Chaim lies in bed. It’s the only day off he’s had for a fortnight. He’s been in Nabatiye as promised, and is planning to confront Anoush tonight. Has she finally decided? He pretends to be asleep as she opens the door with her old key. She creeps into his bedroom, leans over his warm body, the sheet pulled tight to his neck.
‘I know what you’re going to say, but I need a big favour. Please, please go and see Inam today. There’s a morning tea for the prospective parents and I said I would be there.’
Chaim turns over, rolls the blanket all the way to the other side of the bed.
‘Why can’t you go?’
‘I got a call at dawn from one of the nurses at the hospice. She said Bilqis is asking for me, panicking. They assume she thinks she’s back in the camp. During the massacres.’
‘I don’t see how I can go. The girl hates me, Anoush. Remember, it was intimated to me very clearly that it’s only you wanting to adopt her, not us.’
‘Well, I can’t be there. So you’re the only one left.’
He mumbles something into the sheet, turns over and away from the filaments of light escaping from the curtains. She leans further and peers into his face. He puts a hand out from the folds to touch her mouth. Before she can plead one more time he sits up and stretches.
‘Okay. I’ll do my best.’
‘Thank you,’ Anoush says, and he hears the door shut carefully behind her. ‘I’ll see you tonight.’
Chaim gathers gardenias from the pots on his balcony into a bouquet. A peace offering. A measure of his respect. Inam may appreciate it, he thinks, or else she may throw it to the floor. She’s that sort of girl. Some of the petals are already creased and splitting, but he ties them all together into a hard-packed wheel. He begins by feeling self-conscious carrying them on the bus, but in the next breath feels proud when Muslim women around him smile, open-faced and unsuspicious. Usually he only gets scowls for looking so evidently foreign.
I walk with trembling knees to Bilqis’s ward. The contrast with the heat outside never fails to astonish me: cathode blue of fluorescent lights, iciness of walls and floors and the nurses’ immovable features. I shiver as I hurry down the corridors, pressing my hands to my arms for warmth.
‘Didn’t you bring a jacket?’
The Irish nurse who rang me stands at the side of a patient’s bed, taking a vial of blood. She jabs at the old man’s arm, trying to find a vein. He mews quietly, like a kitten. I stand and watch the slow drip-drip of blood thickly collecting, clotting to the sides of the glass. The nurse finishes and wriggles her own cardigan off in one gesture.
‘Here. I’m hot anyway. Give it back to me when you leave.’
I take the cardigan thankfully and put it on, inhaling the nurse’s scent of disinfectant and cheap soap and tobacco smoke. She jerks her head in the direction of Bilqis’s bed.
‘She’s still in the same place. Been screaming and raving all night. We didn’t know what to do with her.’
As I slide down the smooth linoleum to Bilqis’s bed, I hear the nurse call after me.
‘We gave her another shot about an hour ago, so she may still be a bit drowsy.’
Bilqis stares rigidly at me. Her face is a mask of pain, drawn-out mouth dribbling and eyes that dart about, trying to find some respite. I put both my hands on her cheeks.
‘Oh, Bilqis, what have they done to you?’
Chaim sits in the row of chairs provided for the would-be adoptive parents and foster families. The chairs are small and wooden and his legs buckle under him so grotesquely that he’d be better off kneeling upright on the floor. Some of the other men are having the same trouble, balancing cups of milky coffee and slices of cake on their distorted laps. Chaim clutches the bouquet so hard his knuckles turn white.
The French headmistress claps her hands gracefully, as with everything she does. The children, in various states of shyness and reluctance, file into the room hand in hand. They are all girls, all aged between four and twelve and all dressed identically in white starched pinafores and shirts with pale-blue cuffs. Chaim can hardly recognise Inam. She catches his eye, embarrassed and subdued by her scrubbed pink face and plaited hair, and grimaces. She mouths exaggeratedly at him. ‘Where’s Anoush?’
He shakes his head and shrugs his shoulders as if to say, I’m all you’ve got today, sorry. He lifts up the bouquet and gives a self-deprecating grin. The headmistress claps her hands once more.
‘Mes enfants, attention!’
The children stand still in perfect formation. Another teacher bends over a piano and begins to play, badly, out of tune. Il etait une bergeré et ron, ron, ron, petit patapon. The children sing along in muted tones and with expressionless faces. Except for Inam. Although she suffers the same severe stance as the rest of them, feet splayed out in her ugly shoes and hands behind her back, she’s singing completely different words. Her mouth is moving silently and she is singing in Arabic. She faces Chaim and smiles wide as she sings.
I feed Bilqis a mush of hashed meat with flecks of something orange through it, using the moulded plastic spoon the nurse has suggested so it’s easier on Bilqis’s tender, exposed mouth. I put some of the food on the spoon – ‘Just enough and not too much,’ the nurse cautions – wait for Bilqis to wearily open up again, and stick the spoon almost as far down as her gullet. It’s the only way she can eat. She’s lost any ability to chew.
Most attempts fail. The spoon isn’t down far enough; its contents spill over onto her tongue and down the chafed sides of her mouth, mixed with saliva and the half-digested remnants of yesterday’s dinner. I despair, feel tears forming in my eyes. Bilqis gazes at me, steadfast as a lover. It’s okay, she seems to be saying. I have patience. I try again. I gulp down a sob, load up one more spoonful.
‘One more,’ I whisper to Bilqis. ‘Only one more to go.’
Just as I do, the Irish nurse enters the enclosed little world I’ve created by pulling plastic curtains around the bed.
