BEIRUT, 1995

After finishing a new article by working solidly for five hours, I perch on my stool at Che Guevara’s, imagining commuters hurrying back to work from their afternoon naps, shopkeepers pulling up cranky roller doors, unfurling awnings. Arranging displays of fruit or flowers or lining up cups of Arabic coffee. Like so many open wounds.

Stop it, I tell myself. Don’t be so negative.

A day of writing and no human contact always does this to me, makes me cynical: all that work with the awful possibility of it slipping straight into the void, never to be seen. I’ve put aside the article about the Sabra-Shatila massacres; my editor needs a travel piece about Beirut for the weekend supplement, its history and architecture, a paean to the city full of post-war hope.

I steady myself to read the information I found yesterday and photocopied at the American University library. Somehow I feel these reports might contextualise the situation of the prisoner Sayed Ali, help me understand what I need to do.

I order olives and bread from the barman, at the same time knowing I won’t be able to eat them. There are sliced cucumbers and chunks of white cheese on the countertop, free meze that have obviously been there all day. The smell is overpowering. I try to read through claims made by Human Rights Watch, the Israeli Human Rights Coalition, Amnesty International statistics on prisons in the Occupied Territories, as well as in occupied south Lebanon.

I called Sayed Ali this morning, ostensibly to ask him if there was anything I was allowed to bring when I come to conduct the interview. He’s being held in the south of Lebanon at the Khiam Detention Center, prior to a mention hearing, when the judge will allocate a date and place for the court case. Sayed said he expected to be sent to the Russian Compound in West Jerusalem after the relevant documents were exchanged, unless his defence lawyer could think of a good reason why he should stay in occupied territory to be tried.

Not that there is any virtue or respite in being held in occupied territory. I’ve now read all the reports: Lebanese and Palestinians detained without charge, teachers, clerics, teenagers, journalists just like me. The ‘clean’ beatings to the head and belly with rubber hoses, sandbags, open hands, jets of water, beatings that leave no visible marks. The videotaped rapes and threats of blackmail, so there’s no chance the victims will ever tell their families, preoccupied with their unrelenting shame. Sleep deprivation for weeks as an interrogation technique, intimidation at gunpoint, humiliation at the hands of young, female Shin Bet agents, detainees hooded and made to stand wet and naked for hours in the air-conditioned cold of their cells. Swelling feet, dehydration, bursting kidneys. Again, there are no bruises, no blood. Nothing to point the finger at. Little food. Less water. I had an image of Sayed Ali being tortured in this way, but the calm masculinity of his voice on the phone belied it.

‘Anything allowed in?’ I asked.

‘For people like me? With American friends? With media scrutiny? A lot. For the other unfortunates, not much at all.’

I was silent.

‘Packaged food,’ he continued. ‘Magazines. Smokes. Marlboros, if you can get them.’

He seemed modern, educated, his Arabic accent barely recognisable when he spoke English. I asked him for details of his lawyer, legal aid provided by the Israeli government, wrote down the phone numbers of his university professors, the Pakistani man he worked for in America, selling sweets and chewing gum and cigarettes between lectures. He was born in the Sabra-Shatila camp but spent his final college year in New York on a scholarship arranged by Hezbollah. He’d been studying Industrial Design. I asked him what made him come back.

‘The Americans wouldn’t let me stay,’ he replied.

There was nothing I could say to that. I didn’t want to probe any further about his alleged crime and incarceration, at least not before I managed to contact his lawyer, ask more questions of Bilqis, of Amal, his teachers and friends. I made to end the conversation then, unwilling to implicate myself. And he had already mentioned that the guards were listening, and that the phone was more than likely tapped.

‘Shin Bet and Mossad crawling all over this place,’ he whispered. ‘They train the jailers.’

Yet there was one thing Sayed said that kept me there and continues to stay with me now. I asked him if he was at all religious. He hesitated before he spoke and I grew impatient at the silence, as if he were falsely striving for dramatic effect. When he finally spoke he hardly answered my question.

‘Well, Islam means surrender, you know? I never believed it as a kid in the camp. What, submit to our oppressors? I was fighting them back then with stones and taunts and rotting vegetables, since I was six years old. And I’m not surrendering now.’

