Bone Ash Sky (49 page)
I stand up now, move closer to him, arms folded across my nudity. My anger deflated, voice grown weary. I have a headache that makes me close my eyes.
‘Please come here,’ I say, with my eyes still shut. ‘Please come to me.’
He comes. I unfold my arms and let them fall to my sides.
‘Kiss me and tell me I’m an idiot.’
He kisses the top of my head.
‘Anoush,’ he says. ‘You’re an idiot.’
Later that afternoon we lie together on the bed. He’s opened the curtains again, and the floor-to-ceiling windows seem not made of glass but water. We sprawl side by side on our backs, touching only at the curve of the hip. Like this, we reflect sea, ceiling, sky. The sun hits our bodies now in planes of blue shadow and quivering light. My head on the pillow a mirror, indistinguishable from his.
I walk back to the Mayflower, grateful to breathe in the cool dusk air. For almost a month now, I’ve felt inviolate, contained in my own private world of the past. After sex with Chaim I’m now permeable, my hard edges blurry, bleeding into the landscape and its people.
Do I resent this? What I feel is probably closer to panic. I linger at the sea wall, gazing down at murky waves splashing, receding, breaking again. A few beggars – young boys with downy upper lips – jostle me as if on purpose, pluck at my sleeve. I elbow them back, suddenly fierce.
Chaim was rough, insistent after his initial hesitancy. It was as though he were claiming me, touch by touch, with his hands. Or maybe punishing me for the mockery I’d indulged in only a moment before. I was aware of a sense of shock as well as arousal. I’m no prude. Yet he put half his thick, square hand right inside me, burrowing, as if seeking something I haven’t yet revealed. His expression heated, questioning.
‘Stop,’ I said. ‘You’re hurting me.’
He kept going until I took his wrist in my grip and wrenched it away. I hadn’t thought of him as that kind of man before, yet, there he was, driving into me with all the will and force he possessed. In my afternoon fantasies at the Mayflower he’d always been liquid, bodiless, resting between my legs, effortless as air. Yet in his bedroom he positioned me exactly the way he wanted, spread-eagled with my calves up around my ears. He growled at me to move sideways, arch my back, take him in deeper –
no, not that way; like this
– to grasp the sides of the mattress with my hands.
My inner thighs ache now. My vagina feels alien: wet, pulsating, bruised with my own ambivalence. I begin walking, taking an almost pleasurable pride in the dull grind of muscle. He wanted me to stay. I sprang from the bed as soon as the sun went down, splashed myself in the ensuite with cold water, one leg high on the sink. All over my belly and chest, his stray hairs were glued to me with our combined sweat. I wet my head, dousing my hair under the tap. In water, the crushed jasmine I wore in my blouse smelled of cigarette smoke, acid and sweet at the same time. He sat up, watching me through the open door.
‘You all right?’
‘Mmm.’
I answered without giving him anything to go on, came back into the bedroom, and with my face averted pulled on my clothes. The yellow stains under the arms of my blouse, the limpness of the fabric, made the whole room and what had transpired feel suddenly sordid and wrong.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Back to the hotel. It’s getting late.’
‘Why not stay here tonight?’
I stood, poised at the bedroom door with one arm out of my sleeve, looked at him and smiled. It was a smile that closed the door on him. I’m not sure even now why I didn’t want to stay; I wanted to feel him near me again – I even wanted to have sex with him again – but my more urgent need was to be alone. It was something to do with a tardy modesty, a feeling of being profoundly alien to each other, even a lack of love. Beneath it all, a strange disappointment. What was I expecting? My father intact, as in my dreams?
