Bone Ash Sky (63 page)

‘Oh, I’m sure you will, Uncle.’

He inches closer to me, takes my hand.

‘So what are you doing back here, daughter? Surely you know the state your grandmother Siran is in?’

‘I’ve seen her. Do you go?’

‘My wife does. I—well, it upsets me too much to see her like that. I remember her when she was sharp, full of energy. You’re not here to stay, are you?’

‘No. Well, maybe. I’m here for work – but I suppose my real reason for coming back was to see whether I could find out more about my father. About how he died.’

‘You know how he died. He was killed – by the Muslims.’

‘Yes, but I know nothing about him. How it happened, how he felt, whether he was to blame—’

‘Let me tell you something. He came here in eighty-three, not long after you left for America. I saw him with my own two eyes. He came looking for you.’ He chuckles and wipes his face with an open palm. ‘How strange that I should see him, out of the blue like that, after so long – and now you, my child! It’s a miracle. Like something in a book.’

I turn my head away, ashamed of letting Bedros see the tears that are starting to my eyes.

‘It can’t be true. He came looking for me? I can’t believe it.’

‘Yes, daughter. He came looking for you before he was killed. He always cared for you. He loved you. But he was a man scared of his own shadow.’

I don’t know what to say to Chaim. If I reveal why I’m so moody lately I’ll have to tell him the whole story. I’m not sure I can. The bald facts are so unpalatable.
My father was a Phalangist militiaman.
The movement had ties to the Nazi Party in the thirties. Neo-fascists. The Israelis conveniently forgot this during the civil war and helped the militia in their supposed struggle against Islam. My father thought he was better than the Arabs he lived with all his life. He unthinkingly swallowed the prejudice of his own father’s trauma. It started when he was a young boy, this hatred of others. Maybe because he was other, in this foreign place, from birth. Is that why he left us?

I can’t imagine what he was really like away from the guns and shells, the carnage he helped create. The wedding photograph doesn’t help. In it he looks false, a mannequin grinning murder. He killed thousands of Muslims. Civilians. Children, babies. He thought the Israeli occupation was the answer to Lebanon’s problems. Other Muslim factions resented this, especially the Shias. Issa Ali was a Shia. My father died due to his own arrogance. And yet—and yet he’d done all that, then came looking for me in the Armenian quarter, to tell me, what? That he loved me? That he was sorry? Uncle Bedros said he’d come in the rain, a pot of pink flowers under his coat. That he asked about me and cried. I can’t deny the pain this erases, the feeling of warmth and lightness it gives me.

Chaim asks me why I’m so quiet lately, so preoccupied.

‘Too much work,’ I say. ‘I’ve finished four articles and now they want another by the end of the week.’

He shakes his head, miming disbelief. ‘You can’t fool me, but I’ll let it go this time.’ He chucks me under the chin and goes off to work for days and weeks. I can’t tell him.

I go to see Bilqis in the camp but remain silent about what Sayed has revealed. I wait for Bilqis to talk first, look at her now with suspicion, even hostility. I accept tea, choke on more of the dry biscuits. I meet Inam at the school gate, even though she’s old enough to walk home by herself. But Bilqis says she’s afraid of Inam getting involved with the stone-throwers and militants, so Inam is accompanied to and from school. Now Bilqis is often too tired to walk. It seems that she becomes breathless now, even when walking only as far as the shop. Weeks pass. Still I don’t tell her of the reason for my withdrawal, an interior reserve I know she’s too wise not to notice. I leave as soon as I can, while Inam begs me to stay.

I call Sayed Ali and apologise for not coming back. He’s cautiously respectful, and strangely sheepish. I tell him I’m working on the article about him. Assure him I believe in his innocence. I’m not sure if I’m lying. I’m still not sure why I’m so obsessed now with helping him, why I need to convince myself day by day, word by word, of his purity. The link with my father? Some way of finding out more about the way he lived his life? Or severing the bond in this small way between Sayed and his cousin? If Sayed Ali is innocent then maybe I can begin to forgive Issa Ali for the poison he inflicted, on my father and grandmothers and myself, the uncertainty that’s eating away my life.

Sayed comments on my reticence, asks if there’s anything wrong. I deny it, deny everything. When I hang up I’m conscious of feeling empty, wrong, as if I should have said more, gone further. I’m tempted to call again but instead stay by the phone, looking out at the view of the sea from Chaim’s windows.

Chaim is still away. I’m left alone to my looping thoughts. I dream of Issa Ali, the faceless assassin. He comes to me at night and puts his curved knife to my throat. A scimitar, Ottoman, gleaming as a half-moon. His face changes to Sayed’s, the pained expression twisting into a smirk.
Don’t tell anyone what you know
, he says in Arabic.
I
forbid you
. Then Issa comes back, floating, silent as the clouds around him. I hold my hands out in the dark, want above all to forgive. Only by forgiving him can I rid myself of his presence.
How can I know why
you did it?

