Today I can’t get Siran’s voice out of my head. That reedy whine she punctuated with coughs, the melancholy inflection I wonder if my father inherited.
It saddens me that I’ve never heard his voice. Never seen him move, or laugh, or dance. When I think of him he’s always static, caught in a noiseless dream. I would hear Siran nag Minas in that voice, and I hated it. I wanted them to be happy, wanted all of us to be, and had no idea how to do it.
Minas, killed in 1967 by his own rage. Before he died, he spent hours staring at the wall, only jolted out of his reverie by Siran with bowls of warm milk for his stomach. The tumours didn’t kill him, so she said; his guilt and grief did.
‘I’m dying,’ he would scream. ‘I’m dying for all of you.’
I take the bus to the nursing home early, forgoing my cafe breakfast, stomach a tight knot of misery, head teeming with memories, fragments of conversations, disjointed scenes. I’ve picked some jasmine on the way to the bus stop, thinking to give it to Siran. Crooked streets warp then bulge in the strengthening heat, fragile structures creak on wooden poles. The swamp where the Armenian refugee camp once stood continues to bubble beneath.
The nursing home looks smaller, more dingy than I remember. As I pass open doors, catch glimpses of bath-robed, shuffling figures, I remember with a new clarity all those years of secretly listening to Lilit’s mumblings of massacres and deportations, the death of her family and friends.
When I turned to my other grandmother for confirmation or response, Siran merely looked away over the Beirut rooftops then back again at my face.
‘What was it like for you, Grandma? How did it feel?’
Siran laughed, nodding at Lilit. ‘Oh, darling. It was like a bad dream for us, exactly like a dream.’ There wasn’t any weight of blame in her version of events. It was like a moving picture she’d had the misfortune to watch.
Now she sits on an old pink-frilled bath chair with an expression of childish malice. Near her, a plastic bowl containing a sop of bread and milk, food for infants. A fly buzzes, settling on the rim. I start with an involuntary shiver at the sight of her awake, and one of the nuns puts a cautious hand on my arm.
‘It’s the drugs she needs for her diabetes, her sleep, to control her bowels. They give her that look.’
I advance toward her. What can I bring to this brittle wisp of skin and bone? Yellowish hair balding in patches, scrofula reddening her scalp and the back of her neck. Dangling from her ears again, my mother’s earrings. Turquoise and gold, somehow obscene on her soft, drooping lobes. She’s murmuring and rocking, repeating the phrase where is my son, where is my son in rhythmic flutters that don’t stop or waver in intensity. I tuck the jasmine into my blouse. She wouldn’t know what to do with it.
‘She says the same thing over and over all day,’ the nun whispers, solicitous.
I’m aware of smiling stupidly, conscious I have nothing to say, naught to offer.
‘Grandma? I came to see you before but you were asleep.’
I kneel, kiss her upraised palm. Siran flings it away, querulous.
‘Where’s my son, little girl? I was in the shop on the corner buying some bread, stale bread for soup, and he skipped past in his uniform so long ago. He’d gone to be a soldier, he was holding a dead baby in his arms and it was screaming – but where is he now?’
Her new, loud voice and the nonsense she shouts shocks me.
‘I don’t know where he is, Grandma. I thought you might tell me.’
The nun makes a discreet gesture, mutters something about bringing some glasses of tea back, takes the bowl of uneaten food and closes the door behind her. I get up from the floor, sit opposite Siran in another chair. She seems to be half-asleep now, her anger subsided, slippered feet tapping in a soft rhythm on the linoleum floor. Flecks of green and cream, the bottles of pills arranged in a row on the dresser, the narrow, girlish bed with its corners tucked in. There are no ornaments from home, no photographs, no icons. A life wiped out. The cheap chipboard furniture, the threadbare woven blankets, stains on the floor of—blood, urine, faeces? I’m letting my grandmother die here? The blank pale-blue walls, the grimy windowsill, the trapped fly that bangs itself against the pane and then alights on Siran’s lap, twitching. Siran might as well be dead.
I open the window, flick the fly away. Leaning out, I take deep breaths of fresh air cooled by arcing sprinklers on the lawn.
I sit down again. Decide to leave but don’t stir. The nurse might come back with the tea. But there’s nothing I can do here. Yet I feel a drag of responsibility for the wall-eyed, mumbling woman beside me.
