Bone Ash Sky (50 page)

Often when he was sitting, bent over, writing someone’s letter or reading a land contract, part of him was transported back to the little boy at the windowsill in Van with his pile of books. He could feel the excitement coming from that little boy in sickening waves through his body. Then he would stop and look up beyond the window, beyond the sleeping block, beyond the fences, wondering yet again and with more honesty why he never tried to find his own sister, as he had attempted to do for so many other refugees. Something held him back, a dread of finding out the truth like a tremor of physical pain.

He didn’t hear the voice in his head as often anymore; perhaps it wasn’t needed. He had enough to survive here without voices. He had ample food, friendship, even novels sometimes. The aid workers were kind enough to lend him their own books in French and Arabic, even English. He didn’t like that language as much, perhaps because he wasn’t as proficient in it. He wasn’t exactly happy, but there was time enough in the future for that. For now it was something akin to revenge he sought. At times he was tempted to bring forth the voice with strong drink or prayer, beseech it for news of Lilit, or for advice concerning his life’s path, but he pushed away the desire.

He still had his mother’s earrings, hoarded in a pouch sewn into his pillow to wait for the day he could sell them and use the money. Sacred money, to put towards a deposit on some land, or open a jewellery shop that would cater for the demands of Armenian weddings and christenings. Traditional ornaments: lockets and crucifixes and Virgins on fine chains, beatific smiles on beaten gold. Tangible memories of home. A late legacy of Papa, so he would not have been killed in vain.

He hadn’t held the pliant tongs, the hammer, for years now, since Papa had leaned over him in the tiny Van workshop guiding his hands, seducing still more heat from the forge. Minas would fan the guttering fire, murmuring to it in a childish whisper, wanting it to obey him in just the same way it did his father. Now he wondered if his cold fingers would remember what to do. Blazing metal. The hint of transformation on his clothes. Would a woman grow used to that, or would she be disgusted by his daily filth? He hoped to marry an Armenian, have many children to replace the countless ones that died. Of the girl in the death camp he never allowed himself to think.

The radio presenter’s drone cut through his musings. He put his ear closer to the speaker and frowned. Muslim Druze in the Chouf Mountains had revolted against the French mandate. They didn’t want Christians ruling them, accustomed as they were to the supremacy of their chieftains and the strength of a community based on intermarriage. They were barricading their villages, had already begun firing, a precarious balance of power threatening to shift. Minas straightened his collar and spat in his palm to smooth the hair off his forehead.
We’ ll be overrun by those
barbarians if we don’t stop them now.
He switched off the radio, strode outside into the morning air, coughing slightly into his sleeve. He didn’t need a disembodied voice to tell him what to do anymore.

Maronite militiamen came into the Red Cross camp that afternoon, rounding up support against the Druze. French officers stood behind them, nodding and making clear exactly whose money and weapons were involved. The militiamen appealed to the Armenian refugees as fellow Christians, repositories of Western civilisation, keepers of the faith.

‘We don’t see you as strangers any longer,’ they yelled in French through their megaphones. ‘We embrace you now as our own! Christian and Lebanese.’

They promised spanking new uniforms and immediate rank for those who volunteered.

Minas was one of the first.

He heard his commanders barking at their inferiors in badly accented French. He made a point of learning all the new, unfamiliar phrases, practising blasphemy at night in his tent as if mouthing a rosary of supplication.

‘Kill them all,’ he heard his superiors say. ‘Women and children. Violate them.’

There was to be no mercy for a fellow Arab. And the French were there to protect the custodians of their colonial heritage, so they turned a blind eye to any atrocity committed in their name. ‘After all,’ he heard the militiamen say to each other in the long nights spent sleeping in mud and goat’s turds on the mountains, ‘we are not Arab. We are Phoenician. Our civilisation is different to theirs: our backs to the desert, our faces to the sea.’

The Christian Lebanese had always been in danger, a minority in an Islamic region like the Armenians before them. Catholic Maronites looking to Rome for the concerns of the spirit, and Paris for the flesh. A wealthy mountain-stronghold of monks and militiamen in the north of the country, under siege for hundreds of years. It was their turn now, to rule Lebanon as they were always meant to. And Minas would help them.

He slept within hearing distance of the others, but kept apart from the discussions. He was still only a refugee, even after his ten years in Lebanon. Who knew when they’d turn on him as well? He said his prayers and crossed himself three times in the mornings, alert, conspicuous, washing his hands with care before he ate so they should see him and take note.

He didn’t let himself think of the Bedouin who helped him escape from Der ez Zor. That was a long time ago, and he had only been a boy. He simply loaded his rifle, aimed and fired. Fired at whoever he was told was the enemy. See her? Fire. Him? Fire. He went out on all the most distasteful excursions, the fuzzy, grey-area jobs nobody else had the stupidity or the spleen to do.

Today he was in a Druze village in the Chouf Mountains and it was colder than he’d ever known. He hit a chicken coop, the squawks of hens and shit-streaked feathers flying into his face. He flapped one arm about him wildly to disperse them. A woman ran away from him:
Another hen, only bigger
, he thought. He had to laugh, which brought on a coughing fit.
If I don’t laugh, I’ ll only cry. And then what good will I be?

She panicked, ran ever closer to him in a frantic effort to escape. Realising her mistake, at the last moment she turned away. Black scarf slapping at her neck. He aimed between her shoulderblades, felt the
thud-thud
of metal on his collarbone as he stumbled after her. She collapsed among the chickens as he leapt past, his boots avoiding her face, contorted in a last soundless curse.

