Bone Ash Sky by Katerina Cosgrove

in east Beirut after a night on the town. He needed the exercise, dismissed his driver so he could clear his head, become part of the early morning sounds and dawn light of the Christian quarter for the brief time before he’d have to become Selim Pakradounian again. Selim Pakradounian, second-in-command to Elie Hobeika; Selim Pakradounian, efficient killer; Selim Pakradounian, with so many men looking to him for guidance.
    Now he could slink through alleyways, a lean cat sniffing the sea’s trail. He stopped short at the thinness of a child’s cry behind closed windows. A little girl? His? He liked to imagine peering in at his own daughter, ringlets damp with sweat, face rose-flushed against the pillow. She would smile in her sleep and know her daddy was watching. He hadn’t meant to leave her for good when she was born; he was too young then, too angry. And now he was afraid to go back. What if Father wouldn’t forgive him? What if Anoush rejected him? What if she cried and hid behind both her grandmothers’ skirts? And what good could he do her anyway? A father just as absent even if he was right there by her side.
    He could be of no use to her. Only the money he sent twice a year vindicated him. He wondered if she saw any of it, for study or clothes or music, or if his father squirreled it away for when she was married. Or worse still, spent it on the shop and the house. No matter. Sending it made him feel a little better, and that was all he could do. Perhaps it even softened his daughter’s feelings for him, poisoned as they were by his aunt Lilit.
    He saw himself reflected in the glass, only his moustache visible in a ghost-pale face. The heaviness of gardenias here on a low balustrade, and night jasmine thick as grapevines on Christian churches, Crusader castles, fountains, minarets across the Green Line. The wail of the muezzin from west Beirut, sharp as a needle in the clear morning air. A last star, hanging between two cypresses. He listened. A thrush, trembling on a low branch before launching into the same warble he’d heard every morning of his childhood in this city.
    He turned his key in the lock, stumbled upstairs. He knew he’d suffer for his drinking binge, only time now for a quick shower and instant coffee before he had to report to Phalange HQ. He hated instant coffee, wasn’t even sure there was a jar in the house. By Jesus he needed it, though. He pondered last night as he ripped off his clothes, remembered each detail with a lingering sensation of voluptuousness and a faint stirring of disgust. Those fleshy white women: journalists, aid workers, wives of businessmen, black-lace bras under corporate suits. How he loved to uncover them, in more ways than one. He left a pool of clothes on the bedroom floor.
    While he stood under hot water – hot as he could bear it – he brushed his teeth with short, sawing motions, lost in thought. Should be easier now the Israelis are coming to help out. About time too. For all their generosity, they haven’t exactly been right by our side. His gold cross became caught in his hairs as he soaped his chest. The chain twisted yet again. He bent his head under the water’s stream, tried to disentangle those infuriating links. Gave up. Sanaya would do it tonight at her place. She was good at that sort of thing. He tried not to think of what she’d say if she learnt of these other women, chose instead to remember her creased neck smelling of talc and roses, the coil of caramel hair she freed from its pins to press like a river against his chest. Her superb jack-knifing spine when she spread herself out under him. She knew about his other women, even if it was left unsaid; she was worldly, not a child.
    Invariably, as soon as he dwelled on Sanaya, he remembered his dead wife, while simultaneously trying to push the memory back, in the same way you struggle to fight off the onset of a cold. It was their wedding day