Bone Ash Sky (39 page)

He ran up the single flight of stairs, tapped on Sanaya’s door. She opened it after what seemed like too long, stood peering out at him through a sliver of light.

‘Open up,’ he pleaded. ‘I was wrong.’

‘Now is not a good time,’ she whispered.

Behind her he could sense candles being lit, shuffling in the room, jazz playing.

‘But I want to tell you something. I need to tell you.’

‘Not now.’

‘It’s about what happened to me—down south. I need to tell someone.’

She looked panicked, harassed. He could see a thick vein pulsing at her neck. Pulsing, pulsing, telling him to go away.

‘I can’t. Some other time.’

‘Is he here?’

She nodded, resigned. He put his hand out, brushed the side of her neck where the jugular throbbed, and left.

Sanaya mused over Issa as she wandered around her apartment with nothing to do. After their talk that revealed nothing at the half-opened door, something had altered between them. There was a subtle respect revealed, an unspoken tenderness. As if Issa were the little brother she never had.

Part of her knew this was wishful thinking, idealism, her own special brand of naivety. There was an undercurrent of danger to his laughter, a hot iciness to his gaze, an edge to his monopoly of her time.

He lounged on the divan now on most afternoons, sharing whatever treats he scrounged at the borders with her, and read parts of the Koran aloud, bullying her to adopt the veil. He never mentioned Rouba, seemed unaware of any coolness between the women, and for this Sanaya was thankful. It was Hadiya she still missed most of all. The morning visits were never long enough, and she took pleasure in every opportunity to ask him about her. He ignored her, continued intoning classical Arabic in the singsong voice he affected when respectful.

‘Enjoin believing women to turn their eyes away from temptation and to preserve their chastity; not to display their adornments (except such as are normally revealed) to draw their veils over their bosoms and not to display their finery except to—’

‘My adornments are normally revealed, Issa. And it’s time for you to go. I’m sure Rouba has something fresh for you to eat from the stall. All I have are pickled turnips from last year.’

‘Are you waiting for someone else?’

‘Why should I be?’

‘You seem in a real hurry to get me out the door.’

He got up and walked to the window.

‘What’s this I see? A big German car in front of our block. A man in a flashy suit getting out. Looks Christian to me.’

‘Don’t forget Christians once lived here too, Issa. Don’t forget you’re living illegally in a Christian’s home.’

‘Illegally! There’s no law anymore but that of Allah. And you’re flouting it by sleeping with that man. I should tell my comrades to come and stone you both.’

‘So why don’t you?’

As soon as she said that she regretted it. He came closer and put his mouth against her neck, with contained violence.

‘Because I want you alive more than I want you dead.’

A languid knock on the door. His lips still pressed to her throat. She hesitated, paralysed by indecision.

‘Open it,’ Issa said. ‘I’d like to meet him.’

‘Please—don’t say anything.’

She rubbed her neck in a swift motion, opened the door, took the bottle Selim held forward with a pleading glance at Issa.

‘Selim, this is my neighbour Issa, from downstairs.’

Selim put out his hand but Issa stayed where he was. He was examining Selim’s tanned face, his large hair, the heavy silver bracelet that peeked out from his shirtsleeve.
Pimp. Pretty boy.

‘We’ve never forgiven you,’ Issa said suddenly.

‘Excuse me?’

‘You Maronites.’

‘I’m Armenian by blood. A refugee, just like you.’

‘You are nothing like me.’

Issa swept through the door, almost knocking Selim off his feet.

Issa found himself out on the Corniche without knowing how he came to be there. Sanaya. Her round upper arms, her soft thighs. He could see it; he saw it all. Not only did she scorn the veil, she walked around her house in sleeveless blouses, nightgowns, flimsy dresses. In all her glorious sexuality. She was beautiful. Beautiful in any light, at any time of day. He would not let himself think about it. He fixated on her imperfections, willing himself to stand back and see her as she really was, to rid himself of her honeyed influence: her less-than-perfect breasts, the slight hint of a double chin in profile.

He wandered around the seafront boulevard, gruff to the soft-drink vendors who made to approach him then stopped, cowed by his menace. He was ill-shaven, trying to grow a beard, heavy-lidded, stern-mouthed. They backed away, muttering, but not too loud. They were afraid of him. He liked that.

He sat on the low sea wall and allowed his back to be soaked by flurry after flurry of sea spray. He looked up at Sanaya’s balcony, half-hoping to see the lovers in a static Hollywood embrace that could fuel his loathing of them and his own self-pity ever the more. A bleeding sun disappeared behind the mountains and thick hot night settled on the city with the consistency of grease. He watched Sanaya light candles, small stars against the balcony doors, saw her silhouette merge into shadow then stab itself into the glow as she glided about the room. Closer, then further away, her blurring outline pressed into relief.

He closed his eyes and listened to the waves for a while. When he looked up at the apartment again, Selim seemed to have gone, although he didn’t remember seeing the car come to pick him up. Should he go to Sanaya? Would she welcome him the way she melted for Selim?

