They’re here, Sanaya said to herself. They’re really here now.Selim walked home to his apartment in east Beirut after a night on the town. He needed the exercise, dismissed his driver so he could clear his head, become part of the early morning sounds and dawn light of the Christian quarter for the brief time before he’d have to become Selim Pakradounian again. Selim Pakradounian, second-in-command to Elie Hobeika; Selim Pakradounian, efficient killer; Selim Pakradounian, with so many men looking to him for guidance.
Now he could slink through alleyways, a lean cat sniffing the sea’s trail. He stopped short at the thinness of a child’s cry behind closed windows. A little girl? His? He liked to imagine peering in at his own daughter, ringlets damp with sweat, face rose-flushed against the pillow. She would smile in her sleep and know her daddy was watching. He hadn’t meant to leave her for good when she was born; he was too young then, too angry. And now he was afraid to go back. What if Father wouldn’t forgive him? What if Anoush rejected him? What if she cried and hid behind both her grandmothers’ skirts? And what good could he do her anyway? A father just as absent even if he was right there by her side.
He could be of no use to her. Only the money he sent twice a year vindicated him. He wondered if she saw any of it, for study or clothes or music, or if his father squirreled it away for when she was married. Or worse still, spent it on the shop and the house. No matter. Sending it made him feel a little better, and that was all he could do. Perhaps it even softened his daughter’s feelings for him, poisoned as they were by his aunt Lilit.
He saw himself reflected in the glass, only his moustache visible in a ghost-pale face. The heaviness of gardenias here on a low balustrade, and night jasmine thick as grapevines on Christian churches, Crusader castles, fountains, minarets across the Green Line. The wail of the muezzin from west Beirut, sharp as a needle in the clear morning air. A last star, hanging between two cypresses. He listened. A thrush, trembling on a low branch before launching into the same warble he’d heard every morning of his childhood in this city.
He turned his key in the lock, stumbled upstairs. He knew he’d suffer for his drinking binge, only time now for a quick shower and instant coffee before he had to report to Phalange HQ. He hated instant coffee, wasn’t even sure there was a jar in the house. By Jesus he needed it, though. He pondered last night as he ripped off his clothes, remembered each detail with a lingering sensation of voluptuousness and a faint stirring of disgust. Those fleshy white women: journalists, aid workers, wives of businessmen, black-lace bras under corporate suits. How he loved to uncover them, in more ways than one. He left a pool of clothes on the bedroom floor.
While he stood under hot water – hot as he could bear it – he brushed his teeth with short, sawing motions, lost in thought. Should be easier now the Israelis are coming to help out. About time too. For all their generosity, they haven’t exactly been right by our side. His gold cross became caught in his hairs as he soaped his chest. The chain twisted yet again. He bent his head under the water’s stream, tried to disentangle those infuriating links. Gave up. Sanaya would do it tonight at her place. She was good at that sort of thing. He tried not to think of what she’d say if she learnt of these other women, chose instead to remember her creased neck smelling of talc and roses, the coil of caramel hair she freed from its pins to press like a river against his chest. Her superb jack-knifing spine when she spread herself out under him. She knew about his other women, even if it was left unsaid; she was worldly, not a child.
Invariably, as soon as he dwelled on Sanaya, he remembered his dead wife, while simultaneously trying to push the memory back, in the same way you struggle to fight off the onset of a cold. It was their wedding day that always came to him as clear – even clearer – as the first time they had sex. The sex had been rushed, icy, awkward. Painful for her. A death-knell for him. It was better not to remember.
Neither of them had smiled as they stood outside his father’s house and waited for the priest to arrive. Such an honour, to be the first in the quarter married according to the old rites. ‘And not a moment too soon,’ the neighbouring women exclaimed, crossing their ample breasts. ‘We arrived here fifty years ago.’
