I miss Sarkis sometimes, now he’s dead. After all, he was the only one who filled in the gaps in my stories. By the end of his last week, he had almost made me feel whole.
I know now from the hints he dropped, from questions I liked to think were subtle on my part, that he was the boy who betrayed my grandfather in the death camp at Der ez Zor. And that calling me out of the blue that night in Boston was a crooked part of his atonement. When he called I didn’t know he would be dead a week later. He knew, of course. He wouldn’t have contacted me any other way. The cancer had already gone into his liver and lungs and bones, was reaching his brain. But I didn’t know that until after, at the funeral.
We met at a restaurant over a long weekend. He’d chosen a neutral place, perhaps so I wouldn’t cry, shout, make a scene. But his unshed tears were enough to silence me. Outside the plate-glass windows, night rain turned the sky to black and silver. Diamond points in my hair, his old eyes. I sat opposite, playing with my cutlery. He sipped wine between sentences, didn’t touch any of the food on his plate. His hands were trembling, and a thin curl of spit stayed just on the side of his mouth the whole time we were there. I wanted to wipe it off. Every now and then he would open a pillbox and swallow two or three large white pills with his wine. Now I know it was morphine. On noticing my expression, he merely raised his eyebrows, or what was left of them.
He told me what he knew of my father’s death. He didn’t know the real name of the man who had ordered him killed, but he knew the man worked for Islamic Jihad, and that he was a suicide bomber, and a rival of Selim’s. He also knew the name of the Lebanese town in which my father was buried.
He told me all this without glancing up once. Each sentence was a short, pithy fable engineered to impart some important message. The moral evaded me – I was just hungry for the details of my father’s life, any small clues as to who he really was. I asked Sarkis how he knew all this, and he finally looked up at me, his mouth twitching.
‘I’ve spent the last ten years finding out.’
‘But who told you? Do you trust them?’
‘I found some old men, like me. They used to work for Islamic Jihad in the eighties. One of them was Algerian, he lives here in Boston now. I trust his account the most. Do you want to meet him?’
I shook my head. ‘I trust you.’
Sarkis lowered his head again. ‘And I trust him, because he was there. He was the one who pulled the trigger.’
‘What? Who is he? What’s his name? How can he still be roaming the streets, a killer?’
‘He was nothing. A foot soldier, following instructions. He isn’t to blame. The man who told him what to do is the one you should hate.’
‘And who was he?’
‘I don’t know. Only the Iranians in Islamic Jihad knew his real name.’
This final version added something new to the flesh and fat and bone of my father’s character, but at the same time made me sick to my stomach. I had to go to the bathroom and hide my grief. By the end the bottle was finished but our plates were untouched. I had to help Sarkis home. Through slippery streets in the dark, he seemed half-alive, insubstantial, an old man finally empty of guilt.
He’d aged so much since I saw him last. No more the courtly flirtation with its hint of menace, sly intimations of something more. I didn’t confront him that night with how uncomfortable he had made me feel as a sixteen-year-old – it seemed another life. Even as a teenager I’d managed to overcome my dislike of his attentions, allowing him in weak moments to manhandle me, only this much and no more – a flutter of the hand here, a sly tickle there – as he introduced me to Boston’s Armenian community as his goddaughter. I would plaster a smile on my face. By then I’d learnt the necessary coquetries. Poor little orphan, the powdered ladies clucked, jangling as they moved in their old Armenian gold, their bright new American diamonds, and I would let my own forehead crumple in mimed pathos.
I would sit on his sofa when he released me, away from the other guests, and watch the cable news channel that beamed in live footage from the Middle East. I would think of my unknown father. Where was he? Looking for my own features in this or that militiaman’s moustached face. The money had stopped suddenly, Lilit said in one of her letters. Could that mean he was dead? Or in trouble? Now I know that by then he’d already been killed.
