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.
The airport had long since been bombed and reduced to rubble by the Israelis. I was booked on a UN diplomatic flight to the States, beneficiary of the machinations of an Armenian businessman of my grandfather’s generation, genocide survivor made good. Yes, you’ve guessed. Sarkis.
He’d grown rich on something to do with oil, a new company with offices all over the Middle East and the Caucasus. Was it black market oil, terrorist links and shady arms deals? I liked to think so. It reinforced my perception of him as sinister, untrustworthy. My godfather in America, he called himself now. Lilit said Sarkis had been in the death camp with my grandfather, that they helped each other escape. I didn’t believe it. Why wouldn’t Minas have said so? Why was Sarkis never invited to our home when he was alive? There was something more to the story, something unnameable.
Ever since Minas’s death, Sarkis visited us at Christmas and Easter with packaged food from London, duty-free whisky for Siran, a girlish gift for me. It was always wrapped perfectly, and something told me a shop-girl had twirled the ribbons, not him. He didn’t look like he could fold anything straight.
‘Say hello to your godfather,’ Lilit whispered.
‘But he’s not my godfather,’ I began to say.
‘Look him in the eye when you speak; there’s a good girl.’ I saw the reprimand fire her eyes. Siran had already opted out, a crooked shadow in the corner. Sarkis always left early, pleading business commitments, but not before pressing damp American dollars into my reluctant palm.
‘We have money,’ Lilit told me, as she did every day. ‘Enough to get you overseas and into a good school.’
I cried, anticipating my inevitable departure. Lilit remained unmoved. ‘Study. Go to university. We’re modern now. No men to look after us.’
I sobbed, burrowed my head into her lumpy breasts. ‘But how am I going to leave you?’
She patted me on the back, hiked up my greasy pullover, kneaded my ribs, massaging my spine with weakened hands. I relaxed against the softness of her stomach; I was safe now, at least. I always loved her most. More than my mother, or my father.
There are so many moments, milestones, tragedies, small joys – all gone, unrecorded. This moment is lost, too, but in my mind’s eye it’s so clear, so familiar. I can see the dark, low-ceilinged room of my childhood, multicoloured rugs on the floor around the hearth. And the lake Lilit always remembered, even in the midst of the desert or the ravaged city: the Armenian lake where she was born. She talked to me about it so many times: that lake with its colours of bone and ash and sky. And I still haven’t seen it.
When the time came to leave Beirut, I’d grown into what Sarkis called a young lady. I flinched from such undisguised admiration in his face, his outspread hands. Chucking me under the chin, brushing against the tendrils of hair at my temples. His fingers smelled faintly of fish, and so did the money he continued to give me. He limped as he walked, his body looked as if it had been broken long ago then awkwardly put back together again. There were bright scars, still fresh-looking, on his nape and neck. My arrogant teenage self kept asking, how could a man so ugly think I could even look at him? We posed for formal photographs on festival days; his pathetic hand – I can see him as merely pathetic now, and small, and frightened and sad – bunching up the slippery taffeta folds at my waist. I began to hunch forward when I walked, looking down at my feet and hiding my new breasts. Lilit chided me in the same way as when I was small. ‘Don’t be like that. Show him how grateful you are!’
There was so much to be grateful for. I was issued with identity papers and a Lebanese passport, assured by Sarkis I’d be granted refugee status once I arrived in America. At a later date, I’d be allowed to apply for citizenship. I didn’t know at the time how Lilit had organised it. Maybe she bribed him. Or begged. Maybe he owed Minas a favour. Maybe they were children together in that mythical place called Van.
I couldn’t suppress a shudder when he touched my elbow, leaned over to peck my cheek. I glanced at him sideways as he led me to the taxi. He looked young, for all that he was in his seventies. His curly hair fell boyishly into his eyes and was still black, so glossy he must have dyed it. His beard pointy and well-trimmed, emphasising the line of his jaw. Yet there was a smell about him, and I realised it wasn’t fish, or dirty money. It was the desperation of a man who couldn’t reconcile himself to his past.
We were driven from the Armenian quarter to the airport through checkpoints that distinguished themselves from each other with posters of dead heroes, Christian or Muslim, and dirty-coloured flags. Each time we neared the telltale ramps, the driver slowed down and passed his identity papers through the front window. He too had draped a makeshift flag over his dashboard, the customary soiled white towel signifying neutrality. Surrender. Or simple fear. I shrank in my seat. Sarkis appeared calm. The gunman, either bearded or freshly shaven, Islamic or Christian, wrapped in a keffiyeh or sporting mirrored sunglasses, solemn or smiling, would study my face for a moment, an eternity, then with a flick of his hand allow the taxi to move on.
