There’s a hum and burning behind my eyes. The hotel curtains let in too much light; I wake at dawn every morning and can’t get back to sleep. I’ve been here three days now yet it feels more like years – or as if I never left. The same smells, sounds, undertone of anxiety. The bathroom tap drips in a slow, melancholy devotion. Yellowed sheets, threadbare with the washing of generations.
I chose the Mayflower because it was where journalists mostly stayed during the civil war. Now, its faded gentility makes me alternately nostalgic and irritated. The lobby sombre and outdated, stiff fake flowers bleached white by the sun. My room airless, windows nailed shut, balcony doors rusted by sea air. But the staff are welcoming, and there are always a few journalists at the bar downstairs every night. There’s an uneasy excitement about the place, even with its shabbiness, the hotel incinerator under my room, the bathroom door that won’t close all the way.
But I’m still only halfway here, still rising in the cold light of another sunrise, breathing the stale air of a Boston apartment that belongs to me now my godfather is dead. It’s been willed to me, and I feel glad and surprised and slightly queasy. It’s all happened so quickly: his phone call, his death, my journey back. He told me what he knew about the manner of my father’s death, and who killed him, then the struggle was over. He was sick; he knew he was going to die. That’s the only reason he decided to tell me the truth. I realised soon enough that it wasn’t possible for me to listen to all the details. We’d arranged to meet in a restaurant, and I had to leave my seat and go to the bathroom to hide.
Yesterday was my second day in Beirut, and I went to the tribunal. It’s already been underway for a few days, but once I got there I didn’t feel as if I’d missed anything. Like a soap opera with the same interminable plot.
It was held in a provincial court building a long bus ride away from here – in an outer suburb of Beirut that may as well be another town. When I got there I took a seat in the back, not telling anyone who I was. My stomach was churning, I couldn’t even have a sip of water. Couldn’t swallow, couldn’t ingest the reality of what my father did to these people. I had the illogical fear, as I sat there, that someone would recognise me, that one of his victims would turn around and point the finger, scream in my face. I saw Lebanese–Palestinians mostly, relatives of the victims, and a handful of Israelis. Even a girl, about twelve, sitting with what looked like her grandmother. There were no bearded militiamen of my father’s generation there, no generals. Just a few tired-looking Belgian lawyers and two bored UN judges: one Dutch, one Swedish.
On the way there, I’d had visions of standing up, telling them I was Selim Pakradounian’s daughter, confessing my part in their history. Atoning for my father. Asking their forgiveness. But what good would it do? I was worried I’d become emotional, that my memories of the massacre and my father’s role in it weren’t accurate enough to base anything on. So I skulked in the back and listened to Ariel Sharon’s name, Elie Hobeika’s name and my father’s name repeated over and over by lawyers, judges, victims. Elie Hobeika seemed to get the brunt of the accusations – after all, he was the supreme commander of the Phalangist militia during the civil war. My father was only second-incommand, merely following orders. But isn’t that what Eichmann said? I felt uncomfortable, itchy. That first day hasn’t illuminated anything for me, except how unnerved I have the capacity to become.
Now there’s a whiff of burnt skin and rot, the smell of sinks on rainy nights when drains are full. My pillow is hot at my neck. My shorts have bunched into a thick, irritating wad. I take them off and throw them. I count the things I know, the few, slight things I’m certain of.
One. I know there was a civil war. I was here for most of it, born in the midst of its paradoxes; as a child, understood no other life.
Two. I know it lasted seventeen years.
Three. The death count rose to two hundred and fifty thousand. And counting, though the war’s officially over.
What I don’t yet know is my father’s part in it. His intentions. How he felt when he came home after a killing spree. His justifications. Did he lie in lumpy beds like this one and eat himself alive with guilt? I worry my past like the lucent amber beads Arab men play with in midnight cafes. The beads my father would have slid through his fingers, settling his scores. Same bed, same city. Not the same sector of the city, though his Muslim lover had a seafront apartment in west Beirut. He lived far away from Israeli bombs on the other side of the Green Line.
I know that much from my grandmothers, from the man I called godfather. He made it his business to know everything about everyone. Nothing about Sarkis – not his money, his clothes, his laughter or sadness – was innocuous. Tonight I want to go back to Boston, forget about this crazy quest for truth. Old friends wait for me there, and gentle young men who push and prod for more: passion, commitment, a house in the suburbs, three children, undying love. Are all these even compatible? They never introduce me to their parents. I’m not Jewish, or a WASP. I don’t come from the elite of Boston’s families. Since graduating, I’ve worked two days a week tutoring first-years in the craft of researching a topic, writing an article, hooking a reader. Most nights I work in the cafe making coffee for those same students, deflecting the attentions of pubescent boys. I sometimes get an article published, mostly in alternative papers and magazines: streetwalkers in downtown Boston, ten-year-olds on drugs, where to get the best meal in Chinatown. The sympathetic editor from The Boston Globe has only been a recent supporter; for once I was writing about something that related to me directly, and it was the only article I was paid decent money for.