Sarkis was so vulnerable that week before he died. His body – long broken by the torture – was folding in on itself. He spoke plainly about the death marches, the camp. He regained some energy in the lobby of his apartment when we got there, his stick wobbling wildly as he righted himself, re-enacting the pain, twisting his body, pulling at his own fingers until they turned red. They did it like this. Like that. They hit me like this, and I watched the white saliva foam again at the corners of his mouth as he worked himself into a frenzy, as he mimed the mechanical efficiency of the blows, hatred steady as a metronome. I begged him to stop, his breathing so laboured, chest and scalp slick with sweat. His bones were shell-light, his skull shiny and hairless, except for a few baby curls at the crown.
When I got him into his apartment he told me his housekeeper was asleep, her door shut. Now I know she was a night nurse. I helped him bath, averting my eyes from the welts and marks of his torturers as I soaped his back, held a towel out for him to slowly, precariously step into. His long shanks, his Armenian leanness. The harmless penis, curled like a snail.
He died at home in the apartment, not in hospital. The nurse called me, and I saw him when his body was still warm. It was the first time I’d seen a corpse so close – a corpse that wasn’t mangled, or covered in blood. The thin, bluish hands clasped over his breastbone were getting colder, stiffening even as I watched. I bent over his body, my warm tears on his dead cheeks, and surprised myself by kissing him softly on the mouth. Now I make myself believe that his lips retained a final tremor. As if he was going to tell me the last piece of the puzzle, the one name that would change everything.
Chaim comes every other evening with the dog, Julius, and waits in the lobby of the Mayflower hotel. He gazes wistfully at the glass doors of the Duke of Wellington bar on the ground floor, but resists temptation, knowing if he goes in there among the smoke and laughter he may miss Anoush.
He doesn’t want to ask reception to call her room, doesn’t like to appear complacent of her arrival or, alternately, stupidly desperate she won’t come. He wants to arrive at her hotel room, watch her open the door slowly with a smile of recognition on her face. He wants to take her in his arms and kiss her, rough and hard, as if there’s nobody in the world but the two of them. Yet it’s shame that keeps him from doing it, shame and fear and disgust at himself. He’s old enough to be her father. She’s never indicated that she has any interest in him other than as a guide, a support, maybe a friend.
He’s been anxious lately and, if he cares to pinpoint it, it’s ever since he met her. Before her arrival he revelled in the voluptuous anonymity of his floating existence in Beirut: no past, no family, no friends other than the men he worked with, drinking companions and nothing more. No morality or the cringing need for guilt. Now with her probing about his Ashkenazi background – his father, mother and brother; his childhood in Tel Aviv and Eilat; his military service in southern Lebanon – he feels shallow and exposed. As if there’s nothing for her to find beneath the tally of dates and names, nothing to redeem him. Or too much.
He hasn’t allowed himself to dwell too much on his military career for years. Or on his dead brother Alon. Anoush’s open curiosity doesn’t allow him to turn away from the memory any longer, like a cavity in a tooth that must be probed. Those summer days and nights of longing and tears, patriotic songs. Shabbat dinners when he and his mother were alone except for the Muslim servants, breaking challah into four pieces, slurping stew, his elder brother’s absence at the head of the table a silent accusation. By then, his father’s early death was a wound long closed over. Television footage of fighter planes over Beirut, his brother, the tragic knight in tinfoil armour. Down, down in flames.
Will Anoush continue to respect him when she finds out where he really comes from? How even as a teenager he idealised a heroic brother and a pointless war? Is he here in Beirut to atone for all of them: his father’s Zionist beliefs, his mother’s passive racism, Alon’s naive sense of entitlement?
He sits on one of the musty chairs in the lobby. But is it really such a pointless war? It’s a war that can never be won, that will only breed more pain, but would he or his mother be alive without it? Driven straight into the sea, where the Arabs want them? Where else could they go? The only home his family has ever known is Israel. And Israel must protect itself – or it will be annihilated. They can’t let that happen again. He’s the grandson of a Holocaust survivor, his friends’ parents, his neighbours, all survivors of a genocide so painful it can hardly be borne. And here he is, helping his friends’ enemies, his parents’ enemies, to destroy his own people. If his mother knew what he was really doing in Lebanon, she would turn her face to the wall and will herself to die. How can he make Anoush understand this?
