BEIRUT & DER EZ ZOR,
1925–1946

Beirut changed for Minas as he grew older. At times he wasn’t aware of it, yet at other times, especially at night, he felt the silent, quick lurch in his belly. He couldn’t call it anything else but excitement. Here he was, finally, in this city full of promise. It was 1925, and he had been here ten years already. In that time, Beirut had become a blessed icon of the Virgin mother carried through his every moment, waking or sleeping. She was like no other, this mother. She bled and soothed, beat and caressed, kissed and spat. She taught Minas to win and lose, to make a pyrrhic victory and never count the cost.

There were more wars, always wars in Lebanon. Now the Great War had finally ended, now the French controlled most of the Levant and the Ottomans had been scuttled away, war still seemed the only mode in which these big men could talk to each other. Yet he almost liked it that way: war made it clear to him whose side he was on. The French were strong leaders, rebuilding the ravaged city with wide boulevards and official buildings, raising a tricolour flag. They were clear who the enemy was: Muslims. Minas cultivated a grainy image of the enemy in his mind: foreign eyes and screaming mouth – a dimmed mirror in which he didn’t once see himself.

Yes, he liked the idea of war. Killing the enemy was as good as any revenge. Small skirmishes in the mountains, frantic assaults on the higher slopes. Hand-to-hand combat in the slime of city streets.

He finished his breakfast, swallowing the last dregs of powdered milk. He liked the sweetish grittiness it left between his teeth. He wiped his tin mug out with his shirtsleeve and placed it on the shelf above his bunk bed, coughing with the sudden movement. He was older now, well past his teens, with a chest complaint that wouldn’t go away. Was it from the damp of those long-ago caves, or the subhuman conditions in Der ez Zor? No matter. That was all in the past. So many years ago now. Ten years already, and it seemed a lifetime. He’d grown used to the cough, hardly noticed it anymore. He’d grown used to news of war. He fiddled with the dial – a radio he inherited from a dead fellow refugee – and put his ear to the fine mesh of the speaker.

He had also grown used to the Red Cross camp. Another camp, he thought. It seemed now as if he had known no other life, these barbedwire fences, to keep enemies out now instead of inmates in, this icy sleeping block and that radio.

In all the years he’d spent in Lebanon, not once had he attempted to go back to Van, see if the old house was still standing, find Lilit. He justified it to himself when he nestled on the bunk for his afternoon nap, told himself he needed the rest, still weakened by his ordeal, still traumatised. He had no passport, anyway, only identity papers issued by the government, couldn’t leave Lebanon because they’d never have him back, the house probably burnt down, Lilit no doubt dead in the desert, dishonoured and buried in an unmarked grave.

He hadn’t received any money these ten years. Not once had a roll of cash in his pocket, to peel off for drinks and playing cards, women’s trinkets to buy some respite from loneliness. He’d never worked for money, in fact, except for his childhood forays selling crickets to schoolmates in those faraway Van summers, trading stolen eggs. He’d worked hard, but it had all been for the Lebanese and American and French governments. The League of Nations, the Red Cross. He’d been given meagre rations and health care and clothes, shuffled with all the other men in the camp from bed to table to bath, one day indistinguishable from the next. He laughed and mocked himself in the long nights spent lying awake, listening to other men’s whimpers and nightmares and snores. If I thought I was an old man then, I must be dead by now.

He scratched his head, wheezed in the cold spring air and settled his ear more firmly to the radio. In all the fighting, there was always one constant. Muslim against Christian. Whether it was heretic Druze against Maronite Catholic, Shia Muslim against Eastern Orthodox, Sunni Muslim against the French liberators, it was always the age-old dichotomy. Them and us. He liked it that way.

He wanted to side with the Christians in their assault upon Islam. The Allies didn’t make good on their promises of restitution for the Armenians during the Great War, so he wished to do it for them. He thought of their empty speeches as he got up each morning in the dawn light, walking with other refugees to the communal bathrooms to wash in cold water and then back to their huts to eat.

The other men all knew he was militant, prone to spouting the same daily rhetoric and pouring scorn on England and France. They listened to him, cautiously respectful, even though he was much younger than them. He held the floor every morning at breakfast, as they all sat on their carefully made beds eating, legs dangling in the damp air. He drew his bare feet up under his thighs and mocked, through mouthfuls of dry semolina.