Sayed seemed unafraid yet acceptant of his privations: a dangerous combination. I turn back to my notes, give up after reading three paragraphs. I’m not taking in a single word. I lean both elbows on the table, look around, can’t see any of the commuters I take such pleasure in conjuring. The tiny bar has red plywood in place of windows, for no reason I can imagine. Instead I look around the room, as I have so many times before, at the smoke-obscured posters of Che and Fidel, Marx and Lenin, and the former Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt darkening the walls.

I stop here most evenings now, ever since Chaim first introduced me to the place weeks ago. I usually arrive at six and drink one or two shots of arak, feeling that the alcohol settles my stomach for my one meal of the day – my poor stomach that has protested at the very air I breathe in Beirut. It can only be that; I drink bottled water, boil everything I eat to death, take supplements like a good American. I wonder why my stomach can’t remember I was in fact born here, lived here for sixteen years. Instead it reacts with the flutter of every tourist: the drawing-in of breath, the surrender to blackness, the rush to the toilet, then such fleeting relief.

‘What have you been writing today, little Miss?’

The barman leans his mutton-red elbows on the glass surface, trying to peer over my shoulder. I note his low-slung gun with a shiver of apprehension, as I do every time I see it.

‘I’m trying to find a Samaritan to interview. Do you know any?’

‘Aren’t they all in the Bible? Long dead now.’

Chaim pushes open the heavy doors and the barman retreats. He leans to kiss me on the cheek and orders a drink in that way he always does, with a crook of his finger and a nod.

‘What’s he saying about the Bible?’

‘I want to find some Samaritans. There are about five hundred of them left.’

‘They’re Jews, aren’t they? I might be able to find someone my mother knows.’

‘They speak Arabic but pray in Hebrew. I don’t know if they’re Muslim or Jewish. Maybe some hybrid of the two.’

‘Hybrid of the two? How can they believe in Mohammed being the Prophet and be Jewish as well? And why would that be interesting enough for an American paper to pick up?’

‘Such a potent symbol of peace, Chaim! They claim to be both Palestinian and Israelite from way back.’

‘Rubbish. Impossible.’

‘What’s wrong with you?’

‘It’s just an outlandish claim. They must be cracked. How can they be both? It goes against what this whole conflict is about. Either they’re Jewish or Muslim. Either they got to Israel thousands of years ago as Jews or they didn’t. Who cares which language they pray in?’

He downs his beer. ‘Listen, Anoush. I’m an Israeli, and I live in Lebanon. I identify with Arabs, and the Palestinian cause. But no matter what I do, no matter how sensitive and helpful I am, nothing changes the fact that I’m Jewish and Israeli first.’

I decide not to argue; he could be right for once. Then I catch myself in my cynicism. For once? He’s right most of the time, and I already begrudge it. Especially when he speaks of the conflict, of the need not to hate. He’s right. And I’m resentful. Are we becoming an old married couple – after only a few weeks?

‘Want another drink?’

I nod, finishing my arak. Chaim comes back with another two glasses and a bowl of pumpkin seeds.

‘What about the story you had about that terrorist guy?’

‘I don’t know if I believe he’s innocent.’

‘Only one way to find out.’

Sayed walks down the corridor to meet the journalist woman they call Anoush Pakradounian. She seemed okay on the phone but not the least bit compassionate of his plight. Yet she’s been sent by the family. Aunt Bilqis vouched for her. ‘She’s sensitive to our cause; she could get you released.’ She hadn’t said any more. Wasn’t her name familiar? But his aunt said she was trustworthy, was even born in Beirut. She’s Christian – he knows that. Armenian, Orthodox, Western, no matter where she was born. She told him she spent her college years in America, just as he had for that one anxious year, along with his brief stint at a madrassa in Peshawar, learning the finer points of Islamic jurisprudence and how to assemble a dirty bomb from ordinary household substances. The Harvard of Al Qaeda, some would call it.

