I wake with the phone ringing by my head, glance at the clock radio on the bedside table. It’s past seven, and I need to be at the tribunal by nine. I slept badly after waking at sunset and trying to get back to sleep; spent the night stewing over my own stupidity.
‘A Mr D’Andrea to speak to you, madam. Shall I put him through?’
‘No—okay, yes.’
‘Ms Pakradounian? I’m sorry to disturb you so early. I hope I haven’t woken you?’
I’m disgusted by the formality in his voice. As if nothing happened last night on the beach.
‘No, I’m awake. Do you have anything in particular to say to me?’
‘Well, I wanted to apologise for—for, er, having too much to drink. And for my indiscretion.’
‘Which one?’
I’m not giving an inch. He sighs.
‘I am sorry, whatever you think. I was pushy and I frightened you, and I—said some inappropriate things.’
‘Yes.’
Now he’s exasperated.
‘Yes, what? Don’t even think you can blackmail me; nobody around here would believe you.’
‘That’s not my intention. But I do think people would believe me. And I don’t accept your apology – for either of your blunders.’
I slam the phone down. My shoulders relax. He mustn’t know about the tape. And I still don’t know what to do with it. Incriminate him, or save him? Forget about it, or stay angry? I wish Lilit was here – she’d tell me what to do. We would lie like this before I left Beirut, her heavy flank against my hip, head turned so her cinnamon breath stirred the fine hairs on my arms.
I wasn’t there when she was killed, but I know exactly how she would have slumped on her pillow when she was shot. Hardly any movement at all. Imperceptible. Smash of glass, car horns, howls, guns receding – silence. A sniper, a random death. Blood on her face, coming in a syncopated rhythm from mouth, nostrils, eyes; they would have darted about, flickered, then rested on one last point before her heart stopped beating. Was it the ceiling she saw last, with its cracks and damp patches, the open door, the lugubrious sunset outside her window?
She was always so sad. I’d tried to comfort her, to make up to her all the hurts that couldn’t be articulated or explained. But it wasn’t Beirut that made her so sad. I knew that, even as a child. It wasn’t the brief, intense twilights or the sounds of hawkers from across the street. She watched them from her bed, day and night, calling out their wares to passers-by. She told me they hadn’t changed since she first came here. Sometimes she’d trick herself into thinking the hawkers were singing. Singing to her. But it wasn’t their voices that made her sad, or their undertone of painful resignation. It wasn’t the caged monkeys they paraded from the north of Africa or their little sisters, teenage whores in the bars over the beach. It wasn’t any of these things. It was other things, more intangible. Stray dogs like harbingers of death, smell of fish over open fires, the incinerating of garbage. Burning corpses.
Some were refugees, she told me, from camps on the other side of the city. Palestinians. Victims of infighting, revenge killings by PLO militiamen, swift deaths of traitors and Israeli spies. Also, victims of the Phalange. ‘Selim. That stupid, stupid boy.’ I blanched when she spoke like that about my father. They didn’t like to discuss him too much, except when Siran tossed off a few too many Armenian brandies on Christmas Day and started wailing for her long-lost son, her patriot, her poor misunderstood boy. I sat aside with my unwrapped gifts and listened, made myself invisible under the heavy scented tree, arranging and rearranging the placement of the nativity figurines. Mary in the background. Joseph to her left. The baby Jesus in my right-hand pocket, where he’d always be safe. The dead mother. The lost father. The missing bracelet. Even then I was trying to make sense of my own misplaced trinity: If I find just one of the three, will all the others fall into place?
Now I turn my head on the pillow. Lilit’s gone. In the photo by my bedside, she’s posed against a fountain in a bone-yellow courtyard, tiles at her feet in black and white. A desert oasis, with a river close by that saw many bodies, many deaths. When I was younger, I didn’t really listen to the explanation. I was more interested in the similarities I could detect in the young woman’s face. Thin lips like mine, closed against a secret. A fringed veil thrown back over her forehead as if irritated by its weight, feet bare and ringed with beads. Under the gauzy fabric, roughcut hair, fine as mine when I was a baby. I still chart my own features in hers: fingers just like mine, the sharp elbows visible beneath the sheerness of her sleeves, a dress in the dull green of Islam. Wrists dyed indigo, like a Bedouin. Her lapis eyes under the veil, the same colour and shape as mine, and my mother’s, and my father’s. Is that a slight swell under her clothes? A child’s body heavy with a woman’s burdens. A body that, in the wake of its mortality, is becoming increasingly hard to fathom, impossible to categorise. Hands and lips and eyes that have witnessed death, tranquil limbs invaded by brutality.
When she died, a box arrived for me in Boston from the Lebanese nuns who had looked after her. It was full of the debris of a life: photographs, letters, even a baby’s caul. My mother’s? At the bottom, a French–Lebanese dictionary. I was careful with the rice-paper thinness of its pages, sneezed as I opened it. So much dust. On the flyleaf, blue ink fading to grey: Property of Minas Pakradounian, Bourj-Hammoud Refugee Camp, Beirut, 1922.
My grandfather made sure none of the family forgot his heroics, reliving his youth at the table, in front of guests, how he made a grand escape from the death camp with Turkish guards in pursuit, and he, a mere boy of thirteen. He only stayed in Damascus a week, spurred on by his need to travel, to make his fortune on the trading coast. An imam he met in the Umayyad mosque carried him on his mule cart over the Anti-Lebanon mountains and down into the Beka’a Valley, then Minas hitched onward to Beirut. Fig trees and prickly pears growing on the verges gave him sustenance – sometimes a shepherd would share his midday cheese and bread. He drank fresh water from the Litani River, and his feet were grazed down to bone on the grit of the road. Even then, when I was only small, I knew his arrival in Beirut was inspired less by courage than by an all-encompassing fear.
I leafed through the dictionary that day, noting Minas’s underlining of certain words and phrases. Then a note between the pages, dated 1966, the year of my birth, and folded many times. When I smoothed it out on my knee I couldn’t place the inept handwriting.
Dear Papa,
I know you’ ll be disappointed in me. Then again, you always were.
I’m leaving. Maybe I’m leaving to prove to you that I can do exactly what you did. Maybe I’m afraid of being a coward.
Here the ink faded and ran out until I had to hold the paper up to discern the rest of the words, etchings in angry relief against the light.
Maybe it’s more cowardly to leave than to stay behind. Anyway, I’m gone.
Selim.
My father had held that paper in his hands, touched the pen that made those bright marks – now faded – on its surface. I have the note now, also hidden in Lilit’s Koran. How my father would have hated that.
I also have D’Andrea’s tape. It weighs on me now like the burden of my father’s death, the annihilation of my people. I remember the slight wobble in his voice just now on the phone, his split-second vulnerability.
I get up, sit cross-legged on the bed, lay all my relics out on the covers like an incendiary game of Patience. Lilit’s photograph, the veil, the Koran. The black and white photo of my parent’s wedding. My father’s note. The tape with D’Andrea’s damning words. An inventory of objects that hold me back. I close my eyes, for a beat of silence. There’s no way I want to be as vengeful as my father. I take the tape into both my hands, leaving a gap in the line of items. Push it into my recorder and press erase.