Bone Ash Sky (44 page)

The girl looked at her askance, scanned the crowd for assistance. Somebody cut in, shoving her aside.

‘It’s the Israelis, up to another one of their tricks.’

‘But why?’ she asked. ‘Why?’

The people around her shook their heads, tried not to stare, drifted away as she continued to ask why, exchanging glances among themselves, nodding at each other to convey the woman’s strangeness.

By nightfall, the west of the city was robed in a halo of white neon from searchlights erected on the hills, a long-suffering saint under interrogation.

She sat on her balcony the next morning, sipping tea and smoking. More black-market Marlboros brought by Selim. Better than the Gitanes he would bring her last year.

She opened yesterday’s newspaper:
17 September 1982.
Somehow the date surprised her; she hadn’t been conscious of so much time passing. The city still retained its summer heat, in the pavements and between building bricks, as if drawing a blanket around itself in defence against some new atrocity.

It had been hard to sleep last night; she sweated in her airless bedroom and considered calling Selim, but in the end decided against it.

She jumped when she heard Rouba’s voice behind her.

‘You scared me. I didn’t hear you come in.’

‘You were humming to yourself.’

‘Was I? I didn’t realise.’

Rouba sat on the chair opposite.

‘Sanaya, something’s going on in the camps.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Something horrible. My friends who live near there said they could hear dynamiting all night.’

‘But the multinational forces are here, Rouba. Surely—’

‘The marines have left us too early, and those bastard Israelis are doing whatever they want.’

Selim and Elie were on a mission with their men. They rode in jeeps through the clean morning and ate rations from US army tins, a welcome change after tinned hoummus and stale baguettes. The Israelis had supplied them with these rations – as well as fizzy sodas and new guns.

They sat around, enjoying the brightness, basking in the sun. They ate, drank and argued. Some said the Palestinians had murdered Bashir Gemayel, as the Israelis had always maintained. They wanted revenge. They wanted to begin right away, but the others cautioned, waving their cigarettes. They countered with their own stories. Bashir was not dead at all, no – he’d been seen walking out of his wrecked car, covered in blood, into a waiting ambulance. He was biding his time, only to appear again when his country needed him.

In the meantime, they prepared for his arrival. They’d been sent to
flush out terrorists
. The euphemisms were inventive.
Neutralise the camps
,
cleanse the area
,
mop up insurgents
,
disinfect the region of aggressors
. To kill. They had been instructed to kill every living thing in the Sabra-Shatila camps: old men, women, girls, children, babies, stray dogs, pet birds in cages. They were all to be knifed or machine-gunned to death; no explosions until nightfall, the men were warned, when the dead could be bulldozed into mass graves with their shacks dynamited on top of them. A quick way to hide the evidence. Calm and efficient.

By afternoon, Selim was preparing to begin. Elie had long since retired to the Phalange HQ, after giving the men a rousing speech. Orders had come from the Israeli High Command to start at 5 pm.

Selim’s boys were quiet now, some asleep, others staring into space. Most were high on hashish. Their movements could certainly be slower under the influence but were usually more deliberate. Their judgement was clouded, but that too could be useful. Today he felt as if he’d like a little himself. As second-in-command he operated as if he and the boys were one organism. His desires and needs were communicated to them almost by hypnosis, slow-moving unconscious, epiphany. His movements and expressions suggesting more than his spoken commands could elucidate. Today, the boys’ instincts were trained on him with more intensity and fervour than he’d seen in a long time.

He stubbed out his cigarette in the dirt and led them to the first row of huts near the gates. Behind, more jeeps screeched to a halt and the rest of the Phalangist forces stumbled out into the dust, all in silence and something like veneration. The sky was empty of clouds, the colour of the Madonna’s robes.

‘Advance!’ Selim shouted. ‘In the name of the Virgin!’

He glanced down at his gun butt and the Virgin Mary sticker he’d placed there gazed at him with adoring plenitude. He made the sign of the cross, looked away.

The first Palestinian he saw was a pregnant woman, younger than twenty. She wore a sky-blue scarf and her feet were bare. When she saw the Phalangists rushing into her courtyard she began scurrying here and there like a beheaded hen, always covering the same ground, cowering before them in a cursed circle. He watched one of his boys stop in front of her then saw her crumple to the ground before him, as if accepting her fate. She looked like she would have done anything: kissed his feet, let him rape her, maim her, if he would just let her live long enough to give birth to her baby. The boy put his boot on her neck, then leaned over. Blood shot out of her mouth in small, unpredictable spurts. She made no sound, part of the afternoon’s conspiracy of silence.
Maybe it doesn’t hurt
her as much. Maybe she’s just too different from us.
Was it just like slitting open a pig? An Easter lamb, sweet and pliant? Maybe she wasn’t human after all. Or maybe she was screaming deep inside.

Selim entered the hut and killed her husband with one shot.

‘I’m doing you a favour,’ he said. ‘So you don’t have to see what happened to your child.’

He didn’t stop to check if the man was dead on impact. He could hear a gurgle escape from him, the rush of a deflating tyre. He felt no obvious hatred for the dead man, no acute ache of revenge. His hatred was chronic by now, like a back ailment he just had to live with. A justifiable impediment. A personality trait, like an irritating laugh or stammer.

Revenge was part of it, always had been. Still, the sense of injustice, the heat of anger, was not his motivating force. Nor the memory of his father’s tirades, the red, dragging suffering of his persecuted race. Mostly it was a job he must do, he reminded himself, a task in which he brought his best training to bear.