He sighs. Such a long time ago it seems now, so many fine ideals, so many dreams ago. He adjusts the regulation pants around his crotch. Sniffs his underarms. Wouldn’t do to give the wrong impression. He needs her to believe him. Does he believe what he’s saying himself? Maybe. He didn’t do it. But he would have done it if he’d had half a chance. He sits on the ripped plastic chair provided for him and waits.

I go through my notes on the bus taking me south to Sidon. The driver stops for a toilet break at a pastry shop and passengers troop back in a reek of rosewater, holding boxes of cakes. One veiled woman offers me a crumbly pistachio biscuit like the kind Lilit would make. I smile, refuse. My stomach is churning with dread.

Again, I read the legal report on Sayed Ali. I had a hard time finding any credible information on him: searching the Web, finding his college records – he was a middling student – talking to the infuriatingly impenetrable Israeli defence lawyer from legal aid, appealing directly to the Israeli prosecution, trawling through old newspapers on file. I talked to a committee that supports Lebanese prisoners in Israel. They were helpful, then roughly realistic: ‘You can’t help him.’ I left their offices in a plummet of despair.

The report eventually arrived from legal aid, a photocopy so bad I can hardly make out the words. It doesn’t reveal anything incriminating of Sayed. I try to read through to the end but it’s hard to concentrate; the sun gives me a headache. I lean back, close my eyes. By far the most important information thus far has been volunteered by Bilqis and Amal, by cousins and uncles with explicitly divided motivations. Some, I soon realised, were out to blacken Sayed’s name, perhaps to avoid any investigation of their own activities. The old grocer in the camp was too obviously effusive, the sort of man giving cash freely to Islamic charities whose funds went straight to the training camps and bombing operations. Others pronounced the facts so slowly and carefully, with such close attention to detail, that I was wary of disbelieving them.

Fatwas against Israel and the United States faxed by Osama bin Laden, a wealthy Saudi dissident, were found buried under Amal’s shed in the camp. Amal and Bilqis both admitted this. Sayed allegedly transmitted the faxes throughout Lebanon to other operatives last year via email. Also found was a CD-ROM version of a key four-hundredpage text, The Encyclopaedia of the Afghan Jihad. The most damning evidence of all: Sayed knew the supposed operational leader of the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, Ramzi Yousef, personally. Thus he is implicated, along with some one hundred other Middle Eastern men, as a co-conspirator. This could mean any involvement ranging from financing to recruiting, to engineering to keeping records, or being an unpaid cook in a training centre in Syria or Pakistan.

I feel the familiar throb of a headache return. Am I getting in too far? I have no stomach for politics. It’s the personal I seek. My father. Only him. Not these cold-blooded killers, men who can care for their loved ones with such tenderness yet blithely end the lives of other people’s children with the flick of a switch. Yet he was a cold-blooded killer too, and he didn’t even care for his loved ones: not his mother and father, his wife, not even me.

I go over my notes one more time. The estimated cost of the bomb that caused half a billion dollar’s worth of damage to the World Trade Center was all of three thousand dollars. Why am I doing this at all? This is way beyond my scope. I’ve been drawn in to the combined plea of the old woman and the glorious, indifferent child. I don’t know how to explain why I feel the need to help Sayed. Atonement? Maybe. Wiping out my father’s sins with one grand gesture? I reason that it’s for the child’s sake, at least.

From the bus stop, I walk to the Israeli detention centre. Prison. I wonder why Sayed is being kept in occupied territory, why the Americans haven’t extradited him to be tried on the very soil he supposedly helped destroy. Maybe it’s easier to keep him here, where anything is permissible. Interrogation, intimidation, torture. ‘Torture lite’ I’ve heard it called, or ‘enhanced interrogation’: exhaustion exercises, choking in water, violent shaking, forced standing, noise bombardment. I almost begin to run. What if they do it to me? ‘Stress and duress’ techniques: coffin cells, tear gas pumped straight into the eyes, inmates shackled and forced to squat or crawl, the devastating cumulative effect of all those tiny humiliations.