Yet with all my hard work I’m still not the sort of girl the middleclass matrons of Boston want for their sons. I’m too socially awkward – though sometimes it drops away from me and I feel the fluidity of childhood: unselfconscious, untramelled, free. I speak with an undefined accent – though I can’t hear it. The prim, glossy mothers, the large, hawhaw fathers, would be horrified.
Should I go back? Dilek is back there by now, working in legal aid. Then there are my former housemates – good-natured, herbal New Agers – to whom I no longer have anything to say. What else could I go back to? Other friends, already with jobs on major newspapers, in banks, law firms: the corporate cop-outs? Pressure, the trite imperatives, get a good job, compete, succeed. Who am I kidding? I can’t go back.
On my last day in America I pained for Sarkis; too late, I know. Pewter drizzle of a Boston morning, fastening my army surplus jacket at my throat with fingers numb in anticipation. His bedroom abandoned, ghostly in its lack of furniture, grey marks on the wall where his Arshile Gorky reproductions hung. I’d stored them in the basement downstairs, scared of sleeping with the self-portrait of a teenage Gorky, his dead mother’s memory veining his crazed eyes. Her closed-off, cowled face. The peony in his buttonhole, its answering pinkness in her bosom.
I feel a pang of regret now for my small, careful American life, the safe routines of walk and work and study; what was I thinking, leaving it all? Father dead – now godfather. Lilit died long ago, my mother when I was only an hour old. Nobody to stay in Boston for. Nothing there but my own petty flaws, my raw wounds. In Beirut the only link to the past is my other grandmother, Siran, and her grip on reality wanes by the day.
The kitchen was dark and airless; Sarkis’s tea canisters and herbal remedies littered the peeling benches. A cockroach darted for safety into the shadows, living room windows sealed tight against the cold. I took a mug from the cupboard, gulped down water from the tap – ice on my fingertips, the back of my throat – left it unrinsed in the sink. My new tenant would wash it, dry it, put it away. I turned to face the apartment after I opened the front door, knowing how sentimental I was. On the coffee table, lilies in a vase I remembered from my childhood, their alien petals gone brown.
Before I hailed a cab I walked down the street, lugging my backpack and laptop, feeling rain on my hair. A hurried farewell to the extravagantly pierced girl behind the counter; the boy who was the best barista; my one-time employer, his arms elbow-deep in grey suds. Dilek and I worked there together; forgot orders, burnt milk, served those same derelicts with leftovers at the end of a shift, collapsed on the kitchen floor at midnight in hysterics at how tired we were. Dilek asked me to come with her to Cyprus right there, behind that counter. And I said yes, without telling her my real reasons.
I smiled, waved with my free hand. Fellow students just come back from a party, heads down and hung-over, coffee warming their palms. None for me, I was late already. And I knew they weren’t sorry to see me go. I’ve always been the outsider in this university, the entire country. Or so it was easy to think, now I was leaving. I needed it to sound that way or else I wouldn’t go.
At least I’ve established a routine of sorts in Beirut, a comforting pattern that bears no resemblance to my childhood in this city. I wake just after dawn, sprint up the stairs to the hotel gym and run barefoot on the treadmill, gazing far away beyond the mirrored image of my body into the past, where everyone is alive, where everything will be given meaning, where lake meets sky. When I get back to my room I wash the sweat out of my hair to the tinkle of those thick silver rings Lilit gave me before I left Beirut. Tap, tap, as they bang against each other with every movement of my hands, my fingers that look just like Lilit’s, even down to the square, ridged, fragile nails – the metallic sound insistent, as if awakening memory. Responsibility. I sing in the shower, old Turkish wails, American jazz, so I won’t have to heed its call. There was always so much jewellery to ask about, as if the tarnished filigrees and arabesques of silver rings and gold earrings, bridal necklaces and bracelets, held all the answers to Lilit’s Armenian past. Bracelets. Whatever happened to my mother’s bracelet, and the earrings Siran gave her on her wedding day? Nobody ever told me when I asked.