‘You’re taking too long, honey. Her food’s gone cold. Kitchen staff want to wash up as well.’
She draws aside the curtains with a decisive slash and settles herself down near me. She takes the spoon and basin and proceeds to dose Bilqis with the last spoonful, forcefully and without compunction. I sit aside and watch in shame, as if I’ve betrayed Bilqis to her Phalangist torturers.
Inam sits on a chair next to Chaim, twirling her paper plate faultlessly on one hand. She hasn’t touched her slice of cake. She’s professing to be bored with anything he says. When Chaim told her Anoush couldn’t make it because Bilqis had been asking for her, Inam changed the subject without the flicker of an eyelash. She accepted the flowers with something bordering on cautious delight, making a huge to-do of finding a vase for them. They repose now in a chipped mug on the laden trestle table, among filled baguettes and tinned sardines and jugs of bright-yellow custard from a packet.
Chaim eyes her revolving slice of cake.
‘Can I have it, if you’re not eating?’
She passes it to him without a word. Chaim swallows in silence for a few seconds.
‘Anoush will bring you to my place one weekend and you can get acquainted with my dog again.’
Inam raises her eyebrow. ‘He’s such a big dog. I’m scared of him.’
‘Well … yes, he is big. But he would never hurt you. He likes little girls.’
Inam sighs, worldly. ‘I’m not a little girl anymore. And I don’t like dogs.’
‘Come on, you like Julius. Even more than you like me. Do you like me, even a little bit?
‘Hmmm …’ Inam pauses.
‘So why don’t you like me, Inam?’
‘Because.’
‘Tell me, I won’t be offended.’
‘Grandma told me all Israelis are bad.’
‘You know that’s not true. Not every person from one place can be bad.’
‘The ones at the prison were. They had big, nasty dogs too. And they swore at Anoush.’
‘Did they? She didn’t tell me that.’
Inam nods, self-consciously serious.
‘My father would go out and kill them every day. I heard Grandma saying to Aunty Amal. Before he died.’
‘And do you want to kill me?’
Inam ignores the question, fixing her blue eyes on his.
‘I heard them talking. Grandma and Anoush. My father killed her father. Then he killed himself too.’
I sit by Bilqis’s bed. My buttocks are stuck to the cushioned plastic seat.
‘Bilqis? If you’re tired out, I might go home now.’
Bilqis doesn’t open her eyes but her mouth works with the effort to speak. With her head flung right back on the pillow, her skin so white, she could be a corpse waiting to be laid out. I stand up and lean close to her face. The swollen eyelids blue and heavy.
‘What is it? What can I do for you?’
Bilqis tries to raise her left arm, the better one, but it flops onto the blanket after a brief struggle. I stroke her hand, breakable but heavy, the texture of crepe. Bilqis manages a sound, a bellowing cry. A word forms from it.
‘Can’t—’
Another word.
‘—breathe.’
‘She can’t breathe! Come quickly!’
I run out into the middle of the ward. Nurses rush past, attending to other patients, and I grab one by the arm.
‘She needs oxygen! She can’t breathe!’
The girl runs after me to the bed. Bilqis is choking, great globules of food and spit being expelled as she gasps for air, skewed arms clutching at nothing.
‘What do you mean, your father killed hers?’ Chaim narrows his eyes and glares at Inam. Is she lying? Making things up?
Inam leans forward, confidingly.
‘I told you. It was in the war.’
She pronounces the word war as if uncertain of its precise meaning. Chaim rubs his eyes, tries to take her nail-bitten hand. She pulls it out of his reach with a grand gesture.
‘Are you sure, Inam? Are you sure you’re telling me the truth?’
‘Of course I am. But Anoush still loves me, doesn’t she?’
Chaim speaks automatically.
‘Yes, she loves you. Was her father a militiaman, then?’
‘I don’t know.’
He grasps her by the shoulder, bringing her closer. She lets him.
‘Did you hear them say he was a soldier, you know, with a gun?’
Inam opens her mouth, hesitates.
‘I—I think so.’
‘Remember!’
‘Yeah. Yeah, a what-do-you-call-em, Pha-lang-ist, they said.’
Chaim leans back, expels the air he’s been keeping tight inside his chest. Inam studies him and a ripple of doubt passes over her face.
‘It doesn’t matter, does it, Chaim? It doesn’t matter what happened then.’
Chaim repeats it after her – doesn’t matter what happened then – believing something else entirely.
I slump in the matron’s office, am handed a cup of cold tea, another cardigan draped across my shoulders. I’m shaking so much I can’t hold the cup and a nurse takes it from me with painful solicitude. The matron speaks, breaking through the only sound in the tiny room, that of my teeth chattering.
‘I’m sorry, Ms Pakradounian. There was nothing we could do.’
I nod, look down at the linoleum floor, at the strip running from the door to the desk that is somehow lighter than the rest.
‘Is there anyone we can call, Ms Pakradounian?’
I try to think. I’m numb. After a while I open my mouth.
‘Her sister Amal. Her nephew, Sayed Ali.’
Chaim rushes home from the orphanage. He kicks at loose rubbish, rolled-up newspapers, a garbage bag’s contents spilled across the street. He stands for a minute, controlling his breath, looking out at the blackness of sea beyond the Corniche. A beggar comes toward him and Chaim gives him such a look of contempt he doesn’t even attempt to ask for any money, backing away and shaking his head. Chaim fumes, left alone.
He sits on the sea wall, attempts to gather his thoughts. After taunting him about his own father and brother, making him feel like the enemy, like she was sacrificing so many of her principles to be with him. He too is a child of survivors, of genocide. Victims and perpetrators. How different are they? Her subtle rejection, renting her own apartment, wanting to have a separate life. And now this.