I stumble through the centre of Sidon, past orchards of oranges and banana palms and unkempt verges of grass and wildflowers, stinging gravel roads. There aren’t many locals about except for the shopkeepers, stirring themselves from their noonday lethargy when they see me, hoping for a sale. I try not to make eye contact with the Israeli soldiers and their Christian–Lebanese South Lebanon Army auxiliaries. They loiter in groups of two or three, baby-faced, impeccable in their stiff uniforms and polished-mirror guns.

I wave my press card at the guards manning the prison gate: young Israeli boys, good-humoured and in the mood for some talk. I smile tight, walk on down the drive, my sandals slapping against my feet as I hurry away from their stares. Run my hand over my cropped hair, my bare neck. Salt flecks on my fingers.

As soon as I sit across from Sayed at the pockmarked formica table, the headache I’ve nursed all the way from Beirut settles on my left eye. I’m surprised to see he’s clean-shaven, full-mouthed. Young, maybe younger than me, with a sensual crease to his eyes and in the deep lines running from cheeks to chin – not the bearded fundamentalist I was expecting. I like the way he looks and distrust myself for it. Then I force myself to take in the grainy texture of his skin, the heaviness of his eyelids, the open pores on his chin. His square shoulders strain against his prison uniform, yet his shirtsleeves are floppy and too long for his arms, an oversized collar stained by what looks like the remains of a breakfast egg.

I put out my hand and decide to speak English. It might appease my headache, requiring less thought.

‘Sayed? Sa’ laam. Pleased to meet you finally. Is English okay?’

He nods, glancing in small bursts at my cleavage, arms, throat. Each time he drags his eyes away they seem drawn back by some irresistible force against his will. I follow his gaze and he blushes.

‘Sorry. Haven’t seen a decent woman for a long time.’

I swallow something. My pleasure at his words? I make my voice steely and impersonal.

‘Well, let’s get started, shall we?’ I place my tape recorder in the middle of the table and turn it on. ‘Do you mind?’

He shakes his head. I speak quietly but with force into the recorder. ‘First interview with Sayed Ali. Khiam Detention Center, Sidon, 25 August 1995.’

Sayed coughs; it could be nerves.

‘Can you tell me what you’re in here for?’

‘Supposedly instrumental in the bombing of the World Trade Center in ninety-three.’

‘Right. And what do you say to this claim?’

‘I didn’t go near the building. I was working that day. Some jihadis say it was one of the CIA’s dirty jobs.’

‘Let’s not get into the conspiracy theories – yet. If you didn’t participate, why are you a suspect?’

‘I’m Palestinian. I’m educated. I own a computer.’

‘That can’t be it, surely.’

‘Okay – turn off the tape. This is off the record. I once pledged an oath of allegiance to bin Laden.’

I turn it off. Then I decide to play dumb, interested in what Sayed has to say about the shadowy figure.

‘Who?’

‘A jihadi in the Afghan war, a financier of pan-Islamic movements. I was young, stupid. He paid me a good wage for training at one of his camps, more than I could get anywhere else. I needed to help my mother, and I had no work. I looked up to him, though I never met him in person. He was my emir, my leader.’

I speak quietly. ‘I’ve spoken to some of your relatives.’

‘All liars. Except for the women.’

I stare at him, forcing myself not to look down. He resumes speaking in a gentler tone. ‘Okay – one thing is true. When I was a teenager I was trained in guerrilla warfare here in Lebanon, by Ali Mohamed.’

‘What for, if you didn’t do it, or didn’t have any intention of doing anything like it?’

‘I was angry. Disaffected, isn’t that what they call it? That’s all. No way would I bomb a building. I won’t risk my life for anyone or anything.’

‘Then why all this evidence?’

‘I’m a likely suspect, that’s all.’

As he continues talking, he rolls up both sleeves to his elbows and calls out to the guard.

‘Hey, it’s getting hotter in here. Any chance of a fan?’

The guard shakes his head without any change of expression on his face. I watch Sayed’s muscular arms waving about, admiring them in the back of my mind, catch the glint of a silver bracelet on his wrist. Heavy links, elaborately masculine. Multiple crosses. Armenian ones. As he continues to speak I’m not listening any longer. I can feel myself flushing to my temples. Sayed notices my colour.

‘You hot too?’

He turns to the guard again.

‘Look, man, the lady’s about to faint. Can’t you do something about it?’