He fired to the right and left, covering his advance. Behind him he could no longer hear or sense the rest of his unit. Something in him now was afraid. Should he hide until they found him again? He kept running. Quiet village, empty streets. A few corpses lounged in open doorways: all women, it seemed. The men were fighting higher up on the peaks. Fearless warriors, unafraid to die in battle, for tomorrow they would be reborn and suckling at yet another mother’s breasts. Reincarnation, that fixed magic number of Druze souls already in existence. Heretics. If the same people would keep dying and being reborn, well, he’d just have to keep killing them again and again.

The women’s faces were stretched beyond recognition. He avoided the black holes of their eyes. He looked around swiftly: nothing. The other militiamen liked to shoot them first and then bayonet them to make sure they were dead. Minas couldn’t do that. He shot first and then ran.

He slid on discarded fruit, burst tomatoes. An overturned cart. The dead women watched him, unimpressed.
They’re not the same as us.
He tried to look away from the accusation slashed across their faces, in their blown-up limbs. The women continued to stare sightlessly, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. A solitary shot rang out, ricocheting against a building. He flung himself to the ground, propelling his body by the elbows out of range and vision. Snipers, hidden in those seemingly abandoned houses, guarded by their dead. It wasn’t until he crawled behind the cart, heart pounding painfully through his breath, that he realised he’d been wounded. He rolled onto his side, wincing. There, the dark, wet stain seeping through his trousers. The stink of squashed cucumbers everywhere.

Oh, Jesus.
He ripped apart one of his shirtsleeves, made an inadequate bandage for his calf.
Oh, Jesus.
A child walked out on the road in front of him, holding an old brown dress fast to her mouth.
Her dead mother’s?
Oh, my Jesus.
The spread of her saliva widened on the rough fabric. He stared at her through his rifle sight as she came toward his hiding place.
Is
she two? Three?
She was crying, sucking at the dress like a teat. He knew if he let her she would scream and betray him to the snipers.

He peeked out from behind the cart, beckoned the little girl to him with a crook of his finger. He smiled in what he hoped was a fatherly fashion and nodded many times. He fumbled in his chest pocket, still with the fixed grin on his face, found a half-eaten mess of dried figs wrapped in paper. The little girl inched closer, cautious. Her mouth still working at the dress, frantic sucking. She put out her hand for the food. He gave it to her and watched as she tried to unwrap it without letting go her grip on the dress. He lowered the barrel of his gun.
Am I really
doing this?
Her fair head swam then focused into vision.
Murderer.
He swung the gun at her head once, twice, then closed his eyes.

Time passed in long, slow doses. Minutes, seconds, heartbeats, a fly crawling on the bedhead. Lilit stretched her neck back and watched it progress, millimetre by millimetre, until it reached the highest point, where her evil eye dangled from a plaited ribbon. She studied the fine, iridescent wings and intent, magnified eyes, twins to her beaded talisman. Her sleepy cat, a fourth-generation successor to the ginger beauty she befriended when she first arrived, made to claw at the buzzing insect. Lilit restrained her. When the fly reached the pillow, she slapped it away herself. Minutes passed as she turned her head to watch it die. Many minutes, as she lay in her canopied bed and waited for the servant girl to bring sour yoghurt in a tall glass, as she counted the minutes before another day would begin.

Minutes then hours. Hours of careful washing and folding she couldn’t trust the servants to do, putting festival clothes away for winter, taking pleasure in layers of smooth linen and seamed silk. Seasons turned. Wearing those robes again, fragrant folds on bare skin, greeting unveiled female guests for amber tea and ices in her inner quarters. Whitewashing summer garden walls, a team of local men with their paintbrushes and folk songs. She bent down with a tray of drinks for them, looked up: there, the shadows of fruit trees, window grilles, a spasm of memory. Somewhere far away, where another white wall danced in sunlight. No time for that now. There was always baking to do, weaving, slow bathing of tired limbs. Another baby, soapy with vernix, plaster-new.

Only a girl this time, yet Suleiman was pleased. He named her Ayse, after his dead mother. Both he and Lilit loved the baby with a trepidation born of tenderness, taking her into bed with them, watching her small fists clutching and releasing Lilit’s nipple, her nightdress, her hair, conscious of a dearth of time to enjoy her. She was so waxen, so pink and white, so frail. She hardly ever cried, simply gazed up at the quilted canopy as if seeing the heavens.

She died at three months, limp with meningitis. Lilit tried not to let herself believe it was her punishment for sleeping with a Muslim and renouncing her faith. She made a bargain with God.
If I have another
child, I promise to give it an Armenian name.
Suleiman was shaken by her grief and her terrible insistence, told her to name the next child anything she wanted. He assured her that he was pleased she herself was healthy, and still alive.

She took to her bed, afraid that any movement at all would make her lose the next baby, or the next. She dreamed of infants: their drained, ancient faces as they lay stillborn on cold tiles, Suleiman’s dazzling tiles of blue and green. She had been here ten years now, ten years of high walls, and murmured voices, a grudging affection for Suleiman that often felt too much like effacement, nothing else. Weeks later, she walked out into the courtyard one evening, wearing only her nightdress, into a wall of desert heat. The call of the muezzin, melancholy in his devotions. She remembered Lake Van, smug and mute as Fatima’s lips. Children, and blood on its banks, the column marching to who knew where; the blotting out of lives, names, faces; their bones, white then yellow then black; the sharp hairs on the back of Suleiman’s hands, his hands all over her, when he took his pleasure.