I let myself mourn my father’s absence. Did he love me? Did he love me after all? I remember peering at my parents’ photograph on tiptoe when either one of the grandmothers wasn’t looking. Holding it to my chest as if the manufactured warmth from my father’s black and white gaze would permeate in this way through my skin. I caressed his poreless cheek, ran my finger across the inky length of his eyebrow.
Oh,
Daddy.
He smirked back as if he knew he would go away someday soon. My mother remained a cipher, pale forehead wrinkled in doubt under a filmy veil.

I know Selim was second-in-command to the militia led by Elie Hobeika, responsible for the massacres of the camps. The war crimes tribunal confirmed that. I know, I know, I know. But it makes no difference. On one level, a deeper, darker level, I know nothing at all. I know the details of the atrocities, the rapes, the subsequent denials. The window-dressing enquiry run by the Israelis, the Kahan report. No condemnation of anyone at all, except perhaps the victims. When I found out in first-year college, it didn’t stop me from continuing to love the ideal father, so young and handsome; it only made me hate myself.
How can I love someone so evil? How can I absolve him of guilt?
I shuffled through college corridors with my head down, fought not to vomit when confronted with a lunch plate of cold cuts. It reminded me too much of the dead bodies I mutilated in my nightmares.

Who is victim and who perpetrator? Now I hold two men in my arms, side by side in bed, stuck inside the body bags of Chaim’s sweaty sheets. I hug them to me, twin spectators of my suffering. I cry out in sleep and hush myself like a mother comforting a child.
Hush, hush,
it’ ll be all right. There’s hope. We can all remember. Or choose to forget.
I torment myself with outdated notions of right and wrong. I don’t know how to condemn my father for who he was, nor do I know how to forgive his murderer from taking him away, stealing him from me before I had a chance to confront him with my own flawed existence. And what of Issa Ali’s family?

I field countless calls from the UNDP. ‘The woman is asking after you. She wants to see you again. The girl misses you. Apparently she likes you, which doesn’t happen often with anyone at all. Don’t know what you did to charm them so.’

One morning the phone doesn’t stop ringing even when I turn over in Chaim’s bed and resolve to ignore it all day. It stops, begins again. I put the creased pillow over my ears. Finally, I crawl out of bed and pick up the receiver.

‘Yes?’

‘Ms Pakradounian? UNDP.’

I wait, sighing audibly.

‘Ms Pakradounian, there’s a parcel here addressed to you. Seems to be from a detainee at the Khiam Detention Center. Should we send it on?’

‘No. I’ll come and get it.’

In the tampered envelope, I find my mother’s bracelet. There’s one line, on paper torn from a child’s exercise book, printed carefully in English.

I spoke to my aunt and know whose bracelet it is. None of it is
your fault or mine. Sayed.

I sit on the floor in Chaim’s living room. Julius gnaws on a bone in the kitchen, now and then giving tiny grunts of satisfaction. My laptop beckons, but I have nothing to give today. My legs are folded beneath me, palms flat on the keyboard, an absent meditation. I look out at the sea. It’s evening already, the light from the sky that blinded me all day has dimmed and all that remains is a pearl lustre at the edges of my eyes.

I make yet another beginning on the Sayed story, mull over the opening sentence for a moment. Pause, my hand hovering, then press the delete button. I’m making no progress, haven’t been for days. There’s a singular impossibility in writing even the first line, the first paragraph introducing the issue. Too many dimensions, and I know I’m not wise enough or experienced enough nor convinced enough to unravel them. The political. The personal. The blurred space of misunderstanding in between. A tangled heap of coloured threads.

Sayed’s note has alternately comforted and unsettled me. As yet I haven’t replied. Deep down part of me feels he’s wrong. Of course it’s our fault as well. The sins of the fathers. The responsibility to create good out of such evil. Has he tried? No. Have I? I wonder if my father ever really did love my mother. They were first cousins, after all. Tied by blood if not by desire. It was the other woman, that Muslim woman, who meant most to him. The contradictory woman of his other life, that flickering momentary life he conducted apart from his family. It’s hard to swallow, hard not to resent him for such a blunt betrayal.

I get up, water Chaim’s gardenias laboriously with a drinking glass I fill and refill many times. The petals are yellowing, tissue-paper dry. I snap the spent blooms from their stalks and drop them into the street far below. There’s an evening breeze coming off the sea, a rarity. I stay at the balcony rail, let the wind clean away my frustration, the smell of exhaust and construction dust, the fine silt that settles on my eyelids from the ash that comes from garbage burning in the camps. In my silent, meditative state, this ash seems so potent. I don’t want to wipe it off. I lick my finger, taste its bitterness. It’s the bodies of my people, and Chaim’s: in Der ez Zor, Sabra-Shatila, far-away Auschwitz. Death isn’t personal. Violence moves through us, and is gone again.