Siran is talking in her sleep about the saucepan lid that was dented and needed to be fixed and the dress he bought her one Easter that fell to her hips. She was so thin nothing fitted her anymore. I assume she’s referring to Minas. I listen and sit and wait, wondering when I’ll have the courage to get up and go, hearing the rattle in her throat as she snores, watching a thin trail of spittle form on her chin.
Finding a tissue on a side table, I dab at it without any force, afraid to wake her. As I wipe nausea rises to the roof of my mouth. I try not to gag, making a small noise at the back of my throat. This seems to rouse her.
‘What do you want here, little girl? The men have already come and killed our fathers and the rug from Persia needs cleaning with expensive soap. I told her I could do the washing better than her and she went ahead and did it, then I had to do it all over again.’
‘I’m here to see you, Grandma. It’s Anoush.’
The old woman is silent now, face averted to the window. I have the urge to chatter and gossip, fill such obscene quiet with meaningless words. I lean forward and put a gentle hand on her arm.
‘Are you comfortable, Grandma? Can I get you anything – a glass of water, maybe? A biscuit? The nuns have been so nice and hospitable. You know, it’s so lovely here in Beirut, I’d almost forgotten how perfect the city can be in summer. Grandma, I’ve met someone in the last few weeks – he’s so kind, I think you’d approve. He’s a little older than me but it doesn’t seem to matter when we’re together. After all, you always used to say—’
Siran nods then, suddenly knowing. She leans forward and spits out her words.
‘You made my son run away, little girl. It was you who did it.’
I want to protest: I was just a baby when he left us. A newborn. Instead, I wait for her to continue.
‘He would have stayed if it hadn’t been for the scheming of that Lilit and her brother, God curse him. My own husband conspiring against me, little boy and girl, throats cut, thrown in the river. Tell me, did that lamb have to be so charred? My dead beloved silly boy. And your mother Anahit, my girl, all roses and cream, but tarred with a Turkish brush. Curse them all. Especially Minas. Gave me a hard life. All those soiled sheets, what to do? Soak them and boil them and put them in the sun to dry. Hanging like dead men. Get rid of that other woman’s smells. A pimpled girl, dead now. He dreamed about her, spoke of her in his sleep. A husband needs loyalty to his wife, not his sister. And not to some nightmare girl from the desert. Even the Bible says it. A man shall leave his father and mother and cleave unto his wife. Not that Lilit was truly Christian anymore, what with all that time spent in an ungodly country. Dirty spoons, they fell on the ground. Lick them quickly.’
‘What did Lilit and Minas do?’
She’s stopped now, going over her words again, muttering, repeating her phrase from the Bible. She lapses again into the wail for her son and I come forward, without knowing what I’m going to do, and take her by the hands.
‘Tell me what happened, Grandma.’
Siran shuts her red-rimmed eyes, obstinate. ‘Where is my son, where is my son?’ she whispers and shouts, fading and then growing in fervour. I shake her, gripping both shoulders. I shake her again, shake her some more.
‘Tell me, Grandma! I have a right to know.’
She’s blank-faced, lolling in my arms. She should be dead, she deserves to be dead, she’s limp now, useless. I can’t stop shaking her, she’s complicit, her neck so easy to snap, my wrists burning with a rage that’s almost sexual. Suddenly I see the livid eyes and the fear in her mouth and release her, going back to my chair, exhausted by my own violence.
‘I’m sorry, Grandma. Forgive me.’
She hangs her head, unmoving. I kneel again at her feet, kiss the mottled hand. She looks up.
‘Go now, child. Go, Anoush. What a silly name they chose.’ Her voice so lucid now it seems to belong to somebody else.
‘But—Grandma. I didn’t mean to hurt you.’
She unclasps my mother’s earrings in a swift, irritated movement, shoves them at me. Her pink lobes ravaged now, as if she’s taken a knife to them. I look at the gold and turquoise lump in her hands, still warm from her pulse.
‘But Grandma, Minas gave them to you so long ago—’
‘Yes, child. So long ago. Then I gave them to your mother—before she died. Time for you to have them now. Go quickly. You’re late for school.’
She hangs her head and waves me away.
I leave the nursing home with blurred vision, walking through the narrow intimacy of streets, not knowing where to go next. I stow the earrings away in my daypack, shuddering at the thought of ever wearing them. Siran, reduced to a dry husk, an insect’s carapace, an absence of broken memories. And what did I do for her? Nothing. No compassion, no pity. Instead, I tried to force the truth out of her. A truth I already knew. Lilit conspired with Anahit to get her pregnant, so she could marry Selim. My birth was the result of two women, their whispered secrets and lies. Immaculate.