It’s been a week and I’ve only been to see my grandmother Siran once. I thought I missed her when I was in Boston, but I have to admit I missed – still miss – Lilit more. I miss the silences of our Beirut house, the late-afternoon sun that lay thick on the surface of the marble-floored sala and lit pale icons and picture frames into shadow-jewels of silver and blue. Lilit’s singing, which seemed part of the silence itself, Siran’s low agreement as she listened to the radio. Siran always talked to herself, always forgot the names of things. It became a family joke.
I went to see her the day before I went to the enquiry, exhausted by lack of sleep since Boston – since Sarkis’s death, really – and the cheap Greek coffee I ingested in such a quantity on the boat. When I woke at five, I couldn’t settle. On the bus I closed my eyes, trying to rest, then noticed my hands locked into fists on my lap. The sky was a bruise in the first bars of light silvering the sea.
When I got off I was directed to the nursing home by a sullen shoeshine boy. I walked through carefully tended lawns and fragrant hedges to the Armenian Apostolic Sisters’ Home for the Aged. Inside, the building reeked of disinfectant and an obscure stink of decay. Down grey corridors, I was tempted to hold my nose. The head nun clucked in sympathy. ‘We try to mask it as well as we can, but it takes over every time.’
I was ashamed to be so transparent in front of a stranger. The nun opened Siran’s door a crack and I saw an untidy shape under a cotton blanket, one foot poking out, small as a child’s. The nun slipped away, her soft soles almost soundless on the linoleum floor. Siran’s cheek rested on one hand. Her mouth half-open, as if she was on the brink of saying something that would change the course of my life. If only. On her flabby earlobes, my mother’s earrings. They were the only point of light in the room. So that’s what happened to them. She took her wedding gift back when my mother died. Can I blame her?
I knelt down beside her, afraid to touch. In sleep she was incredibly young, yet all the weight of the twelve years since I said goodbye was in her face.
‘Grandma,’ I whispered. ‘It’s Anoush. Are you listening?’
She didn’t move. I reached out, laid my hand on her arm. Nothing. For a moment, panic filled me, and I thought she must be dead. But as I looked closer I could see the rise and fall of her narrow chest, her nostrils flare with every inhalation. I let my hand rest lightly on her arm, and as I bent my head to hers, wishing I was anywhere else but in this airless room, smelling her old woman’s odour and the sour breath inches from my mouth, I was conscious of my ignorance of it all: Lilit’s and Minas’s fate, my mother’s silent pain, the implications of my father’s death.
Siran’s slight, hiccupping breathing started to strip away the layers of denial I’d nursed in all my time in Boston, and in my first days here in Beirut. Suddenly the sweat was springing out of my pores, my mouth dry and my palms wet. I felt myself crumple at her feet and the sobs erupted out of my stomach, so violent I couldn’t breathe. I didn’t care about the nuns hearing, or scaring Siran if she woke. I was beyond caring about anything. For about five whole minutes I cried with the same intensity; then it subsided. I sat there drenched, panting. And still she slept.
I didn’t stay. The nun said some days she didn’t wake at all. That this day was one of them, and it would be better to come back tomorrow. I haven’t been to see her since then. Haven’t been to see my old house, visit friends, track down my father’s fellow fighters, my neighbours. I’m wary of being pulled under, of becoming that little girl – longing, helpless, afraid – forced to flee Beirut with so many unanswered questions. Why did Selim leave me when I was born? Did he ever love me, or my mother? Was he the kind of man I can now try to love, or only despise?
The Beirut of my childhood seems as real as today’s, yet more frightening. The Kurdish butcher I remember is still there, his lamb carcasses dangling like hanged men from hooks in the open air. The fish- and fruit-sellers with their improbable pyramids, buckets of rotting fruit and blood-spattered scales. So unlike the supermarket hush of Boston, housewives with lipsticked smiles, tennis bracelets, little white visors for the sun. The sun in Beirut is never so polite; it burns and shrieks at midday, fizzling out detail until all that’s left to grasp are the bare bones of the city. Blackened sea, bougainvillea petals veined as a fair woman’s wrists, frankincense and sweat in Maronite mountain chapels, pack donkeys with philosophers’ eyes. The old men who live their lives in the cafes, their worry beads that sing lullabies. Those early mornings, getting ready for school after another sleepless night. Wetting my fingertips with water to place on tired eyes, coaxing a mere trickle from the shower in yet another water shortage. Olive oil soap that stained my hands green. Now I shower twice a day.
