Bone Ash Sky (45 page)

On the summer night Selim was now remembering, Anahit came between Minas and him, handing her uncle goat’s milk and honey. She knew he needed it to soothe his stomach ulcers before bed. Selim watched her silhouette as she leaned over the old man. As she sat down next to him. He studied the way she clasped her hands around her knees, holding her slim, braceleted wrists, and rocked forward, looking into the patchwork of lighted windows and roofs as if she could somehow discern something in the sloping streets. As if sensing his thoughts, she turned to him and sighed.

‘I hope you’re safe out there at night.’

‘He should be home every night reading his schoolbooks,’ Minas grumbled at them both. ‘It’s his last year.’

She pouted. It was something Selim noticed her doing often these days.

‘Uncle, you know you’re proud Selim’s such a patriot. And so am I.’

His father huffed but resumed sipping his milk. Selim sat still, willing himself to be cold as moonlight. She continued.

‘I love my cousin a great deal, you know that, Uncle, don’t you?’

Selim waited for the reverberation her sentence made to be over, his embarrassment acute. Rivers of shame and desire coursed up his throat and into his cheeks, and he was thankful the night was dark and the balcony lit only by a guttering lamp. She stood, leaned over Selim and kissed his forehead.

‘But your son, my dear uncle, is single-minded. And high-minded. He never even looks at me.’

Minas drained the last of his milk and gave the glass back.

‘Anahit, he’s your first cousin. I’ve told you before, we’re not Arabs.’

Now Selim began walking again, conscious that some of his men were looking at him strangely. Usually he was one of the first to instigate violence, to push the boys into higher and wilder states of frenzy. Usually the fantasy of his Crusader forbears, crashing and straining in their mediaeval armour, buoyed him. But today he felt strangely sickened. He forced himself to move from hut to hut, checking how quickly the camp was being cleared, watching the shooting and knifing from afar, taking care of rhythm and structure. He blocked out the cries and screams, the swearing. There was always swearing from both sides. He settled his mirrored sunglasses more firmly in front of his eyes.
Terrorists. Refugees. Same thing.
He never once thought of himself as refugee; he was a Lebanese citizen; he was born in Beirut. He was Lebanese, they weren’t.
Dirty Muslims. Stink of sweat. What
are they doing here anyway, living off our land?

He stopped again in the middle of the street. Of course he thought of himself as a refugee. Every day, in fact. At school, in his father’s jewellery shop, on the street, in the stiff volumes he was forced to read on the genocide. He spent his Sunday afternoons looking at the glossy photographs in those weighty, expensive books, a reluctant voyeur.
Sasoun, Bitlis, Kars.
Dead Armenians hanging on meat hooks. Wellgroomed Turks in fezzes, looking on and smiling for the camera. Skulls on tables. Heads on sticks, freshly killed, with the same expression of bewildered affront he saw – and had inflicted – many times since. Dead babies piled in baskets like rotten fruit.

He was ashamed to be looking at the corpses along with those men, somehow complicit in their hermetic grins. At the same time he knew it was necessary, this collective memory – no, more than that, this collective guilt at not being there to suffer too.
Sivas, Trebizond,
Diyarbekir.
Armenian heads displayed on shelves like trophies. His father’s guilt at surviving to tell the tale.
Der ez Zor, Rakka, Ras ul-Ain.

He remembered Minas quoting the Turkish gendarmes: ‘No man can ever think of a woman’s body except as a matter of horror, after Ras ul-Ain.’ And the double shamelessness of those men, blithely photographing such horror. Armenian mothers and babies eating the flesh of a dead horse by the roadside. Stick figures with blank, unaccusing eyes.
Musa Dagh, Urfa, Erzerum.
He was conscious as he leafed through those books that his was a responsibility to look, to re-emphasise the ordeal, to bear witness to the memory.