‘Ha! Those so-called Great Powers in 1915. The Allied governments will hold all members of the Turkish government personally responsible. Ha! Lloyd George again in the same year. We guarantee the redemption of the Armenian valleys forever from the bloody misrule with which they have been stained.’

They had done nothing. There was no international tribunal, no compensation, not even a symbolic gesture from the new Turkish government.

‘I’ve had enough,’ he would say to his fellow refugees in finale. ‘Enough of them and their empty lies.’

One wag decided to challenge him.

‘Well, what are you going to do about it?’

Minas wasn’t exactly sure.

He switched on the radio again when the other men had gone outside. There was work to do in the camp: seedlings to plant, huts to build, hospitals to clean. The compound was already beginning to look a little like a prosperous suburb, an Armenian quarter that would continue to flourish. Armenian women from camps as far away as Aleppo and Iraq had begun to enter and stay, training as nurses and teachers, clicking past Minas on high-buckled boots, swaying in tight white uniforms. Some were marked by indigo tattoos on their wrists and ankles, signifying their incarceration and escape from a Turkish harem. He’d seen them scrubbing at the designs with lemon juice and vinegar to lighten the load of shame. Others – the unmarked – were marrying his friends in quick civil ceremonies, as there were no Armenian priests yet in Lebanon. Orthodox clergy had been the first to be killed by the Turks. There was even talk of the Lebanese government giving this land to the Armenians sometime in the future, so that permanent dwellings could be built and taxes paid.

Minas was absolved from most physical duties, as the other men deferred to his intelligence, his superior reading and writing skills. He also helped most days in the kitchens, doing what he could with tinned and packaged goods from aid agencies. It was difficult to make do with what little they were sent, yet they still fared better than the locals. So many Arabs had starved in the last few years during the Allied blockade, while many Armenians had survived.

The men swore Minas’s bread was the best they had ever tasted, even if it was made with third-rate flour. Though there were always some who spat it out, claiming it was not salty enough, or too dry; they still clung to the memory of their mother’s baking as if it held the secret to their future. Many of them were farmers, peasants, survivors from mountain villages that hadn’t been entirely razed by the Turks. Most of them couldn’t even sign their own names. Minas was one of the few who could write to government agencies to search for missing relatives, to Turkish banks in order to try to recover stolen funds, to fill in forms and decipher statements.

Often when he was sitting, bent over, writing someone’s letter or reading a land contract, part of him was transported back to the little boy at the windowsill in Van with his pile of books. He could feel the excitement coming from that little boy in sickening waves through his body. Then he would stop and look up beyond the window, beyond the sleeping block, beyond the fences, wondering yet again and with more honesty why he never tried to find his own sister, as he had attempted to do for so many other refugees. Something held him back, a dread of finding out the truth like a tremor of physical pain.

He didn’t hear the voice in his head as often anymore; perhaps it wasn’t needed. He had enough to survive here without voices. He had ample food, friendship, even novels sometimes. The aid workers were kind enough to lend him their own books in French and Arabic, even English. He didn’t like that language as much, perhaps because he wasn’t as proficient in it. He wasn’t exactly happy, but there was time enough in the future for that. For now it was something akin to revenge he sought. At times he was tempted to bring forth the voice with strong drink or prayer, beseech it for news of Lilit, or for advice concerning his life’s path, but he pushed away the desire.

He still had his mother’s earrings, hoarded in a pouch sewn into his pillow to wait for the day he could sell them and use the money. Sacred money, to put towards a deposit on some land, or open a jewellery shop that would cater for the demands of Armenian weddings and christenings. Traditional ornaments: lockets and crucifixes and Virgins on fine chains, beatific smiles on beaten gold. Tangible memories of home. A late legacy of Papa, so he would not have been killed in vain.

He hadn’t held the pliant tongs, the hammer, for years now, since Papa had leaned over him in the tiny Van workshop guiding his hands, seducing still more heat from the forge. Minas would fan the guttering fire, murmuring to it in a childish whisper, wanting it to obey him in just the same way it did his father. Now he wondered if his cold fingers would remember what to do. Blazing metal. The hint of transformation on his clothes. Would a woman grow used to that, or would she be disgusted by his daily filth? He hoped to marry an Armenian, have many children to replace the countless ones that died. Of the girl in the death camp he never allowed himself to think.