The guard grimaces as if to indicate his helplessness, and Sayed resumes his story.

‘My cousin was the suicide bomber who blew up the US embassy in eighty-three. Issa Ali. History matters around here. Just my name is enough to incriminate me. Didn’t you do your homework?’

‘I’m sorry, I—didn’t realise.’

I reach across the table to Sayed’s wrist.

‘Do you mind if I get a closer look at your bracelet? It’s a woman’s, isn’t it? Antique?’

‘Could be. My aunt gave it to me when she knew I was going to prison. It used to be Issa’s. There’s something written on it in a language I can’t understand. Could be Greek, or Russian.’

Sayed unclasps the bracelet and hands it over. I take it in both hands, feel its weight on my palms. I study the large silver links fashioned in the shape of Armenian crosses. Delicate, but strong. I read the Armenian engraving, murmuring now, hoping to appear normal to Sayed, losing my train of thought, the bracelet growing hot in my hands.

‘From what your aunt and mother have said this is a simple case of …’ I trail off as he begins speaking again. I’m reading and rereading the engraving on the bracelet as if the next time I sound out the vowels in my head it will change to something else. Please God, a miracle. As if the next time it will not read Pakradounian anymore. How did Bilqis get it? I remember Lilit saying Selim ran off with Anahit’s bracelet as soon as she was born. I squeeze my eyes shut. Sayed is oblivious.

‘It’s okay. You’re not expected to know everything. My cousin was a pretty committed guy. He kidnapped key members of the Christian militias, had them executed. Here’s a story for you – Issa ordered one of those Phalange guys to be killed at the exact same moment as he drove his suicide truck through the embassy building. I can’t remember the guy’s name, but he was high up. Some personal vendetta.’

I turn on the tape recorder. Sayed looks startled. I make an effort to keep my voice steady.

‘What was your cousin’s name again?’

‘Issa Ali.’

I have images of taking Sayed’s head and breaking it open on the table. Calm and efficient. Then walking away. I want to say it in Armenian: That man he had killed was my father. I lean forward, staring at him. It’s then I decide not to say anything, and hand the bracelet back.

After leaving Sayed I feel the headache squeeze tighter, a rubber band around my eyes. The bus journey back to Beirut passes in a blur. The last moments of my interview with him swirl, recede, then press forward and clamour for attention. He didn’t want me to leave so soon. He sat behind that flimsy table, holding the bracelet in both hands, as if he wasn’t sure what to do with it. I told him I’d come back, just needed some fresh air, but I knew he didn’t believe me even as I said it.

I read the report again now in the bus, unable to progress past the typed name in the heading. Sayed Ali. His cousin Issa. The name of the man who ordered the death of my father. Issa. A name meaning Jesus in Arabic. A Christ-like figure who surrendered everything: love, a child, life itself, for a twisted ideal. Was there any redemption in his death? Or only the resurrection of hatred? I sigh again at the implausibility of the situation. How did I stumble into this? Was it a trap? Did Bilqis lure me into the camp – and for what? Surely Ali is a common enough name, as Bilqis told me, like Brown or Smith in the West. But had Bilqis known who I am, who my father was, all along? And why hadn’t she told Sayed?

Once I arrive in Rue Hamra I call Chaim from a phone box, leaning over and dislodging a pebble from my shoe. Again, I can’t shake the disconcerting feeling that I’m aping someone else’s movements, mundane gestures refined for generations. I think of Lilit in Van, gasping with the reality of her new, cruel world. Think of Sayed Ali, his solemnity and quiet deference. Suddenly I’m afraid, with a deathly chill. Sayed and I are connected, by blood, history, ancestral guilt, and nothing can change that now.

Chaim picks up the phone at work.

‘Anoush, are you okay?’

‘Yes, I just—I just wanted to hear your voice.’

‘You sound upset.’

‘No, I’m okay. Come home early tonight, yes?’

