Bone Ash Sky Read Free Page A

say: the spitting image of Selim. Yet more and more, when I look at my face in the mirror now, it’s only Lilit I see. Not in my features, but in the expression. Beggars and refugees and young men lifting their proud heads to look at me, steeped rows of apartment blocks above the sea lit silver and gold and all the shades of cream in morning sunlight. Behind them, bare mountains whisper their dark secrets. I would take off my shoes and walk in the pearl-pale wash of foam on the beach, while Lilit sat on the sea wall, watching. A kaïk vendor walked by with his long wooden pole wreathed in the warm, hollow bread. When I gave him a coin I could feel his palm smooth and dry with sesame seeds. The Orthodox liturgy insinuating its reedy refrain into my thoughts: Profound mystery , the congregation sang. The priest in an undertone, I will wash my hands in innocence and go around your altar, O Lord . We would leave my other grandmother, Siran, taking coffee with the priest and the rest of the old ladies. Crying over her lost son, Selim. Siran thought Lilit was blasphemous for keeping a copy of the Koran by her bedside as well as the Bible. I’d heard them arguing over Lilit’s muffled past – her Turkish husband, her veils, that silver jewellery from Syria – as if the innocent green-covered volume was its entire manifestation.
    Lilit was different, even then. She had a streak of danger I admired, something dark in her past that made her joyful and reckless. She could swim – in a huge, black, knitted bathing suit – unlike any of the other old ladies I knew. She joked. She sometimes even swore.
    Now I poke with my straw at the pistachios floating on the surface of the ruby liquid, wonder what I’m really doing here. Already lonely, condemned to this fruitless exercise. Too earnest for companionship, for the quick darting smiles of these dark-cheeked waiters with their knowing bows.
    Lilit arrived here in the clamour that comes with the end of war. Did she walk on this pebbled beach as a young woman, face exposed for only a moment to the sun, sit laughing at a cafe table? More likely she stood on her flimsy balcony in east Beirut, veiled in a Turkish yashmak, knuckles white against the rail. Her position in the city so precarious, her view of her future so small. Fighter ships in the distance would have seemed as small and inconsequential as children’s toys. I can see them now, still lounging in the port. Are they American, or Israeli? Paper cutouts against a sharp sky. The morning so still it makes no reference to war. Black-fronded palms crackle in the haze from car exhausts, the burning of garbage in the poorer parts of the city. A lone fruit vendor, walking crazily as if dazed by the heat, leads a cart laden with pomegranates down the road among the cars. They look like Christmas decorations, round baubles of painted wood. Everyone swerves to accommodate him. Traffic noise diminishes and all I can hear is the slap of feet on broken pavement, the tinkle of Lilit’s cheap silver rings against my glass.
    Down on the grimy beach, a blonde in a bikini stands poised against the horizon, her waist-length hair being brushed by a short, attentive man. I watch young women like myself choose a table, sit down. Their expressions muted by sunglasses in the latest fashions, extraordinary curtains of hair. Middle-aged men argue on mobile phones, shovel in pastries as they speak. My father would have been their age if he survived the war. One of those soft-paunched men with good humour and dirty jokes and a love of home-cooked food. Who would know just by looking at Selim Pakradounian that he was a militiaman? Someone who kills. Kills indiscriminately. If he were still alive, he’d sit with me in these cafes, listen to my hopes and doubts. We would eat more pastry than was good for us.
    I watch other people, mothers and daughters, lovers and friends. The trickle of rosewater syrup. Crushed cardamom