It had been hard, they conceded – chattering among themselves while Selim burned with boredom – what with the French occupation, famine in the twenties and two wars. They openly marvelled at the composure of the bride and groom. Selim and Anahit stood side by side, almost touching at arm and hip. First cousins, joined by blood. Behind them, fluted columns were festooned with tinsel and flowers, even the crazy outside plumbing draped with wreaths. ‘Too much expense,’ the muttering went. ‘Who’s Minas trying to impress?’ Bougainvillea had been cut back to form a perfect bower, where Selim and his bride now stood. A shrewish wind rose high above roofs and aerials, away into the city. It flung petals onto Selim’s shoulders, little flags of protest he brushed onto the ground. He didn’t want to marry this girl – this cousin he’d known since he was born, seen bathe and eat and toilet, fought with and ignored. He looked at her belly under her wedding belt, still flat. He looked at the small, pinched mouth. He knew she’d been vomiting all morning, bending over the bathroom sink, quietly so nobody would know. Her cheeks were grey and white, ash and salt.
She didn’t look at him. Guilty, maybe. She knew she’d trapped him now – with her mother’s whispers, her pregnancy, her helplessness. She watched intently as the priest prepared to slit the throats of two white doves. The old man muttered, so the women had to lean forward to hear him. Give the good news to the bride of light; thy groom is risen, go forth before him bedecked with adornments; sing a new song to him that is risen, to the fruit of life to them that are asleep. He threw his beard over his shoulder in a way they thought far too irreverent, rolling up his wide black sleeves. The birds flapped in his hands, unblemished and perfect. Selim and Anahit. Sacrificial doves. Minas leaned over and whispered in his son’s ear, clear and authoritative.
‘Be good to her, my son. Don’t shame me again.’
Selim had thought his father at least would take his part against the others. But no. There was something secret between Minas and his sister, something shiny and complicit. He’d seen his father’s face darken when Anahit told him Selim had made her pregnant, but it was more in disapproval of his own son than in judgement of his sister and her daughter. Everyone blamed Selim. They said he was reckless, always had been, even as a child, that he should have known better. Everyone blamed him, except for his mother. He watched Siran now as she stood a little apart from Minas and Lilit, her face arranged into a studied neutrality. For the first time since he was born, he saw that her ears were naked.
Lining the street in a trailing circle were familiar faces, grinning under a trifling drizzle. Someone unfurled an oiled umbrella over the bride. She touched her rain-damp hair, smoothing it at the temples, checked to see the earrings Siran had given her still dangled cold and significant at her neck. Thickly gold as the hairs on her legs, turquoise as the veins at her wrists, the thin white skin over her breasts traced with blue. Her mother sighed.
Selim glanced at Lilit for a moment and a shadow of doubt passed over both their foreheads. You forced me into this. Now you owe me everything, you owe me my life. He knew what she was thinking in turn: Will I be punished for wedding cousin to cousin? Will my daughter be cursed? The Arabs do it all the time.
Minas coughed slightly and frowned as well, but Selim knew it was only because he was excited. Excited enough to say stupid things. He peered through the veil at the face of Anahit beside him, a face he’d known since his eyes could focus. Such filmy skin and translucent eyelids, such innocence, such trust in him. She wore the heavy bracelet his father had given her the day she arrived in Beirut. Selim looked down at his mirror-shine shoes, flinching from her gaze.
Now he shook his head to chase the memories away. This same bracelet circled his left wrist, caught and refracted the morning light as he rubbed at his neck with a flannel, scrubbed the back of his knees. It was a strange design, of bold interlinked silver squares and Armenian crosses, too masculine for a woman. One of the squares was slightly larger, and on it was engraved the surname Pakradounian, twisting along his inner wrist like a snake. It made a lozenge of light on the shower tiles. For a moment more, he was distracted from the demands of his day to stare at the pattern: Look at the way I influence the world. Then he turned his attention to his responsibilities. He mentally ticked off the least important items on his list: return telephone calls to the Red Cross, the Red Crescent, the UN, foreign-media news agencies; no time to attend to them now. Enquiries about lists of Muslim deaths, casualties, victims of the Phalange. Unimportant. Anything they claimed could be censored before printing by the Phalangist office, anyway. The priority today was to boost morale. Although the other militias didn’t know it, the Phalange had suffered a beating in the last few months. He allowed himself a chuckle. The Israelis will soon help us reverse that. And they won’t stay a minute longer than they have to. Just long enough to ensure a Maronite peace. Liberators.