I hang up on his voice, take a bus to Municipality Square. I want to be somewhere that feels like home, a place I feel safe. I berate myself – for coming back to Beirut, for caring about the past at all, for knowing too much and too little about the truth of my origins. My God, why did Lilit and Minas decide to stay in this place? Why didn’t they go back to Armenia and begin a life free of all these lies? They never felt like Arabs, never fit in. I could be in Yerevan now among fellow Armenians, lulled by familiar songs and food. My father may not have left us then, my mother may not have died. Lilit most certainly would not have been killed by a sniper. I could be anywhere, could just go now, forget about all these deaths, these secrets.

The bus stops. I’ve reached the end of the line and the heat of the day is mellowing. There’s a slight breeze, the sound of water. The plane trees on the square are decked out now in their summer finery, beneath them the fountain with only one spout working: a pert Cupid with big belly and trickling penis. There are many people, not like the last time I was here. People sitting on park benches, strolling, children playing and splashing in the water, little dogs with round eyes. A cherry seller. Strawberries in huge peaks. The late sun westering behind stone buildings, rendering them ripe gold and rose and orange.

I squeeze onto a bench, close my eyes. Next to me, I can hear a man and woman arguing in an undertone. She’s telling him he doesn’t understand, he’s asking why she has to over-analyse everything. I open my eyes and he leads her away.

Now an old man is shuffling toward the bench cradling his walking stick, with a fedora pulled low over his forehead. He sits heavily beside me, breathing a sigh of relief and comfort. I close my eyes again, let the children’s shouts and the sounds of fruit sellers and traffic in the distance wash over me.

I feel a hand on my arm. Jerk upward.

‘Tell me, daughter, are you a Pakradounian or am I much mistaken?’

I turn to look into the face of the old man, close enough to see the lines etched so deep they’re white against the tanned face, the insignificant eyes circled by pouches of skin.

‘Yes, I am. Who are you?’

‘It’s Uncle Bedros. Don’t you recognise me? You look exactly like your father. I knew you would come back, I knew it.’

I look into the milky eyes again, and press his old man’s body to me, kissing him formally on both cheeks. He’s twig-thin, with a bent back and huge-knuckled hands.

‘It’s been so long – I don’t know what to say. You look so well, Uncle.’

‘I’m ninety-two this year. And my wife – bless her soul – is convinced I’ll not make it to my next birthday.’

‘Oh, I’m sure you will, Uncle.’

He inches closer to me, takes my hand.

‘So what are you doing back here, daughter? Surely you know the state your grandmother Siran is in?’

‘I’ve seen her. Do you go?’

‘My wife does. I—well, it upsets me too much to see her like that. I remember her when she was sharp, full of energy. You’re not here to stay, are you?’

‘No. Well, maybe. I’m here for work – but I suppose my real reason for coming back was to see whether I could find out more about my father. About how he died.’

‘You know how he died. He was killed – by the Muslims.’

‘Yes, but I know nothing about him. How it happened, how he felt, whether he was to blame—’

‘Let me tell you something. He came here in eighty-three, not long after you left for America. I saw him with my own two eyes. He came looking for you.’ He chuckles and wipes his face with an open palm. ‘How strange that I should see him, out of the blue like that, after so long – and now you, my child! It’s a miracle. Like something in a book.’

I turn my head away, ashamed of letting Bedros see the tears that are starting to my eyes.

‘It can’t be true. He came looking for me? I can’t believe it.’

‘Yes, daughter. He came looking for you before he was killed. He always cared for you. He loved you. But he was a man scared of his own shadow.’

I don’t know what to say to Chaim. If I reveal why I’m so moody lately I’ll have to tell him the whole story. I’m not sure I can. The bald facts are so unpalatable. My father was a Phalangist militiaman. The movement had ties to the Nazi Party in the thirties. Neo-fascists. The Israelis conveniently forgot this during the civil war and helped the militia in their supposed struggle against Islam. My father thought he was better than the Arabs he lived with all his life. He unthinkingly swallowed the prejudice of his own father’s trauma. It started when he was a young boy, this hatred of others. Maybe because he was other, in this foreign place, from birth. Is that why he left us?