In a moment I have an intense desire to look for my childhood house. I keep walking, my feet hurt in their high sandals; I rub at my red eyes with my fists, ashamed to appear so weak to passers-by, who ignore me and continue on their way. Not sure where I am, the streets have changed, been made wider, more accessible, new apartment blocks everywhere now, casting their long shadows in the early morning sun.
I give up too soon on the house, search for my grandfather’s jewellery shop. There it is, gilt letters underneath new Armenian script. Minas Pakradounian – Jeweller Extraordinaire. It’s shut, opens at ten. I stay at the window, dazzled by row upon row of identical gold wedding bands. No more silver and carnelian bracelets, inlaid mother-of-pearl rings. No traces of Armenia. Only the same gold jewellery found everywhere in the city.
I drift through the quarter’s busy thoroughfares, stopping to read the street signs at every corner. Ani. Erzerum. Van. I can’t find Urfa Street but don’t want to ask. Some of the old neighbours may remember me and I’m in no mood to talk, to explain why I’m here. I can’t help but think of the Armenian houses burnt down in Van, just like these: timbered, graceful, with wide carved balconies and sloping roofs. Mulberry trees, charred, with stunted, bitter fruit. Clogs the colour of fire, worn by a young girl going to church.
I sit on a bench in Municipality Square, watching the same meagre plane trees shed the same thin-pointed leaves I monitored each year when I was a little girl. Lilit would bring me here in the autumn when the leaves glistened. I must have been very small, before I started school, because Lilit could walk and didn’t even need a stick. I held her hand and we played wild, screaming games with the drifts of leaves, which slowly blackened as the day wore on, catching them then kicking at the street sweeper’s piles to make them dance in the air.
Once, sitting on this very bench, between Lilit and Minas, I heard them talk. I would have been about three. They were in one of their sad, quiet moods, and I’d wanted to get up and play but was clutching a huge sugared doughnut and Lilit wouldn’t let me eat and run at the same time. So I sat, licking wet sugar from my fingers, and they talked on, half in Armenian and half Arabic, while I was alternately shocked and bored. They spoke of my dead mother, my father who was gone. Something they called a ‘shotgun wedding’. And Lilit saying the jewellery shop belonged to me, without a doubt. They blamed Selim, Selim all the time. Until Minas stood up finally, the sky a lurid orange behind him.
‘Whatever he is, whatever he’s become – I want to find my son again before I die. I can’t bear not knowing where he is each night.’
‘Please, Minas. He knows where we are, he sends money – don’t you think, if he cared for you, wouldn’t he come?’
I watched Minas crumple into Lilit’s arms. I could see he was trying to hold back his tears, but they came in retching gulps. Lilit looked over his shoulder at me and pressed her lips together as if she didn’t know what to do. Something in the twitch of her mouth made me think she wasn’t as upset as she should have been about her brother crying, that something in her was happy about it.
The wind picks up now and fallen leaves flurry around my feet. In the middle of the square is a children’s playground, all rusting slides and swings that look too dangerous to play on. A broken fountain. No children. One yellow and red plastic slippery slide, banked up with the sodden leaves. A rocking horse balancing crazily on its bouncing coil, half-uprooted from the ground. There was none of this when I was growing up. I get up now, brush leaves off my shoulders and skirt, walk to the main road. I press some liras into a bus driver’s hand, don’t tell him any destination. Anywhere. Away from here.
I get off the bus at a corner that looks familiar. Walk as if I know where I’m going. Don’t hesitate. I set off at a brisk pace, taking care to keep to the side of the road, away from shacks and ramshackle buildings, open doorways revealing sharp-bearded men and squalling babies, young women squatting over paraffin stoves, the smell of raw meat and unleavened bread. I squelch through mud and refuse, but keep to the verge. An unshaven man offers me a cigarette and a leer and I avert my eyes.
Soon I find myself in the vicinity of the Sabra-Shatila camps. A little boy of about twelve runs down the incline to the street when he sees me. He stops, awkward, one hand clutching a jagged stone.
‘Mademoiselle?’
I look around; we’re alone. How did he know I’m a foreigner? I think he may throw the stone at me. The zip on his trousers is undone or broken, I can’t tell. He comes toward me and begins his patter in a servile voice I know he’s used on others countless times before.
‘Mademoiselle,’ he says. ‘Mademoiselle, can you spare a coin for a poor Palestinian?’
