Read Online Bone Ash Sky by Katerina Cosgrove - Free Book Online Page A

easy to be when there was no longer anything to lose.
    By day she walked, if it was safe enough to venture out. She walked through her tiny neighbourhood of Ras Beirut, waving in complicit denial to the odd herb- or egg-sellers squatting on the kerb with their kitchen-garden wares, oblivious to the threat of bombs. She passed the young Syrian – a Yezidi , a devil-worshipper, her neighbours whispered – who sat in exactly the same position every day, on a corner in the shade. He was a beggar, dressed in rags like all the other beggars and gypsies she passed, but he begged for words, not money. All around him in plastic bags were words cut from newspapers and books, bus tickets or food packets, or written on tiny squares of wrapping paper. War. Devastation. Kalamata olives. Sadness. Lux soap. One way to Jbeil. Futility. She knew he’d gone mad, shell-shocked by the death of his wife and four children during an air raid two months ago. They had only moved to Beirut this year from their village in Syria. He was at work when it happened; a day labourer, a simple man. Now he sat in his unmoving position, serene eyes staring up to the sky, murmuring his broken mantra as people walked by. ‘A word to give me, sir? A word to spare, young lady?’
    She always stopped and gave him one, bending down to his level, where the smell of his unwashed hair and clothes overpowered her, dismayed by his black bare feet. Each time she forced herself to linger, smile and make small talk after he wrote down her word in his incongruously perfect handwriting. Sometimes she slipped him some money and ran away before he had time to protest.
    She power-walked past the American University campus and cheap student cafes, now bricked-up completely by their frightened owners. She rounded the strafed Gefinor building, once the modern pride of Beirut, to the tree-fringed road twisting through the old, crumbling quarter of Ain Mreisseh, where the last of the city’s Ottoman villas were being picked off one by one like toy targets. Their red-tiled roofs made them easy to spot, their cheerful character easy to justify bombing. What right had they to look so complacent in a dying city?
    There was a certain tree on this route. Miraculously it had escaped the shelling and stood bent in the ruined courtyard of one of those villas. Old and twisted, its trunk thickening to low-lying roots, a woman’s legs and pubis with no torso. On the opposite side, as if merged into it, were the thicker legs and squat penis of a man. Twin lovers with no heads, no eyes, no hearts. She couldn’t abandon this tree. Whenever she became tempted to escape – take her money, leave the apartment to looters, seek refuge with Selim in east Beirut or Cyprus – she thought of the tree, so brave, so foolhardy, so achingly beautiful in the face of decay. Then she knew she had to stay. The tree had become her Beirut.
    Her city had become an amphitheatre of terror. Here in west Beirut, once home to the liberal intelligentsia and artists, where Christians and Muslims lived side by side, people now asked each other’s background and religion before committing to anything, before buying a bunch of grapes, accepting a simple offer of help. Everyone had become adept at euphemism. She’d be surprised if anyone could ever speak to one another in plain, honest terms again. They’d lost the knack. Now there were code words for everything. Seven years of civil war were called the events . Shrapnel had become confetti . Wounds were scratches. Death, our grinning friend.
    The sounds of bombs and guns and the whirring of Israeli planes echoed from the apartments terraced on the mountainside all the way down to the sea. Commercial streets became empty spaces between onslaughts. When there was a ceasefire called, for minutes or hours – never longer – men scurried out for anything they could find in the shops along Rue Hamra and the women stayed at home,