The hot water ran out within minutes. He jumped about underneath the dying stream, trying to wash the shampoo out of his hair and the soap out of his armpits without freezing to death. His penis had shrivelled to a dried date: insignificant. It was the only part of his body he forced himself to rinse thoroughly before he turned off the water. After all, it was the most important thing.
They’re here, Sanaya said to herself. They’re really here now.
Scattered machine-gun fire reverberated through the corridors. It felt as though the gunmen would burst through the door in a moment, accuse her of everything and condemn her in an instant. There was a knock. She jumped. The door opened a crack and a black-veiled head poked through. Rouba’s cheeks were rounder now, yet unhealthy, as if swollen by her grief. Behind her, Hadiya’s flower-like face peeped into the room, eyes huge with fear.
‘Hadiya’s scared,’ Rouba said. ‘She kept asking for you. And I persuaded Issa to come up too. Do you mind if we—’ Issa squeezed through before them, hanging his head. Sanaya came with short hurrying steps, one hand outstretched to Hadiya as she fixed her gaze on him.
‘Sorry, Issa—I—I’m surprised to see you here.’
She scooped Hadiya up into her arms, at the same time surveying Issa’s face, attempting unsuccessfully to hide her stare. He was wounded, and blood seeped through an inexpertly tied bandage on his shoulder.
Rouba pushed forward. ‘He won’t let me look after him. Sanaya. Maybe you have some influence. He insists on bandaging himself.’
Issa squirmed under the combined gaze of both women, embarrassed.
‘I haven’t been out there at all today. My commander said I needed some time off after—after this happened to me. Of course I wanted to keep going—’
‘Of course,’ Sanaya echoed. Something in his voice wasn’t right, as if he was hiding something. Lying. Yet why should he? She turned to the kitchen, put Hadiya down on a stool with a glass of peach nectar – Italian, a gift of Selim’s. She rattled spoons and saucers. Who cared if Issa lied like everyone else? She lied all the time, most of all to herself. I am strong. I am happy. I won’t die like everyone else. Any truth was a scarce enough commodity nowadays.
‘I’m glad you’re all here,’ she said. ‘I’ll make some tea.’
The light bulb in the kitchen guttered and fizzled out, a faint rumble from afar and it shone steady again. Issa stood and cleared his throat.
‘There’s no water, Sanaya. Only what we’ve saved in the fountain. It’s grey.’
‘Damn, I forgot.’
‘I’ll go get some.’
‘No you won’t!’ Rouba said. ‘You’re already wounded. I forbid you.’
‘Who are you – a woman – to forbid me?’
‘Be careful,’ Sanaya said. ‘We’ll think you’re serious.’
‘I am,’ he replied, and turned to go.
On his way out of the building he patted the outline of his pistol through his shirt. He weaved through clumps of household garbage and stranded cars, others appearing stationary but actually caught in the eternal traffic jam of west Beirut. Some people were trying to get home before more bombardments, others trying to flee the city, even a few out merely for a drive because the incessant waiting at home to be hit was driving them crazy. Each driver’s hand fixed permanently to the horn. Those leaving Beirut were jammed in, ten to a car, roof racks strapped with the accumulation of lifetimes: heirloom blankets, gas stoves, overstuffed mattresses, even a black goat that bleated in fury as it was forced to endure the dust, the heat, the smoke and ashes of a disintegrating city. The deserters were the most insistent honkers of all.
He hummed to loud radio music mingling with the honking, in rhythm with the gunfire, syncopating the faraway bombs. The petrol station on the corner was overflowing with people jostling each other to buy enough fuel to get them to the countryside. Taxi drivers loitered nearby, knowing those desperate enough or unprepared enough would pay any price to get out.