Of course he was always a refugee. Mount Ararat on the wall in the parlour, the same cheap reproduction hanging in every Armenian house. Ani, ancient city of a thousand and one churches. Stories of Lake Van and the grandparents he’d never known. Displaced, wiped out, cursed to be forever far away from home. This loss was present in the drawn, haggard faces of the men here in Beirut, on streets named after destroyed villages, in the women’s insistence on feeding their children until they grew as fat as those Easter lambs they gorged on each year. It was heightened each time he left the Armenian quarter and ventured out into the city. He skulked about the Corniche or downtown, hands in pockets. Wondered if this one or that was a Muslim, a fanatic, a bloodthirsty gunman. At first it was fear, yet as he grew into his teens it became swagger, bravado, hatred.
I’m the son of a genocide survivor. I have every right.
He picked fights at streetlights, in queues, at anyone who dared look sideways at him. Palestinian, Lebanese, Muslim Druze. He had no idea whom he was fighting. Now he stopped in the middle of the camp and thought perhaps he was fighting his father all along.

One night, not long after the episode with Anahit, he found his father alone in the kitchen. Minas enjoyed cooking late at night when everyone else was asleep, liked to listen to the radio and perfect ever more elaborate recipes as the clock ticked into another day. Dishes Selim’s grandmother had cooked in the half-forgotten days before the genocide, when there was a sense of plenty and no fear. Milk-fed lamb with almonds and apricots. Trout baked in parchment. Selim loved those dishes. Special yeasted recipes for feast days, with fat raisins and far too many eggs. The secrecy of his father’s act enhanced its pleasure.

That night, Minas looked up from his kneading, fingers glued together with bread dough, and saw Selim standing at the side door.

‘And what time do you call this?’

He gestured with one hand to the clock on the wall and a blob of dough fell to the floor. Selim bent down, picked it up and placed it on the table.

‘It’s not so late, Father.’

He picked out one of the raisins and chewed it thoughtfully, trying to act unconcerned.

‘You have university tomorrow! What am I going to do with you?’

‘Nothing. I want to leave and join the army.’

‘Which army? Not one of the militias?’

‘I don’t care, so long as they’re not Muslim.’

Minas fought to get his hands free of the dough.

‘Fighting! More fighting. No, I can’t have that at your age.’

Selim straightened up and poked a finger at his father.

‘You fought with a militia when you were younger than I am. You escaped one of those camps. You fought for years. And look at you now, reduced to this—’ He broke off, gesturing at his father’s handiwork helplessly.

‘My son—’

Selim shook his head, not wanting to hear any more.

‘Don’t. You—I looked up to you. Now I’m ashamed of you.’

Now, all these years later, Selim could imagine what his father had felt, thought. Now, being a grown man, he could cringe with the poignancy of it, the loss. After he went upstairs, his father would have sat down, leaving his dough to dry out on the table. He would have clasped his old hands together on his lap and looked at them. Gnarled, criss-crossed with cuts here and there, pale dough caught under the fingernails. Hands that could fire a gun, kill, maim women, children.

Was there any use thinking about it? Selim didn’t want to torture himself, but the image came unbidden. His father sitting there, weeping with the futility of all he had ever done. What was the point of joining, killing and being killed, if there would only be more wars?

Selim remembered hearing him call down the hall, not caring if he woke anyone.

‘My son!’

And there he was, stumbling in the dark to Selim’s bedroom, blind through his tears, those old man’s hands of his groping for the door, the rattling knob. ‘You have no idea what it was like,’ he shouted. ‘You would never have made it. You would have died out there – not like me.’

But he had said all this to Selim before: in those late-night rants when he collapsed on the bed, in lectures when Selim came home from school with ruined clothes, in admonitions when he played out on the street too often and didn’t study, at formal dinners when Selim merely stared at his plate and ate nothing. A smack on the side of the head. Tearful protestations from his mother before the guests. His father’s glare at the two women and the young girl whose anger sparked the air: Siran and Lilit and Anahit. Minas was unrepentant. ‘At your age, Selim, I had nothing. Now go upstairs hungry and think about that.’