We passed bombed shells of municipal buildings, entire flattened streets. A grim cityscape of wet soil and smashed glass, as if the city was returning to a primeval state, vegetation creeping thickly over to cover its nakedness. A final surrender to nature would be preferable to what I saw, all the sordid military-industrial waste: black smoke, chemical haze, slow-burning bonfires of clothes and cars. Without the plane trees once lining the kerbs, the boulevards were foreign and frightening, a mouth with no teeth. When I wound down the window, the stench of the streets made me itch all over. Weeds with tiny yellow flowers were the only luxuriance and they grew everywhere, from potholes and between mouldy bricks. Little children armed with paring knives flitted from corner to corner, gathering the hairy stalks in their hands.
The American University campus was the only green space of any size left untouched in west Beirut. The driver slowed down for us to see it. One last time. The place I always expected would be my destiny. No picnics now, no cheap drinks at sundown, demonstrations over what seemed laughably trivial now – student fees, longer opening hours for the library. Sarkis let me slip out of the car to peer at the manicured lawns, ancient yews and swinging palms. All around me, Mercedes and BMWs with their tinted windows, militia warlords safe inside, their opulence standing out among the destruction.
At the bombed-out airport, militiamen everywhere. They lolled about, eating bars of black-market chocolate, smoking Gitanes, rocking weapons in the crooks of their arms as if nursing babies. Cries of baksheesh drowned out the sound of scattered gunfire in the distance. I sat at the back of the plane next to Sarkis, trying not to cry, buried my face in the flight safety manual. Brace for landing. Do not panic. Breathe. Neither of my grandmothers had felt safe enough to come and see me off.
When the plane took flight I caught a flash of the city in a carmine sunset, before cloud cover obscured it from view. From such a height, I could see exactly how destroyed west Beirut was. There were few public buildings left standing: no roads, no telegraph poles, no traffic lights, no colour. Only blue of sea and grey of destruction, the refugee camps a splotch of huddled black. As the plane dipped down once before ascending, I saw east Beirut intact and gleaming white: new high-rises, pools, beaches, resorts fanning out on the coastline toward Jounieh. As the plane ascended, my city, my country, my childhood home became abstract, theory, mere lines on a map. I didn’t feel resentful that I’d been sent away; after all, my grandmothers loved me – it was only a matter of time before Beirut would become more dangerous. For now, the Armenian quarter was still intact, Lilit and Siran safe. And my father? I was uneasy, in my stomach if not my head.
I sit now in the Cafe de Paris, head in hands. Behind the counter, raised voices and the slap of a pan on the stove. I’m so tired. It must be jetlag, the traffic, this yellowish strengthening smog. My bed in the hotel room beckons, dark curtains drawn, the noise of the streets neutered. The notes I’ve typed, these surmises about my grandparents’ past, seem childish now, useless.
I unfold a map of Van, inexpertly drawn by Minas as a gift for Lilit before he died. It’s soft and limp from being carried in my back pocket. I peer at the ghostly markers he’s left behind, the imprint of wet ink on paper. There, the little Pakradounian house nestled in a spring-flushed orchard. Here, the Garden City church, its quince-shaped domes coloured a brilliant red. The ancient citadel, long since reduced to rubble at the end of the Great War, looms over the whole town. Houses becoming larger and more elaborate the closer they are to the centre of Van. The main square, some way in the distance, flanked by tiny shops where Minas has written baker, bookshop, tailor, then the town hall and its tree-shaded courtyard, scene of killing.
I’ve managed to take a few bites of my warm bread. I shut my laptop. The Lebanese woman and her companion wave goodbye, put their sunglasses on in one fluid movement and exit into the teeming street. A uniformed beggar with a withered stump sits at the front door whining, and they step over him. He’s old and blind, probably a veteran of the civil war. Nails dirt-rimmed, patched trousers settling in sad folds at the backs of his knees. He babbles, stops mid-sentence to wipe his sightless eyes in an impatient, furious gesture. He’s speaking in French. What’s he saying? He still hates the Arabs. Demon Muslims, sons of goats; their bombs made him blind. Slashing light, he fell to the ground, all was black. There is no solution. Raze this city and start all over again.
I stay long enough to see the waiter shoo him away, remembering the thin white ribbons attached to landmines, the buzzing of the mosques all day, everyday, those pink and green and ash-yellow edifices of rotting rubble, all the erotica of a fallen city. My father.
I run to catch up with the blind man as he lurches across the street, leaving my glass of tea untouched, knowing as I run that I’m being stupid and sentimental. He slows down when he hears me, puts out a restraining hand. I let him touch my head, stroke my arms, up and down, exploring my closeness. A shudder of revulsion courses through me. If my father lived, would he be like this? The old man parrots his name, age and rank as if saluting a superior, then holds out his palm. I drop some liras into his hand, watch him finger the medals on his chest with tenderness, as if caressing a child’s face.