finally at peace beneath him.

At night he felt the memory of hope weigh down on him like a great white stone in his belly. It would force him to act. The voice in his head increased in volume, singing, startlingly erotic in its lightness, uncaring of his discomfort, spurring him on. He breathed into the girl’s ear.

‘I’ve decided to try and escape. Soon. Maybe even this week.’

Two bodies in the dark, hers against his, his pressed against some sleeping stranger, never sure if the person next to him was alive or dead by morning except for the mushroom coolness that gradually infected his own skin. The girl was alive, though, warm and pulsating against his cheek and thigh in the darkness, her hair sweat-damp against his neck.

‘How? Where to?’

‘Don’t know yet. But you must come with me.’

The desert temperature dropped at nightfall like the sudden closing of a door. Competing winds rose and flapped the sides of the tent in and out, like a giant animal breathing death. He could hear hyenas circling the camp, eager for the carrion it promised. The girl sniffed, as if the stink had only now penetrated her consciousness.

‘I can’t. They’d catch me and kill me. But first they would force me to betray you.’

‘You’ll die anyway.’

She leaned over and he felt the tiny pimples in contact with his mouth. His first instinct was always to recoil, but he opened his lips and allowed her to kiss him, her fingers on his back thousands of crawling lice, her breasts hot and slippery against his chest, her determination silent and painful to the touch.

‘Please,’ she said. ‘Just let me die here.’

She slid on top of him, the weight of her body light, far lighter than the corpses he carried each day. He pulled her hair away from him so that her back arched and her face widened in the half-dark, hair slapping through his hand, mouth open in a soundless scream. Her bittersweet fullness of face, mouth agape in revelation – the presentiment of death firing her eyes.

Lilit readied herself over the coming weeks to escape. Fatima helped her stockpile dried figs and walnuts and find a waterskin, even made her a new set of clothes. A pair of loose trousers and a diaphanous shift, fitting attire for a slave readying to flee.

She thought of her nightly readings with Suleiman: Hagar and her wild-haired son, cast out into the desert. Moses and his tiny barque of reeds. She had no idea where she would go once she was out the front door of Suleiman’s courtyard. Fatima had given her a knife and a tattered map of the region she could hardly read. She also had a muslin pouch of coins Fatima had filched from the household allowance she was given each week.

She had vague plans of following the course of the Euphrates through northern Syria and back into Armenia. Of looking for Papa. She knew Minas was most probably dead by now, judging from the talk at the marketplace. Maybe she should go to Constantinople, lose herself in a big city. Become Turkish. Become anything at all. This last thought gave her a twinge of excitement and a downward lurch of remorse.

Days and nights passed. It was always the same: the daily morning trip to the market, which she and Fatima took turns at making with the servant girls. The baking of sweets, which they also took turns at doing week by week. Suleiman hired a cook for the meals and the baking of bread each day, but a proficiency in pastry-making was one of the hallmarks of a good Muslim woman. So she taught herself how to roll filo pastry and finely crush pistachios and dates, how to heat dark Marmaris honey until it poured liquid and gold. Almond puddings with saffron. And Suleiman’s favourite,
kaymak
of Afyon Karahisar, rich buffalo cream, boiled until solid enough to slice. Suleiman sampled each pastry equally from these trays, day by day, making sure he didn’t eat of the same woman twice in a row.

Much in the same way, Suleiman took turns at sleeping with them. She’d never have believed when she first arrived that she would crave his touch. And yet, there it was. Sometimes, late at night with the lamps dimmed by the servants, she could even close her eyes and imagine he was Yervan. Something in the mildness of his caresses alerted her to the similarity. Yet as the weeks and months progressed she no longer needed to imagine Yervan there beside her. Suleiman was enough. He had a way of inclining his head to the side when she straddled him, as if the pleasure was too much to bear head on. His body was opposite to Yervan’s, dark and slight, hair matted high at his throat.

She never believed she would be jealous of the nights he spent with Fatima, either. The servant girls and peasant women he cajoled with gifts, the occasional whore from the markets – she didn’t bother herself with those. She knew these dalliances were expected of him, even by the reluctant women themselves. But when she knew Fatima was sharing his bed she lay awake for hours in the women’s quarters and burned with frustration and desire. She undressed and picked at her faults, finding more ways to make herself beautiful for him. She cursed Suleiman on those nights, telling herself it would be best if she left soon, so this torture would end, once and for all.

There were some weeks Suleiman turned away from them all and slept alone on the flat roof of the house. He couldn’t breathe sometimes, he would explain to her. He needed the night wind and the stars. She’d read enough of the Koran by now to know he wasn’t being a good Muslim. His duty was to satisfy all his wives. And he only had two, not like the other men of the town who had four women to care for, as well as an ever-changing array of concubines. Then again, neither Fatima nor she was really his wife. She was bought and paid for, a mere slave, and Fatima was something else. A penance, perhaps, a hastily promised favour for a dying brother?

