Bone Ash Sky (65 page)

They found crumpled tissues under the bed, a dirty white towel, Islamic Jihad instruction manuals and cassette tapes. Detailed steps on how to conduct kidnappings, assassinations, suicide bombings. She played them all in vain for any hint of Issa’s voice. She took the towel upstairs with her, ringed by semen stains in concentric circles, like the timelines in the trunk of a tree.

Shattered hearts, lives. She felt she had betrayed Selim to Issa and his torturers. At the same time, illogically, she felt betrayed by Selim. But strangely not by Issa. She kept the towel nearby, made sure the rest was burnt. She hugged her belly at night, lay on her side praying to Allah, then turning to the other side, pleading with the prophet Jesus that both men would miraculously reappear. That she should not be the instrument of their suffering.

She went to the Phalange headquarters, taking care to remove the thin gold chain and hand of Fatima from around her neck. She didn’t let herself think what these Christian militiamen would do to Issa if they found him with one of their men. Her first duty was to the man she told to leave her. Her second duty was to the father of her unborn child. In repeated formulae of skewed logic, she justified it to herself.
Because I
don’t really want Selim, I have to find him. It’s all my fault this happened. If
it wasn’t for me, they would never have met.

She set herself the task before she could find absolution.
I must do
the right thing. Then Issa and I can be truly happy.
What was the right thing?
I have to go against what I really want in order to find it.
Selim’s disappearance was punishment. Punishment for her denial of his love, for her betrayal. For her desire for Issa. She must sacrifice herself for pleasure, bleed for peace. She didn’t deserve Issa without atoning, debasing herself, trying everything to get Selim back.

She pleaded with the Phalange gunmen to find their man, their illustrious member.
He had medals, you know. He commanded a whole
unit.
She tried not to think of the massacres in the camps as she sat there across from these soldiers, handbag clutched to her slippery belly, watching the tired, paunchy, middle-aged men smoke, half-finish the cigarette, fling it down, absent-mindedly pick up the telephone, offer her a glass of tea. She accepted, forced down the sugary liquid. Sat and sweated.

She pleaded again and, after an hour of small talk and pleasantries, became pushy. But Selim was unimportant. The men behind their desks were forced to tell her the truth. Selim Pakradounian was not worth the trouble of upsetting Islamic Jihad.
We do not negotiate with terrorists
, was the mantra. The excuse. For anybody. He had outgrown his specific uses. All they could do was print more posters, more glossy leaflets – she could even hand them out if she wished.

‘There must have been people there who saw,’ she said. ‘They must have seen where he was taken but they just ignored it.’

The men shook their heads at her as if in sympathy, then resumed shuffling paper at their desks.

At home she sat on the divan in a haze of disbelief. She forgot to put the hand of Fatima back around her neck. It lay coiled in her handbag. Of course, she didn’t tell the other two women where she’d been. Rouba sat cross-legged on the carpet, silent for once. Bilqis made tea, crying so much her tears fell into the scalding liquid. Salt tea. Tea nobody touched.

‘Where is my Issa?’ she asked the walls, the windows, the sinister, gleaming sky. ‘How can he be so cruel to us?’

Sanaya surrendered to a fit of sobs, intensified by her inability to decide who she was crying for.

Selim couldn’t stand the beatings any longer. As soon as he thought they were done for the day, another team of men came in and resumed. They strapped him to the table in the corner, stretched him out on his back and tied his ankles to a pole with rope. This was the worst time, when he was unsure what would happen next. Then they attacked the soles of his feet with whips, belts, clubs. One day they must have used a chain. He knew this from the way his feet swelled up when they had left, with a greater speed and intensity than he’d ever witnessed before.

He couldn’t stand waiting for the next administering of
falaka
, the interminable uncertainty, the warped, elongated time frame of the beatings themselves. The only constant was Issa’s winking, elfin face in front of him, coming up close, receding, until Selim was never quite sure he hadn’t been imagining the whole thing. Some days he saw Anahit’s bracelet on Issa’s wrist and wanted to leap up and rip it off. Tear it from him, bite through it like an animal. Yet he had no strength. When Issa was in the room he couldn’t even speak. His throat closed in fear and he writhed in the silence of his impotence. In a strange way, this appropriation of his past seemed more violating than anything else.

They were not trying to find out any information from him; of that he was sure. There was no attempt at questioning, at any form of interrogation. Only the daily brutality of the beatings, conducted in silence. He learnt to be thankful they only beat the soles of his feet. So far they hadn’t touched the rest of his body.

When they left him he lay slumped in a corner for the rest of the day. Sometimes he heard the rustling of rats but never saw them. At night he fancied he could feel them pawing at his face, waiting for him to fall asleep so they could nibble through his eyes and nose. He jerked upward then, making his chains jangle, and the guard on duty rushed in and slapped him like a mother admonishing a wayward child.
Shush, go
to sleep now
, in harsh Arabic.

Some mornings he could hear the angry bleating of goats and knew there would be fresh milk for him to drink at breakfast. It always came to him warm as blood, with globules of yellow fat floating on the surface. He slurped it down greedily, looked up at the standing guard ashamed of his baseness, at the crust of milk stiffening the sides of his mouth. Sometimes they forgot to chain him from the night before so he could try to crawl around his room, examining every single floorboard, every speck of dirt and every mote of dust for some clues as to where he was. He comforted himself with elaborate frameworks of justice.
If they
haven’t chained me up today, it must mean they’re going to let me go.