‘Anoush,’ Chaim screws his mouth up to silently form the sound. ‘I don’t care if your father was a Phalangist or a terrorist or a dictator. It’s your attitude I’m so pissed about. You didn’t trust me enough to tell me the truth. Now I can’t trust you. So what the hell does that say about any future for us?’
He knocks on her front door feverishly, waits. Nothing. He tries the knob, bursts into her bare living room. There are no lights turned on. She has Julius with her. He barks once, a sharp, exhausted cry. In the beam from the promenade below he can discern her huddled form on the floorboards. What right does she have to be upset over an old Arab woman? The murderer’s mother. Her self-indulgence enrages him all the more.
‘Why did you hide it from me?’
She silences him with an upraised hand.
‘She’s dead.’
On the way to Bilqis’s memorial in a hired limousine, Chaim is coldly silent. It’s been seven days since Bilqis’s death and burial. I stood aside while Amal and the other women of the camp ritually washed the pallid body, folding her limbs – grown so thin in death – and wrapping them in a white shroud, clinging in all the wrong places like a little girl’s sundress. Rowda stood aside as well, her lips as tight as the arms across her chest. She didn’t speak to me.
Bilqis was buried the next day before sundown, with her head turned to face Mecca. Chaim didn’t come.
‘It’s not right,’ I can remember him saying. ‘You’ll end up resenting the kid for what her father did. Now it’s all new and happy, but just wait a few years.’
I glance toward the front seat; Inam is happily ensconced with the driver. He’s letting her choose which radio station she wants to listen to. Until now I’ve been looking out my window at the glaring streets, still heat-dazed in early winter: nougat sellers thrusting their wares into the car, the sudden smell of nuts and scorched sugar, vendors of feather dusters preening their borrowed plumage before presenting them to me through the open window like bouquets.
The car stops in traffic and an old woman looks up from selling herbs – feathery rocket, basil, fronds of coriander – from a hessian sack as she squats on the kerb. She holds up a bunch and smiles at me, gaptoothed, overly familiar, knowing I won’t buy. An ironic greeting, a fitting farewell for Bilqis.
I whisper with violence into Chaim’s ear. He jumps.
‘If I don’t help Inam now I’ll dry up and become self-obsessed and shallow. I don’t want to die like my father.’
He seems surprised. ‘How do you know what state of mind he was in when he died?’
‘I can guess.’
‘And what good will it do to take her away from everything she’s known? Don’t you want to go back to the States?’
‘I told you, I won’t go, not now. You know I’ve decided to stay here in Beirut. A year, at least. For Inam’s sake and for my grandmother. At least until she dies too.’
‘And for me?’
I look at him, a different expression on my face. The tears of the last week still fresh in my eyes.
‘Well, not with your attitude of the last few days.’
‘Do you still want me?’
We stare at each other, not sure what to say next. The air around us grows heavy, the sounds of babbling humanity from outside increasing. I remember the excitement I felt when he first told me he loved me, the comfort of lying in bed beside him late at night, my head resting in the hollow made by his collarbones. I feel the thrill again of imagining a future together. A future with Chaim and Inam. I brush my hand against his freshly shaven face. Smoothness of a pebble.
‘I’m sorry, Chaim. I still don’t know yet. You need to give me some more time. It’s not just about you and me anymore. It’s about Inam too.’
The driver stops at the mosque. I draw my white veil around my head and shoulders mechanically, get out of the car in a daze. The imam I requested is waiting outside; he sees me and rushes forward. Chaim sits. He can’t seem to move his legs. After a while, he rouses himself, opens the door for Inam.
Rowda is outside as well, with a group of Red Crescent workers. Her veil is wrapped so completely around her head I can only recognise her by the slash of red that’s her mouth. I begin to follow the imam inside without another glance at her.
‘Wait,’ Rowda hisses, putting out her arm. ‘Do you mind if I’m here?’
‘What do I care? It’s a memorial, Rowda. This mosque doesn’t belong to me. This is Bilqis’s memorial.’
As I say Bilqis’s name, the tears I’ve been trying to hold back all morning – for Inam’s sake, for Chaim’s, for my own – come all in a rush. At the mention of her name, Rowda murmurs Rahimaha Allah, the traditional prayer: Allah be merciful upon the deceased. I turn away and wipe my cheeks with my veil, embarrassed for Rowda to see me like this.
‘It doesn’t matter whether or not I mind.’
But my words are crushed against her shoulder as she draws me close. The group huddles around us, screening my tears from passers-by.
‘I’m sorry,’ Rowda says. ‘I’m so sorry.’
Somewhere in my half-hysterical state, I’m trying to figure out why Rowda is saying this. Sorry for what? For Bilqis’s death; for your prejudices; for everyone here? All I’m aware of are the two strong hands holding my head down, the musty hashish sweetness of Rowda’s clothes, the swishing, smacking sounds from people’s bare feet as they discard their sandals and step over the entrance to the mosque. I pull away.
‘Thank you. I’m sorry too. I—I need to go inside now.’
I sit at the back of the mosque, near the open doors. My veil damp and clammy, a dead weight around my neck. As I kneel and bend my head I can see Chaim walking through the entrance with Inam running behind. I beckon to them but they don’t see. Inam’s tugging on his jacket as they make their way closer, and he stops and looks back at her, exasperated.
Then I see him bend down and twine his fingers with hers, leading her to me.