As Issa crossed to the seafront, he wrinkled his nose at the stink of raw sewerage thrown up by the tide and admonished himself for showing such weakness. A warrior of the Prophet must be as stone. No human emotion must touch him, only purified fire from the fear of Allah. He thought of his mother with painful affection; that in itself was weakness. He thought of that woman Sanaya, of her immodesty and imperious voice; weakness again.
Weakness. He knew too much about it, didn’t want to go back down south. Not ever. He slapped his right hand to his heart. Through the dense haze of car exhausts he spied his regional commander’s gleaming Renault. Could it be his? He dived behind a parked car and hid, trembling. He was shirking his duty, staying with the women tonight. He’d be sent back to the south as punishment if he was caught, and this he wouldn’t – couldn’t – bear. There was something there, something dark, that he dared not admit to himself.
He was letting down his friends, his fellow freedom fighters. He knew at this very moment they were running on foot into Israeli gunfire. The Jews were advancing into the city, by ground and air. His friends were launching homemade grenades at Israeli tanks, unafraid, spines tingling, shrieking the oath of Allah at their foes. Allahu Akbar. God is great. He too should be there. They were tearing pieces from their shirts and wrapping them about their foreheads like Khomeini’s martyrs. His friends were within twenty feet of death. And here he was, hiding behind a car, twitching in fear.
When the Renault moved on, after what seemed like hours, he made for Rue Hamra. There was sure to be at least one shop open to buy some bottles of water. Those renegade shopkeepers would never pass up a chance to make a profit, even at the risk of being bombed. He ran down the street now, afraid the bombing might begin again. His head jerking to the right and left. Signs on the awnings showed more French, less Arabic, these days. Some were even replaced by Hebrew graffiti, no doubt scrawled by the Phalange.
Tattered posters of the Syrian president smiled at him. Assad everywhere: on the shuttered shopfronts, flapping in the wind from the sea, on the windscreens of cars alongside shiny pictures of Bashir Gemayel, the Phalangist poster boy, in his aviator sunglasses and a deeper shade of tan. Other posters, more garish: Yasir Arafat parting his fleshy lips in a leer and gazing toward the green-girdled fantasy of a free Palestine. Butchers all, Issa thought. And that Arafat worse than all of them, pretending to do right by his people and all the while only looking after himself. Hypocrite. Syrian or Lebanese or Palestinian, all they wanted was earthly power without the will of Allah.
He tore down the newer poster of Gemayel and tried to rip it in half. It was laminated, impossible to tear, so he threw it to the ground, stamping on it with his scuffed boots.
‘Hey, son! What are you doing?’
An old man leaned out of his newspaper booth, upsetting straight rows of cigarettes and chocolate bars and Tic Tac dispensers.
‘That’s our future Christian president! What business have you to do this?’
‘There’s no God but Allah.’
‘Are you crazy?’
Issa looked up and down the street. In a dawning joy he realised he and the old man were the only people on the rubbish-strewn, windswept street. Not even the foolhardy shoeshine boys had dared to venture out today. He scanned the booth, the old man, the pornographic magazines, the rows upon rows of bottles. Soft drink. Water.
‘Give me five of your biggest bottles of water.’
He took out his gun; it peeked almost shyly from the gap in his shirt buttons. The old man saw it and started to cry.
‘Don’t kill me. Please don’t kill me. I’m just trying to make a living.’
‘Give me the water.’ A weird, unknown exhilaration took hold of him. It was unlike the adrenaline and raw animal pleasure he took in operating the tank down south, in attacking Israeli soldiers, in hand-to-hand combat against a creature equally armed and dangerous with killing lust. This man was pleading and sobbing. His mouth opened and closed, pink as a child’s in search of nourishment. Issa raised his pistol to the old man’s smooth oval head and watched as bottles were arranged on the counter by shaking hands. He put the pistol back, hugged the water to his chest and strolled away.
Sanaya doled out her daily ration of face cream each night before bed, frightened of the day there would be no more, yet at the same time ashamed of herself: others were already drinking salt water and eating garbage from the road. She knew Selim could get her some, even from Paris, but didn’t want to ask. Why not? She asked him for almost everything else. Yet it was at these times she felt a jab of guilt. If he weren’t so free with his largesse, would she want him at all?