He never thought of escape or if there might be any prisoners kept in other parts of the farm. He never thought of Sanaya. Only rarely of his daughter, the faceless stranger who visited him at night through the darkness. The fact of imprisonment had become his whole world, the sum total of his waking and dreaming life.

Today his feet throbbed more than usual. He looked down at them: black, speckled, swollen to almost three times their size. His tendons had burst. He shuddered, unable to repress a hint of revulsion at this self of his, reduced to spectacle. He put his hands in front of his face, close enough to see dirt caked in the fine wrinkles on his palm, in the dry cracks between his fingers. His nails were nicotine-yellow and far too long. He couldn’t see his face but could feel the growth on his cheeks and chin, soft, almost downy, matted with olive oil. They never washed him, but one young boy routinely oiled his new beard and head and face. There was a pimpled rash on his forehead from the lack of hygiene; he could feel its knobbly ridge under his fingertips. He’d been here weeks, even as long as a month. There was no way to calculate time, to know whether it was night or day.

He looked around. Sheets of hammered metal on what used to be windows, high up near the beamed ceiling. He could be in a disused barn. There was a faint trace of ammonia in the musty, dust-laden air, the rich, hot smell of living beasts. He heard a scuffle at the door. Somebody unbarred it and advanced toward him, bearing a bowl with the promise of something savoury emanating from its surface.

He tried not to look up this time. Yesterday a new guard had objected to his swollen gaze and threatened to kick him with those steel-capped boots. He concentrated instead on the floorboard directly in front of him. A cockroach was making its slow way to his foot. He didn’t dare flick it aside, didn’t dare move. He tried to send it telepathic commands.
Turn the other way! Leave me alone.
He felt the guard set the bowl down beside him, then kneel down to Selim’s level himself.

‘Eat. Good.’

His accent sounded Moroccan, even Algerian. Candid features, even with the scarf pulled over his forehead and around his chin. His Arabic careless and slurred. Selim took up the bowl and shovelled fava beans in with his fingers, burning the roof of his mouth.
If he’s nice to me
it must mean I’m going to be released.
He felt better then, ate with more appetite. The beans were earthy and soft, finely spiced. He closed his eyes, resting them. Then he put the bowl down as another thought took hold of him and paralysed his ability to move, eat, swallow.
If he’s this
nice to me it must mean he feels sorry for me. Because I’m not going to be
released, never going to be released.

The guard watched Selim intently, furrowing his brow.

‘Good? You wan’ something else?’

Selim croaked. It had been a while since he had to speak and his voice was almost gone from all the screaming during the beatings.

‘Some water, please.’

The guard returned presently with a beaker of water. Selim drank it in small sips.

‘You wan’ anything else?’

He thought for a moment and shook his head. There was nothing he could think of, nothing he wanted anymore.

BEIRUT, 1995

T
his time on my way back to the camp I carry calla lilies in a blueglazed pot, bags of fruit. Hair-ties and a brush and thick chapter book for Inam, with stories of latter-day Scheherazades and wicked kings.

‘I haven’t finished the story yet for
The Globe
,’ I tell Bilqis over tea. ‘I should be done by the end of the week.’

‘
Insh’allah
, it will help.’

Inam sits in a corner of the hut and reads her book. I remember those endless childhood days, when half an hour of reading felt like delicious forever. It could never end, as the next moment didn’t really exist. Time was elongated, elastic. A game outside in the park with friends was an entire lifetime of achievement. When I was happy as a child, it was as if this sensation could never finish. When I was sad, my life became indecipherable and overwhelmed the promise of any future. When I was reminded of the loss of my father, this sadness became bound up in who I thought I was. Real joy eluded me, every day.

‘Here, sweetheart. Let’s see if I can remember any written Arabic.’

Inam comes and stands by me, leaning against the chair. I smile, gesture her closer.

‘Sit on my lap. Unless you think you’re too old for things like that.’

With a glance at her grandmother, Inam climbs into my lap, settles in comfortably. She’s small for her age, and wiry, and I can easily bear her weight. Nervous as well as excited, she chews at her bottom lip.

‘Let’s see. Which story shall we start with?’

Inam giggles at my pronunciation, helping with harder words. As the story progresses she forgets herself entirely and presses her rose-petal cheek against my face. We could be sisters. I feel a sense of lightness, grace, as if she and I, here together, are all that matters.

There’s a knock, forceful, insistent. Inam springs forward to open the door.

‘Wait,’ Bilqis says. ‘It could be anyone.’

Inam stands aside, suddenly showing fear.

‘Soldiers?’

Her grandmother doesn’t answer, shouting through the closed door.

‘Who is it?’

‘Only me,’ a girlish voice lisps. ‘Rowda.’

A young woman pushes the door open, takes Bilqis’s right hand and raises it first to her lips then to her forehead in a gesture of respect. Why didn’t I think to do that? Inam immediately runs to her, jubilant, and I’m unexpectedly jealous. The young woman takes time over her greetings, as if purposely ignoring me. She takes Inam into her arms and swings her around. Inam’s thick wedge of hair spills out of its binding and falls over her shoulders. Bilqis chuckles and makes ineffectual swipes at furniture getting in the way of their antics.