Julius lies down just outside the swinging doors to the street, head resting on his paws. Chaim’s already hot; he rolls up his sleeves, tries to distract himself by watching the young clerk, Jean-Michel, arrange faded postcards on a stand, fill his ledger. He’s wearing a black bowtie and a dress shirt, ridiculous in this Edwardian squalor. This squalid city. What was it like for Alon, flying over the sea and checking, double-checking the coordinates, readying himself to bomb an already ravaged city? A city so similar to Eilat, the Red Sea resort town of their childhood summers. His brother was university educated, debated the ethics of such a war with his libertarian friends, talked equality and justice, words Chaim couldn’t understand then, or refused to understand. His politics back then were more rigid, more simplistic than Alon’s. In his mind, any means to rid Israel of its enemies were justified by the end. Alon even began attending the protest marches in the last months of his life, and Chaim mocked him. No Palestinian or Lebanese soldier would question the conflict or be so touchingly naive, so academic.
Alon would gather his university friends around him in the evenings, with wine on the table from their fathers’ vineyards, the glow of Chinese lanterns strung on a trellis mingling with the red warmth in Chaim’s belly. On the smudged horizon, silhouettes of oil tankers competed with a perfect sunset. His brother sat in the circle of rosy light and spoke of the need to avoid civilian casualties, of helping the people of Lebanon decide their own future. He spoke of Israel’s ‘purity of arms’, that their army only ever attacked military targets, while the Palestinian fighters embedded themselves among hospitals and schools and homes. He never talked of the crushed bodies he saw, of the impossible rubble he helped create, rooms that once housed women, families, children twisted into terrible shapes.
One evening Chaim stood aside in the shadows watching his brother’s lean, mobile face, so like their dead father’s, waiting for him to beckon to him as he always did, still talking, still trying to convince his friends of the morality in this war. In the next breath he was crying and babbling about the immorality of what he was forced to do. This time, Chaim leaned against his brother’s ribs, the long, hard arm still tight around him, the friends’ faces closing down now, embarrassed, Alon’s sobs distorting the fine words he’d uttered only a moment before. It was the first time Alon had touched him with tenderness since he was a baby.
He sits and waits, remembering the hard skin of his brother’s arms, the smell of red wine and dry heat. He can still feel Alon’s hands on his shoulders, their heft and weight, the fractured sound of his sobbing. He wishes Anoush was here with him, wishes he could explain everything. And then, she is there, and he doesn’t know what to say. As usual, she comes down to the lobby at eight and they conspire in denying this is a planned meeting, a rendezvous, even an assignation. He sometimes takes her elbow when they cross a particularly busy street. She looks down at him in her high heels – she’s bought some now, succumbing to the pressure of strangers’ stares – and tells him each evening that she’ll wear her old, flat sandals tomorrow. He can see her trying not to walk too tall and he laughs to himself.
‘What are you looking at?’
‘Nothing. Really. Okay, I was looking at you. Don’t hunch like that.’
He suspects she’s offended, but he didn’t mean to offend. What he wants to say is how lovely she is, heels or no, how happy he feels to walk alongside her. But at times he can see her tiny ripples of irritation at his customary glibness, like a cat in a foreign room, pawing at the furniture and looking for a way out. He doesn’t allow her to begin, what with his ready charm and laughter. And anyway, what will she rail at him for? For not being what she wants him to be? At least he’s not his brother all over again, drifting between two worlds, unhappy with both.
They always choose one of two places every night, a basement eating house owned by exiled Turks or a waterfront restaurant in one of the few restored Ottoman villas in Beirut. Most often the eating house, as he can see Anoush is watching her spending and he doesn’t always succeed in paying. Although he insists every night, sometimes she stops him and lays her credit card between them on the table.
Tonight they go to the eating house. She paws at her food, and not even the jovial Turkish owner can tempt her with more. Chaim can sense that something is brewing, that she’s unhappy. He eats her leftovers, picks parsley out of his teeth. She drinks instead and he urges her on, though he’s not sure why. He assumes that he wants to break down her defences, get deep inside. Stop that unblinking beam of hers from shining on his innermost thoughts. It’s not so easy. She lets pearly arak slide down her throat, glass after glass, but never changes into something softer for him to lean against and forget himself.