The adoption process was surprisingly easy, even with Rowda’s negative report. I managed to find another Muslim social worker, who came to my new apartment and stayed for three days, writing a glowing account of my living arrangements. Julius and his good-natured antics obviously helped. My job and apartment in America helped. I referred to Chaim as an ‘honorary uncle’ to the social worker, saying that Inam could rely on him for friendship and support as she grew older. He didn’t object to this, but in his heart I can see he mourns what could have been. Or maybe could still be – he hasn’t given up hope. Nor have I. I’m a mystery to myself these days, but I know I still feel so much love for him. It increases every day, changes. If he and Inam can learn to love each other too, then I can see a future for us. The healing of my father’s wound has left a bigger hole: a hole that’s surprisingly light, and spacious, and free. I’m letting it be. For now.
The court saw fit to milk the situation as a political coup, a bestcase scenario of Israeli–Arab relations. As did the fact that I was staying in Beirut. I wasn’t going to take the orphan away to a foreign country of infidels. After all, it wasn’t as if rich Westerners were clamouring to take away Palestinian children. Unless they were newborn babies, of course. The babies didn’t even make it to the orphanage. They were especially sought after, being adequately unformed, pale-skinned, pliable. Easy to pretend with.
I sat in the office of the orphanage and the French headmistress handed me paper after paper to sign. I could see Amal’s and Sayed’s signatures on the line above mine: Sayed’s a flourish, Amal’s a thin, shaky cross. I kept on scribbling my initials at the bottom of each page, anxious to get it all over with, to take Inam home.
I show Inam her bedroom – tiny, almost a cupboard, but perfumed with triangles of incense I’ve burnt to chase away the past. I switch on a lamp, pale-blue and beaded, with silk fringing Inam caresses as she stands looking at the oval side table, the tiny writing desk against the high, pointed window, a flat ultramarine square of sky.
‘Do you like it?’
Inam wanders to the centre of the room, sits down on the bed, gazing around and up at the ceiling.
‘It’s beautiful.’
I’m relieved at her reaction.
‘This is your room now. There are fresh sheets on the bed, more blankets in the linen cupboard if you get cold.’
Inam nods. She’s overwhelmed by the immensity of the situation. She grasps my hand.
‘Is it really true? I’m living here with you – forever?’
I laugh.
‘Don’t know if we’ll be living here forever, sweetheart. But we’ll definitely be together, you and me, for a very long time.’
Inam thinks for a moment.
‘And Julius?’
‘Well, Julius is Chaim’s dog, and I don’t really know what Chaim will do next. But he’ll always be our dear friend, I hope. Do you like Chaim better now?’
‘I like him so much more now I’ve met Julius. He’s such a good dog – better than the ones at the prison.’
Chaim hears this from the open door, where he’s come with a tray of baked eggplant for dinner.
‘We always liked each other a little bit, didn’t we, Inam?’
Inam shouts back, ‘Whatever you want. Nothing matters anymore now I’m here.’
Inam and I walk arm in arm along the beach. Julius has raced on before us, sniffing at seaweed and sea urchins rotting on the shore. I’m tired. We’ve scaled the split white rocks in bare feet and made it down to the water’s edge. Far away now, obdurate buildings and noiseless cars make no impact. Here we can splash in the foamy waves, watching out all the while for drowned garbage and discarded syringes, feel the hot wind from Africa sting our faces and a hotter sun burn the tops of our heads. We can talk in whispers. Talk about Bilqis.
Since the funeral six months ago, all we talk about when we’re alone together is Bilqis. Whether she’s happy wherever she is, whether she can see us and know how much we miss her now she’s gone. Amal visits once or twice a week but her great-aunt’s presence seems to make Inam’s grief worse. She looks like Bilqis but isn’t – and Inam can’t bear the trick. Yet her grief is always more manageable in the daytime: when she’s at school or after-school activities, when I traipse around the city interviewing people and filing stories for The Star. But in the evening, when dinner is over, when she’s had her shower and is allowed to read for an hour in bed, the tears and disbelief well up and Bilqis is too far away.
Inam wails for me then and I bring her into the big bed. Some nights Chaim is staying over, and I can’t help but feel ashamed. So I ask him to go back to his own apartment and Inam snuggles into the warmth he’s left behind. It’s the only way she can fall asleep for a few hours and be half-awake for school the next day. I worry that Chaim will soon become fed up with the nightly situation and go away to Nabatiye, never to return. Then I reason that it wouldn’t be so bad after all, that at least the situation will be resolved that way.
Some nights I wait until I think Inam is sound asleep, legs and arms kicked out to the far edges of the bed, frail mouth quivering in her dreams. Then I tiptoe silently out to the hall and phone Chaim to come back. I slip down beside him in Inam’s single bed. On some nights he refuses to come back. On others he kisses the back of my neck, breathing comfort into me. When dawn steals through the curtains, I always make sure I’m back in bed with Inam, and Chaim is back in his apartment.
‘Put your sandals back on,’ I say now. ‘I’m scared you’ll step on a syringe and catch something.’
‘I won’t. I’m being careful.’
Inam looks up at my face, pleading. I sigh, feel the responsibility weigh heavy on my chest, hesitate, nod my head. Inam will never know what it costs me to do this.
‘Okay. Just this once.’
Inam sighs, happily. She threads her arm still tighter through mine and hops a little from foot to foot.
‘She might be looking down on us now and smiling.’
‘Won’t she have better things to do, don’t you think?’
‘No. Nothing better than watching over us. She must miss home.’