I fumble in my daypack, careful not to open it too wide.
‘Wait a bit, not sure I have any coins.’
‘Notes are good.’
He comes closer. I notice my hands are trembling. I know he can see this, wonder what he thinks of me, whether he despises me for my fear, my suspicion or merely my perceived Western wealth.
‘American dollars are better.’
‘I’m not American.’
‘I can see that. You speak Arabic too well. But you’re not one of us either.’
I fold some lira notes into his open palm and surprise myself with the vehemence of my words.
‘Now leave me alone.’
‘It’s all right,’ he whispers. ‘I won’t hurt you.’
I walk away, sense him watching my gait all the way down the potholed, empty street. I walk faster, forcing my legs to obey, afraid that at any moment they’ll buckle and let me down. Now I’m shaking all over, with fear, disgust, another shame that’s harder to define.
I don’t mean to come to Chaim’s apartment. My feet lead me here; I’m upset over Siran and the Palestinian boy, and not thinking straight, and now I’m hot and exasperated from walking so far, sweat soaking my lower back, making stains on my blouse. I need to sit down for a minute and Chaim’s apartment is on the way to my hotel. I only want a glass of water. I only want to wash my hands. I want to sit in his living room and look at him, simply look at him.
I press the bell and try to scrutinise my face in the glass doors leading to the building’s foyer. I can’t see a thing and lean closer, rearranging my irritation into something like serenity. Chaim’s voice cuts through.
‘Yes?’
‘It’s me, Chaim. It’s A—’
‘I know it’s you. Come up.’
He buzzes me in. I sit for a while in the marble dampness of the atrium, on the imitation Regency chair for visitors. I can hear Julius in the courtyard playing with children from the ground-floor apartment, can’t imagine what these Muslim mothers with their cultural disgust for dogs think of him; he has a tendency to drool and bark at the slightest provocation, yet he’s gentle and calm even with their toddlers, who slap at him and pull his ears. I know Chaim is upstairs waiting for me, know also that I need this brief, silent time alone to sit, cool down, examine why I’m here.
I trudge up the shallow stairs, feeling his gaze burn the top of my head as he waits at the open door. With the light of the midday sun behind him, he’s transfigured, an angel of mixed tidings.
When I reach the landing he’s vanished into the apartment. I want to hold him, rest my tired head on his chest. Let him comfort me, as my father never did, never will. I tiptoe onto the bare boards, careful not to make any noise. I want to call out to him, run through his rooms, but to do this would break the fragile, spinning game he’s initiated. Instead I let my laptop bag fall onto the sofa with a graceful thump, peer into the kitchen and bathroom, discarding my sandals as I go. My heart’s flailing in my chest, a painful rhythm I attempt to control by breathing out slowly, then in.
When I reach the balcony I lean over the railing, hoping he’ll steal behind me, push his face into my nape, end this stupid vanishing trick. I breathe, counting the length of my inhalations. Nothing. As I move inside again I’m struck by the quality of light over Beirut: the heavy silvering pall that heralds a storm. The sea is flat, a blank page waiting to be inscribed.
I open the bedroom door.
‘Here,’ Chaim says.
He’s standing in front of the bank of windows, his body an indistinct shape against the glare. I can’t see if he’s smiling or solemn, or how I’m supposed to respond to the flat sobriety of his voice. He lets me wait, turning away to draw closed the dark floor-length curtains. His bedroom shrouded now, the brilliance of the sea neutered. Far away on the horizon the low growl of thunder.
‘Kiss me, Chaim?’
He does so, hesitantly, afraid of my resolve. I shiver at the sensation of his moist lips on the dryness of mine, catch the specific, genetic smell of his mouth, his tongue, the recesses of his throat and stomach: too intimate. A phrase from the Armenian liturgy plays through my head. This kiss is given for a bond of fullness. The enmity hath been removed. And love is spread over us all.
Sacrilege. Blasphemy. Shouldn’t I be with an Armenian man, erasing our combined past with this simple act? I turn my head away, walking to the tall, pointed windows. When I open the curtains an inch a line of light splits his body in half. Divided man. A brief fizz of lightning and his face and hands are white. Scent of gardenias from the balcony, semen-sour. I go back and kiss him again, blinding myself to the particularities, frenzied, biting, wanting to peel back the skin of age and gender and culture. He grabs my hands, holds them to his cheeks.
‘Anoush. Can you tell me what you’re doing?’