He glared at the narrow rectangles of light denoting living room, kitchen, bedroom. The apartment was aflame and she was alone. Her flickering figure moved back and forth from room to room, a body cloaked in dressing-gown silk, a wobbling inconsistency in the smoke from so many candles. She’d become unrecognisable to him. Not Sanaya. Not a woman he knew. Not even human, not fleshy, composed only of light.

She came outside and leaned over the balcony, puffing at a cigarette. He could see the ember glow through the outside gloom, see the towels she’d draped on the rusted railing, little white flags of surrender. He’d told her not to do that, even when others in the neighbourhood tied white sheets to aerials and rooftops in a vain attempt to deflect more Israeli bombs from civilian buildings. There couldn’t be any surrender now. She was a traitor to her multiple causes, an idealist bent on satisfying illusion.

He saw her speak on the telephone, dragging the cord all the way out onto the edge of the railing until it could go no further. Who was she speaking to? Not Selim, surely. For a moment he thought he heard her laugh, high above the traffic. She saw him, yes? Her eyes were trained in an instant to the point where he sat, head upturned. He stood up, waved with one swoop of the arm. She went inside. She pulled the blinds down in the bedroom and the lights were extinguished, star by star, until all he could see were shrapnel wounds on the facade of her building, tiny mouths open in horror.

He spent the night at Hezbollah HQ, sleeping on the cool concrete of the floor under a desk. In the morning, while worrying over a cup of instant coffee, he decided to see his mother in the camp.

Issa’s mother was not expecting a visit, without even a crust of bread to welcome him with. She lay in bed by the paraffin stove as late as nine, for now autumn was approaching the mornings grew colder. Or seemed colder here perhaps, in this one-room concrete hut. She surveyed the damp walls with sleepy eyes: dust, spider webs, runnels of moisture from countless leaks in the roof. Maybe it was warmer outside. But there was nowhere to go, anyway. No shops or markets other than the same UNRWA tent selling carcasses of sheep or goat dangling on hooks and garlanded with flies, the same shopkeeper – ‘Half a pound of stewing mutton again this week, Umm Issa?’ – no public squares, no parks, no gardens. Nothing other than the same jagged main road, unpaved, rutted, looped with the same anti-Israeli graffiti, alongside anti-Hamas, anti-PLO, anti-Hezbollah slogans.

Her eyes closed again to block out her surroundings. She lay in bed and dreamed, roaming the travelling markets of her youth. It was a favourite pastime of hers when alone – which was often, except for the few aid workers or journalists brave enough to drop in and see how she was doing. It was always the same fantasy. In reality, she wouldn’t have been allowed to leave the house without her mother or aunts or the servants to escort her, yet in her memory she was always free.

The markets had only come to her home in Jaffa on the days of great festivals, along with the fire-eaters and puppet shows and gypsies, but she remembered them as if it were yesterday. As if they alone defined her childhood before the Catastrophe,
Al’ Nakhba
: the flight from everything she once knew. Her younger self moved under laden orange trees, balancing a basket low on the hip. She flicked her plait over her shoulder, straightened her best abaya to show more forehead. Swayed as she walked. She passed dried fruit in pyramids of improbable colours, was offered a handful of currants by the vendor. A crooked smile. She smiled back at him, lowering her eyes as she knew she should. Chunks of roasted sesame glowed with honey alongside aged cheeses, thick blue skins like the veins on a woman’s thighs. She bought two of the knobbly rounds and placed them in her basket. She tasted spoonfuls from vats of yoghurt in various stages of setting, swirled by a broad wooden paddle. A blanket spread on the dirt with country bread and nothing else, for those too lazy to make their own. Only the very old women bought these. This younger self didn’t know, didn’t know she would one day be one of those women without a home.

Today she remembered a man she had actually met at the markets. She was out of her mother’s grasp for a moment, old enough to wear the veil yet still young enough to resent it. An American Jew, tourist to the Holy Land, bored with guides and grinning touts. He stopped her under a stunted tree, asked her name. She wasn’t married then, hadn’t yet given birth to sons to mark her with their existence.

‘Bilqis,’ she said, blushing. ‘Bilqis Al-Mansour.’

She was pleased he knew she was named for the queen of Sheba. He smiled and recited a phrase from his Bible in sonorous and strangely stirring tones. She was too young then, didn’t understand his loss, a Jew with nowhere else to call home. Now she repeated the line to herself from half-closed lips.
A land of wheat and barley and vines and fig trees
and pomegranates, a land of olive oil and honey.

She stopped in the shade of an olive tree;
rumani
, she called them, legacy of the Roman invaders – the first invaders. She hesitated at a handlettered sign she was only just competent enough to decipher:
Baqlawa
by the kilo
. She bought a whole tray, saw it wrapped in layers of paper, a hot cinnamon parcel at the top of her basket.

She didn’t linger by the sheep marked red for slaughter. Lamb hearts quivered in glass cases, flapping fish in clear liquid. Bones like those of a mythical beast, gnawed by stray dogs. A swift kick from the vendor, followed by curses. She rattled her house keys as she walked, making tinkling sounds the men glanced up to. A younger man, dishevelled stranger from another town, cursed her with a verse from the Koran as she walked past: ‘And let them not stamp their feet when walking so as to reveal their hidden trinkets.’ She smiled, above any bitterness today, and walked on.