Inam skips over the pebbles, splashing herself a little around the hem of her dress. Julius joins in the fun with more enthusiasm than is necessary, almost knocking her over into the waves. She pushes him away and hums, crouching low near the water. I look at her, drink her in: the peach-dark skin, the long-limbed grace, the kiss-curls at the nape of her neck. I can’t get used to this miracle. Inam is not family yet I love her with a ferocity only blood and pain can impart. There’s plenty of that between us, even without the mess of birth.
She plucks pebbles from the shore like flowers, fat stones fall as she wades in further. Up to her hands, her brown wrists. Fingers submerged, silver-finned, and she shakes them free, singing. An unintelligible song, obscured beat by beat as she advances into the blueness, so blue; her voice covered by the lapping of waves then finally increasing in volume, unfolding into the air.
I can’t hear her anymore. Panic makes my voice sharp.
‘Hey! Get back here now.’
She wrinkles her nose and returns, protesting with the slowness of her movements.
‘I wasn’t going far. And you know I’m old enough to be careful.’
She flits up and down, humming the song under her breath, clapping her hands to the quiet rhythm of the music.
‘What’s that song?’
‘I made it up.’
She continues singing, but softer now.
‘I know that tune from somewhere. But I’ve never heard you sing it before.’
‘I used to hear the old men sing it in the camp.’
‘Did you know it’s Armenian originally? There’s also a Turkish version. It’s not in Arabic.’
‘No. I never thought about it.’
‘I’m sure your grandma would have told you. She knew some Turkish, from her days in Palestine. So tell me, isn’t paradise preferable to the camp? She must feel as if she’s gone home to Jaffa.’
‘Not if we’re not there to enjoy it with her.’
‘But she’s with her son, my darling. And with your mother too.’
Inam stops and stares up at me.
‘But Anoush, my father’s not in paradise. He killed too many people. So he must be in hell. Like your father. They’re both in hell.’
‘Who’s been telling you such lies?’
‘Nobody. I worked it out myself.’
I bend down, fix her with a stern eye.
‘Are you sure about that? Nobody said this – not the French teachers at the orphanage, other kids at school?’
Inam shakes her head from side to side, as if mesmerised. I draw her closer, rest the burnished head against my chest.
‘Nobody knows where your father is, Inam. Not me, not you, not Chaim, not the teacher. Only Allah knows. Okay?’
Inam nods and clutches tighter. She seems relieved. I stand up with her arm still about me. We walk slowly. Inam breaks away and paddles in the foam, teasing Julius, and all the while I’m thinking, I said ‘Allah’. I said something I don’t know if I believe. I relinquished control to something higher.
I stop at the water’s edge and Inam runs closer, splashing me as she goes.
‘I got all your messages. They wouldn’t let me out – even for half an hour – to go to the memorial.’
Sayed directs his remark solely to me. He seems to look right through Chaim, who gets up to go.
‘I think I’ll wait outside.’
I put out a restraining arm without looking at him.
‘No. Please stay. Sayed, this is Chaim, my—my … my boyfriend.’
Chaim smiles. Sayed glares but he puts out his hand to Chaim, then jerks it back again when the guard moves forward.
‘I’m sorry,’ Chaim says. ‘Sorry about your aunt.’
Sayed looks down, fiddles with nothing on the tabletop. I try to lighten his mood.
‘I wrote another article about you. Look.’ I fish it out of my bag, unfold the headline. ‘Look, Sayed. Wrongly accused in Israeli jail. It’s in The Star, as you know, and in The Globe. But I also managed to get it into The Florida Times. I have a friend who works there.’
Sayed smiles wryly. ‘Not much sympathy for me over there, I expect?’
‘No, I suppose not.’
All three of us laugh, sourly. When it subsides there’s silence. Sayed clears his throat and looks at Chaim.
‘Listen, thanks for being a friend to Anoush – and to Inam. I don’t know how I would have felt if she was in an orphanage. And by the time I get out—’
Chaim interrupts. ‘They might still be able to do something. Anoush has been talking to your lawyer.’
‘We can’t even appeal. Or so they say.’
‘You can. He’s working on taking your case to the civilian Supreme Court here in Jerusalem.’
‘On what grounds? They all think I had a big part in it. Being Palestinian is enough.’
‘On the grounds that the facts were unfairly represented by the prosecution.’
Sayed seems unimpressed. He sighs. ‘I’m so tired of it all.’
‘Your presence in court isn’t even necessary,’ I say. ‘The case will be argued on a purely academic level.’
Sayed sighs again, looks around at the guards’ impassive expressions, takes a soft packet of cigarettes and lighter out of his breast pocket. ‘Anyone?’
We shake our heads. Sayed proceeds to drag at the cigarette with energy, waving the smoke away from my face. I lean over the table.
‘How are you going, anyway? In here, I mean.’
Sayed stubs the cigarette out on the tabletop with a disgusted expression.
‘I get three meals a day. Exercise. Not much torture, only the psychological kind.’
He glances up sharply to see if any of the guards have heard. Their faces remain cool. I put my hands out flat on the table. Nobody speaks, and the silence becomes uncomfortable. When I remove them, the formica top is marked by my two handprints made of sweat.
‘Be serious,’ I say finally.
‘I am.’
‘Are you depressed? How are your sessions with the counsellor?’
‘I can deal with it.’
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘There’s nothing you can do. Keep talking to this lawyer of yours. Come and see me sometimes. Bring me smokes, books, my laptop if they let you. Bring Inam next month if you can.’
I lean over Chaim’s shoulder. Today is a rare, festive weekend day: he’s in my apartment and frying a breakfast dish involving a vast amount of maple syrup and eggs. He plays the chef, tea towel over one shoulder and warmed plates waiting in the oven.