I can’t imagine what he was really like away from the guns and shells, the carnage he helped create. The wedding photograph doesn’t help. In it he looks false, a mannequin grinning murder. He killed thousands of Muslims. Civilians. Children, babies. He thought the Israeli occupation was the answer to Lebanon’s problems. Other Muslim factions resented this, especially the Shias. Issa Ali was a Shia. My father died due to his own arrogance. And yet—and yet he’d done all that, then came looking for me in the Armenian quarter, to tell me, what? That he loved me? That he was sorry? Uncle Bedros said he’d come in the rain, a pot of pink flowers under his coat. That he asked about me and cried. I can’t deny the pain this erases, the feeling of warmth and lightness it gives me.

Chaim asks me why I’m so quiet lately, so preoccupied.

‘Too much work,’ I say. ‘I’ve finished four articles and now they want another by the end of the week.’

He shakes his head, miming disbelief. ‘You can’t fool me, but I’ll let it go this time.’ He chucks me under the chin and goes off to work for days and weeks. I can’t tell him.

I go to see Bilqis in the camp but remain silent about what Sayed has revealed. I wait for Bilqis to talk first, look at her now with suspicion, even hostility. I accept tea, choke on more of the dry biscuits. I meet Inam at the school gate, even though she’s old enough to walk home by herself. But Bilqis says she’s afraid of Inam getting involved with the stone-throwers and militants, so Inam is accompanied to and from school. Now Bilqis is often too tired to walk. It seems that she becomes breathless now, even when walking only as far as the shop. Weeks pass. Still I don’t tell her of the reason for my withdrawal, an interior reserve I know she’s too wise not to notice. I leave as soon as I can, while Inam begs me to stay.

I call Sayed Ali and apologise for not coming back. He’s cautiously respectful, and strangely sheepish. I tell him I’m working on the article about him. Assure him I believe in his innocence. I’m not sure if I’m lying. I’m still not sure why I’m so obsessed now with helping him, why I need to convince myself day by day, word by word, of his purity. The link with my father? Some way of finding out more about the way he lived his life? Or severing the bond in this small way between Sayed and his cousin? If Sayed Ali is innocent then maybe I can begin to forgive Issa Ali for the poison he inflicted, on my father and grandmothers and myself, the uncertainty that’s eating away my life.

Sayed comments on my reticence, asks if there’s anything wrong. I deny it, deny everything. When I hang up I’m conscious of feeling empty, wrong, as if I should have said more, gone further. I’m tempted to call again but instead stay by the phone, looking out at the view of the sea from Chaim’s windows.

Chaim is still away. I’m left alone to my looping thoughts. I dream of Issa Ali, the faceless assassin. He comes to me at night and puts his curved knife to my throat. A scimitar, Ottoman, gleaming as a half-moon. His face changes to Sayed’s, the pained expression twisting into a smirk. Don’t tell anyone what you know, he says in Arabic. I forbid you. Then Issa comes back, floating, silent as the clouds around him. I hold my hands out in the dark, want above all to forgive. Only by forgiving him can I rid myself of his presence. How can I know why you did it?

I let myself mourn my father’s absence. Did he love me? Did he love me after all? I remember peering at my parents’ photograph on tiptoe when either one of the grandmothers wasn’t looking. Holding it to my chest as if the manufactured warmth from my father’s black and white gaze would permeate in this way through my skin. I caressed his poreless cheek, ran my finger across the inky length of his eyebrow. Oh, Daddy. He smirked back as if he knew he would go away someday soon. My mother remained a cipher, pale forehead wrinkled in doubt under a filmy veil.

I know Selim was second-in-command to the militia led by Elie Hobeika, responsible for the massacres of the camps. The war crimes tribunal confirmed that. I know, I know, I know. But it makes no difference. On one level, a deeper, darker level, I know nothing at all. I know the details of the atrocities, the rapes, the subsequent denials. The window-dressing enquiry run by the Israelis, the Kahan report. No condemnation of anyone at all, except perhaps the victims. When I found out in first-year college, it didn’t stop me from continuing to love the ideal father, so young and handsome; it only made me hate myself. How can I love someone so evil? How can I absolve him of guilt? I shuffled through college corridors with my head down, fought not to vomit when confronted with a lunch plate of cold cuts. It reminded me too much of the dead bodies I mutilated in my nightmares.

