Sanaya decided that she wouldn’t replace the glass in her windows again. She’d already had it done three times and was sick of avoiding flying fragments in the dark. Today she’d stand on a chair and tape plastic sheets over the window frames, just like everybody else. Around her she sensed the other inhabitants of her building, her city, her country, continuing to surrender to the instinctive desire to bring some order and comfort into life amid the chaos and death. A desire she had only this moment abandoned as hopeless.
She recognised in herself a loosening, a strange calm. Slowly, she was letting go of the need to impress. She didn’t fret anymore if her clothes were dirty or if there was no water in which to wash. She stopped wearing so much make-up, tied her hair up every morning because it was so lank. Her days and nights were as slow moving as a dream, and as unpredictable.
She saw women washing clothes carefully with a sliver of soap or none at all, hanging grey underclothes between fallen facades to dry, throwing a pinch of spice into a courtyard pot filled with boiling seawater in which there was nothing but greens gathered from city streets. They scrubbed at rubble that was once a bedroom wall. Busied themselves smoothing threadbare sheets over torn mattresses, looted from ruins next door. This was what gave her city its distinctive and bizarre paradox: the nature of humanity to busy itself with the inane while denying the inevitable.
She forced herself to go downstairs with a bucket and spade to remove broken bricks and garbage from the once-proud fountain. Rouba helped her sometimes, but the others in the building merely conspired in filling it up again. Their concierge – the fountain and garden and its birds had been his pride and joy – was killed by a hooded gunman while crossing the street. Which militia the murderer had belonged to, nobody knew. Anybody could find a gun nowadays and patrol their corner of the street without fear of censure. Except, of course, when a bigger militia decided to claim the same turf. The dabblers and dilettantes would run inside to their wives and brag about their neighbourhood exploits for years to come, on their balconies in the late evenings, in the courtyard downstairs while playing cards.
The care of the canary had been taken over by Hadiya. In reality it was Issa who went with her each morning, changed the water dish and scattered grain, put down fresh newspaper. Sometimes he would take Hadiya by the hand and scour the garden and surrounding streets for a bud, a blade of grass, a rotten lettuce leaf to offer. He professed a deep fondness for the little bird, and was as gentle with it as he always was with Hadiya. Sanaya felt herself grow soft when she watched him with the little girl, aching at his youthfulness, the springiness of his brown skin. She wanted him to hold her hand instead, to touch her lightly, look into her face with the same glittering focus he brought to bear on the bird, the cup of water, a tiny flower he’d found. ‘Our prophet loved animals,’ he told her. Instead of getting up to disturb a cat sleeping on the edge of his robe, Mohammed cut the garment. But Issa was not often home anymore, so the bird’s welfare was left to Rouba. She had no idea where Issa had gone when Sanaya asked her, all she knew was that he wasn’t in the south any longer.
‘Why not?’ Sanaya pressed. ‘Isn’t that where the worst fighting is?’
Rouba looked away. ‘He’s somewhere in Beirut,’ she replied, and Sanaya imagined him getting hurt or dying and was surprised at the chill that crept over her.
The concierge used to hang the canary’s cage from the boughs of the fig tree on sunny days, but this tree had now been stripped of everything: not only its fruit, but its leaves and even its branches too. It had become a stump the neighbourhood children sometimes proclaimed from in their complicated games of cruelty and justice. Hadiya was kept away from those games.
Today Sanaya came to terms with the fact that perhaps she didn’t want the war to end. If it ended, this ultimate distraction from real life and its pressures – find a job, choose a husband, accumulate wealth, have children, succeed, compete – would no longer hold any sway. Nobody was competing now, except to kill each other. Most people were living in the moment, helping each other in small, delicate ways to survive.
The only thing she was afraid of in this war was death. Living with the war had become a necessary distraction, a challenge of daily habit. It came closer each day, placing a hand on her shoulder like a friend. Dying in the war was another matter entirely. If she were younger, she’d say her youth rendered her invulnerable. But she was just old enough to be sensitive to the onset of decay. Just old enough to coddle herself the same way she fabricated her fantasies of the city. The twinned destruction of herself and Beirut, yet their resolute obstinacy to remain – as a city, and as a citizen of Beirut – gave them both just enough strength to continue.