That night, with Minas in his room, Selim shifted awkwardly under the glare of the overhead bulb. He was already undressed, ready to jump into bed. Minas stopped and Selim could see, uncomfortable, how his father slowly surveyed his heavy, marbled chest, the tapering waist. Those muscular arms. All those nights spent at the gymnasium.

Now Selim thinks,
I was only seventeen.

‘What is it, Papa?’

He hadn’t called Minas Papa since he was a little boy, when he would take him to the markets, teaching him how to haggle with Arabs –
they pretend they’re poor but they’re richer than we are
– showing him how to count out the exact amount of change for the Palestinian cab driver and no more –
they don’t need tips, they get too much money from our
government as well as working on the sly
– telling him how you could pick a Muslim girl just from the way she walked, even if she wasn’t wearing a veil –
they walk like they’re teasing you, do you know what that means, son?

Selim repeated his question.

‘What’s wrong, Papa?’

Minas merely stood there, tears gluing his lashes together. He turned and left the room.

Selim stalked now through disorderly lines of huts, looking for somewhere to hide. But he couldn’t. His soldiers needed him.

He told them he was sick, something he ate. He started throwing up, his composure shattered, at the same time trying to direct them to other areas if he felt they were too immersed in one killing, too fixated on one woman or a crying child. The well-oiled machinery mustn’t bog down, mustn’t slow, no matter how he felt. When he saw a soldier being self-indulgent, he barked out a reprimand and watched the boy leave the job half-done, unsure of what to do next.

‘Finish up!’ he boomed. ‘Get onto the next thing!’

He was panting. He estimated the time this would all take before they could stop and let the bulldozers in. A day? Two days? He kept an ever lower profile as he advanced further into the camp. He was becoming more and more afraid to be involved at all. At the same time frightened to become the deserter, the enemy they might turn on. On this day, any call to mercy – or even efficiency – could be construed as betraying the cause. So he stood aside, lit a cigarette to settle his stomach, and gave the impression of monitoring their progress without allowing himself to look.

He didn’t feel as if he was missing anything. There was always a terrible sameness to the appearance of dead bodies, or half-dead bodies, the wounded, the unvarying expressions on an anguished face. It became tiresome after a while. An older woman stood her ground and screamed.

‘Animals! Filthy swine!’

She was crying from rage, not fear.

‘You’re worse than the Israelis. I spit on your mothers’ graves.’

He watched one of his men drag her away. He was feeling better now, detached again. Must have been the cigarette. He strode down the main road of the camp, into streets where the killing hadn’t started yet. Phlegmatic now, seemingly unconcerned. He lit another cigarette, forced himself to inhale with measured calm. Yet there was something wrong with his breathing again. He usually cultivated a studied indifference in these situations; it was the only way to survive. Battles, bombings, assassinations, massacres. He slowed down and caught himself.
Did I
say massacres? Is this a massacre?
No, it was a mission, an operation, that’s what it was.

A young girl ran into his peripheral vision. She didn’t look Muslim, wasn’t wearing a scarf. He threw down the cigarette, pulled out his gun.

‘Stop right there!’

Her arms flayed wide as she wheeled around to face him. She pulled out a wad of cash from the folds of her skirt, and he could see even this far away she was holding close to ten thousand lira.

‘Please, please,’ she cried.

For a moment, her incredible fragility stayed his hand. A moment, and her upright body rested weightless on the earth. She let the money fall. He shot her in the chest and she swayed into the dirt, her full skirt scattered like a blowsy tulip. It was the image of Sanaya. It was the pimpled girl from the death camp. He had one chance to honour his father’s memory, and he’d blown it. He stumbled across to her and fell to his knees, cupping her lolling head in his hand. If it were only the girl from the death camp, he would have saved her. He wouldn’t have left her there to die. He bent closer to her face. Her plait touched his cheek and he shuddered.