I kneel and bury my face in his thighs. He puts his big hands on my shoulders, murmurs under his breath.
‘Please tell me what you need. Surely not this.’
I stand and put my fingers on his eyes, his mouth, closing them. He sighs, enfolds me.
‘Okay. But think about what you’re doing.’
He begins to undress me, button by button, as if he’s never done this before. But I’m impatient again; stepping out of my skirt, pausing as it rests at my feet, a perfect circle. He sits on the bed and I can now see the top of his head, hair slightly thinning, the small, vulnerable circle of his skull. Is this how my father looked down upon those women? Is this who he was in private, how he played the sexual game? This is no game. I unpeel my bra, proud yet half-ashamed of my youthful breasts. His arm goes around me, pulling me close. As soon as I’ve slid out of my underpants I’m suddenly unsure. Angry. At him, at myself. He’s not of my tribe, my flesh. His hands on my breasts are square, wrinkled, wiry hairs all the way down to his fingertips; surely I should have noticed before? My father had pale hands, smooth as a pianist’s. Siran told me.
I turn my head sharply, push him away. ‘Always get what you want, do you?’
He whispers, hurt. ‘Isn’t this what you wanted?’
‘Why are you even here, Chaim?’ I cover my breasts with my hands, flop to the floor. I’m aware of the smell of my sweaty armpits in the close, dark room. ‘Why don’t you go back to Israel?’
‘Why do you keep taking it out on me?’
He’s crumpling now, still in his trousers.
‘What was it like doing your military service, bulldozing houses and bombing civilians?’
‘What are you talking about? I didn’t do any of those things. I tried to help. If you really want to know, suicide bombers tried to blow up our checkpoint twice. Once, they succeeded. I was nearly killed. That’s when I decided to leave.’
I stand, looking for my blouse.
‘You with your Free Palestine fucking T-shirts. What a hypocrite you are. Why didn’t you stay behind and do something?’
‘It was traumatic. It had nothing to do with me at that point, it was like, like a—it was just like a film in slow motion.’
‘Don’t be so naive. You’re just like my grandmother in the nursing home. Only a dream, my dear, only a dream. Of course you’re part of it. Part of the occupation. You bastards have been here for nearly twenty years, let alone in Palestine.’
‘It’s nothing to do with me.’
‘Oh, really! What about your brother? Don’t you worry, I’ve been doing my research.’
‘And what did you find?’
‘Your big brother was a fighter pilot during the war. He helped bomb Beirut.’
‘My brother is not me, Anoush. And you know what – if it wasn’t for people like my brother, and my father, there would be no Israel. There would be no me.’ He spreads his arms out, savagely. ‘There would be no Chaim for you to kick around.’
I catch a sob in my throat.
‘Oh, Chaim. I never meant to—’
‘Listen,’ he says. ‘Listen to me just for once, and get your victim crap out of the way. My people were almost annihilated, right? Just like yours. Genocide. We’ve all suffered, agree?’
I nod, ashamed.
‘And,’ he continues, ‘my family have nowhere else to go. We’re not occupiers, we’re refugees. Do you understand that?’
‘But your family didn’t have a right to go and take over someone else’s land. There were people living on it, before you.’
‘According to many sources, the Jews were there first. Thousands of years ago. How can you say whether the Turks or Armenians were in your country first? If we go down that line, nobody would have the balls to settle anywhere. We all have a right to a home. A right to defend ourselves. And we all have a right to feel safe.’
‘And you feel safe – here? I find that hard to believe.’
‘I’m making a sacrifice to be here. And I didn’t choose to be born there. I’m not going back.’
I stand up now, move closer to him, arms folded across my nudity. My anger deflated, voice grown weary. I have a headache that makes me close my eyes.
‘Please come here,’ I say, with my eyes still shut. ‘Please come to me.’
He comes. I unfold my arms and let them fall to my sides.
‘Kiss me and tell me I’m an idiot.’
He kisses the top of my head.
‘Anoush,’ he says. ‘You’re an idiot.’
Later that afternoon we lie together on the bed. He’s opened the curtains again, and the floor-to-ceiling windows seem not made of glass but water. We sprawl side by side on our backs, touching only at the curve of the hip. Like this, we reflect sea, ceiling, sky. The sun hits our bodies now in planes of blue shadow and quivering light. My head on the pillow a mirror, indistinguishable from his.
I walk back to the Mayflower, grateful to breathe in the cool dusk air. For almost a month now, I’ve felt inviolate, contained in my own private world of the past. After sex with Chaim I’m now permeable, my hard edges blurry, bleeding into the landscape and its people.
