Bone Ash Sky (8 page)

‘Send her upstairs when she wakes. I have some fresh eggs.'

She lived in the heart of the PLO enclave in west Beirut. Her waterfront promenade and the boulevards that radiated from it still retained the beauty of an Orient past so idealised and yet so corrupted in these halfway countries, neither East nor West: delicately amoral, carelessly imprecise, in an advanced state of decay. The scraggly palm trees were indicative of it, the heat that embraced then lacerated, the grit between her teeth from watery coffee sold by vendors at the seaside, overblown fruit hawked by peasants from the south.

In these last few days before the Israeli invasion she discovered – reluctantly, shyly, almost ashamed – how much she was bound to this city. In refusing to leave, in clinging to her flimsy life, she found something interior, precious and reserved, close to love, for the city that mirrored her every breath, her every moan and fear. At night she lay back on her kilim cushions and smoked shisha tobacco scented with apples, gazing out into the middle distance past crowds on the seafront, as if by doing this she might somehow avert their shared fate.

When she was younger, she thought she would travel as soon as she could, explore the whole of Europe – live on the fringes, flout moral codes, a fleeting sparkling citizen of the world. She would promise herself in those nights spent lying awake in bed, hearing the clock tick, hearing her parents argue:
When I turn thirty I' ll be somewhere completely
different, Cyprus maybe, Greece, or taking in the shimmer-heat of the
south of Italy.
She envisaged days of lassitude and iced drinks, nights of tanned skin and cool passion. She had no ambitions; studying was always a chore. She wasn't good at anything in particular, and hadn't really minded. She liked dancing, music, was capable of putting people at ease. She didn't judge. That was her one shining achievement. Now she wished she had something: a hobby, a passion to occupy her days, to make life sing. She should have gone away when she had the chance.

She despised her parents and their small-minded existence, that bitter, hard-earned, middle-class wealth, a dirt-floor factory and its underpaid workers. Manufacturing cheap nylon pantyhose; sheer nude, opaque white, dirty black, she refused to ever wear a pair. She loathed the obligatory end-of-year appearance, the grudging line-up to shake her hand, such a good girl, such a compliant daughter, the pretty child of the boss. Handing out presents, meagre parcels of tangerines and roasted nuts. Her parents would bend down, whisper in her ears, twin conspirators.
You know all this is for you.
She knew it wasn't. If she were dead, her parents would still be doing it. Now they were dead in her place, and she felt as if she had killed them.

She had dreaded the petty rounds of protocol, decorum: endless afternoon visits to fourth cousins and distant friends of friends. Muslim boys chosen for her to marry one day, all on display like so many fake clown-heads at the circus. Aim for the mouth, pop in a ball, win the prize. They sat in a row on stiff high-backed chairs, gobbling down food, betraying their indifference to her with their lack of manners. She watched them, sipped, never smiled. Tea and syrup cake disappearing down their gullets, scent of rosewater, glasses of pure arak poured from a little green bottle for the ladies. She hated it all: Beirut the implacable hostess, Beirut the hypocrite matron, Beirut the painted whore. Now, at the age of thirty, she realised just how much she belonged to Beirut, and the city to her.

It could be because she was now all these things. The slapdash hostess, the failed matron, the virgin whore. Beirut and she had an understanding, or at least something in common. She finally appreciated – if not accepted – her role in a society that alternately condemned and praised her for the very same attributes on different days. And she was no longer ashamed. No, she was defiant. It was easy to be when there was no longer anything to lose.

By day she walked, if it was safe enough to venture out. She walked through her tiny neighbourhood of Ras Beirut, waving in complicit denial to the odd herb- or egg-sellers squatting on the kerb with their kitchen-garden wares, oblivious to the threat of bombs. She passed the young Syrian – a
Yezidi
, a devil-worshipper, her neighbours whispered – who sat in exactly the same position every day, on a corner in the shade. He was a beggar, dressed in rags like all the other beggars and gypsies she passed, but he begged for words, not money. All around him in plastic bags were words cut from newspapers and books, bus tickets or food packets, or written on tiny squares of wrapping paper.
War. Devastation.
Kalamata olives. Sadness. Lux soap. One way to Jbeil. Futility.
She knew he'd gone mad, shell-shocked by the death of his wife and four children during an air raid two months ago. They had only moved to Beirut this year from their village in Syria. He was at work when it happened; a day labourer, a simple man. Now he sat in his unmoving position, serene eyes staring up to the sky, murmuring his broken mantra as people walked by. ‘A word to give me, sir? A word to spare, young lady?'

She always stopped and gave him one, bending down to his level, where the smell of his unwashed hair and clothes overpowered her, dismayed by his black bare feet. Each time she forced herself to linger, smile and make small talk after he wrote down her word in his incongruously perfect handwriting. Sometimes she slipped him some money and ran away before he had time to protest.

She power-walked past the American University campus and cheap student cafes, now bricked-up completely by their frightened owners. She rounded the strafed Gefinor building, once the modern pride of Beirut, to the tree-fringed road twisting through the old, crumbling quarter of Ain Mreisseh, where the last of the city's Ottoman villas were being picked off one by one like toy targets. Their red-tiled roofs made them easy to spot, their cheerful character easy to justify bombing. What right had they to look so complacent in a dying city?

