Bone Ash Sky Read Free Page B

at the bottom of a cup. The tap of false nails on marble tabletops, clink of glass against raised glass. Do I have the courage to stop people, thrust my taperecorder in their faces: What did you do in the war? And you? You? I know I can’t do it, not yet. I need to travel further back, until there’s nowhere left to go.

LAKE VAN, TURKISH
ARMENIA, 1905–1915
    A white wall. It was the first thing she saw when her mother took her outside, opening her eyes wide into the sun’s dazzle. A white wall. She looked at it and remembered everything she’d learnt to forget. Memory before memory had a name. A white wall. Its flickering light familiar yet distant, the same blankness she’d gazed at for forty weeks, the walls of her mother’s womb.
    First a wall, whitewashed each spring. On its surface, shadows of a window grille in diamond shapes: close-patterned bands of light and dark as the sun moved. She lay and looked at it for a long time.
    Her mother called her lamb, quince-bud, rose-petal. The infant responded to the sounds but did not understand the meanings. She cooed and held out her fists.
    In time the child learnt to recognise numbers and letters, great black rounded vowels. She didn’t know how to string them together but Mamma did; she would start to speak and a bracelet of sound would form itself into links of here and there, yes and no, right and wrong. Truth and lies. Muslims and Christians. Them and us. Turks and Armenians.
    â€˜There’s a war on its way,’ she heard Papa say. ‘A world war.’
    He said it in the same way he spoke of the weather, approaching rain. Her small head was tucked into the curve of Mamma’s neck and shoulder and she burrowed in, rubbing the soft creases of skin with her lips and cheeks.
    â€˜Ssh,’ Mamma said. ‘The child.’
    Mamma’s breath smelled of apricots. Dragonflies swooped around her hair, her pale cheeks, her mouth with its constant uplift of surprise. The airy sound their wings made had nothing to do with war, fear, what they were hearing. She fanned them away, stamped her bare feet a little in the long grass. When she moved closer to Papa, wet blades lay flattened and crumpled where she stood.
    â€˜Maybe it’s already in the city,’ he continued. ‘Wars start there and seep into the countryside like blight.’
    But Mamma turned away, spoke so low only her little girl could hear. ‘There’s always hope, do you know what that means?’
    Hope. She made her daughter say it. Hope means everything will be all right someday. The little girl nodded and bit her lip, afraid to say anything wrong. Mamma sighed and swung her up into the trees, so high she was covered in leaves, while polished fruit all around threatened to fall. ‘Pomegranates,’ Mamma whispered. ‘The fruit of our forbears. Remember that.’ As she looked down through Mamma’s arms, yellow and purple irises made a Persian rug beneath her, their two lower petals little sucking mouths.
    She played by the lake while Mamma caught fish to sell. Pearl mullet migrated against the current at this time of year, leaping out of the water straight into Mamma’s hands. She waded in with an apron bunched high around her hips, and algae trailed behind to catch between her legs, sinister green curls.
    â€˜You wait there, my lamb. Don’t follow me.’
    She nodded with her finger far in her mouth. She remembered a time, so much time ago it seemed, when she tried to follow her mother into the shallows, fell and cut her lip on the jagged rocks that hid beneath. Her blood fanned out into the water like wet hair, like the moving, sipping weeds on Mamma’s thighs.
    Mamma was gone a long time, so she pulled oval stones from the suck of mud and washed them until their colours sang dove-grey and pomegranate red. She didn’t know those words yet but remembered the drowsy feel of pink and green and purple behind her