Yet it wouldn’t do to rely solely on this connection between herself and the city. She had rituals to perform, repeating them daily to protect herself. She never shook the tablecloth outside at night, never cooked without throwing a pinch of salt over her left shoulder. She would never remove the amulet she’d worn since birth, the gold hand of Fatima, from around her neck. In her long evenings of reflection, she mused over where she had learnt these superstitions and concluded that she had no idea. Her mother was never interested in rituals, in folk remedies or myths. The first port of call in any family crisis had always been a straight whisky at six and sleeping pills at bedtime. Western doctors, specialists’ fees and potent creams for her beautiful, aging face.
The view of the sea from Sanaya’s balcony lulled her, on some primitive level, into feeling the human war below couldn’t touch her. Violent sunsets, the rush and boom of waves between marbled rocks, the silvery sheen of dawn on the horizon gave her an illusion of constancy. Yet the war of machines, the mechanical war of bombs and explosions, terrified her. Some mornings she didn’t get up at all and stayed in bed all day reading old fashion magazines, telling herself this wasn’t a form of absolution, of giving up. When Issa came back, after weeks of silence, she was deaf to his protests during air raids. She wouldn’t go and hide in the corridor anymore, so he came to her.
Rouba, Hadiya and Issa sat with her in the bathroom for hours during the fighting, playing backgammon, eating, talking. Sanaya took note of the way Issa always let her win, watched the way he ate daintily, like his bird. She liked the way he sat, arranging his long limbs loosely on the floor next to her. Resting his arm against hers as he played, he smelled of sweat and spices, and she found herself surprised that she didn’t mind – whenever she smelled Selim after his workouts, she always wanted him to shower right away.
‘The bathroom’s safer anyway,’ Rouba announced, trying to make the best of the situation. ‘And I wouldn’t want to die all mangled up with our neighbours. It’s better this way.’
Whenever Issa found food in defiance of the blockade, he bought enough for all of them, as much as he could carry.
‘Why do you spend so much time with those backward Shias?’ Selim would ask. ‘Don’t accept anything from them. I can source everything from the Israelis: chocolate, bread, orange juice, toilet paper, extra soft.’
When the water supply was cut off intermittently by the Israelis, Sanaya’s neighbourhood dug its own wells; when electric power was out for more than twelve hours a day, they installed temperamental generators; when the police disappeared, they affiliated themselves with neighbourhood militias for protection. This was another reason she was still with Selim, even under pain of death by Muslim militias if they found out she was sleeping with a Phalangist. He seemed more effective than they. He seemed more powerful than Issa.
Of course, he was more powerful than any of the militias. He had the backing of Israel and America. Sleeping with the devil, that’s what she was doing. A demon with a crooked smile, a soft moustache that hid his frown. A demon who came to her apartment in the middle of the night or the early hours of the morning, so nobody would see him. Especially Issa, though Sanaya didn’t let herself articulate the thought. How would she feel if both men were in the same room?
Selim was so serene at dawn when they lay on their backs, talking. He knew exactly what to do when she became frightened: of the war, the onset of middle age, her lack of a child of her own. He kissed her, opened her up. Calm and efficient.
Selim staked out the Armenian quarter late at night in the Mercedes. His driver didn’t question the location, the post-midnight hour, or Selim’s continued drinking in the back seat. He merely drove back and forth, from street to street and house to house, as directed by Selim’s confused grumbling. Selim knew he was drunk, knew he was sad and confused, but on nights like this there was nothing else for it except to wallow.
‘Show me Urfa Street again, Pierre.’
The car was wheeled around to a stop under the leafless plane trees at the top of the street. He didn’t remember them that way. Maybe the war had traumatised their growth. Jazz played from the tape deck – Frank Sinatra live with Count Basie, his favourite – and he tapped out the syncopated beat on the window as he peered at the streetscape, lighted lamps ghostly in the humid air, filthy kerbs just as he remembered them, that rampant bougainvillea still festooning the facade of every timbered house.
‘Pierre. You’re new to us, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, monsieur.’
‘You carry the name of our venerable founder, eh? Pierre Gemayel, what do you think? Is he genius or god?’
‘Yes, monsieur.’
‘Well, which is he, then?’
He took a quick swig of his whisky, not waiting for an answer. The man’s silence unnerved him.
‘Like the French, Pierre my friend, we Maronites have a civilising duty to this country. A mission. Without us, where would the nation be? Banging heads in mosques and shimmying up palms for dates, no doubt. None of this jazz from America, for one thing. Do you like it?’
‘Yes, monsieur.’ A scarcely perceptible sigh from the older man. Selim heard it and was hurt, yet it only served to make him more loquacious.
