Bone Ash Sky (54 page)

‘Please, Chief,’ he had said, his eyes straining into the dark. ‘It hurts me.’

‘Keep quiet,’ his commander replied, easing closer to him on the straw pallet, clamping a hand on his shoulder, rubbing himself against the back of Issa’s thigh. His rubbing started slow, then increased in intensity, rhythmic, broken, shriller, like his commander’s splintered voice.

‘Keep—still.’

His voice became higher, frenzied, fragmenting into little balls, like liquid mercury spilling on the ground. Issa had seen it happen, a thermometer fell and broke once.
Where was it? At headquarters? In
Beirut?
He tried to remember, tried to force his mind to concentrate on something, anything, so that he wasn’t really lying
there
, not in that fumbling, frenzied moment, with the other man’s body pushing now soft, now hard, into his.

‘Slowly, slowly,’ Chief had said, as if telling himself.

He grew to hate his commander’s Iranian accent, all their accents.
Bastards
, he let himself think.
Idiot Persians. Poofters. Fags.
He thought of all the words, all the evil, offensive, foreign words he could use to describe his superiors. Especially Chief. At the end, when he caught his breath, he could hear Chief shuffling over the floor away from him, rolling himself in his own blanket by the garage door.

That next morning Issa woke with a burning soreness, yet his mind was clear.
It didn’t happen. Didn’t happen to me. Someone else got it
last night.
He was the first to salute Chief, the first to offer his services, polishing muddy boots, washing battledress in cold running streams, preparing meals. No trace of his night anger left. Chief was fine, Chief was brave, Chief knew best.

On the Holy Day of Mourning Chief tore the skin on his chest in remorse and blood splashed over his bare feet. He asked everyone for forgiveness of any sin he’d committed against them in the past year. Issa turned away, blushed, murmured, ‘Nothing, Chief.’ Chief was devout, a holy martyr. He knew how to run such a strong, disciplined organisation.
Iran is our future.

He lay awake now in the spare-room bed. He tried not to think of Selim and Sanaya. He caressed his gun. It reposed by his side like a silent woman.

He picked up Sanaya in a borrowed Renault. International peacekeeping troops were everywhere now, back to keep half an eye on the Phalange and the Israelis. American soldiers sat on the side of the road, well-polished rifles balanced on their knees, and tried to engage passers-by in conversation. Everyone in west Beirut ignored them. Issa released the clutch and the car made a strangling noise. The soldiers clapped and he cursed loudly in English, not caring if they heard him.

On their way to the Commodore the car went at walking pace and nearly blew a tyre from all the shell-holes, ordnance casings and building debris from bombings. When they finally arrived, Sanaya laughed.

‘We would’ve been better off walking, hmm, Issa?’

He glared at her, and then regretted it. He dampened her natural ebullience, weighed her down with his need for perfection. At the bar he swayed back and forth on his ripped plastic stool, looking down at the carpet, pitted with cigarette stubs and burn-holes. Through the plateglass doors to the inner courtyard he saw Sanaya look at the hotel pool, a thick swamp of weeds and journalists’ garbage: broken generators, abandoned satellite phones. Issa didn’t care about his surroundings. He focused his eyes only on her, taking in every detail of her dress, her hair, her deliberately blank expression. His new, fashionably tight jeans sat incongruously on his fighter’s body, and he felt embarrassed.

‘I’ll order,’ she said.

He made to stop her with his arm.

‘It’s shameful for a woman to do what a man can do.’

She shrugged him off.

‘No Muslims here, Issa. Nobody cares.’

He watched as French and Italian soldiers crowding the bar turned and looked at her with appreciation as she made her way to the front. She returned their stares, smiled, accepted their murmured compliments.

She watched him with a maternal eye as he took a sip of his drink. ‘Like it? I chose something sweet for you.’

‘It’s exactly like rosewater syrup.’

‘With an edge.’

‘Like me.’

At the door of her apartment he attempted to kiss her. She let him, submitting, but kept her mouth slack. He bit her bottom lip, giving out an involuntary cry, the squawk of a bird. The smell of death and sex and sour mouth were too great – it hurt him. He drew his lips away but continued to hold her, wedged together, groin to groin and face to face, pressing tight as if without her he might fly.

The women danced slowly in broken circles and Issa sat by the window brooding, gazing down at the foam-lashed sea. Celebration. He wanted to join in. A celebratory dance. But he knew better. He knew the war wasn’t really over yet. Sure, Lebanese politicians were talking of holding a reconciliation conference in Switzerland. Sure. He knew nothing would come of it. What, to let Christians and Jews run the country? Never. The war wasn’t finished – not if he or his militia had anything to do with it.