‘What are you making, Chaim? French toast! Are we turning into real Americans, then?’
‘I like American food,’ Inam says. ‘Hot dogs with ketchup and hamburgers too.’
She waits at the kitchen table, knife and fork clutched upright in each hand. At her feet, Julius begs with one paw on each of her knees, and she leans down and whispers in his alert ear, ‘Don’t worry, my darling, you’ll get some too.’
‘And where have you eaten junk like that?’ I ask. ‘There could be pork in it.’
‘After school. The other kids buy them and then give me some.’
I telegraph a look to Chaim, I knew I shouldn’t have chosen that international school, smooth a cloth napkin onto Inam’s lap and prod Chaim in the kidneys.
‘Mademoiselle is waiting to be served.’
I’m remembering Rowda, her fierce comfort at the memorial, her tense apology. Could we be friends, she and I? Or do I just want her approval for what I’ve done?
‘Inam, what do you think? Should we invite Rowda to come here for tea one day?’
Chaim butts in over the sound of butter sizzling in the pan. He slaps more bread on.
‘Who’s this Rowda?’
Inam answers, ‘That lady at Grandma’s funeral. The pretty one. Don’t you remember? She came and kissed me and ignored you.’
‘Don’t remember,’ Chaim mumbles.
He’s busy attending to his cooking, arranging thick slices of French toast onto a plate and sprinkling them with cinnamon. A deluge of syrup and three fanned strawberries, thrown on for the hell of it.
‘Did she really ignore Chaim, Inam?’
‘Mmm.’
Inam begins attacking the huge portion Chaim has placed in front of her. She speaks through a full mouth.
‘Rowda hates Jews.’
Chaim wheels around from the stove and stares at her. ‘What did you say?’
Inam repeats the phrase in a small voice. ‘She says she hates Jews.’
Behind Chaim, the bread in the frying pan sputters. He brings his hand down to the edge of the stove with force, making the pan and empty plates rattle. Julius growls and flees to the balcony. A stink of burning fills the room. I open the kitchen window. Chaim comes closer to Inam and rests his hand on her shoulder.
‘Inam, I don’t want you to ever say things like that again.’
I inch around him and turn off the gas on the stove.
‘Chaim, the child is only repeating what she hears. Inam, look at me. Chaim, please sit down. Let’s talk about this. ’
He turns away from us with an exasperated movement, takes the handle of the frying pan to empty the mess into the bin.
‘Fuck! I burnt myself.’
Inam giggles into her plate then looks up at him, afraid, waiting for a reaction. He sits, breathing heavily.
‘Inam, grab some ice from the fridge, will you?’ I ask her.
I take his hand and look at where he’s burnt himself, run the coldwater tap. As I speak, I tend to it, immersing his hand in a bowl of cold water, pressing ice to his palm. The way he lets himself be cared for is touching, almost voluptuous, as if he’s surrendered to me completely. I look up at Inam.
‘Sweetheart, is Chaim a Jew?’
She nods.
‘Is there anything about him to hate?’
She shakes her head. ‘I like you, Chaim. I really like you now. You’re kind. Anoush lets me stay up late when you’re here.’
‘So why do you think Rowda hates Jews?’ I ask.
‘Because she’s never met one like Chaim?’
Chaim looks at me, gives a half-smile. I grin back.
‘Inam, what do you think we should say to someone who uses that word – hate – all the time?’
‘I don’t know. I’m sick of all this talk.’
Chaim leans forward, gently taking Inam’s hand in his good one, as he did at the funeral.
‘I think we need to show them there’s another way. A way where we can all be friends.’
She shifts her hand in his. ‘We’re still friends, aren’t we? Even if I said that just now?’
‘Indeed we are. I hope we’ll still be friends when I’m an old man and you’re all grown up.’
‘We will,’ she says. ‘I promise.’
At that, she unlooses her hand from his and continues to sit at the table, serenely eating her French toast with sticky fingers. The knife and fork lie on either side of her plate, untouched and clean. I look from one to the other, child and lover, collapse in my chair and begin to laugh.
Soon all three of us are laughing, even Chaim, who resumes his cooking, breaking eggs into a bowl and shaking his head. Inam doesn’t know why we’re all laughing but she sees no reason anymore to be sad, and laughs the longest between mouthfuls of syrup-soaked toast.
Rowda perches on the edge of Chaim’s broken couch. Just his luck she’s decided to come early today, making lame excuses of a last-minute meeting at the Red Crescent office tonight and no way she can get out of it. She tells him she knocked at Anoush’s door, didn’t have any paper to leave a note. And here she is, asking him for some. Anoush and Inam aren’t home yet, belly dance lessons or martial arts, too many afterschool activities to keep track of. He’d wanted to sit around and watch bad cable this afternoon, order kebabs from downstairs. His only day off this fortnight. He’s gone back to his bachelor ways now that Anoush has moved into her own apartment. Today he feels deflated, as if no amount of trying will get him anywhere. He hasn’t seen Anoush for a few days, she’s been so busy with Inam. And now look.
Rowda accepts tea from him graciously, says no to a biscuit or sugar, and he tries not to bare his teeth and snarl. He wishes Julius would but the damned dog just lies there in the corner and sleeps. Tolerance, Chaim thinks. Compassion. Charity.
‘I hear Anoush’s been helping Sayed Ali,’ she says.
‘Her lawyer’s working on an appeal. He says there’s a good chance Sayed will be out of prison in seven years, maybe less.’
‘And Inam? Will he take custody of her?’