‘Our Phoenician forbears, Pierre, defenders of the only real democracy in the Arab world. Such hopes we have, for the future of our Lebanon.’ He gestured with the whisky bottle. ‘Park in front of the two-storey house over there, the one with the rotting balcony.’
He watched the lighted windows of his father’s house. Behind thick glass he could discern moving figures, voices, sounds of laughter. His father’s cough. Or was he only imagining it? He always contemplated going in, arriving in the midst of a family idyll with only a swift knock at the door to announce his presence. Then he stopped. Yet another part of him wanted to punish them, even his unknown daughter. I won’t go in. Won’t give them the satisfaction. Let them wonder about me. Let them continue to worry, to wonder whether I love them, the twice-yearly envelopes a constant reproach. He’d been trapped, he’d been so young – and now they wanted him to feel guilty as well? And what of this little daughter of his, growing into a woman without a father to look to for protection? Not so little anymore. She must be at least sixteen by now. Tarred with her mother’s brush, no doubt, opinionated and wilful. Complicit in her grandmother’s ambitions.
Did I ever love Anahit? He took another gulp from the bottle and was drunk enough now to be honest with himself. I never did. He only wanted her the way a boy wants the touch of any pliable flesh, the way he needed his own left hand at night under the bedcovers. Nothing more. She’d tricked him into having sex, then got herself pregnant to trap him. That was all there was to it, and he absolutely refused – even now – to feel any remorse. He remembered the night mostly because it had been so cold.
It was early spring but the nights were still chilly. He made sure to dress in warm, dark clothes before he left the house. At the side door he wound a woollen scarf around his neck twice; his only concession to colour. Mother had made it for him last winter in his football team’s stripes, and he knew it would bring him luck. He glanced at his watch, a New Year’s gift from Anahit, nearly midnight. He hadn’t told anyone at home, exams tomorrow and he had no intention of going back to the American University. He was no naive student, no idealist. He was a man of action, wanted to save his country. Or be a hero, whichever came first. He ran down Urfa Street and onto the highway, made it onto the last bus.
At Camp Marash he nodded to black-coated, capped figures. They were all men – no women were allowed at the meeting. Of course, he thought, but the thought was only a result of the habit of discussing everything with Anahit, internalising her disdain of men and their ways. Why can’t I join a liberation organisation if I want? He could hear the rising frustration in her girlish growl. Bet I’ d be more ruthless than any of them. He didn’t doubt it.
The Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia was the largest anti-Turkish organisation he’d heard of, in response to Turkey’s official policy of denial. Archaeologists and academics in Turkey were employed solely to exhume Armenian bones from the killing fields and claim the muddy skulls were Turkish. Turning perpetrators into victims. The Turkish government was manipulating international opinion, with the press lobbied not to use the term genocide. Even the Americans and British called it the ‘alleged Armenian atrocity’, the ‘civil war’, or ‘intercommunal warfare’.
So far the organisation hadn’t managed to assassinate any Turkish figures of note, though not from want of trying. There were a few bungled attempts at government ministers and a few arrests of activists who had been caught, but it was still growing in size. For Selim, it had been hard to find out anything about them at first. They were notorious for their secrecy, even among fellow Armenians. Minas was uncharacteristically silent on the matter, telling him not to meddle. But Selim asked the right questions around the Armenian quarter, in underground bars and at the marketplace, was given the right answers. And so he was here.
He stayed at the back of the auditorium, pulling off his jacket and scarf. The space was quickly being filled with Armenian men, all with that shuffling, sidelong way of walking that betrayed a certain amount of suspicion. Nobody glanced in his direction, nobody spoke. He noticed one slight, boyish figure stand toward the back in the same way he did, shifting from foot to foot, keeping his cap on even in the rising heat. His boots looked just like Selim’s best Sunday pair.
The speeches began. Much talk of suffering, persecution, the danger of being Armenian in an Arab region. Revenge. Many speakers. Finally, a tense, black-browed young man stood and shook his fist at the assembly.
‘Down with Turkey!’
The rest of the men followed suit, shaking their fists. Selim did so as well, noticing from the corner of his eye that the boy kept his arms clasped behind his back.
‘Armenia is now one-seventh of her original size. The Turk has overrun our nation and culture while the rest of the world sits idly by!’
The auditorium blazed with shouts.
‘Shame! Shame!’