The radio presenter’s drone cut through his musings. He put his ear closer to the speaker and frowned. Muslim Druze in the Chouf Mountains had revolted against the French mandate. They didn’t want Christians ruling them, accustomed as they were to the supremacy of their chieftains and the strength of a community based on intermarriage. They were barricading their villages, had already begun firing, a precarious balance of power threatening to shift. Minas straightened his collar and spat in his palm to smooth the hair off his forehead. We’ ll be overrun by those barbarians if we don’t stop them now. He switched off the radio, strode outside into the morning air, coughing slightly into his sleeve. He didn’t need a disembodied voice to tell him what to do anymore.

Maronite militiamen came into the Red Cross camp that afternoon, rounding up support against the Druze. French officers stood behind them, nodding and making clear exactly whose money and weapons were involved. The militiamen appealed to the Armenian refugees as fellow Christians, repositories of Western civilisation, keepers of the faith.

‘We don’t see you as strangers any longer,’ they yelled in French through their megaphones. ‘We embrace you now as our own! Christian and Lebanese.’

They promised spanking new uniforms and immediate rank for those who volunteered.

Minas was one of the first.

He heard his commanders barking at their inferiors in badly accented French. He made a point of learning all the new, unfamiliar phrases, practising blasphemy at night in his tent as if mouthing a rosary of supplication.

‘Kill them all,’ he heard his superiors say. ‘Women and children. Violate them.’

There was to be no mercy for a fellow Arab. And the French were there to protect the custodians of their colonial heritage, so they turned a blind eye to any atrocity committed in their name. ‘After all,’ he heard the militiamen say to each other in the long nights spent sleeping in mud and goat’s turds on the mountains, ‘we are not Arab. We are Phoenician. Our civilisation is different to theirs: our backs to the desert, our faces to the sea.’

The Christian Lebanese had always been in danger, a minority in an Islamic region like the Armenians before them. Catholic Maronites looking to Rome for the concerns of the spirit, and Paris for the flesh. A wealthy mountain-stronghold of monks and militiamen in the north of the country, under siege for hundreds of years. It was their turn now, to rule Lebanon as they were always meant to. And Minas would help them.

He slept within hearing distance of the others, but kept apart from the discussions. He was still only a refugee, even after his ten years in Lebanon. Who knew when they’d turn on him as well? He said his prayers and crossed himself three times in the mornings, alert, conspicuous, washing his hands with care before he ate so they should see him and take note.

He didn’t let himself think of the Bedouin who helped him escape from Der ez Zor. That was a long time ago, and he had only been a boy. He simply loaded his rifle, aimed and fired. Fired at whoever he was told was the enemy. See her? Fire. Him? Fire. He went out on all the most distasteful excursions, the fuzzy, grey-area jobs nobody else had the stupidity or the spleen to do.

Today he was in a Druze village in the Chouf Mountains and it was colder than he’d ever known. He hit a chicken coop, the squawks of hens and shit-streaked feathers flying into his face. He flapped one arm about him wildly to disperse them. A woman ran away from him: Another hen, only bigger, he thought. He had to laugh, which brought on a coughing fit. If I don’t laugh, I’ ll only cry. And then what good will I be?

She panicked, ran ever closer to him in a frantic effort to escape. Realising her mistake, at the last moment she turned away. Black scarf slapping at her neck. He aimed between her shoulderblades, felt the thud-thud of metal on his collarbone as he stumbled after her. She collapsed among the chickens as he leapt past, his boots avoiding her face, contorted in a last soundless curse.

He fired to the right and left, covering his advance. Behind him he could no longer hear or sense the rest of his unit. Something in him now was afraid. Should he hide until they found him again? He kept running. Quiet village, empty streets. A few corpses lounged in open doorways: all women, it seemed. The men were fighting higher up on the peaks. Fearless warriors, unafraid to die in battle, for tomorrow they would be reborn and suckling at yet another mother’s breasts. Reincarnation, that fixed magic number of Druze souls already in existence. Heretics. If the same people would keep dying and being reborn, well, he’d just have to keep killing them again and again.

The women’s faces were stretched beyond recognition. He avoided the black holes of their eyes. He looked around swiftly: nothing. The other militiamen liked to shoot them first and then bayonet them to make sure they were dead. Minas couldn’t do that. He shot first and then ran.