Yet she couldn’t shy away from the truth. It was Fatima who had a traditional wedding to Suleiman as soon as her husband died; she stood in the centre of the courtyard, swathed in sequinned veils, while the imam asked the customary questions of the assembled crowd. Suleiman stood aside and bowed at the end of each response, his heirloom dagger sheathed at the waist. Fatima had been carried to the bridal chamber on the shoulders of virgin youths, beneath the divan a broody hen for fertility. Suleiman was accosted as he made his way to her, scattering coins at the feet of well-wishers to bribe his way in. Fatima was the official wife. Lilit had no status.

When it was Lilit’s turn to go to the market Suleiman always went with her, the servant girls lagging behind with their bundles. Maybe he was afraid she might run away. Find other Armenian slave-girls to conspire with. Or talk to people, learn more about what was happening outside the fortifications of the old city. No fear of that. She didn’t want to excite his suspicions. Not now. She’d linger sometimes over certain stalls, fingering triangles of fabric or perfumed feathers from Africa, bottles of camphor and seed pearls piled in careless heaps. She would buy powdered orchid root for churning ice-cream, coastal sage for tea, the aromatic seeds of black cherry. Then she would invariably feel a tug on the ring slipped over her index finger. The ring attached to Suleiman’s hand on a long thin chain. In this way he kept her close to him.

Even with his suspicions, his shadowing, the brass ring on her finger, in bed Suleiman seemed not to suspect that she would soon leave him. Now she did only what was expected of her, not allowing herself to enjoy his precise attentions as she had in the past. She almost didn’t want to go at all. Life here was soothing, a faint lulling into apathy. Suleiman was slow and gentle in his night caresses, like drinking cool water. He sucked her through his mouth and nostrils, revelling in the smoothness and youthfulness of her body. She kept trying not to enjoy it too much, stopped herself from falling into his touch.

Some nights she wanted to tell him of the plan, confess everything. There were three more months to go before the baby was due. Maybe if she told Suleiman and blamed Fatima for the plot, he would banish her from his house altogether, leaving Lilit and him in peace? She knew she couldn’t tell. So she merely sighed, and opened her mouth and legs to Suleiman, stiff and wooden, paralysed by the fear of giving up her baby.

BEIRUT, 1995

I
t’s still so early the day hasn’t had a chance to heat up. I’ve made it to the courthouse just in time, and now I sit, watching the caretakers out the window sweep the narrow paths and wet grass with short twig brooms. It must be hell on their backs. It’s the last day of the tribunal, and nothing’s happening yet, though everyone is seated and waiting.

Thank goodness D’Andrea isn’t here; I don’t think I could have faced him after our telephone call less than an hour ago. Yet I already feel less animosity toward him now I’ve erased the tape. Maybe I’ve forgiven him. I don’t know. I settle back in my seat, look around. There’s a different mood in the court today: expectant, watchful, almost an exhilaration running beneath the formality of cheap dark suits and carefully impassive faces.

Since coming to Beirut it’s as if my life in Boston has receded, reduced to its essentials. Leaden skies. Raindrops on camellias, sagging petals crammed against the window of Sarkis’s apartment – I still can’t call it mine – the cold hands of a stranger on my bare back at night. I miss no one in particular, though I long for some human contact. Long to fill up my emptiness with somebody, anybody. Not D’Andrea. Not with second-hand memories of this place. Not my non-existent scenarios of who my father really was. Last night before I fell asleep I roiled in that terrible, familiar well of loneliness, and a jazz melody was playing on the clock radio by the bed – but it wasn’t jazz any longer; it had changed into that eerie Armenian lullaby and there was a man there that wasn’t really there, a man like my father with dark straight brows and a smile that could make me melt.

In a chilling moment, I’m struck by the sense that I’m merely existing here in Lebanon, only going through the motions to finish off something that began eighty years ago. And then what? I remember Minas talking – an animated skull swathed in sheets to the chin – from the heights of an iron-barred bed. Was he already in hospital then or was it the bedroom on the top floor of the Beirut house? He was sick, dying. I must have been too young to understand the import of his statement because I continued playing with my dolls, moving them back and forth over the mounds and hillocks of his blanket, chattering under my breath. Yet what I did understand was the anger and shame in his voice as he began to whisper, ‘Come, child, come closer, over here.’

I climbed onto the bed, conscious of his old man’s smell and the dandruff flaking his narrow shoulders. He told me about a terrible place he was sent to when he was only a little boy. That’s what had made him such a horrible grandpa, and I must forgive him. I nodded, pulling at my lower lip. He told me about gritty sand and heat haze as far as the eye could see, tents that bent and cracked like dry skin in red winds that came from the south, wailing that rose and fell like a descant day and night, until he couldn’t discern whether it was women crying or his dead mother calling him, but it was a sound he couldn’t – even now – escape. At that moment, I hated the people who had done this to him.