She wiped off her make-up, spat into a cotton-ball and dabbed at her eyes. ‘Spit’s good for the skin,’ Rouba said. ‘Enzymes.’ Tonight she was restless; she grimaced into her reflection and decided she looked older than ever, tired. Her eyes, once so bright and clear, were drooping, the irises a muddy colour. Wrinkles fanned out from the lids. She frowned, smiled, pouted at the mirror – and felt ashamed. She wanted to be frivolous like those Christian girls in east Beirut, wanted to see European films at the cinema, eat ice-cream at the seaside, travel north to a seafood restaurant in Byblos, white awnings pulled tight against a rising wind. She wanted to go with a man, any man, to that tiny twoseat cafe near the Pigeon Rocks, wear floaty dresses, string bikinis, have sex. She couldn’t do any of these things in west Beirut. Except the last.
So she waited for Selim to knock on her door once a week, sometimes twice, if she was lucky. He could cross from one side of the Green Line to the other, unlike her. His militia protected him at checkpoints, with M16 rifles and Sherman tanks. She readied the apartment for his arrival: killed the spiders which determinedly spun their webs across her cornices, dusted the gilt-framed lithographs of Lebanese mountains and rivers she might be destined to never see again, mourned the loss of an old Beirut she half remembered, the one part of her childhood memory she allowed herself to dwell on fondly.
The rest was all falsity, the crumbling facades of the city’s buildings, her frustrated dreams. Yet at times the destruction of Beirut pained rather than strengthened her resolve; at times she heard the tinkling of her mother’s voice like a taunt. Don’t think you can fool me. The fall of Beirut will mirror your own decay. She remembered her self-consciousness as a teenager, her creeping boredom, the frilled little girl’s dress she was forced to wear that scratched at her new breasts and throat. Mother was always at home to welcome visitors on Sunday afternoons, with murmured gossip under rattling teacups, the low laughter of well-dressed women, a lone piano playing the latest sheet music from France.
She could feel it as she woke and made tea and sat on the balcony in her mother’s dressing-gown, that pink silk grown threadbare under the arms: she’d become another forgotten member of the Sunni bourgeoisie, this new class of existential emigrants, homeless souls, internal exiles. Much as she despised them for their wealth and stupidity, their middleclass values, she’d become them. Become her mother of thirty years ago, a refugee of memory and the mind. She had something in common with Selim, at least. He always went on about being the son of an Armenian.
They had met at a party in east Beirut a year ago, when it was still possible for civilians to cross the Green Line and back again in a night. One of the many glittering receptions given by a leading hostess of the city. Tables so full of meze plates and serving platters and tureens the polished surfaces were no longer visible. More drink available than any of the well-stocked bars on the Corniche, and a record player pumping out a distorted version of the Sgt. Pepper album. It was one of those conspicuously wealthy parties, in appalling taste; the mood was jaded, edgy, slightly dangerous, and she found herself sitting alone near a potted palm, glad of the viewing screen it offered.
Her friend Amani had invited her. ‘Come along,’ she had said earlier that evening. ‘My husband’s away lecturing and I have nobody to go with.’ Sanaya agreed, thinking the two of them would have a few quiet drinks, laugh at the antics of the other guests, then leave.
She needed a diversion; she’d been alone too long, spent too much time in her apartment, had even pleaded illness when her cousins insisted on their monthly drinks at her place. She wasn’t sure why she felt so apathetic lately. Well, she was sure, but didn’t care to admit it to herself. Somehow the bright girlhood dreams she once cherished had faded. There was no large future out there for her. There was no adventure, romance, success. This was it. Life was mundane and dangerous, and the realisation of this made her curl up into herself.
So that night she forced herself to swallow her social queasiness and dress for the party. She thought Amani would introduce her to a few friends, share some idle gossip. But Amani was out to have a good time – too good a time. As soon as they arrived, she disappeared into a side door with a tall man, a bottle of champagne and a wink at Sanaya.