He’s never heard her mention anything much about her parents. Then again, he’s never asked. He knows she’s an only child but isn’t familiar with the circumstances. She does speak of her Armenian grandmothers. It’s always Lilit said this or Siran did that.
Tonight she shows him some photographs she carries with her: poised old ladies wearing headscarves, a laden pomegranate tree in a slip of garden. And one of her grandmother Lilit as a girl, with an expression he can only classify as terror. It was taken in a place called Der ez Zor, back in 1915 when the Armenians were getting massacred.
Looking at the photograph, he can see the resemblance between grandmother and granddaughter immediately. The effect this has on him doesn’t diminish, looking at it more closely: their twinned faces confuse him as he takes in the solemn woman’s rounded cheeks, restless eyes, rough-cut hair, the blossom mouth, as he looks across at Anoush, who seems anxious now, trying to snatch the photograph away. He hands it back to her without comment. Worlds apart, yet so similar: resigned household slave and defiant granddaughter, traipsing through the city armed with her search for something resembling truth.
Now one grandmother is dead and the other might as well be, here in Beirut in a nursing home. Such orthodox guilt. He can relate to it. He rings his mother – now eighty and still living at home with a new generation of Arab servants – every day. Anoush has told him she sends money now and then to Siran when she can spare it: small change for facial tissues, trinkets, bedsocks, sweets. She makes excuses to him about the old woman not recognising anyone from moment to moment, dribbling and babbling like a child, spraying food everywhere.
‘Let’s go together,’ he offers.
Anoush shakes her head. She shows him another photograph, as if to change the subject. Her grandfather, Minas, and Siran on their wedding day.
‘The only photo ever taken of them both,’ she whispers fondly.
Their faces are broad and stunned, the grandfather looking somewhat doubtful beside the beaming young woman, black curls falling into her brow, across the polished silver coins strung on her forehead.
‘Look at those earrings she wears. Gold and turquoise – his mother’s. He hid them all the way through the forced march in the desert, then in the death camp and to Beirut, before giving them to her. Twenty-five years he kept them. True love.’
She says the last two words in an ironic tone but he can see she’s touched by the fifty-year-old love story.
‘They married late. How old was he?’
She laughs, looks up at him for an instant with a face full of coquetry.
‘Doesn’t matter, does it? You’re not married yet. He was nearly forty. He’d been through a lot.’
‘Like me,’ he laughs.
Her face changes, and she doesn’t join in. ‘What have you been through? Looks like your life has been easy enough, to me.’
‘I was only making a joke.’
‘It’s not funny. Why should you or any other Israeli have anything to complain about?’
‘Whoah! What’s all this about? Were we talking about Israel?’
‘We are now. Surely you can’t still think you’re the victims. With your state-of-the-art weapons and your targeted killings. Who made Israel the great moral arbiter of the world?’
‘Listen, Anoush. I didn’t want to get into this, not now. But I’ll tell you something, and maybe you’ll be smart enough to hear me out. They want to wipe out Israel. Do you get it? They want us all dead. Israel doesn’t want to wipe out anyone. We’re trying to defend ourselves. We’re yoked together with the Palestinians, brother to brother, and can’t see any resolution. And yes, I’m here to make my own amends. I’m not the bad guy, nor is Israel.’
She won’t look at him. As he pays for the meal and they leave the building his frustration is so great he wants to hit her. She’s shut down. He stops, faces her, wills her to look into his eyes.
‘You and I come from the same pain,’ he says. ‘The same struggle. Can’t you see that?’
She doesn’t reply, but halfway home she steps closer, links his fingers in hers. He can feel her body softening against him as they walk. They stop under the blue neon letters spelling Mayflower, and kiss goodnight. The kiss, as always, is not long; he doesn’t linger. She keeps her mouth closed, chaste.
He turns aside and makes his way down the street, whistling for Julius to follow him, wishing she would stop him, drag him into her bed. He wants to get inside her head more than any clear desire for her body, cut through her anger and dreams and unravel all her questions: silent figures of grandmothers and absent fathers, the obscure grandfather that started all this pain. Sometimes Chaim would like to kill her father, or at least annihilate his memory. If he wasn’t already dead. He makes Anoush so distant, half-alive, yet sublime too in her indifference to the present.