An old Armenian song played, recorded in Arabic.
My darling, my
love, your sufferings and joys will be many.
Both Rouba and his mother had started wearing colours tonight; enough of mourning for Hadiya, enough of mourning the massacres.

A new year and the end of sorrow at last. He knew better. More sorrow, more pain. He smiled up at his mother, didn’t want her to fret. She even wore a flowered scarf on her head. Her ancestral anklets jingled. She held her hands out to Sanaya and Rouba, they spun together and turned, the three Graces in bas-relief. He’d seen them once on a postcard at the beach, hadn’t bought it when the hawker thrust it in his face and wheedled. Nude women. Pornographic. Swelling hips and moulded buttocks, arms pushed forward in exultation.

Sanaya glowed in and out of wheels of candlelight, slashes of red against white: crimson taffeta, creamy upper arm, red-ruched sleeve, white goose-pimpled breast. Her vermilion lips mouthed the song, her powdered cheeks put him in mind of Marie Antoinette. Cut off her head. Impale her. He looked away again.
You don’t love me.
Such flamboyance was mere vanity, after everything they had been through.

‘Here’s to 1983,’ Sanaya toasted.

The others joined in raising their glasses. He flicked his wrist toward Sanaya, pale amber punch sloshing in his glass.

‘I hope there’s no alcohol in here,’ he said, and smiled morosely before she should become upset by his melancholy.

She danced toward him, hips wobbling, that circling stomach tight against his face.

‘Come on, Issa. Just a little cognac. I waited for hours in a queue to pay far too many American dollars for it.’

He turned his head up to look at her, took a measured, quaking sip.

‘Dance with me,’ she said.

He shook his head, held the glass in front of him to block her. She pulled him up by both hands. The canary chirped in its shrouded cage, woken by the music. Sanaya dragged him to the middle of the room, cajoling, blowing air kisses. He resisted. His glass smashed to the floor and Rouba and Bilqis looked around, startled. In the silence of the record’s end they heard a leisurely knock on the door. Only one person knocked like that. And if Sanaya didn’t answer, he had his own key.

She sprang forward, opening the door.

‘Selim!’

She stood awkwardly, blocking his entry, a schoolgirl reprimanded for playing with her friends.

‘Ah—come in and watch the fireworks. You know Rouba, Issa … and this is Madame Ali, Issa’s mother. I don’t think you two have met.’

They all crowded against the window – it was too cold to go out into the balcony. Selim’s shoulder was pressed against the old woman’s head, the Palestinian boy’s mother; she was so short he felt he should reach out and pat her.
God, she looks familiar.
She glanced up and nodded, he saw her broad, square teeth. Then, in a slow instant, she looked at him again, and quickly looked away. He sipped his drink. She raised her empty glass. The sea abruptly lit up by balls of pink and green. Fireworks this time, not bombs. She looked over her shoulder at him again. His drink suddenly was not strong enough, and he felt a little sick. He swallowed the rest in one gulp and Sanaya noticed.

‘Top up?’

He shook his head, choking on the last of the liquid. He looked again at the woman. She looked straight back. He thought of all the Palestinians he’d killed: in the camps, on the street. Their hands outstretched as they ran. The cries, the pleading. And the ones he’d let live. He smiled at the woman now, faintly, non-committally, seeing a glimmer of contempt in her returning nod. Behind him, he felt Issa’s presence as a malevolent intelligence, a sixth sense wiser than the boy himself.

‘I need to go,’ he said.

He waited in the dark on the stairs for Sanaya to follow and ask what was wrong. He waited a few more minutes, then left.

‘Why have you brought me here?’

Sanaya didn’t answer. On the edge of the refugee camps, the Muslim cemetery seemed to stretch, brown and dusty, all the way to the mountains. But it was an optical illusion. In reality the cemetery was small and poor, enclosed by chicken wire to keep the dead inside.

Selim scanned the horizon without looking any closer, as if to deny where he was standing, shielding himself from any confronting detail: the forlorn tombstones, scarred graves with corpse buried flat on top of corpse, this evidence of mass burial in mounds of baked soil. On the outskirts of the cemetery, Israeli patrols could be heard faintly, distorted by wind.
We have come to cleanse your area of terrorists.

‘Are they going to kill us as well?’ Sanaya shouted.

‘Be quiet. You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Leave me alone.’

‘Sanaya, tell me why we’re here.’

‘Are they going to kill me as well? They’ll spare you. You’re such a good friend to them.’

‘What’s wrong with you lately?’

‘What about you? You’ve killed women, babies. Innocents. And you nearly killed Issa’s mother on your little rampage. She recognised you.’

Selim stared at her, shocked. She waited, enjoying his discomfort. ‘Are you going to kill me too, Selim? I’m Muslim.’