Sanaya tried to smile when people walked past, raised their drinks to her. Others danced on the balcony, threw their empty glasses down, trying to skim them across the surface of the sea. They pointed and exclaimed at colours in the sky. Bursts of light from bombs and shells falling in other parts of the city were merely a backdrop to the view. Stars extinguished. Another explosion. Familiar war. The incessant crack of machine-gun fire, only a faintly off-the-beat bass line to the music inside.
Sanaya hummed along to ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’. It was a strange choice. Out of date, ironic even, nostalgic for better days when there was no war, when Beirut was that much-lauded but true cliché: Paris of the East. Sanaya closed her eyes. She wanted to dance alone, oblivious to the ugliness around her, float among clouds with diamonds in place of pupils, a third eye shining bright. She let herself sway a little, opened her eyes. A man walking by raised his glass to her, self-deprecating, with a twist to the mouth. He was heavily tanned, like a construction worker, the whites of his eyes too bright. A woman behind him struck poses on the coffee table, in her own self-imposed trance, pushing aside the tiny, heaped plates onto the carpet with her stiletto heels. The man stopped in front of Sanaya, his body blocking out the other people. He was wearing a tuxedo, and although his dress shirt was half out of his trousers she thought him pretentious.
‘Having fun?’
She raised her eyes up to him and smirked, sitting more upright on her chair, cross-legged, almost prim except for her bare, hose-free legs.
‘Not really.’
His attention wandered for a moment; a blonde leaned backward over the balcony, screaming, her bell-shaped sleeves flying in the breeze. Sanaya looked, too, and grimaced.
‘I haven’t had enough to drink, maybe that’s why.’
He topped up her glass with whisky from a bottle he carried under his arm. She didn’t think it strange at the time. She was only conscious of him looking at her. His too-white eyes were now closed, the violet lids veined with thread-like capillaries. When he opened them, he didn’t blink. From his vantage point, she felt he could see right down into her cleavage. She stood up, too close in the humid, smoke-filled air, uncomfortably close. Excitingly close. He didn’t move, their torsos and faces almost touching.
‘What?’ she asked. ‘Is there something wrong?’
He shook his head. Together in rhythm, they turned and downed their glasses of whisky. He shook out a packet of cigarettes.
‘Smoke?’
‘Sometimes.’
She let him lean forward and light the cigarette for her, smelled something from his hair, spice and sourness; a lock of it touched her face. She shivered, felt the pressing-down sensation of desire in her belly, runnels of energy, almost like anxiety, or ambiguous signals of distress. She inhaled, felt the smoke enter her brain in tendrils like another form of lust.
That had been a year ago, to the day. An anniversary of sorts. Tonight, Selim would be dropped off at her apartment by his fellow militiamen, after an evening session at the gym. It was always a different Mercedes, armour-plated, that she could see from her upstairs window: always a different number plate, but always with the same gleam, the same plushness, the same understated malice. He was still sweaty and red-faced when he arrived, clutching a half-full bottle of Johnny Walker and jumbo packets of Marlboros, tokens of the generosity and goodwill of Israel and America. No matter how many times he brought these gifts, she tried to make him take them back. But she still wanted them, regretted her scruples once again when he took them away.
The money he brought her she always accepted. He pressed folded notes into her hand in rainbow currencies – dollars, deutschmarks, pounds – citing her cracked ceiling, her mother’s massive, mahogany furniture, the leak from next door’s bathroom seeping into her hall. He never brought her Lebanese liras, worthless for anything but buying bread and newspapers. She conferred with him and nodded at his suggestions, but when he was gone she put the money away under the bed, separate from her own emergency stash. She had no heart for repairs and purchases. She knew Selim didn’t even notice each time he visited that the apartment hadn’t changed at all. She wasn’t sure what to do with the money, but continued to stretch her hand out for more. There was tangible security in so many bills, even if they were worthless.
He eased her into his arms as she stood by the door and, further still, into a blanket of cologne. Under the green upland scent, something rancid as bacteria. She extricated herself from him and lit another cigarette, took some Valium from the packet he proffered.