Who is victim and who perpetrator? Now I hold two men in my arms, side by side in bed, stuck inside the body bags of Chaim’s sweaty sheets. I hug them to me, twin spectators of my suffering. I cry out in sleep and hush myself like a mother comforting a child. Hush, hush, it’ ll be all right. There’s hope. We can all remember. Or choose to forget. I torment myself with outdated notions of right and wrong. I don’t know how to condemn my father for who he was, nor do I know how to forgive his murderer from taking him away, stealing him from me before I had a chance to confront him with my own flawed existence. And what of Issa Ali’s family?

I field countless calls from the UNDP. ‘The woman is asking after you. She wants to see you again. The girl misses you. Apparently she likes you, which doesn’t happen often with anyone at all. Don’t know what you did to charm them so.’

One morning the phone doesn’t stop ringing even when I turn over in Chaim’s bed and resolve to ignore it all day. It stops, begins again. I put the creased pillow over my ears. Finally, I crawl out of bed and pick up the receiver.

‘Yes?’

‘Ms Pakradounian? UNDP.’

I wait, sighing audibly.

‘Ms Pakradounian, there’s a parcel here addressed to you. Seems to be from a detainee at the Khiam Detention Center. Should we send it on?’

‘No. I’ll come and get it.’

In the tampered envelope, I find my mother’s bracelet. There’s one line, on paper torn from a child’s exercise book, printed carefully in English.

I spoke to my aunt and know whose bracelet it is. None of it is your fault or mine. Sayed.

I sit on the floor in Chaim’s living room. Julius gnaws on a bone in the kitchen, now and then giving tiny grunts of satisfaction. My laptop beckons, but I have nothing to give today. My legs are folded beneath me, palms flat on the keyboard, an absent meditation. I look out at the sea. It’s evening already, the light from the sky that blinded me all day has dimmed and all that remains is a pearl lustre at the edges of my eyes.

I make yet another beginning on the Sayed story, mull over the opening sentence for a moment. Pause, my hand hovering, then press the delete button. I’m making no progress, haven’t been for days. There’s a singular impossibility in writing even the first line, the first paragraph introducing the issue. Too many dimensions, and I know I’m not wise enough or experienced enough nor convinced enough to unravel them. The political. The personal. The blurred space of misunderstanding in between. A tangled heap of coloured threads.

Sayed’s note has alternately comforted and unsettled me. As yet I haven’t replied. Deep down part of me feels he’s wrong. Of course it’s our fault as well. The sins of the fathers. The responsibility to create good out of such evil. Has he tried? No. Have I? I wonder if my father ever really did love my mother. They were first cousins, after all. Tied by blood if not by desire. It was the other woman, that Muslim woman, who meant most to him. The contradictory woman of his other life, that flickering momentary life he conducted apart from his family. It’s hard to swallow, hard not to resent him for such a blunt betrayal.

I get up, water Chaim’s gardenias laboriously with a drinking glass I fill and refill many times. The petals are yellowing, tissue-paper dry. I snap the spent blooms from their stalks and drop them into the street far below. There’s an evening breeze coming off the sea, a rarity. I stay at the balcony rail, let the wind clean away my frustration, the smell of exhaust and construction dust, the fine silt that settles on my eyelids from the ash that comes from garbage burning in the camps. In my silent, meditative state, this ash seems so potent. I don’t want to wipe it off. I lick my finger, taste its bitterness. It’s the bodies of my people, and Chaim’s: in Der ez Zor, Sabra-Shatila, far-away Auschwitz. Death isn’t personal. Violence moves through us, and is gone again.

I go inside, watch street lights turn on, one by one, over the whole curving promenade. Tiny starbursts of light. I play the recording of the interview again: play, pause, rewind. Play again. I’ve played the last three seconds of the tape so often I’ve memorised the timbre of Sayed’s voice, the resigned, out-breath in the way he said his cousin’s name. Issa Ali. His voice comes to me when I lie in bed, when I’m under the shower, when I move a morsel to my mouth. Issa Ali. A line of song. A refrain. My reply to Sayed cut off, a swinging pendulum in the darkness of no sound.