‘I propose we begin this holy war on all enemies of Armenia now! I propose—’
Selim felt his attention wandering, much as he was warmed by the sentiments expressed. The reason he was distracted was the boy near him. He sidled along the wall and was now slipping his sweaty hand into Selim’s.
‘Excuse me?’
He tried to pull his hand away but the other boy only gripped it tighter. He tried not to cause a scene. He struggled without moving, using his muscles to exert pressure. Was this a spy, a Muslim bomber, or an internal test for new members? He ceased to resist and became limp. The boy came closer so his cap tickled Selim’s cheek.
‘It’s me, you idiot.’
He pulled away from the hand. He whispered back, furious, spitting in his haste to speak. ‘What do you think you’re doing following me here? You could get shot.’
Only a girlish giggle in his ear. He yanked Anahit by the arm to his side.
‘We’re going. Not a word out of you – not a word.’
Past the guards at the door, who frowned but said nothing, past the floodlit courtyard, through the high gates that spelled Camp Marash in Armenian script. Anahit was convulsing with laughter in his grip, and this made him madder still. He shook her, savage in his embarrassment.
‘They’ll never have me now! My name’s been noted, thanks to you.’
Anahit pushed the cap off her face with her free hand and suddenly her face had changed.
‘Oh, Selim. I didn’t realise. I just—wanted to surprise you.’
He turned from her and strode away.
‘Wait, Selim! I’m sorry—I’ll go back and tell them it was all my fault.’
He wheeled around and arranged his features into a scowl.
‘Then they’ll really think I’m a coward, letting a stupid girl do that.’
She ran to stop him from walking away again, gripping him by the lapels of his jacket. She was crying now, great convulsing sobs that embarrassed him still further.
‘I’m so, so sorry. Selim, please—’
He hesitated, wanting to punish her somehow, then in the next moment hugged her to him like the little boy he knew he still was, the movement of his arms and head fierce against her body.
‘Doesn’t matter. Let’s go. I’d rather fight with a real army than slink around stabbing people in the back anyway.’
They walked arm in arm to the highway. The last bus had gone. It was that time of the early morning when the sky would exert a slight, pale pressure on the eyes. Cars whizzed past, their headlights glowing in the dark. Anahit tightened her grip on him. He stayed passive. She took his arm in a decisive gesture and wound it around her waist. He then turned around, his arms still around her, until they were face to face. She was panting, her mouth open inches from his.
‘So,’ he said. He could feel the warmth of her breath.
It was the first time he’d ever touched her like this. It had always been her taking the initiative: flirting, caressing, even slapping him when she was angry. Now he felt how slim she was, almost frail, but with a core of muscle under his borrowed shirt and trousers, his second-best belt buckled twice around her. He bent his head and kissed her lips; they were like fire. Her teeth knocked against his, their tongues met, and through the kiss he felt her widen into a smile. Slowly, he reached behind her head and tenderly piled her hair up again under the cap; it was growing even colder now.
They reached Urfa Street after an hour and both of them stopped to stand on the rise of the hill, looking down on their home. The honeycoloured stone it was built with gleamed and beckoned, but they both turned, without conferring, away from it. They caught another bus, sat together with their legs twined, the only passengers. It made them giggle. They got out at the Corniche, the sea still and inky under a predawn sky. Made their way to Selim’s campus, lay down together in the middle of the courtyard. Damp grass hard on their spines. It wasn’t cold anymore, or at least they didn’t feel it. He plucked his cap from her and threw it as far as he could. Her breasts warm, the nipples alive. He loomed over her, looking down into her face. Her eyes were open, but she didn’t see him – stony, focused on a landmark way in the distance. Her bare head in his hands was ice, clammy, as if her hair had soaked up all the cold of night.
His aunt Lilit had organised it all. She showed her daughter how to get pregnant, to shame him, trap him into a marriage he was too young to want and too noble to refuse. And now this: Anahit’s death, an abandoned child, a broken family. Such unrelenting guilt. How did we all come to this? He moaned, became aware of the driver’s puzzled enquiry, and excused himself.
‘I’m sorry, Pierre. Back pains. Always come on at night.’
Pierre nodded, self-consciously professional.
‘Perhaps we should be heading back to headquarters now, monsieur? You have a 6 am tomorrow. Or should I say today, sir; it’s already two in the morning.’
He pressed a couple of notes into the driver’s hand.
‘Please, Pierre. Let’s stay here a while longer.’