‘Sit down and stop pawing me. I need a glass of water with this.’
‘I can paw you better in bed.’
She let him lead her by the elbow to her bedroom, swallowed her pills dry.
Selim, as second-in-command to the Christian Phalange leader, specialised in assassinations of key Muslims: rival militiamen, political subversives, intellectuals. The regiments within the Phalange sported religious titles evocative of the Crusades: Selim’s was called The Knights of the Virgin. Whenever he – rarely – went into battle against the PLO or any of the other factions, he wore an enormous rose-red crucifix embroidered onto his breastplate.
‘So they know where to hit me,’ he told her. ‘Right over the heart.’
He saw himself as a Crusader of old, defending Christendom against the bloody hand of Islam. His brand of idealism came with an essential pragmatism, his religion merely a sentimental exercise reserved for Sunday mornings and the lulling ritual of litany, requiring less a conviction of faith than a simple appreciation of the pleasures of incense and flowers. Certainty and absolution, strictly earthly concerns. The fact that Sanaya was born a Muslim didn’t seem to pose a problem in this rough reasoning of his. It was as though he saw women operating outside religion: featureless, fashioned by man not God, neutral bounty, unwieldy spoils of war.
She didn’t want to marry a Muslim. This was partly why she continued to see Selim. Even with his early paunch, his bloodshot eyes, his drinking, he was a good catch. His legs and arms were strong; in summer, with his tan, he looked like a man of the land. She loved this about him, the thrum of sinew and muscle beneath his flesh. She loved his thick eyelashes. She loved his glossy hair. Or so she liked to tell herself. He had power in this upside-down world of war. And some of his tarnished lustre brushed onto her, however briefly, if only when she lay in bed with him before dusk, saffron circle of the late sun clawing its way through her blinds. His palms were soft on her belly, her cheeks, through her hair, his thighs hairless and vulnerable between hers. It was the Armenian in him, he said. Pliable, but steely beneath.
Why should she marry a Muslim when she owned her apartment outright, bequeathed by her parents, in the family for generations? A Muslim husband would only take it for himself, depriving her of freedom. Why would she settle for a Muslim when she had an independent income? Old money hidden in tight rolls, withdrawn from the bank at the beginning of the war, still just enough, even with such inflation, for some luxuries. Gold and silver jewellery, her mother’s rings and necklaces and brooches to sell on the black market if things got really bad.
But at the same time she knew there was no future for her with Selim. Their casual union was illegal, since civil marriages didn’t exist in Lebanon. Even if they agreed to take the final step, they’d have to make their way to Cyprus to bind it. So she kept Selim a secret, from her neighbours, girlfriends, the cousins who came for cocktails once a month – such casual Muslims – and tried to arrange matches with her among their fundamentalist friends.
Her eldest cousin, Shahid, almost suspected. He drew her aside regularly to whisper in her ear, elbow resting on the kitchen counter near the knives as he watched her slice shreds of orange, mix drinks. His admission of violence all the more sinister for being so intimate.
‘If you play with Christians, Sanaya, you know what you’ll get.’
She shook her head, knife poised above the fruit’s soft pale heart, mesmerised by her cousin’s slow breathing. His face was calm when she lifted her eyes to him, his expression self-possessed. He trailed a pinkie finger – offensive, the long burnished nail – in a line from her eye to her jaw.
‘You’ll get your face cut, Sanaya. You know that’s what they’ll do.’
Despite the threats, she didn’t stop seeing Selim. She was more afraid of the alternative: arranged marriage, unsought babies, the unwelcome clinches she’d be forced to submit to each night. No marriage to a Muslim, no sharing her man with another woman. Or three. No divorce whenever he felt like taking someone younger into his bed, throwing Sanaya out of the house and even taking away her children. Not that the Koran authorised any of this behaviour. She read the Koran every night before bed, even when Selim was there, even when he laughed at her. She read the Bible as well, but mainly for the Old Testament stories. It was the Koran she believed: the unassailable word of truth. She read it and cursed those mullahs and clerics, unscrupulous fools sanctifying manmade rules in their own interest.