I lean over the dusty railing on the hotel balcony, letting the sea breeze dry my wet skin. I want some time to ease into the rhythm of the city, to take on its erratic pulse-beat as my own again: crazy cars, gesticulating hands, screech of vendors and beggars from the Sudan and Gaza, the Congo and the West Bank. Men, women, hordes of children lining the pathways, hands outstretched, little girls singing old love songs, their hip-swaying and come-hither eyes incongruous in childish faces. The rankness of trodden vegetables, open sewers and cigarette smoke, cripples and gypsies and tourist touts all jostling each other to get to the other side of the street, to the money, to Paradise. I ache for them, see my family in its own scramble for security.
Then a sudden fragrance and the falsetto voice I remember so well: the sweet-seller with his pyramids of acid pink and sour apple, his simple songs, dodging trolley buses and fruit barrows, mangoes and melons scenting the balcony with the promise of somewhere else. Somewhere less complicated. The manifold perfumes of my childhood, intensified by the sense that I have a limited time to enjoy them before the pull of the past takes me under again: to my ailing grandmother, a house that may be broken or bulldozed like so many others, a place somewhere in the Beka’a Valley where I now know my father was killed.
By mid-morning I’m in the Cafe de Paris. The main thoroughfare of Rue Hamra is close to the hotel and the breakfast offered by its oldest cafe marginally better. I can’t stomach the hotel’s day-old croissants tasting of the diesel truck they came in, the same flaccid figs refrigerated and brought out again day after day; I finally gave up after a few mornings of sitting and eating nothing. Here in the sidewalk cafe, old men sit at the same tables they seem to have occupied for decades. Above them, broken red neon lights mimic the follies of the Left Bank. The men cross and uncross their legs in a fury of backgammon, gulp down shots of arak with their muddy coffee. Argue. I sip sweetened tea, use my laptop.
‘Move on,’ I can hear my more esoteric friends say. ‘Free yourself of these burdens. Meditate. Burn some candles. Get a tattoo in Armenian then make peace with it.’ I always suppress the urge to laugh when they talk that way. But I got the tattoo, more fool me. And now I can’t even summon an ironic smile.
I envisage the landscape of Lilit’s stories. Was its dawn light or evening hush the same as here? I was never told much about the details before my family left Van, but Lilit waxed lyrical about Garden City, that white stone house with its painted shutters, the tender wheat fields and blossoming trees of their ancestral orchards. Lilit had never been back. Most of the town was burnt by the Turks after the deportations. Who knows if the old house is still standing or taken over by some Muslim family, oblivious to its bloodied past? I’m here in Beirut now, where Lilit’s journey ended. Must I go further back, to the very beginning?
Today I hope my stomach – still upset by the boat trip – will allow me to eat bread served warm from the bakery next door, and a slab of mulberry preserve so thick I can cut it with a knife. The cafe owner proposes his house specialty without fail each morning, and each morning I smile and refuse. People come from all over the city for this dish of fried duck eggs and liver. Beirutis in their designer tracksuits with artificially whitened teeth. Their large appetites and gym-toned bodies fascinate me. I watch, listen to their swift talk. Their dialogue flits from Arabic to French to Americanisms, banter, ephemera: mispronounced symbols of attainment. They discuss television shows, nightclubs, manicurists. Complain about living at home with their parents, the price of waterfront property. One woman at the next table leans over and touches me on the arm.
‘American, are you? We see you here two times.’
‘How did you guess?’
‘Your clothes. Hair. The way you so polite to staff. Is not necessary, you know.’
I stay silent, smiling hard. Take a sip of tea.
‘I was born here. I wonder if that makes me a Beiruti, like you?’
‘Of course. Once a Beiruti, always a Beiruti, eh?’
The woman laughs and turns to her boyfriend, and I laugh with her, despising myself. Yet I’m strangely drawn to that bright artificiality, liking to imagine myself safe in the same position: never having left Beirut, taking the smog, the noise, the heat and chaos for granted. The unpredictability of life in this city. The unhealed traumas of war. In a strange way these drawbacks flash the allure of toughness. I’d like to be so big and brash. I’d like to have such a large, uncomplicated smile, such white teeth. Large appetites. To go to the gym each morning and talk and laugh and make love with abandon.
Sometimes it’s those we despise the most that we long to become. I’m deeply, shamefully envious of their shininess, their frivolity, their long muscular legs. I watch with a longing to join in that’s almost sexual. They drink Diet Coke for breakfast. The man burps softly behind his hand and the woman cuffs him. Her long red fingernails reach up to her lover’s hair, ruffle it, lose themselves in its strands. They hum together, surprisingly well. Listen to the latest hip-hop and watch MTV from rooftop satellites. Take holidays in Ibiza and Mykonos, in loud nightclubs and bars that stay open until dawn. They light unfiltered French cigarettes and exhale smoke into my face.