‘She’ll be a grown woman by then. Almost nineteen and able to decide for herself.’
‘Is she settling in well with Anoush?’
‘Is this a counsellor asking or a friend?’
‘Both, I hope.’
‘She’s happy, I think. She and Anoush are fast friends. She even spares a kind word for me at times. They may be going on a little trip early next year, maybe in the spring – a holiday. I may go as well, if work permits.’
‘Not back to the Zionist entity, I hope.’
He decides not to let it pass.
‘Sorry? Are you serious? Can’t you understand basic facts? Israel is a true democracy, unlike here. Or the Territories. All sorts of people live in Israel, and not all of them are Zionists.’
She gulps down her tea. ‘No, I’m not sorry, actually. You think you’re not a Zionist. You are. As far as I’m concerned, anyone who lives or has lived in Israel is a Zionist.’
He lets out a whistle.
‘Shit, you’re loopier than I thought. Here’s your piece of paper. You can go now. There’s no use arguing with you. By the way, Anoush will be taking Inam to Turkey. Armenia, really. Anoush’s ancestral home.’
‘Is Inam happy about that?’
‘Of course she is. She’s never been outside Beirut her whole life. She can get a passport now. She’s also looking forward to my mother coming to stay for a few weeks. Another grandma, she says. A real Jewish grandma.’
Rowda surveys him with her head turned to one side.
‘I already know you’re a Jew. You don’t have to make such a point of it.’
Chaim wills himself to be cold and steady.
‘Why do you feel the need to make me excuse myself for it?’
Rowda puts down her tea glass. Some of it sloshes onto the saucer.
‘It’s your own insecurity that makes you feel that. Self-hating Jew.’
Chaim can feel his eyes bulge. The bitch. When he speaks, his voice is slow, correct.
‘I don’t hate, Rowda. I don’t hate myself, or you. I don’t hate Palestinians or Lebanese or Arabs. I don’t even hate the terrorists and governments who kill innocent people every single day. What I do despair of is this ignorance, this pig-headedness that can’t see people for who they really are. What I fear is the possibility of another Holocaust. And deep down, I know it’s not even about hatred. It’s about fear. I hope we’ll all stop being afraid of each other all the time. I want better than that, for you and me, and Inam – for everyone.’
She simpers, runs her hand over the worn linen of his couch. He feels affronted by this as well.
‘Enough of the fine words, Chaim. I’ll say I’m sorry, if you like. I didn’t intend to insult you.’
She looks at him for a moment, her eyes travelling over his set shoulders, his frozen eyes. He can feel she’s having trouble discerning his expression. He could go either way. She tosses her hair over her shoulder.
‘Could you please tell Anoush and Inam that I came? I’m sorry I missed them.’
She gets up. Before she can make for the door Chaim stands up too, blocking her way.
‘Don’t you think I need more of an apology than that?’
Rowda crumples her mouth, ironically obsequious. ‘I see I’ve hit a nerve.’
Chaim becomes more solid, weighty. ‘Apologise.’
Rowda stands her ground. Julius wakes up and barks, his tail flapping wildly, as if he can’t work out whether to be cruel or kind. The door opens. Inam stands there, takes in the scene. Chaim turns to her, afraid she may fly at him. Condemn him. He opens his mouth to plead his case; his face wrinkles with the effort.
‘Where’s Anoush?’
Inam ignores him. Instead, she plants her feet on the welcome mat and points a finger at Rowda.
‘I was listening in the corridor. You were rude to Chaim.’
Rowda opens her mouth to say something, turns away and walks quickly down the stairs.
There’s still tension, but it’s manageable. There are disagreements, fights, tears, but they’re usually over by nightfall. Inam spends inordinate amounts of time in the downstairs courtyard whispering to Julius when she feels she’s been wronged. The dog rests his head in her lap and snuffles, humouring her complaints, his tail beating an upbeat tattoo on the tiles. There are long periods of sullen silence and stubbornness, but I’m becoming good at taking her for a walk down to the sea and coaxing the bad mood out of her.
Our city is waking as if from a long sleep. The Corniche hosts a carnival atmosphere every night, with food stalls and tea-sellers and buskers from all over the world. Chaim complains about music keeping him awake past midnight. But I like it, feel like going down there and making some noise myself. Downtown cafes are open all hours, dancing spills onto rubbled streets; the bookstalls and antique shops lining Rue Hamra are doing a roaring trade. I take Inam to the American University campus and we sit on the grass with an afternoon picnic, watching students loll about and kiss in secret, notebooks aflutter in the sea breeze. We check out the noticeboard, discussing the different subjects on offer. Inam wants to go to university one day, she says, to study history.
At her age, Inam shouldn’t fully understand what history is. Not yet. But when I sit on the side of her bed at night, watching her sleep, I study her young yet troubled face. I watch the lidded pebble eyes, the knowing brow, the map of time smoothed out across her features. Other times, other people’s histories. Inam was born with them, has first-hand knowledge of homelands, territories, injustices and desires. Intimations of her father and mother, in the flick of a hand, the crazy shapes of her elegant toes, the sharpness of her language. In the sly way she licks her forefinger to smooth down her eyebrows with the glue of her own saliva. The sticky mass of history. Inam surely knows more than enough about that.
She’s celebrating her twelfth birthday. She’s enjoying her new school – American, non-denominational, co-ed – has many friends her age, moderate Muslims and Christians of all stripes, Lebanese, Palestinian, Armenian, Greek. At our apartment, they crowd around her and the magnificent, lighted cake, a gooey thing of Belgian chocolate and Grand Marnier.
