Bone Ash Sky by Katerina Cosgrove Page A

felt safe though; the bombs never came as close as here. It would be very unlikely if her block were to suffer a direct hit. Although she lived in west Beirut, it was the southern suburbs, the Palestinian camps of Sabra-Shatila, Bourj al Barajneh, that bore the brunt. Her city was divided by a no-man’s land of crushed steel and toppled buildings, a Green Line not many had the courage to cross. The swarming camps of the Palestinians were teeming with filth and fear now, the Armenian quarter and Christian east, where Selim lived, still remaining untouched. But for how much longer?
    She went out onto the balcony, trying to see. Nothing, only the sea before her: serene, limpid, a great swallowing eye. Sea draining colour from city and sky, sucking light from the pavement, the people, the pale, unhealthy fronds of the few palms still left standing on the Corniche. Hadiya, somewhere among those mismatched and rubbled streets, sitting up straight at her desk as Sanaya had taught her, mouthing her multiplication tables. A normal little girl at school, a normal day. Here, by the water, it was as if the war didn’t exist.
    Issa still didn’t wake. Sanaya wandered around her apartment, straightening an ornament here, jerking a doily flat, rearranging the silk flowers just so. How pointless it all seemed. There wasn’t much to do; she cleaned incessantly. She went into her bedroom, kicked off her slippers. For how many years, how many days and days had she looked at these same yellowish walls, these glossy brocaded curtains, the green upholstered chair her mother chose when she first married? It stood at a deliberately casual angle to the corner, the way her mother would place it when she was alive. Nothing in this room had changed. It was a monument, a mausoleum. Sanaya was born in this bed, napped under its covers. As a child, she would hide in the space between the bed and the wall, playing with her dolls, serenely content in a world of her own making. She never entered the room when she was a teenager.
    Now she lay on top of the bedspread, staring at the ceiling. The plaster rose was cracked and flaking; a large grey moth nearby stayed very still, miming death.
    Hadiya’s father was dead.
    She thought about breaking the news to Rouba, decided it was better for her to hear it from Issa. Was this cowardice or logic? Stupid men, always fighting. She wondered if Issa saw him die. She tried to nap. Restless. The vein in her right temple itching. She got up to make Arabic coffee, sipped it slowly while standing at the stove, watching the sleeping man. In repose, his face was gracious as a child’s. She turned the cup over on its saucer to tell her own fortune, knowing this ploy could never work. Fate knew just who was cheating.
    Sanaya woke early the next morning and sat up in bed. She was so still she could hardly feel herself breathe: statue, column, pillar of salt. A pale dawn spread itself out over the sea, smooth as a fresh sheet. The few last stars shimmered on the horizon and wind from the ocean set the palm trees on the Corniche alight with the first of the sun’s rays. She sat, holding her dressing-gown closed over her breasts with one hand and Selim’s erect penis with the other. She studied his sleeping face, moved his foreskin up and down indifferently, then, suddenly changing her mind, crept out of bed.
    She sat on her balcony overlooking the sea, alert to any noises from the bedroom, and lit a cigarette from a large box – Cuban this time. Another gift from Selim, her ritual before breakfast. She exhaled with a voluptuous slowness, happy if only for a moment to sit, to revel in her aloneness, in her seeming safety. Her apartment was intact, unlike the other blocks she passed on her walks, doll’s houses with facades torn off, women bathing, cooking, hanging washing in full view, assailed by the honking of cars and trucks. It allowed her to feel contained, with its creamy ornate