Bone Ash Sky Read Free

before Beirut is blazing again. I know this in my bones, in the pulse of my hybrid blood: Armenian, Lebanese, Turkish. There’s another, secret war, lodged deep inside. The battle between hating my father and loving him. Hating him for being a ruthless killer, for leaving me before I had a chance to know him. Grasping at this chance to absolve him, restore the fierce torchbearer to me again.
    I pass a boutique on Rue Hamra and peer into its display. Thigh-slashed gowns with artificial blooms on the shoulder: birdlike, predatory. Sequins, stiletto heels. The sort of dresses I longed for as a teenager, watching other girls at dances, weddings, while my grandmothers would force me to wear little-girl gowns, puffed sleeves and a bow tied at the back. Today I wear a shirt with bone buttons – more than a decade old, reminding me of who I once used to be in this city. Camel-bone, like the carved Syrian earrings dotted with gold leaf that I wear in my ears. Another of my grandmother’s treasures. Spoils of war. The shirt’s been washed so many times it’s become diaphanous. So comforting to wear something so frayed, full of holes: like my memory of those times.
    When the saleswoman emerges from her dark interior, suspicious but expectant, I turn away to follow a crooked road downhill to the sea, elated by its promise of welcome.
    I heave my backpack to the ground when it becomes too cumbersome. I haven’t found my hotel yet, still on a sleep-deprived high from my night on the boat and my first glimpse of the city. I’m pushed and jostled by passers-by, standing my ground to squint up at a street sign that isn’t shown on my map.
    This Levantine sun, harshly hot, exposes every mote and speck of dust, corruption, hypocrisy. I promise myself to buy some sunglasses at the next street stall. A sad artiste caresses his broken oud. The street signs just as I remember, squares of hammered blue tin bordered in white, nailed onto buildings, fences, corners. There’s something aesthetically satisfying about them: I imagine upbeat tourists collecting them as retro artwork to put on their living-room walls.
    The musician is oblivious to me standing here, staring at the street sign in Arabic and French above him. The old man sings in a whine. My violet city luxuriates in the light of dusk. His instrument is only just being held together with peeling layers of tape. Behind him, crumbling colonial apartments: butter and rose and Nile green polluted to grey. Mock-Corinthian columns hold up rickety balconies that double as summer bedrooms, bristling with electrical wiring and outdoor plumbing, the ugliness of modernity obscuring beauty beneath.
    And yet there’s still a sense of grace to my city, in its narrow painted shutters, olive trees and jasmine sprouting from rooftop gardens. The ease with which high-rises marred by shrapnel stand like sentinels, the fretwork of balconies designed for women to see without being seen. I imagine how it would feel to touch those rusting grilles, stroke them as if they’ll suddenly unfurl, revealing my father’s face. Through the gate an Ottoman townhouse, its formal garden taken over by knee-high grass and weeds. Only a matter of time before it too vanishes by bombs or plain neglect. The musician keens. My darling, my love, your sufferings and joys will be many. The sea behind him white with heat and debris from the smoke-filled, hazy air.
    I walk to the Corniche, to drink raisin juice on the promenade. It’s something I did every Sunday. My grandmother Lilit would bring me here, still well enough to walk, both dressed in our church-going finery. She with her walking-stick, its staccato dance on the potholed path; me, conscious of my white eyelet dress and the oversized bow perched like a butterfly in my hair. I would wish my mother was with us too, my lovely mother who had looked so much like Lilit. I took after my father’s side of the family, they used to