I lead the way into town by following the pale thread of lake. Inam wants to drive into the centre – says she’s tired of walking, all this holiday has been is walking – but I feel that approaching Van on foot will reveal more, so we leave the car behind.
On the distant island of Akdamar all that can be seen is a triangletopped dome. The rest of the tenth-century church is obscured by vapour rising from the surface of the water. I have no desire to go there, to ache again for the loss of so many looted treasures, vandalised icons, mosaics gone dull with age. I remember Lilit telling me about the carvings – delicate reliefs of Adam and Eve, Samson, Jonah and his whale, with the head of a perplexed dog. Does Inam want to go and see them? But she’s strangely afraid of the cone-shaped, rickety boats moored at the shore, making her displeasure known until the sailors shrink away, muttering.
The lake is a mirror. I look into it, Inam by my side, and feel ashamed. Guilty I’ve managed to survive, that I can stand here with unmarked skin, healthy limbs wrapped in micro-fibres from the sweatshops of the Third World. What trick of fate has left a few Armenians to survive, to have children, grandchildren, to keep the pain and anger and disbelief alive? In another time, I would have been the bound woman marched through blood and sand, torn from home, trembling in fear of the final blow. Yet from the destruction of my race, tribe, family – I’ve survived. Survived to bear this guilt, this sense of unworthiness. Such a statement sounds so trite on this bare earth, among this bitter history. Psychobabble. As does the political, the economic, the aesthetic universe I float in like a fish underwater.
This is the Armenia of my childhood then. It became Turkey eighty years ago. This lake and its town, uneven rows of skinny houses with carved timber balconies, window frames, studded doors, the slow piling of brick upon hand-hewn brick by Armenians not so long ago. Dirt roads that join remote villages with their Armenian names, old Armenian inscriptions. Defaced words, names since changed, slightly wrong. The memory of oil lamps tended and candles lit in mountain chapels: burnt now, desecrated, their frescoes hacked away. How did we let this happen?
The lake is silent. Inam and I wear sandals too flimsy for this stony bank: a land that seems determined to devour, to reduce me to itself. All I can remember now is Lilit’s mouth: an old scar that cut her bottom lip in half and became white then whiter whenever she cried.
‘So, Inam,’ I finally say. ‘Will you be glad to go home tomorrow?’
‘I miss Beirut,’ she replies. ‘I miss school and I’m sure they’re all ahead of me by now.’
‘After only a week? Surely you’re too clever for that.’
She smiles at the compliment. ‘And you? What do you miss?’
I pause. I miss my grandmother, I want to say. I miss the father I never knew. But most of all, I miss knowing who’s right and who is wrong. I miss the heaviness of womanhood too, the pull of biology. No time for that yet. I have Inam to look after, work, my responsibility to the past. I have Siran. I feel a pinch of anxiety when I think of going back to Beirut, as if the flamboyant city with all its conflict and chaos has become too much for me. I don’t know what I’m doing with Chaim, whether I’m big enough to wait for Sayed to come out of prison. Whether I love them both in different ways. Or if I can just be alone.
My womb is empty for now – and if full at all, would be papery, rectangular, stretched tight by words, stories, swollen with competing versions of the past. No unborn child with its secrets. I have my own living, breathing child now. No infant who knows the world before all worlds. I carry my own worlds now. Worlds of difference, foreign languages, warring tribes.
‘You know, Inam, I think I might miss Beirut too.’
Across the lake, the island starts to rise from the mist as if by some blind force of will. This lake with all its colours of bone and ash and sky. Blue as Lilit’s eyes when she was fifteen, still unclouded by horror. Bone. Ash. Sky. Someone keeps saying it. Repeating it, over and over. Bone and ashes. Sky – that’s all there is. And the lapping of water, like a lullaby that puts me in mind of Lilit – again – singing the high-pitched songs of childhood. I can hear those songs: distant monks from the island’s church chanting in accents plaintive and half-familiar. But there are no more monks on Akdamar, only an abandoned ruin and a story I’d rather forget.
Genocide. A race wiped out. I try on various emotions and the faces that go with them: terror, outrage, acceptance, grief. None of them fit the sense, beneath it all, that I’m repeating empty gestures, the movements of somebody else, on the edge of this same lake, sometime in the past. Could it be possible so much killing took place here? Mass graves shouldn’t be this beautiful. On this serene, cloud-curdled day the atrocities seem a fabrication, tales told to frighten children. Now Inam is uncharacteristically silent. As we walk hand in hand we bend down and comb through the sand, finding smooth treasures, pebbles fragile as bird-bone. I want this ancestral earth to be rich, evocative; soil I can only hope will give birth to something new. We find a sweet wrapper, crudely pink; a Turkish cola can squashed so flat it could be tribal jewellery, millennial old. A clod of earth, a grave of rubbish. A thin human wrist-joint severed from the arm. I fall to my knees now, digging, with unexpected tears blurring my vision. Inam stops, frightened. I’m digging deeper. Fast, faster. She kneels down to help. Brown shards, soft as clay, our fingers crumbling them into unrecognisable splinters. The broken ends of bone are creamy, bleached white. I sift through, more careful now. Teeth, jaw, eye-sockets. These were once skin, fat, hair, a face.
My disbelief at the scale of my discovery attacks me somewhere under the breastbone.
‘It’s okay, Inam. It’s okay. Let’s just place them in the earth again, say a prayer.’
She studies my face, concerned. ‘Why are you crying? There’s nothing to cry about.’
The lake now so still. We get up, hold hands. Not even a bird, not a leaf stirring.