He slid on discarded fruit, burst tomatoes. An overturned cart. The dead women watched him, unimpressed. They’re not the same as us. He tried to look away from the accusation slashed across their faces, in their blown-up limbs. The women continued to stare sightlessly, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. A solitary shot rang out, ricocheting against a building. He flung himself to the ground, propelling his body by the elbows out of range and vision. Snipers, hidden in those seemingly abandoned houses, guarded by their dead. It wasn’t until he crawled behind the cart, heart pounding painfully through his breath, that he realised he’d been wounded. He rolled onto his side, wincing. There, the dark, wet stain seeping through his trousers. The stink of squashed cucumbers everywhere.

Oh, Jesus. He ripped apart one of his shirtsleeves, made an inadequate bandage for his calf. Oh, Jesus. A child walked out on the road in front of him, holding an old brown dress fast to her mouth. Her dead mother’s? Oh, my Jesus. The spread of her saliva widened on the rough fabric. He stared at her through his rifle sight as she came toward his hiding place. Is she two? Three? She was crying, sucking at the dress like a teat. He knew if he let her she would scream and betray him to the snipers.

He peeked out from behind the cart, beckoned the little girl to him with a crook of his finger. He smiled in what he hoped was a fatherly fashion and nodded many times. He fumbled in his chest pocket, still with the fixed grin on his face, found a half-eaten mess of dried figs wrapped in paper. The little girl inched closer, cautious. Her mouth still working at the dress, frantic sucking. She put out her hand for the food. He gave it to her and watched as she tried to unwrap it without letting go her grip on the dress. He lowered the barrel of his gun. Am I really doing this? Her fair head swam then focused into vision. Murderer. He swung the gun at her head once, twice, then closed his eyes.

Time passed in long, slow doses. Minutes, seconds, heartbeats, a fly crawling on the bedhead. Lilit stretched her neck back and watched it progress, millimetre by millimetre, until it reached the highest point, where her evil eye dangled from a plaited ribbon. She studied the fine, iridescent wings and intent, magnified eyes, twins to her beaded talisman. Her sleepy cat, a fourth-generation successor to the ginger beauty she befriended when she first arrived, made to claw at the buzzing insect. Lilit restrained her. When the fly reached the pillow, she slapped it away herself. Minutes passed as she turned her head to watch it die. Many minutes, as she lay in her canopied bed and waited for the servant girl to bring sour yoghurt in a tall glass, as she counted the minutes before another day would begin.

Minutes then hours. Hours of careful washing and folding she couldn’t trust the servants to do, putting festival clothes away for winter, taking pleasure in layers of smooth linen and seamed silk. Seasons turned. Wearing those robes again, fragrant folds on bare skin, greeting unveiled female guests for amber tea and ices in her inner quarters. Whitewashing summer garden walls, a team of local men with their paintbrushes and folk songs. She bent down with a tray of drinks for them, looked up: there, the shadows of fruit trees, window grilles, a spasm of memory. Somewhere far away, where another white wall danced in sunlight. No time for that now. There was always baking to do, weaving, slow bathing of tired limbs. Another baby, soapy with vernix, plaster-new.

Only a girl this time, yet Suleiman was pleased. He named her Ayse, after his dead mother. Both he and Lilit loved the baby with a trepidation born of tenderness, taking her into bed with them, watching her small fists clutching and releasing Lilit’s nipple, her nightdress, her hair, conscious of a dearth of time to enjoy her. She was so waxen, so pink and white, so frail. She hardly ever cried, simply gazed up at the quilted canopy as if seeing the heavens.

She died at three months, limp with meningitis. Lilit tried not to let herself believe it was her punishment for sleeping with a Muslim and renouncing her faith. She made a bargain with God. If I have another child, I promise to give it an Armenian name. Suleiman was shaken by her grief and her terrible insistence, told her to name the next child anything she wanted. He assured her that he was pleased she herself was healthy, and still alive.