Do I resent this? What I feel is probably closer to panic. I linger at the sea wall, gazing down at murky waves splashing, receding, breaking again. A few beggars – young boys with downy upper lips – jostle me as if on purpose, pluck at my sleeve. I elbow them back, suddenly fierce.
Chaim was rough, insistent after his initial hesitancy. It was as though he were claiming me, touch by touch, with his hands. Or maybe punishing me for the mockery I’d indulged in only a moment before. I was aware of a sense of shock as well as arousal. I’m no prude. Yet he put half his thick, square hand right inside me, burrowing, as if seeking something I haven’t yet revealed. His expression heated, questioning.
‘Stop,’ I said. ‘You’re hurting me.’
He kept going until I took his wrist in my grip and wrenched it away. I hadn’t thought of him as that kind of man before, yet, there he was, driving into me with all the will and force he possessed. In my afternoon fantasies at the Mayflower he’d always been liquid, bodiless, resting between my legs, effortless as air. Yet in his bedroom he positioned me exactly the way he wanted, spread-eagled with my calves up around my ears. He growled at me to move sideways, arch my back, take him in deeper – no, not that way; like this – to grasp the sides of the mattress with my hands.
My inner thighs ache now. My vagina feels alien: wet, pulsating, bruised with my own ambivalence. I begin walking, taking an almost pleasurable pride in the dull grind of muscle. He wanted me to stay. I sprang from the bed as soon as the sun went down, splashed myself in the ensuite with cold water, one leg high on the sink. All over my belly and chest, his stray hairs were glued to me with our combined sweat. I wet my head, dousing my hair under the tap. In water, the crushed jasmine I wore in my blouse smelled of cigarette smoke, acid and sweet at the same time. He sat up, watching me through the open door.
‘You all right?’
‘Mmm.’
I answered without giving him anything to go on, came back into the bedroom, and with my face averted pulled on my clothes. The yellow stains under the arms of my blouse, the limpness of the fabric, made the whole room and what had transpired feel suddenly sordid and wrong.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Back to the hotel. It’s getting late.’
‘Why not stay here tonight?’
I stood, poised at the bedroom door with one arm out of my sleeve, looked at him and smiled. It was a smile that closed the door on him. I’m not sure even now why I didn’t want to stay; I wanted to feel him near me again – I even wanted to have sex with him again – but my more urgent need was to be alone. It was something to do with a tardy modesty, a feeling of being profoundly alien to each other, even a lack of love. Beneath it all, a strange disappointment. What was I expecting? My father intact, as in my dreams?
I walk faster now, stepping out onto the middle of the road. Taxi drivers slow down and ingratiate themselves. I had a hard time persuading Chaim not to walk me back to the hotel. He kissed my hands, my forehead, looked on the verge of tears. Yet I was adamant, possessed of an unformed desire to be rid of him straight away. As if I’d betrayed some vast contract with myself by letting him so soon into my life, my body. I walk and three selves come with me. Far too many for Chaim to tag along as well. Armenian, Turkish, American: split into a secular trinity. Which was he making love to? Which one did I surrender up to him, with my own naive ideals? I accused him of naivety when I’m surely worse. He showed me how much we share: family pain and historical guilt, that burden we both carry every single day. And now I feel ashamed. Which Anoush am I now, striding through the odorous dusk, gratified against all my better instincts by the warm flush of pain spreading from my inner thighs?
I stop at the last corner before the Mayflower, look behind me, banishing the ghostly figures that trail in my wake. Three women, or maybe more: Lilit, Siran and the Lebanese woman my father once loved. Or had he? Hadn’t Lilit said he died for her? A secular Muslim, if there can be any such thing. A woman of simple desires, for children and home and security. Am I imagining this conversation? More likely a woman of bold passions, who remained unsatisfied by the bloodless couplings of a Christian militiaman.
And what of Anahit? My own mother, often overlooked. Did anyone love her? And were there any more women? Any dalliances, any dead girl-children? Victims, perpetrators. D’Andrea and his butting, thrusting, middle-aged man’s desire. That moment on the phone when I felt a piercing sadness for him. When I pitied him enough to forgive. How to take up my own steps in this shuffling, complicated dance? I pat my hair down close to my scalp, settle the seams of my skirt in a straight line from waist to knee. This mundane gesture resolves something, if only to integrate these capricious and warring selves.