I walk faster now, stepping out onto the middle of the road. Taxi drivers slow down and ingratiate themselves. I had a hard time persuading Chaim not to walk me back to the hotel. He kissed my hands, my forehead, looked on the verge of tears. Yet I was adamant, possessed of an unformed desire to be rid of him straight away. As if I’d betrayed some vast contract with myself by letting him so soon into my life, my body. I walk and three selves come with me. Far too many for Chaim to tag along as well. Armenian, Turkish, American: split into a secular trinity. Which was he making love to? Which one did I surrender up to him, with my own naive ideals? I accused him of naivety when I’m surely worse. He showed me how much we share: family pain and historical guilt, that burden we both carry every single day. And now I feel ashamed. Which Anoush am I now, striding through the odorous dusk, gratified against all my better instincts by the warm flush of pain spreading from my inner thighs?
I stop at the last corner before the Mayflower, look behind me, banishing the ghostly figures that trail in my wake. Three women, or maybe more: Lilit, Siran and the Lebanese woman my father once loved. Or had he? Hadn’t Lilit said he died for her? A secular Muslim, if there can be any such thing. A woman of simple desires, for children and home and security. Am I imagining this conversation? More likely a woman of bold passions, who remained unsatisfied by the bloodless couplings of a Christian militiaman.
And what of Anahit? My own mother, often overlooked. Did anyone love her? And were there any more women? Any dalliances, any dead girl-children? Victims, perpetrators. D’Andrea and his butting, thrusting, middle-aged man’s desire. That moment on the phone when I felt a piercing sadness for him. When I pitied him enough to forgive. How to take up my own steps in this shuffling, complicated dance? I pat my hair down close to my scalp, settle the seams of my skirt in a straight line from waist to knee. This mundane gesture resolves something, if only to integrate these capricious and warring selves.
B
eirut changed for Minas as he grew older. At times he wasn’t aware of it, yet at other times, especially at night, he felt the silent, quick lurch in his belly. He couldn’t call it anything else but excitement. Here he was, finally, in this city full of promise. It was 1925, and he had been here ten years already. In that time, Beirut had become a blessed icon of the Virgin mother carried through his every moment, waking or sleeping. She was like no other, this mother. She bled and soothed, beat and caressed, kissed and spat. She taught Minas to win and lose, to make a pyrrhic victory and never count the cost.
There were more wars, always wars in Lebanon. Now the Great War had finally ended, now the French controlled most of the Levant and the Ottomans had been scuttled away, war still seemed the only mode in which these big men could talk to each other. Yet he almost liked it that way: war made it clear to him whose side he was on. The French were strong leaders, rebuilding the ravaged city with wide boulevards and official buildings, raising a tricolour flag. They were clear who the enemy was: Muslims. Minas cultivated a grainy image of the enemy in his mind: foreign eyes and screaming mouth – a dimmed mirror in which he didn’t once see himself.
Yes, he liked the idea of war. Killing the enemy was as good as any revenge. Small skirmishes in the mountains, frantic assaults on the higher slopes. Hand-to-hand combat in the slime of city streets.
He finished his breakfast, swallowing the last dregs of powdered milk. He liked the sweetish grittiness it left between his teeth. He wiped his tin mug out with his shirtsleeve and placed it on the shelf above his bunk bed, coughing with the sudden movement. He was older now, well past his teens, with a chest complaint that wouldn’t go away. Was it from the damp of those long-ago caves, or the subhuman conditions in Der ez Zor? No matter. That was all in the past. So many years ago now. Ten years already, and it seemed a lifetime. He’d grown used to the cough, hardly noticed it anymore. He’d grown used to news of war. He fiddled with the dial – a radio he inherited from a dead fellow refugee – and put his ear to the fine mesh of the speaker.
He had also grown used to the Red Cross camp.
Another camp
, he thought. It seemed now as if he had known no other life, these barbedwire fences, to keep enemies out now instead of inmates in, this icy sleeping block and that radio.
In all the years he’d spent in Lebanon, not once had he attempted to go back to Van, see if the old house was still standing, find Lilit. He justified it to himself when he nestled on the bunk for his afternoon nap, told himself he needed the rest, still weakened by his ordeal, still traumatised. He had no passport, anyway, only identity papers issued by the government, couldn’t leave Lebanon because they’d never have him back, the house probably burnt down, Lilit no doubt dead in the desert, dishonoured and buried in an unmarked grave.