She took to her bed, afraid that any movement at all would make her lose the next baby, or the next. She dreamed of infants: their drained, ancient faces as they lay stillborn on cold tiles, Suleiman’s dazzling tiles of blue and green. She had been here ten years now, ten years of high walls, and murmured voices, a grudging affection for Suleiman that often felt too much like effacement, nothing else. Weeks later, she walked out into the courtyard one evening, wearing only her nightdress, into a wall of desert heat. The call of the muezzin, melancholy in his devotions. She remembered Lake Van, smug and mute as Fatima’s lips. Children, and blood on its banks, the column marching to who knew where; the blotting out of lives, names, faces; their bones, white then yellow then black; the sharp hairs on the back of Suleiman’s hands, his hands all over her, when he took his pleasure.

He was always pleased now, it seemed. Even with the Ottoman Empire waning, dwindling, dying; 1925 now and the treaties after the Great War left them in no-man’s land, no longer Asia and not yet in Europe. The last sultan was deposed and exiled to some obscure Italian town Lilit had never heard of. Now the Syrians were pressuring them to leave the newly independent country, yet Suleiman elected to stay. With the few remaining Turks, colonial widows and doddering men, he approached the Arab headman of the town and bowed his head in humility.

Lilit questioned the wisdom of this, remembering what certain races did to those they considered outsiders. But Suleiman waved his hand at her in dismissal.

‘Too late now to think of resettling in Turkey. I was born here, Lilit. My father came as a youth with the Imperial Army. If they can’t accept me, then I’d rather die here than go anywhere else.’

It was all the fault of this new general, Mustafa Kemal: the splintering of Empire, the lack of social cohesion, his scraping servility to Western powers. It was only a matter of time before the French marched in to occupy the country. Or so Lilit thought. Yet Suleiman worshipped him.

‘Ataturk,’ he said, ‘what a saviour. I feel as if I know him already.’

‘But you’ve never met him, Suli,’ she would reply.

‘Ah.’ He would lean over and fix her with a dogged eye. ‘Kemal is a man who knows my own heart.’

She felt a faint intimation of chill, then suppressed it in the next instant: the closing of the door on a draughty room. She remembered the Turk on the death marches, the captor Minas trusted the most. Now this new captor was threatening her world. He was forcing women out of the home and into work, abolishing the veil, making her feel that without education or employment she wasn’t worthy of being called Ottoman any longer. There were no longer any Ottomans anyway; now they were all Turks. The new political slogan was ‘Happy is he who was born a Turk’. Kemal had even changed the language, switched the Arabic script she laboured over for so many years to Roman characters, just as she was beginning to be fluent enough to write without Suleiman correcting her at every turn.

Turkey was proclaimed a republic. Suleiman rejoiced, with musicians brought from the town and feasting that lasted three nights. He even rose from the divan himself, tracing dance steps with Fatima on careful feet. Lilit sat aside on the rug and watched, diminished by a sadness she couldn’t explain. Perhaps it was change, perhaps foreboding, even the first intimations of memories she had long learnt to repress. The drawn-out beat of the tabla.

Suleiman tossed away his grandfather’s fez, a family heirloom, learnt French, even began stumbling through Schiller’s German. He rejoiced at the capture of Smyrna from the invading Greeks, although Lilit cried, thinking of the burning villas, the sea caught up in waves of fire. Old women praying, then dying in the flames. To whom are they praying? she wondered. One Allah. One God. Jesus the prophet, or was He the Son? Suleiman saw her weeping and caressed her face.

‘Ah, my little Armenian!’

The word no longer held its old sting; in truth, no longer held any meaning at all.

Fatima, also, had lost her sting of old. She still cursed, still grumbled, but she too was caught up in the thrills of modernisation. Although it was hard for her, she confessed to Lilit, to really see any changes in a backward little town like Der ez Zor. Lilit opened her mouth to say; Why then, Fatima, don’t you go home to Turkey? But she held her tongue. Perhaps Fatima would leave under her own volition, and she and Suleiman would finally be alone.

Fatima did not go. Within two years the French had arrived. She stayed behind, became a favourite with the occupiers for her provocative belly dancing. She threw off the veil, was given a gramophone by one of her admiring officers, even went so far one day as to announce she was going to bob her hair and become a flapper like the Western women she admired in fashion magazines. She took to parading the markets of Der ez Zor in her new cloche hat and skinny, beaded dresses, scandalising the Syrians and answering their jeers with a defiance born of her protection by the French.

Suleiman waved his hand at her when she would come home, indignant and red-faced, after one of her altercations.

