Bone Ash Sky by Katerina Cosgrove Page B

Selim a secret, from her neighbours, girlfriends, the cousins who came for cocktails once a month – such casual Muslims – and tried to arrange matches with her among their fundamentalist friends.
    Her eldest cousin, Shahid, almost suspected. He drew her aside regularly to whisper in her ear, elbow resting on the kitchen counter near the knives as he watched her slice shreds of orange, mix drinks. His admission of violence all the more sinister for being so intimate.
    â€˜If you play with Christians, Sanaya, you know what you’ll get.’
    She shook her head, knife poised above the fruit’s soft pale heart, mesmerised by her cousin’s slow breathing. His face was calm when she lifted her eyes to him, his expression self-possessed. He trailed a pinkie finger – offensive, the long burnished nail – in a line from her eye to her jaw.
    â€˜You’ll get your face cut, Sanaya. You know that’s what they’ll do.’
    Despite the threats, she didn’t stop seeing Selim. She was more afraid of the alternative: arranged marriage, unsought babies, the unwelcome clinches she’d be forced to submit to each night. No marriage to a Muslim, no sharing her man with another woman. Or three. No divorce whenever he felt like taking someone younger into his bed, throwing Sanaya out of the house and even taking away her children. Not that the Koran authorised any of this behaviour. She read the Koran every night before bed, even when Selim was there, even when he laughed at her. She read the Bible as well, but mainly for the Old Testament stories. It was the Koran she believed: the unassailable word of truth. She read it and cursed those mullahs and clerics, unscrupulous fools sanctifying manmade rules in their own interest.

BEIRUT, 1995
    S omeone is coming to meet me this evening – a contact I met through the tribunal. When I went back for my second session he got up to testify, in his role as project manager for the UN’s post-conflict portfolio. His team spends a lot of time in the Palestinian camps in Beirut and the south of the country.
    He’d been a UNDP finance manager during the civil war, so had seen the Phalangist militias assembling outside the camp before the massacre, asked them what they were doing, and in getting no real reply had called his superiors. Strangely, throughout his testimony he accused both Phalangists and Israelis, but I could also detect his faint distaste for the Palestinians. As if he thought everyone was as bad as each other, and that he was above them all. He mentioned my father’s name three times as well and each time I heard those familiar syllables coming from his stranger’s mouth, in that transatlantic, cultivated accent, I burned from my stomach to my cheeks, red with blood.
    When he finished, he sat – I can only assume deliberately – right down beside me. His name is Kajetan D’Andrea, an Italian of indeterminate age. He could have known my father personally. I don’t know yet. I haven’t told him my surname, or whose daughter I am, just that I’m an American journalist interested in writing an article about the massacre for The Boston Globe . I’ve arranged to meet him this evening in the lobby. I was faintly alarmed, but not really surprised, at how keen he was to follow up.
    The phone rings. Reception calling. ‘A gentleman called Mr D’Andrea down here to see you, madam.’
    â€˜Already? Sorry, yes, I’ll be down in five minutes.’
    I put the phone down, suddenly sweating so much my singlet sticks to my body. D’Andrea said we could meet at ten-thirty, and at first I was put out by how late people stay up in Lebanon. But now the night has slipped away from me, and I’m not even dressed. Cockroaches scuttle into corners as I turn on the bathroom light, strip off, splash myself with water. There’s no window, only an air vent with the cover torn off. The open shower