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

trying to ignore this war they thought had ended long ago.
    Sanaya didn’t stay home. She cloaked herself in her blue abaya and a pair of sequinned sandals she’d filched from one of the overflowing bins lining the Corniche. Spoils of war, discarded last week by fleeing Christians bound for the east of the city. She imagined the woman’s panic: Leave this? Take that? Making two piles: hairdryer, reject ; handmirror, must have ; sequinned sandals, not sure – this third pile for objects requiring the clarification of attachment. Her husband sweeping up the piles on his way to the car, dumping them in the nearest gutter, ignoring her protestations.
    Sanaya walked blind and fast in her discarded sandals and she walked this way to keep hold of her sanity. She didn’t allow herself to see, to really see this devastation wreaked by her own neighbours on each other. No matter she walked past bombed apartment blocks exactly like hers, through shopping arcades collapsed and folded like paper flowers, as gunmen followed her through neighbourhoods pockmarked by shrapnel, demanding her identity card; no matter she stopped and showed it to them repeatedly, either smiling or keeping calm, a splitsecond decision between life and death. She stood with them on streets guarded by other uneasy sentinels: a few palms, bare and spindly, their fronds blown off by car-bomb blasts.
    She woke late in viscous heat to militiamen on loudspeakers. She was thankful Selim wasn’t there; he’d gone back to east Beirut last night. She sat up, looked out the window. Syrians – she could tell from the tattiness of their uniforms.
    â€˜The Israeli leaflets are poisoned,’ they boomed. ‘Come down to the bonfires immediately.’
    She put on a pair of rubber gloves, rummaging in the kitchen bin for the leaflets she had crumpled and thrown in there yesterday. She didn’t believe the Syrians – or at least only half-believed them. But it wouldn’t do not to be seen downstairs at the bonfire. She jumped at a sudden pounding on the door and opened it to a Syrian soldier who thrust out a plastic bag. He didn’t speak. Her hands were shaking in their irregular pink gloves; it wouldn’t do to let him see her shake. He would think she had something to hide.
    He looked around the room as he stood at the door, weapon easy by his side. She turned to follow the trajectory of his gaze, suddenly seeing the room as he must see it: faded opulence, bourgeois pretension, chandeliers and fake-marble columns and iridescent urns so much evidence of her betrayal to the cause. He’s a socialist. Comes from some dirt-poor village in the desert. I could be killed for this in west Beirut.
    She pulled off her gloves, beckoned him inside. Now he turned his attention to her and again she saw herself as he must see her: an aging woman in a rose-coloured robe, breasts loose and sagging, a oncebeautiful face raddled by sleep and humidity. A decadent imperialist. A whore.
    â€˜Coffee? Glass of tea?’
    He slapped his lips together once, twice. The sound was faintly nauseating to her.
    â€˜Some water.’
    She brought it to him where he stood, watched as he drank. Something in the way he held the glass reminded her of Hadiya’s uncle. Issa too had drained the liquid in a gulp, pouring the water into his mouth from above in the peasant fashion, without allowing the glass to touch his lips.
    â€˜ Sa’ laam aleikum ,’ the soldier said when he was finished.
    â€˜ Sa’ laam ,’ she breathed.
    When he’d gone she stood on the balcony, leaning over the railing. Rouba was in the courtyard, hanging out her washing.
    â€˜What was his problem, Sanaya?’
    â€˜Syrian. Wanting leaflets to burn. Do you have any?’
    Rouba smirked.
    â€˜I have one, but I’m keeping it. Don’t like the Syrians. Never liked them. Coming here telling us all what to do.’
    Sanaya watched her shake out a