‘Do whatever you like, my dear. I don’t really mind.’

More and more it was only the two of them in the house: Suleiman with his newspapers, Lilit with her memories, faded now, like worn-out slippers. Their servants all gone except for the loyal cook; it had become too expensive to keep them. The economy was undergoing radical reforms, so Suleiman said, now the French controlled its currency. Lilit didn’t understand. All she knew was that once he’d been rich and now he was struggling in this new Syria. His estates were being leased at lower and lower prices now the Empire had splintered, now the Pashas and Beys had fled. Labourers willing to work merely for food and shelter were becoming scarce.

Most young people were moving to the big cities now: Damascus, Cairo, Istanbul or the new Turkish capital, Ankara, to work and study. Suleiman was pleased at the news of women in universities, learning English and history and mathematics. Lilit was not so sure. Men didn’t like their women to be so conspicuous, so capable. She was only unequivocal in her praise of the practical benefits: sparkling sewerage drains and electric lights in every room.

She begged Suleiman again to allow them to move to Turkey, where they could sample the benefits of democracy. All they had in Syria were the same old lamps that spat oil and fizzled, the same squat outdoor privy, buzzing with flies.

She and Suleiman had become intimates, almost without realising it. They shared the same battered brass spoon as they stirred their tea in the morning – Karadeniz tea they brewed so black it needed a cupful of sugar in each pot – they enquired after each other’s health and sleep, the contents of their shared dreams. They’d long since built bridges to each other’s childhoods. Lilit told him of the birds she grew up listening to each summer in Van, stilts and herons flying to the lake from colder climates; he regaled her with tales of the bald ibis, now extinct, that his father claimed to have seen when he first arrived in the desert. She remembered for him the fragrances of inky blue iris and pink orchid, the many-petalled poppies she made into wreaths for her brother and his friends. She never mentioned Yervan, had almost stopped thinking about him altogether.

Fatima retreated into her bedroom to listen to her gramophone when she was at home, which wasn’t often any longer. She bought French furniture and papered the walls in Louis XIV patterns of embossed rose and gold. She took frequent trips to Pamukkale with the French soldiers for her health, the same women’s problems that had always plagued her. She brought back photographs of them all bathing in calcium pools and wearing the absurd trunks she knitted, meandering arm in arm along the ancient paths.

Suleiman dispensed money and good advice, told her to settle in Turkey, closer to the healing waters. Lilit knew he wanted to be rid of her for some peace at last, but Fatima had her eye on his estate when he died. When Lilit thought of him dying, her abdomen tightened and her knees turned to water. She realised Fatima was well advised if not justified; she was after all the first, and the legal, wife.

Minas sat alone on the steps of his sleeping block, smoking. An aid worker had given him an American cigarette that morning and he saved it all day until his afternoon break from the kitchens. He inhaled now and coughed, then exhaled with pleasure. The smoke was rich and dark, heavy in his lungs. Nothing like the cinders that passed for tobacco here, wrapped in little smirched squares of print.

He took out his week-old newspaper, opened it. It was an Armenian weekly someone had bought on the black market – a rarity. He was pleased. Nobody told the truth about the world like the Armenians. He turned the pages and scanned the headlines, not really reading, worrying about tomorrow, what he should make with the few tins and sacks of grain they still had left until the next shipment. He remembered Mamma’s cooking in those early war years: famine food. She’d stir together a soup of cracked wheat and yoghurt, arch backward with her hands on her hips and sigh. That’s what he would do tomorrow, remind the men of hardship, their mothers, the harsh comfort of the past. Bulghur soup.

He stopped short in his musings, holding the cigarette low at his side so that some ash fell to the ground. The headline on the third page read:

MONDAY 24 OCTOBER, 1946: DJEVET BEY, FORMER VALI OF VAN, CAPTURED YESTERDAY BY ARMENIAN REPUBLICAN FORCES AND SENTENCED TO DEATH. THE BEY, FIFTY-FOUR AND IN BAD HEALTH, WAS FOUND HIDING IN AN UNDERGROUND CAVE IN THE CITY OF—

He stopped reading and looked up at the sky, feeling tears, hot, angry childish tears, start to his eyes. This was the man who condemned Papa to death, drove them all out of their homes, deported them into the desert. He had a vision of the old man now: unshaven, filthy, wild-eyed, tortured maybe, at the mercy of his former victims. Yet he too had only been obeying orders from higher up, a factotum himself, merely a petty bureaucrat immersed in paperwork.