He hadn’t received any money these ten years. Not once had a roll of cash in his pocket, to peel off for drinks and playing cards, women’s trinkets to buy some respite from loneliness. He’d never worked for money, in fact, except for his childhood forays selling crickets to schoolmates in those faraway Van summers, trading stolen eggs. He’d worked hard, but it had all been for the Lebanese and American and French governments. The League of Nations, the Red Cross. He’d been given meagre rations and health care and clothes, shuffled with all the other men in the camp from bed to table to bath, one day indistinguishable from the next. He laughed and mocked himself in the long nights spent lying awake, listening to other men’s whimpers and nightmares and snores.
If I thought I was an old man then, I must be dead
by now.
He scratched his head, wheezed in the cold spring air and settled his ear more firmly to the radio. In all the fighting, there was always one constant. Muslim against Christian. Whether it was heretic Druze against Maronite Catholic, Shia Muslim against Eastern Orthodox, Sunni Muslim against the French liberators, it was always the age-old dichotomy. Them and us. He liked it that way.
He wanted to side with the Christians in their assault upon Islam. The Allies didn’t make good on their promises of restitution for the Armenians during the Great War, so he wished to do it for them. He thought of their empty speeches as he got up each morning in the dawn light, walking with other refugees to the communal bathrooms to wash in cold water and then back to their huts to eat.
The other men all knew he was militant, prone to spouting the same daily rhetoric and pouring scorn on England and France. They listened to him, cautiously respectful, even though he was much younger than them. He held the floor every morning at breakfast, as they all sat on their carefully made beds eating, legs dangling in the damp air. He drew his bare feet up under his thighs and mocked, through mouthfuls of dry semolina.
‘Ha! Those so-called Great Powers in 1915.
The Allied governments
will hold all members of the Turkish government personally responsible.
Ha! Lloyd George again in the same year.
We guarantee the redemption of the
Armenian valleys forever from the bloody misrule with which they have been
stained.
’
They had done nothing. There was no international tribunal, no compensation, not even a symbolic gesture from the new Turkish government.
‘I’ve had enough,’ he would say to his fellow refugees in finale. ‘Enough of them and their empty lies.’
One wag decided to challenge him.
‘Well, what are you going to do about it?’
Minas wasn’t exactly sure.
He switched on the radio again when the other men had gone outside. There was work to do in the camp: seedlings to plant, huts to build, hospitals to clean. The compound was already beginning to look a little like a prosperous suburb, an Armenian quarter that would continue to flourish. Armenian women from camps as far away as Aleppo and Iraq had begun to enter and stay, training as nurses and teachers, clicking past Minas on high-buckled boots, swaying in tight white uniforms. Some were marked by indigo tattoos on their wrists and ankles, signifying their incarceration and escape from a Turkish harem. He’d seen them scrubbing at the designs with lemon juice and vinegar to lighten the load of shame. Others – the unmarked – were marrying his friends in quick civil ceremonies, as there were no Armenian priests yet in Lebanon. Orthodox clergy had been the first to be killed by the Turks. There was even talk of the Lebanese government giving this land to the Armenians sometime in the future, so that permanent dwellings could be built and taxes paid.
Minas was absolved from most physical duties, as the other men deferred to his intelligence, his superior reading and writing skills. He also helped most days in the kitchens, doing what he could with tinned and packaged goods from aid agencies. It was difficult to make do with what little they were sent, yet they still fared better than the locals. So many Arabs had starved in the last few years during the Allied blockade, while many Armenians had survived.
The men swore Minas’s bread was the best they had ever tasted, even if it was made with third-rate flour. Though there were always some who spat it out, claiming it was not salty enough, or too dry; they still clung to the memory of their mother’s baking as if it held the secret to their future. Many of them were farmers, peasants, survivors from mountain villages that hadn’t been entirely razed by the Turks. Most of them couldn’t even sign their own names. Minas was one of the few who could write to government agencies to search for missing relatives, to Turkish banks in order to try to recover stolen funds, to fill in forms and decipher statements.