There was a certain tree on this route. Miraculously it had escaped the shelling and stood bent in the ruined courtyard of one of those villas. Old and twisted, its trunk thickening to low-lying roots, a woman's legs and pubis with no torso. On the opposite side, as if merged into it, were the thicker legs and squat penis of a man. Twin lovers with no heads, no eyes, no hearts. She couldn't abandon this tree. Whenever she became tempted to escape – take her money, leave the apartment to looters, seek refuge with Selim in east Beirut or Cyprus – she thought of the tree, so brave, so foolhardy, so achingly beautiful in the face of decay. Then she knew she had to stay. The tree had become her Beirut.

Her city had become an amphitheatre of terror. Here in west Beirut, once home to the liberal intelligentsia and artists, where Christians and Muslims lived side by side, people now asked each other's background and religion before committing to anything, before buying a bunch of grapes, accepting a simple offer of help. Everyone had become adept at euphemism. She'd be surprised if anyone could ever speak to one another in plain, honest terms again. They'd lost the knack. Now there were code words for everything. Seven years of civil war were called
the
events
. Shrapnel had become
confetti
. Wounds were
scratches.
Death,
our
grinning friend.

The sounds of bombs and guns and the whirring of Israeli planes echoed from the apartments terraced on the mountainside all the way down to the sea. Commercial streets became empty spaces between onslaughts. When there was a ceasefire called, for minutes or hours – never longer – men scurried out for anything they could find in the shops along Rue Hamra and the women stayed at home, trying to ignore this war they thought had ended long ago.

Sanaya didn't stay home. She cloaked herself in her blue abaya and a pair of sequinned sandals she'd filched from one of the overflowing bins lining the Corniche. Spoils of war, discarded last week by fleeing Christians bound for the east of the city. She imagined the woman's panic:
Leave this? Take that?
Making two piles: hairdryer,
reject
; handmirror,
must have
; sequinned sandals,
not sure
– this third pile for objects requiring the clarification of attachment. Her husband sweeping up the piles on his way to the car, dumping them in the nearest gutter, ignoring her protestations.

Sanaya walked blind and fast in her discarded sandals and she walked this way to keep hold of her sanity. She didn't allow herself to see, to really see this devastation wreaked by her own neighbours on each other. No matter she walked past bombed apartment blocks exactly like hers, through shopping arcades collapsed and folded like paper flowers, as gunmen followed her through neighbourhoods pockmarked by shrapnel, demanding her identity card; no matter she stopped and showed it to them repeatedly, either smiling or keeping calm, a splitsecond decision between life and death. She stood with them on streets guarded by other uneasy sentinels: a few palms, bare and spindly, their fronds blown off by car-bomb blasts.

She woke late in viscous heat to militiamen on loudspeakers. She was thankful Selim wasn't there; he'd gone back to east Beirut last night. She sat up, looked out the window. Syrians – she could tell from the tattiness of their uniforms.

‘The Israeli leaflets are poisoned,' they boomed. ‘Come down to the bonfires immediately.'

She put on a pair of rubber gloves, rummaging in the kitchen bin for the leaflets she had crumpled and thrown in there yesterday. She didn't believe the Syrians – or at least only half-believed them. But it wouldn't do not to be seen downstairs at the bonfire. She jumped at a sudden pounding on the door and opened it to a Syrian soldier who thrust out a plastic bag. He didn't speak. Her hands were shaking in their irregular pink gloves; it wouldn't do to let him see her shake. He would think she had something to hide.

He looked around the room as he stood at the door, weapon easy by his side. She turned to follow the trajectory of his gaze, suddenly seeing the room as he must see it: faded opulence, bourgeois pretension, chandeliers and fake-marble columns and iridescent urns so much evidence of her betrayal to the cause.
He's a socialist. Comes from some
dirt-poor village in the desert. I could be killed for this in west Beirut.

She pulled off her gloves, beckoned him inside. Now he turned his attention to her and again she saw herself as he must see her: an aging woman in a rose-coloured robe, breasts loose and sagging, a oncebeautiful face raddled by sleep and humidity. A decadent imperialist. A whore.

‘Coffee? Glass of tea?'

He slapped his lips together once, twice. The sound was faintly nauseating to her.

‘Some water.'

She brought it to him where he stood, watched as he drank. Something in the way he held the glass reminded her of Hadiya's uncle. Issa too had drained the liquid in a gulp, pouring the water into his mouth from above in the peasant fashion, without allowing the glass to touch his lips.

‘
Sa' laam aleikum
,' the soldier said when he was finished.

‘
Sa' laam
,' she breathed.

When he'd gone she stood on the balcony, leaning over the railing. Rouba was in the courtyard, hanging out her washing.

‘What was his problem, Sanaya?'

‘Syrian. Wanting leaflets to burn. Do you have any?'

Rouba smirked.

‘I have one, but I'm keeping it. Don't like the Syrians. Never liked them. Coming here telling us all what to do.'

Sanaya watched her shake out a pillowslip with a sharp, decisive flick. Rouba, too, was defiant in almost imperceptible ways. Gnarled and misshapen, another foolhardy tree.

BEIRUT, 1995

I
left the city at sixteen during the height of civil war, and I can recall that dreary afternoon as if it were yesterday. One of the wettest winters on record, the Armenian quarter flooded by relentless rains. Trees twisted and buckled under the onslaught of shells, rotting trunks exposed bruise-yellow and blue in the downpour. Some took on fantastic shapes: stripped limbs, coupling bodies in a death embrace. But I was too young to understand this, or any of what was going on: a city turning on itself.