He had an image of himself leaning over and staring into that flabby, bluish face. Eye to bloodshot eye, a picture so strong it caused his throat to parch and the hand that held his dwindling cigarette to tremble. What would I do? Drawing his lips together to spit into that face. ‘Help me,’ the Turk would mouth, ‘please help me.’ And Minas would turn away, without revenge, yet without forgiveness either.

He had entertained a brief notion of returning to Armenia, of joining the Republican forces. But something small and lost inside him caused his stomach to turn jelly-like whenever he contemplated going home. Was it shame for Papa’s death, Mamma’s unmarked burial in the sand, the broken memory of his sister? Anguish at his own helplessness. And where would he go now anyway? To Yerevan? The new capital city of the Armenian Communist state, a satellite of the Soviet Union. He wouldn’t dream of going there, to be sucked into yet another empire bent on glory. Or Aykesdan, with its fertile fields and orchards? His home in Van was officially in Turkey now, the house they once lived in taken by Kurds, no doubt, filthy nomads who had no idea how to sleep straight in a bed.

He glanced up and saw a young woman standing before him, leaning sideways to read the same headline. She was a stranger, a newcomer to the camp perhaps. He didn’t recall seeing her at the communal table or at the weekly meetings. He spoke before he could think.

‘I saw him once.’

‘Who?’

‘The man they’re going to kill.’

‘A Turk? They’re executing a lot of them these days.’

‘Not the masterminds, of course, only the lackeys.’

‘Do you think they should execute this one?’

He looked at her again, without seeing. All he could take in was a smear of mouth, her soiled apron that melded into the grit and dirt and grey sky around them.

‘Without a doubt. Did you need to ask?’ He flung the newspaper into the mud. ‘You can have it. I’m finished.’

She picked it up with motherly concern and grinned.

‘I never learnt to read.’

‘But I saw you reading just then.’

‘I can recognise some of the letters but can’t make them into words.’

He held the stub of his cigarette toward her, inclined his head to get a closer look.

‘Smoke?’

She shook her head. He drank her in now, his hungry gaze hidden by the screen of smoke and his hands. She was short, ample-hipped. Her hair curled around her ears and into her eyes. No etched designs of slavery on her face or hands, no marks of blue. Her shoes were scuffed and old, the stockings darned; she balanced on one heel, waiting for him to speak, like a little girl.

‘I can teach you,’ he said.

The days passed swiftly now for Minas. He met the young woman in the dinner hall every evening after the meal was cleared, and they sat close together at the long table, heads almost touching. Her name was Siran; her parents and three sisters had died in the first of the Constantinople massacres. She was the youngest, hidden by her mother with a Muslim neighbour who then tried to betray her, but she escaped. She told him this with absolute purity and acceptance. She showed him the welt on her neck from a Turkish knife. Her broad, pale face made him marvel as she spoke.

She pronounced new words, as they read, with childish care, and he coached her with his silence and approval. Within weeks she’d let her shoe fall to the floor and rubbed her silken foot – he couldn’t know if her movement was deliberate or merely habitual – to a quiet rhythm on his leg.

Some evenings they talked of the future, children, a house, without mentioning themselves by name in the equation. Impersonal chatter. They merely discussed possibilities, sounding each other out. He mentioned his mother’s gold earrings and how much he could get for them on the black market. Siran spoke of the Lebanese and French governments’ new scheme, good land going cheap in the camp. She said she had no dowry, her parents’ possessions had all been taken by the Turks, and looked down at her stockinged feet in shame.

The next morning he found her at the other side of the women’s communal latrines, washing her hair in a bucket. She was cross, he could tell, her customary curls dripping lank around her cheeks.

‘You shouldn’t be here, Minas. Can’t you see—’

He held out the earrings in a twist of paper. ‘Take these. Keep them until I ask for them back.’

She took the package, opened it to see. ‘Do you mean—’

‘What? That I want to marry you?’

She breathed in, squeezed some water from her hair in consternation. ‘I’m sorry, Minas, I didn’t mean to push you.’

‘This is your dowry, Siran. And it will come back to me.’