Even so, he felt at times that killing was like the twinned sickness and satisfaction he felt while masturbating. Secretive, but a performance, no matter how intimate. Like the twisted lozenge of light his bracelet made on the bathroom tiles each morning, killing another human being was the way in which he made an impact upon the world.
I’m alive and I
can take away your life. In this way I’m doubly living.

Surely it was more than that. After all, the act wasn’t always so pleasurable. At times he felt illogically diminished by this very exercise of his power. Then it
was
Papa and his tirades; it must be. Something in those whispered taunts, at night in bed when he was half-asleep already and couldn’t be sure he heard right. The signalling cough down the corridor. His father standing by the door with a circle of light around his head. Selim sitting up in bed, still navigating his dreams.
What is
it, Papa?
And Minas bending over with a hand heavy on his cheek.
Nothing, my son, nothing at all.
Then he would sit at the end of the bed and abuse Selim for not being a good enough son.

After that, long after all the swearing, the disappointment and anger, came the maudlin reminiscences and the crying. And Selim, in his love and shame for his father, would try to keep his eyes tightly closed and keep dreaming, allowing Minas’s voice to weave into his own private images of suffering and war. He became his father: holding the girl from the death camp in a last grasping embrace, retasting her sweet insistence.
And I flinched away from her filth, did you hear me, son? Even
though I was just as dirty as she was.

Why now, why all this guilt?
Selim could remember wanting to say it, yet not having the courage to ask. Papa survived because he had to. She succumbed. He comforted his father with these arguments – or did he? – and Minas repeated them after him so the girl wouldn’t come to him in his nightmares. She wanted him to survive. Yet he left her behind, ran away from her.
Just as you, my son, are going to do to me.

Selim lay in bed then and tried to stop the tears escaping from his eyes. It hurt his chest, his cheeks, to hold them back. His father told him to stay home, be good, marry an Armenian girl – but never his cousin. It was wrong. The Arabs did it. At this point Selim’s fatigue got the better of him and he fell into open-mouthed sleep, his father curled up, too, lightly snoring at his feet. And their dreams fed off each other: Selim lying in a gutter somewhere in the warring south of the country, bleeding, calling for his Papa. Or running, running at night when Minas’s own legs shuddered and strained with the effort of keeping up with him. And Selim saw two boys, hand in hand, wading through deserts riven with blood. Two boys; twin Minases and twin Selims, crying and laughing in a crisis of fear and freedom.

Selim knew now what he meant, the cruel subtext to all his father’s ranting.
You’ve never suffered, my boy. You don’t know what it is to be
Armenian.
His father’s voice descending to a hiss.
Food on the table,
tucked into bed, coddled all your life. You have no idea what we went
through to get you here.
So as the years went by, he fulfilled the prophecy and withdrew from his father more and more.

Minas, meanwhile, complained to anyone who would listen: Lilit, a worried Siran, bored neighbours, to customers who wandered into the jewellery shop expecting only a glass of tea and some small talk. He contrived to repeat the same thing every time, and Selim would hear it second-hand from Anahit: Selim was always such a good boy. Seventeen now, old enough to know better. And it was dangerous out in the streets, what with Palestinians and Muslim Lebanese running all over the place with their new guns. Another war, just like all the others. It wasn’t really a full-scale war yet, but the Israelis were already rumbling over Arab borders. They even talked about nuclear power. Wipe out the whole region with one flick of a switch. Then those crazy Muslims from all over the region going on about pan-Arabism, socialism, decolonisation. Selim knew Minas only understood enough of those words to dislike them, so he didn’t even try to explain to his father the very real threat Muslims posed to the whole of the Middle East.

Selim thought back to one night he remembered so clearly, perhaps because he’d been so ashamed. On this late summer’s night Minas sat in his chair looking out over the same landscape, muttering the same platitudes as every other night. Telling Selim to look after his family. Wishing he would just stay home and do well at school.

‘It’s your own fault,’ Lilit would interject from her bedroom, where she sat in the breeze that came from the open door. ‘You’re the one who’s been stuffing his head with hatred for Muslims since he was in swaddling clothes. And my daughter too.’ Selim and Anahit exchanged wry smiles.

Minas didn’t want his son to fight. He always said Selim was too precious to be wasted on an idea. Of his own fighting days he said little, only that it was a necessary war, to establish French control in the region. Assisting their only protectors at the time. Now these same great powers had their own huge armies and allies from all over the world. ‘Why should Selim be called upon? Let the French and English and Americans be killed for a change,’ he replied to his sister. Lilit called these justifications, then threw back her head and laughed. When she did this Selim felt all of four years old, and secretly hated his aunt for being so prescient.

Selim knew that Minas approved of Anahit. He thought it was a good thing Anahit was so adamant, so fundamentalist, so very Armenian. Gone were the stories she was fed by her mother about her Turkish heritage. She spoke Armenian and Arabic and French fluently, did well at school but stopped to work in the jewellery shop. Her mother urged her to go on and try for the American University, but Anahit said she would rather work with Uncle Minas. She professed to hate Muslims as much as he and Selim did, screwing up her nose in disgust when she spoke of them. She hated the way they drank their muddy coffee, the way they spat in public at her feet, the way they treated their women. Selim had watched his father in the jewellery shop countless times. Whenever a rich Muslim came into the quarter expressly to visit their shop, having heard how fine Armenian craftsmanship could be, it was all Minas could do to prevent Anahit from refusing to serve him. ‘I hate them as much as you do,’ he whispered. ‘But we need them in business, they need us. See?’