‘Are you sure you should put that much alcohol in it?’ Chaim asked me the day before. Anxious, licking at a smear of icing with his finger. I flicked a lump at him, laughed.
‘I’m not Muslim, you know.’ As soon as I heard myself say the words, I felt in the wrong. Am I dishonouring Inam’s past, in this way and countless others? These doubts are unanswerable, an unease I know will follow me until Inam is grown up, maybe beyond, until I can feel my choices have been justified.
Chaim sat at the kitchen table and half-watched me ice the cake. He was absently building a little tower out of the beach pebbles Inam had gathered and left strewn there. Like the memorials of the Holocaust: each cairn a generation, each pebble a soul.
Inam stands at the head of the table and poses for photographs, ready to cut the cake. Chaim stands on a chair with the camera. ‘Look up!’
The girlish singing – the boys refuse to join in – is deafening, raucous.
‘Happy birthday to you! Happy birthday! ’
Inam closes her eyes, just for a moment, and I close mine too. The song wobbles and changes, our grandmothers’ voices cracking, calling: My darling, my love, your sufferings and joys will be many. We remember; do we really remember or would we merely like to? The strength of our desire to know overcomes reality. Another room, another time, a beautiful mother dimly known from photographs and Bilqis and a fat white candle, funereal tones, a corpse-like father grinning from the corner.
Hot wax drips onto the icing. Inam cuts the cake and makes a silent wish; I gather up the spent candles and take them to the kitchen, to save them for next year. Standing at the counter, I break off a piece, the wax warm and yielding in my palm. Alive. I roll it between my fingers, making a tiny, perfect ball. I can try to tell Inam about hatred, about mistakes and lies. What I can’t tell her is how to avoid them. I see Lilit led away by Turkish men, flushed face in her palms. Split pomegranates and the solid ball, like this wax, that water gruel makes when it cools, Minas stuffing it into his mouth in the death camp. I think of Chaim, and last night: the trail of his semen on my thighs so thin, so translucent I took it between my fingers for only a moment before it vanished. All of us, here for a single moment, then gone.
Late that night, when the girls and boys have all gone home clutching paper plates of leftovers and moist parcels of cake, I sit on the edge of Inam’s bed and tuck the sheets down over the still-flat chest.
‘Before you go to sleep, there’s something I need to give you.’
‘Another present?’
‘No – not really another present. Haven’t you had enough?’
I laugh. Inam laughs too, holding up her wrist with its Armenian bracelet, so that the heavy silver links and crosses sparkle in the lamp’s dim light.
‘This one’s my favourite.’
‘It was my father’s for a while. An antique from the forties. One day I’ll tell you the story of your father and this bracelet too.’
‘Not now? I hate it when people tell me I’m not old enough to know things. I understand everything.’
‘I’m sure you do. But maybe not this – not yet. Isn’t it gorgeous? My grandfather made it himself. Apparently my mother wore this bracelet originally, even when she was a little girl.’
‘The mumma you never knew?’
I try to speak softly. ‘That’s right, Inam.’
‘Just like me.’
‘Just like you. And now we have each other.’
Inam sighs, but it’s a sigh of contentment and tiredness. I squeeze the thin, braceleted wrist.
‘Time for some sleep now. But first, our secret. Actually, it’s a little like a present.’
Inam sits up in bed and looks at the envelope. On it is a message in Arabic, scrawled in black pencil: For my darling Inam. Don’t open until you turn twelve.
‘Your grandmother gave it to me before they took her to the hospice. It’s from your mother.’
I bend down and kiss her on the forehead. ‘Do you need me to be here while you read it?’
Inam shakes her head, slowly. I get up to leave, come back on an irresistible impulse and kiss her again, holding her so tight she can’t breathe.
‘Call me if you need to talk about anything in the letter.’
I close the door.
Inam sits very still for a while, until she’s certain Anoush has gone down the hall and into her own bedroom. She then opens the envelope with small, careful tears where it’s been glued down, and takes out a smooth, flat pebble. Not stopping to examine it further, she lays it on the bedspread as she unfolds the letter. Her eyes scan the closely written page in Arabic, searching for the last line. With great and everlasting love, Your mother, Sanaya. She winces when she sees the handwriting, can’t recall if she’s ever seen anything written by her mother at all.
14 November 1983
My darling Inam,
Now that you’re twelve, no longer a child, not yet a woman, I’m writing this to you. Writing, not speaking, in case in these uncertain times, you find yourself alone without me to guide you and tell you a little of your history.
We’re a historic people, all of us, and we allow this to shape our actions and emotions and the very stuff we suppose we are made of. When we allow history to shape us in this way we sometimes lose our humanity, our compassion, our logic, and we can commit any crime in the name of ignorance. All those little, messy truths and that one big lie – the lie of who is right and who is wrong. Nobody is right, my darling Inam. We’re all right and we are all, too often, and tragically, wrong.
Your father loved you although he never knew you. I’m sure of that. I’m sure he looks over you from wherever he is and smiles. He hated injustice and this hatred consumed him, but he also felt a deep love for the smallest objects: the soft line of a woman’s veil, a piece of fruit, the bird outside his window.
He loved more often than he hated, but hatred became so much easier to fall into. Please don’t judge him.
With great and everlasting love,
Your mother,
Sanaya
Inam isn’t sure what to feel after reading this. Part of her would like to understand; the other part shuns this raw, new knowledge. She puts the letter back inside the envelope, licks it shut again and wedges it under her mattress. The pebble she looks at carefully now: greyish-blue, shiny as a mirror, perfect as a peach. She holds it tight in her hand as she falls asleep.