She flung herself at him and he felt the wetness of her face and hair at his throat, in his mouth. He wanted to kiss her but something stopped him, perhaps the memory of another’s look in her face. He drew away and unscrewed the earrings, putting them with slow formality in each of her ears.

‘I have to go now, clear away breakfast. Wait for me tonight. And after today, hide those earrings until we have our own home together. Until we’re safe.’

That night Siran laughed and clapped her hands when she managed to read a whole page of Charents’s poetry in Armenian, and Minas leaned over and kissed her warm, springy hair. It was only then he thought of the girl at the death camp with clarity and drew away.

Fatima had come back home to Suleiman, disgruntled. She’d been home for years now. She still complained of how the French had duped her in that brief golden period in the twenties. The French were stupid, the French were shallow, the French only liked young girls with no morals. They had let the Syrians gain independence. Not once, but twice. Once in the twenties and now, with the onset of yet another world war. If this is what one could call independence: lip service to the idea but fighting among themselves in the streets.

They would be here a long time yet, Suleiman told her. Free French fighting Vichy troops who were loyal to Germany. Many Vichy soldiers were fleeing the country, and Fatima was suddenly afraid. They shelled Damascus in one last blaze of resentment. She refused to believe they killed Syrian civilians in the blasts, snapped her mouth shut when Lilit waved the newspaper in front of her face. There were other soldiers on the streets now, in the hammams, in the marketplace: British and Australians with cold faces and red, capable hands. They were here to keep the French in tow. The local Arabs fawned over them, called them liberators.

Fatima let her hair grow back, resumed going to the mosque with Suleiman. The gramophone lay under an embroidered cloth in her bedroom until it was forgotten and used as a table for tea and halva when she had guests. Lilit stayed away from the centre of town and the sight of the foreign soldiers with a fear that paralysed her limbs and on some days made her brain cease to form coherent meanings. She spent more time in the courtyard among the date palms, taller now, dwarfing the high walls around her.

She continued to share Suleiman’s bed. Even now, when she was past forty and her breasts soft and limp, her thighs wasted. He still wondered at the beauty of her body, drank her long in his gaze. She let him swallow her, inch by inch. She lay still and ecstatic in his arms, felt her tenderness for this man change and grow, pricking her into sensation. She cried out in pain and he soothed her, murmuring words of forgiveness that she mouthed along with him. Then she became pregnant once again. A child of her waning moon.

This time, the baby lived. The midwife was Syrian Christian, well schooled and kind. She lit a votive lamp in front of the icons by the bedroom door, garlanded the image of Saint Hripsime, Armenian virgin, with roses from the garden. Lilit was nourished by a herbal broth, acrid with leaves and twigs, to prevent bleeding. The midwife carried church incense through the house and left it burning, redolent of gardenias, by the bed. She chanted Aramaic low under her breath as she massaged Lilit with olive oil, her belly, her tight shoulders and thighs.

There were no curses, no suspicions. Fatima was impotent, flabby, preoccupied in tending to her ailments. The baby squalled when the time came, latched on to the breast within seconds. A morsel of date flesh was placed in her mouth so she would find only sweetness in life to come. Lilit named her Anahit, and Suleiman stood aside with one hand on her glistening head.

More time passed. Suleiman grew fat and tired. He settled into his fifties with some of the resignation Lilit had seen in an old dog preparing to die. His breathing grew short and ragged, his heart gave him moments of pallor and panic that he dismissed with jokes and waves of the hand.

‘My heart has always given me all kinds of trouble,’ he said, and reached over to rub Lilit’s cheek with a smile.

She held his hand there, alarmed at how cold it was against her skin, and went for the doctor. Suleiman swallowed the pills the doctor gave him each day with his tea, grew quieter and more careful in his movements. He played with their new daughter desultorily, as with everything he did. He just couldn’t be bothered much any longer. The young Arabs of the town tolerated him, waved at him, half-respectful, half-disdainful, as they passed the house, where he reclined on the rooftop under a shirred canopy.

He had become a relic of ages past, like the fat belly dancers they trundled out at festivals, like the sense-memory songs of the wailing oud.

Lilit served Suleiman iced sherbets and sweetmeats with the same reverence she had always exhibited. It had been thirty years since she came into his life. He was pleased she was there, he said. Allah willed it.